Less consciously literary and considerably more pulpy than Laurence, the Jan Hilliard novel Morgan’s Castle (written by Nova Scotia-born Torontonian Hilda Kay Grant), suggests an alternative CanLit tradition to me—our dime store authors.
Villain Hitting for Vicious Little Nobodies is a lot.
The first utterance by Larry, the raucous novel’s restless narrator, indicates just how far things did progress from the book’s early days as a sturdy pioneer saga: “I’m grateful for this cell and its vinyl padded walls and floor that they laughably justify so that I don’t harm myself.”
An adept technician and genius at the craft of spinning a story, Atwood, who turns 86 in November, breathes tremendous vitality into Book of Lives.
Funny, unsettling, and often completely off the rails, Pools is a snapshot of the early 1980s[…]
Paxman is a whiz at threading this complex and evolving history into a recognizably Christie-esque formula, whether it’s Death on the Nile or A Haunting in Venice.
Young’s characters yearn for community, for untroubled friendships, for peace, love, and understanding (to quote Nick Lowe)—as though they too grew up with a notion of the Welcome Wagon and feel nostalgia for something they hold dear but cannot actually manifest in their everyday lives.
As a title, The Hypebeast, will mean nothing to many people. And, for select others, something highly specific.
In her self-portrait from a chronological distance, Percy celebrates a semi-misspent youth—all of its fiery enthusiasms and blind alleys, its dramas and earnestness, its lessons learned, misunderstandings, messiness, unbridled pleasures, and excesses. And, yes, humiliations.
There’s palpable tension in the spare opening pages of Yellow Barks Spider, a debut novella by Vancouver-based Saskatchewan transplant Harman Burns. Even before the story begins, a dedication—“for ██████ wherever you are” —draws any curious eye. A technique Burns revisits later, redaction—with its there/not there visibility—prompts inevitable questions: what’s the masked name and the story behind …
Playing satirist, tragedian, humorist, and social historian, Lambert produces a unique book that contains a complete world.
© 2025| THE Miramichi Reader
