* Note: A slightly different form of this review appeared in The Telegram

Kathleen Winter is no stranger to writing, in any form. She has written for television — from Sesame Street to CBC documentaries — and for newspapers, including her former weekly column, Naturally, in The Telegram. Her last book, boYs, a vibrant collection of short stories, won the prestigious Winterset Award and the Metcalfe-Rooke Award. Annabel is her debut novel.

Annabel tells the story of a child who is born both male and female, in the hyper-male hunting culture of 1960’s Labrador. Surgically altered at birth and given the name Wayne, only three people know of his secret: his parents and a trusted neighbour. But as Wayne approaches adulthood, as his identity strives to lay a foundation, the woman literally buried inside of him, Annabel, refuses to be forgotten. It is the story of a “son” who wants to swim in an orange bathing suit, not trunks. It is the story of a mother who has to deny her son, who could have been her daughter, that one, simple wish, and live with that denial. It is the story of a wife who loves her husband, but not wholly enough to stop longing for her life back in St. John’s, and who she could be. It is the story of a Labrador man whose ability to connect with the natural world exceeds his ability to connect with his family, yet he is there, faithfully, when needed, and out of love, not fatherly or marital duty, genuinely doing what he thinks is right by them: providing for his wife and forcing a maleness on Wayne, but never without empathy, admitted hypocrisy, or guilt.

“Treadway loved his wife because he had promised he would. But the centre of the wilderness called him, and he loved that centre more than any promise.”

It is just as much a novel about the characters as it is about their predicament, and Winter can channel her varied characters masterfully, switching points of view between her five characters as they encase themselves in private worlds. In showing us all angles of her five main characters, from inside and out, whether it was her intention or just gifted writing, she’s showing us the humanity that overrides gender and age, and the basic human traits and desires that unite us all.

Annabel is also an evocative portraiture of ethereal Labrador. Winter’s writing reaches a hand out of those pages and hauls her reader down into an authentic Labrador you’ll feel like you know by sight, smell, sound, and experience. It is convincing, right down to the plants, the smells, or how a blind man can navigate a canoe and hunt ducks. You’ll see its desolation and its draw, depending on the character she channeling. “The village of Croydon Harbour, on the southeast Labrador coast, has that magnetic earth all Labrador shares. You sense a striation, a pulse, as the land drinks light and emits vibration … the visitor has to be an open circuit, available to the power coming off the land.” Her skill in this regard is crucial, because setting plays a big role in how these characters are shaped or misshapen, isolated or liberated, together or alone.

Her writing is a mesmerizing combination of crisp language, deep empathy for her well-wrought characters, and a world-savvy wisdom. There is an unobtrusively aphoristic quality to the writing that will at times stir your mind. This aspect of the novel comes through particularly well in the world-travelling, tender-hearted, deeply intelligent character, Thomasina. “To Thomasina people were rivers, always ready to move from one state of being into another. It was not fair, she felt, to treat people as if they were finished beings. Everyone was always becoming and unbecoming.”

She delivers her story with a gracefulness that matches the mystique of Labrador and the tenderness required to carry this story. Annabel is an unforgettable novel of struggles, personal and inter-personal, and Kathleen’s empathetic voice does them justice in a way that connects reader to story. Destined to be one of the biggest novels out of Newfoundland this year, this is a story of isolation and a communication breakdown that breaks a family down, and breaks the reader down along with them.

Winner of the hip-assuring Metcalf-Rooke award! (Previous winners: Rebecca Rosenblum & Kathleen Winter)

This is fresh, new, fearlessly vibrant writing. Amy inhabits moments, she potently exorcises memories from her characters and you experience their longing or panic or exultation. The innovative structure in many of these stories should be celebrated, read, and emulated. It gets to a point where, What new can happen in writing, really? Every story has been told. A hundred times. That’s where Amy Jones comes in: every story might have been told one hundred times, but not the way she delivers them. This is where she excels: what Amy Jones does with narrative structure and point of view in some of these stories is innovative, epic, and unforgettable. In “How to Survive a Summer in the City” she uses ten tips, like Seek out free air condition, as pagebreaks. Pagebreaks that tie in to the story in clever ways as shifting points in the story. Amy’s radical switch in POV in the heart-wrenching “One Last Thing,” a story of a sister whose sister has run away, took the story to a level of potency no other technique could have. And after being floored a few times by her narrative wizardry, you think, What else does she have up her sleeve, and story after story she’s hauling out some new literary stunt, some new way to make her story enthrall you. I read “An Army of One” and I forgot to breathe. Read this full collection and you’ll never forget her, you might even consider her 2009’s big discovery in CanLit short fiction. I do. I’m really quite jealous I haven’t written some of these stories myself. My only complaint about this collection is that the opening story, a fine and solid story in isolation, doesn’t showcase Jones’s greatest talent. (Granted, “her greatest talent” is a relative claim, so I am being bias, a critical faux pas.)

