Books

Rémi Thériault photo
Kagiso Lesego Molope’s depictions of South Africa’s social landscape of the 1980s feel deeply authentic.

Story of women in apartheid-era South Africa a welcome addition to a genre lacking voices

Reviewed by Zilla Jones 5 minute read Saturday, Mar. 21, 2026

Kagiso Lesego Molope’s fifth novel We Inherit the Fire is set in South Africa during the dying days of apartheid in the late 1980s. Schools and neighbourhoods are being desegregated, and people are reckoning with the past and taking stock of what they have lost.

Despite these themes, this is a quiet novel which examines the life of one family.

Molope is an Indigenous novelist and playwright of the San people of Southern Africa. She won the 2019 Ottawa Book Award for Fiction for her young adult novel This Book Betrays My Brother and, in 2014, she was the first Black author to receive the Percy FitzPatrick award for the best South African childrens’ book in English. She lives in the Ottawa area.

The story centres around teenaged Kelelo and her mother Kewame. In Kewame’s own teen years, she started a protest that turned into a riot and led to her imprisonment. She is now known as the “Mother of the Nation,” revered by the Indigenous Black population. However, years of incarceration have taken their toll, and Kewame struggles to be a present and active mother to her four daughters, while also dealing with a failing marriage and the impending death of her beloved grandmother.

Advertise With Us

Weather

Mar. 26, 12 AM: -5°c Blowing snow Mar. 26, 6 AM: -11°c Cloudy with wind

Winnipeg MB

-3°C, Blowing snow

Full Forecast

Haddon’s illustrated memoir details troubled upbringing — and a yearning for peace in the present

Reviewed by Andrea Geary 4 minute read Preview

Haddon’s illustrated memoir details troubled upbringing — and a yearning for peace in the present

Reviewed by Andrea Geary 4 minute read Saturday, Mar. 21, 2026

The international success of Mark Haddon’s 2003 novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time propelled the British writer and artist into literary stardom, yet failed to quell his internal discontent and depression. In his illustrated memoir Leaving Home, Haddon reveals how his unhappy childhood, anxious adolescence and generally troubled adult years have directed his writing.

The Curious Incident won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award as well as Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction. Adapted as a Tony Award-winning play, it was staged at the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre in 2016. Haddon also wrote the bestselling novels A Spot of Bother and The Red House, as well as a poetry collection, and has written and illustrated children’s books.

Haddon grew up near Northampton in the 1960s. He and his younger sister Fiona were raised by a father who, despite training as an architect, primarily earned his living through designing abattoirs. Their mother likely suffered from undiagnosed and untreated depression, and to the young Haddon her unhappiness and unending criticism led to his feeling of being unloved.

He includes one colour photo showing his mother as a beautiful, smiling young woman, and wonders why she changed and became so discontented. “She radiates something I never saw her radiate in real life, nor in any later photos, even those in which she is smiling and appears happy… Maybe the picture’s deceptive, but I think that soon after it was taken some kind of light died in her.”

Read

Saturday, Mar. 21, 2026

Jarman’s short stories offer dazzling literary landscapes

Reviewed by Rory Runnells 4 minute read Preview

Jarman’s short stories offer dazzling literary landscapes

Reviewed by Rory Runnells 4 minute read Saturday, Mar. 21, 2026

In his new powerful collection of short stories Smash & Grab, New Brunswick-based writer Mark Anthony Jarman continues his mastery of the form, with seemingly no limits to his fervid imagination.

All 14 stories show Jarman brilliantly and seamlessly tackling any genre, from memoir to offbeat sci-fi to manic surrealism. One among many of the great pleasures in reading him is being absorbed into the wide emotional turmoil of his protagonists’ embattled worlds. As one critic correctly put it, “(his) style is the work’s substnce, its DNA.”

One senses that his prototypical narrator, a rough-hewn, enraged but also surprsingly tender man, wants to exist in an endless story surrounded and enshrined by literary/musical references, but unfortunately lives in this concrete world of crumbling architecture and despoiled nature.

This is seen powerfully in both The Cutpurse of Venice and the book’s final story, The Bailiffs Arrive With Their Grey Eyes, both of which deal with trips to Italy. To the narrator, the central history of that country’s place in Western culture has been reduced to a chaotic mix of tourists, resentful Italians and, in Venice, bold pickpockets.

