Our young separatist narrator is imagining his own future and the future of Quebec, and both man and nation are struggling with matters of expression and independence, in Hubert Aquin's Next Episode (published in 1965, translated by Sheila Fischman in 2001). “I am the fragmented symbol of Quebec’s revolution, its
The first volume of his Toronto trilogy introduces readers to Bernice Leach, who has left Barbados to work in Toronto as a housekeeper in an upscale neighbourhood in the 1960s. She has left behind a son and his father, as well as a mother and a sister, and she is
In the past, I've made large stacks of creepy reading with the RIP challenges in mind, but I have a habit of stacking up many lovely possibilities but then choosing different books altogether later on. Perhaps this is partly because books can surprise you and take you in unexpected directions.
As was the case with her first novel, Gilaine Mitchell's follow-up is set in the small town of Stirling. In her debut, Film Society, a group of women meet to watch their favourite films in the red brick house at the end of Anne Street. One of the characters in Film Society,
On the list of 10 Perfect Alice Munro sentences, recently selected by CBC, this is the first: "Every year, when you’re a child, you become a different person." It begs the question, "When does one stop becoming somebody new every year?" Perhaps after an event like the incident described in this
