Literary

Roll Up the Rim tells the story of the good-hearted but down on his luck Owen and the misadventures that come into play while living a life below his capacity. Owen doesn’t know he’s the town genius, so he spends his time content working at Tim Hortons, obsessing over Roll Up the Rim and living […]

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 […]

It’s big news when an avid promoter of Atlantic Canadian fiction releases his sophomore novel. Chad Pelley, who runs the CanLit site Salty Ink, is very aware of the literary landscape in which his book has landed. Every Little Thing indulges in the expected familial tragedy abated with humour and community that has characterized much […]

In this fast-paced, nihilistic American short story collection, Adam Levin explores 10 disturbingly imaginable worlds with a sort of cartoonish realism I’ve never before encountered. We begin with “Frankwittgenstein,” a hilarious, non-stop social commentary about a family whose patriarch becomes obsessed with curing preadolescent anorexia and fritters away his life (and family’s money) fashioning an […]

Imagine your life punctuated by strange talismans—taxidermy, a narwhal’s tooth— illustrated by forgotten items of clothing—an old cardigan, a slip—set in motion by an antique opal found on the ground. Imagine your life in footnotes. Now imagine you are young and sent to live in Paris against your will. Imagine you get there and do […]

“The desire for facts and the need for fiction are often interchangeable….” And that is exactly the attitude Sarah Dearling takes in her newest novel. I have difficulty calling it a novel because the ever-tenuous genre does not quite apply. Half-memoir, half-fiction, The Art of Sufficient Conclusions follows a young, troubled teacher who stands in […]

When Lucie Walker comes to, she’s knee-deep in the San Francisco Bay with no recollection of how she got there. Lucie, now an amnesiac, is quickly claimed by her former-fiance—a stranger she now has to try and fall back in love with—and, as it turns out, is not much of a likable person. As she […]

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 […]

Lily is a teenage girl trying to make sense of her past. Luc is a fallen angel looking for redemption. They fall in love. In an apocalyptic future, a Demon Slayer tracks down Airie, a half- human/half-goddess and soon they face an epic battle with demons. They fall in love too. Meanwhile, Jamie, a female […]

Beautiful Creatures by Kami Gracia and Margaret Stohl. A New York Times bestseller about a young teenage girl battling between good and evil forces. City of Bones by Cassandra Clare. A modern story about demon hunters that is currently being adapted into a film. Bitten by Kelly Armstrong (Women of the Otherworld series). Get a […]