A.L. Kennedy wins Lannan, to appear on Writers & Co.

Day, by A.L. Kennedy
0887847692 | $29.95 hc | in stock
House of Anansi Press (HarperCollins)

A.L. Kennedy has been named the winner of the prestigious 2007 Lannan Literary Prize for Fiction, an award that brings a $150,000 cash endowment.

Kennedy has been the subject of many recent honours. Her most recent novel, Day, won the Austrian State Prize for European Literature, and she has also recently won Italy’s Premio Napoli prize.

The Lannan Literary Awards and Fellowships were established in 1989 to honour both established and emerging writers whose work is of exceptional quality. The awards recognize writers who have made significant contributions to English-language literature. The fellowships recognize writers of distinctive literary merit who demonstrate potential for continued outstanding work.

A.L. Kennedy’s latest novel, Day, tells the story of a former WWII tail-gunner revisiting his wartime experiences while working as an extra in a POW film. Day has been called “gorgeous, intense . . . right and true” by the Globe and Mail, and “a forceful, wholly achieved piece of work by a writer of enormous power” by The Telegraph.

A.L. Kennedy is going to be on CBC Radio’s Writers & Company on Sunday, December 9 at 3 p.m. ET, and 5 p.m. MT/PT, and will be available as a podcast after that.

City of Widows author on CBC Radio’s The Current

City of Widows, by Haifa Zangana
978-1583227794 | $24.95 hc | in stock
Seven Stories Press / Publishers Group Canada

Haifa Zangana, author of City of Widows, will be on CBC Radio’s The Current on Friday, November 23rd.

ABC Spookshow in the Calgary Herald

ABC Spookshow, by Ryan Heshka
9781894965682 | $14.95 hc | in stock
Simply Read Books / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)

The Calgary Herald (November 4, 2007) has reviewed ABC Spookshow:

“This ABC book is not for those learning their alphabet . . . this macabre little hardcover, the size of a CD, is for those who revel in ghoulish imagery. The clever and eerie illustrations have a pop-art feel and any given page could be enlarged into a legitimate piece of art. The whole book feels like a bad dream after too many monster movies. Images like the M is for Mad Scientist and Q is for Quagmire Monster are particularly creepy.”

Becca at Sea gets starred Horn Book review

Becca at Sea, by Deirdre Baker
978-0888997388 | $9.95 pb | in stock
Groundwood Books (HarperCollins)

Deirdre Baker’s debut novel has received a starred review from the Horn Book:

From a frequent Horn Book contributor, an excellent first novel. Becca’s many relatives may suppose that she is simply a nice, obliging child, but make no mistake: like Dick King-Smith’s oh-so-determined Sophie, she is competence and persistence personified. In a dozen linked episodes set on her Gran’s small island off the coast of British Columbia, Becca averts many a mishap and disaster. It’s Becca who insists that the leak in Gran’s new inflatable craft is a problem (Gran is far too enthralled with marine life to care); Becca who gets her bossy older cousins to safety when they’re lost in the woods; Becca who extricates Aunt Fifi from the colossal blackberry patch where she is comically ensnared and who facilitates her aunt’s equally prickly romance with the island’s only plumber. Every time her elders ignore her cautions, Becca saves the day with ingenuity, tact, and enough grace to beguile her family and readers alike. Baker’s strengths are many here. Her dialogue is true-to-life, witty, and intelligent. Each episode enriches the portrait of Becca’s memorable extended family with delightfully preposterous, yet insightful, detail. (Fifi’s spat with the plumber—it’s about Shakespeare—is a hoot; it also reveals the characters’ most salient quirks.) With a lovingly depicted island setting that readers will yearn to visit, this funny, endearing book should find a wide audience. j.r.l.

Three PGC titles in Canadian Living

Publishers Group Canada will have three children’s titles featured in Canadian Living through November & December:

November 2007:

The Wave Runners, by Kai Meyer
9781405216357 | $12.95 pb | in stock
Egmont / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)

“…features pirate adventures in the Caribbean, but Jack Sparrow is nowhere to be found in this tale of two teens who find themselves at sea fleeing from a pirate king.”

