Posted by: Beth Powning - author of The Sea Captain's Wife

On the evening of January 15, 2010, the Sussex Royal Legion in Sussex, New Brunswick, was transformed into an 1860s sailing ship for the launching of my new novel, The Sea Captain’s Wife.

Angelika Glover, my editor at Knopf Canada, came from Toronto. I had obtained a costume for her from Kings Landing Historical Settlement. We helped each other into vast crinolines, long dresses, detachable sleeves. In our 1870s house, I was struck by the sight of Angelika as she stood in the hallway adjusting her collar in the mirror. And then again as I saw her coming through the back door into the winter dusk, and as she and I rustled our long skirts over the snow in the deep country quiet. This is what literature is about, I thought; the thrill of entering another time, another world.

Perhaps it was this feeling that gripped every visitor to the Legion that night. People were greeted by high school students in costume, a six-foot-tall lighthouse, the sound of a fog horn and a cloud of fog. The room’s lighting was low, with pools of light illuminating photos and paintings of nineteenth century sailing ships and shipyards, and tables covered with objects gleaned from attics, or on loan from museums: ship’s logs, sextants, tools, even a captain’s sea chest. The Sea Captain’s Wife spilled from a leather trunk on the Indigo table; the manager and her assistant had travelled an hour from Saint John. There was the swish of long skirts, the half-giddy pleasure of women dressed in period costume. One woman wore a wedding dress from the 1840s. My son was resplendent in a brown beaver top hat and silk ruffled vest. A pirate appeared wearing a hoop earring and eye patch. The room smelled of chowder that simmered on the kitchen’s big stoves, attended by many volunteer cooks. Hundreds of biscuits were baked. A sea shanty group, “Before the Mast,” sat in a boat at the front of the room next to the stage - and the stage itself was a ship’s prow, with a life-sized figurehead made for the occasion, a huge canvas jib hung from a spar, and a ship’s wheel.

At seven o’clock, people began pouring in. They came and came. People reported that three adjacent parking lots were filled and that a line stretched far down the snowy sidewalk. The sea shanty group began to sing as the chairs filled and people jostled for space along walls. My neighbour and friend Kevin, dressed in a period captain’s outfit, was the emcee. I was introduced by the event’s organizer, Patricia, the high school librarian who had worked tirelessly, serving as the hub of a wheel of about 25 volunteers. As I read, I experienced the palpable energy of 500 utterly silent people. Afterwards, I thanked people in the crowd who had helped with the book in diverse ways: the veterinarian who told me how horses were disposed of in the 1860s, the doctor who had researched nineteenth century medicine. The sea shanty group sang again. People milled about, chatting with the women who had made the chowder, swapping yarns at the artifact tables, buying beer at the Legion bar, meeting old friends.

And they waited patiently in line to buy books. I signed and signed, for two hours. One man said to me, “I heard about this event on CBC. I told my wife we were going to go to it. ‘Harry, you don’t read!’ she said. ‘I’m going to read THIS book, I told her.’” To my astonishment, a couple told me they had come from Nova Scotia. And others from Fredericton, Saint John, Sackville.

It was a success beyond the wildest expectations of SLICE, Sussex Literary Initiatives and Cultural Events. We will all be talking about it in years to come, a warm, vibrant outpouring of community pride and support - just as we still tell tales of the Age of Sail.

Posted by: Cassandra Sadek - Marketing Manager, Digital Specialist, Random House of Canada

Reading by moonlight while waiting for The Great Pumpkin? Face your fears this Halloween with a bestseller (and a bag of chocolate!).

If you fear… a missing child:
Fear the Worst by Linwood Barclay

Seventeen-year-old Sydney Blake’s summer is shaping up to be typical for a teenager: she’s spending it with her father, and she has landed a part-time job at a local hotel. One night, Syd fails to come home from her shift, and her father Tim is a bit alarmed. However, that alarm turns to full-on panic after he visits the Just Inn Time hotel and the manager claims that Syd has never worked there… more

If you fear… a pack of werewolves:
Frostbitten by Kelley Armstrong

New York Times bestselling author Kelley Armstrong returns with the tenth installment of the Women of the Otherworld series.

The Alaskan wilderness is a harsh landscape in the best of conditions, but with a pack of rogue werewolves on the loose, it’s downright deadly. Elena Michaels, the Pack’s chief enforcer, knows all too well the havoc “mutts” can wreak. When they hear of a series of gruesome maulings and murders outside Anchorage, she and her husband, Clay, journey to Alaska in the dead of winter in order to hunt down the dangerous werewolves… more

If you fear… a body under water:
The Taken by Inger Ash Wolfe

In the second mystery novel featuring D.I. Hazel Micallef (after The Calling) is still recovering from back surgery when a report comes in that a body has been found in a nearby lake, snagged under several feet of water. But as D.C. Wingate says, the whole thing is way too eerie. The first installment of a story has just been published in the local paper: a passage that describes in detail just such a discovery. Real life is far too close to fiction for coincidence… more

If you fear… an arranged murder:
Breathless by Dean Koontz

In the stillness of a golden September afternoon, deep in the wilderness of the Rockies, a solitary craftsman, Grady Adams, and his magnificent Irish wolfhound Merlin step from shadow into light…and into an encounter with enchantment. That night, through the trees, under the moon, a pair of singular animals will watch Grady’s isolated home, waiting to make their approach… more

If you fear… a ghost story:
Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger

Another brilliant, original and moving novel from the author of The Time Traveler’s Wife.

Julia and Valentina Poole are normal American teenagers - normal, at least, for identical “mirror” twins who have no interest in college or jobs or possibly anything outside their cozy suburban home. But everything changes when they receive notice that an aunt whom they didn’t know existed has died and left them her amazing flat in a building by Highgate Cemetery in London. They feel that at last their own lives can begin… more

Discover your next great (spooky) read at BookLounge.ca.

Posted by: Michelle Wan - author of the Death in the Dordogne mystery series

Researching a book on location in France is more than it’s cracked open to be. I say “cracked open” because you start with a Fabergé egg - the jeweled prospect of a long-term stay in France where you will write The Book (call it the omelette). Give the fragile shell of irreality a tap and a Bruegelesque scenario spills out. Example: flight Toronto-Paris, dog in hold, smooth. Train to Bordeaux not too stressful. Bordeaux train station awful because Bordeaux station is all stairs, no trolleys, and Tim and I have 4 large bags, an immense dog crate, 2 backpacks, 1 dog who needs to pee, and only minutes to make connection to Le Buisson. Arrival at final destination hell because first thing dog does on entering house is eat rat poison. We make him vomit (all over livingroom carpet). Max’s fecal matter is neon orange for the next few days, but no lasting damage.

When we try to open bank and internet accounts, situation goes from hell to Helleresque. Can’t get internet without bank account. Can’t get bank account without proof of residence (utility bills). Don’t have utility bills because house belongs to my sister who lives in California. Eventually a compassionate bank employee breaks the deadlock. Now we’re clicking, life is good, sun is shining (weather lousy in Ontario, we hear). Sun shining through magnifying glass burns a hole in my desk. Two day before my sister arrives, dishwasher, oven, fridge and phone die. We attend an outdoor theatre presentation. It is washed out by a powerful storm. As we drive back in a monsoon, avoiding fallen trees, someone accidentally powers down all the car windows. Back at house, electricity is out, and the kitchen is flooded. My sister puts gas in her diesel rental car.

When I’m not dealing with detours, if not outright road blocks (i.e., life), I do my book research. I realize that one does not have to know French to speak French. You can say, for example: “Regardez les pompom girls en blue-jeans qui mangent les chips au ketchup,” and you will be perfectly understood. On site, Tim and I hike the scrubby plateau of Gramat Causse and the foothills of the Pays Basque, spend time in the High Pyrenees, surrounded by splendid peaks, pure air, mountain livestock and dizzying switchback roads. You are warned when you enter tunnels to watch out for cows, who like the shade. They’re there all right, lying about, not inclined to move, eyes glowing trustingly in your headlights. Back in the Dordogne the hedgerows are full of sweet plums and blackberries. The trees are heavy with golden fruit. Tim and I are putting on weight (all that gastronomic research), and Max has become a thoroughly French dog (everyone calls him Maxsou, he is welcome everywhere and has developed his own star rating of restaurants). I am aware that existence here is secure, tranquil, and deeply satisfying. Guess I’d better get busy creating a murder or two.

Posted by: Jessica Scott - Marketing Assistant, Digital Specialist

I just saw the Angels & Demons movie this weekend, and I’ve got The Lost Symbol on the brain. In case you haven’t heard, the new novel by Dan Brown has been announced: The Lost Symbol will be arriving in bookstores September 15, 2009. Can you believe that it’s been 6 years since The Da Vinci Code was originally published? For fans, it’s been a long wait for the new Robert Langdon adventure!

Luckily, this handy widget will tell you, to the second, when that wait will be over.

Meanwhile, there’s a lot happening on the web to tide us over until the fall. You can be sure that I’ll be keeping an eye on www.thelostsymbol.com, for lots of exciting announcements.

Looking for a bit of a challenge? Follow @lostsymbolbook to test your code cracking skills - cryptic tweets pulled from the content of the new book will keep you guessing all summer.

Become a fan of Dan Brown on Facebook for updates on the book, including The Lost Symbol cover reveal!

If you are going to stay one step ahead of this summer-long event, featuring an enigmatic array of codes, cryptic trivia, puzzles, secret history, maps, aphorisms, ciphers, and arcane knowledge, you’ll need to gather clues from these sites. Will you be the one to discover The Lost Symbol?

Posted by: Julie Forrest - Marketing Coordinator, Digital Specialist, Random House of Canada

Last night I had the pleasure of attending my first Chuck Palahniuk event, hosted by McNally Robinson Booksellers at the Isabel Bader Theatre. Chuck’s new book, Pygmy, went on sale last week and his devoted (I’m not using that term lightly) fans were eager to get their hands on signed copies and meet their idol in person. I arrived two hours before the start of the event, and the line was already long. As per Chuck’s request, some of the attendees arrived creatively attired as U.N. delegates (an homage to the climax of Pygmy).

When Chuck arrived, the crowd cheered, whistled and clapped. He stopped to chat with the faithful folks at the front of the line.

He signed a heck of a lot of books, and patiently posed with very happy devotees.

And then the fun really began. Over the course of the evening, Chuck entertained us with his hilarious retellings of “fairy tales” in Pygmy speak (read one of them here ); he was interrupted by a “sext” from Margaret Atwood (he assured the crowd that “boys only tease the writers they like”); and he whipped 200 inflatable penguins at us (plus one lone naked inflatable man). Seriously. The crowd lapped it up.

In conversation, Chuck talked about the origins of Pygmy’s hilarious pidgin English (it was modeled on his own bad German as well as his older Ukranian immigrant relatives who “will never see his work, so they won’t be hurt”). He explained that writing in Pygmy’s voice actually wasn’t that difficult, and he and his friends made a game out of talking in Pygmy speak. The quotes from fascist dictators peppered throughout the book also came from a challenge to his friends (wouldn’t it be fun to be Chuck Palahniuk’s pal?).