Jones’s stories are as vibrant as the book’s cover. This is lively writing, punchy diction, and critically acclaimed dialogue, with closing lines that are occasionally a whole lot more for the deeper reader. They are character-forward stories featuring memorable characters — like the longing, list-writing Miriam Beachwalker — and if the title gives the illusion it is a sexually charged book: at times it is. The writing in stories “An Army of One” and “All We Will Ever be” censor nothing about the line between lust and longing, and properly captures the potency of unrequited love or, forgive me here, “the power of love.” The writing is tender in places and explicit in others, so that the vivacity of memories, passion, emotion, and desire punch through more than effectively.

Also commendable: she tells her stories in a way that is all Amy Jones. She tells them in a way that alternates between a wind-stealing punch in the guts and a playful punch on the shoulder. These stories, at times, fierce, powerful, and sexually charged, come from a tender, honest, and at-times vulnerable place, not an obnoxious, boisterous one. It is a deeply human collection, as vibrant as the front cover image. 

What Boys Like is on my top ten best collections of short stories. It’s her understanding of how to best tell a story, her explorations with narrative structure and POV are cutting and effective, and never gimmicky or repetitious. See “How to Survive a Summer in the City,” “One Last Thing,” An Army of One, “Twelve Weeks,” or “All We Will Ever be,” for a lesson in What Salty Ink Likes about Amy Jones.

The Artificial Newfoundlander is a fast-paced ride, a vibrant story, crackling with wit and adorned with an off kilter yet entirely realistic cast of characters. This is a great, gut-busting summer read, with a rare abundance of laugh-out-loud moments, thanks to the book’s likeably cheeky, amusingly over-contemplative protagonist.

Hugh Norman is a semi-disgruntled professor of English. Suddenly, and unannounced, his daughter barges in on him one day, her children in tow, fleeing her home in Vancouver, telling him she’s leaving her husband. It quickly becomes apparent that there’s more to her sudden, unexpected arrival than a dissolving marriage, and this subplot provides an engaging, humourous mystery angle to this novel, as Hugh tries to piece together why she’s just run across the country to his doorstep. There are calls to his house from “the incredibly rude woman.” He eaves drops when she calls and has “been able to rule out the following: a collections agency, an aggrieved wife, drug dealers, political parties, and angry landlady, a cult.”

Not long after his daughter arrives, his son-in-law — who happens to be a former student and drinking buddy of Hugh’s –  shows up just as confused as Hugh. This man, Foley, a well-meaning womanizer and somehow endearing halfwit, is one of the best likeable-fool characters you’ll come across. I found myself waiting for Foley moments as I read the book. Mathews is a masterful crafter of characters, each one of his many characters are alive and real and convincing and flawed and human. Foley showing up puts Hugh in an awkward place: though he’s never agreed with his daughter’s choice of a husband, he quite likes Foley. In fact, there was a mild jealousy when Emily took a romantic interest in Foley, and a suspicion her interest in Foley was out of spite (long story).

This engaging family dynamic and comic-mystery plotline is only one of many plotlines woven seamlessly together in this great novel. This is what makes the book shine. There’s an obvious benefit to a writer having a book with 4 or 5 plotlines: the reader doesn’t tire from a “slow” or linear plot. But not every writer can weave plotlines like Mathews has here. Jagged and jarring shifts can knock a reader out of the story, but that’s never the case with Mathews: his transitions are not only seamless, his storylines all play off each other. The other plotines include Hugh’s dealing with the at-times indignant, almost schoolyardish politics of the race for the head of the department (the players involved here provide yet another round of entertaining character squabbles). Hugh is a prof who doesn’t quite condone or fit in with academic hoopla, and is himself intrigued by and writing about an obscure novelist and embittered priest named Cleary, “ I am in a fanclub with one member.” Hugh’s research on and portrayal of Cleary, an enigmatic man presumed dead under suspicious circumstances (though his body was never found) – is yet another engrossing subplot, as is his rekindling of a relationship with Maureen Finnerty, another storyline that fleshes out the novel and Hugh’s character, and gives the book one of the funniest, most original gender-role dilemmas I’ve read. I won’t spoil it here.

