Hockey Book Reviews.com

Canada Reads has announced its list of books and panelists for the upcoming competition in 2009. Canada Reads is a CBC radio annual contest where they determine one book each year that every Canadian supposedly will enjoy. In 2008, a hockey book, of sorts, won. Paul Quarrington's King Leary , defended in the competition by hockey writer/musician Dave Bidini, is a novel about a legendary retired ice hockey player living in a nursing home. The novel replays his life in flash backs as he journeys to Toronto to record a ginger ale commercial. Past winners include Lullabies for Little Criminals by Heather O'Neill, A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews, Rockbound by Frank Parker Day, The Last Crossing by Guy Vanderhaeghe, Next Episode by Jean-Louis Major, In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Odaatje. Quarrington's book was the first hockey book ever nominated in 7 years of this competition. No hockey books were nominated for the 2009 competition. Instead, we will find a winne...

I am pleased to tell you, the winner of the 2008 Canada Reads has been announced, and it is Paul Quarrington’s King Leary ! Percival Leary was once the King of the Ice, one of hockey’s greatest heroes. Now, in the South Grouse Nursing Home, where he shares a room with Edmund “Blue” Hermann, the antagonistic and alcoholic reporter who once chronicled his career, Leary looks back on his tumultuous life and times: his days at the boys’ reformatory when he burned down a house; the four mad monks who first taught him to play hockey; and the time he executed the perfect “St. Louis Whirlygig” to score the winning goal in the 1919 Stanley Cup final. Now all but forgotten, Leary is only a legend in his own mind until a high-powered advertising agency decides to feature him in a series of ginger ale commercials. With his male nurse, his son, and the irrepressible Blue, Leary sets off for Toronto on one last adventure as he revisits the scenes of his glorious life as King of the Ice. King L...