Review: Nova Scotia is often lumped together in guidebooks with its neighbours, Canada's other Maritime provinces: New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland and Labrador. Orkin makes a compelling case for Canada's second smallest province, where more Gaelic is spoken than in Scotland, and where you're as likely to spot a whale as a black bear.

He punctuates generic guidebook information (history, geography, where to stay and what to do) with lively fact boxes on the region's quirky diversity, such as the history of the lobster-peg industry, or an account of the arrival, in 1899, of the province's first car.

The guide includes plenty of maps and up-to-date information on how to spend a holiday in Nova Scotia – unless, like Orkin, you are so taken with the place that you end up buying a house and moving your family there.

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I'm not sure that Joshua Ferris's new novel The Unnamed, good though it is – at times, very good – is the novel someone should pick up during these days of sub-zero temperatures and cloudy misery. That goes doubly so for fans of Ferris's excellent first novel from 2007.

The sublimely comic and caustic Then We Came to the End. Ferris's The Unnamed is a bleak if fascinating read, more reminiscent in mood and tone of Cormac McCarthy's The Road than Ferris's National Book Award-nominated debut. If your life is going along swimmingly and you love winter, then this book's for you.

If not, be warned.The "unnamed" of the title is a very strange malady afflicting Tim Farnsworth and, by extension, his wife, Jane, and daughter, Becka. At any moment, whatever he is doing at the time, Tim will get up and begin walking.

He can't stop himself. He will walk and walk for kilometres and kilometres until he is overcome by exhaustion, collapses and goes to sleep, resembling more a homeless person than the wealthy law partner he is.Back at the spacious family home, Jane will await his phone call to come and fetch him.

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There has been a vogue in the past few years for writing books about years. Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s is the latest contribution to the genre.

He somewhat defeats the object at the very start by pointing out, quite correctly, that many of the parts of the world about which he writes would not have considered the year to be 1492 in any case; and he might have added that in our own country the year would not have begun until March 25.

The book is a general history of around about that time. Indeed, by the end of it, one is not sure how much of it was directly to do with 1492. This is not to say the book proceeds under false pretences; but anyone who buys it to learn what was going on in much of the world during that year will be disappointed.

The event everyone remembers about 1492 is that it is supposed to be the year America was discovered; though the author has already written a book about the man who had a better claim to having done that, Amerigo Vespucci.

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Modern day horror stories seem required to contain a healthy dose of gore and detached limbs, so it’s a pleasure to encounter a tale that depends solely on the tension of a setting to provide the chills. British author Sarah Waters’ latest novel, The Little Stranger, mounts a convincingly terrifying case as to why one should not live in a rambling, dilapidated old estate. Set in 1949 England, in a small countryside town, Hundreds Hall is home to the last of the landed gentry, who’ve lost all their money and are managing to survive by selling off family heirlooms and shutting off wings in their ancient abode. The local doctor, Farraday, also the narrator, is called out to attend to one of the two servants left and becomes entwined with the family, the Ayreses, as he recalls how his parents worked as servants themselves at Hundreds. The owners, a family composed of fading beauty Mrs. Ayres, hearty daughter Caroline and war-wounded son Roderick, all seem to be on the verge of something…something not good. Farraday describes the ghostly incidents and psychological horrors that follow with a tense mix of scientific distance and a yearning, unaware desire to be one of them, one of the aristocrats. The Little Stranger is a book about ordinary life and Waters’ deftly lulls you into a sense of security, so the frightening moments become ever more magnified.
 

On the eve of their Silver Anniversary, Mary Gooch is waiting for her husband Jimmy--still every inch the handsome star athlete he was in high school--to come home. As night turns to day, it becomes frighteningly clear to Mary that he is gone. Through the years, disappointment and worry have brought Mary's life to a standstill, and she has let her universe shrink to the well-worn path from the bedroom to the refrigerator. But her husband's disappearance startles her out of her inertia, and she begins a desperate search.

For the first time in her life, she boards a plane and flies across the country to find her lost husband. So used to hiding from the world, Mary finds that in the bright sun and broad vistas of California, she is forced to look up from the pavement. And what she finds fills her with inner strength she's never felt before. Through it all, Mary not only finds kindred spirits, but reunites with a more intimate stranger no longer sequestered by fear and habit: herself.

