April 3, 2024 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels, Reviews
In his genre-bending debut novel, Dayspring, Toronto writer Anthony Oliveira has crafted a truly one-of-a-kind depiction of the life of Jesus Christ – reimagined from the perspective of the apostle John, described in the Bible ... Read More »
To explain the plot of Elaine McCluskey’s The Gift Child is both to give everything away and to reveal nothing important. Although the novel does, in the words of its narrator Harriett Swim, take us ... Read More »
March 20, 2024 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels, Reviews
Eynhallow, one of the smaller Orkney Islands, is a rugged, inhospitable place. Seventy-five hectares in size, it is a mere speck in the North Atlantic, now preserved as a bird sanctuary. As Toronto writer Tim ... Read More »
March 13, 2024 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels
Interesting Facts about Space, the sophomore novel from Emily Austin (Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead), orbits Enid, an information architect at the Canadian Space Agency, who – true to the book’s title ... Read More »
February 28, 2024 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels, Reviews
At first glance, the valley is inviting, deeply so. Verdant with orchards and vineyards that overlook a lake, and situated in a leisurely era before cellphones, Instagram Stories, and overtourism, the unnamed region appears idyllic, ... Read More »
February 21, 2024 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels, Reviews
Cold, the chilling new thriller from prolific Ojibway writer Drew Hayden Taylor, begins with a plane crash. Journalist Fabiola Halan, one of two passengers in a Cessna piloted by Merle Thompson, is on a press ... Read More »
January 17, 2024 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels, Reviews
With Apparitions, Saskatoon writer and Deaf awareness advocate Adam Pottle (Voice: Adam Pottle on Writing with Deafness) has crafted perhaps the most unsettling novel of the year, an account of violence and despair, isolation and ... Read More »
December 13, 2023 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels, Reviews
Brandon Reid’s debut novel Beautiful Beautiful centres around 12-year-old Derik Mormin, who is Heiltsuk through his father and English through his mother. After living in the city for all of his life, he is detached ... Read More »
December 13, 2023 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels, Reviews
The pitch for an article on “demystifying the writing process” that I received in my email within days of reading The Cobra and the Key was the kind of odd, grandiosely worded missive you might ... Read More »
December 13, 2023 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels, Reviews
“Our creative process was born there, in the bottom of garbage cans our parents emptied so that we could sit quietly, observing the world and putting it into words,” writes Caroline Dawson in an autobiographical ... Read More »
December 13, 2023 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels, Reviews