Twenty-two years ago, I clipped an article from a Toronto newspaper about the restoration of Sainte-Marie among the Hurons near Midland, Ontario. I had studied the history of the mission and the slaughter of the Jesuit priests when I was in elementary school, culminating in a vague understanding of it
It begins with a short but vividly drawn scene: two lovers alone in a room in Paris in 1917. Sensorily rich and broadly sketched: the reader is immediately engaged. Not only by the substance, but by a couple of unexpected phrases therein: questions arise. Those questions are soon set aside
Take Tanis Rideout's Above All Things or Mary Novik's Muse: history is stuffed with stories begging to be retold. "Fiction and nonfiction both have to be true, but nonfiction has to be fact-checkable as well." So says Phllip Gourevitch. Indu Sundaresan's The Mountain of Light might not be fact-checkable, but
Everything I know about the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, which precipitated WWI, I learned from fiction. First, Aleksandar Hemon's short story, "The Accordian", which explores the very moment of the shots' impact, inspired by the presence of a bystander. This man seems to be the author's grandfather, standing in the
A blindfolded woman in labour, in the back of a van that has left Evin Prison in Tehran. It's an un-put-down-able scene. Atria Books - Simon & Schuster, 2013 It's 1983, in the third year of the war with Iraq, but the fierce immediacy of the story pulls
