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Justin recommended this book, a marvelously inventive collection of essays. The cover alone is spectacular: a black hardback with three staggered layers of paper slipcover. The largest, in tones of gold shows earth and stone and figures of cowboys and giants, dueling soldiers and ragged refugees. The next is a jungle in shades of green with, among others, Tarzan and an aviator climbing out of a crashed plane. The smallest shows frothy ocean waves with a giant squid and broken-masted ship. Similarly, each essay peels away layers of stories and references to lay bare what's at the heart of things.

Readers of Chabon will be familiar with some of these subjects, such as his passionate defense of genre literature and comics/graphic novels, his appreciation of Sherlock Holmes, the metaphor of the Golem of Prague. Where he takes these subjects may astonish you.

I particularly liked the title essay, which starts as a meditation on Chabon's childhood in Columbia, Maryland. Being a native, I watched this planned city grow from its first idealistic foundations to the city it is today. James Rouse, famous for developing festival marketplaces such as Faneuil Hall in Boston, Pioneer Place in Portland, and Harborplace in Baltimore, had experimented as well with building a small community—not just houses, but a real community—in Baltimore called the Village of Cross Keys. Taking his cue from the influential urban planner Jane Jacobs, Rouse believed that we need cities, not suburbs, and that our urban life is best served by a mixture of public and private spaces, by small clusters of homes, and a heterogeneous population.

The core of Cross Keys is a group of shops surrounding an open plaza, with office space on the second floor. Originally, the shops aimed to include everything you would need: a grocery store, cafe, hotel, clothing stores, a bookstore, and so on. Clusters of homes—some apartments, some rowhomes—are all within easy walking distance. Nowadays, the hotel is still there, but the shops are mostly upscale clothing stores. The grocery couldn't compete with the large chains nearby and the neighborhood grocery store that we had all been going to forever. Talk about everybody knowing your name. My sisters and I had to bus to another neighborhood to buy our feminine hygiene products.

Columbia started out as a large-scale version of Cross Keys. A central mall and office buildings were located by the man-made lake. The town was divided into villages, groups of homes for ten to fifteen thousand people, with a central gathering place and schools. Rouse insisted that a certain percentage of the homes in each village were to be priced for low-income families. He also insisted that Columbia would be racially integrated—no small thing for a town situated between the race-riot hotbeds of Baltimore and Washington in the late Sixties and early Seventies.

Chabon's essay is about the map, Rouse's Plan for Columbia and the other maps that inspired his childhood imaginings. What he found especially seductive were the unfinished parts, the empty spaces, the unexplored territory. It's fascinating to follow Chabon through permutations of this idea.

Columbia hasn't completely fulfilled Rouse's vision, its villages looking more like upscale suburbs, its mall grown to monstrous proportions. But there's time yet. This month, when we have seen dreams start to come true, it's good to remember Rouse and others who have dreamed big dreams.

Tokyo noir. I asked for more workplaces and certainly get one here: vivid descriptions of working the night shift in a factory that makes boxed lunches. Kirino sucks in the reader with detailed descriptions of the inspection process before the employees start work, the smell of the different foodstuffs to be assembled, and the way the line works.

Four women have banded together to support each other and make the line run more efficiently. Their ages and characters vary widely but all struggle in the traps their lives have become, watching their families disintegrate.

At 43, Masako has learned to walk alone, her natural reserve having hardened into an enigmatic shell. Her teenaged son has not spoken for three years, since being expelled from school, and her husband has withdrawn into his own world as well, sleeping in another room and rarely speaking to her. The co-worker who runs the line is Yoshie, a widow in her late fifties, whom they call the Skipper. She is barely scraping by financially, and cares for her rebellious, teenaged daughter and invalid mother-in-law. The descriptions of changing the old woman’s diaper—cloth because Yoshie cannot afford disposable diapers—bring back memories of when my children were babies.

The youngest at 29, Kuniko, is deeply in debt. Never one to postpone gratification, she is overweight and lusts after designer clothes and shoes. As the story begins, her husband takes all their savings and disappears, leaving her with no way to pay off her debts, even if she were inclined to do so. The fourth woman, Yayoi, is 34 and quite lovely. However, the strain of taking care of two small children has driven a wedge between her and her husband, who has fallen for a hostess in a gambling club. When Yayoi discovers that he has gambled away all their savings and complains, he becomes physically abusive.

