Book picks similar to
For Those Whom God Has Blessed With Fingers by Ken Sparling
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The Mad Trapper
Rudy Wiebe - 1980
When it ended, he was the most notorious criminal in North America, the object of the largest manhunt in RCMP history.This is the story of Albert Johnson, the Mad Trapper, a silent man of superhuman strength and endurance, who defied capture for fifty days in the bitter cold of winter, north of the Arctic Circle. He was a man who crossed hundreds of miles of frozen tundra on foot, who survived dynamite blasts and the pursuit of police, trappers and the army, and who became the first man to cross the Richardson Mountains in a blizzard.
Buying on Time
Antanas Šileika - 1997
The book manages to be both harsh and sympathetic. It welds humour, tragedy and the personal embarrassments we all live through in a colourful and memorable way.
Bad Things Happen
Kris Bertin - 2016
Between jobs and marriages, states of sobriety, joy and anguish; between who they are and who they want to be. Kris Bertin's unforgettable debut introduces us to people at the tenuous moment before everything in their lives changes, for better or worse.Kris Bertin's stories have appeared in the Walrus, the Malahat Review, the New Quarterly, PRISM International, and other magazines. He lives and writes in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Outside the Wire: The War in Afghanistan in the Words of Its Participants
Kevin Patterson - 2007
Throughout each piece the passion of those engaged in rebuilding this shattered country shines through, a glimmer of optimism and determination so rare in multinational military actions–and so particularly Canadian.In Outside the Wire, award-winning author Kevin Patterson and co-editor Jane Warren have rediscovered the valour and horror of sacrifice in this, the definitive account of the modern Canadian experience of war.
Stanley Park
Timothy Taylor - 2001
The novel uses a "Bloods vs. Crips" metaphor for the philosophical conflict between chefs such as Papier, who favour local ingredients and menus, and those such as his nemesis Dante Beale, who favour a hip, globalized, "post-national" fusion cuisine.Papier also endures conflict with his father, an anthropologist studying homelessness in Vancouver's Stanley Park, who draws him into investigating the death of two children in the park.
I Am Secretly an Important Man
Steven "Jesse" Bernstein - 1996
"The work is deeply felt...Bernstein has been there and brought it back. Bernstein is a writer." [William S. Burroughs]
H
Elizabeth Shepard - 1995
To his father, he is bizarre and embarrassing. To his psychiatrist, he is a case study in mental illness. To the counselors at the camp where he is spending his summer, Benjamin is a "freaky kid" who shuns his peers and is strangely--and perhaps dangerously--attached to his best friend, Elliot, a stuffed letter H.Through the letters of his sister, mother, father, camp counselors, and psychiatrist--and, most touchingly, through those Benjamin writes to Elliot--this audacious and utterly unsentimental novel gives us a moving and sometimes shocking intimacy with a child whose disorder may be a kind of fragile genius. H is an astute, sympathetic evocation of the state we persist in calling "madness.""A new and mind-boggling perspective on mental illness from the point of view of the sufferer and those who would love and care about him. . . . H is a very poignant, enthralling debut."--The Boston Globe "Shepard is a reverse archaeologist, designing a tiny contemporary lost world for readers to excavate. . . . Everything matters. . . Shepard gets everything right."--New York magazine
Other Women
Evelyn Lau - 1995
An older married man. Their haunted relationship evolves in a floating melange of restaurants and hotel rooms against the looming backdrop of their separate, anonymous cities. Although erotically charged, the affair is never consummated - yet the love Fiona feels intensifies into an obsession that continues to possess her long after Raymond leaves her. Along the way, at receptions and restaurant tables, at dinner parties and on trips, Fiona meets other men and women in relationships that are coming together or falling apart-friendships, marriages, love affairs - each offering their own version of love's nature. And, throughout, Raymond's wife Helen holds a central place. For Fiona, Helen herself is "the other woman" - mysterious, enviable and untouchable.
Lost Geography
Charlotte Bacon - 2000
"Lost Geography" takes the complexity of migration as its central subject: Why do landscape, work, and family lock some people in place and release others? In settings both rural and urban, these stalwart, tragically dispersed yet resilient people respond not only to new environments and experiences but to the eruption of sudden loss and change.As the settings and characters shift in this wise, resonant book, readers are invited to see how habits of survival translate from one generation to another. How are we like our forebears? How does circumstance make us alter what our heritage has told us is important? With unfailing subtlety and elegance, "Lost Geography" teaches us, in a luminous sequence of intense personal dramas, that what keeps us alive isn't so much our ability to understand the details of our past as having the luck and courage to survive the assaults of both the present and history.
The Story of Bobby O'Malley
Wayne Johnston - 1985
His memories cluster around the houses they lived in, the schools he went to, the uncles and aunts and cousins he knew as a boy. This is an extremely funny book and the account of how Ted O'Malley repaired the plumbing is likely to become a classic of its kind. It is also a warm and touching book. As a picture of its time, it is clear, true and absolutely unforgettable
Even Weirder Than Before
Susie Taylor - 2019
But when her father suddenly leaves and her mother breaks down, Daisy's old life disappears, and she is set free in the rift created between her parents. Susie Taylor's sharp, quick-witted prose carries Daisy through a family cataclysm, relationships with boys, and her increasingly confusing feelings towards girls, especially Wanda. A refreshingly perceptive and honest debut, Even Weirder Than Before explores the nature of family, friendships, and sexual awakenings--and introduces one of Newfoundland's most exciting new writers.
Lion in the Streets
Judith Thompson - 1992
The ghost of a young murdered girl flits through every scene linking the pain and anguish of all the characters struggling to cope with urban life.
The Death Of Donna Whalen
Michael Winter - 2010
John’s, her friends, family, and neighbours believe the culprit to be her abusive boyfriend, Sheldon Troke. But the evidence is circumstantial, the testimonies tainted by personal bias and attempts at deception. Police and prosecutors face a daunting challenge, and the course of justice, with all its intricacies and failings, takes many unpredictable turns before the truth is finally revealed. In this extraordinary novel, Michael Winter has mined the records of Sheldon’s trial—thousands of pages of court transcripts, police wiretaps, newspaper reports, private letters and diary entries—and distilled their raw, naked truth into a mesmerizing work of documentary fiction that captures the myriad voices of the people involved.
To the Hermitage
Malcolm Bradbury - 2001
In Stockholm he is joined by various other members of the project—including an academic, a lustful opera singer, and a Swedish diplomat. On the journey to Russia more is revealed about the great Enlightenment writer Denis Diderot—the son of a knife maker in Langres, who went to Paris and compiled the Encyclopedia, a book that changed the world.
Mothers and Sons
Colm Tóibín - 2006
With exquisite grace and eloquence, Tóibín writes of men and women bound by convention, by unspoken emotions, by the stronghold of the past. Many are trapped in lives they would not choose again, if they ever chose at all. A man buries his mother and converts his grief to desire in one night. A famous singer captivates an audience, yet cannot beguile her own estranged son. And in "A Long Winter," Colm Tóibín's finest piece of fiction to date, a young man searches for his mother in the snow-covered mountains where she has sought escape from the husband who controls and confines her. Winner of numerous awards for his fifth novel, iThe Master/i -- including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award -- Tóibín brings to this stunning first collection an acute understanding of human frailty and longing. These are haunting, profoundly moving stories by a writer who is himself a master.