A Perfect Night to Go to China
by David Gilmour
from Thomas Allen & Son
This astonishing novel - unlike anything Gilmour has ever written before - begins with every parent's worst nightmare: the disappearance of a child. A father makes a casual error of judgement one evening and leaves his six-year-old son alone for fifteen minutes. When he returns the child is gone and three lives are changed forever. Has the boy been kidnapped? Spirited out of the country? Is he dead? The story that unfolds is told by the novel's narrator, a television host named Roman, who searches for his son through the city and through the underworld of dreams and tries to bring him back. Pursued by an unshakeable conviction that his son is speaking directly to him, Roman begins to enter a haunting relationship with the missing child and his own conscience. In the meantime, his behaviour becomes increasingly erratic and he is rejected by his grieving and angry wife, eventually fired from his job, and shadowed by a persistent policeman who thinks Roman is hiding the child. Written in the clear, elegant prose Gilmour is known for, "A Perfect Night to Go to China" is a completely absorbing and original work of fiction. It sets up a harrowing premise and doesn't let up until the last surprising page.
The Siren and Selected Writings
by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
from Harvill Press
Lost Between Houses
by David Gilmour
from Vintage Canada
Lost Between Houses is about a turbulent year in the life of Simon Albright, a fifteen-year-old private school boy struggling to be his sophisticated mother's best friend, the rebel his girlfriend adores and the son his father respects. Which is a hard act to pull off when your mother is distracted, your girlfriend too beautiful and your father in and out of a mental institution. Lost Between Houses unfolds with mingled sarcasm, grief and awe, and grips the reader until its startling climax.
The Leopard (Everyman's Library Classics)
by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
from Everyman's Library
The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling
by David Gilmour
from Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was a unique figure in British history, a great writer as well as an imperial icon whose life trajectory matched that of the British Empire from its zenith to its final decades. Kipling was in his early twenties when his first stories about Anglo-Indian life vaulted him into celebrity. He went on to be awarded the Nobel Prize, and to add more phrases to the language than any man since Shakespeare, but his conservative views and advocacy of imperialism damaged his critical reputation -- while at the same time making him all the more popular with a general readership. By the time he died, the man who incarnated an era for millions was almost forgotten, and new generations must come to terms in their own way with his enduring but mysterious powers.
Previous works on Kipling have focused exclusively on his writing and on his domestic life. Here, the distinguished biographer David Gilmour not only explains how and why Kipling wrote, but also explores the themes of his complicated life, his ideas, his relationships, and his views on the Empire and the future. Gilmour is the first writer to explore Kipling's public role, his influence on the way Britons saw themselves and their Empire. His fascinating new book, based on extensive research (especially in the underexplored archives of the United States), is a groundbreaking study of a great and misunderstood writer.
The Siren" and Selected Writings
How Boys See Girls
Sparrow Nights
by David Gilmour
from Counterpoint
After she leaves you, how bad can it get? An exhilarating novel of erotic and psychotic extremes from one of Canada's best novelists.
Everyone would agree that Darius Halloway is the most civilized of men--a professor of French literature, a connoisseur of ideas and women and wine, a perfect guest at life's dinner party. Darius himself would agree--that is, he would until Emma, waifish and insatiable Emma, leaves her empty clothes hangers rattling in his closet and walks out the door.
For a little while, it's not so bad. He's in shock. He thinks she must come back. And other women find his melancholy quite compelling. But then the sparrows of insomnia start picking at the inside of his skull. And life's little aggravating moments seem to require him to seek direct retaliation. And all his smoothness and cleverness is soon directed toward wreaking the most elaborate revenge...and getting away with it. Until the ultimate revenge arises, and there he is, in the most damning of situations, with his nerves on fire and his heart in his throat...and finally not thinking of Emma.
The Hungry Generation
Back on Tuesday
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