Melanie, a young graduate student, is grieving the loss of her mother and main support system when she discovers that her PhD funding has been cancelled. Then she meets Stone, owner of Winter Willow, an old mansion in her neighbourhood, and is offered a position as his personal assistant.
What does it mean, to do the wrong thing for the right reasons? 16-year-old Winnie, the self-reliant narrator of Deborah Hemming’s taut novel Throw Down Your Shadows, is about to learn that painful lesson. It’s summer, 2005. Winnie lives with her artist mother, Ruth, in Gaspereau, a small rural community next door to Wolfville, in Nova …
Lesley Choyce has been a mainstay on the Atlantic Canadian literary scene for decades. The author of 100 books, he has written and published in every genre imaginable. He has won and been shortlisted for numerous regional and national literary awards, operates a publishing house, held teaching positions at Dalhousie University and other institutions, and …
In Anne Simpson’s gripping third novel, Speechless, A’isha Nasir, a Nigerian teenager, has been convicted of adultery and, in keeping with Sharia, or Islamic Law, been sentenced to death by stoning. But A’isha’s situation is neither simple nor straightforward. Raped by a man in her village, the fact that she has had a child out …
At the beginning of Dark August, 20-year-old Augusta “Gus” Monet learns that her great-grandmother Rose has died. The death of her only blood relative galvanizes Gus to take charge of her meandering life. She ditches her petty criminal boyfriend Lars and heads back to the small Ontario town where she spent part of her childhood. …
The End of Me is an astonishing set of sudden stories about the experience of mortality.
Jerry Levy’s quirky narratives provide a high-spirited alternative perspective on the crushing emotional isolation and myriad pressures that often accompany modern urban life. The fourteen stories in The Quantum Theory of Love and Madness, Levy’s follow-up to his 2013 collection Urban Legend, also frequently stretch the boundaries of narrative plausibility and occasionally veer into pure fantasy. …
The Innocents is set on Newfoundland’s harsh northern coastline, 100 or more years in the past. The Best family is struggling to establish a homestead in an isolated cove where father Sennet fishes and salts cod and mother Sarah maintains a vegetable patch, cooks and raises the children: Evered, Ada and baby Martha. Then, in …
Jaime Burnet’s novel tells an urgent, socially relevant story firmly rooted in time and place. Crocuses Hatch From Snow is first and foremost a novel of Halifax, Nova Scotia, one that addresses the good, the bad and the ugly from the city’s, and the province’s, long history and recent past. The novel opens in October …
The Waiting Hours, Shandi Mitchell’s suspenseful follow-up to her award-winning debut novel, Under This Unbroken Sky, examines the professional and personal lives of people working in crisis response: Mike is a cop, Kate an ER nurse, and Tamara a 911 operator. But Mitchell’s novel probes much deeper: into her characters’ personal lives, relationships and traumas. …
Akin demonstrates yet again that, when it comes to fictional worlds, Emma Donoghue is at home everywhere. The novel is set in New York and Nice, France. Seventy-nine-year-old retired academic Noah—widowed, set in his ways, still living in the same apartment where he and his wife Joan (nine years dead) spent their married life and …
Family matters dominate Ryan Turner’s exceptional collection of short fiction, Half-Sisters & Other Stories. The characters in these dramatically subtle, psychologically probing stories are often coping with or reacting to tragic or unhappy events—separation, estrangement, sudden death—and are compelled by circumstance to re-connect in tentative or awkward fashion with family members with whom they may have had little contact and who are largely unknown to them.
Joan Thomas’s GG-award winning fourth novel, based on actual events, is mainly set in the 1950s in Ecuador. In 1956, a group of American missionaries set their sights on a group of indigenous people living in the Ecuadorian rainforest with the intention of converting them to Christianity.
The main action of Megan Gail Coles’ debut novel takes place in St. John’s, NFLD, on a single day—February 14, Valentine’s Day—as a blizzard threatens the city. The setting is a fashionable downtown restaurant called the Hazel, which caters to a varied clientele: politicians, snobbish business types, couples willing to splurge on a special-occasion dinner. The characters are restaurant staff and patrons, their relatives, friends and acquaintances.
Novels, like love and family, take many forms. On every page of Reproduction, his debut novel, Ian Williams finds ways to resist and defy conventional narrative practice while constructing an audacious and uniquely challenging story that crosses generational lines. In the process, he has written a poignant, resonant tale about intersecting lives and the ways that seemingly trivial decisions can have unexpected and far-reaching consequences.
© 2024 | THE Miramichi Reader
Nicholas Selig, Editor-in-Chief