When asked about how he started writing, Chuck told us about the writing workshop he’s attended every Thursday night for 20 years. He said that even if he never sold a piece of work, he would still be writing just for the Thursday night parties. The man likes to have fun; hence the penguins, the stories, the humour. ‘Twas a fun night indeed, and I too am now a devoted disciple of the cult of Chuck.

Want in on the fun? Join us at www.OperatonH.com.

Posted by: Janet Joy Wilson - Imprint Sales Director, Third Party Distribution, Random House of Canada

My job is to ‘take care’ of our client publishers and yes I do feel a motherly love for each and every one but sometimes one has a child that one favours a little more than the others. This season my favourite has a book that I have embraced and intend to ensure that everyone reads.

Every Man Dies Alone was written in 24 days by a prolific but psychologically disturbed German writer named Rudolf Ditzen, who spent a significant portion of his life in asylums (for killing a friend in a duel, for threatening his wife with a gun), in prison (for embezzling to finance his morphine habit) and in rehab. In spite of his precarious emotional state, he wrote more than two dozen books under the pen name Hans Fallada, which he took from Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Before the war, he was an international bestseller and considered on par with Thomas Mann and Herman Hesse.

The Otto and Anna Quangel of Fallada’s novel are stand-ins for real-life Berliners, Otto and Elise Hampel, a working-class couple who conducted a postcard campaign for more than two years at the height of Hitler’s power, after Elise’s brother was killed in the war. Arrested in October 1942, they were sentenced to death by the Volksgerichtshof (People’s Court) in January 1943 and executed by beheading. Their Gestapo files came into Fallada’s hands in the fall of 1945, entrusted to him by a poet and postwar cultural official, Johannes Becher, who knew of Fallada’s prolific literary output and recognized his gift for objective narration.

This past month I was visiting Melville House in Brooklyn when the fax came in from the New York Times with a review that would be run on the following Sunday. The first line of the review began with “A signal literary event of 2009 has occurred, but if publishers had been more vigilant, it could have been a signal literary event in any of the last 60 years.” As Dennis Johnson sat at his board room table reading aloud, albeit with difficulty as the faxed copy was extremely blurred, to his co-publisher and wife, their publicist, an editor, and myself, we sat and listened in disbelief, joy and wonder. When he was finished, we were silently drinking in all the superlatives that had been used to describe a book that had been a result of a long search and many years to bring to fruition. I think it was me who suggested we needed to have some champagne to celebrate.

Every Man Dies Alone is in stores this week. It is the first time it has ever been translated into English. The book is more than a thriller, more than a love story, it is a slice of history that Fallada has created that will stay with you and you’ll want to talk about with other readers.

More and more glowing reviews are coming in and I couldn’t be more thrilled for my favourite but I don’t think I’ll forget that moment in Brooklyn when my own timing couldn’t have been better.

Posted by: Mary Novik - author of Conceit

A 36-seat plane delivered me to Halifax the next morning. No reception committee was there to meet me. Big city, I thought, setting out to explore on my own. Lonely and hungry by late afternoon, sure no dinner would be in the offing, I treated myself to a giant steak and garlic mashed potatoes. Back at the inn, my phone rang. It was my host, Alexander MacLeod, arranging to take me to the reading. Young, hip, intelligent - it was too much to expect old-world gallantry. But maybe not - he dashed ahead to his car to open the passenger door for me.

The reading took place in St. Mary’s University Art Gallery, a fantastic backdrop, and Alexander’s introduction was superb. When it was over, he and fellow faculty member Stephanie Morley insisted on taking me out for dinner. Alexander regaled us with insider tales about local writers. Romans-à-clef, the pastoral versus the gritty, new “comers” versus the old guard, defections to Upper Canada, writing clans and outsiders, scandals and feuds—this was juicy stuff. The pints of beer were being drained and I felt, for a moment, like an honorary member of the Atlantic tribe.

I gulped down more Shiraz. “Why am I the only one who orders wine?”

“Too snooty,” they told me, grinning. “People here don’t have money for wine. It shows you’re from away, not from here.”

In my head, names of fiction writers were swirling: Wayne Johnston, Ann-Marie MacDonald, Bernice Morgan, Lynn Coady, Michael Winter, Lisa Moore, Joan Clark, Michael Crummey, Ami McKay, Donna Morrissey, Don Hannah, Mark Jarman, Edward Riche, and Alexander himself, son of Alistair MacLeod of Cape Breton Island. Add in the poets Anne Compton, George Elliott Clarke, Brian Bartlett, Anne Simpson, and Ross Leckie’s new ice-house gang. And that’s just the tip of the eastern iceberg. It hit me that the Atlantic is experiencing a boom surpassing anything across the country. A renaissance, if that isn’t too snooty a term for it.

Driving me back to my inn, Alexander detoured to the citadel to show me Halifax at night. Although I’d missed Saint John’s reversing falls, I would journey back to the other ocean buoyed up by Maritimes hospitality and the rising tide of Atlantic literature.

For more about Mary and Conceit visit www.marynovik.com.

Posted by: Mary Novik - author of Conceit

In January, I hopped an Airbus in Vancouver wearing new snow boots and carrying a down coat with a hood. I was heading to Saint John to read from my novel Conceit (Doubleday 2007) in the hugely successful Lorenzo Series, organized by poet-in-residence Anne Compton, the tastemaker of the Maritimes. Anne had arranged to bring me in a day early, in case of storms. Her last e-mail warned, “We are in a deep freeze here. You’ll need that new warm coat of yours.”

In Ottawa, the departures monitor showed flights cancelled to Halifax, but not to Saint John. I trudged across the snowy tarmac to board a Dash 8 55-seater, which taxied ominously into a de-icing bay to get sprayed. The 31 minute bumpathon came to a halt in Montreal.

“I wasn’t going to fly into Saint John even if told to,” confided the pilot, as we deplaned, “not in this weather.”

After four hours sleep, I was back at Montréal-Trudeau trying to fly standby. I’d missed my interview on CBC, but was damned if I was going to miss the reading. After two more aborted attempts to get to Saint John, I finagled my way onto a Dash 8 headed (after de-icing) for Fredericton. Once there, I jumped into a taxi and sped south on icy roads to the Fundy city.

Watch out for moose, a sign said. I could barely decipher the driver’s accent - soft, seductive, determined to entertain although I was clutching the door handle and straining my eyes for large mammals ahead. Soon, I had surrendered to the lilting rhythms of tales about the harsh life of the Miramichi and its famous son, novelist David Adams Richards.

I had heard him called the Canadian Faulkner. “What do you think of him?” I asked.

“I went to school with him. His books are all about us, his family and friends. A good man, well liked, still lives here.” (Richards has actually lived in Toronto for the past twelve years.)

When the taxi pulled up at the University of New Brunswick, Saint John, forty minutes late, the coffee and desserts were gone, but eighty people were waiting patiently. Chilled to the bone, I walked straight to the mike, glugged a small bottle of water, and began to read from the Great Fire of London in 1666.

Afterwards, I had my first taste of Atlantic hospitality. The enthusiastic readers lined up to get copies of Conceit signed, then Anne put me into a taxi to the Delta Brunswick, and told me to curl up in bed, watch a bad movie, and order anything I liked from room service. My tray arrived with a glass of pinot gris, poached Atlantic salmon, and a large thermos of hot chocolate.

The next morning, I caught a bus back to Fredericton, which was a balmy minus10°. Waiting to escort me to lunch was Ross Leckie, creative writing chair at UNB Fredericton. Listening to Ross talk about writers he admired, I picked up a purity of motive, a cultivation of language for its own sake, refreshing after the Vancouver writing scene. Fredericton is a city of poets, a culture going back to poet-in-residence Alden Nowlan and to the Confederation poets. Poets aren’t marginalized here as they are in the rest of Canada: they are the centre. Today, Ross’s talented students meet in the ice house where the ice-house gang, a group of writers that included David Adams Richards, workshopped in the early seventies.

Mark Jarman, the fiction half of the creative writing team, took me to dinner where we were joined by novelist-in-residence, the Irish writer Gerard Beirne. They ordered pints of beer and we dove headlong into another literary conversation. That night, I was asked to read long passages, something people squirm through in large cities, yet the audience was attentive. Afterwards, the faculty took me to Alden Nowlan’s house, now a clubhouse for grad students, where I was handed a pint of ale and taken round to look at the memorabilia by Brian Bartlett.

Posted by: Alexander McCall Smith - author of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series

Early winter is my favourite season, particularly if the sky is clear and the air sharp. Those are the sort of conditions we have been enjoying in Scotland recently - and I have found it ideal writing weather. So I have now finished volume ten of the No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, which rejoices under the title of Tea Time for the Traditionally Built. I finished it last Tuesday, when I wrote the final words: ’ … the lovely smell of rain.’ That was it. There then followed a few telephone calls: to Richard Beswick, my editor in London; and Edward Kastenmeier, my editor in New York; and to my agents, Caroline Walsh and Robin Straus in London and New York respectively. These are all people who have been intimately involved in the Mma Ramotswe books. And there are others: Diane Martin of Random House Canada, Neville Moir of Polygon in Edinburgh and Rowan Cope of Little, Brown have also played a major part in the publishing of these books. Others who play a big role are: my assistant, Lesley Winton; Jan Rutherford, who is my publicist and press agent in Edinburgh; Bobby Nayyar, who looks after this newsletter and a whole lot of other things in London; and Michiko Clark and Russell Perrault, in New York. (I could mention many other names, but this list is getting a bit long and those not mentioned will know how much I appreciate them too!) In a way, it’s a bit of an extended family, with you, the readers, ultimately being the most important members of the family. Obviously I cannot be in touch with everyone, but I must say that little gives me more pleasure than to hear from people who read the Mma Ramotswe books and the books in my other series.

In Edinburgh we had the launch of my new novel, La’s Orchestra Saves the World. It was a wonderful affair, held in the Queen’s Hall, with about six hundred people present. The Really Terrible Orchestra played a selection of pieces from the era in which the novel is set, and their rendition of ‘In the Mood’ brought tears (of laughter) to many eyes. The trumpet section did its best, as usual, but … A donation was made to the Gurkha Welfare Trust, which was received by a tremendously smart Gurkha officer who marched into the hall in full dress uniform to accept the cheque. He was in fact the Queen’s Gurkha Orderly Officer, sent specially for the occasion, and so it was a great honour. We also had another charity represented, Sistema Scotland, which has set up an orchestra for children on a housing estate where there is a certain amount of need. This orchestra sent a group of its very small players (they are aged about seven) who enjoyed themselves greatly playing a little of what they had learned. Sistema Scotland has been strongly supported by my friend Peter Stevenson, who appears - as himself - in the Isabel Dalhousie novels.

What’s next? Corduroy Mansions is still running in the electronic edition of the Telegraph. In January I go to India to appear at the Kolkata Book Fair and to deliver lectures at the University of Kolkata. Then on to Australia and New Zealand - the details of the events there are set out below. In February Abacus brings out the paperback edition of The Miracle at Speedy Motors.

