Category: ENG4U Reading List

Winner of the Governor General’s Award, this is Jane Urquhart‘s first novel. Urquhart pinpoints the book’s origins to the east coast. “Everyone says, I’m sure, that their novel began with a visual image,” she laughs. “Well, my novel began with a visual image. I was in Newfoundland, standing on a beach in Brigus Bay, and I looked across to an arm of land that was sticking out into the ocean, and there was the most wonderful house I have ever seen. Very old, very weatherbeaten, up on a cliff looking down on the ocean. I said to Joan Clark, the writer, who was with me, ‘I want that house, it has to be mine.’ I’m very covetous about architecture. And she said, ‘Well, that’s where Rockwell Kent lived when he was in Newfoundland.’”

Urquhart, who studied art history in university, knew something of Kent, a New York-born painter dating to the early part of this century who was associated with Robert Henri’s Ashcan School. She had no idea that he’d settled in Newfoundland, let alone that he’d been unceremoniously expelled during the First World War – for singing German lieder from the porch of his rented house. (taken from an interview with Quill & Quire)

When young Vittorio Innocente’s mother, Cristina, is bitten by a snake during an encounter with a blue-eyed stranger in the family barn, the superstitions and prejudices rampant in their small Italian town immediately roil to the surface. But the worst is yet to come for the independent-minded Cristina. Eight months pregnant and unable to abide her treatment in the village any longer, Cristina books a passage to Canada for herself and Vittorio, although it will not be to join her irascible husband Mario, who sailed there when Vittorio was an infant. A national bestseller for seventy-five weeks, Lives of the Saints won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Books in Canada First Novel Award, and the Bressani Prize. It is the first novel in the Vittorio Innocente Trilogy, which includes In a Glass House and Where She Has Gone.  Nino Ricci web site.

Winner of the 2000 Giller Prize, David Adams Richards weaves an intense story of love and honesty, an exploration of how humanity faces inhumanity, how lies and disappointments cannot and will never destroy truth and human greatness.  At the age of twelve, Sydney Henderson pushes his friend Connie Devlin from the church roof. Looking down on Connie’s motionless body, Sydney believes he is dead. Let Connie live and I will ever harm another soul, Sydney vows to God. At that moment, Connie stands up, wipes his bloody nose and with a laugh walks away. In the years that follow, the self-educated, brilliant and now almost pathologically gently Sydney holds true to his promise.

Haunting and harrowing, as beautiful as it is disturbing, The English Patient tells the story of the entanglement of four damaged lives in an Italian monastery as World War II ends. The exhausted nurse, Hana; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burn victim who lies in an upstairs room and whose memories of passion, betrayal, and rescue illuminate this book like flashes of heat lightning. In lyrical prose informed by a poetic consciousness, Michael Ondaatje weaves these characters together, pulls them tight, then unravels the threads with unsettling acumen.