Love can be beautiful and disastrous at the same time. In Sheung-King’s debut novel You are Eating an Orange. You are Naked., he brilliantly evokes the complexities of an intense romantic relationship with the use of lyrical language and folk tales that draw the reader in.
If you like your stories to follow a straight line, this quintuplet may give you whiplash. Each one invites you into an introspective world of intense emotions, whether for a woman, 4-track cassette, California in the 90s, or disdain for accordions and addiction aftermath. Plenty of play on wordplay suggest that these stories are best …
In One for the Rock, his first venture into crime fiction, Kevin Major has written a fast-paced and highly enjoyable novel that will appeal to fans of the genre, but which also offers the dual bonus of an engaging narrator and a vividly rendered St. John’s, Newfoundland setting.
Carolyn Bennett’s debut novel Please Stand By is a fast-paced story about a woman trying to save the public television station in Edmonton where she freelances at. When a corporate man from Toronto is recruited to make changes to the Alberta Broadcasting System (ABS) and threatens the protagonist Suzanne Foley’s livelihood and those of her …
Blaze Island opens with a Category Five hurricane off one of Newfoundland’s most northern Islands, a ferry ride from Gander. Rain and wind batter the Island and the home of Milan Wells and his daughter. A disturbance from the front door finds a young man, soaked and unconscious. Catherine Bush tells us a story of …
Melt by Heidi Wicks explores the life-sustaining anatomy of friendship and the complex relationships we have with our pasts.
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. …
There are novels that feel alive. There is no other way to describe it, because words like ‘fresh’ or ‘current’ are not enough. These novels are more than just a compelling plot or strong writing. They do more than tap into current events or debates. These novels offer access to something made animate on the …
Skin House got me with this line on its back cover: “Skin House is a story about two guys who end up in the same bar they started out in.” I thought, sweet, a kind of modern Waiting for Godot story. Wrong. But oh, so good in what it does do. Take a down-and-out guy …
Jean Marc Ah-Sen, award-winning author of Grand Menteur — a novel about Mauritian street gangs—, has returned with something new: a collection of short pieces titled In the Beggarly Style of Imitation. Now a novelist and short story writer, Ah-Sen has proved what a multi-faced creator he is. He is currently working on another novel “just to make sure the first one wasn’t a fluke,” he says (Ah-Sen, “The Jean Marc Ah-Sen Interview”). In the …
Some People’s Children is Bridget Canning’s second novel, and effectively debunks the myth of the ‘sophomore slump.’ The novel follows Imogene Tubbs as she navigates the difficulties of life as a teenage girl living in rural Newfoundland.
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.
Since the author personally sent me this book to review, I am hesitant to say anything bad about it, but I thought the story was going to be different somehow. I was under the impression that this novel was about a woman’s journey across Canada to ‘find herself’ and that the subject matter would be …
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Nicholas Selig, Editor-in-Chief