I’ve rarely encountered such memorable characters. Men don’t come off very well in this book, most of them selfish and greedy, intent on using women as toys that can be abandoned when you get bored. I’ve certainly known my share of irresponsible men, but I don’t think it is a universal trait by any means, nor one necessarily linked to the y-chromosome, so I was relieved to see at least one thoughtful and responsible male character, a young worker at the factory, half-Brazilian and half-Japanese.

Although I often read hard-boiled crime fiction, some of which is pretty gruesome (think: Minette Walters, Dennis Lehane), no book has disturbed me as much as this one. I found that I could not even read it in the evening or my dreams would be simply horrendous. It wasn’t the level of gore that disturbed me; hey, I laughed at the wood chipper in Fargo. No, what horrified me were the psychological changes that the murder caused in all of the characters.

Most mysteries follow the detective who is trying to solve the crime. A few might interpolate a chapter now and then from the evil murderer’s point of view. But Kirino stays almost exclusively with the murderer and the murderer’s accomplices, all of whom react to their first murder and the stress of the police investigation in ways that surprised me. Surprised me? No, they staggered me. I had no idea that the human psyche could go down those paths. Yet, with Kirino leading me by the hand, I found each step completely believable.

I recommend this book with caution. It is a murder mystery like no other.

So why don’t we get more books set in the workplace? Granted, most offices have fewer opportunities for drama than a police station or a hospital, but in the end the same things drive the story: the interactions between a group of people within their environment.

Anyone who has worked in an office knows that there is plenty of material for both drama and comedy. In fact, during a period when I worked in a particularly stressful environment, we joked about what a great sitcom our work lives would make. Each new, absurdly counter-productive move by the management would send us racing to the back parking lot to compare notes on how that particular sitcom episode would develop. Later, when the British series about office life came out, I figured they must have gotten the idea from us.

Here we have a small doctors' office, staffed by two doctors and three employees. Caroline is the receptionist and tells much of the story, alternating with one of the doctors, Hap Markowitz. The other two employees are Alice, the nurse, and Brice, who handles the financials. Caroline calls them “the ABCs”. The other doctor is the recently divorced Will Strub. In the course of the story, the friendships between these five characters develop and shift in unexpected directions. They clearly care for each other, even as they annoy one another.

The book is quite funny, in a dark way. Brice’s love of old movies, Alice’s reinventions of herself, Will’s discovery of religion all lard the storylines with humor. Some of the storylines are very dark indeed, yet the prose is compulsively readable.

At first, I thought this was going to be a chick lit book, something light, in the “Sex and the City” vein perhaps. But it turns out to be much more serious than that and becomes a very interesting exploration of friendship, what we owe to our friends—our work friends, our personal friends—and where we draw the line between our responsibility to them and our responsibility to ourselves. I would love to find more books like this one.

Although I know many people thought this the best book they had read all year, I found it, in a word, boring. My only motivation for continuing to slog through it was that it was my book club’s selection for the month, although in the end I had to miss that particular meeting.

As most people know by now, this is the story of two women in Afghanistan, both of whom we meet as children. Mariam, the product of an affair between a maid and the married master of the house, lives with her mother in Herat and is occasionally visited by her father. After her mother's death, Mariam is married off to Rasheed, a man 30 years her senior who lives in Kabul. Rasheed does not allow her to leave the house unless she is with him and covered by the burqa. When she fails to produce a son, Rasheed becomes even more abusive.

Laila, who lives on the same street as Mariam and Rasheed, is orphaned in her teens when her parents are killed by a bomb. Pregnant and told that her boyfriend has been killed, Laila sees no choice but to accept Rasheed's invitation to become his wife, joining Mariam in the household. After some initial enmity the two women become friends, and Rasheed's abuse extends to Laila as well. I don’t think I’ve given anything away; you can see all of these plot developments coming when the girls are first introduced.

Two things made this story so boring. One is the simplicity of the language. Some books can hold my attention with the sheer beauty of their prose, but this isn't one of them. I admire Hosseini's courage for writing in English, which is not his first language, but the simple sentences and preponderance of one-syllable words hardly constitute a prose style likely to capture the interest of an adult reader. While appropriate for the sections of the book about the women's childhoods, the use of such language to describe their lives as adults further infantilises them. Perhaps this is Hosseini's intent.

