As with the earlier stories in this collection, readers are cast back in time: by thirty years in "The Children Stay". Readers find themselves on the east coast of the Island, Vancouver Island, but the exact location of the cottage is reminiscent of the way in which the Maitland River
While Love and Forgetting was in my stack of current reads, I listened to the World Book Club's podcast edition of a discussion of Albert Camus' The Outsider. Camus is someone whose work I associate with formal study, not pleasure, but Harriet Gilbert's interviews draw me into subjects I don't
You might think Struan is an unlikely setting for a novel. A town you can walk through in under ten minutes (even on slippery wintry surfaces). Knopf Canada, 2013 "Walking from one end of Struan to the other takes less than ten minutes. If you kept walking south
Listening to an interview with Amy Tan, for the Guardian book club, I was struck by the fact that she lifted many of the stories from her mother's life for the pages of her work. Yet, while reading Lives of the Family, it is easy to imagine so many of
"Give her a room of her own and five hundred a year, let her speak her mind and leave out half that she now puts in, and she will write a better book one of these days." So said Virginia Woolf. McClelland & Stewart, 1998 And although Kath
