Growing up in the Arctic town of Kuujjuaq, Sheila Watt-Cloutier describes herself as a “a cautious child who didn’t like taking big risks.” That characterization may seem surprising coming from an Inuit woman who has arguably done more than anyone to raise awareness of how environmental pollutants and climate change have affected circumpolar peoples. Read more…
Quill and Quire
MEET ME IN VENICE:
A Chinese Immigrant’s Journey from the Far East to the Farawy West
by Suzanne Ma
“If you are born in Qingtian, you are destined to leave,” goes a famous, reverse-Hotel California refrain about this isolated Chinese county three hundred miles south of Shanghai. Migrants started leaving Qingtian in the seventeenth century and never stopped, many enduring years of painful separation from spouses or young children in their quest to become rich elsewhere. Read more…
IN REAL LIFE
by Cory Doctorow
Near the beginning of writer and copyright activist Cory Doctorow’s new graphic novel, Anda and her friends are listening to a speaker at their Arizona high school. Liza, a “kick arse” gamer in a massive multiplayer role-playing game called Coarsegold has a pitch for the girls in the class: probationary memberships in her prestigious gaming guild on condition they play using female avatars. Read more…
JULIET WAS A SURPRISE
by Bill Gaston
Novelist, dramatist, poet and short story writer Bill Gaston is a quadruple threat, but it’s with his short story collections that he’s had the most measurable success (his 2002 collection Mount Appetite was nominated for a Giller Prize, 2006’s Gargoyles for the Governor General’s Award). Gaston’s work has a number of recurring themes, yet the range of situations with which he explores these consistently astonishes; ditto for his ability to temper the macabre and the cringeworthy with humour. Read more…
OUTSIDE IN
by Sarah Ellis
Sarah Ellis’ latest YA novel tackles issues of waste, consumerism and family in a Borrowers-style tale about close encounters between those who live in, and off, conventional society. Read more…
THE LOBSTER KINGS
by Alexi Zentner
The multi-generational tragedies and mythical creatures that pervaded Alexi Zentner’s lauded first novel Touch move from the woods of the west coast to the waters of the east in his new novel about a legendary lobster fishing family. Read more…
SO LONG, MARIANNE
by Kari Hesthamar
Marianne Ihlen has the rare distinction of having being muse to not just one but two famous men. She figures in the novels of writer Axel Jensen, with whom she moved from Oslo to the Greek Island of Hydra in 1957, when she was 22. Two years later, when Jensen abandoned the couple’s brief marriage shortly after their son was born, a not-quite-famous Leonard Cohen—who had just arrived on the island and was immediately smitten with Marianne—readily stepped up, and the two embarked on a relationship that endured for almost a decade. Read more…
CADILLAC CATHEDRAL
by Jack Hodgins
In his new novel, Jack Hodgins returns to the Vancouver Island community of Portuguese Creek that served as the setting for earlier books such as Broken Ground and Distance. Here, an unorthodox road trip is sparked by a combination of death and unrequited love, but despite the presence of unusual cars and a group of friends performing illegal activities, Cadillac Cathedral isn’t The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test or even On the Road but rather a warm, gentle novel brimming with charcoal grey humour. Read more…
THE STRANGE GIFT OF GWENDOLYN GOLDEN
by Philippa Dowding
This lively, fast-paced novel by the author of the Lost Gargoyle series moves fluidly from the whimsical to the fantastical and takes an intriguing detour to some dark places in between. Read more…
ALL THE BROKEN THINGS
by Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer
Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer prefaces her third novel by pointing out that some of its more dubious plot points are in fact true; namely, that until the late ‘70s Ontario had a bear wrestling circuit, the Canadian National Exhibition had freak shows and the chemical Agent Orange—used by the U.S. Army to conduct herbicidal warfare during the Vietnam War—was produced in Elmira, Ontario. Read more…
A HOUSE IN THE SKY
by Amanda Lindhout and Sara Corbett
As a child growing up in small town Alberta, Amanda Lindhout found escape from the dank basement apartment where her mother often suffered beatings at the hands of her boyfriend in the National Geographics she bought from the local thrift shop.
Later, after years of travel in exotic locales, Lindhout would find herself in another dank room—this one in Somalia—where she was gang raped, beaten, and tortured. When her 15-month captivity ended, she learned that her kidnappers’ original target had been a reporter-photographer duo from National Geographic she’d met the day before she and her photojournalist partner Nigel Brennan, with whom she was working as a fledgling journalist, were kidnapped. Read more…
JANE, THE FOX AND ME
by Fanny Britt, Isabelle Arsenault ill.
