BOOK REVIEW / Paperbacks: The Faber Book of Contemporary Canadian Short Stories - ed Michael Ondaatje, pounds 7.99

Eclectic 700-page sampling of recent literature from a country that, in Ondaatje's phrase, is still arriving: all the usual Anglo-Saxon big guns, of course (Atwood, Munro, Shields, Gallant), but also plenty from the immigrant tradition (including Josef Skvorecky and Rohinton Mistry) and, totally unfamiliar to most British readers, the newly confident voices of native Canadians whose culture the pioneering settlers and their descendants so nearly managed to wipe out.