Purchased from the Book DepositoryAuthor Michael Frayn is nothing if not prolific. He has written 11 novels (a quick check says that I have read seven), 15 plays (I’ve seen three in WestEnd pro...
Gift from Kimbofo at Reading MattersThere seems to come a point at each stage in life where little annoyances swell of their own accord into seemingly insurmountable problems, turning into a barrier ...
Purchased at Indigo.caI need to offer a few words of explanation before I get to Clark Blaise’s Pittsburgh Stories, because personal experience indelibly colored my reaction to this nine-story ...
Review copy courtesy Doubleday CanadaThe present tense of Vincent Lam’s The Headmaster’s Wager opens in 1966, the most recent Vietnam War already under way and American involvement beginn...
Review copy courtesy Bond Street BooksLet me start this review with a warning: The Street Sweeper contains some of the most disturbing, heart-breaking prose that I can recall reading. As author Ellio...
Dave MargoshesThis guest post uses material published in the “Afterword” in A Book of Great Worth, which itself borrows from a brief essay Dave Margoshes wrote for the literary magazine The New Quart...
Review copy courtesy Coteau BooksFull Disclosure: Back in the 1970s, Dave Margoshes and I were colleagues for a few years in the newsroom of the Calgary Herald. He moved on, continuing what he now de...
Purchased at Indigo.caI’ve been working my way through Patricia Highsmith’s five Ripley novels at the leisurely pace of one every year or so (and Tom Ripley has kindly been providing the ...
Purchased from Indigo.caI will admit that I have been awaiting the North American publication of Five Bells for some months, ever since I first came across the striking image on the cover of the Nort...
Library of America collectionThis post will be in keeping with two of the 2012 objectives for the KfC blog: 1) a more disciplined approach to reading and reviewing short stories 2) finding the time t...
Purchased from the Book DepositoryJohn Lanchester has been an author who has had my attention since his oustanding 1996 debut, The Debt To Pleasure, a novel that seemed to be about cuisine for its fi...
Review copy courtesy Random House CanadaLinden MacIntyre has been one of Canada’s best-known television journalists for some time, but he added a new string to his bow in 2009 with the publicat...
Review copy courtesy McClelland & StewartOscar Lowe is a care assistant at a Cambridge nursing home. One October night on his way home, he takes a shortcut through the grounds of King’s Col...
Mario Samigli was a man of letters, getting on for sixty years old. A novel he had published forty years before might have been considered dead if in this world things could die even when they had ne...
Purchased at Indigo.caGerard Woodward’s trilogy on the life of the Jones family (August, I’ll Go To Bed At Noon and A Curious Earth) has been on the shelf beside my reading chair for some...
Purchased at Indigo.caMordecai Richler is a special friend of this blog. My post on his signature work, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, is at the top of the alltime KfC blog hitlist (although Ju...
Purchased from the Book DepositoryMatt Freeman is one of those despicable characters who are necessary to complete the world of entertaining fiction. Get Me Out Of Here is narrated in the first perso...
Purchased at Indigo.caJulius is a doctor of Nigerian descent, a young psychiatrist entering the final year of a fellowship at an Upper West Side hospital in New York, not sure about what he will do n...
Review copy courtesy House of AnansiFans of the Sergio Leone/Clint Eastwood spaghetti western movies (yes, I am one) may have occasionally paused to wonder: Whatever became of those Mexican settlemen...
Purchased at Indigo.caMy experience with The Art of Fielding is a useful reminder that I should be careful about letting ingrained bias get in the way of me reading some good novels. The appearance o...
Purchased at Indigo.caWe never do learn the full details of the event that precipitated the story in Tom McCarthy’s debut novel, Remainder: “It involved something falling from the sky. Te...
Purchased at Indigo.caGrant me the indulgence of explaining how I came to read Southern Stories, a collection of Clark Blaise’s early short stories, before I get to the volume itself. Blaise...
Purchased at Indigo.caI will confess upfront that Tony Judt has been a KfC favorite for some years. I don’t read a lot of non-fiction, but I galloped through his epic work Postwar (assuming tha...
Purchased at Indigo.caI think that it is fair to say that for as long as there has been an English novel, authors have chosen to place dysfunctional families at the centre of their work. From Austen ...
Review copy courtesy Random House CanadaTranslated by Sheila Fischman The original French version of Ru has already garnered an impressive pack of prizes — Canada’s Governor-General’...
Gift from Lee MonksOne of my objectives for 2012 is to take a more disciplined approach to reading short story collections. While I have always appreciated the form (let’s face it, Canada has e...
Purchased at Indigo.ca Take an apparently mundane, just a bit out of the ordinary, circumstance. Explore it in detail to create an over-arching, stage-setting device. And then, in much greater detail...
Purchased at Indigo.caTranslated by Linda Coverdale Lightning is the third (and apparently final) instalment in French author Jean Echenoz’s trilogy of short, tightly-written fictional biograph...
Review copy courtesy Random House CanadaFebruary 6th, 2012 marks the 60th anniversary of the ascension of Queen Elizabeth II to the throne of England. With the exception of her ancestor, Queen Victor...
Used copy purchased from Alibris.comAs 2011 draws to a close, KfC is going to indulge in some blogging selfishness with this review. Regular visitors here will know that I am a fan of the newspaper/j...
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