Reviews. News. Interviews.
Early on a May morning, a young Nova Scotia woman straps on a small backpack and leaves the Halifax Common to start her journey along the coastal roads of Nova Scotia. Planning to cover almost a marathon a day, she will walk the perimeter of the entire province in just under three months to raise awareness for the Heart and Stroke Foundation and the Brigadoon Children’s Camp Society.…
In April 2017, Justin Barbour and his Cape Shore water dog, Saku, arrived in Robinsons, on the Rock’s west coast, where they began a quest to experience the province’s woods and waters first-hand. A late winter lingers as they push over the Long Range Mountains to the interior of the island, where they hope thawed lakes and rivers will allow them to continue by inflatable raft.…
Overland is the true story of a journey from Australia to Switzerland without flying. From vast deserts to an Indonesian fishing boat, a slow train through Burma to an armed confrontation in Laos, lullabies from middle-aged Chinese businessmen to a cold night on the Great Wall, wolves and reindeer herders, thieves and nomads: this is a vivid illustration of Asia and the people who live there, and of one ancient, stubborn motorcycle travelling through the world’s wild places.…
few of us were visiting over beers on an English seaside patio. One of the group seated at the picnic-style table was Renaissance man Gray Lightfoot – successful author and poet – a bus driver the rest of the week. I referenced Lightfoot being a bus driver-slash-poet. The others sniggered, thinking I just called him a piss-poet. “You don’t get the joke, do you?”…
The Miramichi Reader’s West Coast Editor, Bill Arnott is a published author and poet and a world traveller (although he’s isolating in Vancouver at the moment, he’s not going anywhere). Someplace he IS going, and you can join him is at Bill Arnott’s Gone Viking Online over at YouTube. You see, Bill was booked at libraries in and around Vancouver to promote his new book. …
April is National Poetry Month. This year’s theme, A World of Poetry.
A world of poetry. This, I understand. Being witness to stomped-verse haka in Waitangi, the lyrical thrum of Outback didgeridoo, breathy sax in a wet London underpass, red slashed characters on a mud wall in Hebei, tanka blurred through joss smoke in Kyoto, rantings of a street poet in Times Square, the guttural slur of a Greenlandic hymn, and a master’s spoken-word reverberating on old timber, sibilant sea hissing through cracked glass.…
Ontario author Lesley Strutt’s novel On the Edge is part of Inanna Publication’s Young Feminist Series, and is an adventurous read for all ages, especially for those who like sailing stories. Fourteen-year-old Emma (short for Emerald) is living an overly-restrictive life on her Aunt and Uncle’s farm near Kingston, Ontario. For mysterious reasons. her mother handed over care of her to them when Emma was only a little girl.…
the son of James S. Rockefeller Sr. the successful Wall Street banker, young James’ childhood was “very privileged. There were no material wants. The food was plain but wholesome. Wealth, as I grew to be aware of it, was not be flaunted, but I didn’t know back then that my family had it.” As you read through the pages of Wayfarer, his memoirs, you definitely get the sense that none of the four children in the house in Connecticut received any special treatment, nor did they believe they were entitled to any.…
Written for middle-grade readers, TIMEFLIES takes the time travel trope in a different direction: the three children, Grizelda (Griz), Sam and his sister Alisha can only time travel to get answers to a question they pose. Once they get the answer, they are back in the present. Oh, and in their travels, they are three common houseflies. Different, isn’t it? And how do they get to perform this feat you ask?…
Warning! Reading this book will leave you exhausted! I was only a few chapters in when I had to put down the book and wonder aloud: “How does a seventy-year-old manage to do all this in a day?” Let me back up and explain what Sandra Phinney’s Waking Up In My Own Backyard (2017, Pottersfield Press) is all about.
Basically “Waking Up” came about as an idea to do something different -each day- for 31 days straight.…
Canadian author David Cozac was born and raised in Toronto. He works for the United Nations. In the past, he worked for several human rights organizations, including PEN Canada and Canadian Journalists for Free Expression.
Finishing the Road (2017, Tightrope Books) is Mr Cozac’s debut novel and it certainly augurs well for any future books he may pen. Set in Guatemala in the closing years of its Civil War (1960-1999), it involves three principal characters: Marc, a young man from Toronto who is in the country to learn Spanish, Sixteen-year-old Magdalena and her younger brother Jacinto, Ixil people now living in Guatemala City whose father was taken away by the military, and whose mother died while they were hiding from government troops in the jungle, and Claire, a French journalist who has recently learned of her Guatemalan father and has traveled to the country to meet him for the first time.…
Wong is the author of five non-fiction bestsellers, including Out of the Blue and Red China Blues, named one of Time magazine’s top ten non-fiction books of 1996. She has won numerous journalism awards and is now a professor of journalism at St. Thomas University. A third-generation Canadian, Jan is the eldest daughter of a prominent Montreal restaurateur.
Apron Strings (2017 Goose Lane Editions) is a different kind of book.…