Zoe Migicovsky

Canadian urban fantasy author Kelley Armstrong starts a new series with Omens, featuring Olivia, a wealthy young woman with a perfect life until it all predictably falls apart. In this case it’s because she, and the world, learn she was adopted from serial killers serving life sentences. She escapes to Cainsville, Illinois, a small town […]

The Wisdom of Psychopaths is an intriguing non-fiction book that promises to reveal “what saints, spies and serial killers can teach us about success.” The scientific content was well-researched and detailed, as Dutton, a research psychologist at the University of Oxford, delves into both contemporary and historical studies. His search for psychopaths isn’t limited to […]

Olympos If there is a genre for approachable, engaging and relevant non-fiction, The Virtual Self by Canadian journalist Nora Young definitely belongs in it. The book tracks our self-tracking, or online-reporting, habits, which have exploded along with websites like Facebook and Twitter. In accessible language, Young, the host of CBC Radio’s Spark, discusses the history […]

Nominated for the Orange Prize, On The Floor by Aifric Campbell is the story of 28-year-old Geri Golloy, an investment banker in London. She’s made her name by doing business with a star client in Hong Kong who is now insisting that she move there, even though she doesn’t want to. The novel takes place […]

Translated from Spanish, Sabina Berman’s novel Me, Who Dove Into the Heart of the World is a story with a narrator as unconventional as the title. The strong and unusual voice belongs to Karen Nieto, a highly functioning autistic who was a once-feral child in Mexico with an incredible bond with the ocean. Discovered by […]

The exquisite craftsmanship of the words inside The Deer Yard match its beautiful exterior. The collection of 21 poems begins with an explanation of the format, which uses the Wang River Sequence as a model. Thurston, living in British Columbia, would write four lines and send them to Cooper, who, living in New Brunswick, would […]

In The Land of Birdfishes is an unexpected and intricate debut novel by Nova Scotian writer Rebecca Silver Slayter. Although the story begins with two sisters who are blindfolded by their father after their mother’s suicide, it quickly transitions to decades later. Aileen, who is partially blind, travels to Dawson City, Yukon, where her fully […]

Sometimes tragedy can become a gimmick to sell books, and when reading Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala, I almost wished that were the case. Instead, the memoir is a raw, fragmented story of a woman who lost her two young sons, her husband and her parents, when the massive 2004 tsunami hit Sri Lanka. With one […]

A Tale for the Time Being is an original and powerful story that blurs the lines of reality as it alternates between the diary of sixteen-year-old Nao, a Japanese girl who is heavily bullied and planning to commit suicide, and a struggling novelist, Ruth, living on a remote island in British Columbia who finds the […]