Reviewed by L.D.Y. Hardcover (available in trade), 470 pages, 2006 Rating: 10/10 Reason for Reading: I loved Fingersmith; The Night Watch is currently on the shortlist for the 2006 Booker Prize. Synopsis: Four restless Londoners, three women and a young man, deal with war-torn life in the 1940s, struggling to find happiness and love in […]

Reviewed by L.D.Y. Hardcover (available in trade June 2007), 322 pages, 2006 Rating: 8/10 Reason for Reading: I really enjoyed Pardonable Lies. Synopsis: In 1931 England, a young woman named Georgina comes to private investigator Maisie Dobbs with a dubious but heart-felt case: that her brother’s death wasn’t an accidental fall, but a murder. Her […]

Reviewed by L.D.Y. Hardcover (available in trade), 317 pages, 2005 Rating: 10/10 Reason for Reading: It was on the Booker Prize Shortlist for 2005. Synopsis: 18-year-old Willie Dunne has settled nicely into his young life – he’s got family he’s close to, he has a wonderful sweetheart, Gretta, who he’s hoping to start a life […]

Reviewed by L.D.Y. Hardcover (available in trade), 340 pages, 2005 Rating: 8/10 Reason for Reading: Continuing on the big mystery kick I seem to be on lately. Synopsis: It’s 1930, and Maisie Dobbs is working as a private investigator when a strange case falls into her lap. Sir Cecil Lawton vowed to his dying wife […]

Reviewed by L.D.Y. Hardcover, 337 pages, 2005 Rating: 9/10 Reason for Reading: I have a weakness for biographies about authors. Synopsis: Mistress Bradstreet is a biography of Anne Bradstreet, a Puritan that moved to America with her family at the age of eighteen, just a decade after the Pilgrims first arrived in the early 17th […]

Reviewed by L.D.Y. Hardcover, 128 pages, 2005 Rating: 9/10 Reason for Reading: I love having gorgeous photograph collections around to randomly browse through when the mood strikes. Synopsis: The Women is a collection of one hundred photographs focusing on the Native American women of more than eighty tribes (culled from what Cardozo believes may have […]

Reviewed by L.D.Y. Trade, 340 pages, 2004 Rating: 10/10 Reason for Reading: My second Booker Prize shortlister read of 2004. Synopsis: In The Electric Michelangelo, Hall guides us through the life of Cy Parks, whose odd upbringing in a hotel filled with the fatally ill seems to have him destined for an unusual life. Cy […]

Reviewed by L.D.Y. Hardcover (available in trade), 338 pages, 2004 Rating: 9/10 Reason for Reading: Shortlisted for the Booker Prize this year. I figured I’d see how many I could read before the prize was announced so I could see if I agreed on the decision, because I’m silly like that. Synopsis: The Master is […]

Reviewed by L.D.Y. Hardcover (available in trade), 412 pages, 2003 Rating: 7/10 Reason for Reading: I believe I saw an ad for it in the book section of Saturday’s Globe and Mail. I like to pick the section up once and a while and hunt for brand new (to me, at least) authors. Synopsis: Alessandra […]