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Thammavongsa launches debut novel Tuesday

Ben Sigurdson 4 minute read Yesterday at 2:02 AM CDT

Award-winning poet and fiction writer Souvankham Thammavongsa brings her debut novel to Winnipeg on Tuesday, when she’ll launch Pick a Colour at McNally Robinson Booksellers’ Grant Park location at 7 p.m. in an event co-presented by Plume Winnipeg.

The slim novel chronicles a day in the life of Ning, a nail salon owner and former boxer whose emotional range (and loneliness) are revealed to the reader through the course of her doting on clients.

The author of four books of poetry, Thammavongsa’s short-story collection How to Pronounce Knife won a number of awards, including the 2020 Giller Prize. (Pick a Colour is also shortlisted for the Giller.) She’ll be joined in conversation by Winnipeg author Lindsay Wong.

For an interview with Thammavongsa, see Tuesday’s Free Press.

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Aspirations aplenty in Boynton’s board book

Harriet Zaidman 4 minute read Yesterday at 2:02 AM CDT

It’s never too early to encourage toddlers aged 1-3 to follow their dreams — and When Pigs Fly! A Song For Dreamers (Boynton Bookworks, 24 pages, board book, $11), by prolific American writer Sandra Boyton, does just that.

Right from birth, kids may be told their aspirations are impossible, but they just may find their own path as they absorb the lyrical poetry and look at Boynton’s oh-so-cute trademark illustrations. They’ll have sweet dreams as they plot their lives as future grown-ups.

● ● ●

In Aggie and the Ghost by Matthew Forsythe (Simon & Schuster, 64 pages, hardcover, $25), a little girl is excited to live alone (it’s a story, so we’ll accept that), but her new house is haunted by a messy ghost. To Aggie’s annoyance, the ghost won’t follow her strict rules, such as “no eating all the cheese.”

New in paper

1 minute read Preview

New in paper

1 minute read Yesterday at 2:02 AM CDT

Tell Me Pleasant Things About Immortality: Stories

By Lindsay Wong (Penguin Canada, $23)

The Winnipeg-based author’s collection brings together otherwordly creatures and immigrants in a range of horror-tinged stories.

Shock Induction: A Novel

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Tell Me Pleasant Things About Immortality
Tell Me Pleasant Things About Immortality

Biography of beloved, complicated comedic icon ensures legacy lives on

Reviewed by Jen Zoratti 5 minute read Preview

Biography of beloved, complicated comedic icon ensures legacy lives on

Reviewed by Jen Zoratti 5 minute read Yesterday at 2:02 AM CDT

John Candy would be — should be — celebrating his 75th birthday this Halloween.

When the Canadian comic actor, best known and beloved for his work on the sketch comedy series SCTV as well as in movies such as Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Uncle Buck, Splash, Home Alone, Cool Runnings and so many more, died on March 4, 1994 at the too-young age of 43, it was nothing short of a tragedy.

Here was a man who brought so much joy to people, an open-faced, preternaturally youthful guy as sweet as his surname who had an enormous heart that eventually gave out on him in Durango, Mexico while filming Wagons East.

Paul Myers’ new biography, John Candy: A Life in Comedy, is a warm, thoughtful, sensitive portrait of a complicated comedian by a writer who clearly has great admiration and affection for his subject matter.

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Canadian Press files

Fellow comics as well as co-stars and directors interviewed by Paul Myers remembered John Candy for his sense of humour, his kindness and his generosity.
Canadian Press files Fellow comics as well as co-stars and directors interviewed by Paul Myers remembered John Candy for his sense of humour, his kindness and his generosity.

Ramping up Canada’s bang for the buck

Allan Levine 9 minute read Preview

Ramping up Canada’s bang for the buck

Allan Levine 9 minute read Yesterday at 2:00 AM CDT

During the Second World War, hundreds of Canadian businessmen volunteered their services to lead Canada’s wartime economy. They were known as “dollar-a-year” men, though the vast majority were not actually paid a dollar each year. They played a significant role in transforming Canada into the fourth-largest industrial power in the world. In this adapted excerpt from The Dollar a Year Men: How the Best Business Brains in Canada Helped to Win the Second World War by Allan Levine, the story of Canada’s wartime aircraft industry is chronicled.

