Literary

Nicole is your average Portland hipster, chugging along, happily raising chickens and hosting karaoke nights at the local dive bar. But when a palm reader reveals a long-buried family secret (Nicole’s mom lied about the identity of her father), Nicole has to re-examine her childhood in light of the news. As Nicole tries to track […]

“I heard someone say that once a girl opens her legs she can never close them again.” Fans of Berger’s award-winning Maidenhead will (sort of) know what to expect with Little Cat, a collection of the author’s first two novellas, Lie With Me and The Way of the Whore. In the former, the reader is […]

Revolutions never end the way you want them to, whether personal or political there are always extenuating circumstances. In her first novel Kay transports you to the seedy underbelly of Budapest where the story twists and turns through time, similar to the fabled tunnels buried deep under the city. Trying to escape after a messy […]

“We are all horrors under the skin.” And it is around that brazen literary perspective that Rosie Garland fashions her titillating Victorian tale, bringing to life the filthy underbelly of Dickensian London from a satisfying humanist perspective. Though no stranger to the margins of gothic performance art—she moonlights as alterego Rosie Lugosi the Vampire Queen—this […]

Spring is a great time to find a good book to read and the Atlantic Book Festival— a one-week showcase of emerging Canadian authors—wants to help with that. The festival concludes with the Atlantic Book Awards at Alderney Landing on Thursday, May 16 at 7pm. This year marks the fifth anniversary of the ABA. The story […]

Buried Truths tells the story of 14-year-old Zoë, who after the death of her mother moves from Toronto to small town Newfoundland to live with a father she believed was dead. Whenever you delve into the mind of a teenager you are bound to wind up with a certain amount of selfishness and—while not lacking […]

I really wanted to like this book, but I found the stories in Eat Your Heart Out to be, overall, a bit weak and repetitive. Boland is obviously rooting for the underdog here. Her characters are victims—people-in-progress just trying to get their shit together. Depicted over and over again are half-uttered intimacies between men and […]

The only thing I didn’t like about this book was the fact that I almost didn’t read it because it bore a Chatelaine Book Club sticker. Life After Life taught me to swallow my pride, dump my prejudices and get back to judging a book by its first sentence, not its cover. This is an […]

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 […]

Building Stories is not a book. It’s an immense box filled with hardcover graphic novels, mini-comics and oversized newspaper comics that together tell the story of an apartment building and its inhabitants. I’m not an anarcho-primitivist, but I love that Building Stories is a physical art piece that can’t be read on an e-reader. Chris […]

“Faith is like imagination. It sees something where there is nothing.” Grace McCleen is an exquisite new author who comes from a fundamentalist religious background. This, combined with an English degree from Oxford, a keen eye for the childhood experience and a mastery of description—turning trash into one little girl’s paper-and-glue paradise—makes The Land of […]

DISCLAIMER: Do not read this book in public because you’ll look insane. Not just because you’re reading a book with the weirdest title ever, but you’ll be laughing so hard people will stare at you and clear their throats passive aggressively. The master storyteller and humourist returns with a new collection that never disappoints. From […]