The Quincunx

The Quincunx
Author: Charles Palliser
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Total Pages: 802
Release: 1990-11-27
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0345371135

An extraordinary modern novel in the Victorian tradition, Charles Palliser has created something extraordinary—a plot within a plot within a plot of family secrets, mysterious clues, low-born birth, high-reaching immorality, and, always, always the fog-enshrouded, enigmatic character of 19th century—London itself. “So compulsively absorbing that reality disappears . . . One is swept along by those enduring emotions that defy modern art and a random universe: hunger for revenge, longing for justice and the fantasy secretly entertained by most people that the bad will be punished and the good rewarded.”—The New York Times “A virtuoso achievement . . . It is an epic, a tour de force, a staggeringly complex and tantalizingly layered tale that will keep readers engrossed in days. . . . The Quincunx will not disappoint you. It is, quite simply, superb.”—Chicago Sun-Times “A bold and vivid tale that invites the reader to get lost in the intoxicating rhythms of another world. And the invitation is irresistible.”—San Francisco Chronicle “A remarkable book . . . In mood, color, atmosphere and characters, this is Charles Dickens reincarnated . . . It is an immersing experience.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review “To read the first pages is to be trapped for seven-hundred odd more: you cannot stop turning them.”—The New Yorker “Few books, at most a dozen or two in a lifetime, affect us this way. . . . For sheer intricacy and ingenuity, for skill and clarity of storytelling, it is the kind of book readers wait for, a book to get lost in.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer

The Quincunx of Time

The Quincunx of Time
Author: James Blish
Publisher: Hachette UK
Total Pages: 73
Release: 2011-09-29
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0575104147

Travel at light speeds is common, and Earth - the first in the universe to discover it - now reigns over many worlds. But in order to rule effectively, Captain Robin Weinbaum, head of Security, needs an extremely advanced communications system. He gets it with the Dirac transmitter, the first machine capable of sending instantaneous messages anywhere in the universe. The only problem is that someone called J. Shelby Stevens has a machine that can do the impossible - tap the transmissions before they are even made! It is Weinbaum's job to find Stevens. And unless he does, time will be abolished and the universe closed to Earth forever . . .

Days by Moonlight

Days by Moonlight
Author: André Alexis
Publisher: Coach House Books
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2019-04-02
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1770565795

Gulliver’s Travels meets The Underground Railroad: a road trip through the countryside – and the psyche – by the author of Fifteen Dogs. Longlisted for the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize Botanist Alfred Homer, ever hopeful and constantly surprised, is invited on a road trip by his parents’ friend, Professor Morgan Bruno, who wants company as he tries to unearth the story of the mysterious poet John Skennen. But this is no ordinary road trip. Alfred and the Professor encounter towns where Black residents speak only in sign language and towns that hold Indigenous Parades; it is a land of house burnings, werewolves, and witches. Complete with Alfred’s drawings of plants both real and implausible, Days by Moonlight is a Dantesque journey taken during the “hour of the wolf,” that time of day when the sun is setting and the traveller can’t tell the difference between dog and wolf. And it asks that perpetual question: how do we know the things we know are real, and what is real anyway? “A mash-up that is part fabulism, part faux biography, and part satire, Days by Moonlight conveys the experience of grief, managing to transform its inarticulable and symbolic weight into a finely wrought literary work.” —Quill and Quire

The Unburied

The Unburied
Author: Charles Palliser
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 437
Release: 2000-11
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0743410513

In Victorian England, Dr. Courtine is invited to spend the days before Christmas with a friend from his youth. Courtine finds himself drawn into a haunting world of avarice, skullduggery, and exceptional evil stemming from a 200-year-old murder.

Fifteen Dogs

Fifteen Dogs
Author: André Alexis
Publisher: Coach House Books
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2015-03-23
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1770564039

Winner of the 2015 Scotiabank Giller Prize Finalist for the 2015 Toronto Book Awards Winner of the 2015 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize "[Alexis] devises an inventive romp through the nature of humanity in this beautiful, entertaining read … A clever exploration of our essence, communication, and how our societies are organized." – Kirkus Reviews "This might be the best set-up of the spring." – The Globe & Mail "André Alexis has established himself as one of our preeminent voices." – Toronto Star — I wonder, said Hermes, what it would be like if animals had human intelligence. — I'll wager a year's servitude, answered Apollo, that animals – any animal you like – would be even more unhappy than humans are, if they were given human intelligence. And so it begins: a bet between the gods Hermes and Apollo leads them to grant human consciousness and language to a group of dogs overnighting at a Toronto vet­erinary clinic. Suddenly capable of more complex thought, the pack is torn between those who resist the new ways of thinking, preferring the old 'dog' ways, and those who embrace the change. The gods watch from above as the dogs venture into their newly unfamiliar world, as they become divided among themselves, as each struggles with new thoughts and feelings. Wily Benjy moves from home to home, Prince becomes a poet, and Majnoun forges a relationship with a kind couple that stops even the Fates in their tracks. André Alexis's contemporary take on the apologue offers an utterly compelling and affecting look at the beauty and perils of human consciousness. By turns meditative and devastating, charming and strange, Fifteen Dogs shows you can teach an old genre new tricks. André Alexis was born in Trinidad and grew up in Canada. His debut novel, Childhood, won the Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Trillium Book Award, and was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and the Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. His other previous books include Asylum, Beauty and Sadness, Ingrid & the Wolf and, most recently, Pastoral, which was also nominated for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and was named a Globe and Mail Top 100 book of 2014.

