Fiction Genres Recent Picks

August 2009

Humour/Satire/Black comedy

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Life according to Lubka by Laurie Graham. (2009)
Buzz Wexler is an old hand at the music PR business: Angry Belgians, Cheesy Boyz and Ear Waxx were all her babies, and for a woman who was forty last birthday she certainly keeps up the pace. But that's about to change. Now some twenty year old has been given Wasabi Gymslip, the Japanese group predicted to go stellar and Buzz is being sidelined into something called World Music. It'll be a blast, her boss assures her. The Gorni Grannies may not be the tantrum-throwing celebs Buzz is used to but they present other challenges. How to stop Lubka straining yogurt through M&S knee highs; how to persuade Mara that Tail Waggers' Gravy Bones aren't intended for human consumption. (Amazon)

UFO in her eyes by Xiaolu Guo. (2009)
Silver Hill Village, 2012, on the twentieth day of the seventh moon Kwok Yun is making her way across the rice fields on her Flying Pigeon bicycle. Her world is upturned when she sights a UFThing, a spinning plate in the sky, and helps the Westerner in distress whom she discovers in the shadow of the alien craft. It's not long before the village is crawling with men from the National Security and Intelligence Agency armed with pointed questions. When the Westerner that Kwok Yun saved repays her kindness with a large dollar cheque she becomes a local celebrity, albeit under constant surveillance. (Amazon)

The enthusiast : a novel by Charlie Haas. (c2009)
Henry Bay has his own America going. If there's an offbeat interest or extreme sport that's poised to sweep the nation, chances are there's a magazine for its enthusiasts, and chances are also good that Henry has worked there. He's a modern nomad, associate-editing his way from state to state, exploring the small worlds that make up modern America from one enthusiast magazine to. But those are other people's interests, Henry's still looking for his own enthusiasm. He ends up finding more than he ever imagined. (Amazon)

Pygmy by Chuck Palahniuk. (2009)
Agent Number 67, nicknamed Pygmy for his diminutive size, arrives in the United States from his totalitarian homeland (a mash-up of North Korea, Cuba, Communist-era China, and Nazi-era Germany), as an 'exchange student' into the welcoming arms of his Simpsons-spinoff Midwestern host family. Host cow father (he works in the biological weapons complex outside of town), chicken neck mother, pig dog brother, and the disconcertingly self-possessed cat sister introduce Pygmy into the rituals of postmodern American life, which he views with utter contempt. Along with his fellow operatives, all indoctrinated into the mindset of the totalitarian state, he is planning something big, something truly, truly awful, that will bring this big dumb country and its fat, dumb inhabitants to their knees. (Amazon)

I am Not Sidney Poitier : a novel by Percival Everett. (c2009)
This is the story of a young man named Not Sidney Poitier who bears an uncanny resemblance to the famed actor and is adept at deploying a hypnotic technique called Fesmerism. When Not Sidney is young, his mother dies, but not before becoming an early investor in Ted Turner's enterprises. The boy then moves to Atlanta, into the home of Ted Turner. Despite his vast wealth and celebrity looks, when Not Sidney ventures out into the world as a young adult, he faces bizarre, stinging and potentially deadly forms of racism. (Amazon)

Blue collar by Danny King. (2009)
What happens when white van man meets gold card girl? Charlie's great. She's everything Terry has ever dreamed of in a woman and more. She's sophisticated, intelligent, funny and beautiful. She enjoys dinner parties and hanging out in the West End's trendiest night spots. She is, for want of a better word, wonderful. Terry simply can't believe his luck. And neither do the lads on Terry's building site. (Amazon)

B is for beer by Tom Robbins. (c2009)
B Is for Beer explores various aspects of beer culture, ancient, modern, and otherworldly; brutal, infantile, divine- and dramatizes the surprising things that happen when the life of a feisty nursery school kid named Gracie Perkel intersects with each. (Amazon)

The Kiss Murder by Mehmet Murat Somer ; translated by Kenneth Dakan. (2009)
Being Istanbul's foremost transvestite detective, nightclub owner and computer expert is pretty time-consuming. So when she receives a visit from her hysterical friend Buse asking for help, she is initially reluctant to commit. Buse has, for several years, kept in flagrante photos and letters from a former relationship with a powerful man. So when her apartment is ransacked and Buse is later found dead, our girl needs to polish her Thai kick-boxing skills, slip into her slinkiest Audrey Hepburn number and use her formidable powers of charm and flirtation to trace the killer. (Book cover)

A very handy man by Taylor Kenwrick. (2009)
The story about one elusive dream every man covets about all other, to be taken seriously by his own family. Like Don Quixote before him, tilting at tool sheds, our humble hero embarks on a journey into the unknown which goes no further than his own backyard. Defeated at every turn, his only companion a rejected goldfish, he loses everything precious to him, but emerges from the wilderness transformed to a fabulous new world. (Book cover)

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