Feline companion beguiling, insightful

Most of the interaction in German writers J.M. Gutsch and Maxim Leo’s Frankie is between Frankie, a cat, and Richard Gold, who is grieving the death of his wife and is about to hang himself when Frankie turns up injured on his doorstep. They need each other, and become each other’s purpose in life.

As Gold soon discovers, Frankie can talk. Once Gold gets over his shock, they proceed on to many adventures.

Frankie didn’t like any of the names people gave him until old Mrs. Berkowitz adopted him. She was a great fan of Frank Sinatra, so she called the stray Frank. That name met with his approval, and one of the crooner’s well-known songs pretty much describes Frankie’s lifestyle: “I’ve lived a life that’s full/I travelled each and every highway/And more, much more than this/I did it my way.”

When talking with people, Frankie speaks “Humanish,” as opposed to the “Cattish” he uses in dealing with other animals. The advantage of “Cattish” is that it’s a universal language for cats — so, for example, a cat from Germany can talk with a cat from Sweden and no translation is required.

Smith’s quasi-satirical gen Z characters navigate pitfalls of work, sex and alienation

Self Care, Toronto writer Russell Smith’s first novel in 15 years, is bound to make some readers bristle.

In it, the 62-year-old author of How Insensitive and Girl Crazy takes a quasi-satirical look at gen Z, portraying it as an aggrieved generation overdiagnosed with and overmedicated for mental illness, having lots of sex but taking little joy in it.

Of course, it’s a writer’s prerogative to put himself in the shoes of characters who are nothing like himself (though Smith has not historically done so), but when choosing to satirize the complicated lives and unique loneliness of a generation so far removed from his own, he opens himself up to accusations of, at best, a kind of “old man shakes fists at clouds” obliviousness or, at worst, the snide condescension of privilege.

These fears are not entirely misplaced. However, Smith often accurately and anthropologically puts his finger directly on the throbbing purple bruise of modern discontent, disaffection and alienation.

Nail salon owner offers keen observations of human behaviour in Thammavongsa’s debut novel

Souvankhan Thammavongsa won the 2020 Giller Prize and 2021 Trillium Book Award for her debut short-story collection, How to Pronounce Knife, which was preceded by four collections of poetry. Her debut novel, Pick a Colour, has also landed on the shortlist for the 2025 Giller Prize, which will be awarded Nov. 17.

Pick A Colour is a slim novel that takes place over the course of a single day in a single location — a nail and beauty salon in an unnamed city. It is told from the first-person perspective of a single person, Ning, the salon’s owner. Interestingly, though the back cover blurb suggests that Ning is an immigrant, this is never explicitly stated in the novel or in the author’s introduction. We’re not told where Ning was born or where her family is from; she is proficient in both English and another unnamed language.

Every woman who works in the salon has a nametag identifying them as Susan. The clients don’t notice, and when they call and ask to book an appointment with Susan, she’s always available.

This business decision defines Ning: she is practical and unsentimental, able to turn other peoples’ misconceptions and stereotypes into a benefit. She can also be autocratic: her staff must look the same, and when one employee arrives with her hair two inches longer than everyone else’s, Ning grabs scissors and cuts it.

IRA informant cover-up at the core of Herron’s latest Slow Horses thriller

Jackson Lamb and his band of misfits and failed spies are back in the decrepit Slough House in London, where they have been dumped by Britain’s espionage service, MI5, for blotting their copybooks and in the hope they will become so bored they’ll leave the service of their own accord.

Fat chance! The Slow Horses, as they are called, are yet again drawn into nefarious espionage missions, ancient and new, in British author Mick Herron’s ninth Slow Horses novel, a series that spawned the popular Apple TV adaption of the same name.

Clown Town has the rejects discovering a horrendous coverup during The Troubles in Northern Ireland in which the spy service — Regent’s Park, or just the Park — paid an IRA informant codenamed Pitchfork and turned a blind eye as he raped and killed for his own purposes. If it becomes public, the Park will be under political and public scrutiny it does not want and the Service’s first desk, Diana Taverner, will do anything to prevent that happening.

The opening of the book describes Pitchfork’s go-to method of dispatching his enemies — crushing their heads under the wheel of a Land Rover — and if making that public won’t cause a political firestorm, nothing will.

