Sent by her employment agency to the home of Miss LaFosse, a flighty night club singer in 1930s London, Miss Pettigrew finds, not the g...

Thomas C. Foster has indeed written a "lively and entertaining guide to reading between the lines," as the subtitle of his...

All I knew about Anne Morrow Lindbergh before reading Gift from the Sea was that she was the wife of Charles Lindbergh the aviator, and...

This is a story that features in virtually every winter-on-the-prairie novel ever written: caught in a blinding blizzard, a character t...

Louis Hémon, a Frenchman, visited Canada and lived and worked among the Francophone peasants ( les habitants ) of the Lac-St-Jean region ...

  The Bottle Factory Outing by Beryl Bainbridge, first published in 1974, was one of five of her books to make it to the Booker shor...

I know of Colm Tóibín more for his presence on the judging panel at the Giller Prize a few years ago than for his work.  I lucked upon...

When I saw this book on the shelf at the public library my interest was piqued.  I was raised by parents who believed in the power of b...

T hese roles which, being neither those of Hero nor Heroine, Confidante nor Villan, but which were none the less essential to bring abo...

  Life is change, my dear, so we might as well enjoy it, don't you think? (63) About a month ago I finally placed all the Giller ...

After reading Good Behaviour by Molly Keane earlier this month, I was thrilled to see that my library has most of Molly Keane's boo...

2 a.m. insomnia and none in the stack of half-perused books on the floor by my bed would suffice. Off I trundled to scour the shelves for ...

Having never read any of Dervla Murphy's writing before picking up her autobiography at the library last week, I only knew that she wro...

 Divided by the months of the year, we dip into the lives of Mayle and his (largely unmentionned) wife as they settle into life in thei...

The Awakening is very close to perfection.  In each paragraph, there is much to be pondered.  Kate Chopin's s subtle use of symbol...

Included as the first story in Jane Urquhart's Penquin Book of Canadian Short Stories (2007), it is also the title story from Alice...

    At a Loss for Words by Diane Schoemperlen is a very fast and fun read.  Written as a letter to a man who has broken her heart, we ...

My experience with all of Margaret Atwood's books has always been that they start off slowly, setting the scene in almost a ploddi...

 'I spent some time farther north - went up to a mission when I was only a kid with one of the priests, and later after I had grow...