This is an article that focuses on the publication of several books in Canada as of October 4, 2004. So writes an elderly Giacomo Casanova to a friend in Susan Swan's new novel, What Casanova Told Me. From Swan's Puritan girl on the run from an arranged marriage to the middle-aged protagonist of Richard Wright's Adultery, Michael Winter's expat painter in The Big Why, the pet owners in Helen Humphreys' Wild Dogs and--above all--the precocious girl geniuses in Paul Anderson's Hunger's Brides, they all kick hard against the traces. And now, with All That Matters, Choy has returned to familiar territory. This time the fictional child looking back is the Chen family's First Son, Kiam-Kim, older brother to the children of The Jade Peony. Winter's previous novel, This All Happened, featured an author working on a historical novel about Kent, who left New York for Newfoundland in 1914. There's heat aplenty in Helen Humphreys' fourth novel, Wild Dogs, despite its occasionally choppy 185 pages.