IN MID-JUNE 1940, Halifax businessman Ralph Pickard Bell was on a fishing trip in Prince Edward Island when he received a telegram from C.D. Howe. The all-powerful minister of the Department of Munitions and Supply in the Liberal government of William Lyon Mackenzie King requested that Bell travel to Ottawa immediately to meet with him. Bell replied that he was on vacation and could not leave. Howe expressed his displeasure. Upon further reflection, Bell, who no doubt had been following the news stories about the Nazi conquest of Western Europe, reconsidered. He chartered a private plane and was in Howe’s office the next day. “That’s better,” said Howe with a smile when he saw him.

Howe had first met Bell and his wife, Anna (called Rita), on a cruise to Bermuda in the late 1920s and knew that Bell was an amateur pilot. He told Bell that he wanted him to oversee Canada’s new aircraft production program. Bell was taken aback. He said he could fly planes, not build them. “I didn’t ask you that,” Howe barked. “I said I wanted you to take charge.” By the time the meeting ended, Bell had been appointed the director general of the aircraft production branch, a position he was to hold until October 1944.

Few dollar-a-year men personified a Munitions and Supply branch like Ralph Bell. For more than four years, he was at the centre of a remarkable and complex undertaking: the development of Canada’s wartime aircraft industry almost from scratch. In 1939, there were eight small aircraft plants that employed approximately 4,000 workers and produced about 40 airplanes a year in a total of 500,000 square feet of factory space. These factories were poorly equipped, and most were located close to desolate fields. They were supported by a handful of service, repair and overhaul shops in Montreal, Toronto and Winnipeg. By 1944, the industry employed more than 116,000 people — 30,000 of whom were women who worked as seamstresses, riveters and welders. They manufactured more than 4,000 planes annually in 15 million square feet of factory space. In all, more than 16,000 aircraft — Lancaster bombers, Avro Ansons, De Havilland Mosquitos, Boeing’s huge Catalina flying boat, the Curtiss Helldiver, and the Harvard and Cornell trainers, among others — were produced during the war to service the RCAF, the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan (especially the Avro Ansons), and the air forces of Britain and the United States. The estimated total value of this production was $850 million — the equivalent of about $14 billion today.

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National Film Board of Canada / Library and Archives Canada

C.D. Howe gets the feel of things by taking hold of a steering wheel during ceremonies on June 19, 1943, that marked the delivery of the half-millionth unit of motorized equipment produced in Canada during the Second World War.

National Film Board of Canada / Library and Archives Canada C.D. Howe gets the feel of things by taking hold of a steering wheel during ceremonies on June 19, 1943, that marked the delivery of the half-millionth unit of motorized equipment produced in Canada during the Second World War.

Duo surmise next pandemic could be far more deadly than COVID-19

Reviewed by Barry Craig 4 minute read Preview

Duo surmise next pandemic could be far more deadly than COVID-19

Reviewed by Barry Craig 4 minute read Yesterday at 2:00 AM CDT

For three years, the murmur of underlying fear lived among us, and the future seemed about as promising as palliative care.

It was our unforgettable COVID-19 pandemic, the world’s most catastrophic natural event in the past 100 years.

Authors Michael Osterholm, an estimable epidemiologist, and exceptional journalist and filmmaker Mark Olshaker, are sharing with conviction and authority what they learned from COVID-19, what we did wrong, where we’re headed and how we’ll fight back if the next pandemic were to be the deadliest ever — the so-called Big One.

“The Big One is not optional; it’s not an if, it’s a when,” say the authors.

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Associated Press files

In this 2023 photo, patients with COVID symptoms use ventilators at the crowded Changhai Hospital in Shanghai, China.
Associated Press files In this 2023 photo, patients with COVID symptoms use ventilators at the crowded Changhai Hospital in Shanghai, China.

