(from thesudburystrar.com
by Jessica Watts)
Now that we are a few days into the first week of 2014, it’s a time to take a look back at the best reads of 2013. This year, CBC Books has put together a list of the best Canadian books of the past year. They attempted to highlight the most “buzzed-about Canadian books” from 2013 by choosing the most popular books from lists posted by a variety of Canadian and international book sites and blogs including The Globe and Mail, Chapters-Indigo, Quill & Quire, Slate, Macleans, Amazon, GoodReads, the Huffington Post Canada, the Washington Post, Flavorwire and the Guardian. The books that made it to the top are ones that garnered multiple mentions on these best of the year lists. So, thanks to CBC Books we have a list of these books for you to add to your must-read list.
A House in the Sky by Amanda Lindhout made it to the year-end lists for Globe 100, Amazon Top 20, Slate, Chapters-Indigo, Huffington Post Canada and Quill & Quire. This book tells the story of the author in 2008 when she was 27 and in search of adventure. She persuaded Australian freelance photojournalist Nigel Brennan to accompany her to war-torn Somalia. Within days, she and Brennan were kidnapped. In this gripping memoir (written in conjunction with journalist Sara Corbett) Lindhout chronicles the pair’s 15 months in captivity.
The Woman Upstairs is written by Claire Messud and made it to the year-end lists for Globe 100, Washington Post, Huffington Post Canada and Flavorwire. “How angry am I? You don’t want to know.” The speaker is Nora Eldridge, the protagonist of Messud’s fascinating story of a middle-aged woman who has left her youthful artistic ambitions behind and settled for a quiet but unfulfilled life as a schoolteacher. When she befriends the artist mother of one of her pupils, Nora’s creative urge is reawakened. But as she gets more invested in the relationship, things go badly awry.
The Silent Wife by A.S.A. Harrison made it to the year-end lists for Globe 100, Slate, Chapters-Indigo, Quill & Quire and the Guardian. It’s a chillingly incisive portrait of a relationship that’s on the rocks -- and is fated to end in murder. The story’s point of view alternates between Jodi and Todd, an affluent Chicago couple, as the doubts and deceitfulness that secretly undermine their relationship come increasingly to the surface.
Eleanor Catton wrote The Luminaries which made it to the year-end lists for Globe 100, Quill & Quire, Macleans, Flavorwire and the Guardian. Catton stays true to the conventions of the classic Victorian novel, delivering an elaborately structured plotline, a colourful cast of characters and entrancing prose. At more than 800 pages, The Luminaries isn’t light reading. But it’s a dazzling work of imagination that has enthralled readers and reviewers worldwide.
Emancipation Day by Wayne Grady made it to the year-end lists for Globe 100 and Chapters-Indigo. This richly textured novel is based on the author’s own family story. He discovered in the course of genealogical research that his father was black, although he had passed himself off as a white man of Irish descent and kept the secret of his race from everyone. In Grady’s fictional account, set in the 1940s and ‘50s, Jack Lewis is a handsome charmer who travels to St. John’s, Newfoundland, with the navy and ends up marrying a local white girl whose status-conscious family disapproves of the match.
The other five books that made the list are An Astronauts Guide to Life on Earth by Chris Hadfield, Caught by Lisa Moore, The Longer I’m Prime Minister by Paul Wells, MaddAddam by Margaret Atwood and The Orenda by Joseph Boyden.
Jessica Watts is co-ordinator of outreach programs and partnerships at the Greater Sudbury Public Library.
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