Fabrizio's Return
Mark Frutkin
December


A brilliant novel packed with delights: grand romance, alchemical potions, violins to make you weep, commedia dell’arte theatre, reappearing comets, rambling skeletons and cracks in time.

It is 1682 in Cremona, Italy. With his manservant, an insolent dwarf named Omero, Fabrizio Cambiati, a priest, climbs the town clocktower to await the return of a comet that is said to reappear in the skies every 76 years. He has a new invention called a telescope with which to scour the night. As they await the comet, he scopes the town below and sees the commedia dell’arte players setting up in the town square and a Jesuit arriving in a carriage. We later learn that the Jesuit is Michele Archenti, a Devil’s Advocate sent from Rome to investigate the candidacy for sainthood of this same Fabrizio Cambiati – 76 years later!

The novel then begins again, this time in 1758 when Archenti settles himself in the town to assume his investigations. It is his job to find the flaws in Fabrizio’s character. In this attempt, he interviews a number of citizens, including an old duchess who holds a secret about Fabrizio’s life that would ruin the reputation of this priest, who was both a hidden alchemist and healer. The play held in the town square connects the two time periods by reflecting the goings-on in the wider world. We meet the players, as well as the duke, his beautiful daughter, a happy madman roaming the countryside with a skeleton on his back, and a hunchback who lives with his mastiff in a labyrinthine palace that is, like imagination itself, continually mutating.

With enormous assurance and a wonderful affection for his characters, Mark Frutkin has woven a miraculous tale that explores the ambiguous nature of reality and on every page packs joy into the reading.

(From the publisher.)

Roots of Stone
Hugh G. Allison
November


November is a month where it feels like everyone is holding their breath. The blazing days of autumn are at an end, the trees stripped bare. After the merry-making of Halloween and the quiet shade of Remembrance Day, we know too that the snow is coming and dear god, Christmas.

It is a good time for reflection and contemplation -- a great time for a good history book to give you a fresh perspective. If you like your history with an anecdotal touch and a personal feel, and you like your wee dram of whiskey to peruse it with, then Roots of Stone is the book for you.

(Bet you wondered when I would get to the Scots angle? November 30th is St. Andrews Day, lads and lassies).

The author, Mr. Allison decided to give his mum a great gift, she being the family records-keeper. Taking the genealogies she had researched during her life, he has written a memoir of Scotland but from the perspective of his family. The major battles and politics of the culture are explored through the eyes of the people who made them. From high born and those of the fields, from bards and poets, Allison weaves a personal view laced with humour and irony, but most of all with a heartfelt passion for the land and the people who created it. If history can teach us, it helps to close that connection when an author can speak to us with so intimatea voice

If your own roots are Scottish you will love this. But it doesn’t take Scots roots to appreciate the pride and love of where you come from and respect for those that got you here.

Benighted
Kit Whitfield
October


If you have been to our store or follow this website you will know that we LOVE Halloween. The store is always a little spooky as we are all pretty daft, but we love to decorate the store and dress up and remember what it is like to be a kid again. When I read an advance copy of Benighted back in July I knew it would be the perfect feature for this lovely month where all manner of things go bump in the night.

From a literary perspective Whitfield follows a trend established by writers such as Margaret Atwood (The Handmaiden’s Tale), P.D. James (Children of Men) and Mary Doria Russell (The Sparrow). To explore a theme the writer creates a society so removed from ours that they can explore what might otherwise make the novel a polemic diatribe and allows the reader to identify with the predicament of the characters.

Whitfield has gone way out on a limb. This is a novel about prejudice, an extremely divided society and retribution at the hands of the subclass. And it is about werewolves.

It is a world and a history like ours. But ninety percent of the population is “lycos” – lycanthropes that change on the full moon. The other ten percent are “barebacks” or that second class citizenry that make up the Order of St. Giles. Normal by our standards they are considered disabled by the greater population, treated with pity and distaste – but are necessary to protect the lycos from themselves and others when they “lune”. If they do break out of their self-imposed sanctuaries and destroy property or actually kill, they are subject to the Order who will try, convict and punish them. What happens when you, a human suddenly must defend a lycos that has injured your partner while in an altered state? When you are born into a lycos family, sent to live in a crčche when they lune, brutally abused and forced into the Society of St. Giles because there is no other choice? Live a sub marginal existence while creatures you risk your life for every full moon treat you with contempt. And what happens when you then have total control over them when they commit a crime?

