The Time in Between David Bergen McClelland and Stewart, Canada, 2005 This wonderful fourth novel by Canadian author David Bergen won the 2005 Giller Prize and the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award. It received a prestigious starred review from Kirkus Reviews. It was on the 2007 longlist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary [...]
Mont Blanc Turbo Ballpoint Pen This is one of my favourite vintage pens. The Mont Blanc Turbo collection came out in three formats: the ballpoint, the rollerball, and the fountain pen. Unlike most Mont Blanc models, the Turbo never came out as a pencil. The Turbo ballpoint pen works with a twist mechanism. They only [...]
Sacrament Dave Eggers McSweeney’s, U.S.A. 2003 Sacrament is basically Eggers’ previous novel You Shall Know Our Velocity with an extra section put in about two-thirds of the way through. The added 49 pages throw into question the reliability of the protagonist/narrator of You Shall Know Our Velocity. Eggers completely changes the context of the story. A neat [...]
The Cat’s Table Michael Ondaatje Jonathan Cape, U.K 2011 This mostly fictionalized memoir is Ondaatje’s most recent novel. It is about a boy named Michael who travels from Ceylon to England on an ocean liner to go and live with his mother. The Cat’s Table is the table furthest away from the captain’s table, where [...]
Shadows on the Hudson Isaac Bashevis-Singer Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, U.S.A. 1998 This novel by Nobel Prize winning writer Isaac Bashevis-Singer was published posthumously. If you click on the publishers note to the left, you will see that he originally wrote this book in the late 1940′s and published it in a serialized form in [...]