RAGS OF TIME
Maureen Howard
The Rags of Time tells of an aging Manhattan writer with an ailing heart, who is reviewing and examining both her own history and the lives she has imagined in her fiction. A moving meditation on aging and death, on memory, forgiveness, and redemption, The Rags of Time is also, in its ambitious interplay of history, politics, art, and life, a book that explores the very necessity of telling stories.
Viking, hardcover, 9780670021321
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THE COST OF LIVING
Mavis Gallant
Mavis Gallant is renowned as one of the great short-story writers of our day. This new gathering of long-unavailable or previously uncollected work presents stories from 1951 - 1971.
NYRB (US), paperback, 9781590173275 Bloomsbury (UK), hardcover, 9781408806104 (November)
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SUCH A GOOD EDUCATION
France Théoret
Translated from the French by Luise von Flotow
Such a Good Education traces the formative teenage years of Evelyne, in 1950s Montreal. Born into a culturally destitute environment, raised in an economically disadvantaged family, and taught at a traditional Catholic day school, her mother proudly asserts that all of this adds up to "une belle education."
When Evelyne ends up a barmaid in her parents’ hotel, she discovers just how wrong her mother is, and how much suffering is enabled by silence and denial.
Cormorant Books, paperback, 9781897151488
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GOOD TO A FAULT
By Marina Endicott
Winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and a finalist for Canada's Giller Prize, this novel is about a young woman who, after crashing into their beat-up car, takes an itinerant family of six into her home. The consequences of her practical goodness becomes a thought-provoking meditation on what it means to be good. And when is sacrifice merely sefishness? What do we owe this life and what do we deserve?
Freehand Books, paperback, 9781551119991 Windmill Books (UK), paperback, 9780099537458 Allen & Unwin (AU), paperback, 9781742370262
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GOING AWAY SHOES
Jill McCorkle
Jill McCorkle, a master of the short story whose work has been compared to that of Alice Munro and Lorrie Moore, is a writer whose characters insist on our immediate and total attention. Here, in her first collection in eight years, are eleven new stories bristling with her signature wit and weight. One way or the other, all of these stories are about women looking love in the face without flinching.
Algonquin (US), hardcover, 9781565126329
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A FEW KINDS OF WRONG
Tina Chaulk
Mechanic Jennifer Collins is a woman in a man's world, but since her father's sudden death her world has been falling apart. Now she's in a losing battle, risking everything to cling to the past while everyone else moves forward.
In A Few Kinds of Wrong, Tina Chaulk takes us into the garage and tells the poignant story of Jennifer, her pain, her loves, and her coming to terms with reality. Above all, this story reminds us that memories - those one cannot forget and others one battles to hold onto - can never be controlled.
Breakwater Books, paperback, 9781550812688
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THE LACUNA
Barbara Kingsolver
The Lacuna is the story of a man's search for safety in the grinding jaws of two nations, Mexico and the United States, at a moment when the entire world seemed bent on reinventing itself at any cost. This is Kingsolver's first novel in nine years.
Harper (US), hardcover, 97800608522573 Faber & Faber (UK), hardcover, 9780571252633
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THE WELL AND THE MINE
Gin Phillips
Resonant, vivid and clear-eyed in its portrayal of both the best and the worst of human nature, The Well and the Mine is a stunning novel about love, hope and the importance of doing the right thing.
Virago, paperback, 9781844086535 (November) Penguin, paperback,9781594484490
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THE COLLECTED STORIES OF LYDIA DAVIS
Lydia Davis
Lydia Davis is one of America's most original and influential writers. Now, for the first time, Davis's short stories are collected in one volume, from the groundbreaking "Break It Down" (1986) to the 2007 National Book Award nominee "Varieties of Disturbance."
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (US), hardcover, 9780374270605
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THE SENTIMENTALISTS
Joanna Skibsrud
Skibsrud's debut novel connects the flooding of an Ontario town, the Vietnam War, a trailer in North Dakota and an unfinished boat in Maine. With its quite mullings, and lines from Bogart, The Sentimentalists captures a daughter's wrestling with a heady family mythology.
Gaspereau Press (CAN), paperback, 9781554479785
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