Such is our main character Lola Galley, a public defender (read paralegal and hands-tied investigator) who discovers a group of lycos that are hiding a secret – a secret that could destroy the world order and the future of both lycos and barebacks. This is a good book, belying the goofiness of my description. Extremely well-written, moving and profound, Whitfield has created a character in Lola that goes against the grain. You don’t like her, you don’t like her actions but you totally invest in her. Because prejudice works both ways and she may be more vulnerable in this society because of her own perceptions as much as how the world works.

This book has already been optioned for a movie. Unfortunately Hollywood will turn it into an “Underworld” and defeat the intense and startling theme Whitfield explores and explores so passionately. Not only is this a great book that will keep you up all night this Halloween, it will make you look at your own perceptions of this world where discrimination and classes are things of the past. Right?

The Black Book
Orhan Pamuk
September

A New Translation and Afterword by Maureen Freely

Galip is a lawyer living in Istanbul. His wife, the detective novel-loving Ruya, has disappeared. Could she have left him for her ex-husband, Celâl, a popular newspaper columnist? But Celâl, too, seems to have vanished. As Galip investigates, he finds himself assuming the enviable Celâl 's identity, wearing his clothes, answering his phone calls, even writing his columns. Galip pursues every conceivable clue, but the nature of the mystery keeps changing, and when he receives a death threat, he begins to fear the worst.

With its cascade of beguiling stories about Istanbul, The Black Book is a brilliantly unconventional mystery, and a provocative meditation on identity. For Turkish literary readers it is the cherished cult novel in which Orhan Pamuk found his original voice, but it has largely been neglected by English-language readers. Now, in Maureen Freely’s beautiful new translation, they, too, may encounter all its riches.

From the publisher

The Olive Readers
Christine Aziz
August

(I don't know if it's this pestilence of heat and humidity or that I sadly need a vacation, but I just could not find a book I wanted to feature this month. Then Amal, suffering under the weight of the last days of her last course for her M.A. in English Lit, approached me with The Olive Readers and offered to review it. If you have read her Staff Picks Page, you know it wasn't an offer I could pass up.)

I'm going to preface this review by stating that my family is from Lebanon, and that, up until July 12th, I was planning on going on vacation there in August. This is significant to the review because, when I chose this book for our feature, I hadn't read it yet, and so picked it up purely based on the fact there was an olive tree on its dusky-coloured cover. Since reading it, though, I've had more cause to approve my own choice: set in a dystopic near-future, this book explores political and cultural themes that are extremely relevant to world events today.

Jephzat lives in a world that has survived huge ecological upheavals thanks to the work of an environmental revolutionary named Maya. Since her death, however, her legacy has been usurped by gigantic corporations who have carved the world up into different Companies, abolishing nations and displacing whole populations the better to maximize the efficiency of their production. Books, sculptures, art, anything that evokes the abolished past or allows a smattering of cultural identity, have been outlawed and destroyed by this Federation of companies; everyone speaks one language, and labours only in whatever pursuit their Company requires. Jephzat and her family live under the auspices of the Olive Company, and have just survived a border skirmish with the Water Company-a radical corporation that is hoarding the secret of how to create water. Over time, Jephzat becomes aware of a society known as the Readers, an underground organization dedicated to the recovery and maintenance of the past, and with the eventual overthrow of the Federation in view.

Though it deals fairly overtly with political concerns, this is a book that is written with warmth and tenderness, and there are moments so gorgeously drawn that they leave indelible impressions on the mind: a kiss taken from the lips of a drowned woman, the deeply tactile pleasure of discovering ancient volumes in a hidden library, the innocence and anguish of a woman's love for her sister. Aziz manages to infuse the cold, detached world of her creation with bursts of colour and light, and the overall impression to be left with-one especially useful in the world we live in-is one of compassion and hope. Well-written, with beautiful characters and compelling storytelling, this is a novel I highly recommend.

The Red Power Murder
Thomas King (Hartley Goodweather)
July

Nothing says a Canadian summer like sticking your feet up at the cottage (or campsite) with a cold brew in one hand and a good book in the other. Especially a mystery. Something that teases your mind while your body and spirit just … hmm, kind of surf.

The Red Power Murders is the second book in Thomas King's "DreadfulWater Mysteries". The first was published under the Hartley Goodweather nom-de-plume (pen names are something I absolutely detest. If your readers can't accept you trying something different then you don't really want them as an author, do you?). And while the first book in this series grounds you a bit more in the town of Chinook and DreafulWater himself, the Red Power Murders is actually the better of the two and can be read independently - which is a good indicator of the future of a series - that it gets better as it goes along. Look at Ian Rankin.