I’m very much looking forward to one event in particular - the one that will take place on April 1 in the Town Hall, New York. Those of you reading this who live in that part of the United States (or indeed elsewhere) may wish to come along and hear that extraordinary orchestra, the Really Terrible Orchestra (RTO). I shall be talking about the books as well and I do hope that it will be an enjoyable evening. Quite a few people are travelling over from the UK to attend this event, so if you feel like splashing out and treating yourselves to a short spring break in New York …

It is almost Christmas, of course, and I would like to wish you a Happy Christmas and a very good New Year. I hope that we shall have the chance to meet at one of my events in 2009, but if we do not, we shall still be in touch through my newsletter and through the books. Thank you very much for your support over the past year.

Warmest wishes,
Alexander McCall Smith

Posted by: Terry Fallis - author of The Best Laid Plans

I had a wonderful day at the Ottawa International Writers Festival on Sunday. At 2:00 p.m., Sarah Dearing chaired our panel on Canadian literature. Bill Gaston started things off with a wonderful reading from his new novel, The Order of Good Cheer. I read next from my novel The Best Laid Plans. The crowd was very kind and laughed in all the right places. Then Stephen Henighan read from his book of essays, The Afterlife of Culture. Then, with all four of us on the stage, Sarah Dearing posed questions to drive a discussion on the state and future of our literary culture. I was a little intimidated by the topic but the discussion flowed easily with several questions from the floor as well. After 90 minutes (that seemed more like a half-hour), we moved to the foyer to sign our books. (The signing didn’t take long but it was fun.)

After our session, literary comet Joseph Boyden, hot off of his Giller shortlisting, read from his new novel Through Black Spruce, to a packed house. CBC radio personality Laurence Wall adroitly moderated the session. Beyond the moving reading and insightful discussion, the highlight of the session had to be Joseph Boyden performing three different moose calls (I kid you not!). The line up at Boyden’s signing table after the session snaked around the foyer and almost certainly left him with a swollen pen hand.

The final session I attended brought together three amazing writers for a reading and discussion. South African Booker nominee Damon Galgut read from The Impostor, Amitav Ghosh read from his Booker-nominated novel, Sea of Poppies, and then Kenneth J. Harvey read from his epic masterwork Blackstrap Hawco. What a thrill to hear these three celebrated authors.

I spent the evening choosing my selections for a reading I’m doing at the Ottawa Public Library tomorrow (Monday) and sifting through some great memories of a wonderful OIWF weekend.

Posted by: Dinah Forbes - Executive Editor, McClelland & Stewart

On October 21, the coldest night of the fall so far, Peter Robinson’s fans and admirers bravely fought through a few tiny flakes of snow to pack into the Crush Wine Bar in downtown Toronto for a terrific birthday bash. It wasn’t the author’s birthday, and it wasn’t exactly the birthday of his hugely popular detective, DCI Alan Banks, but it was the twenty-first birthday of Banks’s first appearance in fiction. He is such a real character and has grown and changed so authentically over the course of the eighteen novels in which he features that it seemed odd he wasn’t there in person to blow out the candles on his chocolate birthday cake.

Spotted in the crowd were crime-fiction writers José Latour, Howard Shrier, and Rick Blechta; IFOA impresario Geoff Taylor; Martin Levin, books editor at The Globe and Mail, and several women I cannot name who would have loved to meet an off-duty Alan Banks in person. All of them were also there to celebrate the publication of All the Colours of Darkness, Peter’s latest Inspector Banks novel, and were delighted to meet the author, who spent much of the party in the corner, trying to avoid the gaze of an eight-foot tall poster of himself and autographing copies of the new novel for a line-up of fans.

Posted by: Jessica Scott - Digital Marketing Assistant

Being new to Random House I have already been dazzled by the scope of books we produce and the quality of our authors, plus the people I work with have been awesome so I really didn’t think it could get any better. That is until they offered me movie passes. What? Seriously? The only thing I like at vaguely the same level as books is movies, so I eagerly said yes.

Last week I attended a sneak preview of the newest book into movie for Chuck Palahniuk. Choke, originally published in 2002, tells the story of Victor Mancini, a medical-school dropout, is an antihero for our deranged times. Needing to pay elder care for his mother, Victor has devised an ingenious scam: he pretends to choke on pieces of food while dining in upscale restaurants. He then allows himself to be “saved” by fellow patrons who, feeling responsible for Victor’s life, go on to send cheques to support him. When he’s not pulling this stunt, Victor cruises sexual addiction recovery workshops for action, visits his addled mom, and spends his days working at a colonial theme park.

Want to read an excerpt?

It was a fantastic movie and to be honest, like nothing I’ve ever seen before. I thought for sure I would hate Victor but Sam Rockwell did an amazing job at really making me feel sorry for him as well as try and understand the nature of sexual addiction. By far the most touching and dynamic performance was Anjelica Huston. She was superb as both the present day aging mother with dementia and in the flashbacks as a slightly-off, fugitive mother. There was a tangible conflict between Victor and his mother, a first class, love/hate relationship. The supporting cast rounded out the story line quite well and I feel like a number of them although for now are small name actors will have pretty impressive careers ahead of them. Fight Club already has a cult following and after seeing Choke I’m sure it will become another fan favourite. In fact it’s already got me thinking about what they would do for a film version of Chuck’s upcoming book, Pygmy. Hmmmm….

Posted by: Julie Forrest - Online Marketing Coordinator, Random House of Canada

One of my favourite perks of working in publishing is meeting my favourite authors in person, and getting my books signed. August has shaped up to be a banner month. First I had the pleasure of meeting the marvelous Andrew Davidson, author of The Gargoyle. Andrew Davidson is awesome. Soft-spoken and modest, he took his time with each and every person who waited in the long line for him to sign their books. He patiently posed for pics with gushing fans like me.

A week later I met Andrew Pyper, at the TINARS launch of The Killing Circle. It was a great event, and the Gladstone ballroom was packed. Andrew is a funny guy, and not afraid to speak his mind. In conversation with Nathan Whitlock, he talked about the satirical elements of the book (it has a lot of fun with the CanLit scene) and confessed they were a little more prevalent in the first version of the novel. He reminded us that plot is not a dirty word—a book is more entertaining when stuff actually happens!

Do attend a TINARS event some time—they are a fresh, fun alternative to traditional readings. See you there! I’m the geek standing in line with my book and my camera.

Posted by: Julie Forrest - Online Marketing Coordinator

I’m very lucky that part of my job is to give away good books to good people.

Last weekend I attended a conference for bloggers, and gave them a preview of a magnificent book that goes on sale on August 5: Andrew Davidson’s The Gargoyle.

By candlelight, we sipped wine, and nibbled hors d’oeuvres. We admired each other’s new tattoos, in the spirit of the book’s enigmatic heroine, Marianne Engel.

Our lucky door prize winner got to take home a fabulous set of gargoyle bookends (I really, really wanted to keep them for myself).

Yes, bloggers are all over The Gargoyle. Can’t wait to hear what they think!

Posted by: Anne Collins - VP, Publisher, Random House Canada

Some marvelous books have origins just as marvelous, and The Gargoyle is one of them.

The writer is Canadian, a young man from Pinawa, Manitoba, who until this book sold around the world last year had been making his living by writing educational materials in Japan for half of each year. The rest of the time he lived in his parent’s house in Manitoba, when he wasn’t in libraries exploring 14th century German mysticism, Dante, Japanese and Icelandic folklore, and the other lineaments of a story he was trying to get out of his head and onto the page. The story involved the love affair between a burned man in a hospital isolation unit and a schizophrenic sculptor named Marianne Engel, who was certain she had loved this man since he was a mercenary in the early 1300s in Germany. The burned man wasn’t so certain, and the novel is a long persuasion.

When the writer, Andrew Davidson, was done (at somewhere around the 300,000 word mark), he researched literary agents, and decided to send his manuscript to one of the best of them, a fellow named Eric Simonoff, who works at Janklow Nesbit in New York. Though the manuscript arrived unsolicited, the cover letter was so witty that Eric actually started to read the pile of pages, and kept reading until he was done. Then he took the time to send Andrew a fix note, telling him that he’d consider taking him on as a client if Andrew cut the book in half. In Eric’s experience, no new writer ever followed that advice, and so he did not expect to hear more from Andrew Davidson. But about six months later, a perfectly bound and typeset copy of The Gargoyle, an edition of one, landed on Eric’s desk.

I happened to walk into Eric’s office shortly thereafter, and Eric impulsively handed it to me as a fellow Canadian and publisher. The short version of this long story is that within days I had made an offer to publish The Gargoyle in Canada. Andrew and I worked then together on the final draft of the book—a total and complete treat for me, and not so bad for Andrew either—which Eric then sent to editors in New York and London in May 2007. Two more English language publishers—Doubleday in the US and Canongate in the UK—soon fell in love fiercely with the book and signed on, and in months 23 foreign languages publishers were also on board, all before pub date. I know why: The Gargoyle is a novel about love written in a way that not only hopeless romantics will adore, but that sneaks past the defences of people who think they will never fall for a love story. I won’t say more, because I hope you will read the novel too.

Posted by: Julie Forrest - Online Marketing Assistant

Author Elizabeth Hay has just returned from a tour of the North, where she revisited the Yukon and Yellowknife, the setting of her Giller winning novel, Late Nights on Air.

At the same time, Elizabeth participated in her very first blog tour: she chronicled her travels from the road, sending her posts to some of her blogging fans.

You can catch up with Elizabeth’s blog posts at the following sites:

April 28: Metro Mama

May 2: The Book Mine Set

May 7: Pickle Me This

May 15: The Library Ladder

Posted by: Julie Forrest - Online Marketing Assistant, Random House Canada

Last night I attended my first event as an employee of Random House, a reception for Sadie Jones, author of The Outcast.

This is my favourite recent read; the story is tragic and devastating, yet ultimately hopeful.

The novel has such a cinematic quality; I can’t wait to see it adapted for film (there’s a fantastic trailer for the book—see it here). I had a chance to chat with Sadie briefly, as she signed my book (she is lovely by the way). I mentioned a future film version of the novel, and we pondered the question, who could play the protagonist, Lewis? Our troubled hero ages from seven to nineteen during the course of the story. No one immediately comes to mind. Elle, a fellow blogger who attended the event with me, says it would have to be a newcomer. I’ve slept on it, and still can’t come up with anyone suitable; it will have to be someone young, and there should be a different actor for the child Lewis. I suppose time will tell—let’s just hope they don’t cast one of the usual suspects, like Leo DiCaprio! Lewis deserves more.

Posted by: Alexander McCall Smith - Author of The Good Husband of Zebra Drive

This is Part 2 of Alexander McCall Smith’s March newsletter. You can catch up with Part 1 here.

The main book news is that volume nine in the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series has now been published in the UK (and in some other countries, including Australia) and will shortly be published in the USA and Canada. The Miracle at Speedy Motors takes us back to the everyday world of Mma Ramotswe and Mma Makutsi. There are anonymous letters flying around, and there will be no prizes for guessing who is writing them. And Mr J. L. B. Matekoni gets an idea into his head again — but Mma Ramotswe is, as usual, tolerant and understanding. Mma Makutsi continues to be engaged to Mr Phuti Radiphuti (when will they get married?).

