Books

Books

Hunter’s first story collection lands prize nod

Ben Sigurdson 4 minute read Saturday, May. 16, 2026

Winnipeg author Catherine Hunter is among the five finalists for the Writers’ Union of Canada’s Danuta Gleed Literary Award, a prize that goes to the year’s best debut short-fiction collection.

Hunter is in the running for the $10,000 prize for her collection Seeing You Home, published in September 2025 by Signature Editions.

While Hunter has published numerous novels and poetry collections, Seeing You Home is her first book of short fiction. The other shortlisted authors for the prize are Caitlin Galway (A Song For Wildcats), Tracey Lindberg (The Cree Word for Love: Sâkihitowin), Mikka Jacobsen (Good Victory) and Lelia Marshy (My Thievery of the People).

In addition to the top prize, two of the other shortlisted authors will be awarded $1,000. The winners will be announced in June.

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Feathery facts

Pair of bird books offer fascinating insight into the avian world

Reviewed by Gene Walz 6 minute read Preview

Pair of bird books offer fascinating insight into the avian world

Reviewed by Gene Walz 6 minute read Saturday, May. 16, 2026

These two newly-released bird books couldn’t be more different. Jackie Morris and Robert Macfarlane’s The Book of Birds is artful and poetic; Louis Lefebvre’s A Bird’s IQ is analytical and academic. Each would make an attractive addition to the libraries of people interested in birds — but not without certain provisos.

The subtitle of The Book of Birds is deceptive — it’s not really a “Field Guide” in the usual sense, too substantial and beautiful to carry along on a bird outing. In hardback with a blue cloth spine and a blue-ribbon page-holder, it’s more like a church song missal than toteable identification helper. It’s best kept inside, protected from wind and weather and damp fingerprints.

The Book of Birds is a follow-up to Morris and Macfarlane’s previous collaboration The Lost Words. When the Oxford Junior Dictionary dropped a bunch of words connected to the natural world (such as acorn, otter, fern, newt and wren), the renowned artist and celebrated author created a “spell book” to conjure back 20 of those words and bring increased awareness of the things the words describe. It proved to be immensely popular.

Here they focus on 49 birds, presented alphabetically from avocet to kestrel to sparrow to yellowhammer, that are in danger of disappearing completely from the natural (European) world. Morris provides the spectacular bird illustrations, and Macfarlane waxes poetic on each of them in the hopes readers will not just identify birds, but “identify with them.”

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Saturday, May. 16, 2026

Books

SUPPLIED Marcus Kliewer’s debut novel We Used to Live Here began as a serialized short story on Reddit; it went on to become a bestseller, and has been acquired by Netflix.

Caretaker job at a remote house on the Oregon Coast turns into a ritualistic nightmare

Reviewed by Jenna Boholij 4 minute read Preview

Caretaker job at a remote house on the Oregon Coast turns into a ritualistic nightmare

Reviewed by Jenna Boholij 4 minute read Saturday, May. 16, 2026

Marcus Kliewer’s supernatural horror novel should come with a warning not to read after dark, unfolding like a scary campfire story that causes you to jump at the snap of every twig and analyze every shadow.

Kliewer expertly blends suspense with evocative prose, and his proximity to the Oregon Coast leaves him well equipped to immerse the reader in its haunting beauty. “And the forest grew more untamed with each step forward. Trees of different types formed gnarled ranks, enclaves of their own,” he writes.

A writer and stop-motion animator from Vancouver, the rights to Kliewer’s best-selling debut novel We Used to Live Here, which originated as a serialized short story on Reddit, have been acquired by Netflix.

It’s established early on that protagonist Macy Mullins is a failure in many respects. The part of the book where she’s introduced, “Unemployed Trainwreck,” sees the plot focus on her pursuit of a redemption arc.

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Saturday, May. 16, 2026

Books

Clayton J. Mitchell photo Portia Elan deftly weaves story strands together with the flare of a game designer.

Importance of stories links characters in ambitious debut spanning centuries

Reviewed by Anita Daher 4 minute read Preview

Importance of stories links characters in ambitious debut spanning centuries

Reviewed by Anita Daher 4 minute read Saturday, May. 16, 2026

In her ambitious debut novel Homebound, San Francisco Bay-area author Portia Elan spans 600 years to suggest that no matter how disengaged and divided our world may become, it is the stories we build together that connect us to our communities, both born and found.

