Books
by Richard B Wright
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Adultery |
This absorbing novel is about a happily married, middle-aged editor who attends the Frankfurt book fair and has an affaire with a younger colleague. On their way back to Toronto, they spend a weekend in England where, on a lonely beach, they make love. While Daniel sleeps, Denise leaves the car and is never again seen alive. The majority of the book depicts how people survive such enormous tragedies and, despite them, carry on.
(Polly Sams Plant - bwl 27 December 2004) |
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Clara Callan |
This novel by a Canadian, for which he won the 2001 Giller Prize, takes place in the mid to late 1930s, and follows the lives of two very different sisters who have grown up in small-town Ontario. His amazing ability to get inside their minds is compelling and convincing. Their lives are depicted through Clara's diary entries, and through their correspondence when Nora moves away, and what unfolds makes an interesting and insightful story.
(Polly Sams Plant - bwl 14 July 2002) |
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October |
A retired professor travels to England to visit his daughter, Susan, who has been diagnosed with breast cancer. By chance he meets a crippled friend of his adolescence, Gabriel, whom he's not seen for sixty years. This reunion and what ensues intertwines with his struggle to accept his daughter's possible death. Although I was drawn into the well written story, I found the way he dealt with Susan's devastating illness rather too impersonal.
(Polly Sams Plant - bwl 44 February 2008) |
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