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.
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.
Employing a variety of experimental techniques in style and structure, Daniel Allen Cox’s fourth novel, Mouthquake, details the queer coming-of-age of a stuttering young man in Montreal.
Claudine Dumont’s Captive is animated by the idea of power, and how quickly it can be gained or lost. When Emma, the novel’s first-person narrator, is abducted from her bedroom by a group of masked assailants and awakens in a locked room, she is quickly reduced to a state of helplessness and terror.
The title suggests tangled nights on the beach, afternoon cocktails, at least a bit of coming-of-age necking. But That Summer in Provincetown is only glancingly about any such summer.
In the village of Malabourg, girlhood is a difficult, even dangerous time. This fictional town on the Baie des Chaleurs, the setting of Perrine Leblanc’s second novel, is a place out of time, inhabited by generations of lantern-jawed fishermen and run by local gossips. The Lake, translated into English by Lazer Lederhendler, seems at first glance to promise a kind of thriller, but its village setting is the stuff of contes or legends.
The word Balkan may bring to mind a number of associations. Complex borders, fraternity, religion, betrayal, atrocity. It gets complicated very quickly. Josip Novakovich’s most recent collection of short stories, Ex-Yu, explores each of these topics in turn and in conjunction
While short story collections tend to feature a relatively even style and emotional palette, Daydreams of Angels offers readers a wide spectrum of both. In these twenty stories sparkling with wit and fantasy, O’Neill gives us a variety of genres, including heartfelt coming-of-age stories, miniature historical fictions, allegories, tall tales, and even literary cover versions. And while these stories largely stray from the gritty realism of her novels, they nonetheless retain the powerful emotional resonance of those works.
Breathing Lessons is a timely novel. It feels contemporary, and – as an account of the intimate life of Henry Moss, identified as a “homosexual everyman” on the back cover – it deals with questions that could only be broached now, when gay people are making their way into the social mainstream and facing the issues that this inevitably involves.
Music must float in the air over Montreal, a city that has nurtured many a lauded performer from the late classical pianist Ellen Ballon to Arcade Fire and Nikki Yanofsky. So it is only natural that music has been the central focus of a number of books by local authors, including most recently Mary Soderstrom’s River Music.
In Children into Swans: Fairy Tales and the Pagan Imagination, Jan Beveridge explores the stories, characters, settings, and themes that have preceded and often inspired the tales we know today.
