Canada

On 25 July 1865, during a heatwave, Dr James Barry died of dysentery in his London lodgings. A charwoman came in to ‘lay out’ the body. She had known the deceased gentleman: a strange-looking fellow, about five feet tall, slight and stooped and with a large nose and dyed red hair. But nothing had prepared her for what she found when she folded back the bedclothes. Barry’s whole body — ‘the genitals, the deflated breast and the hairless face’ — was unmistakably female. And as if that wasn’t shock enough, the charwoman’s eye was drawn to pronounced striations in the skin of the belly. As a mother of nine, she recognised them immediately as the marks of childbearing.

Madeleine Thien’s third novel, recently long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, begins in Vancouver with Marie, who, like the author, is the daughter of Chinese immigrants to Canada. Marie tells us that her father committed suicide in 1989 and that, soon after, the 19-year-old Ai-ming — whose father knew Marie’s father — came to stay, having escaped China in the aftermath of Tiananmen. Ai-ming is drawn to a notebook that has been found among Marie’s father’s surviving paperwork: a handwritten copy of part of a mysterious Book of Records. Marie persuades Ai-ming to tell her the story. Her tale transpires to be not the content of that book, but the crucial role it has played in the lives of their families.

In spurts and bursts and flashes, a sublime novelist at work reveals herself. In Annie Proulx’s new novel, there are breath-taking pages and set pieces of extraordinary power. A man on board a ship, as the temperature plummets, sees all those around him embedded in ice before the catastrophe falls on him; a logging run down a river blocks, builds and explodes with the force of missiles; a wall of fire sweeps across a forested wildness. There are individual chapters of great dramatic force, as Proulx’s people confront the possibilities before them and produce their own solutions. But are those flashes enough?

'This day fucking sucks,' remark several characters over the course of Xavier Dolan’s It's Only the End of the World. It’s hard to argue with them. Recriminations, ugly behaviour and shitty attitudes are par for the course in this dysfunctional family drama. A young, gay playwright named Louis returns home after 12 years to his family to announce that he is dying, probably of AIDS, although that word is never mentioned. His emotional roller coaster of a homecoming lasts a grand total of five hours, as he tries to reconnect with his nervous, oblivious mother, the younger sister whose adolescence he missed and takes heaps of abuse from his brutish older brother.

Patrick Gale’s first historical novel is inspired by a non-story, a gap in his own family record. His great-grandfather Harry Cane spent the first part of his life as a gentleman of leisure among the Edwardian comforts of Twickenham. What then suddenly prompted him to abandon his wife and small daughter and emigrate to the Canadian wilderness? The official line was that he had money troubles, yet he doesn’t seem to have been short of cash in Canada. As far as we know, Harry Cane’s motives went with him to the grave. In this re- imagining of his life, however — partly because homosexual love is a theme throughout Patrick Gale’s work — it feels entirely convincing that his secret should be ‘the love that dare not speak its name’.

For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure, Mark Steyn is sort of a hairy, successful version of me— a civilised, larky type of chap who was just tootling along minding his own biz and scribbling about his favourite show-tunes when — crash, bang, wallop! — he found himself on the frontline of commentating on the clash of civilisations. He is obsessed with the fact that Islamism poses the greatest risk to peace, progress and piano bars since the second world war and is unable to comprehend why so many people seem so bovinely oblivious to this fact. Like Richard Littlejohn — another fine, undervalued writer — he is unfashionable, not using 20 words when two will do and never apologising for being alive.