Thumps DreadfulWater is a retired cop from California who has settled into the small town of Chinook with a new girlfriend, a new career in photography and a cat named Freeway that pretty much rules his life. But retired is a word the local sheriff doesn't seem to understand as Thumps generally gets seconded as deputy once a dead body turns up. In the Red Power Murders the bodies are connected to a thirty year old mystery that goes back to Thumps militant friends from university in Utah and the still unsolved case of a missing native activist.

Written in a breezy but snappy style reminiscent of Robert Parker in his early Spenser days, King has created a brilliant cast of characters; Beth, the amazingly built town coroner, Archie, local independent bookseller (Thanks, Mr. King for the description of big box bookstores - I owe you one) who autopsies Thumps breakfasts and Moses Blood, mayor of the discarded trailer park and local native savant -- who may be archetypical in his homilies but you just really wish he lived next door.

This book is just what you need to take on holidays. Easy to read, packed with wry humour and you just know that whatever Thomas King puts his hand to write - regardless of the name he writes under -- the magic and the mystery of his storytelling will be there to take you away.

Vision of Light
Judith Merkle Riley
June

(I was so thrilled to find my favourite historical coming back into print I asked Amy -- it is no misnomer to call a “M.A.H. student” our resident historian -- to do the review. I realized that only one line stating, “Buy This Book”, wouldn’t be quite good enough. Thanks, Amy, well done.
– Pat)

Originally published in 1989, A Vision of Light was re-released a few weeks ago, and we should all rejoice! For those who love historical fiction as much as I do, it does not get much better than this. A witty, powerful historical novel, it is one to savour. Fourteenth century England is suffering from the Black Plague, urban decay, war, and religious heresy, but only with the prose of Judith Merkle Riley could all these facets of history be weaved together so beautifully in historical fiction.

In 1355, God instructs Margaret of Ashbury to write her memoirs; however, there is one enormous problem: she is illiterate. After hiring a poor, starving monk, Brother Gregory, her life is translated to paper, and her story told. As Margaret recounts her life, it becomes quite obvious that she is a most extraordinary woman. She has traveled throughout the country, become a well-known herbalist and midwife, and been blessed with a unique gift for healing, called the Vision of Light.

Those who have been around the store may have noticed that I, the budding historian, love history and historical fiction, so I was drawn to this book, for obvious reasons. The triumph of this book is the way that the author uses the historical circumstances, constructing beautiful scenes, while keeping the focus on her characters. For instance, when Brother Gregory saunters through London on his way to Margaret’s house, the subtly of the surroundings is magnificent; yet, despite the great scenery and history, the characters remain the focus of the story; character development does not take a back seat to historical detail.

Now that the summer is coming upon us, we all search for a great book to curl up with and relax, so grab a copy, and enjoy.

Also, watch for In Pursuit of the Green Lion, the second Margaret of Ashbury novel, being re-released in the fall (not to mention the third installment which will, fingers crossed, be out in the next year).

Labyrinth
Kate Mosse
May


There has not been a book out in the past three years that has not been compared to Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code. Like Harry Potter with kids, Brown’s book has inspired many non-readers to read and the movie premiere this month will only fuel that. Regardless of your sentiments with regards to Brown’s work, you can’t quite knock him for that. Any book that will get people looking for historical information about the subject of a fictional novel has done more than provide sheer entertainment. But unfortunately reading the Da Vinci Code is like going for fast food. It immediately fills the craving but leaves you wanting something more. Labyrinth is like sitting down to an eight course French dinner. It appeals and satiates all your senses.

Mosse tells a two tier story. The first opens on an excavation site in the southwest of France. Alice Tanner is a volunteer on a dig that uncovers a small cave in the side of a mound harbouring two ancient skeletons. Its discovery sends Alice scrambling across Languedoc searching for a friend who instantly disappears – and running from the men who claim she has the key to a secret she knows nothing about.

But we also fall back into the 13th century and follow the story of Alais Pelletier, daughter of the Indendant of Carcassonne, a city state in a province besieged by Pope Innocent III’s crusade against the Cathars – a sect of Christian society deemed heretics by the Church and rumoured to know where the Holy Grail can be found. In this overwhelming land grab by the northern nobles of France, Alais is drawn into the secret world of the Grail and her family’s destiny to protect it.