In her excellent recent essay, “Shakespeare’s Daughters”, Rachel Cusk bemoans that novels about home life are still considered inferior to those tackling supposedly weightier matters like war, and calls on those who fictionalise “domesticity and motherhood and family life” to champion their subject with renewed honesty. Lisa Moore’s February is a glowing example of just how ably this may be done.

Centred around a real event – the sinking of an oil rig off the coast of Newfoundland in 1982 – February is the story of how one family is affected, immediately after the tragedy and 20 years on. The novel is recounted mainly from the point of view of Helen, who becomes a widow when the Ocean Ranger goes down.

She is left, not only without her beloved husband, but with the continuing responsibility of bringing up their three small children while pregnant with a fourth. Her voice is set against that of her eldest child, John, who calls his mother as the story begins, 25 years on from the death of his father and on the brink of having a child himself. In this, as in all aspects of her novel, Moore explodes opposites against each other, revealing unexpected truths.

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A  fair-minded man, T. Jefferson Parker gives Second Amendment zealots a full voice in this artful and frightening thriller about gun trafficking on America's southern border.

Newshounds know that the Mexican drug-cartel violence spilling over into Texas, California and Arizona -- assassinations, large-scale home invasions -- is carried out with firearms made and sold in the United States, usually legally.

Thousands of Mexicans have died at the hands of the cartels, many of them judges and law enforcement officials, some women and children.

A typical American gun dealer in "Iron River" refuses to accept any blame, however: "I sell a legal product for self-defense," one says.

"I sell to people who pass the background and have legal ID. I can't control what happens later. . . . Those animals down there are the killing machines, not the guns.

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Joshua Ferris’s first novel, Then We Came to the End, won rave reviews through its artful and humorous look at office life. The book was honored with the PEN/Hemingway Award, and announced the arrival of a fresh, young talent on the scene.

Most writers would be tempted to follow such a success with a similar recipe for their second novel. But not Ferris, who decided that, instead of tinkering with the formula, he ought to turn it upside down. In The Unnamed, his follow-up effort, he presents a dark, unsettling personal tragedy that is a world away from the élan of his award-winning debut book.

Tim Farnsworth has a peculiar medical affliction, one that is so rare that it lacks even a name. He periodically experiences an irresistible urge to walk… and walk and walk, until he collapses from exhaustion.

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In Cat the Cat's friendly world, names are an uncomplicated affair, most of the time. This early reader pictures Cat, an irrepressible kitty in a purple dress, skipping and cartwheeling to greet pals like Mouse the Mouse and Fish the Fish. All is well until Cat meets a chartreuse creature with eyestalks, a blue tongue, four arms, and three legs. She skids to a halt and her tail electrifies.

The individual, unrecognizable but clearly amiable, stops stacking blocks to say, “Blarggie! Blarggie!” This time Cat's initial response to the repeated question, “Cat the Cat, who is that?” is “I have no idea,” but Cat finally decides this might be “a new friend!” and responds with a bouncy “Blarggie!” of her own.

Willems provides just enough humor and surprise to entertain youngest audiences and subtly suggests some future reading: Duck the Duck cradles a Pigeon doll, and in a second book being released simultaneously—Let's Say Hi to Friends Who Fly!—another character rides a Pigeon playground toy. Cat could become another favorite; her personality sparkles in expansive gestures and gleeful interactions.

Along comes the second post-apocalyptic tale to hit UK cinemas in the last month, and the critics have got this one pegged as the poor relation of John Hillcoat's The Road, which arrived first and is likely to stand the test of time rather better. Despite some excellent cinematography and a stylish, sepia-toned vision of America in the wake of nuclear devastation, The Book of Eli is hampered by faith-based sermonising and at least two ham-fisted final act twists, which most viewers will have spotted coming a mile off.

The Hughes brothers, of Menace II Society and From Hell fame, are in charge here, with Denzel Washington as Eli, a powerful desert warrior on a journey to the west coast with a not-so-mysterious tome in his possession.

The landscape he must travel through is populated by the dregs of civilisation: a wild, wild west inhabited by cannibals and murderers, who our hero ably dispatches with consummate martial arts expertise. After approaching a makeshift settlement in the hope of finding fresh water, Eli is captured by the avaricious Carnegie (Gary Oldman), the rickety old town's self-appointed leader, who attempts to take the book, which he believes will give him great power.

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