While it is called the Artificial Newfoundlander, it succeeds — perhaps better than any other Newfoundland-set novel — in capturing contemporary St. John’s in terms of its vibrant, diverse arts scene, and that scene’s range of players: from eccentric social butterflies to its enigmatic reclusive artists. Who better to portray modern-day St. John’s than a transplant “come from away” teacher of creative writing like Hugh Norman (or Larry Mathews) with a fresh set of eyes? Whether it is the promising young filmmaker, Raissa McClouskey, who is too quick to flash her engagement ring and announce she is taken to all the men she assumes want her, or the Salingeresque writer-priest Cleary, Mathews serves up a cast as vibrant as modern day St. John’s.

I haven’t been this gut-busted by a novel since Ed Riche’s Rare Birds back in 2001. I enjoyed Hugh’s candid honesty and cerebral musings: it helps that the writing is witty and distinctive, and a pleasure to read. It’s the kind of book you lay down, and halfway through another task, find yourself wanting to pick back up, just to hear that Hugh guy again. That kind of narrative hook is invaluable, as are this novel’s pace and narrative construction. Mathews’ clever witty diction deserves applause, and so does his smooth, edgeless transition from one storyline to another. Each one is grounds for a novel in itself, but instead, each subplot is pared down, sharpened to a point and stitched into the other, and as a result, there is far less filler in this novel than most, and thus far more punch. Mathews’ constant wit, his unforgettable characters and his multi-layered plot prevent the story from growing stale and linear, as even the best of novels often do. It’ s a fun book and a quick read from a “searing and silver-tongued wit.” (That quote is from Mark Anthony Jarman’s backcover endorsement.)

- Winner of the 2004 ReLit Award.

- A NOW Magazine top ten book of the year, and a finalist for the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction and Pearson Canada Readers’ Choice Book Award.

Still Life with June was, by page 9 or 10, clearly going to be of the best books I’d read all year. Before I’d finished it, it had become a plain favourite book of mine. It’s all there: great writing, a distinctive style, an engaging story told in a calculated way. Also, a key ingredient in the recipe for a great book, I’ve come to decide, is how memorable the book is. This book is in every way memorable. It is also unique in structure: there are hundreds of small chapters, some are pages long, some are random story-enhancing bits no longer than this: “The things I hate most are: 1.) middle-east violence 2.) hospital food 3.) Microsoft Word 6 4.) My father.”

Still Life with June pairs heavy subject matter with a comedic tone in a way that makes both the story and comedy more poignant. Greer masks the sadder aspects of this story with a comedic tone, so that the starker side of the story feels all the more potent in those moments when he chooses to haul off  that mask of comedy. In other words, this is dark subject matter outweighed by levity, except for the moments that matter. This is very effective. This novel is outright funny and downright grave: not something most writers could pull of so flawlessly.

In Cameron Dodds’ take on the world there are two types of people: “losers who know they are losers, and losers who don’t know they are losers.” Cameron, a small-time writer, considers himself a loser who knows he is a loser. He works at a Sally Ann drug and alcohol treatment centre, where he steals the file of Darryl Green, a recent suicide case, and gets so engrossed in the file he translates it into fictitious short stories and befriends the deceased’s sister: a Down Syndrome patient named June, who he regularly visits.

We get a hilarious dose of humour-infused, self-deprecation upfront to get to know the character. “I’m losing my hair. Each morning I stand in front of the bathroom mirror with a wooden ruler and measure from the bridge of my nose to my hairline. It recedes about a quarter of an inch every six months.” He gets into how he loves dried apricots, and although he’s allergic to them, he eats them anyway, despite the welts he gets: “If you didn’t know any better you’d probably think I was heavily into S & M.” And the next chapter is only two words: “I’m not.” By page six he is naked and unwillingly handcuffed to a bed by a man who, he explains, fits the profile of a serial killer.

