Rankin’s new sleuth proves up to the task

The reigning king of Scottish detective novels, best known for 26 books featuring rogue detective John Rebus, takes readers south to London for The Heights, his first standalone book in nearly two decades.

Ian Rankin’s new protagonist, Det. Sgt. Gillian Gish, at first seems tamer than the iconic Rebus. She has transferred to London in part to care for her failing mother, for example, but is not above stretching the rules when she feels the need for urgency, and was known for an occasional streak of recklessness from her previous posting.

In British detective fiction, it’s usually the council tower blocks that are rampant with bad guys, but Rankin situates this tale in a decidedly more upscale locale.

The Heights of the title is a new, extremely expensive 18-storey highrise with a view of Hyde Park that doesn’t impress Gish, who grew up in the gritty inner-city area of Tottenham and is back in the family home because mom, who has the onset of dementia, needs help from Gish and friends and neighbours.

New book by Peter Mansbridge, Mark Bulgutch offers insight into classrooms past and present

If not for the ugly blight on its reputation perpetrated by the now-defunct residential school experiment and some lesser-known provincial and territorial disputes, Canada’s school system would have an enviable record in its commitment to meaningful education.

Readers may also question the future of classroom education given existential threats from the ever-accelerating pace of artificial intelligence (AI), but this timely book suggests Canada’s educators will continue to fulfil their age-old roles of preparing students for an ever-changing world.

Featuring deeply personal individual commentaries from teachers and former students, this tribute to those at the front of classrooms is reminiscent of a writing style effectively employed throughout an earlier culturally-themed book assembled in 1966 by iconic Canadian author James H. Gray titled The Winter Years.

Yet unlike those earlier revelations that spoke largely of hopelessness and despair permeating throughout much of Canada’s communities during the 1930s, stories featured in Peter Mansbridge and Mark Bulgutch’s A Noble Profession: Inspiring Stories of the Teachers Who Shape Our World combine to paint a compelling and uplifting portrait of our 21st-century national education system.

On the night table: Emily St. John Mandel

Emily St. John Mandel

Author, Exit Party

I just read a novel that I really liked called The Silver Book by Olivia Laing. They’re a British author — and they’re really, really good, one of those writers who I would read anything they publish at this point. It’s a queer love story that’s also about Italian cinema in the 1970s — just a really interesting work. And I’m about to start the novel Sunrise by Téa Obreht.

Carol Off’s journey from West Kildonan to war zones woven into questions of Canadian identity

Defining a Canadian identity has long been the preserve of this country’s chattering classes. Of late, the preoccupation’s gone more mainstream.

In her new book True Patriot Love: Reporting from the Frontlines of Canadian Sovereignty, Carol Off nicely frames the impetus for this change right off the hop. “When Trump was elected president for the second time in November 2024 and he began to think aloud maybe Canada should no longer exist as a country, something snapped in our otherwise go-along-to-get-along disposition and we found ourselves at a crossroads,” she writes. “We considered two options: either we could cease to exist as a country or we would become something we’ve never been before – a truly sovereign nation.”

Off is the author of five previous books, most recently 2024’s At a Loss for Words, but is best known as a long-running host (2006-2022) of CBC Radio One’s current-affairs program As It Happens.

Her latest book is part memoir, part political journalism and part historical survey. And it’s top notch.

Office politics, sibling rivalry plague lowly copy editor bent on saving valued verses

“If poetry disappeared tomorrow, would the world end?”

This is one of the questions Bonnie Garmus’s latest novel Peck & Peck asks readers. Garmus returns with her trademark wit and larger-than-life characters in a novel that encourages self-belief, doing what you love and emphasizes the importance of the written word.

The American-born, U.K.-based Garmus is the bestselling author of the internationally recognized Lessons in Chemistry. That debut novel was named by New York Times readers as one of the 100 best books of the 21st century.

Peculiarly named after his mother’s heroic dog, Batter Gray has spent most of his life trying to figure out where he belongs. Desperately trying to ignore that he has “an ear” for poetry, he finds himself unnaturally drawn to it, much to the disappointment of his friends and family. “There isn’t a parent alive who wants their kid to grow up and be a poet.”

Author’s bond with Harris’s hawk offers ruminations on falconry, anxieties and purpose

After a harrowing battle with breast cancer in her 40s, Candida Meyrick sought to recover and find a new sense of purpose by taking up the ancient sport of falconry.

Be More Bird is not just a chronicle of her experiences training, hunting with and bonding to her bird. As the hortatory title indicates, it is arranged as a self-help book for her, her bird and, by implication, those who choose to read it. What it does not recommend is being more voracious and predatory like a raptor.

A slender, spare book (with generous amounts of white space), it’s written simply and directly. Although it presents a thorough and attractive account of the life and skills of the bird she adopts, whether you’ll like Be More Bird will depend on what you think about falconry.

