Posted by: Frances Bedford - Publicity Manager

For the first time in its 104-year book-publishing history, McClelland & Stewart will debut a book in serialized podcast format.

Free audio episodes from The High Road by Terry Fallis will be posted weekly starting June 1, 2010, with the finale airing October 12, 2010. A print and e-book edition will be available for sale beginning September 7, 2010.

The High Road is the highly anticipated sequel to Terry Fallis’s award-winning novel, The Best Laid Plans. The High Road podcast will be read by the author and available, chapter by chapter, in its entirety, in audio download format from www.terryfallis.com and iTunes, among other podcast directories.

This unconventional publishing strategy has already proven successful for Mr. Fallis. His first novel, The Best Laid Plans, began as a podcast, then was self-published, won the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour, and was re-published in print and e-book format to great reviews by McClelland & Stewart. The Best Laid Plans podcast has drawn 3500 subscribers from all over the world.

In a statement posted to his website, Mr. Fallis says:
“I’ve always been a firm believer in the power of podcasting to build an audience, even for literature. I also believe that if listeners like what they hear, even if it’s free, a good portion of them will go out and buy the book. …This decision reflects enlightened thinking by a traditional publisher and a willingness to test the social media waters and explore how it can help drive interest in, and sales of, a book. In this case, my book. Think of it as new media supporting old media.”

Doug Pepper, President and Publisher of McClelland & Stewart Ltd. says:
“For 104 years M&S has been staying on top of new trends and looking ahead for new ways to market books. We are excited about this opportunity to partner with a savvy author and be adventurous with a bold new idea to build an audience for our books. We expect that, as with the success of The Best Laid Plans, the free podcast will encourage pre-publication word of mouth and ultimately drive sales of the print and e-book editions that follow.”

The High Road by Terry Fallis (Emblem Editions, $19.99, original trade paperback) will be published in print and e-book format on September 7, 2010. This deeply funny satire continues the story of Angus McLintock, an amateur politician who dares to do the unthinkable: tell the truth.

Click here to listen now to the first chapter of The High Road by Terry Fallis.

Posted by: Pamela Murray - Sr. Editor & Manager, Co-Publications, KRC Group

The end to the sweet torment was a date on the calendar: March 12, 2010. This was the day of Canada Reads reckoning, when the country would find out whose book emerged the winner.

When I learned that Nicolas Dickner’s Nikolski was in the running, I was thrilled but terrified at all the big guns it was up against. So many huge books, and great ones. Good to a Fault a Giller nominee. Fall On Your Knees, a beloved classic. Generation X the acorn that became the mighty oak of Douglas Coupland’s phenomenal publishing career. The Jade Peony ensconced on school curricula! Nikolski was no stranger to recognition in its French version, winning awards, acclaim and readers in Quebec, where it was first published. But how thrilling that this competition would have so many more people reading this special book by this uniquely gifted young writer.

When we first decided to publish the book at Knopf Canada, I told my colleagues that the book would be a fantastic Canada Reads selection - for one thing, the book actually covers so much of Canada, from West to East. But also because it’s so much fun, and fun to talk about. All that was needed was a champion, somewhere, to get the same idea.

Fast forward two and a half years or so. I met Michel Vézina for the first time on the day the contenders were announced. Much has been made of this author and publisher’s past as a fire-breather, but personally I prefer to imagine him as a wish-granting genie. I liked his attitude right away - how, when Jian Ghomeshi asked him what his strategy for the defending the book would be, he said, it will be easy, my book is the best! (Exquisitely concise literary criticism.) Of course, all the other champions projected confidence, too…

Twitter had an ineluctable hold on me for the months (months!) leading up to the debates. At first it seemed that people reading all five books were starting with other titles, and there wasn’t a lot about Nikolski. But before long reactions started to trickle in and they were great. Could I dare to dream that the book about fish, pirates, garbology and a gnarled family tree might actually win?

Debates week. Office door closed, radio on, edge of seat steadily wearing away. The first two books to go were Generation X and Fall On Your Knees. As the week went on I railed against the slings and arrows aimed at “my” book, and cheered every bit of praise (Rollie said it was a “bouncy adventure”)!