More than anything, this is a novel about identity. Every single character is in denial about something, about who they are, and they are outright lying about who they are, to themselves and others, and in many cases, literally assuming other people’s identities. Cameron, the story’s main character, is a writer pretending to be anything it takes to collect material for stories — including befriending “losers who don’t know they are losers” in gay bars on Christmas day to get their sad stories for his writing. Another main character is a girl pretending to be a writer by outright faking her entire identity. No one is who they seem, or, no one really knows who they are, or, no one is satisfied with who they are. Except for his cat, Juxtaposition, or more affectionately, Juxta. Cameron is jealous of Juxta, wishing he could be his cat for a day and “glory in my sloth, without having to wonder who I am or what my life is about.” Juxtaposition, one of the coolest cats in CanLit history, acts as Greer’s muse for reflections on identity, and why we’re all so self-loathing these days. “My cat doesn’t hate herself. If you hate yourself you don’t spend two hours each day grooming with no chance of ever getting laid. And she doesn’t even know her parents [to blame everything on them.]” Without giving too much away about his brilliant, page-turner of an ending, Cameron quite literally gets lost looking for himself.

Very innovative and edgy, but not in that edgy-for-the-sake-of- it way, Still Life with June definitely deserved a 2009 re-issue and a new wave of appreciation so that people like me, who missed it the first time, can enjoy it this time. And, since it truly is one of those rare gems that begs a second read, people who enjoyed it last time can enjoy it again.  It is a Cormorant bestseller for very obvious reasons: it is an unforgettable and infectious novel. Few writers give us a book this memorable, re-readable, and original. It is screaming film adaptation, and has been optioned.

Come, Thou Tortoise (2009)

Jessica Grant

Knopf Canada

- Available in softcover March 9th!

- A Globe and Mail Best Book of 2009!

- Shortlisted from the 2009 Winterset Award and Amazon.ca’s First Novel Award!

- Winner of The National Post’s Canada Also Reads Competition!

 Pardon all the adjectives, but this books really is a fresh, innovative, unprecedented, unforgettable gem. Pardon the cliché but I mean it: There is nothing quite like this. The story, the tone, the characters,  the diction, the delivery: all Jessica Grant’s. It is also everything great about the fresh, ultra-modern diction of Burning Rock fiction. Grant’s crisp, accurate descriptions dance the story so vividly off the pages. “Her skin felt like an old elbow,” “Her brown hair makes a beaver’s tail down her back.” The story’s heroine, Audrey Flowers, sees and describes the world in a consistently fresh, unique way: “the wind was flappy,” or “Downtown is a bit smooshed. It takes Verlaine five tries to park the Lada,” or “Why did she name her horse [Rambo] after that sweaty, bullety Sylvester Stallone?”

“Bullety”; no one has ever used that adjective before, that apt neologism. And” flappy wind,” a virtually perfect-but-unused adjective for wind, so revealing of her character.  It is no wonder Michael Winter, a CanLit icon known for his attention to detail,  endorsed this novel with a plea, “Please —I beg you dear reader — read Jessica Grant. “

Nutshell summary: Audrey Flowers’ father is knocked into a coma just before Christmas (by a Christmas tree hanging out the back of someone’s truck) and she has to return to Newfoundland, leaving her pet tortoise behind with her friend, Chuck, a dejected player of small-not-big roles in Shakespeare plays. (The tortoise narrates every so many chapters, relaying his chaotic history of ownership and the demise of Audrey’s relationship with her deserting, rock-climbing ex.) Back at home, Audrey, obsessed with the game of Clue, and possibly suffering from a low IQ, ends up slowly piecing together a family mystery and the truth behind her ever-lasting pet mouse, all the while recapping her entire childhood with her unconventional, endearing family. The ending is one of those endings where it is past midnight, and you just want to sleep, but you can’t lay the book down.

