Reviews

Blackfly Season

Whodunit: who killed the competition? Answer: Peter Robinson and Giles Blunt, Canada’s most accomplished writers of crime fiction. The two of them constitute a mystery fan’s dream team: Robinson has the plot chops, while Blunt’s ... Read More »

March 21, 2005 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Lines of Truth and Conversation

By Joan Alexander

"There is no heaven on earth. Hope must be devised. Pretend.” So concludes Celia Marx, a wife and mother expressing both her hidden cynic and her risk-taking writer-self in “Home for Lunch,” one of 10 ... Read More »

March 21, 2005 | Filed under: Fiction: Short

Sweetness in the Belly

By Camilla Gibb

In her third novel, Camilla Gibb takes readers to the often overlooked country of Ethiopia. Gibb intertwines a story of exile in Thatcher’s London with a past pious existence in Haile Selassie’s politically unstable Ethiopia ... Read More »

March 21, 2005 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Snow Man

By David Albahari, Ellen Elias-Bursac, trans.

The fourth novel by David Albahari to be translated into English is a meditation on the immeasurable gulf that separates the ideas of exile and refuge. Refugees tend to come en masse, and even away ... Read More »

March 21, 2005 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Rollercoaster: My Hectic Years As Jean Chrétien’s Diplomatic Advisor

By James Bartleman

The trouble with James Bartleman’s new diplomatic memoir is that he has his own tough act to follow. For sheer entertainment value, Rollercoaster can’t compete with his previously published On Six Continents, replete as that ... Read More »

March 14, 2005 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography

The Secret Mitzvah of Lucio Burke

By Steven Hayward

Steven Hayward’s debut novel is a big-hearted fable set in Depression-era Toronto in the enclave of poor Jews and Catholics known as “the Ward.” It begins with a challenge: Bloomberg, the legendary pitcher for the ... Read More »

March 11, 2005 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Three-Day Road

By Joseph Boyden

One of Canada’s great unsung heroes was Francis Pegahmagabow, an Ojibway from the Parry Island (now Wasauksing) band who fought in the First World War. Known under the sobriquet Peggy, he received the Military Medal ... Read More »

March 11, 2005 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Bastardi Puri

By Walid Bitar

The poems in Walid Bitar’s third collection are, as the book’s paradoxical title suggests, pure bastards. The poetics of Bitar, a Lebanese-born Canadian, are characterized by typically postmodern concerns: fractured subjectivity; the malleability of language ... Read More »

March 11, 2005 | Filed under: Poetry

Playing with Matches: Misadventures in Dating

By Amy Cameron

Billed as a companion book for women “who have more experience with recipes for disaster than recipes for romance,” Amy Cameron’s Playing with Matches attempts to capitalize on the impulse to anecdotalize the infamous (but ... Read More »

March 11, 2005 | Filed under: Reference

The Enamoured Knight

By Douglas Glover

Douglas Glover’s extended meditation on Don Quixote, The Enamoured Knight, is simply packed to the brim with marvellous stuff. Not only does he lovingly and with great thoughtfulness delve into the richness of Cervantes’ masterwork, ... Read More »

March 11, 2005 | Filed under: Criticism & Essays

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