Fanny Britt is well known in her native Quebec as a translator, playwright and children’s author. As well as being the first of her books to be translated into English, Jane, The Fox & Me is also her first foray into the graphic novel genre. She’s fortunate to be supported in this endeavor by the beguiling Isabelle Arsenault, whose illustrations for Kyo Maclear’s Virginia Wolf deservedly won the Governor General’s Award in that category a year ago. Read more…
GOING HOME AGAIN
by Dennis Bock
Dennis Bock’s first two novels were about the fallout from various real wars: the Second World War in 2001’s The Ash Garden and the Spanish Civil War and the Second Sino-Japanese War in 2006’s The Communist’s Daughter. The fallout in his latest, about two once-estranged brothers whose marriages fall apart at the same time, is of a more intimate nature, but feels no less powerful for being so. Read more…
CREEPS
by Darren Hynes
In Darren Hynes’ story about two disaffected teens in a small Labrador mining town, Pete “the Meat,” a snarling, be-muscled thug, is a bully in the classic mold. He and his posse’s victim of choice is Wayne Pumphrey, singled out for his smallness and the fact he never fights back. Beginning with verbal taunts (“faggot” and “pussy”) the attacks quickly get physical: Wayne’s tormenters hurl ice balls at his face and make him eat yellow snow. When things get really bad Wayne wets himself. Read more…
A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING
by Ruth Ozeki
Ruth Ozeki explores notions of doubleness, causality, honour, and time in clever, sometimes deeply affecting ways in her luminous new novel. Ozeki’s protagonist, with whom she shares a first name, is a middle-aged writer of Japanese ancestry who lives on an under-populated island off the B.C. coast. On the beach one day, Ruth discovers a Hello Kitty lunchbox wrapped in a barnacle-encrusted bag. The box contains a number objects, including what appears to be a copy of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, but which turns out to be the diary of a 16-year-old girl from Tokyo named Nao. Read more…
THE LAKE AND THE LIBRARY
by S.M. Beiko
In S M Beiko’s florid debut, 16-year-old Ashleigh’s fantasy to escape her “bitter, broken” Manitoba town is finally about to come true: her chain-smoking nurse mother has announced they’ll leave at summer’s end. An incurable romantic, “Ash” spends her time painting, reading literature and dreaming of a love that will feed her “Coleridge soul and Neruda-spurned pulse”; one she knows she’ll never find in Treade. Read more…
SOME GREAT IDEA:
Good Neighbourhoods, Crazy Politics and the Invention of Toronto
by Edward Keenan
Invoking Toronto’s recent history alongside its more distant past, political observer Edward Keenan, an editor at the city’s alt-weekly newspaper The Grid, has written a succinct, accessible book that brings some much needed context to the carnival-like atmosphere at Toronto City Hall under the tenure of Mayor Rob Ford. Read more…
MISS MOUSIE’S BLIND DATE
by Tim Beiser; Rachel Berman, illus.
“Spring is such a funny thing,” muses author Tim Beiser in the opening lines of this delightfully brisk ode to seasonal romance among the woodland set. Miss Mousie has stopped in at the local deli, where she finds her knees turning to jelly at the sight of Matt LaBatt, the water rat, whose matinee-idol looks – black fur, red eyes, lemon-yellow teeth – leave her momentarily speechless. After Matt makes a disparaging comment about Miss Mousie’s weight, she beats a hasty retreat to her burrow, where she can hide her “chubby, tubby body” from the judgmental eyes of the outside world. Read more…
THE INCONVENIENT INDIAN:
A Curious Account of Native People in North America
by Thomas King
Novelist Thomas King describes his brilliantly insightful, peevish book about native people in North America as a “a series of conversations and arguments that I’ve been having with myself and others for most of my adult life.” Making no excuses for the intrusion of his own personal biases and the book’s lack of footnotes, King suggests we view The Inconvenient Indian not as history, but as storytelling “fraught with history.” Read more…
WAGING HEAVY PEACE
By Neil Young
That a musical shape-shifter like Neil Young would take an unorthodox approach to his memoirs is to be expected. Indeed, this charming, poignant volume is much like Young’s oeuvre: sustained periods of pure delight punctuated by sudden, unexpected turns. The stream in Young’s stream-of-consciousness is more like a river that’s burst its banks. Read more…