 

December 2007:

Snowflake Friends, by Melissa Four
9781405230391 | $16.95 bb | in stock
Egmont / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)

“…a story and magnetic playbook with eight play magnets, including Poppy Panda, Felix Fox and Pete Porcupine, that teach kids about shapes and counting.”

 

 

Eco-Diary of Kiran Singer, by Sue Ann Alderson & Millie Balance
978-1896580470 | $18.95 hc | in stock
Tradewind Books / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)

“…is set in Vancouver’s Camosun Bog and full of lovely musings on nature.”

Six McArthur titles make Carnegie Medal Long List

Out of the 45 titles on the long list for the Carnegie Medal, McArthur & Co. has six (four from Orion and two from Hodder Kids). The shortlist will be decided in January.

Gatty’s Tale, by Kevin Crossley-Holland
978-1842555705 | $12.99 pb | in stock
Orion / McArthur & Co. (HarperCollins)

 

 

Incarceron, by Catherine Fisher
978-0340893609 | $9.95 pb | in stock
Hodder Kids / McArthur & Co. (HarperCollins)

 

 

Stoneheart, by Charlie Fletcher
978-0340911624 | $21.95 hc | in stock
Hodder Kids / McArthur & Co. (HarperCollins)

 

 

Soul Eater, by Michelle Paver
978-1842551141 | $9.95 pb | in stock
Orion / McArthur & Co. (HarperCollins)

 

 

Blood Red, Snow White, by Marcus Sedgwick
978-1842551844 | $19.95 hc | in stock
Orion / McArthur & Co. (HarperCollins)

 

 

Dolphin Song, by Lauren St. John
978-1842555330 | $18.95 hc | in stock
Orion / McArthur & Co. (HarperCollins)

Die With Me reviewed in the Globe

Die With Me, by Elena Forbes
0887847889 | $21.95 pb | in stock
House of Anansi Press (HarperCollins)

Elena Forbes’s debut mystery received a great review in the Globe & Mail (November 17, 2007):

The House of Anansi is a high-cultural Canadian icon. When we see its imprint, we expect high quality, and Die With Me, Elena Forbes’s debut, delivers. This brilliantly crafted British cop novel features a fascinating investigator, Detective Inspector Mark Tartaglia, and a nasty killer who goes by the name of Jack.

Forbes’s sure hand shows from the opening page, as a man awaits his “bride” in a churchyard cemetery. The woman who appears is young, a bit tragic-looking and obviously in search of love. She thinks she’s found it in this man, who has convinced her to join him in a ritual. We know something is fearfully wrong, but what happens is a shock.

Tartaglia is the officer in charge. But just as he gets his teeth into it, he’s replaced. Bureaucratic infighting is now a cliché of cop novels, but Forbes makes it fresh.

The killer, who narrates part of the novel, is also well done. There are some first-novel flaws – Forbes turns ordinary people into red herrings and uses coincidence to make things work – but these are hardly major issues in a fine novel.

Forbes is already at work on a sequel, and that’s good news.

Oprah talks about Charlie Wilson’s War

Charlie Wilson’s War, by George Crile
Trade edition: 978-0802141248 | $21.00 pb | in stock
Movie tie-in edition: 0802141242 | $15.95 pb | in stock
Grove Press / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)

Actors Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts talk about their upcoming film, Charlie
Wilson’s War, on Oprah (November 19, 2007) — film releasing December 25.

Winston of Churchill in the Winnipeg Free Press

Winston of Churchill, by Jean Davies Okimoto, illustrated by Jeremiah Trammell
978-1570615436 | $18.50 hc | in stock
Sasquatch Books / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)

The Winnipeg Free Press featured an interview with author Jean Davies Okimoto talking about her new book, Winston of Churchill:

A new Manitobear for the kids to meet:

Winston battles global warming in Churchill

November 17th, 2007

WINNIE the Pooh, your days may be numbered.

A second Manitoba ursine has a more timely angle in his bid for literary immortality.

A cigar-smoking white polar bear is the hero of a new self-published American children’s picture book, Winston of Churchill: One Bear’s Battle Against Global Warming.

