Reviews

The Wind Is Not a River

Vancouver author Brian Payton is best known for wilderness-focused non-fiction, such as Shadow of the Bear and The Ice Passage. With The Wind Is Not a River, a tale of love and survival set during ... Read More »

March 13, 2014 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Clyde

By David Helwig

The father of Clyde, the political analyst and title character of David Helwig’s new novel, died in Dieppe and his mother raised him in grim, post-war Ontario, employing a no-frills parenting style that would be ... Read More »

March 13, 2014 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

The Ever After of Ashwin Rao

By Padma Viswanathan

When Air India Flight 182 exploded over the Atlantic Ocean in 1985, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney phoned his counterpart in India to offer his condolences, even though the vast majority of passengers were Canadian. The ... Read More »

March 13, 2014 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

The River Burns

By Trevor Ferguson

In 1984, arson destroyed a 69-year-old covered bridge in the small Quebec town of Wakefield. Many residents mourned the loss of this popular landmark and, in 1997, built a replica with largely volunteer labour and ... Read More »

March 13, 2014 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

This Location of Unknown Possibilities

By Brett Josef Grubisic

We are all constantly writing and revising our own stories, serving as protagonists in the tangled and evolving fictions of our own lives. We narrate our progress, building myths and legends, identifying cruxes and climaxes, ... Read More »

March 13, 2014 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

★ Landing Gear

By Kate Pullinger

In 2009, Kate Pullinger won a Governor General's Literary Award for her historical novel The Mistress of Nothing. Five years later (with a collection of short stories in between), Pullinger proves she can write just ... Read More »

March 10, 2014 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

My Journey

By Olivia Chow

Two memoirs by high-profile Canadian women show just how far ambition and single-mindedness can take a person. My Journey, by New Democratic Party MP Olivia Chow, and Unsinkable, by Olympic rower Silken Laumann, are motivational ... Read More »

March 3, 2014 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography

Sanaaq

By Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk; Peter Frost, trans.

As Bernard Saladin d’Anglure observes in his foreword to Sanaaq, “this is an atypical novel.” Written in Inuktitut over a period of many years beginning in the 1950s, and first published in syllabic script in ... Read More »

February 24, 2014 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Cadillac Cathedral

By Jack Hodgins

In his new novel, Jack Hodgins returns to the Vancouver Island community of Portuguese Creek that served as the setting for earlier books such as Broken Ground and Distance. Here, an unorthodox road trip is ... Read More »

February 20, 2014 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels