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The Table Comes First
Family, France, and the Meaning of Food
By Adam Gopnik, Vintage Canada, 317 pages, $19.95
Writer Adam Gopnik examines the role of food in our lives, especially as it concerns our relatively new change from mere "eaters" to compulsive gastronomes, with television stations and books devoted to the cultivation, preparation and consumption of food.
A World Elsewhere
By Wayne Johnston, Vintage Canada, 294 pages, $22
Newfoundlander Landish Druken, a student at Princeton at the end of the 19th century, is befriended by fellow student Padget (Van) Vanderluyden, son of the wealthiest man in the United States. Years later, when Landish and his adopted son need help, Van invites them to his family's "castle" in North Carolina, where they discover a new, and nearly irresistible, world of lies and deceit.
A Dublin Student Doctor
By Patrick Taylor, Forge, 492 pages, $15.99
Readers of Patrick Taylor's other Irish doctor novels will recognize the elderly Dr. Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly, the eccentric but kindly senior medical practitioner . A Dublin Student Doctor looks back to an earlier period in Irish medical life, to O'Reilly's years of medical training during the 1930s.
Vital Signs
By Tessa McWatt, Vintage Canada, 165 pages, $18.95
Mike and Anna are a middle-aged couple with grown children and good careers when Anna begins to mangle sentences as the result of a brain aneurysm, and their lives change radically. Mike, a graphic artist, tries to communicate his love for Anna with drawings.