Reviews

The Carpenter from Montreal

“Am I trying to deal with a crisis I left behind?” wonders Cynthia McConnell near the beginning of George Fetherling’s neo-noir novel. Well might she ask, as she speaks to us from beyond the grave ... Read More »

October 3, 2017 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Afterwork: Essays on Literature and Beauty

By Anne Compton

Governor General’s Literary Award–winning poet Anne Compton’s latest book is a collection of essays surveying the writer’s life and interests, all bound by Compton’s lyric voice. Afterwork begins with an essay on the first summer ... Read More »

October 3, 2017 | Filed under: Criticism & Essays

Dead Reckoning: The Untold Story of the Northwest Passage

By Ken McGoogan

The Arctic adventures of explorers like Sir John Franklin are familiar to the many Canadians who harbour a seemingly insatiable interest in the discovery of the Northwest Passage. But for every white man obsessed with ... Read More »

October 2, 2017 | Filed under: History

Oil’s Deep State: How the Petroleum Industry Undermines Democracy and Stops Action on Global Warming – in Alberta, and in Ottawa

By Kevin Taft

For all the wealth they potentially possess, Alberta’s vast petroleum reserves have proved a mixed blessing at best. Even the industry’s staunchest defenders have to concede that the laborious extraction of oil from sand has ... Read More »

October 2, 2017 | Filed under: Politics & Current Affairs, Science, Technology & Environment

The Patch: The People, Pipelines, and Politics of the Oil Sands

By Chris Turner

October 2, 2017 | Filed under: Politics & Current Affairs, Science, Technology & Environment

Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell

By David Yaffe

How does a biographer say something new and insightful about well-known public figures who have already had large dollops of ink spilled on their behalf? Authors David Yaffe and Nicholas Jennings take distinctly different approaches ... Read More »

September 28, 2017 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography

★ 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

★ Don’t Tell Me What to Do

By Dina Del Bucchia

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

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