With tremendous satisfaction I’ve just finished reading a small masterpiece by Edmonton author Caterina Edwards. Edwards uses the pacing of a murder mystery as she describes her investigation into the crimes committed against her own mother, her mother’s family, and the untolled numbers of Italian inhabitants of an Adriatic island off the coast of Yugoslavia.

“It’s a taboo subject” says Italian scholar/historian Cesare Segre.        
The Italians won’t speak of it; the Yugoslavians won’t speak of it, we discover.

Nor would Caterina’s mother, Rosa Pagan speak of it. But as the old lady slips into the confusion of Alzheimer’s, she loses control over the fiction in which she has wrapped her life. And with each tear in the cloth, Caterina glimpses more of the truth.

Tirelessly the daughter works against the dissolution of her mother’s memory: she seeks out living relatives and old friends, searches through Italian libraries, pores over historic documents, and gathers scraps of history which slowly fit together into a discernible whole. And as the tragedies of Rosa’s life reveal themselves, so Caterina begins to come to terms with the painful chaos of her own ‘peace-time’ upbringing.

Finding Rosa, the story of Caterina Edwards' search for her mother’s history, is one of the best books I've read in years!

Signed copies are available at Belgravia Books & Treasures

Another fabulous book is Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell.

The first of its six sections is written in a voice similar to that of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. This narrative describes an eighteenth-century sea adventure.

To the reader's great surprise, Mitchell drops the naval adventure narrative in the middle of a sentence and moves on to a deliciously self-indulgent voice telling a story of European decadence between the wars.

Oops, he drops that one too. Now Mitchell moves on to an American political espionage-style tale. Soon we are caught up in car chases and assassinations.

In all, Mitchell pulls us through six voices and six half-narratives. I was always reluctant to let go of the dropped narrative to move on to the next, but marvelled at Mitchell's ability to create new voices and vocabularies, and was soon caught up in the new tale.

In the end, Mitchell does resolve all the narratives and ties them together with his mind-boggling creative talents.

We may not have a copy of this book in the store today, but if you'd like us to hold our next copy for you, send us an email and we'll set up a request card.

(Readers will want to know that we are not discussing a similarly titled book, The Cloud Atlas, by Liam Callanan, whose merits remain, well, a closed book.)

In the area of non-fiction, I recommend The Island of the Seven Cities by Paul Chiasson.  This is the story of a successful New York architect who returns to his native Cape Breton to nurse an illness. While recuperating, he takes long walks in the countryside, and during one of those walks he comes upon the remains of a very sophisticated cobblestone road. With time on his hands, he begins to sift through the history of Cape Breton in an attempt to establish who built that road.

Chiasson discusses the early mapping of Eastern Canada, the etymology of Cape Breton place-names, and aspects of local First Nations culture that made me rethink my notions about Canadian history. Although there are many websites that dismiss Chiasson's theory, nonetheless, for me the book was a page-turner. Read it and make up your mind for yourself.

Lorie