It’s a cliché to start a story with the main character waking up – startled or otherwise. But, Connie Barnes Rose’s use of this device in her latest novel, Road to Thunder Hill, manages to work.
Public intellectual, lawyer, and poet, F.R. (Francis Reginald) Scott was one of those truly great and spirited Canadians. The Canadian part is important, not just because he was born and lived here, but because he spent his life fighting and writing for what he believed was best for his country and its people.
There’s an illustration of a treadmill on the cover of Rob Benvie’s latest novel, Maintenance. It works, and not just because the book features several exercise sequences: a post-conjugal violence workout, a teen’s weightlifting sesh, tennis champs sweating it up on the courts, and even some allusion to a lapsed yoga habit.