In Stephanie Makes a Scene, we meet her decades later and Rory takes the back seat. It is thrilling to connect the stories and see her develop into a promising older playwright, returning to Landers Cove, Nova Scotia at sixty-seven years old.
“Addicts don’t talk about the pain, the loss, the moments of deep sorrow that anchor us to the underbelly of society.”
This is the story of Clemence, an unhappily married, eager-to-be fulfilled magazine writer of dream wedding articles.
Mary’s brother Jess has just returned to his hometown after serving eight years in the military in Afghanistan. His sight has been compromised by an injury, and he brings with him the body of his close friend, a fallen soldier.
Haruki Murakami’s latest novel, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, is a towering achievement.
In The Wedding, author Gurjinder Basran weaves a fictional story depicting an extravagant wedding between two wealthy Sikh-Canadian families living in Vancouver.
From the first story, I was captivated by the complex drama of the Shane family and their lives in rural Idaho during the early 90s.
Margo and Dick were together for ten years, and she had no idea she would be facing widowhood at the “tender age of sixty-two”.
Set in small-town Nova Scotia, The Sugar Bowl Feud explores the many facets of grief and how four very different siblings deal with and cope with the pain of overwhelming loss. Told in alternating chapters, from each of the sibling’s points of view, we are introduced to each sibling along with their quirks, opinions, and personalities.
As she blows out the candles on her thirtieth birthday cake in the opening of Lucid, Charlie Marin reveals herself to be the antagonistic force driving Jenna Boholij’s literary thriller.
Charlie has a successful job, compassionate family and friends, and a boyfriend in Winnipeg, but she cannot move past the death of her twin Cara, who died at age thirteen. The details of how she died are hidden away, but this loss makes Charlie numb to her circumstances and all possibilities for her future.
Bird Suit’s fictional town of Port Peter could be any number of small towns on a lake, overrun with summer tourists buying ice cream and cheap souvenirs on the boardwalk, filling up the local pubs and motels, knocking up the local girls – before disappearing in September. There are, however, two things that make Port Peter special: its perfect peaches and its Birds. “The women of the town tell one another about the Birds in secret… When a Port Peter girl gets pregnant by a tourist boy, a woman in her life gives her all the information she needs to know.”
Karl Pringle, the luckless misfit at the centre of Jerry Levy’s collection of linked short fiction, The Philosopher Stories, is someone most of us can identify with, regardless of (or maybe because of) the fact that he is often deceitful, sometimes deluded, and pretty much always mired in a sinkhole of self-pity.
Mira and Bernard are both suffering the effects of recent losses. In her forties, childless and recently divorced from David, Mira’s past is very much on her mind.
All the way through, I felt like I knew Aubrey McKee — especially when he admitted his strange paranoias and personal shortcomings, wondering whether he’d ever measure up, even whether anyone might ever fall in love with him.
© 2025| THE Miramichi Reader