Contributions and plight of migrant workers detailed in vital account

Reviewed by Joseph Hnatiuk 4 minute read Preview

Contributions and plight of migrant workers detailed in vital account

Reviewed by Joseph Hnatiuk 4 minute read Yesterday at 2:00 AM CDT

Numbering in the hundreds of thousands, migrant workers are too often unnoticed and under-appreciated, living and working among us, many hoping to one day proudly proclaim Canadian citizenship. Others never warm to our long, cold winters, preferring annual seasonal-work contracts that help support families temporarily left behind.

In an engaging and well-documented study, Calgary-based writer Marcello Di Cintio reveals why migrant workers are such vital contributors to Canada’s ongoing nation-building plans, and even include foreign students who become part-time workers seeking additional income for living expenses.

Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers is the latest sociological study by Di Cintio, who has authored several books including Driven: The Secret Lives of Taxi Drivers and contributed to periodicals such as the Walrus and Canadian Geographic.

As the subtitle signals, stories emanating from the many interviews comprising this book come mainly from legally vetted “migrant workers,” as opposed to undocumented “migrant refugees” who ignore national borders and are pitiful reminders of world inequities.

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Jason Kryk / Canadian Press files

Foreign workers are particularly crucial in agricultural and service sectors in Canada.
Jason Kryk / Canadian Press files Foreign workers are particularly crucial in agricultural and service sectors in Canada.

Exploration of indie rock’s history, from scrappy DIY recordings to lifestyle brands, hits all the right notes

Reviewed by Jordan Ross 4 minute read Preview

Exploration of indie rock’s history, from scrappy DIY recordings to lifestyle brands, hits all the right notes

Reviewed by Jordan Ross 4 minute read Yesterday at 2:00 AM CDT

‘I hear that you and your band have sold your guitars and bought turntables. I hear that you and your band have sold your turntables and bought guitars.”

American music critic Chris DeVille quotes this LCD Soundsystem lyric twice in his ambitious debut book Such Great Heights. It’s a lyric that skewers the cyclical nature of cultural trends, and the desire — shared by musicians and listeners alike — to be the first to adopt a certain sound or aesthetic, and the first to discard it once it becomes uncool.

DeVille is a self-described “elder millennial” and the managing editor of Stereogum, an independently owned website that publishes music news, album reviews, artist interviews and trend thinkpieces.

He defines indie rock as “music released on independent music labels — i.e., companies not associated with the ‘big three’ major labels Warner, Sony, and Universal — or self-released without label support at all.” However, he quickly complicates that definition, showing how “indie” was always a fluid term, “less a defined musical style than a container for a particular audience’s evolving tastes.”

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Chris Walker / Chicago Tribune

In this 2016 photo, James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem performs at Lollapalooza in Chicago’s Grant Park.
Chris Walker / Chicago Tribune In this 2016 photo, James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem performs at Lollapalooza in Chicago’s Grant Park.

Gowda good to go for October book club

2 minute read Preview

Gowda good to go for October book club

2 minute read Yesterday at 2:00 AM CDT

The Free Press Book Club, McNally Robinson Booksellers are pleased to welcome Toronto-born, California-based author Shilpi Somaya Gowda to the next virtual meeting on Tuesday, Oct. 28 at 7 p.m. to read from and discuss her new novel A Great Country.

Published by Doubleday Canada in April 2025, the core of A Great Country focuses on a three-ish week span of time in the life of the Shahs, an Indian family who have recently relocated to a very affluent area of California called Pacific Hills.

Priya and Ashok Shah have been in the United States for two decades, welcomed three children (Deepa, Maya and Ajay), built up their careers and, with the move, are trying to give their kids every advantage in life. When 12-year-old Ajay — who is autistic, but undiagnosed — innocently flies a drone he built near the local airport and is consequently detained by police, the Shah’s world is turned upside down. The family then bands together to help Ajay process what is happening in the lead-up to his arraignment, while also reflecting on police violence and their own individual places in the world that Pacific Hills represents.

Though the real time covered in the novel is brief, Gowda writes from the perspective of each Shah family member, opening up the narrative and covering years’ worth of relationships, emotions and motives from the past which provides necessary context. Gowda’s pacing is wonderful, drawing out early scenes for pages upon pages and keeping the reader in suspense, while cutting the climax of the novel unexpectedly short. And while the content of A Great Country is dense and challenging in many ways, Gowda writes with an inherent warmth, ultimately making this an approachable and easy read.