Read

Saturday, Mar. 21, 2026

Shanghai Gothic novel a delight

Reviewed by Susan Huebert 4 minute read Preview

Shanghai Gothic novel a delight

Reviewed by Susan Huebert 4 minute read Saturday, Mar. 21, 2026

A change in circumstances can help people reinvent themselves — or reveal who they really are. In The Fourth Princess: A Gothic Novel of Old Shanghai, Janie Chang uses the genre of a Gothic novel to show how people’s choices can affect not only their own lives, but also those of the people around them.

Chang is the author of historical fiction novels such as Three Souls, Dragon Springs Road and The Porcelain Moon. She is originally from Taiwan but has lived in the Philippines, Iran, Thailand and Canada (she’s now in B.C.). Her family history and ancestral stories are frequently inspiration for events in her novels.

The Fourth Princess is set in Shanghai, China, mainly in 1907 and 1911. The story begins with a sale notice for Lennox Manor, a house just outside the city, before describing the actions of Lisan Liu, an orphan who has been raised by the kindly but distant guardian Master Liu.

Lisan has no memory of her early life. As the story begins, she is on her way for a job interview — an initiative she has taken without her guardian’s knowledge — with Caroline Vessey, an American. When she returns home after a successful interview, her guardian and his brother hold secret discussions about Lisan before finally allowing her to become Mrs. Vessey’s live-in private secretary at Lennox Manor.

Read

Saturday, Mar. 21, 2026

On the night table: Jenna Diubaldo

1 minute read Preview

On the night table: Jenna Diubaldo

1 minute read Saturday, Mar. 21, 2026

Jenna Diubaldo

Partner/blender, Sons of Vancouver Distillery

I have an audiobook I’ve been listening to by Adam Rogers. He wrote Proof: The Science of Booze, which is one of my favorite alcohol books. In that book he tackles really nerdy science aspects of alcohol, but anecdotally, finding interesting stories that teach you things.

Lately I’ve recently been listening to his most recent book, Full Spectrum: How the Science of Color Made Us Modern.

Read

Saturday, Mar. 21, 2026

Windsor publisher nabs pair of nods for politics prize

Ben Sigurdson 4 minute read Saturday, Mar. 21, 2026

It’s no small feat that two of the five books to make the 2026 Writers’ Trust Shaughnessy Cohen Prize short list are from Biblioasis’ Field Notes series of micro-books.

The short list, revealed March 18, includes On Oil by Don Gillmor and On Book Banning: Or, How the New Censorship Consensus Trivializes Art and Undermines Democracy by Ira Wells, both from the Windsor, Ont.-based publisher’s series of short books.

The other three finalists for the prize are On the Ground: My Life as a Foreign Correspondent by Brian Stewart, Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community by Maggie Helwig and Women Who Woke up the Law: Inside the Cases that Changed Women’s Rights in Canada by Karin Wells.

The $40,000 prize is named after the late Windsor-area MP and awarded to “an exceptional book of literary nonfiction that captures a political subject of relevance to Canadian readers.” The winner will be announced April 29.

Alexander Zemlianichenko / Associated Press files
Odd Arne Westad believes what he calls the ‘Great Powers’ must seek compromise, tentative deals on at least some of the issues that are making today’s conflicts more intense.

As instability threatens to sweep across the globe, leadup to previous wars offer lessons for today’s powers

Reviewed by Barry Craig 5 minute read Preview

As instability threatens to sweep across the globe, leadup to previous wars offer lessons for today’s powers

Reviewed by Barry Craig 5 minute read Saturday, Mar. 21, 2026

Author Odd Arne Westad probably has more degrees than a thermometer. However, he seems to think us ordinary folks are smarter than we are — at least some of us — because in his new (and 18th) book The Coming Storm he leaves out some critical, basic information.

Nowhere in his book does Westad list the world’s Great Powers, as he calls them, all together. He writes about five of them all at once, and in a manner that leaves the mistaken impression that’s all there are. Later, more of them pop up here and there, if you can keep track. It’s distracting and needless.

Secondly, Westad speaks often in his book of multipolar/multipolarity. But he never unpacks what it is.

Westad, a historian at Yale, is already celebrated for his sprawling 2017 book The Cold War: A World History, his intensive study of the causes of the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union from 1945 to 1991. He has also taught at Harvard and the London School of Economics; his multilingualism (he speaks six languages) helps him research efficiently.