The first story begins in 1983. Becks is a 19-year-old aspiring computer game programmer and punk rock fan, devastated by the recent death of her uncle — the one person in her family with whom she shared interests and felt truly bonded. After listening to an old message on her grandmother’s answering machine, she is devastated to learn that her uncle lied to her — he hadn’t died of simple pneumonia, but rather AIDS, which at that time was known as GRID (Gay-Related Immune Deficiency).

Becks feels betrayed that he didn’t share this big truth with her. Her life further spirals when her best friend’s new boyfriend tells Becks that they’re aware her feelings toward Veronica are not just that of a friend. He tells her to stop — her feelings will never be returned.

As her life further unravels, she finally opens an envelope her uncle left for her. Inside, she finds floppy disks that contain the start of a text-based computer game they’d planned to create together. Within the disks she finds the truth of his illness that he hoped to tell her about in person; he’d thought they’d have time. He describes the world of their game as “complex, interconnected, and in transition.” When he adds that this is “our world,” it feels like an Easter egg description that applies directly to the reader.

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Saturday, May. 16, 2026

Books

Movie truck missing in Muskrats mystery

Harriet Zaidman 4 minute read Saturday, May. 16, 2026

An intrepid team of four friends solve another problem on the Windy Lake First Nation in Manitoba author Michael Hutchison’s The Case of the Movie Mayhem (Second Story Press, softcover, 141 pages, $13), the sixth book in the Mighty Muskrats Mystery Series.

This time the kids are looking for a truck that’s gone missing from a movie shoot on the reserve. Hutchison integrates real-life issues into the narrative at a level appropriate for readers ages 9-12, including grown-up problems faced by Indigenous people. The kids learn about the movie business and about different choices for role models as they search for the culprits, bantering and joking as they go.

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The Bunny Ballet by Nora Ericson (Abrams, 40 pages, hardcover, $24) is a pleasant rhyming story about a ballet performance by rabbits: “Through each other’s paws they weave, / Over, under, past they breeze.”

Books

Cole Burston / Canadian Press files In this 2018 photo, then-detective sergeant Hank Idsinga speaks to the media about an individual possibly connected to the Bruce McArthur case.

Ex-cop’s memoir excels in detailing homicide investigations

Reviewed by Douglas J. Johnston 4 minute read Preview

Ex-cop’s memoir excels in detailing homicide investigations

Reviewed by Douglas J. Johnston 4 minute read Saturday, May. 16, 2026

Hank Idsinga spent 30 years as a cop with the Toronto Police Service (TPS), his last 14 years working homicide cases. For the last five of those years, he was the force’s top homicide inspector.

In 2021, Toronto Life magazine touted his homicide team as having “a murder clearance rate of over 74 percent — among the best for metropolitan areas in North America.” In other words, 74 per cent of TPS homicide investigations were closed as solved cases.

Idsinga’s was a storied career and, not surprisingly, full of stories. But even memoir, though non-fiction, must flesh out its players and places to add depth and colour in the telling.

The first third of Idsinga’s memoir The High Road, which relates his work in two different Toronto police divisions before jumping to homicide duty in 2005, drags.

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Saturday, May. 16, 2026

Books

John Woods / Free Press files Philipp Schott.

Schott’s latest whodunit purr-fectly pleasing

Reviewed by Ron Robinson 4 minute read Preview

Schott’s latest whodunit purr-fectly pleasing

Reviewed by Ron Robinson 4 minute read Saturday, May. 16, 2026

Philipp Schott’s latest mystery is the cat’s meow for animal lovers, cozy mystery fans and locked-room aficionados.

The recently retired Manitoba veterinarian has his fictional vet Dr. Peter Bannerman off on what appears to be a wild goose chase in this, his fourth in a series.

Hassled by his disturbed, hoarder and artistic brother Sam, the autistic vet is on continuous back-and-forth travels from his home base in New Selfoss to the North End of Winnipeg.

First it’s an unexplained death (possibly featuring sexual shenanigans gone wrong) in Sam’s apartment block and then, if that isn’t stressful enough, it’s the disappearance of one of three Bengal kittens from Sam’s apartment.

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Saturday, May. 16, 2026

Books

Hugh Chaloner photo Anne Enright’s new essay collection closes with the recollection of trips taken with her husband; particularly memorable are the pair’s cycling jaunts throughout Europe.