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Shilpi Somaya Gowda
Shilpi Somaya Gowda

Characters struggle in stories of isolation

Reviewed by Cheryl Girard 4 minute read Preview

Characters struggle in stories of isolation

Reviewed by Cheryl Girard 4 minute read Yesterday at 2:00 AM CDT

Suddenly Light is a collection of 15 short stories by Scarborough, Ont.-based Nina Dunic.

This is the second book by Dunic, who was born in Belgrade but brought to Canada as a baby. Her debut novel, The Clarion, won Ontario’s Trillium Book Award and other honours.

Some of the stories here have been longlisted for the CBC Short Story Prize, while others have won other notable short story contests.

This collection of stories seems to be connected mainly by an overriding sadness and an epidemic of loneliness shared by the characters in each story. Many lead isolated lives, never quite connecting with anyone.

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Characters struggle in stories of isolation

Local author wins Dafoe book prize

Ben Sigurdson 1 minute read Preview

Local author wins Dafoe book prize

Ben Sigurdson 1 minute read Wednesday, Oct. 15, 2025

Winnipeg author and historian Gerald Friesen has won the 2025 J.W. Dafoe Book Prize for his biography The Honourable John Norquay: Indigenous Premier, Canadian Statesman.

Published by University of Manitoba Press in April 2024, Friesen’s book chronicles the life of Manitoba’s first Indigenous premier, who served from 1878-87, and the impact he had on the province at a pivotal time of growth.

Norquay left many documents from his 19 years in office, but little had been known about the rest of his life, which saw him die suddenly in 1889 at age 48. Friesen spent 10 years pulling together the 600-plus page book.

The J.W. Dafoe Book Prize is named after former Manitoba Free Press and Winnipeg Free Press editor John Wesley Dafoe, and is awarded to the best book on Canada, Canadians and/or Canada’s place in the world published in the previous calendar year. The award is worth $12,000 and will be presented to Friesen at an event later this fall.

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Wednesday, Oct. 15, 2025

The Honourable John Norquay
The Honourable John Norquay

Authors ruminate on urban life, offering radical responses about their potential

Reviewed by Matt Henderson 4 minute read Preview

Authors ruminate on urban life, offering radical responses about their potential

Reviewed by Matt Henderson 4 minute read Saturday, Oct. 11, 2025

The advent of the city is a relatively recent phenomenon. For much of our past, we relied on families and small groups of families for survival. It’s only in the last 10,000 years that collective development has led us inwards into communities that, ideally, capture human ingenuity and compassion and, at worst, reflect the deep underbelly or our selfishness and contempt for each other.

The notion of the city — and more specifically the utopian city — is the central theme of this third volume of the Alchemy Lecture, hosted annually at Toronto’s York University. The City of our Dreaming brings together four scholars who ask deep questions about the nature of cities and offer radical responses as to their potential.

V. Mitch McEwen is a professor of architecture, Laleh Khalili a writer and professor, Gabriela Leandro Pereira an architect and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson a writer. Each offers unique pathways to critically analyzing cities in their current state while using the city as a canvas for utopian philosophical inquiry into the how we treat each other, other species and the planet.

While there exists a common thread between all four essays — namely, currents of justice, the commons and reciprocity — each thinker addresses the city in unique ways that are layered, nuanced and deeply rooted in their lived experience.

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Saturday, Oct. 11, 2025

John Woods / Free Press files
John Woods / Free Press files

Soldier’s story reflects grim nature of life in the trenches

Reviewed by Graeme Voyer 3 minute read Preview

Soldier’s story reflects grim nature of life in the trenches

Reviewed by Graeme Voyer 3 minute read Saturday, Oct. 11, 2025

‘Every time I see the dead and wounded along the trenches, I feel sick at the awfulness of this war.”

These were the words of Lester Harper, a disillusioned Canadian soldier in the First World War.

Canadian-born historian Brandon Marriott reconstructs Harper’s wartime experiences, using an archive of more than 700 pages of letters written by Harper during the war.

