A Map of Glass

This is literary fiction with big black bold capitals. Sometimes literary fiction can be defined as telling a story through oblique methods, filtering it through more than one prism. Done well this can be an ingenious device that opens up multiple levels of the story, a way of making the present ans......more

This is a richly woven book that blends different stories and themes, all set near Lake Ontaria in Canada. The opening scene, of a confused man in full winter in a desolate snow landscape, is beautifully portrayed. The focus then briefly shifts to an artist who temporarily settles on a Canadian isla......more

Walking Toward the Past This wondrous and evocative novel begins with a man walking over the ice to a distant island. He is so stricken with Alzheimer's that he cannot even remember his own name, Andrew, but the four pages in which Jane Urquhart describes his situation are almost poetry: The whole......more

In a haunting, topographically rich novel that transports the reader to a disappearing region of a rural, Canadian peninsula, two narrative time periods tell a story. The novel, textured with the natural world of impermanence and change, progresses with an almost hyperreal cohesion, drawing out its......more

This is a wonderful novel, set on an island in Lake Ontario, Canada. It follows the story of Sylvia (a woman with what is described as a 'condition' but either is a form of autism or just a personality trait that has been labelled by others to control her) as she aims to find out what happened to he......more