For the past couple of weeks, I have been listening to Joseph Boyden's Through Black Spruce on my daily walks. I was walking in full summer, listening to descriptions of winter in Moose Factory in Northern Ontario. The clusters of cloud in the story were from the exhaust of snowmobiles in
Reading about Sabrina Ramnanan's love of Anne of Green Gables made me really want to read the debut novelist's Nothing Like Love. And it's a good thing that I understood this about her reading past, because it prepared me perfectly for her prose style. Random House CanadaDoubleday Canada, 2015
It's not impossible to find them, but if you read a lot of literary fiction, the novels which contain humour are outnumbered. Each of these books actually addresses a serious issue (or touches upon it, for Susan Juby's novel doesn't delve very deeply): global warming and habitat erosion, family farm
It's an old term, 'wolf border', from the Finnish language: susiraja. The boundary betweent the capital region and the rest of the country: everything which lies beyond the border is wilderness. HarperCollins, 2015 Certainly Rachel does have to explain a lot about her scientific work with wolves beyond the
Carrie's mother died on Tuesday. The loss has fragmented her view of the world, dulled her senses (or is that the alcohol?) and sharpened her wit. NeWest Press, 2015 Given the circumstances, the novel's narrative tone is a quick slap to the face, heightened colour left behind in