Marriott was drawn to this subject because Harper was his wife’s great-grandfather.

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Saturday, Oct. 11, 2025
Soldier’s story reflects grim nature of life in the trenches

Narrative’s notebooks navigate love, longing and a quest for a lost child

Reviewed by Laurence Broadhurst 5 minute read Preview

Narrative’s notebooks navigate love, longing and a quest for a lost child

Reviewed by Laurence Broadhurst 5 minute read Saturday, Oct. 11, 2025

He turned. He looked back, precisely when he seemed to have the cosmic solution in his hands — and that was his terrible undoing. That was Orpheus’s mistake.

Susanna Crossman reimagines turning and looking back here, in a kind of experiment in genre. The Orange Notebooks is an adventure story, to be sure, but it is also part aching memoir, part lyrical poetry, part polychromatic kaleidoscope, part surreptitious “found footage” but, most thoroughly, part primordial myth.

Crossman seems to dwell, as her writing does, between worlds. She grew up in the U.K. in a “utopian commune” about 50 years ago but now resides in France, writing (both essays and fiction), lecturing and practising arts therapy. Her 2024 memoir, Home Is Where We Start, set a lingering tone of journeys, nostalgia and psychological reflection.

The Orange Notebooks reprises that tone, beginning with the pretense that we are being handed a set of journal reflections written by our protagonist, “Anna,” who herself lives in liminal spaces. She too was raised in England but grew to adulthood as a server on an English Channel ferry, married a dashing Frenchman with an exotic name, Antton (the two Ts a vestige of his Basque heritage) and eventually settled with Antton in a lovely rural French home, both as teachers.

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Saturday, Oct. 11, 2025

Morgane Michotte photo

Susanna Crossman’s novel carries a tone of nostalgia and reflection that’s similar to that of her 2024 memoir, Home Is Where We Start.
Morgane Michotte photo Susanna Crossman’s novel carries a tone of nostalgia and reflection that’s similar to that of her 2024 memoir, Home Is Where We Start.

Late husband haunts musings on life and death

Reviewed by Jarett Myskiw 4 minute read Preview

Late husband haunts musings on life and death

Reviewed by Jarett Myskiw 4 minute read Saturday, Oct. 11, 2025

Death is one of our few universally shared experiences, yet it remains, at least in our culture, nearly unapproachable in conversation.

Poet, professor and artist Kristjana Gunnars’ latest work, The Silence of Falling Snow, is a layered exploration of her husband’s illness and death, of grief and the future, told through the lenses of art, philosophy and nature.

The Silence of Falling Snow is difficult to precisely locate in both genre and theme. Late in the book, Gunnars declares that she “does not want explanation” of the mystery of living, and that she can write about death “only obliquely.” Both ring true, and we arrive at neither a set of postulates nor conclusions but rather questions, often poignant and difficult.

Gunnars’s husband haunts the text: he is both central and absent. Not only is he long since gone, but much of his illness and life are left unspoken. Even his name remains in silence.

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Saturday, Oct. 11, 2025

The Silence of Falling Snow
The Silence of Falling Snow

Dirty cops targeted in Thorne thriller

Reviewed by Nick Martin 4 minute read Preview

Dirty cops targeted in Thorne thriller

Reviewed by Nick Martin 4 minute read Saturday, Oct. 11, 2025

Det.-INsp. Tom Thorne watches four police officers get murdered right in front of him and does absolutely nothing, because even the four victims aren’t yet aware that they’ve just been murdered.

Only one deserved it in the warped sense of justice of the person who killed them — and will certainly have deserved it in the minds of some readers.

The four will be far from the last in one of the best police thrillers Mark Billingham has ever written.

What the Night Brings is the 19th Thorne murder mystery featuring our tough, jaded copper and his familiar eccentric eclectic pals and lovers: fellow DIs Nicola Tanner and Dave Holland, boss Russell Brigstocke, romantic partner Helen Weekes and, of course, pathologist Dr. Phil Hendricks — he of the goth clothing, tattoos, piercings and loud, exceptionally colourful declarations of his gayness and abundant sexual appetites.

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Saturday, Oct. 11, 2025

What the Night Brings
What the Night Brings

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