Our young separatist narrator is imagining his own future and the future of Quebec, and both man and nation are struggling with matters of expression and independence, in Hubert Aquin's Next Episode (published in 1965, translated by Sheila Fischman in 2001). “I am the fragmented symbol of Quebec’s revolution, its
Despite its sedate and unassuming cover, Pauline Holdstock's The Hunter and the Wild Girl begins in a rush. Goose Lane, 2015 "With a shriek of splintering boards, the girl breaks into daylight and stands blinded, panting, sucking air as if it were a great hot soup, her chest
If the idea of experimental or innovative short stories makes you squirm, even though you are simultaneously bored with more traditional structure, Not Anyone’s Anything belongs on your bookshelf. Ian Williams puts relationships at the core of his work and this fiction collection exhibits this tendency as well. I also
The first volume of his Toronto trilogy introduces readers to Bernice Leach, who has left Barbados to work in Toronto as a housekeeper in an upscale neighbourhood in the 1960s. She has left behind a son and his father, as well as a mother and a sister, and she is
From my discovery of Neil Bantock's Griffin and Sabine books, I have sought out books that play with form. (Even earlier, I fell hard for Anastasia Krupnik's To-Do lists which appeared as handwritten notes on lined paper in Lois Lowry's books.) Recently, Kim Belair's and Ariadne MacGillivray's Pure Steele (2013) struck