The second and more important factor is that the characters are one-dimensional. Abused Woman #1 and Abused Woman #2 passively suffer their fate. I respect that Hosseini is trying to challenge himself by writing about women, but even the male characters—Rasheed, Mariam's father, Laila's boyfriend—have no depth. None of the characters grows or changes in the course of the story. Well, Mariam does eventually befriend Laila and try to protect her, but that does not make Mariam any different from the girl she had been before her marriage. Without character development, the story becomes just one instance of abuse after another. Perhaps if the characters had been presented in more depth, I might have cared about them and cared about their fate. But I didn't.

Michael Chabon in his fascinating collection of essays, Maps and Legends, talks about the dangers involved in creating characters. To make them live, you must confront your fears, reveal deeply hidden secrets, tell the truth. Here, Hosseini views his characters from a distance, moving them around like chesspieces on a board, never truly getting inside their heads.

Of some interest are the details of daily life in Herat and Kabul. However, since the two women spend most of their time imprisoned in the house, such details are few and far between. I'm at a loss to understand why so many people liked this book so much. Maybe if I had known nothing about spousal abuse or the lives of women in fundamentalist societies, I would have found the book more interesting.

On the other hand, perhaps I am expecting too much, wanting literary substance in a popular novel. But the best book they'd read all year? Oh well. This is not the first time that high expectations have ruined a novel for me.

These are the top twelve best books I read in 2008. If I blogged about the book, then I’ve noted the date when I posted the review; please check the archive for a fuller discussion of the book.

1. Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino
8 September 08
Indescribable. You just have to experience it.

2. Averno, by Louise Gluck
Gluck’s lyric meditations on death, often using the myth of Persephone as a way in; deceptively simple language that strikes to the core, the beauty of the natural world, solace and despair commingled. Still too close to these poems to blog about them.

3. The Three-Cornered World (Kusa Makura), by Natsume Soseki
22 September 08
An artist visits a remote mountain resort out of season; beautiful descriptions, thoughtful—and sometimes funny—discussions about life and art. Is solitude necessary for immersion in your art? Is distance necessary for aesthetic appreciation of life?

4. The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, by Kate Summerscale
8 December 08
Fascinating account of a true crime investigation by one of Scotland Yard's first detectives, with illuminating social context about Victorian England.

5. The Book of Ebenezer Le Page, by G.B. Edwards
31 March 08
Fictional first-person narrative of life on Guernsey in the beginning of the 20th century; a character and a voice that stay with you.

6. The Lost Upland, by W.S. Merwin
12 May 08
Three stories set in the rural uplands of France with their limestone outcroppings, sheep pastures, and vineyards; gorgeous language, flawed and funny characters, the sadness of an ancient way of life disappearing.

7. The Gathering, by Anne Enright
13 October 08
A peculiarly affecting story of an Irish family; fiction rarely feels this real.

8. The Untouchable, by John Banville
11 February 08
Fictional retelling of the story of Anthony Blunt, one of the Cambridge spies; devotion, betrayal, the quest for authenticity—it's all here.

9. True Confessions, by John Gregory Dunne
A classic crime story—can't imagine why I'd never read it before; it has the qualities that later made Chinatown such a great film.

10. After, by Marita Golden
Will change the way you think about race, cities, police. One of the most honest books I've ever read. Just as good on this second read for my book club.

11. The Lighthouse, by P.D. James
2 June 08
Further investigations by Commander Dalgleish, this time on a small island off the coast of Cornwall that has been turned into an exclusive resort; an intelligent read, with allusions to lighthouses and small islands to delight the reader.

12. The Darling, by Russell Banks
A woman's life, from Weather Underground to Liberia to a farm in upstate NY; I especially appreciated the parts set in Liberia and the understanding of its past and complex present that I gained from this book.

A good corrective to last week's Lost Highway with its almost-too-close-for-comfort point of view. Here, the point of view is about as remote as you can get and still be close third person (i.e., following a particular character). The tone is distant and impersonal, as though the events were being observed from a high mountaintop.

