The Best Laid Plans by Terry Fallis

Canada has a long history of satire. Canada has produced more than its fair share of satirists and comedians although most have to travel to the US to find an audience. Ditto comedy and satire writers. A few years ago, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, canceled  Snakes and Ladders, a political comedy set on Parliament Hill that had found an audience (which usually means CBC will cancel it immediately in favour of a multicultural sitcom set in suburban Toronto). But first-time novelist Terry Fallis knew there was an audience for Canadian political satire and decided to write The Best Laid Plans. But after failing to find a publisher he self-published it through iUniverse.
Fallis then submitted his own book to the judges of the prestigious Canadian literary award the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour. And this week, The Best Laid Plans won the $10,000 prize, beating out such A-list authors as Will Ferguson and Douglas Coupland. Read the review here.

The Journey Home by Dermot Bolger

The Great Books List has a hatfull of Irish writers and most wrote about their homeland and what is meant to be Irish. But that Ireland has gone. Dermot Bolger brings the bad news to America some 18 years after his novel The Journey Home was first published in Britain. According to this week's New York Times the difficulty Bolger has had finding an American audience may be related to the big problem bedeviling the young suburban Dubliners of “The Journey Home”: they can’t get a grip on what it means to be Irish anymore. Read the review here.

Dancer and the Thief by Antonio Skarmeta

In movies there are tales of sexy safecrackers and wisecracking Vegas looters every season. Yet in the written world, thievery is a rare motor to run a novel on. Who knows why? When a counterexample as entertaining and fleet-footed as Antonio Skármeta's Dancer and the Thief comes along, you wonder whether literature could do well by catching up with its take on taking.

The story begins the 20-year-old Ángel Santiago, a romantic and near-virgin, and the sixtysomething Vergara Gray, famous gentleman thief being released from a Chilean jail. Ángel has been given the plans for a brilliant robbery of one of the ministers who profited during the time of Pinochet, and it is his task over the bulk of the novel to convince Vergara Gray to be his partner in the job. Read the review here.

Any novel that can push everyday politics off the news pages is both unusual and welcome, but if the book is itself a political novel, it may belong there. The Ghost, by Robert Harris, is a political novel and a half, by an author whose first career was writing about politics before he turned to popular fiction

In the novel, a recently retired British prime minister hires a ghostwriter—the nameless narrator of the title—to turn his dreary memoirs into something publishable. This politician, Adam Lang, is a slick performer, but things went awry when he took his country into a disastrous Middle Eastern war, and he is now being denounced as a war criminal. Sound familiar? Read the full review here.