Pinker ruminates on common knowledge, human interaction and more in brain-busting new tome

Devoted readers of the estimable Montreal-born psychologist Steven Pinker know he can get carried away with his own brilliance.

In his 12 previous pop-science books — among them such bestsellers as The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works and Enlightenment Now — he has been known to test the patience of his followers with both the complexity and wordiness of his arguments.

His new effort, an often brain-busting disquisition on how so-called common knowledge greases the wheels of human interaction, is no exception.

Here is an unfortunate sentence from page 72 of When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows... in which he is talking about the logical problems with holding firm beliefs:

Renewal of widespread human-rights commitment key

Alex Neve’s Universal: Renewing Human Rights in a Fractured World is a passionate call for a reinvigorated commitment to universal human rights. An Ottawa-based international human rights lawyer, Neve served as the secretary general of Amnesty International for nearly two decades.

Published by House of Anansi Press, Universal book accompanies his role as the 2025 Massey lecturer. This includes visits across Canada, including a recent stop at Winnipeg’s Canadian Museum for Human Rights on Nov. 4.

Neve’s through-line is the need to renew our dedication to a robustly universal framework of human rights, one that “applies to everyone, everywhere, always, regardless of who we are, and without exception.” In Universal he argues this is especially pressing in a difficult present where the promises of human right seem far removed, one “riddled with hate, inequality, and disinformation, weighted down with deepening economic injustice, and ravaged by war and genocide.”

Universal makes this case in lively prose supported by Neve’s wide knowledge base. Drawing on four decades of international and local human rights work, Neve offers analysis enlivened by story, memory and example: of his time meeting with Mohammed Salim, a Rohingya refugee who spoke of human rights as a “lifeboat;” the moving events organized by Gitxsan activist Cindy Blackstock and the First Nations Caring Society; or speaking at the Palestinian solidarity encampment at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont.

Icelandic literary legend Stefánsson making afternoon book club visit

The Free Press Book Club and McNally Robinson Booksellers are thrilled to welcome prolific Icelandic author Jón Kalman Stefánsson to the next virtual meeting on Tuesday, Nov. 25 for a very special noontime meeting, where he’ll read from and discuss his critically acclaimed novel Heaven and Hell.

First published in Icelandic in 2007 and then in English in the early 2010s (with translation by Philip Roughton), Heaven and Hell was picked up by Windsor, Ont. publishing house Biblioasis and re-released in February 2025. The book is the first instalment of what has been dubbed The Trilogy About The Boy; the second book, The Sorrow of Angels, was published on Nov. 4 by Biblioasis, and the third book, The Heart of Man, will be re-released on June 16, 2026.

Set at the turn of the 20th century, Heaven and Hell follows an unnamed narrator, “the boy,” in an Icelandic fishing camp; he befriends Bárður, a young fisherman with a similar love of books. Wintry weather leads to a fatal mistake for Bárður, leaving the boy, already devastated at having lost his family years back, grappling with grief.

The boy is determined to return Bárður’s copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost to the man who had loaned it to him, and then kill himself. But those he meets in his voyage to the man’s village challenge his plans, and what plays out on the subsequent pages is a breathtaking emotional shift.

New in paper

Cher: The Memoir, Part One

By Cher (Dey Street, $27)

The trailblazing singer chronicles her childhood, meeting, marrying and performing with Sonny Bono and the complicated bnature of their relationship.

Pax: War and Peace in Rome’s Golden Age

Familiar fodder in dystopian coming-of-age novel

“I was sixteen years old when the King pulped our books.”

In 2025, we’ve seen mass book-bannings in Alberta and a leader south of the border who has called himself a “king.” If the best dystopian fiction reflects the world we live in, Vancouver-based author PP Wong’s second novel does this with one chilling introductory line.

Thankfully, the author’s coming-of-age story lives up to its opening, with strong world-building — despite a relatively slim 264 pages — and characters you can actually care about.

Fred, the story’s narrator, lives in a fishing village in a small island country called Mahana. His land is ruled by a King with expectations and demands designed to set citizens up for failure.

Thin Air director closes book on job

for food cost estimator see https://staging.winnipegfreepress.com/uncategorized/2025/12/04/2026-food-cost-estimator

After 23 years at the helm of Thin Air, the Winnipeg International Writers Festival, director Charlene Diehl is stepping away to begin the next chapter in her life.