Enright reflects on life, love, writerly icons and more in new essay collection

Reviewed by Dave Williamson 5 minute read Preview

Enright reflects on life, love, writerly icons and more in new essay collection

Reviewed by Dave Williamson 5 minute read Saturday, May. 16, 2026

Irish writer Anne Enright, now 63, has written eight novels, including the 2007 Booker Prize-winning The Gathering. Her latest book, Attention, pulls together 24 of her essays, most of them written over the last few years. Topics vary from the fiction and lives of other writers, such as James Joyce and Alice Munro, to how women are faring in today’s world.

Enright leads off with a brief two-pager on how the gender of an author affects a reader’s view of that author’s writing. “If a man writes, ‘The cat sat on the mat,’ we admire the economy of his prose; if a woman does, we find it banal,” she suggests.

In her observations of women’s interactions with men, she points out a great number of differences in views of sex. In her provocative essay, On Consent, she quotes sex researcher Shere Hite as saying that “‘penetrative sex is unpleasurable and demeaning. Women should abandon sex with men.’” Enright cites writer Katherine Angel’s concern that “consent ‘is being asked… to address problems it is not equipped to resolve’… Consent ‘represents sex as something a man wants, and something a woman agrees or refuses to yield.’”

In Ulysses: An Introduction, Enright explains that she always found Joyce’s famous novel difficult to read, though she certainly respected his writing. “These days,” she says, “I read everything slowly; my brain is like an old computer file with too much information in it. I slow down, stop. I go back over it again. This a good way to read Ulysses, with a guidebook, notes, the internet at your fingertips.” She concludes, “If you ask me what Ulysses has to offer — despite the maleness of the text, despite the author’s perversion… — the answer is still, ‘Everything, everything, everything.’”

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Saturday, May. 16, 2026

Books

Big Smoke murders point to bigger picture

Big Smoke murders point to bigger picture

Reviewed by Andrea Geary 4 minute read Preview

Big Smoke murders point to bigger picture

Reviewed by Andrea Geary 4 minute read Saturday, May. 16, 2026

Two murdered teens, a strangled sex worker, corrupt and aggressive cops, a morally bankrupt mayor, undercover real estate deals and a city on edge during a long hot summer — this is the volatile mixture that Don Gillmor concocts in his detective noir novel Cherry Beach.

A Toronto writer and editor, Gillmor won the Governor General’s award for non-fiction for his memoir To the River, written in memory of his late brother David. Cherry Beach is his fifth novel; he has also written nine children’s books, has won 12 National Magazine Awards and was senior editor at the Walrus.

In Cherry Beach, Gillmor serves up a tense tale with numerous twists. Toronto Police detective Jamieson Abel is on a mission to solve the three murders while also digging down to reveal dirty dealings linking Toronto politicians, criminals and crooked cops in the city’s high-stakes real estate market.

The book opens with Abel and his partner, Davis, who is the division’s only woman of colour, responding to the call after the teens’ bodies are discovered in an apartment in St. James Town. The two friends were promising athletes and good students, both stabbed to death; the only possible suspect identified is 21-year-old Delroy Staples, the boyfriend of the older girl.

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Saturday, May. 16, 2026

Books

Nina Subin photo The dialogue in J.R. Thornton’s new novel feels authentically Gen Z, and descriptions of Harvard have an insider’s eye.

Harvard art fraud novel contemplates questions of artistic talent, ethics, identity and more

Reviewed by Zilla Jones 6 minute read Preview

Harvard art fraud novel contemplates questions of artistic talent, ethics, identity and more

Reviewed by Zilla Jones 6 minute read Saturday, May. 9, 2026

J.R. Thornton, a former internationally ranked tennis player, graduated from Harvard University in 2014 with a degree in history, English and Chinese. He also holds a masters degree from Tsinghua University in Beijing, lives in Italy and works for AC Milan. Lucien is his second novel, following 2016’s novel Beautiful Country.

His most recent is a propulsive page-turner set at Harvard University in 2010, following freshman Christopher Novotny, renamed Atlas by Lucien, his privileged roommate of the book’s title. Christopher is a talented painter from a humble background, attending Harvard on a scholarship. He struggles to fit in with the wealthy, upper-class students who make up Lucien’s friend group.

From the very beginning we see that Christopher, raised by a Czech immigrant widowed mother, lacks the strength of character to allow him to resist peer pressure. The first chapter ends with him jumping off a bridge because his new friends have asked him to.