While Mma Ramotswe leads her eventful life in Gaborone, I lead my own life here in Scotland. I am currently working on volume five in the Isabel Dalhousie series, and hope to finish that novel shortly after Easter. Volume five of the Scotland Street series has also just been finished, and will be published in hardback in the UK in July under the title The Unbearable Lightness of Scones.

In April I go to the USA for a lengthy tour (the details of which are set out below). I have just completed a German tour for my German publishers, in which I went to Munich, Berlin, Hamburg and Leipzig. Readers of the von Igelfeld series may be interested to know that in Hamburg I visited my old friend, Professor Dr Dr (honoris causa) (mult) Reinhard Zimmermann, who plays a part — as himself — in the books.

I also recently visited Paris and Madrid. In Paris I gave a talk at the American School and also in the residence of the American Ambassador. The Paris trip was organised by my American lecture agent, Steven Barclay, who does a lot to support the American School. He hosted a dinner for my wife and me, my New York agent, Robin Straus and her husband, Joseph Kanon (the novelist) and David Sedaris. Those of you who are not familiar with David’s work should look into it — he is very, very funny, even if his humour sometimes requires a strong stomach (he tells very funny stories about boils and other human difficulties).

I shall be in Botswana in June. I am involved in the setting up of a very small opera house there — the No. 1 Ladies’ Opera House. I shall write more about that in the next newsletter — in the meantime, I send you my warmest best wishes. And I hope that you enjoy The Miracle at Speedy Motors.

Posted by: Alexander McCall Smith - Author of The Good Husband of Zebra Drive

This is an excerpt from Alexander McCall Smith’s newsletter. You can visit his website here.

Last night I went to the premiere showing in London of the film version of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. It was a bitter-sweet occasion: that very morning the director of the film, Anthony Minghella, that good and kind man, died in hospital from complications following an operation. We were all shocked by this sad news: Minghella was the United Kingdom’s most distinguished film director and The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency is now his last film.

As I am sure you can imagine, I felt very sad. Anthony had been planning for years to make the film. I had complete confidence in him — indeed, I counted myself most fortunate that it was he who was going to make the film. And now this. And yet we must remind ourselves that the film he has made is a wonderful, joyous hymn of praise to Botswana and to Mma Ramotswe. Everything in it is perfect. The actors and actresses are just right: wait until you see Mma Ramotswe, Mr J. L. B. Matekoni and Mma Makutsi — each one of them is just exactly as he or she should be! And the whole film is permeated by love. The film is a stand-alone feature film that was designed to set up a subsequent television series. It will be shown on television stations throughout the world, but may also be shown in some theatres. We await news on that. But there is very important news on the television front: HBO in the United States and the BBC in the UK have teamed up to commission a thirteen-part television series which will start to be filmed in mid- to late-2008 and will be shown in the USA, the UK and throughout the world in early 2009. This is wonderful news indeed, and it came in time for Anthony Minghella to enjoy it. (I am not sure, by the way, when the film will be shown in the USA: I think that it will be shown by HBO closer to the time that they begin the series.) Anthony Minghella was a great man who brought happiness and a very humane vision to this world. I feel very happy that he loved Mma Ramotswe, and I know that she would have loved him.

Posted by: Martha Leonard - Editorial Assistant, Doubleday Canada

Last week in our editorial meeting my colleagues and I were discussing John Boyne’s forthcoming novel, Mutiny on the Bounty (early 2009). As is bound to happen when talking about a historical event that has been documented, recreated, and interpreted by Hollywood, we fell into the debate of which film was best. Directors Lewis Milestone and Carol Reed’s 1962 film, starring the late actors Richard Harris and Marlon Brando, was the outright winner amongst our group, but this caused me to wonder (onto the keys of my computer): How does Brando’s portrayal of lead mutineer Fletcher Christian and his conquest compare to the one, and the story, of John Boyne? If we put Brando and Boyne on parallel planks and made them walk, who would sink to the bottom of the Pacific and who would float to the surface?

If we’re putting a wager on it, my money’s on Boyne to float. You may know him as the author of 2006’s young adult sensation, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, or from one of his four other published novels.

Everyone knows the story of the Bounty. In case you don’t, the Coles notes version is thus: Captained by the now-infamous William Bligh, boat sets sail for Tahiti (or Otaheite, as Boyne’s Bligh prefers). Crew remains happy on long voyage. Bounty arrives at Tahiti. Crew enjoys island life. Bounty departs for return voyage. Mutiny, led by Master’s Mate Fletcher Christian, occurs and Captain and seventeen others are shoved of in a puny launch to return to England, or die trying. Bounty returns to Tahiti and crew abandons their King’s mission to continue enjoying island life.

You may ask, “If I know the story of the Bounty, why should I bother reading this novel? ” Please indulge me. Allow me to answer that, and to tell you why my money is on John Boyne.

Boyne’s version of the Bounty’s journey is told from the perspective of the person whose ears are privy to the most detailed information aboard and the one closest to Captain Bligh himself. In the same way he did with Bruno in The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, John Boyne puts the reader in the King’s-issued uniform of “Turnip” and takes you on a journey unlike any of the Bounty films. John Jacob Turnstile, a young orphan plucked from his life as a petty thief in the streets of Portsmouth, tells his story with more tension, excitement, and honesty than you could hope for. Boyne’s protagonist pulls you into berth his outside the Captain’s suite to rub his back as he suffers seasickness and makes you feel parched and hungry during times of strict rationing. You will explore Tahiti in a whole new way (and for those who have never visited, myself included, you will encounter for the first time). You will see ship-life in a fresh light. You will see a side of one of history’s most publicly defeated loyalists that you never have, and that you possibly never expected to. You will meet a young man whose naivety will sometimes make you roll your eyes and cause you to chuckle, and whose life story, whose belief in those around him will by turns exasperate you and break your heart (If you’re anything like me, he might make you cry).

With is careful eye and writing hand, John Boyne constructs a full crew, from quartermaster to cook. History has given us a one-dimensional sense of the achievements (a term used more loosely for some than others, I’d say) of Captain Bligh, Fletcher Christian, John Fryer, and their warrant officers, able seamen, and petty officers aboard the Bounty, but here they come alive in the most engaging way. In this novel these men are not just sailors, but friends, lovers, and free thinkers. The kind of men whose company you want to stay in for all of its pages.

On the recommendation of my colleagues I rented the 1962 Mutiny on the Bounty film. Sure, it has the credentials of its Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations and various award wins behind it, but it lacks the pure heart and passion this novel carries from the first word to the last. I can’t wait this novel to be published so I can enjoy it again in its finished form. It’s the kind of book you can, and will, get lost in. The kind of book where the pages turn themselves. The kind of book you will want to take everywhere with you go. Even on holiday. Especially to Tahiti.

(If you haven’t read John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, do so. Even if you’re an adult. Actually, especially if you are an adult.)

Posted by: Alexander McCall Smith - Author of The Good Husband of Zebra Drive

Here is the final excerpt from Alexander McCall Smith’s latest newsletter, with some updates on his latest projects.

During February, Scottish Opera will be performing part of the opera on which I have been working with Stephen Deazley, a composer, and Ben Twist, a dramatist. This will be part of a programme they are doing in which they are performing several works in progress, one of them being ours. It is based on my book Dream Angus. Also in February, I am going to Paris for a few days to do an event at the American School there. This has been arranged by my lecture agent in the USA, Steven Barclay, who has a strong connection with that school. Steven is great company and I look forward to being in Paris as his guest. I then go for a few days to Spain to do press interviews for my Spanish-language publishers.

In February the UK paperback edition of The Good Husband of Zebra Drive will be published. March sees the publication in the UK and elsewhere of the next Mma Ramotswe book, The Miracle at Speedy Motors, which will come out in the USA and Canada in April. In March I shall be doing a number of events in the UK and a tour of Germany for my German publishers. The details of these events will be on the website. In April I look forward to a major American tour, starting in New York and heading off in every direction thereafter. Those tours are pretty tiring, as they take me across the entire country and involve numerous flights. But they are really rewarding too, as they give me the opportunity to meet many readers of the books and I count that as a great privilege. Indeed I am very much aware of the fact that these books have given me a very great privilege in this life—that of being part of a prolonged conversation with many people throughout the world. Not a day goes past but that I think about the pleasure that that has brought me and how fortunate I am to have had that opportunity. So thank you for that. Thank you.

Finally: news of the film. It is now fully edited—the music put in etc. I have not yet seen it, but am told that it is stunning (I have seen a few excerpts). Jill Scott, who plays Mma Ramostwe, has done a really great job, as have the other actors. We will let you know when we have concrete news of when it can be seen.

Alexander McCall Smith

Posted by: Alexander McCall Smith - Author of The Good Husband of Zebra Drive

This is the third of a series of excerpts from Alexander McCall Smith’s newsletter. We’re rejoining him in Sri Lanka.

My wife and I also went to lunch with Geoffrey Dobbs on the tiny island that he has about twenty yards off the beach. You wade to it and are presented with a towel when you arrive on the other side. Geoffrey explained to me that when the tsunami hit he was actually swimming in the sea off the island. He was swept away, but a fisherman threw him a line eventually and he lived to tell the tale.

Back to Scotland for a week and then, I’m afraid, I set off again, this time to Florida, to carry out two public events. The first of these was in Lakeland, which is an attractive town near Tampa. I spoke at Florida Southern College there, and signed books afterwards. As always in the United States, I encountered great kindness and generosity, and had a very enjoyable dinner in an ancient Mexican restaurant with two professors of English, Mary Pharr and her husband Donald. They are close readers of the Scotland Street series and we got on extremely well.

On to Palm Beach, where I addressed the Four Arts Society and did a signing. Palm Beach is quite a place—very fashionable indeed, and I am happy to report that the ladies there do a good line in very large hats. I had lunch with the Director and the Librarian from the Society and at a neighbouring table there was a Palm Beach lady wearing a hat which was as large as the table at which she was sitting. Again the warmth and kindness of the audience was remarkable.

Now I am back in Scotland and hard at work again on the Isabel Dalhousie novel. In fact, it’s going very well and I hope to finish it this month. I have just written a scene in which Eddie, Cat’s assistant at the delicatessen, has tried out his newly acquired skills as hypnotist on Jamie—with unexpected results. Sometimes when I am writing I find that I burst out laughing. It must sound rather sinister to anybody else in the house to hear laughter coming from a room containing only one person.

Scotland Street is also going well. I should finish volume five in that series this month. Poor Bertie. His mother has arranged psychotherapy with a new psychotherapist and is also going to go to cub scout camp with him. Matthew and Elspeth Harmony are back from their honeymoon in Australia, and Domenica has recovered the stolen Spode tea cup from her neighbour’s flat (there is, however a complication in that plot-line.)

Posted by: Alexander McCall Smith - Author of The Good Husband of Zebra Drive

We left Alexander McCall Smith last week in Sri Lanka—this week we’re catching up with him at the Galle Literary Festival.

The Galle Literary Festival was founded by a very good man called Geoffrey Dobbs. Geoffrey spent much of his business career in Hong Kong before he ended up in Sri Lanka, where he set up a number of hotels. When the tsunami hit Sri Lanka he devoted a great deal of his time and energy to setting up a charity to help get the Galle region back on its feet, and he has done great and good work in that respect. He has been tireless in working for the benefit of people who lost everything in that disaster, and he is much appreciated in the country as a result.

