What I was not carrying in my bookbag this month: David Mitchell's Ghostwritten, Shauna Singh Baldwin's The Tiger Claw and the third volume in G.R.R. Martin's Ice and Fire series. These hefty volumes stayied at home, but these slimmer books were travelling this month. And there was more to-ing and fro-ing this month
“If prison isn’t prison, the outside world has no meaning!” So says Aurora to Charmaine in Margaret Atwood's new novel, The Heart Goes Last. McClelland & Stewart, 2015 (Penguin Random House) It dates back, the CanLit icon's interest in imprisonment, a preoccupation with the idea of lives which
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
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
In the past, I've made large stacks of creepy reading with the RIP challenges in mind, but I have a habit of stacking up many lovely possibilities but then choosing different books altogether later on. Perhaps this is partly because books can surprise you and take you in unexpected directions.