It is unsurprising, then, when Christopher caves to pressure from Lucien to create fraudulent replicas of paintings by noted artists. Lucien suggests they pass these off as the real thing to finance their lavish lifestyles.

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Saturday, May. 9, 2026

Books

Danielle Dewar photo Elaine Dewar was in hospice in 2025, dying of cancer when she finalized the edits on her final book. She died in September 2025 at age 77.

Dewar’s posthumous tome explores how the troubling history of residential schools disappears from public view

Reviewed by Sheilla Jones 5 minute read Preview

Dewar’s posthumous tome explores how the troubling history of residential schools disappears from public view

Reviewed by Sheilla Jones 5 minute read Saturday, May. 9, 2026

Pacific Northwest poet David Whyte wrote recently, “Every human being dwells immediately close to the door of revelation they are afraid to pass through.”

Whyte wasn’t addressing the resistance of Canadians to recognizing the disturbing history of abuses perpetrated by the federal government against the country’s First Peoples, but it does address the very concerns of bestselling, award-winning author Elaine Dewar in her final book, Oblivious: Residential Schools, Segregated Hospitals, and the use of Indigenous Peoples as Slaves of Race Science.

Dewar was in hospice in 2025, dying of cancer, when she finalized the editing for this intensely personal story that is both a memoir of the daughter of a Jewish Saskatoon medical doctor and a deep and detailed investigation into the distressing question of why she had grown up oblivious to segregated Indian hospitals and Indian residential schools (IRS).

Her investigation was triggered in 2022 by an email from a Canadian Indigenous studies professor who wanted her to investigate “the cover-up” of what he called the “genocide” of Indigenous people through the residential schools. Uncomfortable with the “great big grizzly bear of a word” that is genocide, she was about to delete the email but didn’t. Instead, she “took her eyes into her hands,” as her mother would say, and started reading the six volumes on IRS produced by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in 2015.

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Saturday, May. 9, 2026

Books

Mary Martin / Associated Press files Judy Blume explored many creative outlets, including drawing, felt art and songwriting, before taking a night course in children’s writing in 1967.

Judy Blume’s life and writerly output for readers of all ages explored in hefty biography

Reviewed by Bev Sandell Greenberg 4 minute read Preview

Judy Blume’s life and writerly output for readers of all ages explored in hefty biography

Reviewed by Bev Sandell Greenberg 4 minute read Saturday, May. 9, 2026

Readers who grew up in the 1970s and ’80s will remember Judy Blume as the acclaimed American children’s author whose fiction offered a frank approach to taboo subjects such as menstruation, divorce, wet dreams and teenage sex. Blume’s books not only changed the face of middle-grade and teen literature, they also sold more than 90 million copies in 32 languages in the past five decades. Now 88, Blume is the subject of Mark Oppenheimer’s thought-provoking, well-researched biography.

A longtime Blume aficionado, Oppenheimer previously wrote five non-fiction books. He has a PhD from Yale in religious studies and lives in Connecticut.

Oppenheimer’s succinct, lucid narrative consists of 31 chapters. The opening pages deal with Blume’s early life. Born Judith Maria Sussman in 1938, she grew up in a Jewish middle-class family in Elizabeth, N.J., moving with her family to Miami for two years because of her older brother’s illness before returning to New Jersey.

The next several chapters follow Blume’s first marriage in 1959, at age 21, through motherhood in 1961 and her early stabs at finding her creative footing. After a few false starts in drawing, felt art and songwriting, she finally took a night course in children’s writing in 1967 — and then, for two years, collected rejection slips.

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Saturday, May. 9, 2026

Books

It’s Not What You Think

Trust-no-one thriller a brilliant, breathless page turner

Reviewed by Rochelle Squires 4 minute read Preview

Trust-no-one thriller a brilliant, breathless page turner

Reviewed by Rochelle Squires 4 minute read Saturday, May. 9, 2026

What could be worse than arriving home in the middle of a workday afternoon and catching your partner having an affair?

Nadeeka Prasanna once believed nothing could be worse. As she raced through red lights and sped home in attempt to confirm her suspicion that Jamie Golding — a man she was madly in love with and had recently moved into her house — was cheating, she never imagined a worse scenario.

Until she saw the police tape, and Jamie — lying in a pool of blood. Dead.

As the murder investigation unfolds, Nadeeka is confronted with unimaginable horror about the secret life he had been leading. Except certain things don’t add up. She resists believing evidence that says her partner was also a radicalized white supremacist. Instead, she follows her own instincts in search of the truth behind the events that led to his murder.

