March 13, 2024 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels
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 »
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
Anne Michaels’s new novel opens on a battlefield in France in 1917, as John lies wounded in the snow. The dozens of short passages, some as concise as two words (“Memory seeping”), capture John’s experience, ... Read More »
November 15, 2023 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels, Reviews
Marie-Claire Blais first appeared on the literary landscape fully formed at the age of 20; her debut, La Belle Bête (translated into English as Mad Shadows), caused a furor in her home province of Quebec. ... Read More »
October 18, 2023 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels, Reviews