Gaétan Soucy, The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches, 1998

A deliberately difficult book to form any kind of mental dialogue with, its talkative narrator being a nameless teenage girl whose weird father dies in the first paragraph. With her and her brother never having been beyond the boundaries of their home, her perspective is particularly unique and discomfiting when she becomes forced to deal with the outside world. She also has a gender identity problem, and this is totally embedded into her narrative to the extent that the reader also becomes unsure, and from there the nightmare gets progressively worse. An impressive, disturbing and cunningly told story, with very menacing undercurrents.  PY

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Andrew Kaufman, All my Friends are Superheroes, 2005

Tom is the only normal person he knows: everyone else has one superpower which defines their lives, such as his wife, the Perfectionist, to whom he becomes invisible on their wedding night thanks to Hypno, her hypnotist ex-lover. She thinks Tom has abandoned her, but six months later on a flight from Toronto to Vancouver he has to figure out how he can finally make her see him again. This book is a very neat idea that with poor editing could have sprawled all over the place, but instead it’s tightly put together, just the right length for the kind of literate surrealist fantasy that it is. Not laugh-out-loud funny though the off-beat humour works in an intelligent Being John Malkovich kind of way, and I’d recommend this to any number of people who admire ambitious books that aren’t also self-consciously smug about their own cleverness.   PY

Velma Wallis, Two Old Women, 1993

A long and graceful retelling of an Athabaskan legend of two old women, Ch’idzigyaak and Sa’, who are abandoned by their tribe and left to fend for themselves in the Alaskan wilderness. Velma Wallis, an Athabaskan herself, has kept to straightforward traditional storytelling even though this is a centuries-old, octogenarian version of Thelma and Louise.   PY

•  Two Old Women won the 1993 Western States Book Award.