On the last day, Good to a Fault was eliminated, leaving Nikolski and The Jade Peony to duke it out. The final vote: Samantha Nutt voted for Nikolskito leave, as did Perdita Felicien. Michel and Simi Sara voted for The Jade Peony to go. It was down to the vote of Roland Pemberton a.k.a. Cadence Weapon a.k.a Another Wish-granting Genie because, with his vote, Nikolski emerged triumphant!

So now, the whole nation will be reading this hugely entertaining book and discovering its many charms. And if anyone wants to discuss the Three-Headed Book or the Lost Saga of the Garifunas or the mysterious contents of Montreal dumpsters, just be in touch. I’ll be here - beaming, and definitely believing in magic. (Not to mention editing Lazer Lederhendler’s translation of Nicolas’s next novel, Apocalypse for Beginners - watch this space…)

Posted by: Jessica Grant - Author of Come, Thou Tortoise

Last Monday I was invited to a meeting of the Best Kind Book Club. I walked. It took half an hour. On the walk I thought about how being an author means people read your book secretly, when you are not looking. I am still not used to this. I would like to be there, just to make sure everything is going okay. Or I would like to know when you are reading my book so I can send warm thoughts to my characters, who are performing. Also, I would like to see the set you are using. The food. What kind of airplanes.

But this is impractical. Readers read books behind authors’ backs. I know that.

Except! Sometimes readers will invite you behind the scenes. Sometimes they will show you the set.

Last Monday night, I, the author of Come, Thou Tortoise, walked into the Best Kind Book Club meeting and lo! Real-life oranges in castles, “Piety” pie, licorice allsorts, a toy mouse, a windup tortoise, model airplanes (Lufthansa and DHL - not Qantas - profound apologies), a Jell-O orange castle with a flag on top, homemade chocolate tortoises. Kelp!

I batted my eyelashes. So these are the hands my book has been in - the best hands, the best kind of hands. I cupped an orange in a castle in my palm. I had never seen a real one, didn’t know they existed, or could exist. I had just made them up.

The Best Kind Book Club welcomed me back into the book I thought I had lost and fed me Tortoise food and shared their sets and told me about the performances they had seen in their minds - each one different - and we laughed about some funny things that had happened in those performances.

When the time came to go, they wouldn’t let me walk. They gave me a drive. They sent me home with parts of the set, including an orange in a castle. I put the castle on my counter. I marveled at it. I took pictures. I thought: this is the best gift I’ve been given, ever. I can’t eat it. Yes, I can. Imagine eating something you imagined. Imagine.

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: Tan Light - Coordinator, Digital Sales & Marketing

On Tuesday, December 1, 2009 Jian Ghomeshi announced the 5 books and their defenders for Canada Reads 2010. Congratulations to Ann-Marie MacDonald, Nicolas Dickner, Douglas Coupland and Wayson Choy! (And Marina Endicott, who rounds out the list)

We don’t want you to miss any of the action. Here is a round-up of links to CBC’s Canada Reads content:

• Read The Canada Reads Blog and the CBC Book Club which is all about Canada Reads this month!
• You can find the CBC Book Club on Twitter too, @cbcbookclub. More twitter coverage can be found by searching #canadareads.
• Canada Reads also has a Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/#/pages/Canada-Reads/37300206075
• Learn more about the panelists defending our books.
• And finally, be sure to enter the CBC’s weekly Canada Reads Contests

But of course, you want to know more about the books and authors being defended this year. Check out these links for interviews, excerpts and more.

Ann-Marie MacDonald
Photo © Gabor Jurina

About the Author

Interview #1

Interview #2

Canada Reads selection: Fall on Your Knees

Excerpt | Reader’s Guide

Attention Bloggers! You can include this widget for Fall on Your Knees in your Canada Reads post. Just copy and paste this code:

<script type=’text/javascript’ src=’http://insight.randomhouse.com/widget/viewer.js’></script>
<script type=’text/javascript’>new InsightBookReader(‘preview’, ‘9780394281780’, ‘Fall%20on%20Your%20Knees’, ‘Ann-Marie%20MacDonald’, ‘0’, ”, ‘http://www.booklounge.ca/cgi-bin/buy_landing.php?isbn=9780394281780’);</script>

Also by Ann-Marie MacDonald
The Way The Crow Flies Excerpt | Reader’s Guide
Her Plays, Belle Moral and Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet)

