by Richard Wagamese Indian Horse follows Saul Indian Horse as his life takes him from a northern Ojibway reserve through the world of the the White Man and all the abuse and racism it forces him to endure. After a hopeless life in a residential school, he gets a taste of joy and salvation in…
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by Marian Engel I think I should start things off by warning that this isn’t Claire Cameron’s The Bear, as people seem to immediately think when I bring up Engel’s book. No, this is that book that fell off of everyone’s radar in recent years, despite my understanding that it was at least somewhat controversial…
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by Omar El Akkad In a story like American War, you can see how an author’s experience comes out in the narrative, adding a sense of legitimacy to the whole thing. And who could be better than El Akkad, an award-winning journalist reporting on war, terror, and civil unrest, to tell the story of the…
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by Charles Bukowski There’s something almost inexplicable about Bukowski’s writing that hits you when you read it. It’s probably something to do with how natural his prose is, but I think there’s more to it than that. Bukowski knew things, man. He did things that I’d probably work hard to excise from my own writing,…
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by Heather O’Neill I think that The Lonely Hearts Hotel is going to be a tough sell for a lot of people, largely due to its explicit portrayal of sexual violence, but I think the author’s decision to explore it in such a way has to do with a commentary on perversion in society––though I…
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by Sergei Lebedev I don’t think I can stress enough the importance of actually getting to the heart of your story in your synopsis. If that little summary on the back of your book sets people up for the wrong expectations, it can really affect the amount of enjoyment readers glean from your story. The…
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by Graham Greene Imagine it now: A virile, young man wanders around the book store. Having recently finished Greene’s marvelous Our Man in Havana, he casually glances to see what else the author may have for him to enjoy, only to find that he wrote Orient Express. Of course, it wasn’t until after purchasing it…
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by Sean Michaels It feels like I’ve recently been struggling quite a bit to write my reviews, but usually that has something to do with getting to the heart of what I feel about the books I’m reading and why. Oftentimes, I’ll have difficulties when there are objective problems with a story, but I still…
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by Madeleine Thien My first encounter with Do Not Say We Have Nothing was when I saw it on the Giller long list. Out of all the presumably great stories that made the list, the synopsis held my interest the most. Thien’s book follows a group of people as they struggle through the Chinese Cultural…
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by Cordelia Strube In my final review related to the International Festival of Authors, something that hasn’t happened since I think The Fault in Our Stars repeated itself. You see, all the characters in On the Shores of Darkness, There is Light have very clear voices, but one in particular had the wrong one initially….
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