cutting for stone abraham verghese summary

The Colony of Good Hope, Kim Leine (Pan MacMillan, April)įirst published in Danish in 2019, now in an English translation that impressively captures its polyphonic narrative, Kim Leine’s historical novel takes us to early 18th-century Greenland, where Denmark’s King Frederik IV has dispatched an expedition to discover the fate of a colony he established there some years previously. From that setup emerges a tale that moves between past and present to show the reverberations for a Mi’kmaq family whose four-year-old daughter is stolen during berry-picking season and raised by a local white family. The Berry Pickers, Amanda Peters (HarperCollins, April)Īmanda Peters’s 1962-set debut was inspired by her Mi’kmaq father’s stories about crossing the border from Nova Scotia into Maine each summer to pick berries with other Indigenous labourers.

The 2008 financial crash provides a background score for the Giller-winner’s quiet new novel about Lulu, a sexagenarian actress who, after flubbing her lines while performing Beckett in Ottawa (“Can’t you make it up? Who would know?” asks an ex-lover on behalf of all of us), beats it to the home of her old friend Nan, who’s been living a decidedly un-Beckettian existence in the Northern Ontario town of the title. Snow Road Station, Elizabeth Hay (Knopf, April) Despite some far-flung locales – Argentina, Hawaii, Ecuador, San Francisco – the focus of these tales is on the inside of their characters’ minds, and the seemingly inconclusive moments that make up their lives. Coetzee: “The strangest book you are likely to read this year.” Places Like These, Lauren Carter (Book*hug, April)Ī first collection of stories by the novelist and poet whose last book, This Has Nothing to Do With You, won the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction at the Manitoba Book Awards (where she was also declared the province’s most promising writer). 1881), who went from Australia’s national boxing circuit to a mental asylum in Perth, the novel has amassed some stellar blurbs, including from Helen Garner “meets a need I didn’t know I had” and J.M. A fictionalized account of the life of the Rasputin-like Italian-American boxer Joe Grim (b.

Michael Winkler’s novel was a cult sensation in his native Australia, where it was the first self-published book in history to be shortlisted for the country’s most prestigious prize, the Miles Franklin Award (one publisher rejected it as “repellent”). Grimmish, Michael Winkler (Coach House, April)

Cutting for stone abraham verghese summary