More Summer Reading

Shortlisted for the Howard O'Hagan Award for Short Fiction, Boundaries is a collection of short fiction with an eclectic cast of people and places. The inhabitants of QueAng-QueAng; the wise Shultz and his companions; Tommy Joe, a Texan robber and Lorne, his Canadian accomplice - these are but a few vignettes of Robert Rawdon Wilson's personal and fantastic portraits about human desires and responses.

The Mackin Charm
Jack Hodgins
McClelland and Stewart
272 pp.; paperback; $16.99
ISBN 0-7710-4196-9

By the author of the national bestseller Broken Ground comes The Mackin Charm. Rusty Mackin dreams of escaping the confines of rural Vancouver Island for a film career in Hollywood -- but he has to escape his overbearing, large family first. As we meet each member of the Mackin clan at a family member's funeral, we listen to the stories of friends, family and neighbours. Rusty grows more restless but as the new day dawns he confronts uneasy secrets within his heart.

Notes from the Hyena's Belly: Memories of my Ethiopian Boyhood
Nega Mezleka
Penguin Canada
256 pp.; paperback; $25.00
ISBN 0-14-028582-2

Nega Mezlekia is a Canadian of Ethiopian birth who recounts the struggles of his early life in Africa in Notes from the Hyena's Belly. He was a child and young man in Ethiopia during the communist reign of Junta which followed the fall of Emporer Haile Selassie. Both an autobiography and historic account of those tumultuous years, Mezlekia tells of the brutal mass slaughters of Ethiopian youths, the murder of his mother by snipers, and the execution of his father. Mezlekia himself was imprisoned and repeatedly tortured, forced to join a guerilla army at the age of 18. Now an engineer in Toronto, Mezlekia fled Ethiopia in the 1980's via the Netherlands.

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