RECENTLY REVIEWED
The Penalty Killing
by Michael McKinley
Fans of the Toronto Maple Leafs will find much to relate to in Michael McKinley’s debut sports mystery. The Continental Hockey League stands in for...
Bitter Medicine: A Graphic Memoir of Mental Illness
by Clem Martini and Olivier Martini
In Bitter Medicine, award-winning playwright Clem Martini chronicles his family’s 30-year struggle with schizophrenia, and in so doing reveals a deeply flawed Canadian health care...
Cool Water
by Dianne Warren
The publicity bumpf for Dianne Warren’s first novel compares it to the work of Carol Shields and Miriam Toews, but Thornton Wilder’s Our Town is...
Lonely: Learning to Live with Solitude
by Emily White
In recent years, the memoir has shifted from the tell-all to the personal essay, and from there it has branched out into various forms of...
The Heart Does Break: Canadian Writers on Grief and Mourning
by George Bowering and Jean Baird, eds.
The Heart Does Break was born of paralyzing grief: Jean Baird, struggling with the sudden death of her daughter, Bronwyn, consulted counsellors and psychologists to...
Never More There
by Stephen Rowe
Never More There is Newfoundland-based school teacher Stephen Rowe’s first collection of poems. In many ways, it is a typical debut, featuring poems of family...
Wait Until Late Afternoon
by David Bateman and Hiromi Goto
Like conceptual artwork, Wait Until Late Afternoon, a book-length poem in two voices, requires some contextual explanation before its intent and effect can be fully...
Windstorm
by Joe Denham
B.C.-based fisherman and timber framer Joe Denham caused a stir with his first poetry collection, Flux, in 2003. The book garnered considerable critical acclaim and...
Hot Potatoe: Fine Ahtwerks 2001–2008
by Marc Bell
The most fascinating thing about Marc Bell’s Hot Potatoe is the stream-of-consciousness artistic sensibility that permeates every page, from the cover to the contents to...
Jew and Improved: How Choosing to Be Chosen Made Me a Better Man
by Benjamin Errett
Benjamin Errett’s memoir about his conversion to Judaism upon becoming engaged to a Jewish woman has at its centre a potentially interesting subject, but the...
Toby: A Man
by Todd Babiak
The son of two marginally successful hot dog vendeurs in the Montreal suburb of Dollard-des-Ormeaux, Toby Ménard is the perfect gentleman. So perfect, in fact,...
The Spice Necklace: A Food-lover’s Caribbean Adventure
by Ann Vanderhoof
If there is a common element to travel writing, it is the obsessive quest to capture the authenticity of the cultures and locations being described....
Vancouver Special
by Charles Demers
Vancouver is notoriously difficult to pin down or define. The city is characterized more by its contradictions than by any overarching symbol or mindset: its...
Edible City: Toronto’s Food from Farm to Fork
by Christina Palassio and Alana Wilcox, eds.
Edible City addresses the past, present, and future of food in Toronto. Like its predecessors – uTOpia, GreenTOpia, and HTO – the book is a...
The Best Canadian Essays 2009
by Alex Boyd and Carmine Starnino, eds.
The word “essay” comes from the French verb essayer, which means “to try.” Essays, therefore, should always be considered works in progress. But the 14...
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