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I now know why this book won the 2009 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Canadian Booksellers Association Libris Award as well as receiving numerous other literary accolades. What an excellent book! I decided to read it to prepare myself for reading Linden MacIntyre's new novel, "Why Men Lie" (publication date: March 2012)

The story follows the life of a Catholic priest named Duncan MacAskill. Duncan is known among his fellow clergymen as the "Exorcist" because he has spent most of his time as a priest being the Bishop's clean-up man and take care of potential controversies before they become public. After a period of time when he was sent to minister in Central America, he is sent by the Bishop to oversee a small Cape Breton Island parish where he would keep a low profile and deal with an new impending public controversy, all the while, dealing with his own personal demons.

I found this book to be very well-written, even though at times the plot jumps back and forth between the present and the past. The dialogue between characters was very true to life, in my opinion. You really get a sense of Duncan's personal inner conflict and wonder how he is going to make it through.

This book was published at around the same time as a $15 million settlement was reached in the sexual abuse scandal in the Antigonish diocese in Nova Scotia. As a non- Catholic, I did not know some of the references to the Catholic religion, but that did not seem to hamper my understanding of what was happening in the book. "The Bishop's Man" has been described in Quill & Quire as "a well-crafted, brave and painful examination of one of the most monstrous issues of our time." Since Linden MacIntyre is from Cape Breton Island, the reader gets a true sense of what life on the island is really like.

I highly recommend this book.

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This book is perfect for anyone who loved ROOM by Emma Donoghue. I really liked it.

Ten-year-old Judith McPherson's world revolves around her fundamentalist religious faith: reading the Bible with her father every night, going to church "meetings" and preaching "the word" to the community. She has no television or books to entertain her, so she creates a miniature world she calls The Land of Decoration out of discarded scraps she finds and writes in her journal which she hides under a board in the floor of her bedroom.

Judith and her father are members of a small religious sect whose objective is to save people's souls and to wait for the end of the world. This makes Judith a prime target for school bullies, one in particular, Neil Lewis, who is bound and determined to make Judith's life very difficult in and out of school. She is also affected by her father's decision to cross the picket line during a strike at the factory where he works and the dangerous results that come from that decision.

To cope with this constant bullying, Judith turns to her beloved Land of Decoration and creates scenarios to help her deal with it. However, events take place that make her believe that she has been "chosen" as God's instrument and has been given special powers.

This book is extremely well written. It's difficult to believe that this is a debut novel. Grace McLeen has written a very emotionally powerful novel that touches on a number of sensitive issues. The ending particularly grabbed me, but I won't give it away.

Give this book a try. Perfect for book clubs. You won't be disappointed. Judith is a character you won't soon forget.

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Jodi Picoult has another winner here. This time she writes about a family's experience dealing with end-of-life issues. I don't think this is her best work, preferring My Sister's Keeper and House Rules, but she deals with the multiple issues in this book with her usual skill.

I find that she always does her research when writing her novels and always deals with sensitive issues with such skill. You learn quite a bit about the behaviour of wolves in this books and how close to human behaviour they really are.

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I bought this book for my husband as a birthday gift since he is a big Eric Clapton fan. He absolutely loved it!

It is written by Chris Welch who, when he met Eric Clapton, was an entertainment writer for a London newspaper assigned to interview him. They have been friends ever since.

The book is full of information, lots of great photos and a complete disography of every album Clapton has ever recorded. My husband found some albums that he didn't have yet and details about Clapton's life that he didn't know before.

It would make a great gift for the Eric Clapton fan in your life. I highly recommend picking it up.

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Fans of Can-lit, award-winning books and historical fiction, if you haven’t yet read Clara Callan, do not hesitate to pick this book up. If you have read it, pick it up again. It’s that good.

Richard B. Wright’s celebrated novel is the powerful and moving story of two small-town sisters, Clara and Nora, and their life-changing experiences on the eve of the Second World War. Clara Callan is a masterpiece of fiction that won the 2001 Giller Prize, Governor General’s Award and Trillium Award.

Written in diary and letter form, this book brilliantly tells the sister’s stories; Clara is a spinsterish school teacher who lives a quiet life in a small town in Ontario and Nora escapes the small town life for the glamorous world of show business in New York City, landing a role in a radio soap opera. Underneath their seemingly ordinary lives, the sisters struggle with seldom talked about social issues like abortion, affairs with married men and single motherhood.

I really liked this book because you get a true sense of the characters and the historical events of the 1930’s told through their correspondence and Clara’s diary entries. Though very different in their personalities, Clara and Nora are linked by their shared past and the complex social expectations of that era. You often forget that the author is actually male.

I highly recommend this masterpiece of Canadian fiction. You will be instantly drawn into Clara and Nora’s world and will not forget them.

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Alice La Plante’s Turn of Mind is a gripping psychological thriller, perfect for fans of Lisa Genova and S.J. Watson. It kept me riveted right until its startling conclusion.

Dr. Jennifer White is a newly retired orthopedic surgeon, who specialized in hand surgery, who is entering the beginning stages of dementia. The story begins with the brutal murder of Jennifer’s best friend of thirty years and neighbour, Amanda. Jennifer is a prime suspect in the murder, but her condition prevents authorities and even herself from knowing conclusively if she committed the murder. The book is narrated in the first person, from Jennifer’s point of view and gives a startling insight into the disjointed mind of a person with dementia.

