ll the battlements are empty/And the moon is laying low/Yellow roses in the graveyard/Have no time to watch them ...
By Kimberly Bourgeois
Fiction
In his fifth novel, Turkish-Canadian writer Agop J. Hacikyan constructs a loving portrait of life in Istanbul during the mid-twentieth century that sadly misses the mark as often as it hits it. Written in the third person, yet with a distinct journal-like quality, The Lamppost Diary is a rambling episodic tale.
By Gina Roitman
Varsha Dharma is the teenaged daughter of Canadian-born parents. Her family lives in the house that her mysterious immigrant grandfather Mr. J.K. Dharma built in the wilderness outside a small town in northern British Columbia. When Varsha’s mother dies, her father goes to India to get a new wife. Suman, the new bride, could not have imagined the cold and isolation awaiting her.
By Elise Moser
Imagine a murder during the 1955 Maurice Richard Riot in Montreal. It happens right in front of the Sun Life Building, and the murder weapon is a legendary Quebec artefact. One pictures a smile on the author’s face as he feels the tension and potential of the set-up.
By Rob Sherren
In his second novel, Dirty Feet, Togo-born Quebec author Edem Awumey overlooks the much-explored image of Paris as the luxurious and vibrant cultural centre in favour of the city’s dark side.
By Rosel Kim
What constitutes a person other than a collection of memories, both those acquired in one’s own lifetime and those passed down through generations? If you strip someone of his memories, do you strip him of his soul? And if memories are the very building blocks of humanity, who decides what to construct?
By Kimberly Bourgeois
Alice Zorn’s debut novel Arrhythmia is an ambitious, deftly handled exploration of human beings in love. Far from stuttering along as its title might seem to suggest, it seldom misses a beat.
By Claire Holden Rothman
The stories are tight, economical, and each sentence has been nursed and carefully crafted. Spry has an ear for slang and tone; whether it’s a demented orderly or a young woman at rehab, he gets it right.
By Vanessa Bonneau
This gives the book an authentic feel, and provides the reader with the inside scoop (on insecurities, on sex – the usual topics that make a diary a juicy read).
By Vanessa Bonneau
Door weaves the journeys of several human characters – Aydee, Lucas, and Sandra – against a fantastical background of altered states of consciousness (and even states of identity), which seem to involve visits to a world of large, menacing creatures – part myth, part machine, part human.
By Louise Fabiani
Ravvin’s precise tonal control keeps the book fascinating; the unexpected stringing-together of odd incidents develops a curious sense of meaning. Nevertheless, the quiet elegance of the structure occasionally seems forced and tends to make the book’s more obvious moments seem even more obvious.
By Matthew Surridge
Exploring the dark side of the maternal and matrimonial experience is both relevant and valuable, and Akerman is to be commended for her choice of subject matter. But by populating her tales with bitter, resentful, powerless, and almost uniformly unhappy female characters, the author catalogues the weaknesses of women while largely failing to celebrate their courage and strength.
By B. A. Markus