Profile: Psychologist Joe O'Loughlin

Joe O'Loughlin (M) is a fictitious crime solving clinical psychologist created by Australian author Michael Robotham.

The series began in 2005 with the novel The Suspect (M), which garnered much praise around the world.

"Pleasantly creepy....Plotted with precision and narrated with real intelligence." - New York Times Book Review

"The brilliance of CRACKER, the complexity of REBUS and the suspense of PRIME SUSPECT in one novel" - Scottish Daily Record

Joe has a seemingly near perfect life- a great job, a beautiful wife and a loving daughter. But Joe has secrets, things he needs to keep secret, lest they wreak havoc with everyone's happiness. In The Suspect, Joe finds himself accused of a terrible crime, but the complications in his life forces him to keep his alibi secret. Joe must turn detective in order to clear his name and protect those he loves so dearly. Thus begins the crime solving career of psychologist Joe O'Louhglin.

Throughout the series, Joe develops a close working relationship with Detective Vincent Ruiz, the officer who originally arrested him in The Suspect. From this fateful exchange, begins the development of a crime solving duo for the ages.

Robotham's suspense novels are fast paced, cleverly constructed and have intriguing and realistic characters. The tone is on the darker side, with some violence and gruesome scenes. Joe's self depreciated humour does helps to lighten things up a bit for readers.

The Library has the first four novels in the series, with the fifth novel, The Wreckage on order.

Staff Pick - My Antonia by Willa Cather

Published in 1918 My Antonia (M) by Willa Cather is considered to be one of her best novels. If you, like me, grew up devouring books by Laura Ingalls Wilder (M), you will certainly appreciate My Antonia.

Narrator, Jim Burden, travels to Black Hawk, Nebraska following the death of his parents to live with his grandparents. His grandparents are comfortable, prosperous farmers who provide him with a stable and loving home. Their neighbours were largely recent immigrants from Scandinavian and Eastern European countries who were struggling with language and with basic survival. One neighbouring family, the Shimerdas and their daughter Antonia, fascinate young Jim and become the focus of the story. Over the course of five books (or chapters) we read about the progress of Antonia's life. We see her as a young girl, strong and smart and proud to work as hard has her brother. As a young woman she goes out and work as a hired girl and sends all her money home to her family. She struggles with responsibility and the desire to be young and free. Perhaps the most touching book is the final one where we see Antonia as the mother of a large family. Despite the unhappiness in her life, she ends up surrounded by a loving family who appreciate her strength.

This is a relatively small book that deals with so many big ideas. Overall it is a reflective read that focuses on the inner emotions of the characters as well as evoking a strong sense of place. The narrator, Jim, plays an inactive role as an academic and an observer. This is a book about women and their role in settling the American west. It's also a story about the immigrant experience. Cather paints of picture of the struggle to learn a new language and to cope with unfamiliar foods and basically try to survive in a land where everything is strange. There are hints of the lives left behind filled with learning and music, given up for a promise of a prosperous future that might not pay off for a couple of generations. My Antonia reflects the idea of Manifest Destiny with the settlers' moral right to expand across the continent relying on hard work, self-reliance and neighbourly support.

Willa Cather was born in Nebraska and was acknowledged with a Pulitzer Prize in 1922 for One of Ours (M). You can read more about her fascinating life in Hermione Lee's Willa Cather: double lives (M).

If you enjoy character driven novels with evocative descriptions of natural landscapes you might also enjoy A Thousand Acres (M) by Jane Smiley and Plainsong (M) by Kent Haruf.

"A successful Iowa farmer decides to divide his farm between his three daughters. When the youngest objects, she is cut out of his will. This sets off a chain of events that brings dark truths to light and explodes long-suppressed emotions. An ambitious reimagining of Shakespeare’s King Lear cast upon a typical American community in the late twentieth century, A Thousand Acres takes on themes of truth, justice, love, and pride, and reveals the beautiful yet treacherous topography of humanity." publisher

