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Joan Thomas' Night Table Recommendations

Tuesday, Feb 23, 2010 at 9:37am

I've been reading funny books, it seems, and books with a satiric edge. Oh, just looking for laughs to get me through the winter. And these are all Canadian writers!



Goya's Dog by Damian Tarnopolsky (Penguin Canada, 2009)

I just finished this book, my first encounter with Damian Tarnopolsky's writing. Goya's Dog is about a hapless British painter who ends up stranded in Toronto at the beginning of World War II ("Somewhere, Europe was devastating itself"). It's all clever, achingly funny, perfectly calibrated, in that terrain between the farcical and the poignant-I read it in a day.

Come, Thou Tortoise by Jessica Grant (Random House, 2009)

A wonderfully fresh, comic novel by a Newfoundland writer. The story begins with Audrey (aka Oddly) flying home to Newfoundland to be with her father who's been knocked into a coma by the trunk of a Christmas tree on the roof of a passing car. While some writers contrive to be quirky, Jessica Grant has created a narrative voice and a cast of characters that are convincingly quirky down to the ground. I saw their crazy eccentricities and puns and in-jokes as a code for their affection for each other. A really fun read.

Amphibian by Carla Gunn (Coach House Books, 2009)

Phineas Walsh, this novel's narrator, is a bit like Christopher, the boy in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, but to my taste Amphibian is a far more interesting book. Phineas is a preternaturally bright and honest 10 year-old, freaking out about species extinction and collapsing ecosystems. He can't seem to practice the adult virtues of double-think and denial, and his unswerving logic and palpable anxiety are staring to get to people. As a writer who struggles to find a way to express my own anxiety about the natural world, I was full of admiration for the inventiveness of this novel and the punch it pulled.

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On Wednesday, February 24th On the Same Page and McNally Robinson present an old-fashioned afternoon tea party at which Joan Thomas will be chatting about her celebrated first novel, Reading By Lightning, with host Meira Cook. Her second novel Curiosity (McClelland & Stewart, 2010) is set for release on March 30th. Join us at McNally Robinson Grant Park on Thursday April 1 at 8:00 pm to celebrate the launch of Curiosity.
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