Quill and Quire

BOOK REVIEWS

★ All We Saw

By Anne Michaels

In a note accompanying her long-awaited sixth collection of poetry, Toronto poet laureate Anne Michaels asks: “What words can we have for the last weeks and hours before the imminent death of one we love?” ... Read More »

September 25, 2017 | Filed under: Poetry

★ Hummingbird

By Tristan Hughes

It’s summer in Sitting Down Lake, a community of four cabins in northern Ontario, and Zachary Tayler, the 15-year-old narrator of Tristan Hughes’s fifth novel, struggles with loss and loneliness. “I don’t recall ever thinking ... Read More »

September 25, 2017 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

That’s My Baby

By Francis Itani

Frances Itani’s previous book, the 2014 Scotiabank Giller Prize–nominated Tell, ends with the clandestine adoption of a baby girl called Hanorah. In Itani’s new novel, Hanorah is all grown up and determined to discover for ... Read More »

September 25, 2017 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Things Not to Do

By Jessica Westhead

The anxieties and disillusionments of modern life seem to be at the core of most contemporary short-fiction collections. So it is little surprise that the similarly titled Things Not to Do, by Toronto writer Jessica ... Read More »

September 21, 2017 | Filed under: Fiction: Short

Sit

By Deborah Ellis

Children, like dogs, are often told to “sit.” But in Deborah Ellis’s new collection of 11 short stories, the kids are much too rambunctious for that. In “The Glowing Chair,” Miyuki is a 12-year-old Japanese ... Read More »

September 18, 2017 | Filed under: Children and YA Fiction