But he is not one to sit about and, as well as being one of the inventors of the new sport of elephant polo, he decided that a literary festival would not only draw visitors to the region and help out in that way but that it would add substantially to the cultural life of Sri Lanka. And it has done exactly that. It is one of the most enjoyable literary festivals I have ever attended and I can thoroughly recommend to anybody who wants to spend a holiday in that part of the world to go to the festival as part of the trip. The next one will be in January 2009: details will be available on their website.

Who was there? As well as major figures from Sri Lanka, which has a lively literary tradition, international visitors included Gore Vidal, William Dalrymple (a friend of mine who writes books on Indian history) and Vikram Seth (with whom I share an editor in London). There were several remarkable parties and—this being a very important feature of the festival—a number of lunches and dinners where readers could choose to sit down to a meal with the writer of their choice. Those were wonderful, as they gave everybody a chance to meet a writer whose work they were interested in. I had an extremely enjoyable dinner attended by about sixty people, where I was able to speak personally to everybody and where we were treated to a superb meal by a famous Australian chef.

Posted by: Alexander McCall Smith - Author of The Good Husband of Zebra Drive

This is the first of a series of excerpts from Alexander McCall Smith’s newsletter. You can also visit his website, here.

January and February are months that I devote to writing and try to ensure that I have as few disturbances as possible. In theory. In practice, although this is a relatively quiet period, I have found that there have been several diversions, with more to come. Fortunately the business of finishing the next Isabel Dalhousie novel is going well, in spite of various other commitments.

The first of these was a trip to Sri Lanka to attend the second Galle Literary Festival. I have never been to Sri Lanka before, although I have been several times to India and have visited a number of other countries in the region. (Thailand and Singapore are both favourites of mine.) So the invitation to speak at the Galle Festival was one I was very keen to accept, even if it did fall in what should be a quiet period at home. I justified the whole thing to myself by saying that I would spend ten days writing there before the festival itself started, and that is, in fact, what I did. My wife and I established ourselves in a small, quiet hotel in the Old Fort at Galle (the Galle Fort Hotel) and every morning I wrote about Isabel Dalhousie while my wife read, swam, and saw the sights.

Sri Lanka is a gem of a country. We were in the southern part and did not visit the central area, which is hilly and where much of the tea is grown. That we shall do on our next visit—and I certainly intend to go back. Galle itself is a very old town that used to be a Portuguese and Dutch settlement before the British occupied it. These layers of history are all still in evidence, and one still comes across Portuguese and Dutch names in contemporary Sri Lankan families. The people, by the way, are particularly charming and make the visitor feel exceptionally welcome. It is a lovely place to visit, my only note of caution being this: you will not be able to visit the north and north-east until the tragic war which has simmered away there for so many years is finally brought to an end. The people I spoke to about this seemed to be universally distressed and despondent that the hostilities are proving so long-lived, and they all expressed anxiety about the ending of the ceasefire.

Posted by: Michelle MacAleese - Editorial Assistant, & Assistant to the Publisher, Knopf Canada

Me: single 20-something female, vitamin-D deprived publishing professional, avid reader. Seeks: quirky, comforting, vaguely inspirational and definitely well-written reading material.

Reading in February can be tricky. By now I’ve finished the books I was given as Christmas presents, any “fun summer reads” will still seem flakey until the patios open again, and there’s not as much motivation to read something intelligent as there is every fall in the back-to-school spirit. It’s a dangerous time of year to be disappointed: there just aren’t that many daylight hours by which to read this dark, short month (and most of those hours are taken up by working). It really puts the pressure on to choose a good paperback to slip in your bag for that long, snowy commute. Then there is Valentine’s Day fast approaching—one big anxiety-inducing, potentially disappointing, hard-to-shop-for “holiday.”

Take heart! There is a literary antidote to the February blahs, and it makes the perfect Valentine’s Day gift to buy for yourself (or, if you insist, for your lover).

Four Letter Word is a collection of fictional love letters written by a stunning roster of writers each of whom delivers an amazing letter. Some are bitter and hilarious, some are earnest and sad, some are downright stalkerish (in a good way). Single or coupled, male or female, romantic or…not, you’ll like this smart book. It’s as much about fiction as it is about love.

On February 14th I will brave the snow and expectation by taking this super-cute book on a date to a little candlelit table at a cafe I know. I’ll spend my Valentine’s Day with Panos Karnezis, Phil LaMarche, Jeff Parker, Michel Faber and Leonard Cohen. I know I won’t be disappointed.

Posted by: Todd Babiak - Author of The Book of Stanley

I used to make fun of writer friends who had websites and blogs. Given our busy lives, with families and jobs and leaves to rake and, most importantly, BOOKS TO READ, where was the time to express unconsidered opinions about, say, chocolate? Besides, it always seemed an embarrassing exercise in self-love. “Shoot me,” I remember saying, to my friend, William, “if I ever get a website. The sound of it: toddbabiak.com. Tasteless! Boorish! Actually, don’t shoot me. Stab me, with something that isn’t even sharp. Just press really hard, again and again.”

Three months later, I had a website.

It’s been difficult, avoiding William at dinner parties and the theatre. Perhaps William doesn’t know I have a website. Now that I have one, with handy links to Amazon and Indigo-Chapters pages where my novels are sold, I judge the quality of my friendships by the “comments” button under my blog entries. So far, it’s mostly my brother and Cousin Brad who respond to my provocative posts about those yellow ribbon magnets, that guy who peed in my garbage cans, and chocolate. Which leads me to conclude that my brother and Cousin Brad, who are blood relatives and therefore ineligible to be my friends, are my only friends.

The website has been most useful as a mechanism for contact; readers can hunt my address down and email me after reading the novels. The Book of Stanley, my latest book, contains religious themes. It hasn’t been nearly as controversial as some had expected, partly because people with serious religious views have so many holy texts to read, they aren’t interested in novels that include sasquatches, Busby Berkeley routines in schoolyards, and sex scenes in Montreal townhouses. But I have received a number of emails, more than thirty, from Scientologists who believe I am attacking them in the novel.

My internet research of Scientology has revealed little of substance, so if I have inadvertently attacked the religion it had to be either instinctual or supernatural. And by supernatural I mean spiritual. And by spiritual I mean religious.

Someone, God or the life force or possibly Yoda, wanted me to write what I wrote. He is omniscient, isn’t He? And omnipotent? How could I have slipped through His fingers? If He has fingers, which He assuredly does not. What would He use them for? You think God feeds Himself, or plays baseball? God.

I’m not sure if William has religion. He’s always been pretty slippery about that stuff, along with details of his salary and sex life. But just in case, I’m taking martial arts classes. In case he’s fashioned a blunt shiv, I want to be ready.

Posted by: Kate Henderson - Online Marketing Assistant

Recently, I was lucky enough to attend an advance screening of The Kite Runner film, based on the best-selling novel by Khaled Hosseini. It’s a strange thing to see the movie version of a book you’ve read—particularly if you have a fondness for the book.

Personally, when I read a book and then see the movie, I feel a sense of entitlement—like I’m owed something more because I have my own special connection to the story. I have already imagined what all of the characters look like, designed the set as I have envisioned it, and set the tone of each scene the way I read it in the novel. Invariably, the director of the real movie doesn’t live up to the standards of the Oscar-worthy director in my head and I’m left saying “Meh, it wasn’t as good as the book.”

But this is not so with The Kite Runner! The director, Marc Forster, crafted his film to be so true to the book that I think all devotees of the novel will be impressed. The performances are fantastic, the music beautiful, and the visual treatment of the entire film is spectacular! And the kites! (sigh) I want to learn to fly a kite…

Still, I’d tell anyone who hasn’t already read the book to do so before seeing the film. Even though you’ll know what to expect plot-wise, this film is compelling from start to finish and is a rare example of a novel translating beautifully onto the big screen.

Posted by: Gail Anderson-Dargatz - Author of Turtle Valley

I wrote about my many days of collecting butterflies in my new novel Turtle Valley, how I found the butterflies on the shoulders of country roads by alfalfa fields where they had been struck by passing vehicles. As I wrote in the novel, in these areas butterflies “littered the ground like yellow confetti” and when I picked them up, “the luminous scales from their wings dusted (my) fingertips like eye shadow.” These insects became a precious commodity for me, a gift that I collected by the dozens and stored in boxes, a bit of summer that I would pull out to laminate onto bookmarks on cold winter evenings. It should come as no surprise, then, that my working title for Turtle Valley was “A Hatful of Tattered Butterflies.”

There’s a bit of irony here, that I would immortalize the act of collecting these butterflies within the novel that marks the end of my homemade bookmark tradition, because it has come to an end, at least for now. I hesitate to say I’ve retired from this venture altogether, as so many authors claim to have given up writing, say, only to come out of retirement when a good idea (and an empty pocketbook) strikes. But I now have a blended family of four kids, I teach in the UBC Creative Writing MFA Optional-residency program, I’m at work on the next novel project, and I have a new, high tech hobby — blogging and running a forum — so there is little time left over in the day for seeking out dead bugs.

Still, I very much miss this exercise. When I hunted for materials to create my bookmarks, the world was suddenly full of riches. As Annie Dillard wrote in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, “…if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days.” When I made bookmarks, finding the iridescent wings of a dragonfly literally made my day, as did stumbling across a clutch of skeleton leaves beneath a poplar, or, of course, finding the dead butterflies windblown and clustered along the roadsides like the petals from an ornamental cherry. I see these “pennies” less and less myself now, though I know they are there: my five-year-old spots and gathers them on our walks together, for his morbid and beautiful collection of dead butterflies and beetles, rocks, flowers, leaves and bones that he rightly calls his “treasures.” He whoops as he scoops up the pennies that I pass by. Still, the strange joys of this old hobby of mine linger on. When a butterfly flew through the open door into our house today, and my son captured it against the window within his cupped hands, I couldn’t help but notice the beauty of the insect’s wings, and how lovely they would have looked on one of my bookmarks.

Posted by: Lara Hinchberger - Executive Editor (Fiction), McClelland & Stewart

One of the best things, as well as one of the most difficult things, about being an editor is trying to keep up with the best of new work, not only in Canada but from around the world. As you can imagine, the prospect gets even more daunting when you take into consideration all the books published in French, in Japanese, in German, in Spanish…I mean, someone had to tackle the first English translation of Haruki Murakami and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

When I recently took up a new position at McClelland & Stewart, I was especially excited to discover that one of the novels just on the cusp of being published here was Voice Over by Céline Curiol. This debut garnered extraordinary praise (including from Paul Auster) when it was published in France in 2005.

Auster called it “brilliant”: a perfect word, because the work is both intelligent and something of a sharp-edged, polished jewel. I read it obsessively, not the way you sometimes do novels that are like slipping into a warm bath (nothing wrong with that) but with something more like a mental adrenaline rush. Curiol writes so unblinkingly and subtly about the path of one woman’s obsessive love that anyone who has ever found themselves on an emotional precipice and wondered how on earth they got there—or wondered how someone else wound up in that dangerous place—will be mesmerized. And her Paris, with the packed rush-hour metro, the drag bar, the menacing nighttime streets, will give you a whole new perspective on the City of Light.

