Globe and Mail

Something called the “CanLit generator” became a minor sensation on social media recently. Go to the latter’s website and click on a button and you get a series of random, non-sequiturish plotlines based on clichés about our national literature: “An unnamed protagonist becomes involved with the fur trade to make peace with the parents they never knew”; “An archivist absent-mindedly buries a memento in the dirt outside their childhood home to rediscover themselves at the family cabin.” Read more…

Starting in the early eighties, Kurt Palka published four novels over the course of roughly a decade. They were historical sagas and Len Deighton-ish wartime thrillers set in locales ranging from the Canadian author’s native Austria to imperial Mexico. Equinox, one of two published under the pseudonym Kurt Maxwell, focused on the then-hot topic of contract terrorism. All are currently out of print. Read more…

International headlines recently reported that one of Earth’s last uncontacted tribes, Peru’s Mashco-Piro, appeared to be attempting to communicate with the world outside their Amazon home. Visions of civilizational oneness sealed with pox-thwarting fistbumps dissipated, however, when it became apparent that what the Maschco Piro actually wanted was metal cooking implements, which they grabbed from a nearby tourist resort before retreating back into the jungle.

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The protagonists of Nino Ricci’s newest novel, Sleep, and his last, The Origin of Species, are both intellectually blocked academics who have problematic relationships with women and skeletons in their closets. But where Origin’s Alex Fratarcangeli eventually finds redemption through empathy for a series of people who enter his life, Ricci has deemed that neither conscience nor outward interference will impede Sleep’s David Pace in his journey down a path of moral depravity and self-sabotage. Read more…

Set mostly in mid-twentieth-century Ireland, Jane Urquhart’s new novel is dedicated to three real but unconnected people who inspired some of its characters: the English World War Two aviator Vi Milstead Warren, the Irish poet Michael Kirby and the Canadian artist Kenneth Lochhead, famous for the massive mural, Allegories of Travel, that has presided over Gander, Newfoundland’s airport lounge since 1959. Read more…

Over the course of five novels, Robert Hough has shown a liking for the nooks and crannies of his preferred genre, historical fiction, as well as for characters at the far ends of the fortune spectrum: his wild cat tamers, stowaways, charlatans and conmen tend to be either down on their luck or flush with success. If you’re looking for tales of simmering middle-class disenchantment, in other words, you’ll want to look elsewhere. Read more…

Beth Powning has produced six books to date, including two critically acclaimed works of historical fiction (The Sea Captain’s Wife, The Hatbox Letters) and three memoirs in which she writes, evocatively, of her rural New Brunswick home—where she has lived since the early ‘70s—and, achingly, of the experience of giving birth in her twenties to a stillborn child (Shadow Child). Read more…

Etta and Otto, the first two characters in the title of Emma Hooper’s debut novel, are a childless, elderly couple from rural Saskatchewan. On page one, Otto wakes to find a note from Etta: “I’ve gone. I’ve never seen the water, so I’ve gone there. Don’t worry, I’ve left you the truck. I can walk. I will try to remember to come back.” Read more…

There’s a little-known codicil to the maxim “time heals all wounds,” which is “except those inflicted in adolescence.” How else to explain why the social slights of teenage-hood stick with us in a way, alas, that trigonometry formulas do not?

It is, at any rate, a premise key to Harriet Lane’s crackerjack new novel. Her has been dubbed a domestic thriller, but might just as aptly be called a class thriller—“class” meant here not as a short form of “classy,” though I suppose that shoe fits too, but in the socio-economic sense. Read more…

Much of the power of Colm Toibin’s writing comes from what’s left unsaid. That’s literally the case with Nora Webster, the eponymous heroine of his beautiful new novel, a recently widowed mother of four who, especially in the book’s early parts, asserts herself through taciturnity: she carefully considers what to say but often chooses to say nothing at all. You could consider that a form of risk-taking, given that fiction’s most memorable female characters have tended to be either Sturm-und-Drang types (Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, Lisbeth Salander) or the pluckily sharp-witted (Elizabeth Bennett, Anne Shirley, Becky Sharp). Nora doesn’t fit into these or most other categories, but she’s just as indelible. Read more…

In her fourth novel, Ellen in Pieces, Caroline Adderson gives us a midlife portrait of Ellen McGinty, a divorced former publicist who sells the Vancouver home where she raised her two daughters to bankroll a second career as an artist. The move brings with it an unexpected pleasure when Ellen finds herself in the arms of Matt, “a sweet, rutting lad” twenty years her junior. Read more…

In her latest book, perversity, alienation, obesity, ominousness and manic humour continue to be grist for Michelle Berry’s fictional mill. Though it changes up the details, Interference largely maintains the form of Berry’s previous novel, Blind Crescent, about the personal goings-on in a suburb terrorized by a serial killer. The stage here, a small city called Parkville, is supposedly larger (though only by degrees), while a local pedophile ring supplies the requisite sense of unseen menace. Read more…

Roughly based on the 2006 Grand River land dispute in Caledonia, Ontario, Krista Foss’ poised debut is about the fallout from the Mohawk blockade of a housing development in Ontario’s tobacco country. Outwardly, Smoke River has the affect of issue-driven fiction. But by allowing her vivid ensemble of characters to grab hold of the wheel, Foss manages to steer the novel away from an object lesson in native-white relations to focus on the personal quandaries that arise from the characters’ complex, overlapping allegiances. Read more…