Who? Where?
“Established in 1972, Dundurn Press is one of Canada’s largest and leading independent trade publishers. With over 2,300 books in print, Dundurn Press is recognized for producing high quality, award-winning books across multiple genres. We publish books that reflect the world, satisfy curiosity, enlighten, and entertain. We seek to amplify and elevate exceptional Canadian voices to the world, particularly those that have not yet been discovered or have been previously underrepresented in trade publishing.” (From Webpage) [Now located in Toronto]

First encounter?
I started reading from Dundurn’s catalogue to explore Kim Moritsugu’s backlist, including The Glenwood Treasure (2003) and The Restoration of Emily (2006) in 2006 and, eventually, one of my favourite writers, Cordelia Strube had a novel published there, Planet Reese.

Other Dundurn Reading:
Steve Burrows’ A Siege of Bitterns (2014)
Farzana Doctor’s Six Metres of Pavement (2011), All Inclusive (2015), and Seven (2020)
Cheluchi Onyemelukwe-Onuobia’s The Son of the House (2021)
Heidi von Palleske’s Two White Queens and the One-Eyed Jack (2021)
Priscila Uppal’s Projection (2013)

Read Indies: Hosted by Karen and Lizzy

RECENT READ: Sumaiya Matin’s memoir, The Shaytān Bride (2021)

Sumaiya Matin’s memoir, The Shaytān Bride (2021), opens with the disclosure that she was unsure whether this bride was real or mythic. She was sure, however, that Shaytān/was once Iblis and created by Allah, but some considered him an angel, others a jinni. The idea of a woman married to him contravened all social expectation in her Bangladeshi Muslim family’s home: “I imagined her walking the earth as if she didn’t have to anticipate any turn or fall, as if there were no limits or bounds as to where she could go. She didn’t accept everything she was told. She asked questions.” This introduction immediately intrigued me and the arc of her story held my attention steadily through more than three hundred pages.

The emigration story is incorporated, against a backdrop of her father’s experience of migration as a boy, from India to East Pakistan and, later, during the Liberation War, when East Pakistan became separate country of Bangladesh. In contrast, moving to Canada “the West, after all” was less overtly tumultuous. The family’s immigration story begins with a brief stint in Thunder Bay: “…only stillness. Rows of houses deep in slumber and acres upon acres of wild.” After six months, the family moves to Toronto, a culturally diverse midtown neighbourhood. The balance between specificity and universal experience invites readers into the fold, snugs them in, readies them for a story.

When her father discovers a Polaroid photograph of her with Bhav, teenaged Sumaiya struggles to explain their connection: he is not an eligible boy for her to marry. “How could I put into words then that Bhav was both peace and dissonance?” This is just the beginning of her struggle to reconcile her personal needs with her family’s. “The more I had dug and dug and dug to find the voices of women within myself, the more I started to see behind Anmu’s tough love.” The ordinary life, of Bollywood movies and Moleskin journals, is enriched with enough history to complement the personal narrative and the kind of soul-searching that culminates in fresh understanding.

RECENT READ: Rowan McCandless’ Persephone’s Children: A Life in Fragments by (2021)

Ever since I discovered Anatasia Krupnik’s handwritten lists in Lois Lowry’s middle-grade novels, I have loved the sense of peeking into someone’s personal notebook. That’s what Persephone’s Children: A Life in Fragments by Rowan McCandless (2021) is like.

Her use of unconventional forms is smart and pointed, playful and provocative. She launches into an abecedarian sequence, each term alphabetically arranged to beckon readers inward, and then she decorates it with snippets of historical reproductions of charts and forms, and peppers it with photographs. Sounds like it might be a little much? It might be. But I couldn’t say—because I just love it.

Objectively, I can say that it’s the kind of volume likely best enjoyed in delectable servings rather than gulped whole. Because if I imagine describing the techniques and organizing principles that she employs, even a fragment of that list, well—it sounds gimmicky. But this book looks like my notebook: a quiz torn from a magazine, a puzzle, a series of related sketches, a set of writing prompts. The only difference is that she’s constructed them all, arranged them to assist in her reflection on life as a “Black and biracial, daughter of multiple diasporas.”

These constructions do serve to introduce an element of distance, it’s true. But simultaneously there is some incredibly intimate material, so it balances out. Readers can’t possibly overlook the fact that this is a memoir, not an exercise. And an exceptionally good fit for me, too, because all the works she cites are books I’ve read or dabbled in: Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (translated by Maria Jolas), Adrienne Rich’s poetry, and Joan Didion’s essays.

RECENT READ: Emily Brewes’ The Doomsday Book of Fairy Tales (2021)

Emily Brewes’ The Doomsday Book of Fairy Tales (2021) landed on my stack in conjunction with my article about writers confronting the climate crisis. There are some very ordinary and recognizable elements to the story, like the description of a younger sibling entering the scene: “With the density of a tiny star, she pulled us all into her orbit.” But it is a post-apocalyptic story: “Unknown unknowns, knocked into existence by the progressing fall of ecological dominoes.” It reminded me a little of Lauren Carter’s dystopic writing with the slightly claustrophobic family dynamic explored in Barbara Gowdy’s Falling Angels.

This metaphor echoes my experience reading the story: “I could feel Metzler’s rising discomfort like the spread of warm pee in a cold lake.” There is a peculiarly unsettling pace to the story. It is not stressful in expected ways: “Waiting is the essence of stagnation. For the first time in recent memory, we remained in one place, unmoving.” The novel upsets your expectations of this kind of story and attaches a weight to states of being that we associate with peacefulness: “Silence stretches like a visible distance. I remember walking down a road that didn’t seem to have an end—a wide paved expanse that vanished over the horizon.”

The fairy tales integrated into the novel are handled deftly; they did not feel intrusive, more like outgrowths from the narrative and, almost immediately, an undercurrent of awareness that they were interacting with the narrative allowed my growing understanding to really thrum. Not that there was much comfort surrounding that. Even things that should be comfortable here are not: “I felt like a pin in a map to mark a point of origin. Home. Trying on the word in my mind was similar to digging an old sweatshirt, from the bottom of a forgotten drawer: comfy and kind of smelly.”

Brewes’ capacity to interrogate contradictions is intriguing and I eagerly await (and dread reading) her next novel. “The trouble with stories is that they begin and they end. Lives certainly follow this pattern: one is born, one dies. Life as a whole does not. There are no happy endings, because nothing ever ends.”

This quotation also brings to mind another exciting Dundurn volume from this season: Lauren Davis’ Even So (2021) which both Naomi and Anne have read recently.

It feels like a successor to Davis’ Giller-nominated novel Our Daily Bread, which also considers the process of “othering”. Here, we have two women, living in Princeton and Trenton, one who volunteers at Our Daily Bread Food Pantry and the other who’s dedicated her life to service to the community there, one who thinks about dinner parties and the other who thinks about food scarcity.

But, of course it’s not that simple. There are no happy endings here either, only a sense of the wheel turning and how differently people lean in (and don’t) to help it go ‘round.