I can’t wait to hear Céline Curiol read from Voice Over at this year’s International Festival of Authors in Toronto, on October 19th — and she’ll be at the Festival in Ottawa too, on October 16th. Kudos to both festivals for helping bring the world to us.

Posted by: Anne Collins - VP, Publisher, Random House Canada

I don’t know quite how to argue for fiction in the face of the images from Burma that have been on the news and the web this week, images delivered to us at such cost. The broken boy being carried away in the arms of his friends; the flip-flops abandoned in the street as protestors run from the riot police; saffron-clad monks being clubbed; a Japanese photographer dying of a bullet wound, holding his camera aloft for one last shot; Aung San Suu Kyi peering out the gate of the crumbling villa in which she’s been held on house arrest for eleven of the past eighteen years. There are no images of this woman, as important to the world as Gandhi or Nelson Mandela, being hauled off to prison, though this is what is rumoured to have happened: the junta has shut down the Internet, the cell-phone networks, the media. But with luck this time and some real will on our part to help, we won’t turn our backs as we did in 1988, when hundreds of thousands of Burmese took to the streets demanding freedom, and thousands of them were killed with impunity by the horrible old men who have had the country in their grip for decades now.

How do we find that real will? Now that I’ve worked up to it, I will argue that one way is to read The Lizard Cage by Karen Connelly, a novel by a young Canadian writer who spent nine years of her life imagining the world inside the solitary confinement cell of a singer named Teza, whose songs became the rallying cries of the 1988 student protests. I’ve never been to Burma, but thanks to Karen, I feel as though I have. Her book is great fiction, as the Orange New Writer judges understood earlier this year when they awarded her the prize, and it is also an emancipatory gift of understanding, a brick she has tossed through our indifference, a plea that no one should have to live under the thumbs of evil old men, who have managed to imprison a whole country on our watch.

Posted by: Gail Anderson-Dargatz - Author of Turtle Valley

I moderated a panel on publicity and self-promotion at UBC this past summer, and during that event one of our participants, Denise Ryan, features editor at the Vancouver Sun, reminded me of the pots of honey and the homemade bookmarks that I brought to media interviews and readings as I promoted A Recipe for Bees. I squirmed a little as she talked of the honeybees I had evidently laminated onto the bookmark she had received. (Geez, did I really do that? Didn’t they get squished in the laminating machine?) But, as Denise pointed out, she most definitely remembered me and my book because of those homemade bookmarks. In fact, she said, I started something of a trend as other authors felt they had to come up with homemade bookmarks too. “I felt this incredible pressure,” she said. “When my book comes out, will I have to make bookmarks too? I’m not crafty at all!”

Of course I’m not the only author to make bookmarks; other writers are just as “crafty” or more so. Eden Robinson’s bookmark for Monkey Beach featured a miniature perfume vial filled with sand from the real Monkey Beach. The one I have contains a tiny shell. And the fact is I rather fell into the whole bookmark making enterprise. Before I became a published author, when I still had time on my hands, I made paper. And so I ended up putting instructions on how to make paper into The Cure for Death by Lightning, along with many recipes from my grandmother’s scrapbooks. When the novel was about to be published, I made thank you gifts for my editors Louise Dennys and Diane Martin: homemade paper scrapbooks, complete with the photocopied entries from my grandmother’s scrapbooks that had inspired those in the novel. Diane and Louise said they loved them, and so I made a few more for other folks at Knopf. This lead to requests for scrapbooks for select media and booksellers and, well, the scrapbooks got smaller and smaller (making paper is hard work!) and I ended up making homemade paper bookmarks instead. They were a big hit (so big, in fact, that the cover for the German edition of the novel is a piece of my homemade paper in which a dead butterfly is embedded), so I made a whole lot more of the bookmarks, and, well, as I say, I stumbled into this tradition. Collecting the materials and making bookmarks became my new hobby.

The Cure took off internationally, and I found I had much less time for papermaking as I turned to writing fiction full time. So I started using commercial papers instead that I printed with the title of my books and showered with flowers that I picked from my own garden and dried between the pages of my phonebook. They were often quite pretty, if I do say so myself, and I enjoyed making them. People seemed to like getting them too, though I do remember one woman who refused a bookmark with the wings of a tortoise shell butterfly laminated to it. “I can’t even touch it!” she cried. Evidently bugs made her squeamish, dead bugs even more so. I hadn’t considered that readers might get creeped out by the bugs on my bookmarks. I just thought the butterflies, like the dried flowers and leaves that I collected, were beautiful. And I promise you: no insects were harmed in the making of these bookmarks. I only used road kill.

Posted by: Marie Phillips - Author, Gods Behaving Badly

Hello Canada! (Now I sound like I’m doing a stadium tour.)

Here’s my first novel: Gods Behaving Badly. Well, I say “first novel.” That’s not strictly the truth.

I wrote my actual first novel when I was 13. It was a gothic tragi-comedy entitled The Lone Bagpipe, inspired by a book found in the school library entitled The Joy of Bagpipes and is now sadly out of print. (The Joy of Bagpipes, I mean. It will come as no surprise that The Lone Bagpipe was never actually in print.) The Lone Bagpipe was followed by Lady of Spain, an erotic novel composed at age 15 in collaboration with two friends. It was the result of extensive book-based research as my erotic experiences at that point numbered nil. I didn’t embark on my first grown-up novel until I was 27. This one—The Talentless Miss Pidgeon—was ill-starred, though why publishers wouldn’t leap on a story of a homicidal screenwriter who becomes possessed by her imaginary twin, based on Macbeth, I cannot fathom.

By the time I started writing Gods Behaving Badly I was working at a London independent bookshop and wondering if I would ever see my own name on one of the covers that surrounded me every day. I thought I might be in with a chance this time, as Gods… had a relatively innocuous plot-line following the antics of Greek gods living in contemporary London. A sort of romantic comedy adventure fantasy with gods in it. Which didn’t stop people from asking me whether it was autobiographical.

Working in a bookshop is the perfect job for the aspiring author. You are surrounded by books all day, you talk about books all day, you read and read, books and reviews, you see books you hate become bestsellers and books you love sink without a trace. You get very opinionated about covers, stickers and blurb. You learn how the industry works (and doesn’t work). You are armed and ready for when your book enters the fray.

And as it turns out, Gods Behaving Badly would probably never have been published if I hadn’t been working in a bookshop. It was my boss who chatted up the UK Random House rep and made the discovery that Jonathan Cape was accepting unagented submissions. I needed no further encouragement and off the e-mail went with chapters one to four.

Shock number one: Dan Franklin, Cape’s publishing director, replied straight away to acknowledge receipt. That never happens.

Shock number two: the very next day he asked to see the rest of it. That never happens.

That was a Friday. He’d said he was going to read it over the weekend, and when Monday morning came I opened up the shop feeling queasy, knowing that this was the day I was due to receive my rejection. The phone rang. It was Dan, calling to offer me a deal. That so never happens it’s actually a black hole of not-happening, sucking things that do happen into its maw. Except that it happened to me.

Within a week I had found an agent and the book was making waves at the Frankfurt Book Fair. We sold it in fifteen countries, including Canada - hurrah! My father spent the war years in Banff, and I did my own winter trip when I was 18, walking the streets of Toronto, Montreal and Quebec City, wearing six coats, with a Margaret Atwood novel in my gloved hand. From what I understand, we have a December release date for Gods Behaving Badly in Canada, which is great as reading is my second favourite indoor activity. (My favourite is playing the piano. Why, what were you thinking?)

I very much hope you enjoy the book. If not, feel free not to mention it to anyone, but if you were accidentally to leave it lying face up on a table…

Thanks for reading.

Marie Phillips

Posted by: Mike Fuhr - Director, National Accounts Marketing

I had the privilege of taking in a pre-Toronto Film Festival screening of Ian McEwan’s Atonement recently and I have to say I left the theatre absolutely gutted. What an amazing film. McEwan has such a way of setting a stage and drawing you in before setting his characters loose. I cannot wait until more people get the chance to take in the movie version later this fall. Booklovers will not be disappointed at all. In fact, I’m sure it will leave lots of people longing to pick up a copy of the book. (Did someone just say, Oscar?)

Posted by: Randy Chan - Associate Marketing Director

The Outcast is a novel we’re publishing in Spring 2008, and an advance reading copy was thrust into my hands by our Vice President of Marketing who could not stop raving about it. And because there is never a shortage of things to read, and never enough time to read everything, it always helps when a book is heavily endorsed by a colleague whose taste you trust. Without further delay, I began reading it on a TTC bus. Now normally, I hate starting a new book on public transit because I’m never fully focused (it’s much better when I’m at home in my pajamas with a glass of wine), but there I was on the King Street route hooked from page one and wanting to skip out of work to keep reading.

There is something about Lewis Aldridge (the outcast) that solicited my full sympathy. When we first meet him he has just been released from prison, a hardened soul at the age of nineteen. But the author, Sadie Jones, then takes the reader backwards in time, to tell the story of what happened to Lewis’s family, how he lost his childhood, how he became an outcast. In completely unsentimental ways, I came to understand—and forgive—Lewis outright, which says a lot about the author’s talents since Lewis is disastrously flawed.

But it’s not just Lewis who has become etched into my mind. His father, try as he might, cannot father; his step-mother, Alice, learns to cope with life’s disappointments in heartbreakingly self-destructive ways; and young Kit Carmichael, loves Lewis unconditionally, but at a huge cost—these are all characters I came to care about deeply.

The Outcast is deceptive in its simply written style. In fact, it is a psychologically astute portrait of a group of people on the verge of implosion, all outcasts in their own way. This is no ordinary story. It is extraordinary in every way, and I hope you will be as hooked as I was—even on public transit!

Posted by: Jennifer Herman - Marketing Manager, National Accounts

For as long as I can remember I have loved to read and be surrounded by books. And so working at a publishing house is the perfect job for me. I get to read fabulous books by some of my favorite authors including Dean Koontz, Linwood Barclay and Karin Slaughter to name but a few. I also get to read books that don’t normally fall into my favorite category of mystery/thriller and am occasionally surprised by the results.

Case in point. I will sheepishly start off by saying that Loving Frank by Nancy Horan was a book that I thought I wouldn’t like. Historical fiction is not my usual cup of tea. And so I was pleasantly surprised to find myself over 80 pages into the book before I even came up for air.

The story tells the tale of Frank Lloyd Wright and the affair he has with a married woman named Mamah Borthwick Cheney. For a first novel, Horan picks and ambitious subject yet manages to blend fact and fiction together beautifully. This is a fast paced narrative, with interesting characters and intriguing plot.

More than a love story, it is a snapshot of early 20th century misogyny and power of living your dream. The voice of Mamah is powerful and yet her struggle to balance her wants with what society (and her family) deems as proper is so moving. The end of this book made me cry and it’s a story that will stay with me forever.

Posted by: Martha Leonard - Editorial Assistant, Doubleday Canada

Rosie Little is not your average contemporary fairy tale heroine: Her eagle-eyes spy the wolf in grandmother’s clothing and her sixteen-hole cherry red Doc Martens will make more of a fashion statement than Cinderella’s glass slippers any day.