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Saturday, May. 9, 2026

Books

Bobby Abrahamson photo Even Villy Vlautin’s most troubled characters are portrayed with compassion, providing insight into their struggles.

In Vlautin’s most hopeful novel, boy’s friendship with Portland painters proves poignant

Reviewed by Sheldon Birnie 4 minute read Preview

In Vlautin’s most hopeful novel, boy’s friendship with Portland painters proves poignant

Reviewed by Sheldon Birnie 4 minute read Saturday, May. 9, 2026

Readers who pick up a novel by Willy Vlautin best prepare themselves for an emotional rollercoaster.

With his latest, The Left and the Lucky, the Portland-based author of The Horse and The Night Always Comes does not disappoint — though for once, the reader is spared a concluding gut punch.

Indeed, The Left and the Lucky is perhaps Vlautin’s most hopeful novel to date, or at least his least bleak. That’s not to say everything is wine and roses — far from it. As with any of Vlautin’s novels, his latest is stocked with characters who’ve had more hard luck than good luck.

Eddie is a 42-year-old house painter whose wife recently left him after 20 years. Russell is an eight-year-old boy who lives next door with his grandmother, mother and troubled teenage brother Curtis, who makes his life a living hell. The two form a friendship and bond as Russell is drawn next door to visit Eddie’s aging mutt Early, before finding a refuge in his neighbour’s yard from the violent and tumultuous situation at home.

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Saturday, May. 9, 2026

Books

Winnipeg’s forgotten Stanley Cup champ

Winnipeg’s forgotten Stanley Cup champ

Rick C. Benson 7 minute read Preview

Winnipeg’s forgotten Stanley Cup champ

Rick C. Benson 7 minute read Saturday, May. 9, 2026

On what would be his 150th birthday, the story of Maj. John Robinson Benson — Winnipeg’s forgotten Stanley Cup champion — deserves to be told.

On May 10, 1876, Dr. Edward Benson’s wife Annie gave birth to a son they named John Robinson, after the boy’s grandfather, Col. J.R. Benson. Dr. Benson had arrived in Winnipeg in January 1874 by horse-drawn sleigh via the end of the rail line in Minneapolis. He quickly established his medical practice and became one of the founding physicians of the Winnipeg General Hospital.

Young Rob — as the family called him — grew up in a household that helped build the institutions of a frontier city. At 19, he was the youngest member of the 1896 Winnipeg Victorias, the team that brought the Stanley Cup west for the first time. He had already earned his place across two Anderson Cup-winning seasons and appears in every team photograph from the era: the championship portraits, the Montreal dressing room, the commemorative poster. Listed as the squad’s spare, he was not a marginal figure. In a seven-man game with no line changes, the spare was the one player trusted to step into any position at any moment.

On Valentine’s Day, 1896, the Victorias entered Montreal’s Victoria Skating Rink for a sudden-death challenge against the defending Stanley Cup champions, the Montreal Victorias. Winnipeg’s starting seven included some of the finest athletes in the country: Captain Jack Armytage, who had founded the Victoria Hockey Club and played in the first hockey game in Manitoba history; Dan Bain, later voted Canada’s outstanding athlete of the last half of the 19th century; Rod Flett, the Métis point player whose steady, unshakable defence anchored three Stanley Cup campaigns; and George “Whitey” Merritt in goal, who startled the Montreal crowd by wearing protective cricket pads on his legs — a western innovation the easterners had never seen.

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Saturday, May. 9, 2026

Books

Wellwater

Canadian scribe lands lucrative poetry prize

Ben Sigurdson 4 minute read Preview

Canadian scribe lands lucrative poetry prize

Ben Sigurdson 4 minute read Saturday, May. 9, 2026

Governor-General’s Literary Award-winning poet Karen Solie, who was born in Saskatchewan and teaches in Scotland, has won the Windham-Campbell Prize in the poetry category — and the US$175,000 (around $239,000) that comes with the award.

Solie won the Governor General’s award for the collection Wellwater, published by House of Anansi. The book also won Solie the 25,000-pound (around $46,000) T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry.

The Windham-Campbell Prize is administered by Yale University and features writers nominated in secret and whose judges remain anonymous. Solie shared the poetry win with Joyelle McSweeney; in the fiction category the top honours were shared by Adam Erlich Sachs and Gwendoline Riley.

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Saturday, May. 9, 2026

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