Ruby Red by Kerstin Gier

Ruby Red is the first in a YA time travel trilogy by German author Kerstin Gier. The story is set in present day London and features a likable teen heroine who never expected to inherit the time travel gene. That honour was supposed to go to Gwen's cousin, Charlotte. Instead, Gwen is thrown into a dangerous adventure that has her crisscrossing back and forth in time, unsure of who she can trust. She isn't at all prepared, but Gwen's common sense and her love of period films helps her to roll with it.

I read an American edition of the English translation, which keeps some of the British terminology (loo, not toilet; tablet, not pill) but not all (cookies, not biscuits, for example.) It was a little disconcerting, but nothing compared to what Gwen had to negotiate... like climbing through a tight spot while dressed in a hoop skirt. Oh, and by the way, Gwen can also converse with ghosts and gargoyles who are invisible to everyone else. It's a lot of fun.

Imagine a mash-up of To Say Nothing of the Dog (Connie Willis), Grave Mercy (Robin LeFevers), Dreamhunter (Elizabeth Knox), The Time Traveler's Wife (Audrey Niffenegger) and The Eyre Affair (Jasper Fforde). Adventure, humour, fancy costumes and a cliffhanger of an ending. Sapphire Blue is the second volume and Emerald Green will be released on October 8, 2013.

Caught by Lisa Moore

Lisa Moore's Caught is a high-stakes adventure that begins in the Maritimes in 1978 when David Slaney crawls under a fence and escapes from prison. Slaney is on the run, across Canada and then onward to South America, never sure who he can trust. He is determined that he will never be locked up again.

RCMP Inspector Patterson is close on Slaney's heels. He is determined to gain a long-overdue promotion by capturing Slaney and his accomplices.

This book has everything I love: great characters, a strong sense of place, an engaging plot and an elegant way with language.

Slaney is an entirely sympathetic young man who has made some bad choices. He meets all kinds of interesting people on his travels.

A salesclerk in a Montreal toy store knew that Slaney "was Anglo by the look of him and addressed him in English. She flattened everything she said like she was running it through a ringer washer. All the th's were d's and she was dropping h's and she was emphatic. Her vowels had carbuncles and she resented having to spit them out and it was as sexy as anything Slaney had ever heard."

Slaney spent weeks on a boat in the company of a different young woman. "Ada was reading murder mysteries and Hemingway and she had a Fitzgerald and a really good Dashiell Hammett, she said, and when she was done she tossed them over the side." (That image will stay with me!)

Faith is explored from different angles. An orgasm is likened to a sacrament: "She spoke a few words and it was a phrase from a prayer." And then religion pops up again on the very next page: "Three soldiers took the bag below deck to count the money and they all waited in the hot sun with their heads bowed, silent, as though in church." A little later, "There was the ridiculous golden light, liturgical and autumnal, touching everything glass and metal."

Are our lives subject to some divine plan? "The best stories, he thought, we've known the end from the beginning."

We are mortal, and so in life it is our journeys that matter, not our end. In fiction, I want both: a good trip and a good ending. Moore delivers both in Caught.

It happened that I was listening to Piper Kerman's memoir Orange Is the New Black during the same stretch of time that I was reading Caught. It was a bit surreal, contrasting fiction and nonfiction about serving time for criminal activity relating to drugs, but also a good pairing.

The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman

The Imperfectionists is about a mixed group of newspaper people -- reporters, editors, foreign correspondents, publishers and readers -- and about a small international English language newspaper headquartered in Rome. Canadian author Tom Rachman has created a kaleidoscope of 11 interlocking short stories, each one focused on a different character. Each story is titled with a newspaper headline and ends with a clever twist. The novel spans the 50 years of the paper's existence, right up to today's decline of print journalism.

A typical Roman street, taken on my last visit there.

The setting is so vivid that I not only got to walk the scenic streets of Rome, but continue right along inside the homes of people who live there. Private lives and work lives are contrasted with extraordinary insight.

Reviews of this book mentioned the humour, but as I listened to the audiobook narrated by Christopher Welch [Recorded Books: 9 hr 45 min] I felt it was more poignant than funny. I empathized deeply with the characters and was saddened by their troubles. After I had finished the audiobook, I read the paper book and discovered that some parts made me laugh. So I learned something new about myself. The visceral experience of audio can override my brain's recognition of what is comical about human foibles.

For example, there's the chapter "The Sex Lives of Islamic Extremists," in which two Americans are each hoping to get a Cairo stringer assignment. I felt bad for poor Winston Cheung, who was in over his head and annoyed by Rich Snyder, a blowhard opportunist. Yet check out this dialogue:

"I remember when I was in the Philippines during People Power back in the 1980s, and everyone's all, like, 'Oh man, Tagalog is so hard.' And I'm, like, 'Bull.' and within days, I'm, like, picking up chicks in Tagalog and stuff. That was after two days. Languages are totally overrated."
"So your Arabic must be excellent."
"Actually, I never speak foreign languages anymore," he explains. "I used to get so keyed into cultures that it was unhealthy. So I only talk in English now. Helps me maintain my objectivity."

In "Global Warming Good for Ice Creams" a cranky corrections editor fusses:

"GWOT: No one knows what this means, above all those who use the term. Nominally, it stands for Global War on Terror. But since conflict against an abstraction is, to be polite, tough to execute, the term should be understood as marketing gibberish. Our reporters adore this sort of humbug; it is the copy editor's job to exclude it. See also: OBL; Acronyms; and Nitwits."

The Imperfectionists is perfect: smart and funny and thought-provoking.

Readalike: A Visit from the Goon Squad (Jennifer Egan).