"A heartstrong story of family and romance, tribulation and tenacity, set on the High Plains east of Denver. In the small town of Holt, Colorado, a high school teacher is confronted with raising his two boys alone after their mother retreats first to the bedroom, then altogether. A teenage girl -- her father long since disappeared, her mother unwilling to have her in the house -- is pregnant, alone herself, with nowhere to go. And out in the country, two brothers, elderly bachelors, work the family homestead, the only world they've ever known. From these unsettled lives emerges a vision of life, and of the town and landscape that bind them together -- their fates somehow overcoming the powerful circumstances of place and station, their confusion, curiosity, dignity and humor intact and resonant. As the milieu widens to embrace fully four generations, Kent Haruf displays an emotional and aesthetic authority to rival the past masters of a classic American tradition. Utterly true to the rhythms and patterns of life, Plainsong is a novel to care about, believe in, and learn from." Discover

2 New Nova Scotia Short Story Collections

For your reading consideration - two new short story collections from local writers:

White Eyes : 16 stories (M)
by Larry Gibbons

"Larry Gibbons spent ten years on a Mi'kmaw reserve-held there by his love for a woman, not by any typical white role such as priest or social worker or teacher. Stirred by the tenderness, tenacity, and flexibility of Mi'kmaw extended family, and challenged by a native spirituality so different from his own upbringing, Gibbons found his voice as a writer. Out of that he created the remarkable stories in White Eyes.In a writing style that is casual but rigorous, Gibbons' voice-always passionate, often confused, frequently marvelously comedic-offers a unique bridge between white and native culture, even as he entertains with a sharp, self-deprecating eye." - Publisher

The Men's Breakfast: 19 stories from Cape Breton Island (M)
edited by Ronald Caplan

"The Men's Breakfast is built out of short stories by the likes of Frank Macdonald, Bill Conall, Dave Doucette, D. C. Troicuk and more-plus remarkable novels-in-progress by Maureen Hull, Brian Tucker, and Stewart Donovan that stand alone. In a shocking scene that turns on a breath, Joyce Rankin trumpets the challenges to which a woman rises to protect her children, and Phonse Jessome pulls off the tough-guy bravado of the best of crime writing.Caplan found the most fragile magic delivered out of the hands of Russell Colman and Tim Vassallo, and then some remarkable brute force masterfully carved by Paul MacDougall and Victor Sakalauskas.

Sharp wit and compassionate insight abound in this book, as The Men's Breakfast flowers forth with the finest in human relationship: a hard-bitten father's affection for his wayward son, a teenage youth caring for a dis-abled woman, a pack of kooky apartment-dwellers on a road trip to a funeral.As Caplan points out in a poignant introduction that explains the book's title, "Some of these 19 writers have achieved a bit of fame, others will be happy discoveries-and all are worth reading in this entertaining and thought-provoking book that has been built to last, to be returned to, and to share." - Publisher

5 Great Non-fiction Books- National Book Critics Circle Awards

The National Book Critics Circle Awards have announced their shortlists for books published in 2011.

"Founded in 1974, the NBCC is a nonprofit organization of book reviewers and critics that honors outstanding writing and fosters a national conversation about reading, criticism, and literature, in part through annual awards for the year’s outstanding books. Books are directly nominated and chosen by leading book critics. The NBCC thus offers the unique opportunity for professional critics to recognize and reward literary excellence."

The nominees in the non-fiction category are:

Liberty's Exile: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary War (M)
by Maya Jasanoff

"In this lucidly told and engaging work, Jasanoff examines the loyalist diaspora following the American Revolution in which both white and black adherents to the British scattered across the empire to various locations including Nova Scotia, Jamaica, and Sierra Leone and attempted to reconstruct their lives in the face of tremendous obstacles.

Combining compelling narrative with insightful analysis, Jasanoff has produced a work that is both distinct in perspective and groundbreaking in its originality. Strongly recommended for both students of the Revolutionary Atlantic world and British Empire generalists."- Library Journal

Pulphead: essays (M)
by John Jeremiah Sullivan

"A sharp-eyed, uniquely humane tour of America's cultural landscape--from high to low to lower than low--by the award-winning young star of the literary nonfiction world. In Pulphead, John Jeremiah Sullivan takes us on an exhilarating tour of our popular, unpopular, and at times completely forgotten culture. Simultaneously channeling the gonzo energy of Hunter S. Thompson and the wit and insight of Joan Didion, Sullivan shows us--with a laidback, erudite Southern charm that's all his own--how we really (no, really) live now." - Publisher

The Information: a history, a theory, a flood (M)
by James Gleick

"Acutely sensitive to the human drama involved in pioneering thought and discovery, best-selling science and technology writer Gleick has developed an epic sense of humankind's quest for mastery of information, the vital principle. In this tour de force, the first book to fully chronicle the story of information and how it has transformed human thought and life, Gleick follows the path from the ingenious codes used by African drummers to the invention of the alphabet and writing, which made possible deep analysis and logic, the bedrock for information theory.

