Sarah Fletcher

A small-town charm dominates much of the local fiction about our fair city, and Montrealer Elaine Kalman Naves’s first novel, The Book of Faith, keeps religiously to this invisible holy commandment.

Susan Pinker’s The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier, Happier, and Smarter integrates research about human community and social interaction in a perceptive and timely study. But in Pinker’s impulse to serve readers straightforward prescriptions for this troublesome human condition in which we flail about, she occasionally neglects to balance her thesis with more subtle insights into our minds and bodies.

Using her childhood experiences as a springboard, Guzzo-McParland tells of the changes in a fictional village in the south of Italy in the years after the Second World War.

Literature abounds with similarly uninspired narrators, which makes me wonder why loser narrators are so popular.Why do we buy these books when writing guides tell us no one wants to read about losers?

There is something comical in journalist William Marsden’s description of the 2009 Copenhagen summit. In the opening chapters of Fools Rule, he unpacks the proceedings of the two-week conference and lays out an absurdist labyrinth of greed, mistrust, and simple bureaucratic idiocy.

When the AIDS epidemic in Africa exploded in the 1990s, global relief initiatives sought HIV-positive Africans to testify for their campaigns. Their recruitment, however, was frustrated by stigma. AIDS confessions often deeply upset social and familial hierarchies and many sufferers preferred to live in denial. The limited medical resources available at the time thus created a barter system in which victims who were more forthcoming banked on their stories for treatment, even as others were left to die.