Read

Saturday, Mar. 21, 2026

Learn more about Advertising solutions

Characters in subway a window on the world

Sharon Chisvin 4 minute read Saturday, Mar. 21, 2026

A young boy learns about the world as he travels with his mother on the subway in My Subway Runs (Groundwood, 32 pages, hardcover, $22), a story poem for children ages 3-6 set in author James Gladstone’s home city of Toronto.

The boy sees every kind of person, including the sleeper in the corner who no one seems to look at or goes near. The speedy trains blow the passengers’ hair, the wheels screech sharply.

Back home, he feels comforted knowing that “Below the afternoon road, I know my/subway is still running.” Award winner Pierre Pratt’s illustrations capture a child’s perspective of the motion, the crowding and the humour of the underground world.

● ● ●

MIKAELA MACKENZIE / FREE PRESS
Margaret Sweatman launches her seventh novel, Night Birds, on Thursday.

Author mines dreamworld before striking gold

Ben Sigurdson 5 minute read Preview

Author mines dreamworld before striking gold

Ben Sigurdson 5 minute read Wednesday, Mar. 18, 2026

Margaret Sweatman didn’t initially set out to write an eco-thriller about the perils of global capitalism.

The Winnipeg novelist, lyricist and playwright started out writing Night Birds, her seventh novel, around the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic and initially had other ideas.

“I was talking to one of my grandsons when I was starting the book — when he asked what I was writing about, I said dreams. He said, ‘I love dreams’ — we love our dreaming minds,” Sweatman says.

And so it began.

Read

Wednesday, Mar. 18, 2026

Four Canadians make long list of Carol Shields Prize

Ben Sigurdson 4 minute read Saturday, Mar. 14, 2026

The long list for the 2026 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction was revealed on March 10, with a quartet of Canadians among the 15 finalists.

The prize, which comes with a US$150,000 payout (about $203,000), is awarded for excellence in English-language writing to a woman or non-binary writer in the U.S. or Canada. The prize was first awarded in 2023.

The four Canadian writers in contention are Nina Dunic for the story collection Suddenly Light, Jaime Burnet for the novel Milktooth, Amanda Leduc for the novel Wild Life and Lee Lai for the graphic novel Cannon. Last year’s winner was St. Lucia-born, Ontario-based Canisia Lubrin for the book Code Noir.

The short list for the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction will be announced April 21, and the winner revealed on June 2. For the complete long list, see carolshieldsprizeforfiction.com.

Mikaela MacKenzie photo
Margaret Sweatman

On the night table: Margaret Sweatman

2 minute read Preview

On the night table: Margaret Sweatman

2 minute read Saturday, Mar. 14, 2026

Margaret Sweatman

Author, Night Birds

I just read Madeleine Thien’s novel The Book of Records. Holy mackerel, that is a masterpiece. It’s so good. When she does delve into this kind of realism with characters interacting, or the war, it’s engaging. And then she goes into this other realm… it’s incredible.

Another recommended book is Jeremy Thomas Gilmer’s This Rare Earth: Building the Dams, Mines and Megaprojects that Run our World, a beautiful book of non-fiction. It’s about a man working in mines; his job is to make sure the dams aren’t going to collapse. It’s a fantastic book by Vehicule Press. I had to order it from them; you might not find in the bookstore, but I would recommend it.

Read

Saturday, Mar. 14, 2026

Exploration of latter-era Dylan attempts to unpack songwriter’s enduring genius

Reviewed by Morley Walker 4 minute read Preview

Exploration of latter-era Dylan attempts to unpack songwriter’s enduring genius

Reviewed by Morley Walker 4 minute read Saturday, Mar. 14, 2026

Anyone who has paid serious attention to Bob Dylan in the past couple decades knows that the bard of Minnesota is a force of nature unrivaled by few artists of the 20th and now 21st century.

Yet the casual music fan likely thinks he hasn’t penned a memorable song in 40 or 50 years.

At the 2016 ceremony in Stockholm for his Nobel Prize in Literature, the Bobster’s stand-in, Patti Smith, performed A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, which dates from 1962.

The mission of this exhaustive and often exhausting work of mainstream scholarship is to debunk this popular misconception.

Read

Saturday, Mar. 14, 2026

Trotsky’s killer devoted to Stalin, communism

Reviewed by Graeme Voyer 3 minute read Preview

Trotsky’s killer devoted to Stalin, communism

Reviewed by Graeme Voyer 3 minute read Saturday, Mar. 14, 2026

Leon Trotsky was a leading light of the Russian Revolution (1917) and subsequent civil war.

