So here's the first terrific novel of 2010: The Amazing Absorbing Boy (Knopf Canada) by Rabindranath Maharaj.

Our narrator is Samuel, a comic book-loving Trinidadian teenager who leaves his home after the death of his mother and moves to Canada to live with his distant father in the Toronto neighbourhood of Regent Park.

It's a classic outsider-looking-in story as young Samuel tries to make sense of his new surroundings. Along the way, he encounters a panoply of eccentric and vivid characters: a junk store owner, some conspiracy theorists, a half-mad cab driver and a fetching Cuban refugee with tattoos.

Samuel is a keen observer with a splendid imagination, and Marahaj reminds his readers how remarkable the mundane and overlooked can really be when seen afresh. The author holds up a mirror so that urban Canadians, not just Torontonians, can see themselves as others do.

It's also very funny, as in the scenes in which Samuel's Uncle Boysie comes for a visit from Trinidad ("I glanced at his fur coat and hat and prepared for the worst").

Despite his loneliness and inexperience, Samuel makes a home in this "big mall of a country" where the squirrels "walk around as if they were not afraid of a single soul."

The Amazing Absorbing Boy is a great mix of commentary, sentiment, humour, charm, play and storytelling.

. . .

Deloume Road (Knopf Canada) is the first novel from the much-traveled writer Matthew Hooton. It shows promise with lots of luscious language in its leisurely paced pages.

Hooton really captures the heat of late summer with its lazy afternoons: even the people who work for a living - a butcher, a painter, a farmer - don't seem to do all that much.

Amid the buzzing dragonflies and drooping flowers we get a portrait of a community of sorts in rural Vancouver Island, less of a town than people in houses off a country road.

Each of the characters has a different story to tell, and Hooton shifts between points of view, from teenage boys to a recent widow. People miscommunicate and fail to understand each other. Not much happens, but that's OK...

...until the last few pages. Then the author wraps things up too quickly and includes a scene of such grotesqueness that it undermines whatever he accomplished in the earlier pages. It's a unnecessarily jarring conclusion that seems like it belongs to a different book.