This year's Massey Lecture text begins with passion and grandiose declarations. "I have had a lifelong obsession with blood, and I'm not the only one. As both substance and symbol, blood reveals us, divides us, and unites us. We care about blood, because it spills literally and figuratively into every
Lisa Moore has pulled from the headlines to create fiction before, and this is not the first time she has pulled readers into painful territory by the heart. Grove Press, 2014 "I learned to graft bits and pieces of true-life experiences together to form fiction. I learned not
The cover of Christene A. Browne's Two Women pulled me back to a literary pilgrimage I made to Regent Park, in Toronto, after I read Rabindranath Maharaj's The Amazing Absorbing Boy. But Regent Park is not so much a character in this novel as the women themselves. Though, which two
While Love and Forgetting was in my stack of current reads, I listened to the World Book Club's podcast edition of a discussion of Albert Camus' The Outsider. Camus is someone whose work I associate with formal study, not pleasure, but Harriet Gilbert's interviews draw me into subjects I don't
You might think Struan is an unlikely setting for a novel. A town you can walk through in under ten minutes (even on slippery wintry surfaces). Knopf Canada, 2013 "Walking from one end of Struan to the other takes less than ten minutes. If you kept walking south