In Rosie Little’s Cautionary Tales for Girls, Danielle Wood has turned the fairy tale on its head and presented to us a collection of sassy, sharp and hilariously funny stories. The note at the opening of the book states that “these are tales for girls who have boots as stout as their hearts, and who are prepared to lace them up (boots and hearts both) and step out into the wilds in search of what they desire.” Cue a flashback to the eight-hole cherry red Doc Martens I wore as a teen — sixteen holes would have been too much for my mother to handle — and I was immediately sold.

Have you ever had one of those moments while reading when you are overcome by a déjà vu and can’t separate the book from something you are certain has happened to you before? Or when you find yourself falling so deeply into the author’s observations and descriptions that you realize how frightfully — and sometimes embarrassingly — accurate she is? I had more than one of those moments while reading this incredibly assured collection of tales.

And Rosie? She’s fierce and sometimes a menace, that’s for sure, but her compassion is undeniable. Rosie’s experiences serve as good reminders for hard lessons you have already learned and will make you grateful for the ones you have managed to avoid so far. She’s the friend you have who is always the life of the party, but who doubles as a voice of wisdom and acute listener, too. I know more than one real-life Rosie.

Though I have yet to know a woman whose love turned her into a mannequin or to be turned into one myself, as I read these Cautionary Tales I laughed out loud, felt my hair stand on end, and called friends to relive embarrassingly similar moments. These charming 275 pages make for a thoroughly entertaining walk through the woods to grandmother’s house on a summer afternoon, handsome woodcutters and all.

I asked my Mom about those cherry red Docs the other day. She thinks they are stored in a box somewhere, along with my three-hole black ones that Rosie would never have approved of… Maybe it’s time to dig those old red boots out and dust them off.

Posted by: Mike Fuhr - Senior Manager, National Accounts Marketing

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens was one of my favourite books when I was in university. Admittedly, it wasn’t a book I would have read were it not on a course list. But, in this case, thank goodness for first year English!

When I first got wind of Mister Pip before our fall sales conference, I felt a strange mixture of intrigue and suspicion. Who, pray tell, was this Lloyd Jones who dared to riff on Dickens? So, I sat down with a pot of coffee and quietly devoured this amazing book in one sunny afternoon. I simply could not put it down.

Set on a remote island in the South Pacific which has been beset by civil war and chaos for several years, Mister Pip follows young Matilda as she discovers literature and uses Dickens’ book as a means of escaping the troubles so close at hand.

One day, Mr. Watts, the only white man left in their black community, decides it’s time the children receive an education. So, for part of each day, he entertains a classroom with readings from Great Expectations, one of the few books left in the village. The children soon become enthralled with the idea of Victorian-era England and with the main character, Pip. Pip begins to take on his own life as he entertains, engages and challenges Matilda even in her darkest, most fearful moments.

Mister Pip will haunt and beguile you with that pitch-perfect mixture of heartbreak and hope I’ve found in so many of my favourite books: To Kill a Mockingbird, The Lovely Bones and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time all leap to mind. Above all, it’s a story about that place deep inside of yourself that no one can ever touch, no matter how hard they might try.

Posted by: Tim Armstrong - District Sales Manager, Trade Division

Unfolding as a beautifully quiet, interior monologue, Graham Swift’s Tomorrow follows Paula, a woman coming to terms with a decision she made years ago - one that has ruled her life as “her secret”. We have all sat up during those quiet pre-dawn mornings wondering what tomorrow will bring (and yes that saying is where the title came from). The point of this book is not that there is a secret to be revealed, but that it is Paula who has a secret and it is her secret.

Not all secrets are of the “I killed my dad and married my mother” world-changing variety. Ordinary, boring people have secrets. Every secret is important to the person who keeps that secret, whether they bite their toenails, or truly love Elvis and can’t get enough. It is part of the human condition to withhold secrets. The secret holder frets that “if the world only knew, they would think differently of me” and that is what keeps Paula up on this one night. Her secret is what has ruled her life for sixteen years, and why her husband can continue to sleep through the night unbothered. Intrigued yet?

This will be the sleeper on the fall list, perfect for those reading groups who like to share their intimate secrets (to the embarrassment of others).

Posted by: Maylin Scott - Assistant Manager, Library Sales & Academic

Among the many, many things my Mum has given me, one of the earliest and most lasting is her love of reading. She read to me at night, taught me my letters long before kindergarten, constantly took me to the public library, and most importantly never censored anything that I wanted to read, but let me loose to explore, indulge and reject at will. She also scoured jumble sales, always on the lookout for used copies of Enid Blytons to add to my collection.

The bond between a mother and child is always unique and changing and thus almost impossible to depict accurately in any book or memoir. However, if such a thing were possible, this Mother’s Day I’d love to give a hug to two particularly memorable fictional mothers.

Roddy Doyle’s Paula Spencer is such a lovable and complicated mess. Her abusive marriage was detailed in The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, and in the sequel that bears her name, she’s now a recovering alcoholic, filled with guilt and desperate to make amends to her children. At the same time she’s discovering a whole new sober world that is alternatively scary and exhilarating. Her sardonic, witty and painfully vulnerable voice really tugs at the heartstrings.

My second favourite mother is Reta Winters in Carol Shields’ wonderful novel Unless. Her emotional journey trying to understand why her smart, beautiful daughter has taken to begging in the streets is such a compelling and insightful exploration of those inevitable distances that grow between family members and the necessity of trust and letting go.

Both these novels are great because they are not just about maternal relationships, but feature strong and tough women who, simultaneously, are also actively searching - and finding - their own identities outside of motherhood. As my own Mum has always done and taught by example.

Posted by: Diane Martin - Vice-President, Publisher, Knopf Canada

Wow, what a lovely paragraph and what great choices. Maylin has set the bar frighteningly high. (I met Maylin’s mother once at Doors Open. I was working a table at the Royal York when we were selling John Sewell’s book on all the interesting buildings/spaces in Toronto. I’ll never forget her. She said, “Hi, I’m Maylin’s mommy!” I could tell she was so proud to have this extraordinary daughter. I hope she has a great Mother’s Day.)

On this Mother’s Day - since mine is no longer with us, and my darling children are out of town - I will think of Sheilagh Fielding, the unmarried mother of two and Wayne Johnston’s most celebrated character, star (with Joey Smallwood) of The Colony of Unrequited Dreams and most especially The Custodian of Paradise. I will also think of Moranna MacKenzie, another mother of two, who has to endure many Mother’s Days without access to her children in An Audience of Chairs by Joan Clark.

A few mothers have sprung from the pen of Alexander McCall Smith. There is Mma Ramotswe of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, whose then-fiancé, now-husband adopts two children from Mma Potokwani at the orphan farm and deposits them at Mma Ramotswe’s house on Zebra Drive - without consulting her! But she forgives him of course and the two children are very happy to live with Mma Ramotswe and then with Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni who moves in after the wedding (so much cake!). And Isabel Dalhousie in Edinburgh is also poised to become a mother when we last see her in The Right Attitude to Rain. (She is not married either.) We must wait for The Careful Use of Compliments to find out if it’s a boy or a girl and who, surprisingly perhaps, will be jealous. And maybe we should remember that most, though not all, mothers are perfect. Think of Bertie’s mother Irene in the 44 Scotland Street series. She has read all the works of Melanie Klein and wants her 6-year-old Bertie to learn Italian and play the saxophone - sounds very reasonable to me! - but Bertie would prefer a boy’s life of fishing and rugby (whatever that is).

And finally and more seriously, Happy Mother’s Day to all the women in Africa who have taken on the mothering role for countless AIDS orphans, and to Stephanie Nolen, a new mother herself, who writes so movingly about them in 28: Stories of AIDS in Africa.

Posted by: Maylin Scott - Assistant Manager, Library Sales & Academic

It’s an incredibly busy, yet deliciously heady time as we head into our fall sales conference; piles of manuscripts are literally hitting our desks on a daily basis. I’m particularly excited about a new novel called Orpheus Lost by Janette Turner Hospital. In fact it may be the very first book I’ve ever read that made me immediately go out and buy a music CD (Gluck’s opera Orfeo ed Eurydice plays continually in the background of this novel).

Orpheus Lost is set mostly in Boston, in a contemporary America where several more terrorist attacks have taken place. Leela Moore, an academic doing complicated research into the mathematical relationships in music, first meets Miska in the subway, where he is playing his violin. They embark on a passionate affair but she becomes disturbed by Miska’s silences and the odd way he has of disappearing for short periods of time.

Citizens are continually being investigated for possible ties to terrorist activities, and one night Leela finds herself picked up by a car and taken to a locked room. However, she doesn’t know that the key interrogator is Cobb, an old friend of hers from childhood who, after a stint with the army in Iraq, now works for a private security company. When Miska goes missing for real, Leela desperately turns to Cobb for help, not realizing that he has secrets and traumas of his own to deal with.

This is a richly complex literary novel. On the one hand it’s a beautifully written, sensual, blush-inducing love story, that also tackles the very personal search for identity within a fragmented world. And yet it is also a gripping, suspenseful thriller that is extremely perceptive and probing, not just about contemporary global anxieties but also about how humans cope daily with the destructive effects of war through the generations. An absolutely terrific read!

Posted by: Mike Fuhr - Marketing Manager, National Accounts

The Culprits begins innocently enough when Hank, a lonely computer operator in Toronto, searching for love on the Internet, finds Anna, a young Russian woman who, quite unexpectedly, is more than happy to meet him. What blossoms in time is an interesting relationship where both partners must fumble through their respective pasts in order to cobble together their best possible future.

There is definitely an iron fist (curtain?) at work inside the deceptive velvet (revolution?) glove humour of this book. The ongoing war in Chechnya and its related terrors are visited on these and many other characters in very deep, very personal ways. For instance, when Anna cons a very agreeable Henry into paying a ransom to free “an old friend,” he inadvertently supports an awfully fiendish, dreadfully bloody act of violence.

Along the way there, particularly in the last 50-odd pages, there are some head-spinningly-good epiphanies as the book takes a more serious tone.

Robert Hough writes with fantastic irony and a sense of humour that fans of Douglas Coupland and Kurt Vonnegut will find familiar and yet refreshing. I really enjoyed it and I can’t wait to see it on shelves soon!

Posted by: James Young - Imprint Sales Director

I was excited and surprised yesterday by the news that Oprah has selected Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as her next book club pick. Cormac McCarthy just might be the greatest living American author, in my opinion, and now his genius is about to reach over a million new readers. I’ve been a devoted follower since discovering his masterpiece, Blood Meridian almost 20 years ago. That novel is the ONLY book I’ve ever read five times and I can count on one hand the novels I’ve read even twice.

The Road finds McCarthy as a master of his craft. Not only is it a dark and terrifying story of a father and son surviving in a post-apocalyptic America, its also rich with emotion and awe. No one writes such beautiful prose about a stark landscape as McCarthy. I suppose my one regret is that for all these years I felt like I belonged to the exclusive club of his dedicated and worshipful readers, but now his greatness is about to revealed to the rest of you.