Nicolas Dickner
Photo © Antoine Tanguay

About the Author

Video Interview

Canada Reads Selection: Nikolski

Excerpt | Reader’s Guide

Attention Bloggers! You can include this widget for Nikolski in your Canada Reads post. Just copy and paste this code:

<script type=’text/javascript’ src=’http://insight.randomhouse.com/widget/viewer.js’></script>
<script type=’text/javascript’>new InsightBookReader(‘preview’, ‘9780676978803’, ‘Nikolski’, ‘Nicolas%20Dickner’, ‘0’, ”, ‘http://www.booklounge.ca/cgi-bin/buy_landing.php?isbn=9780676978803’);</script>

Douglas Coupland
Photo © D.J. Weir

About the Author

Author Interview

Douglas Coupland’s Youtube Channel

Douglas Coupland’s latest book, Generation A is a kind of response/rethinking of Canada Reads selection, Generation X. It explores new ways of looking at the act of reading and storytelling in a digital world. Click here to read an excerpt

Also by Douglas Coupland
The Gum Thief
JPod
Eleanor Rigby
Hey Nostradamus!
All Families are Psychotic
Miss Wyoming

Wayson Choy
Photo © Robert Mills

About the Author

Audio Interview

In 2001, six years after publishing The Jade Peony, Wayson Choy suffered a combined asthma-heart attack. When his heart failed him a second time, four years later, it was the strength of his bonds with the people in his life, forged through countless acts of kindness, that pulled Choy back to his life. Framed by Wayson Choy’s two brushes with death, Not Yet is an intimate and insightful study of one man’s reasons for living.
Read from Wayson Choy’s memoir Not Yet.

Also by Wayson Choy
All That Matters - Excerpt | Reader’s Guide

Posted by: Michael Schellenberg - Associate Publisher, Knopf Canada

It isn’t everyday that we crack the champagne before noon, but this morning, the Knopf Random Canada (KRC) group had two wonderful reasons to celebrate. Two books had made the Scotiabank Giller Prize shortlist - that’s the Holy Grail of Canadian publishing - and both were edited by Anne Collins, doyenne of Random House Canada. So, KRC’s executive publisher Louise Dennys gave a heartfelt toast for Annabel Lyon’s wonderful novel The Golden Mean - check out that cover, kids - and the brilliant The Bishop’s Man by Linden MacIntyre.

It all started in a room at the glamourous Four Seasons, where the assembled group of nervous editors and publishers quaffed orange juice squeezed from real oranges and fair-trade coffee. Then, Jack Rabinovich took the podium to introduce the jurors.

This very generous man sponsors the award in memory of his late wife Doris. This year, the jury was comprised of the elegant Victoria Glendinning from England,

the handsome Russell Banks from the US, and Alistair Macleod, who couldn’t be there. And then Victoria started to read the nominees - this is always an interesting exercise, because the names are read alphabetically, and everybody in the room began to clock which books had been left off as the list was announced. When Kim Echlin’s wonderful novel The Disappeared (published by Penguin Books) was announced as the first nominee, people were shocked to realize that Margaret Atwood’s splendid The Year of the Flood hadn’t made the shortlist… As well as Annabel and Linden and Echlin’s books, also shortlisted were Colin McAdam’s Fall and Anne Michael’s The Winter Vault.

Well, back to work - hoping to find the Giller nominees of years to come - and then to turn our attention to the announcement of the Man Booker Prize this evening in London. KRC has two books on the shortlist….

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: 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: Tan Light - Coordinator, Digital Sales & Marketing, Random House of Canada

Despite the freezing temperatures outside, the Gladstone Hotel was packed on Jan. 14 for the launch of Priscilla Uppal’s new novel, To Whom It May Concern. In this modern, multicultural re-telling of King Lear, Uppal explores the vulnerability and complexity of family and inheritance. Hosted by Pages Books and This Is Not a Reading Series, it was a most enjoyable evening for all.

The show started off with five of Priscila’s friends and colleagues discussing their own personal Shakespeare/King Lear stories. The line-up included our very own Andrew Pyper and Anthony De Sa, as well as playwright Linda Griffiths, Prof. Deanne Williams, and author Shyam Selvadurai. All five monologues were passionate, personal, and thoroughly enjoyable. Personally, I loved Anthony’s tale of teaching King Lear to his high school English class. He hooked them with ‘the angle’: King Lear was a pervert.

