picking up the pieces

FEBRUARY
by Lisa Moore

Lisa Moore’s second novel, following 2005’s Giller-shortlisted Alligator, employs similar time and perspective shifts to paint a portrait of Helen, a woman shattered by the drowning death of her husband, Cal, in the historically true sinking of the Ocean Ranger off the coast of Newfoundland in the early 1980s. Read more…

THE FLYING TROUTMANS
by Miriam Toews

The considerable charm of Miriam Toews’ fiction comes, in part, from her ability to create characters in situations of long-term duress with a brilliantly emulsified mix of repression and humour, punctuated by bursts of real emotion. In this, her first novel since nabbing the Governor General’s Award for A Complicated Kindness, Toews’ unsunny topic is mental illness – something on the periphery of, but never so solidly confronted in, her previous work. Read more…