Quill and Quire

Fiction: Novels

Astra

By Cedar Bowers

At once a character study and a group portrait, Cedar Bowers’s debut novel takes its name from its heroine, Astra Winter Sorrow Brine, born and raised on Celestial Farm, a British Columbian agricultural commune. With ... Read More »

May 17, 2021 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels, Reviews

★ This Eden

By Ed O’Loughlin

This Eden, the propulsive new novel from Irish-Canadian writer and journalist Ed O’Loughlin, begins with a meet-cute. Alice and Michael are both students in the University of British Columbia’s engineering program, and their first contact ... Read More »

May 3, 2021 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels, Reviews

★ Speak, Silence

By Kim Echlin

In May 1993, the United Nations established the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), in response to the horrendous crimes perpetrated against civilians during the region’s conflicts in the 1990s. The tribunal’s objective ... Read More »

April 26, 2021 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels, Reviews

Second Place

By Rachel Cusk

Like much of Rachel Cusk’s writing, Second Place feels more like a conduit for philosophical and cultural thought than mere storytelling. Told in the first person, Cusk’s 11th work of fiction recounts a summer in ... Read More »

April 19, 2021 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels, Reviews

Foregone

By Russell Banks

Midway through Foregone, the latest novel from Russell Banks, the main character recalls a woman who published a memoir titled My Autobiography as I Remember It. Banks’s protagonist, a Canadian-American documentary filmmaker named Leonard Fife, ... Read More »

April 12, 2021 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels, Reviews

Charity

By Keath Fraser

Is there a more misunderstood or neglected literary form than the novella? Even more than poetry or short fiction, the novella tends to get overlooked by readers and publishers alike, neither seeming to know quite ... Read More »

March 15, 2021 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels, Reviews