A love story set amid the terrible beauty of Newfoundland’s coast by Donna Morrissey. Sylvanus Now is a young fisherman of great charm and strength. His youthful desires are simple: He wants a suit to lure a girl—the fine-boned beauty Adelaide. Adelaide, however, has other dreams. Set against the love story of Addie and Sylvanus is the sea on the cusp of cataclysmic change. Caught between his desire to please his wife and his strongly independent nature, Sylvanus must decide what path his future will take.
Tuesdays with Morrie: an old man, a young man and life’s greatest lesson
Excerpt: The last class of my old professor’s life took place once a week in his house, by a window in the study where he could watch a small hibiscus plant shed its pink leaves. The class met on Tuesdays. It began after breakfast. The subject was The Meaning of Life. It was taught from experience.
No grades were given, but there were oral exams each week. You were expected to respond to questions, and you were expected to pose questions of your own. You were also required to perform physical tasks now and then, such as lifting the professor’s head to a comfortable spot on the pillow or placing his glasses on the bridge of his nose. Kissing him good-bye earned you extra credit.
No books were required, yet many topics were covered, including love, work, community, family, aging, forgiveness and finally death. The last lecture was brief, only a few words.
A funeral was held in lieu of graduation.
MITCH ALBOM’s first full time newspaper job was as a feature writer and eventual sports columnist for The Fort Lauderdale News and Sun Sentinel in Florida. He moved to Detroit in 1985, where he became a nationally-acclaimed sports journalist at the Detroit Free Press and one of the best-known media figures in that city’s history, working in newspapers, radio and television. He currently hosts a daily talk show on WJR radio (airs Monday through Friday, 5-7 p.m. EST) and appears regularly on ESPN Sports Reporters and SportsCenter.
The God of Small Things
In her first novel, award-winning Indian screenwriter Arundhati Roy conjures a whoosh of wordplay that rises from the pages like a brilliant jazz improvisation. The God of Small Things is nominally the story of young twins Rahel and Estha and the rest of their family, but the book feels like a million stories spinning out indefinitely; it is the product of a genius child-mind that takes everything in and transforms it in an alchemy of poetry. The God of Small Things is at once exotic and familiar to the Western reader, written in an English that’s completely new and invigorated by the Asian Indian influences of culture and language. Arundhati Roy has written screenplays for two films and lives in New Delhi.
The Underpainter
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)
Lives of the Saints
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.
Digitizeme 