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
When I was a girl, I had the same kind of advent calendar that Derek McCormack describes receiving every year from his mother, the flat ones made of cardstock, with winter scenes decorating them, little images behind each flap as you discovered them. No toys, no candies. House of
When I was a girl and allowed to choose my own books for a special occasion, I always selected an anthology. If I'd spotted a book like Rotraut Susanne Berner's The Winter Book, it would have been a shoe in. First, my choice was practical: they were larger books. (Well,
First, it's small enough to fit in a pocket. The book, not the moose. And there's something charming about that, right? And something seductive about the idea that you can easily sit down with a book and meet its characters and stay with them, in a single sitting,
It's not something you hear much about anymore: once, people more commonly pitched fits, threw fits, had fits, staged fits. Hissy fits. Crying fits. (Now rants and tantrums.) A fit of rage. A fit of pique. A fit of temper. Blustery and ephemeral. Unpredictable and dramatic. Fits, whether in human nature
