What I was not carrying in my bookbag this month: David Mitchell's Ghostwritten, Shauna Singh Baldwin's The Tiger Claw and the third volume in G.R.R. Martin's Ice and Fire series. These hefty volumes stayied at home, but these slimmer books were travelling this month. And there was more to-ing and fro-ing this month
“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
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
She tells you straight-up: "The decision when to begin a family story is arbitrary." HarperPerennial, 2015 (US edition) And she lays out the doubts and uncertainties: "Who am I to claim the official version?" And, so, Alison Pick is our seemingly uncertain and unsanctioned guide. But, she also
Beginning: Was it like this before? A slow start, a growing realization that these characters are not trying to be likeable, only to be believable? Doubleday Canada, 2015 Pip (short for Purity) seems rather like a middle-aged woman in a young woman's skin, so many worries and an overwhelming sense
