Like the sand dollar that Rhoda’s father slips into his pocket, this is a gritty story. Her sister Joanne repatriated their father, with an air passage to back the claim, and now he has come to live with Joanne. “Then waja come here for?” “Because Regan sent me on
If The Cat’s Table (2011) was a slow and steady unravelling of a young boy’s memories, yarn taut and tidy, Warlight is a mass of moth-eaten fragments, remnants of a finely-crafted woollen garment pulled from a trunk. A thing of beauty, yes, but the devastation is the first thing
It’s as if Billy, from “The End of the World”, had heard the tragic story of Shirley and Pete Higgins and used it to justify his reluctance to leave Canada. Unlike Billy, Shirley and Pete were thrilled to honeymoon in Europe, thrilled by all the ordinary things made extraordinary
What a fine author with whom to launch Women in Translation month (hosted by Biblibio) one of the few contemporary authors whose work I have followed from the beginning in Sheila Fischman’s translations: Ru (2009; 2012) and Mãn (2013; 2014). Themes from both of her previous novels resurface in Vi, and
I was just mentioning Coyote stories a couple of months ago, in my Spring Quarterly round-up of short fiction. But these illustrated coyote stories are inviting for both younger and older readers. Two of the tales are illustrated by Johnny Wales, full-sized and full-colour (and mostly double-spread) illustrations,