In the second part of the evening, Quill & Quire review editor Steven Beattie interviewed Priscila about To Whom It May Concern. She explained that her aim was to explore the tragic and comedic dimensions of failing to communicate, of keeping secrets, especially from family, and the consequences of our betrayals. Unlike characters in the play, Uppal and Beattie discussed how characters in her novel are not one-dimensionally ‘good’ or ‘evil’. Uppal’s characters are well-rounded and very human, each having their secrets and their redeeming qualities.

Despite the fact that this was “work” (I was hosting the Booklounge.ca VIP contest winners), I thoroughly enjoyed myself. To Whom It May Concern has been added to my nightstand’s ‘to be read’ pile.

Posted by: Tan Light - Coordinator, Digital Sales & Marketing, Random House of Canada

The biggest prize in Canadian literature, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, was awarded last night at the Four Seasons Hotel in Toronto. Our own Anthony De Sa was up for this prestigious award, valued this year at $50,000, for his story collection Barnacle Love. Not a sum to sneeze at in the book world! And while we, the average joes, could not attend the ceremony, a number of the young publishers made it to the Giller Light Bash, a party at which we watched the Gillers and ate great food, all in support of Frontier College.

Here in the Digital department, we thought that our new Twitter feed would be a great way to cover both parties. We had our Giller correspondent - Nicola Makoway, Anthony De Sa’s publicist - who tweeted for her first time to bring us coverage from the main event.

At the same time, we were tweeting from the floor of the Giller Light, snapping photos of authors and food, while waiting for the big announcement. You can check out our Twitter feed here to catch all the fun.

If you missed the announcement, the winner was Joseph Boyden for his sophomore novel, Through Black Spruce (Penguin, 2008). Congratulations to Joseph, and to the four shortlisted authors. I for one, can’t wait to do it all again next year!

Posted by: Tan Light - Coordinator, Digital Sales & Marketing

Ask anyone who knows me, and they will tell you I love two things: Books and the supernatural. As a kid, the first two sections of the library I went to every weekend were Horror for fiction & Occult for non-fiction. Over the years, I have developed quite a collection of paranormal fiction, from Christopher Pike to Anne Rice and Kay Hooper. If you’ve been following our new RandomHouseCA twitter feed, then you know that my absolute favourite author is the wonderful Kelley Armstrong, author of the Women of the Otherworld Series and the new Darkest Powers Series for young adults.

In order to develp a plan for the release of her latest book, Living with the Dead, I have been living and breathing her books since late summer. I’ve had the opportunity to meet with the company big-wigs as the “resident Kelley Armstrong fan” (What a title!) and get a sneak peek at the books coming next year. I’ve even worked with Kelley via email to develop a Facebook application, (you can check it out here), a first for both of us.

But the cherry on the cake was finally meeting Kelley in person. She was here in Toronto last night for a signing at the Chapters Queensway. (By the way, they have signed copies of the whole series in stock right now!) It took me an hour by transit, but I hauled my first edition hardcover copy of Bitten, the first book in the Otherworld series, all the way down there to be signed. And to my delight, Kelley turned out to be one of the nicest people. We spent nearly an hour talking about writing (yes, I am an aspiring author myself) and what it’s like to write in the supernatural genre.

The whole evening confirmed that Kelley has rightly earned her place as my personal hero.

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: 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 completed the fifth and final installment of her blog tour, chronicling her recent trip to the Yukon and Yellowknife. You can catch up with her previous posts here. Now, over to Elizabeth.

May 15, Yellowknife

Six days of unbroken sunshine since we arrived. We’re staying with good friends on Latham Island in the old part of town. My husband, a coastal boy from the north shore of Boston, says it reminds him of New England—the rock and water at our doorstep—the winding, narrow roads. This part of Yellowknife seems more beautiful to me than ever. We are in the perfect spot at the perfect time of year: the sun is warm, the air off the frozen lake is cool, the mixture is just right.

Many changes. Big new houses and lots of them. More roads. Visible prosperity. What used to be called Rainbow Valley, the First Nations village at the end of the island that’s now known by its Dogrib name Ndilo, is abustle with construction; the tiny, flimsy, multi-coloured prefab houses that I knew in the 1970s are nearly gone. The new rainbow is the line of green, orange, blue, red and yellow houseboats that stretch out along Jolliffe Island in Yellowknife Bay. What a place this is for quirky, ingenious habitations—the town’s old improvisational style lingers in the houseboats and in many of the new houses in the old part of town. The subdivisions are a different story. Around Niven Lake new mega-houses on lots created by blasting away the magnificent outcroppings of rock look like they belong in Calgary. I can’t help thinking that Yellowknife is an architect’s paradise and a builder’s nightmare.