Posted by: Michael Schellenberg - Senior Editor, Knopf Canada

It is hard to believe that April is upon us. I feel like it’s already October. As an editor, you spend your life thinking and talking about books that are six months or a year, or in some cases, many years off. So, it becomes a challenge to remember what books are being published now, and when people ask, what books are coming out from Knopf, I am often stopped short. But there is one wonderful moment that quickly brings you back to the here and now: when a new book arrives from the printer.

I had one of those moments earlier this week when Heather Mallick’s new book Cake or Death: The Excruciating Choices of Everyday Life landed on my desk. I had the pleasure of being Heather’s editor, and all I have to say is that you are in for a treat. Whether she is hilariously riffing about the consolations to be found in cleaning her house, quietly reflecting on her relationship with her mother, or giving tips on how to cope with people you just can’t stand, Heather’s writing is at once incisive, hilarious and provocative. For those of you who know Heather from her old Globe and Mail columns, or faithfully read her column in Chatelaine, you are going to love this book. And if you have not yet been introduced to the particular pleasure of reading Heather, choose cake, and dip into this delightful book.

April also brings Phil LaMarche’s rivetting debut novel American Youth, a page-turner of a story involving an accidental death and a young boy whose mother forces him to lie about his role in the event. When we received this manuscript, five of us read it over a weekend and we’ve been talking about it ever since. I can assure you that if you respond to this book in the same way we did, it will inspire one of your book club’s most interesting and heated discussion.

And fans of Mma Ramotswe have a reason to rejoice. (As do readers who haven’t discovered her yet.) The Good Husband of Zebra Drive, the eighth book in Alexander McCall Smith’s wonderful No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, comes out this month. Diane Martin, publisher of Knopf Canada, and founder of the Mma Ramotswe fan club, assures me it’s the best book yet. I believe that it was my membership in that fan club that led me to getting my job here at Knopf, but that’s a story for another time. Now, I have to get back to a manuscript that won’t be published until next April…

Posted by: Marion Garner - Publisher, Vintage Canada

I’ve been in this business for quite a while and I still get a quiet thrill when I see someone reading a Random House book. Yesterday’s commute in the first major snowstorm of the year was actually relatively painless compared to other days on the Toronto Transit Commission.

It was made even better when, en route to work on the subway, I saw a fellow passenger reading the Vintage edition of Anita Rau Badami’s stunning first novel Tamarind Mem. Coincidental, because one of my tasks for the day was to try and finalize the paperback cover for Anita’s most recent novel Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? On the way home, I spotted someone reading the Vintage Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. I know these books sell very well. I look at sales figures all the time. For some reason it still comes as a bit of a shock to see people actually reading them.

Posted by: Val Gow - Imprint Sales Director

The nice thing about summer books is being able to introduce those quirky novels that might get lost in the larger fall season. This summer Doubleday Canada will publish two books that definitely fit the category of perfect seasonal reads. Recently I recommended two to our sales team that I thought I’d mention here.

Fresh: Mark McNay’s debut novel that is exactly that - fresh. Quirky, compelling, and set in a poultry slaughter house in Scotland, this is a book that will grab you immediately. Even though it is written in a thick Scottish accent and features a liberal dose of regional slang, it’s easy to understand the universal frustrations that young Sean (the protagonist) faces while trying to make his way in the world. The best parts of the book are those that contrast the gritty reality of a dead-end life with the loving heart that beats in even the most despicable character. And to make it even more appealing, it has just been announced that Fresh has won a U.K. Arts Foundation Award for New Fiction!

Three Bags Full: Billed as a ‘sheep mystery’ (as it is set in a flock of sheep), Leonie Swan’s debut novel has already won fans in both our Mississauga and Toronto offices. Give it a try I think you will be impressed.

An unforgettable cast of characters (the sheep), try to solve the murder of their beloved shepherd, and in the process they learn a lot about humans and their eccentric ways. I was immediately drawn into the mystery and I quickly believed that the animals were capable of thought and emotions. And I never felt betrayed by the interesting device of problem-solving sheep. I don’t want to give away the murderer but certainly all of the human suspects have motive enough to kill George, and even some of the flock are suspects, for a time…

Posted by: Randy Chan - Marketing Manager

I was very excited to read The End of East by Jen Sookfong Lee for three good reasons: 1) I love reading novels that document multiple generations of one family (it’s amazing how much drama can be milked out of one family, isn’t it?) and in particular the Asian immigrant family, which always moves me. 2) Like any avid reader I love discovering new voices, and Lee’s voice is so fresh. She is part of the New Face of Fiction program which has also launched the careers of Yann Martel, Ann-Marie MacDonald and Dionne Brand so I’ll read anything that comes out of that program. 3) Lee has a friendly and sassy author photo, and I like that.

What you need to know about the plot is that the main character, Samantha Chan, has returned home (to Vancouver) to care for her ailing mother, and that the story of her grandfather, Seid Quan (who immigrated to Canada in 1913), serves as the novel’s backbone. But Samantha’s story is the one that really speaks to me: her internal breakdowns and her struggle to prevent family mistakes from repeating themselves.

What sets this novel apart? Its sheer readability, which is where the freshness comes in. It is incredible how Lee can move a story along efficiently: in some chapters a character is born - and then dies - within a dozen pages. And yet somehow Lee doesn’t skimp on the depth of the characters. You still feel their heartbreak, their elation, their spirit. It’s as if Lee took a steak knife to her novel and trimmed off all the fat. Kudos to Jen Sookfong Lee for writing a novel that represents a New Face of Fiction in every sense.

Posted by: Maylin Scott - Assistant Manager, Library Sales & Academic

Ian McEwan is such an intense, intelligent writer that I like to read him, if at all possible, in one concentrated sitting. Not easy, when he’s also one of those writers whose prose is so remarkable that I like to frequently go back and reread whole pages - and I am not a fast reader. His new novella, On Chesil Beach is both delightful and disappointing in its brevity - I could have absorbed myself in these characters for many more chapters. It’s set ostensibly on Florence and Edward’s memorable wedding night in the early sixties, but with flashbacks to their initial meeting, and a bittersweet glance into their future.

The happy couple is about to consummate their relationship and both are terrified, being virgins. With the same clinical precision that McEwan brought to brain surgery in Saturday, he slowly dissects the emotional and physical awkwardness of sex. I certainly will never think of French kissing in quite the same way again; I had to pause and consider if what he was describing was physically possible, but knowing his reputation for meticulous research, I can only assume that it is. Let’s just say there are references to dental work and gag reflexes. I still can’t quite decide whether to nominate him for the Bad Sex Award or to frame this amazing paragraph as an example of the most brilliant, uncomfortably funny prose I’ve ever read. McEwan fans are in for real treat.

Posted by: Ellen Seligman - Publisher (Fiction) and Senior Vice-President, McClelland & Stewart

Red Dog, Red Dog is a powerful work of fiction. It’s the debut novel by Patrick Lane, author of the memoir There Is a Season. As a grabber, in his covering letter agent Dean Cooke described it as William Faulkner meets Quentin Tarantino. The fact is, in the majesty and hard-edged beauty of the writing it is Faulknerian. The book is set in the interior of B.C. and there are moments of the most breathtaking beauty and then of the most harrowing violence. The writing is absolutely stunning. Lane has the ability to look squarely into the heart of darkness, but he has tenderness, a vast compassion and love.

Posted by: Martha Kanya-Forstner - Editorial Director, Doubleday Canada

Great news! Our sister company Doubleday US has bought CS Richardson’s novel, The Grand Tour of Ambrose Zephyr, and they plan to publish it in August 2007. The timing of our publication will not change but obviously the addition of such a high caliber partner is a great one.

There will be one significant change to the novel and that is its title. With a firm sense of what works best in their market Doubleday US has retitled the book The End of the Alphabet and we are going to follow suit - the novel being best served if it has the same title on both sides of the border. I should say that the novel will have a happy life beyond North America too as rights for it have already been sold in Italy and Germany, with a Spanish deal soon to follow. CS Richardson’s agent was thrilled with the attention the book got when she pitched it to international publishers at the Frankfurt Book Fair earlier this month. She has since had queries about the novel from territories as diverse as Israel and South Korea. So it seems that readers around the globe will be treated to this very special story.

Posted by: Anne Collins - Publisher, Random House Canada

I stayed up all night recently with Tomorrow, a new novel by Graham Swift, which we’ll publish in the summer of 2007. This is actually one of the real treats of my job, getting to read in manuscript, before a lot of other people have the chance, the work of a novelist as fine as Graham. But still it was funny: there I was, sleeplessly turning the pages of a deceptively simple domestic novel, which takes place in the head of a woman lying awake beside her sleeping husband from midnight to dawn. “Domestic” in Graham’s hands is not quiet in any regard. All night I found myself talking back to his book, much in the way that I wanted to talk back to Carol Shields’ last and so powerful novel, Unless.

The woman is sleepless because “tomorrow” she and her husband are going to have to tell their sixteen-year-old twins something she worries is going to completely change their family life. All the risks and fleeting joys of marriage and family twine around your throat as you read: the high stakes of loving anyone, particularly the same person for decades and decades; the inevitability of losing people; the shaky bulwark of a marriage bed; how you actually raise your children in order for them to leave you happily.

I can see Graham, when he tours, having to fend off interviewers who want to tell him stories of their marriages, because there is something in this novel that makes you want to confide in it. He says that the book, when it gets down to it, is about a lot of things, but most of all about happiness. Such a tough subject, really, and so surprisingly, refreshingly and confidently evoked by one of the most thoughtful, subtle and accomplished fiction writers I know.

Posted by: Diane Martin - Vice-President, Publisher, Knopf Canada

Don Hannah’s wise and beautiful new novel, Ragged Islands, arrived, as it turned out, at a propitious time for me. My mother-in-law is in her nineties and had recently moved into a residential facility for the aged, and while she chose to make the move, the adjustment was tough. A woman who had been in possession of all her faculties, she became confused about where she was, and why. She would call us in the middle of the night to find out, for example, if it was 3 AM or 3 PM and the family was becoming rather stressed.

Then along came Ragged Islands. The main character in Don Hannah’s new novel is an old woman, Susan Ann, who is in the hospital, probably dying. Most of her family surrounds her, worrying, caring and resenting all at once. I couldn’t believe the insight Don gives us in this novel about what goes on inside the mind of an elderly person who’s nearing the end of her time. It made me teary, but I felt so elated to have some new sense of my mother-in-law’s experience. It calmed me down and gave me new hope and energy for our relationship. This lovely novel, Ragged Islands, could be the sleeper of the Spring 2007 season. Hope so!

Posted by: Kendall Anderson - Editor, Vintage Canada

The Halifax Connection is a blast! Canadian history - usually so dry and dull - is brought vividly to life. Through the eyes of a talented counter-intelligence officer, we see Montreal and Halifax in the mid 1800s, with all its richness and dirt and dinginess. The American Civil War is raging just below the border, and Erryn Shaw must stop Canada from getting involved. How different our world would have been if spies like Shaw hadn’t been around. We’d all be American!

What I like best about Marie Jakober’s writing is that I learned a true story about Canada’s past through a great novel - one with intrigue, witty dialogue, and even a little bit of sex for spice. The perfect book for a visitor to Canada, for any reader who loves historical fiction like Diana Gabaldon, and even for good teen readers.