On the longlist, I’d read just four of the books when the nominees were announced, two last year and two this year. For those who can forgive short stories for not being novels, Lisa Alward's Cocktail will satisfy on many levels. She’s got the sharp observations of writers like
Although this project was motivated by a recent statistic reported from the 2020 election in the United States, I’ve been reading about slavery since I was a kid. But, first, I watched Cicely Tyson in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1974) and A Woman Called Moses (1978) about
Although the last of the Jalna books written, Morning at Jalna is only the second in the sequence. It is set while the civil war is raging in the southern United States, and readers are immediately informed that the Whiteoaks are sympathetic to the southerners. In school, during the 1970s
The Canadian Opera Company is now presenting a new 50th-anniversary production of "Louis Riel", originally written for the celebration of the Canadian centenary in 1967, with an attempt to shift that oh-so-colonial gaze, now including indigenous artists and languages with more nuanced representations of the historical figures. These are powerfully important
It's the book which Moth discovers in Mr. Wentworth's study in Ami McKay's second novel, The Virgin Cure (2011): "The Witches of New York was the book I’ found most intriguing." "Listing addresses from Broome to Nineteenth Street, it claimed to be a reliable guide to the soothsayers of the