This is intellectual history of tremendous verve, insight, and significance. Unfailingly spirited, often poetic, Gleick recharges our astonishment over the complexity and resonance of the digital sphere and ponders our hunger for connectedness. Destined to be a science classic, best-seller Gleick's dynamic history of information will be one of the biggest nonfiction books of the year." - Booklist

A World on Fire: Britain's crucial role in the American Civil War (M)
by Amanda Foreman

"Whitbread Prize winner Foreman weighs in with a big book rich in description and strong in narrative, with a large cast of characters that includes British nobles and American statesmen jockeying for power, British journalists reporting the war, and Englishmen and Irishmen fighting, respectively, with the Union and Confederate armies in what they regarded as noble causes. Foreman's special strength is tracking the social relationships that bound together, or estranged, the movers and shakers in London and Washington, with keen insights on the political maneuverings that kept England out of the war.

The result is a very good read and a grand panorama of the war on land and sea, in the press, and in drawing rooms and public assemblies on both sides of the Atlantic" - Library Journal

To End All Wars: a story of loyalty and rebellion, 1914-1918 (M)
by Adam Hochschild

"World War I stands as one of history's most senseless spasms of carnage, defying rational explanation. In a riveting, suspenseful narrative with haunting echoes for our own time, Adam Hochschild brings it to life as never before. He focuses on the long-ignored moral drama of the war's critics, alongside its generals and heroes. Thrown in jail for their opposition to the war were Britain's leading investigative journalist, a future winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and an editor who, behind bars, published a newspaper for his fellow inmates on toilet paper. These critics were sometimes intimately connected to their enemy hawks: one of Britain's most prominent women pacifist campaigners had a brother who was commander in chief on the Western Front. Two well-known sisters split so bitterly over the war that they ended up publishing newspapers that attacked each other. Today, hundreds of military cemeteries spread across the fields of northern France and Belgium contain the bodies of millions of men who died in the "war to end all wars." Can we ever avoid repeating history?"- Publisher

What are we talking about, again?

For a while, I used to write posts for the Reader under the theme of "Six Degrees of the Library Collection". They were fun little posts that connected authors and titles found at the library, through commonalities and links between the books or the writers. I recently noticed something that is more of a One Degree of the Library collection: a number of books that are all linked to each other through their very similar titles.

The book that got me thinking was What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank (M), a new short story collection by Nathan Englander that is to be released this February. Englander is an author to watch. His two previous publications—the 1999 short story collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges and the 2007 novel The Ministry of Special Cases—both received rave reviews. Of The Ministry of Special Cases, Booklist said "Four p's best describe this work: poignant, powerful, political, and yet personal." Expect a similar approach in his newest, which has already received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly and Booklist.

When I saw a write up of the Englander book, I felt like I'd encountered the title before: or almost. The book that immediately jumped to mind was What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (M) by Haruki Murakami. Murakami is a well known Japanese fiction author, sometimes categorized as surrealist, who writes thoughtful, often melancholy stories that feature themes of science fiction and fantasy, and offer commentary on modern life. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is one of Murakami's few nonfiction titles. In it he talks about his personal interest and participation in long distance running.

Intrigued by these titular similarities, I also tracked down What We Talk About When We Talk About War (M) , the name of a talk given by Canadian author Noah Richler at the Frye Festival in Moncton in 2010. The lecture is due to be published as a book by Fredericton's Goose Lane Press this spring and, according to the publisher, discusses Richler's view "that in the past decade, Canada has gone from being a peacekeeping to a “warrior” nation, and he examines what this says about us as a country."

Keen readers may have already figured out the connection between these books: the short story What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver (and the collection of the same name). Both Englander and Murakami indicate that their titles are direct tributes to the Carver title, I haven't encountered whether Richler intended the same or not. Of Carver's collection, amazon.com said "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is not only the most well-known short story title of the latter part of the 20th century; it has come to stand for an entire aesthetic, the bare-bones prose style for which Raymond Carver became famous." The stories from this Carver collection can be found in the Halifax Public Library in the collection entitled Where I'm Calling From (M).

