Sunday 23 February 2014

Digression: Books I'm Reviewing—Audrey Thomas' "Local Customs"


   A ghost story! 
   There's fiction that you read and all the while understand that thematically or stylistically it belongs to a current fashion or literary norm. Narrated by a series of talkative and quarrelsome spectres, Local Customs appears to stand well outside convention as it presents a series of biased and partial accounts of the life of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, a real-life English poet who died in western Africa in 1838. Economical, funny, and decidedly odd, Thomas' novel crackles with personality even as it's suffused with Gothic atmospherics. 

 




My actual review appears in The Vancouver Sun

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