How easy it is to slip back into the social fabric of the town. People are welcoming and easy. Many people I knew in the seventies are still here and happy to be here. Some left only to return, drawn back and drawn in by any number of things, none of them unrelated to the quality of the place—storied, and also poetic.

The painter Sheila Hodgkinson, an old friend, has a small trailer-turned-into-a-home in Trail’s End, the town’s original trailer park. From the front you would never guess that her back door opens onto a natural rock terrace that leads up a sloping rocky stretch to the best view in town. Yesterday we stood beside her and took in all of Back Bay, Old Town, Yellowknife Bay, Jolliffe Island. The ice, white when we arrived, is blacker by the day. The houseboats are strokes of colour against the steady rock and shifting ice and sky.

Last weekend, thanks to wonderful friends Karen Johnson and John Stephenson, we camped overnight on the Yellowknife River. Karen drove us to Cassidy Point on Prosperous Lake and there we pulled our canoes across the frozen lake to the open water near Tartan Rapids. I just loved scooting the canoe off the ice into the water, something I haven’t done since the Thelon River canoe trip with John in 1978. We portaged around the rapids and came to the Yellowknife River and camped on the other side of it, just down from the rapids. I also loved seeing the river in two states of being, brimming with new melt-water and frozen hard farther out. In the morning two beavers the size of elephants sunned themselves on the edge of the ice. They were nose to nose, or side by side, apparently just keeping each other company on that beautiful day.

These last two weeks in the north have been packed full and deeply satisfying. I think of the lovely high school English teacher, Joyce Sward, making a special effort to drive us from Whitehorse to Skagway so that we could see the White Pass. Of Whitehorse librarian Lori Schroeder driving us from reading to reading in the Yukon and being knowledgeable and kind the whole time. Of my old friend John Stephenson’s long, patient, excellent arrangements that made it possible for me to come back to Yellowknife. Of his wife Karen Johnson’s lovely hospitality. Of everyone in Yellowknife—at CBC North, at the NorthWords Writers Festival, the Book Cellar, the public library, First Air—who worked to make things work out so well. I think of the mayor, who took us on a tour of Yellowknife and then took us to his home where his wife and mother fed us a hot lunch. I think of the joy of seeing old friends. It actually startled me, the intense pleasure of reconnecting in the flesh with a place I loved at the time and have written about so much.

I was asked at one point what my life would have been like if I had never left. In a way, I never have.

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: 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: Gail Anderson-Dargatz - Author of Turtle Valley

My husband and I had our honeymoon this past August at the Writers at Woody Point festival in Newfoundland, where I launched my new novel Turtle Valley. It’s a wonderful event where musicians and authors share the stage. Music, music everywhere, but I couldn’t get my man to dance. One of the local ladies, who I’d watched dance night after night, finally tapped Mitch on the shoulder and said, “You’ve got to let your inner Newfoundland out!” Mitch did find himself out on the dance floor in the end, but it took a wee bit of magic to get him there.

Stan Pickett and his band The Pickett Line were playing at the Old Loft Restaurant where we had supper one night. We were chatting away, only half taking in the music. Then I poked Mitch to get him to listen. The band was playing “Music for a Found Harmonium,” by The Penguin Café Orchestra. It was our wedding march! Mitch got up to tell Stan what the song meant to us, but I still couldn’t get him to dance.

At the wrap-up event at the Legion on the last night of the festival, Stan Pickett and his band were playing once again. After the party had been rollicking for a bit, Stan told the crowd that Mitch and I were on our honeymoon, and that he had a surprise for us: the band would play us “The Wedding Gift,” a slow dancin’ tune written by a friend of his, Dave Panting. What could Mitch do? Everyone at the Legion was turned to us. So he led me to the floor and I got my honeymoon dance with my husband, just a shuffle really, but when he whispered in my ear that he loved me, that was good enough for me.

For more of Gail’s adventures at Woody Point, check out her blog.

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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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.