Read Your Way Around the World - Sudan

Read Your Way Around the World invites you to Sudan. Sudan is a large and ethnically diverse country with Arabic as the dominant language and a long history of conflict and civil war.

Mansour El Souwain who contributed to Beirut 39: new writing from the Arab world (M) has some interesting things to say in this interview about the relatively new concept of the Sudanese novel and its origin in a rich oral and narrative poetry tradition.


Sudanese writer Leila Aboulela tells the story of the wealthy Abuzeid family in Lyrics Alley (M). Sudan is on the brink of massive change as British rule comes to an end. The family fortune seems and secure and comfortable until their beloved eldest son Nur is seriously injured. Nur channels his disappointment into a creative career as a poet. Just as the country itself is changing, the Abuzeid family finds itself divided between traditional and progressive values. A family saga told from multiple perspectives.


Wilbur Smith was an early favourite author for me. Wilbur Smith's novels are fast-paced, adventurous and often follow a family through multiple generations. Two of his families, the Courteneys and the Ballantynes, are featured in The Triumph of the Sun (M). The action in this violent and maybe even melodramatic story centers around the Siege of Khartoum, a bloody event in Sudanese history.


Moving to modern times, Acts of Faith (M) by Philip Caputo is set against the Sudanese civil wars. The novel tells the story of aid workers whose actions, though well intentioned on the surface, are designed to further their own causes as well as those of the locals. This is a novel with a huge cast of characters that tells a really big story.


The Four Feathers (M) by A.E.W. Mason is a classic much-filmed novel about honour and courage set in 1882 England and Sudan. Harry Feversham, a British officer, resigns his commission out of fear that he will prove himself a coward. His fellow officers and fiance give him white feathers to symbolize his cowardice. In order to redeem himself he travels to Sudan and plays an heroic role in this classic adventure story.


Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih tells the story of two Sudanese men who were both educated in England in Season of Migration to the North (M). They meet in a small village in Sudan and are drawn together by their similar experiences. Season of Migration to the North is a literary novel which deals with the clash between cultures and traditions.


God Grew Tired of Us (M) is the arresting title of John Del Dau's book about his experience of being one of Sudan's "Lost Boys". In this memoir he describes how he was forced from his village and separated from his family in 1987 as a result of the civil war. We read about harrowing escapes, the terrible conditions in refugee camps and ultimately his resettlement in the US which allows Dau, ultimately, to return to Sudan and reunite with his family.

Staff Pick- Chinaberry Sidewalks : a memoir by Rodney Crowell

Rodney Crowell is a singer songwriter from Houston. Early in his career he was championed by likes of Emmylou Harris, Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt. He later broke into the Nashville mainstream in1988, with a string five consecutive top ten country hits from his album Diamonds and Dirt. He later moved away from this lucrative mainstream country genre to create a body of critically acclaimed Americana music. He is was also well known for once being married into country music royalty, as the erstwhile husband of Roseanne Cash.

I first discovered Rodney Crowell during this second phase of his career His semi-autobiographical album The Houston Kid remains one my favourites. While reading his new childhood memoir, Chinaberry Sidewalks (M) I was quite struck with just how much of what he refers to in the book is alluded to in his songs.

"Mosquito truck blowing out DDT.
Barefoot heathens running wild and free.
Air raid buzzer at a noon day scream.
Leaving in a dream. On Telephone road"

His ragged childhood is the primary focus of this memoir, with only fleeting mentions of his later success as a performer. If you are looking for information about Nashville and/or his relationship with Roseanne, this is not the book. This memoir is really about his complex relationship with his parents.

His upbringing was brutal by today's standards. He lived in a dirt floor shack with a serious leaky roof. His father was a heavy drinker, a frustrated singer and often turned violent. His mother was just as rough and tough, just as apt to hit rather than to hug her only living child. Despite all this, Crowell comes to truly love his parents. He tells us fabulous stories about his parent's parties and his first use of a shotgun, about fiery preachers and lowdown sinners, neighbourhood bullies and epic battles with bows and arrows, and his first kisses and first guitars.

Although he had an awful lot to complain about, this is actually an uplifting book. Rodney Crowell has somehow managed to weather the storm with his dysfunctional family and ended up in in a place of love, respect and appreciation.

"Another Houston Kid. On a downhill skid. For Crying out loud."

Well written, entertaining and emotionally moving. Highly recommended.