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My Favourite Books of 2011: Nadia (Operations)
by Nadia
Fiction / December 22, 2011
This is my first year at Raincoast and already it’s hard to choose a favourite. There have been plenty of non-fiction recommendations from everyone, so I’m going to recommend some good fiction from this year.
For the mystery lovers, A Trick of the Light by Louise Penny is a pretty sure bet. Written by a Canadian author and set in Québec, this is the seventh and latest in the mystery series featuring Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec. This mystery features two worlds: the world of art and the world of a small town. It makes for an interesting and engaging cast of characters and the central mystery itself is not an easy one to solve. Having grown-up in small town Québec myself, the setting of Three Pines was an added incentive to me to pick up this book.
I enjoyed it enough to pick up a copy of the previous novel in the series, Bury Your Dead, that I plan to read over Christmas.
This next one isn’t a new pub, but I haven’t managed to read much (read: none) of the new science fiction that was published in 2011. But if you like science fiction and you haven’t read Ender’s Game, I can’t recommend it highly enough. Winner of both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for best novel, it’s a classic and the first in the series about Andrew “Ender” Wiggin. It’s in the process of being adapted into a movie by Odd Lot and Summi that will feature Harrison Ford, Asa Butterfield, Hailee Steinfeld and Ben Kingsley. It was first published in 1985 and is still available from TOR.
And since Jamie’s already gone and recommended both an older book and one we don’t have here at Raincoast, I’m going to add my favourite science fiction book of them all: To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis. This is part science fiction (time travel is central to the plot) and part comedy of manners (most of the novel takes place in Victorian England). It’s a very funny book, with plenty of literary references slipped in alongside the laws and physics of time travel.