Each of the four sections of the book features a different set of people, all from the same family. The first part, set in Saskatchewan, covers twenty years in lives of Margaret and Davis, starting from their meeting in 1933. Davis has just emigrated from Scotland and is working his way across Canada. In Regina, he falls ill and meets Margaret, who is a nurse in the town's small clinic. Although she grew up on a farm and he in a fishing family, they share a love of books and language. Their meeting changes their lives as both let go of their dreams and settle down on a farm. We alternate between the two seamlessly as their relationship and marriage mature.

The second part follows their daughter, Hilda, as she moves from Saskatchewan to Toronto. Hilda's daughter, Danielle, is the focus of the third part, which covers her childhood in Toronto and young adulthood in Paris. Then the focus shifts to Osman, a man she meets there who is half Turkish and half English. The fourth and last part follows Sophie and Sasha, Danielle's children.

Each part is self-contained. While some of the distance comes from the tone of the book, it is also a result of these separate novelettes. We move fairly quickly through time and space: the book covers the years from 1933 to 1991 and shifts from Regina to Toronto to Paris to London, back to Paris and then to New York.

I felt that I did not have the leisure to get to know the characters the way I would have liked, but the overview approach has its advantages. I remember liking Western Civ in college. At least a dozen times in each hour-long lecture, our professor would say, “And now we see on the horizon . . . “ The course, though superficial in many ways, gave me an overall timeline, a structure in which to fit my later, more in-depth readings.

Similarly, this book, by covering four generations in a little over 250 pages gives a sense of what is gained and lost by a family's multiple emigrations that complements the more in-depth explorations of the emigrant experience by authors such as Michael Ondaatje and Jhumpa Lahiri. Although I always find it a little sad to read a compressed version of someone’s life—I feel that so much of what made that life worthwhile is missing, and death comes so soon—I enjoyed this book.

I had a difficult time getting into this book, but I stuck with it because I have liked Richards's books in the past. The opening confused me and required several readings before I could move on. Eventually I realised that the book is written in a point of view that is even closer than close third person.

A quick recap of point of view (POV) may be in order. In first person POV the main character narrates the story: “I opened the refrigerator door, but didn’t see anything I wanted to eat.” Rarely used and difficult to sustain is second person POV: “So you go to the store, and you stand there staring at the ready-to-eat display, slavering over the Fettucini Alfredo and roast beef with gravy.” In third person POV the story is told by an anonymous narrator: “Her doctor had put her on a low-fat diet to bring down her cholesterol.” Third person is the most commonly used POV, and there are several variations. In third person omniscient, the narrator knows what is going on in every character’s mind and provides commentary on the action. In third person limited, the narrator sticks with a single character but still summarizes and provides background information; the narrator can also shift between multiple characters (often done, but difficult to do well). In close third person, the narrator knows only what a particular character knows, sees only what that character sees; while describing events through the character’s consciousness; however, the story is told in the narrator’s voice.

Here, Richards takes close third person a step further. Each section of the book is written as though the featured character himself were writing it, so that we get events filtered through his mindset and described in his voice.

The story opens in rural New Brunswick with Burton Tucker, a brain-damaged man who runs a failing convenience store. We experience life as Burton sees it, so no wonder I found the beginning confusing. Bewildered and forgetful as he is, Burton believes that he has sold a winning lottery ticket worth thirteen million dollars to Jim Chapman, a local man whose construction company has gone bankrupt.

Burton mentions this to Alex Chapman, Jim’s middle-aged great-nephew. Initially planning to be a priest, Alex went off to seminary but became disillusioned. At university, he had some success but left just as he was about to receive tenure and returned home. I was dismayed at first by the tirades about corrupt priests and seminarians, phony (but politically correct) professors and students, and ignorant friends and neighbors. However, I finally realised that these are Alex's views. He thinks everyone else is as ineffectual and dishonest as he himself is. At least I hope that’s true. I’d hate to think that these are Richards’s opinions and voice.

Upon his return he lives with his great-uncle. The two Chapmans are locked in an endless battle, and eventually Jim throws Alex out. Living in a shack, mooning over his high school girlfriend who is married, Alex is sure that she still loves him and that the money from the winning lottery ticket would bring her back to him. One of his high school tormentors who has since become a friend, Leo Bourque, gets wind of Alex’s scheme and demands a share. The two clash over right and wrong, predestination and free will, life and death.