As mentioned in her acknowledgements, it is a very “punny” novel.  There is a great sense of humour in the narration, in terms of obsessive references to the game of Clue, two  consistent catch phrases, an offbeat plot and its off-kilter delivery, and a plethora of puns . Random examples:  The narrator purposefully left the L out of her father’s obit, so it read Water Flowers, not Walter Flowers. Her father used to refer to the family unit as “The Bouquet,” (because their last name was Flowers). In the opening chapter, in one of the funniest scenes I’ve ever read, Audrey, in an act of delusional heroics,  gets herself into a predicament in which an air marshal is asking for his gun back through the bathroom door (and his last name just so happens to be Marshall). Even before that, we get the lines, “Winnifred is old, she might be three hundred. She came with the apartment. The previous tenant, a rock climber named Cliff …” (A rock climber named Cliff. And Cliff, by the way, referred to the ceiling as an overhang, because the walls and ceilings of his apartment were equipped with climbing holds, for when he wasn’t busy rappelling from the fire escape). Grant’s outwardly off-kilter novel works because it is balanced with a sadness not milked into melodrama like most writers would do. The offbeat nature of the book, and constant puns and wittiness aren’t exhausted or cheesy; instead they perfectly fuel what makes this novel an utterly unique gem. This is a book you will never forget. It helps that she portrays the wacky Flowers family in a believable and endearing manner. (Her live-in uncle Thoby has one arm longer than the other, for some reason, so he is obviously the one to change light bulbs or scrape ice from windshields.)

Also, it is okay that eight or nine of these chapters are narrated by Audrey’s pet tortoise, because Winnifred is one of the best characters of the year, and hilarious, and might do for the tortoise pet trade what Sideways did for wine? A quote to summarize all my raving, “Audrey’s brilliant. She’s hilarious. I could read about her all day. Same goes for the tortoise.” – The Globe & Mail.

Check out her renowned collection of short fiction as well: Making Light of Tragedy

Yes, I am being purposefully witty: February’s book of the month is February, but also because the softcover version just hit stores.

As I read February, I was overwhelmed with the sensation that I was, for the first time, reading the work of a fully evolved writer. In terms of bare-bones writing, in terms of sentence-level writing, and how well an author crafts a sentence to capture a moment in words: There is no one else in the country who can touch Lisa Moore’s elegant rendering of language. Lisa made her mark with Open, and Alligator got all the attention it deserved. But with February, she’s peaked. She’s distinticve, and what she does with language is nothing less than dazzling, and then there is her uncanny ability to inhabit every pore and sinew of her endearingly human characters, and project their stories up off the pages in the most meaningful ways, with her tender, visceral diction. What she does with language is pure art. Pure innovation. With all the right words and nuances, moments and memories are fleshed out and almost x-rayed, until the reader is made to experience her protagonist’s very core and consciousness. Through her rendering of the main character, Helen O’mara, I have felt the irrevocable and deflating loss of a spouse. Lucid is the word I am after, her scenes dance right off the pages and all over your heart. Especially when you have the chance to hear her read her own work. 

If my words aren’t enough, the backcover is graced by the following endorsement from the legendary Richard Ford:  ”Lisa Moore is an astonishing writer. She brings to her pages what we are always seeking in fiction and only find the best of it: a magnetizing gift for revealing how the earth feels, looks, tastes, smells, and an unswerving instinct for what’s important in life.” 

February is the story of Helen O’mara, a woman widowed and left to raise her children alone after she losses her beloved Cal the night of the Ocean Ranger disaster, Valentine’s Day, 1982. In no way does Moore exploit, sentimentalize, or overuse that real-life tragedy. Instead, with a truly shocking and core-penetrating skill, she shows us the effect of that loss on Helen. How and why, years later, her mind still trickles back to that ill-fated February. Structurally, February unfolds in a non-chronological order. Helen’s memories, her daily routines of present day life, her watching her grandchildren or helping her son cope with the reality of an estranged, impregnated fling are all happening at once. Moore’s non-linear narrative structure not only makes the book a more engaging read, it also captures how life really works, the reverberations of our past echoing in the present, often at random. Her memories come at random to pierce through the mundane chores of every day life. This is an important work, and perhaps the apex of CanLit, if not simply a shining example of what is meant by creative writing: sentences that evoke emotions in their reader; words strung together with an artful, calculated precision so that a reader feels what they’re reading.

 February earned its way onto numerous “best of 2009″ lists, most notably the  Quill & Quire’s and Globe and Mail’s.

Scrabble Lessons is deeply affecting and gorgeously written. As a writer, reading her is like holding on to fireworks. It’s a thrill to be so fondly jealous you never wrote these stories yourself. No detail is left blandly described, and it is all so fresh and vivid. Example: “The tears started, big fat drops cutting inside her cheekbones and taking the easier nose-side route,” and you know what she means. You know she sat back in her chair and saw all her scenes and never missed a thing in describing them; it’s like she’s writing from the inside out. Where most writers might say Gary was confused, or Gary was disoriented, she’d say “Gary felt like he’d stepped inside some weird foreign film, like he should be looking around for subtitles to make sense of it all.” Even each gesture is given a unique visual. For example: “She shook her head like there were flies buzzing around it” or “She held her fingers ruler straight.”