The Quincunx

The Quincunx
Author: Charles Palliser
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Total Pages: 802
Release: 2014-02-19
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0804152403

An extraordinary modern novel in the Victorian tradition, Charles Palliser has created something extraordinary—a plot within a plot within a plot of family secrets, mysterious clues, low-born birth, high-reaching immorality, and, always, always the fog-enshrouded, enigmatic character of 19th century—London itself. “So compulsively absorbing that reality disappears . . . One is swept along by those enduring emotions that defy modern art and a random universe: hunger for revenge, longing for justice and the fantasy secretly entertained by most people that the bad will be punished and the good rewarded.”—The New York Times “A virtuoso achievement . . . It is an epic, a tour de force, a staggeringly complex and tantalizingly layered tale that will keep readers engrossed in days. . . . The Quincunx will not disappoint you. It is, quite simply, superb.”—Chicago Sun-Times “A bold and vivid tale that invites the reader to get lost in the intoxicating rhythms of another world. And the invitation is irresistible.”—San Francisco Chronicle “A remarkable book . . . In mood, color, atmosphere and characters, this is Charles Dickens reincarnated . . . It is an immersing experience.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review “To read the first pages is to be trapped for seven-hundred odd more: you cannot stop turning them.”—The New Yorker “Few books, at most a dozen or two in a lifetime, affect us this way. . . . For sheer intricacy and ingenuity, for skill and clarity of storytelling, it is the kind of book readers wait for, a book to get lost in.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer

Rustication: A Novel

Rustication: A Novel
Author: Charles Palliser
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2013-11-04
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0393241505

One of Publishers Weekly's Best Books of the Year. "A literary Dr. Frankenstein, [Palliser] has stitched together parts of Jane Austen and Edgar Allan Poe. The result is deliciously wicked." —Ron Charles, Washington Post Charles Palliser's work has been hailed as "so compulsively absorbing that reality disappears" (New York Times). Since his extraordinary debut, The Quincunx, his works have sold over one million copies worldwide. With his novel, Rustication, he returns to the town of Thurchester, which he evoked so hauntingly in The Unburied. It is winter 1863, and Richard Shenstone, aged seventeen, has been sent down—"rusticated"—from Cambridge under a cloud of suspicion. Addicted to opium and tormented by sexual desire, he finds temporary refuge in a dilapidated old mansion on the southern English coast inhabited by his newly impoverished mother and his sister, Effie. Soon, graphic and threatening letters begin to circulate among his neighbors, and Richard finds himself the leading suspect in a series of crimes and misdemeanors ranging from vivisection to murder. Atmospheric, lurid, and brilliantly executed, Rustication is sure to spin readers into its "spider's web of intrigue and violence" (Jane Jakeman, The Independent).

The Hidden Keys

The Hidden Keys
Author: André Alexis
Publisher: Coach House Books
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2016-09-19
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1770564659

Giller Prize winner André Alexis’s contemporary take on the quest narrative is an instant classic. Although the Green Dolphin is a bar of ill repute, it is there that Tancred Palmieri, a thief with elegant and erudite tastes, meets Willow Azarian, an aging heroin addict. She reveals to Tancred that her very wealthy father has recently passed away, leaving each of his five children a mysterious object that provides one clue to the whereabouts of a large inheritance. Willow enlists Tancred to steal these objects from her siblings and solve the puzzle. A Japanese screen, a painting that plays music, an aquavit bottle, a framed poem, and a model of Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater: Tancred is lured in to this beguiling quest, and even though Willow dies before he can begin, he presses on. As he tracks down the treasure, however, he must enlist the help of Alexander von Wurfel, esteemed copyist, and fend off Willow's heroin dealers, a young albino named "Nigger" Colby and his sidekick, Sigismund "Freud" Luxemburg, a club-footed psychopath, both of whom are eager to get their paws on this supposed pot of gold. And he must mislead Detective Daniel Mandelshtam, his most adored friend. Based on a reading of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, The Hidden Keys questions what it means to be honorable and what it means to be faithful.

Ring

Ring
Author: André Alexis
Publisher: Coach House Books
Total Pages: 215
Release: 2021-09-28
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1770566848

THE GLOBE AND MAIL BEST BOOKS OF 2021 CBC BOOKS THE BEST CANADIAN FICTION OF 2021 A fresh take on the romance novel from the Giller Prize–winning author of Fifteen Dogs From their first meeting, it was clear that Gwen and Tancred were meant to be together. But, as we know, the course of true love never did run smooth. Gwen’s mother, intuiting that her daughter is in love, gives her a magic ring that has been passed down through endless generations of mothers and daughters. This ring grants its wearer the opportunity to change three things about her beloved. Like all blessings, this may also be a curse. Ring turns the literary romance upside down and shakes out its pockets. It’s a playful meditation on the past, on magic, on race, on honour, on faith, and, yes, on love. Following on the heels of Pastoral, Fifteen Dogs, The Hidden Keys, and Days by Moonlight, Ring completes Alexis’s Quincunx, a group of five genre-bending, philosophically sophisticated, and utterly delightful novels. “A great novel doesn’t try to answer questions, but, like Days by Moonlight, complicates them. ” —The Globe and Mail on Days by Moonlight “This imaginative travelogue will amuse readers even as it raises weightier issues. ” —Publishers Weekly on Days by Moonlight “I’m far from being a dog person, but as a book person I loved this smart, exuberant fantasy from start to finish. ” —The Guardian on Fifteen Dogs “A clever exploration of our essence, communication, and how our societies are organized. ” —Kirkus Reviews on Fifteen Dogs "Ring raises questions about love, marriage, fidelity, and the divine." —Canadian Writers Abroad