Mosse is the co-founder of the #cc3300 Prize for Fiction in the U.K. If that is not enough to legitimize her work, then possibly the two pages of bibliography at the back of the book, for further reading on the subjects she explores should. Her compelling writing and fascinating plots make it easy yet stimulating reading. This is a fabulous book and a great opportunity this month. The hardcover has been specially priced at the trade price $24.95) and is still 20% off.

So there is no excuse at all. Buy this today and fill up on some good food for the mind, heart and soul.

The Mobile Library: The Case of the Missing Books
Ian Sansom
April


At any point in time we have all been a stranger in a strange land. New school, new country, new job. But for Israel Armstrong, a nice Jewish librarian from London, the town of Tundrum in Antrim, Northern Ireland – might as well be the moon. In a country of fry ups for breakfast, roast chicken for lunch and toad in the whole for dinner, all with a bit of overcooked veg on the side, not only is Israel lost without a map, but slowing starving to death to boot.

But things start out really well. The day Israel arrives he discovers that the Library where he has accepted the position at of Head Librarian has been closed. Standing in the rain on a cold December morning with no food and an incipient migraine, the future looks pretty bleak. But not quite as bleak as when he discovers the council is setting him up (with an ironclad contract) to resurrect the town’s Mobile Library in a condemned bus. But wait, it doesn’t stop there. With the help of the former driver Ted – a pugnacious, ex-pugilist with a plank on his shoulder, he may be able to resurrect the damn thing, but unfortunately all 15,000 books have gone walk-about.

Of course, it falls to the new Head Librarian to round up the missing books in time for the soon-to-be grand opening. Meanwhile he’s living in a rebuilt chicken coop on a struggling farm run by a vindictive and surly woman, her evangelistic father and a brother who is studying philosophy at Oxford. No phone, no money and very quickly no clothes (read it to find out how he loses those) except for the selection of too tight t-shirts (“Niggaz With Attitude”) and para pants Brownie lends him, Israel isn’t just a stranger, he may as well be from another galaxy.

This charming and absolutely hilarious novel is obviously the beginning of a series. And like any good u.k. author the humour is the language and not so much the slap-stick Peopled with a cast of amazingly ridiculous but surprisingly lovable characters, Tundrum itself seems to be a village not too far left from the BBC’s Ballykissangel. A delight to read in this lovely new spring weather, I highly recommend it for fans of Alexander McCall Smith, Sarah Caudwell, M.C. Beaton … and perhaps Christopher Moore under the influence of a little Guinness and chips. Great fun!

Haunted Ground
Erin Hart
March 2006

(Our guest reviewer this month is Perfect Books own graphic designer extraordinaire, Catherine. Someday I may finally get the incredible bookmarks she designed for us printed! Thanks, Cate).

Haunted Ground is Erin Hart's first novel, and it is a masterpiece, a superb atmospheric mystery set in the countryside of Ireland. What finer way to celebrate Ireland's own special month and St. Patrick's Day too, than to feature this remarkable novel in March?

A farmer named Brendan McGann is cutting peat in the Irish countryside when he discovers the perfectly preserved head of a beautiful young Irish colleen with long red hair, there is no indication that a body was ever interred with the decapitated head. The forensic scientists of the Garda (Irish police) are unable to ascertain who the young woman is and how long she has been buried in the peat bog, and archaeologist Cormac Maguire, whose special area of academic expertise is bog bodies, is summoned to examine the grisly discovery and assist the police in their inquiries. Cormac is joined in his work by Nora Gavin, an American pathologist working in Dublin who also has an interest in bog bodies. Cormac names the dead woman cailín rua (red girl), and she swiftly becomes not just a bog body or an archaeological find, but a poignant symbol of mythic Ireland and present day Irish social problems, as well as a metaphor for Cormac and Nora's own troubled pasts.

As always with a first rate mystery novel, there is more than one thread being skilfully spun and woven in Haunted Ground. Two years before the novel begins, Mina Osborne, the wife of a local landowner named Hugh Osborne, vanished without a trace along with her young son Christopher Osborne. Hugh Osborne is still in mourning for his lost wife and son, but many of the villagers believe he murdered them for their life insurance policies. Others believe that the two simply became lost in the peat bogs and perished. As far apart as they seem to be at first glance, the fates of the cailín rua and Hugh Osborne's family are closely interwoven.

