Loom, the solitary and reclusive neighbor, is a delicious enigma who has captured the imagination of the Zaydan women, as he either slaves away in his garden or endlessly toils at constructing an igloo in the icy snow. He never lets up and is always looming just on the periphery of their home and, indeed, their minds.
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Sarah Selecky's collection of short stories was shortlisted for the Giller Prize, Canada's top literary prize. The image on the book cover is of a broken plate: a particularly apt image for a collection in which characters are invariably fragile and the stories document the period before, during, or after their breakage.
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One of the things I look for in a novel is a sense of place, the ability of an author to transport me across the world and set me down in a setting very different from my own. I do not just want descriptions of what a town or city looks like; I want to understand the place—its customs, its people, its smells and tastes. Reading should be a form of travel …
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It is not often, when I am reading, that I am so overcome by emotion that I must put the book down until later, when I am quite myself again. I was not expecting that to happen when I began to read 13, rue Thérèse; after all, I've read many love stories and many war stories.
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Plum is an ordinary Australian girl who is approaching her fourteenth birthday. Physically, academically and socially Plum is entirely unexceptional. Like many teenagers she finds her parents (and their antique-collecting) embarrassing.
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