Shhh ... silence is golden, so they say. No one puts this to the test like Candy, the coquettish auctioneer’s daughter in Mark Foss’s second novel – a darkly humorous tale of sibling rivalry and devotion.
By Kimberly Bourgeois
Fiction
John Goldbach’s third book, It Is an Honest Ghost, in some ways continues the formal and thematic explorations of his earlier work. The stripped-down prose and philosophical semi-speculation that marked his first story collection and his satirical noir novel The Devil and the Detective are present here, too. That noted, It is an Honest Ghost is no rehash; it provides new, and arguably more polished, takes on such concerns.
By Peter Dubé
To beckon is to entice, to draw someone in. It may be an act of deception, but it is not an act of coercion. When someone is beckoned, he responds willingly. That is the difficult reality that lies at the heart of Matthew Murphy’s debut novel, A Beckoning War.
By Danielle Barkley
The opening catalyst of Sylvain Neuvel’s sci-fi thriller Sleeping Giants is a classic premise of the genre: something is where it shouldn’t – or can’t – be. A giant metal hand is accidentally found by an eleven-year-old girl in the Midwest. The hand appears to be a millennium older than the oldest known civilization in the Americas; the technology needed to create and move the hand barely exists now, let alone then.
By Anna Leventhal
What a thrill to follow a writer from promise to fulfillment. Alice Petersen’s debut collection of short stories won the 2012 QWF Concordia University First Book Prize and marked her as a young writer to watch. Her second collection, Worldly Goods, more than delivers.
By Katia Grubisic
An elaborately coiffed woman, an intricate tapestry, and a woodblock sinking ship on the cover promise a story of love, history, and war. And Louis Carmain’s Guano delivers assuredly on all counts. But there’s also an off-white splotch that closer inspection reveals to be bird shit, a commodity once valuable enough to spark the minor war that provides the backdrop for this unsanitized yet sparkling historical novel with a sly contemporary feel.
By Pablo Strauss
Set in Chicoutimi-Nord in the mid-nineties, Geneviève Pettersen’s first book is a harrowing coming-of-age novel about a teenage girl whose life quickly spins out of control. Winner of the 2015 Grand Prix littéraire Archambault and a bestseller in its original French, The Goddess of Fireflies is narrated by Catherine as she navigates the eventful year between her fourteenth and fifteenth birthdays, a year full of change, violence, substance abuse, and star-crossed romance.
By Jeff Miller
A playwright in Larry Tremblay’s The Orange Grove, a tertiary character representing the author himself, asks, “Why should he not have the right, as an artist, to talk about war?” – even if he hasn’t been exposed to it. The novel argues that a writer has permission not only to discuss war he has no intimate relationship with, but also to enter into racial and religious conversations beyond his scope as a white, North American writer.
By Mike Spry
Li Bai, the eighth-century Chinese poet, didn’t like to feel tied down. He spent much of his life on the road. He got married four times. Drank himself to sleep in bars. And he admired those who, as he put it, “made nothing of sea-crossing or of mountain-crossing.”
By Eric Boodman
ontrary to stereotypes about millennials becoming illiterate, twenty-somethings do read and write – a lot. What ...
By Crystal Chan
The first novel by second-generation Korean Canadian Christina Park, The Homes We Build on Ashes, explores key aspects of the Korean experience, from the mid-twentieth century to the present. A work of fiction inspired by Park’s grandmother, the story is primarily that of Nara, a woman who repeatedly rebuilds her life in the face of significant hardships in Korea, then Canada.
By Patricia Maunder
Named for its author’s hometown, Samuel Archibald’s debut short-story collection Arvida is a grab bag of family lore, tall tales, idle boasts, and dark secrets – the kind of stories usually told around a kitchen table or campfire before vanishing into the night air like smoke.
By Pablo Strauss