In the wake of my IFOA reading list and the literary prizelists of the season, my November reading felt relatively whimsical. Without duedates attached to the majority of my reading, it was a pleasure to slip into volumes which had sat untouched in recent weeks. Each of these three volumes covers,
Poems for a Girlhood, it's subtitled. But it's actually for girlhoods. For the author's. And Reena Virk's. At least, for what of Reena Virk's girlhood is known and what can be imagined. She was murdered on November 14, 1997 when she was fourteen years old. At least eight teenagers participated in her
What's interesting about each of these novels is that none fits a traditional model in the suspense genre. Shari Lapena's The Couple Next Door is the closest to a conventional thriller. But even her novel spends more time on characterization and atmosphere than many loyal genre readers would tolerate. Nonetheless, she
Conflicted: that describes my first impressions after meeting Pillow in Andrew Battershill's Giller-nominated novel of the same name,and it also describes his perspective on the world. It's hard to be Pillow, to see all the angles which converge and diverge simultaneously on any single thought he has. For instance: "Pillow
This is the award's 42nd anniversary and the prize is announced on the evening of October 11, 2016 at the Bram and Bluma Appel Salon in the Toronto Reference Library. This year's finalists for the 2016 Toronto Book Awards are Howard Akler's Men of Action (a memoir), Ann Y.K. Choi's Kay’s Lucky Coin Variety (a novel), The