Its author, Washington State-based Jean Davies Okimoto, admits she did not set foot in northern Manitoba before putting pen to paper.

Instead she found her inspiration a few years ago in a PBS TV nature documentary featuring Scottish actor Ewan McGregor that was set in Churchill.

“My idea started with the bear,” Okimoto said in a telephone interview from her home on Vashon Island near Seattle.

“If he was from Churchill, he had to be named Winston. Then he had to smoke a cigar. After that came the issue of global warming.

The main book upon which she relied for research was Mark Fleming’s Churchill: Polar Bear Capital of the World, released in 1988 by Hyperion Press of Winnipeg.

In Okimoto’s book, illustrated by Alaskan Jeremiah Trammell and distributed by Publishers Group Canada, Winston persuades his fellow polar bears to stage a protest rally so that tourists in Churchill will take action against the melting ice caps. (In the process, he must give up his hypocritical cigar habit.)

“We will fight for ice,” says Winston, echoing the words of his namesake, the Second World War British prime minister.

“We shall fight on the beaches… we shall fight on the hills. We shall never surrender.”

The children’s section manager of McNally Robinson Booksellers said Friday that she has already re-ordered after selling eight of her first 10 copies (at $19 each).

“It’s a message book, but it’s got such winsome illustrations that its absolutely approachable for kids,” Lynn Popham said.

“All the schools and libraries will want to have it.”

Okimoto, 65, says this is the fourth of her 17 children’s and young adult books to be set in Canada.

She and her husband, Joe, stopped in Winnipeg in 1996 on a cross-Canada train trip. She got out at the train station to find a phone book to look up the number of her favourite author, Carol Shields.

“I was too shy to call her,” said Okimoto, who claims to have read the entire Shieldsian output. “One of my favourites is set in Winnipeg (The Republic of Love), so I think I have a feel for your city.”

Okimoto was unaware that British author A.A. Milne’s world-famous bear, Winnie-the-Pooh, was named after this city.

“I’m delighted to hear that,” she said. “I think it’s good karma. It bodes well for my bear from Manitoba.”

G&M: Secret History of the War on Cancer "most important science book of the year"

The Secret History of the War on Cancer, by Devra Davis
9780465015665 | $33.50 hc | in stock
Basic Books / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)

Devra Davis’ new book features on the cover of the Globe & Mail’s book section (Nov. 17, 2007):

malignancies

ANDREW NIKIFORUK

In 1936, the world’s cancer experts assembled in Brussels to talk shop. The gathering heard a lot about workshop hazards and environmental toxins. A British scientist, who had studied identical twins, argued that cancer wasn’t inherited, but mostly the product of early chemical exposures in life. A meticulous Argentine showed how sunlight combined with hydrocarbons could sprout tumours on rats. Others explained how regular exposure to the hormone estrogen prompted male rodents to grow unseemly breasts. Everyone agreed that arsenic and benzene were workplace killers, too.

Since then, the cancer establishment has retreated from the truth faster than Canada’s commitment to a greener country. What began as sincere investigation into the economic root causes of a complex set of 200 different diseases, at the turn of the 20th century, quickly degenerated into a single-minded focus on treatments after the Second World War, argues Devra Davis, one of North America’s sharpest epidemiologists (her previous book, When Smoke Ran Like Water, was a finalist for the National Book Award).

In the process, industry and its propaganda hit men have used every opportunity to discredit, dismiss or disparage information on cancer hazards in the workplace or at home. So let me warn comfortable readers here and now. This courageous and altogether horrible book is about as unsettling as it can get. It painstakingly documents such a persistently foul pattern of deceit and denial that I often wanted to throw it against a wall and scream.

Furthermore, Davis’s hair-raising investigation – in what is easily the most important science book of the year – will rob you of any lingering, Disney-like fantasies you might have entertained about the nobility of cancer fundraising campaigns. And if you have lost a relative or friend to a malignant tumour (odds are you have), Davis will make you weep again, knowing that fraud and outright criminal neglect have turned a 40-year-long medical war into a questionable $70-billion charade.