July 26, 2023 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels, Reviews
Near the end of Christine Higdon’s evocative and provocative novel Gin, Turpentine, Pennyroyal, Rue, Isla McKenzie wonders how different things will be for the next generation, who “could live through the twentieth century, and even ... Read More »
In his memoir Brown Boy, journalist, lawyer, and recent Radcliffe Fellow Omer Aziz delivers a compelling account about growing up in Canada, struggling to find his way in life as the son of Pakistani immigrants, ... Read More »
July 19, 2023 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography, Reviews
Cat, a middle-class wife and mother, has largely accepted the typical expectations both roles entail. Just shy of 39 and largely dissatisfied, Cat dutifully soldiers on, trying to rebuild a lost career, enduring the indignities ... Read More »
July 12, 2023 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels, Reviews
The kids aren’t alright in What Comes Echoing Back, the long-gestating third novel of Nova Scotia’s Leo McKay Jr., the author of the Giller Prize–shortlisted Twenty-Six. On the cusp of adult responsibilities and quandaries, they’re ... Read More »
July 5, 2023 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels, Reviews
In Moroccan Canadian journalist Sheima Benembarek’s Halal Sex: The Intimate Lives of Muslim Womxn in North America something precious is presented to readers. More complex, textured, and irreverent than a simple representation of marginalized voices, ... Read More »
June 28, 2023 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography, Reviews, Social Sciences
Coming out isn’t always easy. And it isn’t always by choice. One encounter on a fateful afternoon leads to a lifetime of alienation and discontent for Kyle Turner, the central character in this debut novel ... Read More »
June 28, 2023 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels, Reviews
Nada Syed, the titular character in Uzma Jalaluddin’s new novel Much Ado About Nada, is nearly 30, not flirty, and certainly not thriving. Nada works a job she hates, lives with her overprotective parents in ... Read More »
June 21, 2023 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels, Reviews
The days of the western’s primacy in popular culture may have come and gone, but its underlying value system of an ascendant masculinity has managed to stave off extinction; this is the premise of Aaron ... Read More »
June 21, 2023 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels, Reviews
To read Christina Sharpe’s latest book, Ordinary Notes, is to enter into a kind of willed seduction. Sharpe’s delicate facility with language, tone, and rhythm, and her ability to articulate the achingly inarticulable, are, ... Read More »
June 14, 2023 | Filed under: Criticism & Essays, Memoir & Biography, Politics & Current Affairs, Race & Ethnic Relations, Reviews, Social Sciences
A complex and magnificent drama is about to be explained. This is the promise of Let It Destroy You as the novel opens on physicist August Snow on the eve of his trial for war ... Read More »
June 14, 2023 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels, Reviews