There are crimes old and new here, and Haunted Ground explores both, moving among tortured and sinister personalities, dark deeds and divergent centuries with ease and assurance. The many threads of which the book is composed are woven together in a truly masterful way, and it is difficult to believe that this is a first novel, so deft and lyrical is the author's weaving. Here is a rich, vibrant and compelling tale in which the characters are wonderfully drawn, and in which the verdant landscape of Ireland and Irish culture also have starring roles. Erin Hart has a deep love of all things Irish, and her rendering of the Irish landscape, village life and local personalities is impeccable. She describes aspects of Irish life such as traditional music and folklore, village pubs, farming and peat cutting in a clear voice and with a sure hand. Whether you are a devotee of Celtic archaeology, a student of Irish music and folklore, or a mystery junkie, this is a book to be read slowly and treasured.

Alchemy
Maureen Duffy
Feature February 2006

I like soup. I mean I really like soup. I especially like what a friend of mine terms his as “refrigerator soup”, meaning whatever he has in the larder that he can throw in makes the soup. He’s a great cook so whatever is in it is mixed and spiced and intensely flavourful. This is what Alchemy is all about and is a perfect title and description for this book.

Jade Green (I know, really) is a young solicitor in London with her own small firm called Lost Causes. When a professor from a small private University comes to her for help fighting his termination from the school, she is hesitant to accept but hungry. Delivering Chinese food on the side to make ends meet, she agrees to start some inquiries. Doctor Adrian Gilbert has been accused of teaching the students Satanism at a school run by an American religious group The Temple of the Latent Christ. In his defense he gives her the journal of a young alchemist, Amyntas Boston charged with witchcraft in the seventeenth century. She is quickly drawn into the young woman’s story, a sequence of events that somehow lightly parallels her own. Quickly caught up in Amyntas’s world and the rife intrigue of academia and a new world order, Jade learns more than she wants to about her own past and who she is. Duffy’s writing passes deftly from one time period to the next, especially as the manuscript Jade’s reading begins to quietly influence her.

This novel is a “refrigerator” soup of ideas. Scattered throughout are the court politics of the seventeenth century, the widely flung grasp of internet culture, theology past and present, modern mores of the twenty-first century, poetry and Shakespeare, witchcraft then and now, -- good and bad --- and passionate soul devouring love and the horror of betrayal.

It’s a good solid mix; a strong stock with lots of spice and kernels of real meat to satisfy the intellect. Highly recommended.

The Ice Queen
Alice Hoffman
Feature January 2006

Be careful what you wish for. A small town librarian lives a quiet life without much excitement. One day, she mutters and idle wish and, while standing in her house, is struck by lightning. But instead of ending her life, this cataclysmic event sparks it into a new beginning. She goes in search of Lazarus Jones, a fellow survivor who was struck dead, then simply got up and walked away. Perhaps this stranger who has seen death face to face can teach her to live without fear. When she finds him he is opposite, a burning man whose breath can boil water and whose touch scorches.
(from the publisher)

O.K., I’ve had a helluva time writing this review. I chose this book as my feature back in the early fall as it was the perfect for January. The Ice Queen – about a woman who has frozen herself from the world … I mean, perfect. And it’s an Alice Hoffman. No questions about its quality. There has only been one book of hers I haven’t loved (and since it was an Oprah pick and sold like a demon, I can’t begrudge her that). I hadn’t had a chance to read the hardcover of The Ice Queen yet but figured I had time (silly me) and I always try to save her books for a time when I have lost faith in books and the publishing industry as a whole. To make a long story short, it was late to arrive in trade paperback; I couldn’t find my hardcover copy and hadn’t read it yet. So I went around reading as many reviews as I could to prepare myself, feeling guilty and swearing this would never happen again. I found my hardcover copy the day before it arrived. Read it and was swept away. But the damage was done. What else could I say about this truly wonder filled tale? So you can read the publisher’s blurb above, but here’s how I felt about the book.

This is one of Hoffman’s best ever. Although tough to beat out books like Practical Magic, Green Angel and Second Nature, she still tweaks it up a notch in sheer lyricism, poetry and imagery. The wishes aspect that all the reviewers describe is essential to the book, of course, but for me it was the constant fairy tale theme that is the background. Right down to the plot – a classic. A quest, discovery and salvation and/or redemption – it’s all there. All beautifully rendered with surprising humour, language to make you weep and relationships so compelling you cannot put the book down. It’s not a big book, 211 pages. I read it in an evening, and then went right back and read it all over again, just for the language.

Alice Hoffman is a treasure. And if it is one you haven’t discovered yet, get cracking. You have somehow lost your way to a very magical kingdom. Here are a few of our favourite landmarks: