“If prison isn’t prison, the outside world has no meaning!” So says Aurora to Charmaine in Margaret Atwood's new novel, The Heart Goes Last. McClelland & Stewart, 2015 (Penguin Random House) It dates back, the CanLit icon's interest in imprisonment, a preoccupation with the idea of lives which
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
This year I have read some stand-out collections, but for the most part I neglected to take notes from them: Joy Williams' Honored Guests, Kathleen Winter's The Freedom in American Songs, Jessica Grant's Making Light of Tragedy, Shawn Syms' Nothing Looks Familiar, Elaine McCluskey's Hello, Sweetheart, Julia Leggett's Gone South and Other
It’s frightening, what happened to the author late one night travelling on a dark road after an exhausting studio session, forced to suddenly stop because of two shadowy figures ahead. (You can read about the event in an article on her UK publisher's site, here.) Simon & Schuster, 2015
Angie Adbou handles multiple narrative voices very well. Readers familiar with her earlier novels, The Bone Cage (2008) and The Canterbury Trail (2011) will know this, having inhabited narratives from varying perspectives. They will also know (as will readers of her 2006 collection of short stories, Anything Boys Can Do) that