Batwoman: To Drown the World by JH Williams III, W Haden Blackman, Amy Reeder and Trevor McCarthy

Kate Kane/Batwoman battles ethical conundrums that are straight out of the tragedies of ancient Greece in the second bound volume of the Batwoman series. Will she betray her father or her lesbian lover? Will she kill one person in order to save a host of children? The monsters that Batwoman battles are also straight out of the mythologies of ancient Greece -- and other places and times -- including Medusa, La Llorona, the shapeshifting fox of Japan, and the reptiles in the sewers of modern urban legend.

To Drown the World is Volume 2 in the DC New 52 Batwoman series, collecting issues 6-11. The story is told in jagged pieces, jumping between the present and assorted flashbacks. I found it unpleasantly disorientating the first time through, but everything comes together and subsequent readings went more smoothly. Several artists contributed to this work and I disliked the pale colour scheme on some of the pages, which added to the initial choppy feeling.

There are some terrific sexy moments between Kate and other women. Yes, women plural. But it is abundantly clear that Maggie is Kate's true love. I already know that a marriage proposal comes up in a future issue because of a news story on the AfterEllen website: "Batwoman writers resign, say DC won't allow Kate and Maggie to get married." It'll be interesting to see what comes next for Batwoman.

My reviews of two previous Batwoman episodes can be found here: Batwoman: Hydrology and Batwoman: Elegy.

Nocturne by Helen Humphreys

Helen Humphreys is one of my very favourite writers (The Reinvention of Love; The Frozen Thames; Coventry; Wild Dogs; The Lost Garden; etc.). Nocturne: On the Life and Death of My Brother is a contemplation of existence, grief, and the solitary nature of creative work. I find Humphrey's calm writer's voice deeply comforting.

"Everything becomes a memorial. This wooden chair is a memorial to that tree."

Nocturne is a small volume with 45 brief chapters, the number of years that Humphrey's younger brother Martin lived before dying of pancreatic cancer. My copy has flags every few pages, marking beautiful passages. It is written in a conversational style, addressed to Martin.

"I've been thinking about the human soul, about the presence of the unseen in our lives, about how, the moment you died, I felt you leave. What was it that left? And why did I feel that you did leave? It wasn't simply that a light was turned off, that your consciousness was stopped, but rather that you moved swiftly from your dead body and went somewhere else. But where did you go?

Martin was an accomplished pianist and music was his life's work. The score of John Cage's 4'33" is the memoir's epigraph, a poignant choice. If you aren't familiar with it, 4'33" is a composition of silence. I've encountered it in a number of books recently, including When Women Were Birds and A Visit from the Goon Squad.

Humphreys was present when Martin performed the piece. "I remember the nervous laughter from the audience as you sat down at the piano, hands folded together in your lap, back straight, and didn't play a note. That laughter subsided into an uncomfortable silence, and that awkward self-consciousness was followed by a growing attentiveness, all in the space of five minutes."

"Is the noise of music really better than the silence it is invading?"

"Were you made in part by the music that you played? And if so, when you died, the silence we were left with was that same silence that exists in a concert hall the moment after the music stops -- a silence that still tastes of the sound it carried."

Humphreys writes that her brother's death forced her to slow down and experience the present moment. "This may be why the completely unexpected happened and I fell in love again. It saddens me that you'll never meet Nancy, and that my new life is so far removed from my old one."

Nancy Jo Cullen and Humphreys will both be at the Vancouver's Writers Fest this year and I'm looking forward to seeing them there.

Readalikes: When Women Were Birds (Terry Tempest Williams); Name All the Animals (Alison Smith).

The Silent Wife by A.S.A. Harrison

The Silent Wife is a psychological thriller set in Chicago about a 20-year-marriage that is speeding towards a crash. A.S.A. Harrison gets us inside the heads of Jodi and Todd through alternating Her and Him chapters. Their destination is clear from the second paragraph, where we learn that Jodi's "notions about who she is and how she ought to conduct herself are far less stable than she supposes, given that a few short months are all it will take to make a killer out of her."

The narrative has an inexorable pull -- the details of how things can fall apart in such a spectacular way. The central characters are not admirable specimens, but Harrison makes them believable and fully human. Even though I sped through this like an express train, Jodi and Todd will live on in my memory.

Readalikes: Gone Girl (Gillian Flynn); The Middlesteins (Jami Attenberg); The Woman Upstairs (Claire Messud).

The Panopticon by Jenni Fagan

Jenni Fagan's The Panopticon is a compelling first novel told in the voice of a fierce young lesbian, Anais Hendricks. Anais has spent her entire childhood as a ward of the Scottish government, placed in countless foster homes. At 15, she is moved to the Panopticon, a home for chronic young offenders.

Anais finds a place for herself amid the residents there, including other teenage queers. If she doesn't manage to turn over a new leaf, however -- and convince the police that she is not the one who put an officer in a coma -- the next place for her will be a secure lock-up until she turns 18.

"If they put me in a secure unit like John Kay's, with the kiddie killers or the pedos or whatever the fuck it is they keep up there, do you think there is any chance that I won't just fucking hang myself, Helen?"
"Calm down, Anais!"
"I'm not spending my life inside, for something I didnae fucking do!"
She takes coconut oil out of her bag and rubs it into her hands. She doesnae think I'm getting out -- she thinks I'm in the system now, all the fucking way. Foster care. Homes. Young Offenders. Jail. Where to when I graduate? Experiment headquarters -- so they can pickle my fucking brain.

Be prepared to have your heart broken by the circumstances of this young woman who can't seem to catch a break. Anais is like a diamond in the rough and I was cheering for her every step of the way.

Readalikes: Rose of No Man's Land (Michelle Tea); Lullabies for Little Criminals (Heather O'Neill).