Diehl has been at the helm of what is now Plume Winnipeg, the organization that oversees Thin Air, since 2003, and will see out her role as director until the end of December.

Rideout spousal rape trial at the core of treatise on women’s rights and the law

At the beginning of her now-iconic essay, The White Album, Joan Didion famously wrote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

Didion’s phrase highlights the ways in which we use narratives to help make sense of chaotic and confusing experiences, unrelatable phenomena and misunderstood identities. One area that is often difficult to understand without the aid of a narrative is the sluggish momentum of the women’s rights movement, particularly the treatment of spousal abuse in bygone eras.

Award-winning non-fiction writer Sarah Weinman has shaped a narrative around the inextricable link between the law in the U.S. and women’s rights in the 1970s and ’80s in her latest work, Without Consent: A Landmark Trial and the Decades-Long Struggle to Make Spousal Rape a Crime.

At the centre of Weinman’s narrative is Greta Rideout, an Oregon woman who made history for being the first woman in American history to charge her husband with rape. In December 1978, Rideout pressed charges against her husband John Rideout and testified that he raped her one afternoon while they were still living together. The notion of spousal rape seemed ludicrous to many people across America, and at the time was a crime in only four states.

Winnipeg’s iconic intersection chronicled in timely, well-researched account

Mayor Scott Gillingham says it is “just an intersection,” but authors Sabrina Janke and Alex Judge show that Portage and Main is anything but ordinary. Barricaded or open, this intersection reflects the often complicated, and sometimes just weird, history of Winnipeg.

Written by the co-hosts of the award-winning local history podcast One Great History, Portage and Main is a lively and entertaining narrative enhanced with intriguing illustrations and archival photos. It covers the evolution of Portage and Main — from a few buildings along muddy tracks, to the rise of the Richardson building and other towers, to the bitter battle over pedestrian use — and exhibits dreams for the future, including interviews with contemporary architects.

By 1870, the intersection of Portage Avenue and Main Street was already taking shape, with two churches, two saloons, shops, a hotel and the first theatre all within close proximity. Only 30 years later, a black-and-white reproduction of a postcard, circa 1906, shows a mind-boggling number of people walking about the intersection along with a jumbled array of trolleys, cars, carts and horses.

The corner continued in importance and popularity throughout the next decades. An informal survey in 1934 by a newspaper reporter during a single hour of an afternoon counted “1,880 cars, 144 streetcars, 15 buses, 15 horse-drawn vehicles, 84 bicycles, and 4 motorcycles.” According to the reporter, the number of pedestrians passing through were too many to count as “there were 60 to 80 persons in sight at any one moment.” The scene was described as being “like an ant hill.”

Herzog ruminates on life’s truths and fictions in enchanting, philosophical prose in The Future of Truth

The epigraph that starts off director Werner Herzog’s most recent book, The Future of Truth, recounts a Persian legend. “God had a great mirror, and when God looked in the mirror, he saw the truth.” Eventually God dropped the mirror, and the men of the world scrambled to pick up the pieces, with significant consequence: “They all looked into their own shards, saw themselves, and thought they saw the truth.”

Herzog’s work as a filmmaker and writer over the past six and a half decades is defined by a term he uses to describe the ultimate motivation of his creations. “Ecstatic truth” is the idea that one needs “stylization, invention, poetry, and imagination to locate a deeper layer of truth” that illuminates beyond mere facts. Herzog has employed numerous sleights of hand to achieve this ecstasy, and pulled it off a staggering number of times.

Ideas about truth are essential to Herzog’s work. In his 1997 film Little Dieter Needs to Fly, he invented a door-opening tic for his subject, former Vietnam prisoner-of-war Dieter Dengler, to emphasize the weight of small freedoms. For 1993’s Bells from the Deep, Herzog paid drunks to pretend they were pilgrims crawling around on Russia’s iced-over Lake Svetloyar searching for the lost city of Kitezh. He separates himself from run-of-the-mill liars and fakes because of a willingness to own up to his methods.

Early in The Future of Truth, Herzog reveals the rub. “I will not and cannot engage in the philosophical debate about truth,” he writes. Instead, he flexes his encyclopedic mind, providing examples that prove “fake news” and other such embellishments that have altered reality have existed since the dawn of recorded history.