“My name is Dr. Jennifer White. I am sixty-four years old. I have dementia. My son, Mark, is twenty-nine. My daughter, Fiona, twenty-four. A caregiver, Magdalena, lives with me.”

As the story unfolds, we can see that things within Jennifer’s family are not always what they seemed. Jennifer’s deceased husband, James, was not who people thought he was. Her two grown children, Mark, a lawyer, and Fiona, a professor, who have power over their mother’s medical and financial decisions respectively, have agendas of their own. Even Magdalena is hiding something from her past.

I think what I liked the most about this book was the honesty of Jennifer’s narration. At times, she doesn’t recognize her caregivers or remember their names, but knows they are people she should know. Her thoughts, though disjointed, give insight into her life and at times adversarial relationship with Amanda. Did she kill Amanda or not?

This is a book that is hard to put down. A very compelling read. I highly recommend it.

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Make sure you have a good chunk of time to set aside for this debut novel because once you start it you won’t want to put it down. This gripping, suspense-filled psychological thriller by British author S.J.Watson is truly a page-turner.

Christine Lucas is a 47 year old woman who has an unusual form of amnesia where she is unable to remember her past or even what has happened the day before. She wakes up each morning next to a man with greying hair who says he is her husband, Ben, and that she was in a car accident that robbed her of her memory. Each morning, after Ben goes to work, Christine also gets a phone call from a psychologist named Dr. Nash who says he is treating her for her amnesia and for her to look in her closet for a journal where she has been recording her memories, but he doesn't want her to tell Ben that he is treating her. We read the journal along with Christine as she tries to piece together her past. However, the closer she comes to the truth, the more questions she has and the more unbelievable it seems.

There are many twists and turns in this book that will keep you riveted. It will keep you thinking right until the surprising conclusion. As Christine has more and more memory flashes, you wonder along with her if she should trust her husband or Dr. Nash.

I'm not normally a fan of the thriller genre, but I loved this book. I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a great read.

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What a great book! Sarah Nickerson is a career-driven, overscheduled working mother living with her family in an affluent Boston suburb. In an instant while driving to work, her life is drastically transformed from a professional working mother to a person struggling with a traumatic brain injury known as "Left Neglect", a condition in which trauma to the right side of the brain results in the person not being able to recognize anything that exists on the left side.

As a result of her accident, Sarah must relinquish control over her life to others around her, including her formerly absent mother. As she heals physically and tries to regain her independence, she must also re-evaluate her future, which may in fact no longer involve conference calls and spread sheets.

What struck me most when I read this book is that what happened to Sarah could happen to anyone. Who hasn't gotten behind the wheel of a car and pulled out their cell phone? As a parent, you work as hard as you can to provide the best for your children but what is the ultimate cost for this lifestyle? You can sense Sarah's frustration as she struggles to recover, but there are also moments of humour and poignancy as she reconnects with her family, especially her mother.

Lisa Genova masterfully tells Sarah's story so that you learn about this interesting medical condition, but also feel empathy for Sarah's challenge with starting her life over. Fans of her first book, "Still Alice" will not be disappointed with this follow-up. A great choice for book clubs.

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Fans of The Memory Keeper's Daughter will not be disappointed in Kim Edwards' new novel, The Lake of Dreams. This family saga touches all the bases, dealing with themes of love lost and found, family secrets, a hidden past and the important role women played in history.

A great deal of expectation was riding on this follow-up to the wildly successful Memory Keeper's Daughter. While each book is different, The Lake of Dreams is definitely worth reading.

At a turning point in her life, both jobwise and in her relationship, Lucy Jarrett returns to her family home in upstate New York from Japan after hearing that her mother has been injured in a car accident. Ten years have lapsed since she left home to go to college and she returns only to find herself still haunted by her father's unresolved death by drowning a decade earlier, which she partially blames on herself for not going fishing with him that day. She also is reacquainted with her first love, Keegan Falls, for whom she struggles to sort out her feelings.

Suffering from jet lag one night, Lucy stumbles upon some old papers in a locked cupboard in the family attic that bear the name of a family ancestor she has never heard of named Rose, who apparently lived a century before. Lucy throws herself into a quest to discover Rose's identity and in turn discovers a secret past that alters her understanding of her heritage and herself.

The Lake of Dreams is a beautifully written novel. I particularly liked the way Kim Edwards wrote about the interpersonal relationships of the characters. Lucy seems a little put off that life has gone on in her absence since her father's accident. She seems uncomfortable about her mother's budding romance after years of being a widow and also of the fact that her brother, Blake, has decided to join in the family business with their Uncle Art who Lucy feels pushed her father out of the business. The characters all seemed very real to me.

I highly recommend this novel. Great choice for book clubs and for those who like books about family relationships. It is also a Heather's Pick.

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Ruth and Dana are "birthday sisters", born on the same day, in the same small hospital into families completely different from each other, yet they share a connection that remains a well hidden secret.

Ruth Plank is an artist and romantic, the fifth daughter of a farming family, who yearns for life beyond the confines of the farm that has been in their family for generations.

Dana Dickerson is a scientist and realist, raised by an artist mother who has no time for her and a drifter father, always searching for the next great scheme, who longs for stability and rootedness.

The two girls are different in every way yet they share a need to make sense of who they are and find their places in a world in which neither has ever felt like they truly belonged.

Written in the alternating voices of Ruth and Dana, The Good Daughters is a compelling page turner, written with an incredible depth of feeling that connects you with these characters. I found it hard to put down and was disappointed that it had to end. I look forward to reading more by this talented author. I highly recommend this book.