Alex reminds me of Wade Whitehouse in Russell Banks's Affliction. Living in a trailer in rural New Hampshire, working as a well-driller, snowplow operator and part-time town cop, Wade sees his life gradually disintegrate even as he tries to turn it around. He is fighting on all fronts: plowing the relentless snow, worrying about money, battling his ex-wife for more time with his daughter. His great chance comes when he believes he has uncovered a web of corruption in his town. Like Alex, he has great schemes and great dreams and can't understand why nothing works out for him.

However, Wade engaged my sympathy in a way that Alex never did. Perhaps this is the danger inherent in forcing the reader to spend so much time in the head of an unpleasant, egotistical, obtuse character whose life is spiralling out of control. Much as I admired Richards's skill in crafting this unusual point of view, I didn't settle down and enjoy myself until we got to Markus Paul, the First Nations policeman with a rational and logical mind, who is investigating a local murder. On the other hand, the relentless darkness and ruination do serve to highlight the rare good and unselfish act.

There is much to like here. The ever-changing relationship betwen Alex and Leo is very well done, full of surprising insight and unexpected turns. And Richards always excels when exploring the effects of poverty and the unforeseen things it can lead you to do.

This remarkable novel is a mystery like no other I’ve read. There is a crime, to be sure, but we know who did it and more or less why. Swan ignores the conventions of the mystery genre and instead explores the effects of the crime on the inhabitants of the small town where it occurred. While moving forward in time linearly for the most part, each chapter is told from the perspective of a different character: the father as a child hiding in a tree, the mother telling of her children’s births, the doctor who treated one of the girls, the playmate of the other, the girls themselves.

Longtime readers of this blog will know that I am not a fan of narratives with multiple points of view. Perhaps I am simply becoming a crotchety curmudgeon, preferring the sustained 19th century narratives—my first favorite reading—to the frenetic jump-cutting of some modern novels. And it’s true: I prefer to have only one window open at a time on the computer, and cannot stand the little commercials that have started popping up in the corner of the television screen over the last few years. Perhaps I’m too easily distracted, or too linear a thinker.

I prefer to believe, though, that it’s just a very difficult task, writing multiple points of view, and most writers who try just aren’t up to the challenge. Some, though not all, are successful when alternating chapters between the perspectives of two or three characters. Even then, the stronger narratives employ these changes in succession rather than going back and forth with each chapter. Worst of all is when we jump from one character’s head to another within a single scene.

Here, each chapter stays with a single character. Although I found it a little confusing at first, the quality of writing was such that it was worth making the effort to reorient myself at the beginning of each chapter. Swan uses little imagery, relying instead on the things of this world to take us into the lives of these people living, first in England at the end of the 19th century, and then in a small town in Canada. We inhabit each character, whether it is a little boy sneaking out of the house before dawn and walking through the sleeping town, a woman watching the image appear the first time she develops a photograph, or a man gradually growing more inebriated as he sits over a long dinner with other men of the town trying to make sense of the events that have engulfed them.

Turning the last page, I was startled to realise how invested I had become in these people and their town. Even such short accounts bring out the depth of emotion, the reality of these lives. Together they make up a mosaic reflecting our fractured reality, our distinct perceptions and personal filters. Just as individuals must function within the web of society, so these stories together reveal the cumulative effects of this crime and its aftermath and left me thinking about the lasting effects of a single incident. There are many turning points here, often small events in themselves—decisions made, undeserved hardships endured—that gradually shape these lives. I don’t believe in fate, but I do believe that we are changed and molded, even our very brain chemistry altered, by the happenings large and small that make up our histories.

What a fascinating book! Summerscale relates the events leading up to and following a true crime, the murder of a child in Road Hill House in June of 1860. The Road Hill murder captured the public's imagination, as did Jon-Benet Ramsey's murder more recently. During the decade previous to the Road Hill murder, the number of newspapers had multiplied at an astonishing rate, going from 700 in 1855 to 1,100 in 1860. Domestic killings had become popular fodder—even then, apparently, “if it bleeds, it leads”—and the Road Hill murder, with its twists and turns, took over the headlines.

One of the best things about this book is the way it puts the details of the case into the cultural context of Victorian English society. For example, it was only in the 19th century that the home of the nuclear family became a “sacred space”, a secure refuge that should not be violated by public scrutiny or by government aggression. Every home a castle, in other words. One newspaper of the time even compared this tradition to a castle’s moat. I wonder if this cultural change could be related to the concurrent proliferation of newspapers with their daily fare of sex and violence.