His rival within Russian communism was Josef Stalin; the two leaders had a visceral dislike for one another. When Stalin consolidated his power, Trotsky was obliged to flee, eventually settling in Mexico.

But Trotsky could not find safety anywhere; Stalin was bent on killing him. A Soviet agent succeeded in this grim task, assassinating Trotsky with an ice axe in 1940.

British journalist and popular historian Josh Ireland details the events leading up to Trotsky’s violent death in his absorbing account.

Read

Saturday, Mar. 14, 2026

Darryl Dyck / The Canadian Press files
In his latest, David Suzuki reflects on his personal life, his accomplishments and the state of the environment and science today.

Pioneering scientist Suzuki reflects on his life’s work

Reviewed by Cheryl Girard 3 minute read Preview

Pioneering scientist Suzuki reflects on his life’s work

Reviewed by Cheryl Girard 3 minute read Saturday, Mar. 14, 2026

It is hard to believe that Vancouver’s David Suzuki, an internationally renowned geneticist and environmental activist best-known in Canada for his popular television series The Nature of Things with David Suzuki, turns 90 years old on March 24.

Co-authored with Ian Hanington, David Suzuki: Lessons from a Lifetime is part autobiography and part celebratory tribute to Suzuki’s long and accomplished life. Both informative and entertaining, it is absolutely brimming with photographs, letters and tributes from friends, family and colleagues.

At times, Suzuki’s contributions are intimate glimpses into his personal life, beginning from when he was a young boy in an internment camp for Japanese-Canadians “housed in rotting buildings with glassless windows.”

In other later sections Suzuki shares his thoughts and reflections on science and the environment and where we are today.

Read

Saturday, Mar. 14, 2026

Tallulah photo
Robyn Harding’s eighth novel follows a couple in a strained relationship who are befriended by a couple with plenty of secrets.

Couple’s Spanish retreat falls into clutches of unexpected guests in Harding’s latest

Reviewed by Dave Williamson 5 minute read Preview

Couple’s Spanish retreat falls into clutches of unexpected guests in Harding’s latest

Reviewed by Dave Williamson 5 minute read Saturday, Mar. 14, 2026

Vancouver writer Robyn Harding’s eighth novel is a remarkable page-turner, a thriller made up of 60 fast-paced chapters, most of which feature cliffhanger endings. Called Strangers in the Villa, the novel takes place entirely on the east coast of Spain, north of Barcelona, close to where the artist Salvador Dali once lived.

Particularly intriguing is the way in which Harding chooses to tell the story. The narration is in the third person, but it is not omniscient. In any chapter from Curtis Wade’s point of view, the reader learns some of what he thinks and says, but only select bits about his background. What the other three main characters believe about him may not be true.

The first section, Sydney and Curtis, offers 24 chapters, with those from Sydney Cleary’s point of view alternating with those from Curtis’s.

Sydney is a 40-year-old woman who had been a public defender in New York City, Curtis an entrepreneur. The two had been together for 15 years and married for 12. When Sydney discovered Curtis had had an affair with a woman named Collette, she was jolted, but she agreed to their seeing a therapist named Ellen Dwyer.

Read

Saturday, Mar. 14, 2026

Alia Malley / Associated Press files
Michael Pollan

Pollan’s search for self, musings on consciousness a dense, delightful trip

Reviewed by Craig Terlson 5 minute read Preview

Pollan’s search for self, musings on consciousness a dense, delightful trip

Reviewed by Craig Terlson 5 minute read Saturday, Mar. 14, 2026

Have you ever thought about what’s it like to be you? How is it that you can see, think, feel and experience everything from the taste of coffee to the pain of grief, or the redness of a rose?

If your head is already swimming then buckle up, as journalist and Harvard professor Michael Pollan takes us on a journey into consciousness in his new book, A World Appears.

Pollan has written about plants, food sustainability and, most recently, psychedelics. All of these prior subjects play a part in his newest and most complex book.

He begins by naming the “hard problem:” how is it that we have consciousness, and how the brain processes subjective experiences known as qualia (such as the list in the first paragraph.) In his journey into the relatively new field of consciousness study, Pollan interviews different scientists and philosophers as well as exploring literary and spiritual perspectives.

Read

Saturday, Mar. 14, 2026

March 25, 2026

Notification Settings

Staging Breaking News

Staging Recommended Reads