Take the opening story, “Scrabble Lessons.” The detail is there, she talks about the clinking sound of the tiles as she hears her mother and grandmother playing scrabble in another room, and describes everything in a way you see; she really puts you there with lines like: “Rob was two-handing his beer glass like it might get away from him.” And there is some sort of harsh, intentionally paradoxical contrast in many of the lines in this story: a lot of the most vivid violent sentences are played off so casually. Example: “Just about the time the steering wheel was punching through Dad’s chest, Mom was joining VELO to CITY, her V boldly claming the red square of a triple word score.” You get a juxtaposition of the violent, unfathomable death of her father laid over the mundane, everyday routines of her life, except this day, her father dies in a car accident and with these sentences stacked the way they are, you really get a sense of the narrator’s shock via Vryenhoek’s command of language and lingual wizardry. When her mother shares her scrabble wisdom, or lessons, is it not a metaphor for life, done in a subtle way for the deeper reader? A clever parallel between the game of scrabble and the game of life; the approaches to each.

I could make some half-apt and flattering comparisons, so that anyone reading this might get a feel for this book. I could say, “Scrabble Lessons is Lisa Moore’s short fiction meets Kathleen Winter’s,” but there’s something here that’s all Leslie Vryenhoek’s, and that’s what excited me the most. A new voice, and I love it. This is a perfect collection of short stories: punchy, top-notch creative writing that makes you feel something. Jammed in around all these skilfully constructed sentences is raw emotion you feel, seeping out through the words. These are stories you feel as a reader and admire as writer.

Easily One of the most well-conceived, well-presented, and exciting books out of Atlantic Canada this fall?

St. John’s based editor and author, Mike Heffernan, has put together “an anthology of dark Atlantic Canadian fiction … full of viceral imagery … for anyone who likes their literature written with a ragged quill pen, a messy inkpot, and a sinister edge, Hard Ol’ Spot brings us the dark beauty of Atlantic Canadian fiction.”

* Features story-specific artwork by the super-talented Darren Whelan

A Foreword by Kathleen Winter.

And Stories from:

Michael Crummey, Sara Tilley, Michelle Butler Hallett, Ramona Dearing, Gerard Collins, Jo-Anne Soper-Cook, and more …

“This is a book where a hard place breeds violence, reckless escape and, perhaps cruelest of all: hope.”

Listen to CBC’s Angela Antle interview Mike and Darren here: http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/nlwamgaloot_20091129_23733.mp3

Never More There
Stephen Rowe
Nightwood Editions
Poetry

How do we reconcile story with fact? What must one lose for the other to exist? In this debut collection, Rowe explores the nature of mythology and how it morphs in time to retain cultural and personal significance. Folk tales, supernatural creatures, family histories and personal elegies come together to expose the cohabitation of the dead and the living; the relationship between cold absence and stark presence.

“One of a new generation of Newfoundland poets who are inspired by the riches of their culture, Stephen Rowe casts a meditative eye on the world about him.”
- Mary Dalton, award-winning author of Merrybegot and Red Ledger

“Again and again while reading Never More There I was struck by arresting lines and images, by Stephen Rowe’s rigorous attention to the natural world and the world of words. Eloquent and passionate, Rowe is poet of real promise.”
- Michael Crummey, award-winning author of Galore and Hard Light

Never More There was shortlisted for the 2009 Fresh Fish Award

Atlantic Canada’s 100 Greatest Books
Trevor J. Adams & Stephen Patrick Clare
Nimbus Publishing

In Atlantic Canada’s 100 Greatest Books, Trevor J. Adams and Stephen Patrick Clare review the top one hundred Atlantic Canadian books—both fiction and nonfiction—ever published, as chosen by a panel of local readers and literary luminaries. In their own knowledgeable reviews, Adams and Clare offer insights into these titles’ continuing influence and celebrate their contributions to the Atlantic Canadian literary landscape. Illustrated in full colour with book covers and photos of the authors, and accompanied by personal selections from celebrities in the literary community and beyond, Atlantic Canada’s 100 Greatest Books is a requisite companion for fans of Canadian literature.