Among others, Charles Dickens was fascinated by the case. He believed, as did the local police and a majority of the public, that Samuel Kent, the father, and Elizabeth Gough, the nursemaid, were responsible. The popular scenario held that three-year-old Saville must have woken in the night to see the two engaged in, er, inappropriate behavior, and was killed to keep him from telling anyone.

Summerscale enables us to follow the case along with the police and public. She gives us the clues, the interviews, the photographs of the major players, extracts of newspaper articles. She includes drawings of the layout of the house and yard, just as the papers of the day did, exposing that private space and the family’s private actions to public view. We learn about the history of the Kents, that the second Mrs. Kent, Saville’s mother, had been governess to her four stepchildren during Mr. Kent’s first marriage, to a woman said to be insane. Jane Eyre had been published 13 years earlier, in 1847.

The man named to investigate the murder was Jack Whicher, one of the eight men selected for the first detective unit to be set up in England. These men, making up their methods as they went along, thrilled the public with their exploits and became the models for Wilkie Collins's Sgt. Cuff in The Moonstone and Dickens’s Inspector Bucket in Bleak House. Whicher himself was well-known as a quiet, shrewd, and successful detective. He later played a significant role in the case of the Tichborne Claimant.

Assigned to the case over two weeks after the murder, Whicher found himself at odds with the local police. Not only did they refuse to cooperate with the London detective, but during the intervening weeks, they had lost important clues and allowed themselves to be hoodwinked by the Kent family. For example, on the night after the murder’s discovery, the policemen assigned to stay in Road Hill House and prevent the family from tampering with clues spent the night locked in the kitchen by Mr. Kent, a fact they later tried to cover up.

Whicher’s investigation was also hampered by public pressure when he arrested someone other than the nursemaid, Gough, for the crime. Knowing who has committed a crime and proving it are two different things, of course, and this crime, like so many in our day, was tried not only in the courtroom but in the press and the pubs and the breakfast rooms. Summerscale’s book gives us a resolution of sorts, but doubts remain as to what really happened on that June night.

The Road Hill murder inspired many early English detective stories: The Moonstone and The Mystery of Edwin Drood, as well as The Turn of the Screw and Charlotte Yonge's The Trial. Only a few years earlier, in 1849, the first English detective story had appeared, so the genre was still in its infancy. I highly recommend this true story of the origins of the English detective story.

Every year I collect the songs I’ve been listening to over and over in a playlist. Here is this year’s:

Working Class Hero, John Lennon
Working Poor, David Francey
Workhouse Boy, Sweet Felons All
Pretty Polly, Orange Line Special
Long Black Veil, The Band
Hard Steel Mill, David Francey
A Thousand Miles, David Francey
Long Way Home, David Francey
Hills/Mulqueen's, Nightingale
Regain/Psalm of Life/Plant un Chou, Nightingale
The Waiting Game/Raze, Nightingale
La Belle Rose, Nightingale
Three Pieces By O'Carolan, John Renbourn
The Lady and the Unicorn, John Renbourn
William Taylor, John Roberts & Tony Barrand
Brigg Fair, John Roberts & Tony Barrand
The Maid of the Mill, Jinky Wells
The Pleasant Month Of May, Sam Larner
John Barleycorn, Tim Radford
The Painful Plough, Finest Kind
The Orphan/Through the Grapevine, Elvie Miller & Naomi Morse
Honeysuckle Cottage, Band Of Friends
Whiskey Before Dinner, Band Of Friends
Farewell to Whiskey, Rhythm Rollers
Precious Staggering Blues, Precious Bryant
A Song For Sheryl/David's Air/Rorate Coeli/I Long For Thy Virginitie, Waverley Station
Waiting For Jim, Waverley Station
Calum Sgaire, Alasdair Fraser
A New Beginning, Bare Necessities
The Star Of The County Down, Walt Michael & Company
John Of Dreams, Walt Michael & Company
Fanny Power, Walt Michael & Company
Ashokan Farewell, Walt Michael & Company
Botany Bay, Kate Rusby
Urge for Going, Tom Rush
Moon On The Water, Aengus Finnan
The Black Isle, Becky Tracy