The Dead Husband Project

There’s a moment in the title story of Toronto writer and CBC Radio producer Sarah Meehan Sirk’s debut collection when the eponymous husband – who has miraculously recovered from a terminal illness, thereby scuppering his ... Read More »

August 9, 2017 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Strangers with the Same Dream

By Alison Pick

What is our responsibility to strangers? Who do we help, love, and decide to make a part of our family and community? These are some of the questions explored in Alison Pick’s engrossing third novel. ... Read More »

August 9, 2017 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Bellevue Square

By Michael Redhill

With Bellevue Square, the first panel of a projected triptych titled Modern Ghosts, Michael Redhill puts his protagonist, Jean Mason, through wringer after wringer. As witnesses and vicarious participants, readers can appreciate Jean’s otherworldly predicaments, ... Read More »

July 31, 2017 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

This Side of Sad

By Karen Smythe

James is a retired teacher who suffers panic attacks. He is despondent and withdrawn. One day during deer hunting season, James “decide[s] on danger” – in the words of his wife, Maslen – walks into ... Read More »

July 31, 2017 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

★ Demi-Gods

By Eliza Robertson

It’s a rite of passage for young novelists to tackle rites of passage: the sun-dappled, backward-glancing, coming-of-age fable is as regimented and routinized as any lean-boned crime thriller or bulky, mock-Victorian doorstop. There is currently ... Read More »

July 31, 2017 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

A Three-Tiered Pastel Dream

By Lesley Trites

There’s a claustrophobic and secretive quality to Montreal writer Lesley Trites’s debut, a book of short stories that illuminates the lives of girls and women. In the first story, “Pepto-Bismol Pink,” a woman sleeps with ... Read More »

July 24, 2017 | Filed under: Fiction: Short

Everything Is Awful And You’re A Terrible Person

By Daniel Zomparelli

The debut collection of fiction from poet and editor Daniel Zomparelli isn’t a daring adventure into a new genre for the author. Rather, it’s a natural complement to the niche he has created with his ... Read More »

July 24, 2017 | Filed under: Fiction: Short

Readopolis

By Bertrand Laverdure; Oana Avasilichioaei (trans.)

If English Canada ever wants to break out of the literary doldrums in which it all too frequenly finds itself mired, it would do well to stop casting its eyes wistfully back at a nostalgic ... Read More »

July 24, 2017 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Other Houses

By Kate Cayley

Roo Borson’s latest poetry collection begins in Rome with an ekphrastic view of a 2,000-year-old fresco commissioned by Livia, wife of Augustus Caesar. The image symbolizes the thematic question of Borson’s book: in what ways ... Read More »

July 24, 2017 | Filed under: Poetry