One might say that Medicine Walk is a novel about the disconnect between a father and a son. McClelland & Stewart, 2014 “Eldon Starlight. Franklin Starlight. Four blunt syllables conjuring nothing. When he appeared the kid would watch him and whisper his name under his breath, waiting for
Sean Michaels’ prose invites readers to participate in the relationship between sound and shape through the simple but beautiful language of Us Conductors. Random House of Canada, 2014 His images are simple and fresh, and they are momentarily disorienting – as beautiful things can be. “I didn’t laugh
It doesn’t get much more obvious than stacking these truths on the book jacket: there it is. Knopf Canada, 2014 The Confabulist Steven Galloway For even though the noun more commonly associated with ‘confabulate’ is ‘confabulation’, what is most important here is not the story itself but the
These sentences are dappled across a two-page spread of Mariko and Jillian Tamaki’s This One Summer (2014), as though they are wafts of milkweed ink: House of Anansi, 2014 “The first time I ever saw a milkweed was on the beach at Awago. I thought they were magic
These stories were chosen “to be read rather than merely admired, or even envied”, including five previously unpublished stories. Thirty years later, the list of contents conjures up echoes of the Giller Prize, Canada Reads, and even a Pulitzer. Frances Itani’s “Grandmother” “And she has long known what the rest of
