Delicate and deliberate, these stories are sometimes startling and always moving. In some, the darkness is overt and inescapable; in others, quietly pervasive and creeping. A passage from "Welcome to Paradise" seems to whisper of the author's motivations: "Even now I like ghost towns and abandoned houses, places that seem
It's no secret that Mazo de la Roche loved to read. So, we have sassy young Adeline pulling out a book on the ship which takes her from Ireland to the wilds of what-would-soon-be-Canada. There's at least one literary reference in each of the volumes, and sometimes these are endowed with
The thing with an explosion is that it comes out of nowhere. And that's exactly what happens in Alison Watt's debut novel. Even though I knew that the 1917 event was at the heart of this Halifax story, I was completely absorbed in Clare and Fred's ordinary workday at
In which there is talk of true stories and stories that fall between the cracks of imagined facts and probabilities. Kyo Maclear's Birds Art Life (2017) Arranged as though composed over a twelve-month period, this would seem to be the perfect book to read slowly, meditatively. To allow the pages
Sarah Dunn's new novel, The Arrangement takes Owen and Lucy, who are imagining themselves unhappily married in the future, and encourages them to sleep around. The idea comes to the happily married couple via a conversation at a dinner party, which is also how Sarah Dunn came upon the idea