Candida Meyrick is the author (as Candida Clark) of six highly regarded novels published between 1998 and 2006. Since then she has written essays, book reviews, short fiction and poetry, devoting her creative energies chiefly to large landscape paintings, some inspired by her outings as a falconer.

Story of Canadian electronic music, A Nation of Tinkerers, hits all the right notes

While Canada’s place in the global histories of rock and folk have been firmly established, the country’s contributions to the development of electronic music is perhaps less well known. Michael Rancic’s A Nation of Tinkerers is a welcome correction to this, tracing the multiple ways in which Canadian musicians, composers, producers, DJs, engineers and inventors have played a crucial part in creating the sonic landscape of the present.

In a typically Canadian fashion, the story begins with institutions, tracing how the National Film Board, the National Research Council and various research studios housed at universities in the 1950s and ‘60s served as incubators for audio experiments, developing instruments and equipment that would generate the electronic bleeps and bloops that would come to define postwar modernity.

Rancic’s title comes from composer Bill Buxton, who speculated that Canada’s place at the forefront of explorations of the intersection of music and technology derives from a national tendency toward everyday experimentation.

The story Rancic tells is not one of technological advancement through individual genius, but instead of persistence and playfulness, often in the shadows and away from the glare of musical celebrity.

History of Irish mental asylum dug up in dream-like, genre-bending prose

One inescapable plot point in the horror genre happens early on where, unbeknownst to the cast of characters, they move through a portal, leaving their normal world to enter a whole new one where evil exists and is going to challenge them. In the 1996 computer game Diablo, the portal for the player’s protagonist is a door leading to the basement of a cathedral where evil waits to be confronted.

Irish author Doireann Ní Ghríofa, whose acclaimed non-fiction work A Ghost in the Throat won the James Tait Black Biography Prize for its genre-blending finesse, returns in a similar style in Said the Dead. Here, the text has a strikingly similar inciting incident to Diablo, excluding the fantastical horrors sitting beneath the cathedral; the horrors in Ní Ghríofa’s text are real recorded experiences left behind in medical casebooks in the city archives of Cork, Ireland.

The narrator, presumably Ní Ghríofa, is drawn towards the redevelopment of a local mental asylum, where one of the few original intact structures awaiting demolition is a decaying church. It’s there, amid decomposing wood pillars, dust-covered pews and discoloured stained glass, where the narrator missteps and falls straight to the floor, finding a fragment of a lead frame, which once held stained glass, beneath her hand in the shape of the letter “L.” The narrator falls through a figurative portal and discovers the driving power behind the rest of the text.

Lucia Strangman was one of the first female doctors to work in a mental asylum in Cork. She began her career in the 1890s recording the progress, or lack thereof, of the many patients living within the institution’s walls.

KGB agent in Iran’s defection to MI6 recalled in powerful, riveting prose

In factual accounts of Cold War spy defections, or in movie and TV thrillers, there are a few basic reasons for deciding to undermine your own nation by providing secret information to the enemy: disillusionment with your government; getting a better life for yourself and family; adventure; fear for your life; money.

British author Ben Macintyre, in his account of how KGB Major Vladimir Kuzichkin supplied a treasure trove of intelligence to Britian’s spy service, MI6, before defecting, has discovered another, unusual reason: erectile dysfunction.

Yes, erectile dysfunction.

It’s true Kuzichkin was also disillusioned by the way the KGB was operated, but of greater concern was his wife’s disillusionment with his affliction, coupled with the fact the Soviets had no treatment for the condition; he saw defection to the West as the only way to get medical help and save his marriage.

British colonization of underworld a raucous romp straddling sci-fi, satire

If you were to colonize hell, how would you do it? Let’s look at who empired best.

The Roman Empire, long lasting for sure, stretched centuries, from 27 BC to about 476 AD. The Mongols created the largest contiguous land empire, but only from 1206 to 1368.

But the Brits? The British created the largest global maritime empire that lasted centuries, from 1583 all the way to 1997. These people knew how to empire.

Of course, if the Brits had colonized hell, it would have messed with their slogan: The Sun Never Sets on the British Empire. When the reader is first introduced to British hell in Robert G. Penner’s wonderfully imagined Notes on a Colonial Situation in Hell, the sun does not rise nor set. Hell’s sky glowed an endless eerie yellow that played, well, hell with the colonists’ attempts to sleep.

Min Jin Lee’s epic new novel explores family dynamics and lofty aspirations of Korean-American family

Set between 1992 and 2007, Min Jin Lee’s American Hagwon details the desire of many Koreans to attend U.S. colleges. Reminiscent of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, it is a window into the stories of the Korean diaspora, contrasting the lofty aspirations of the characters with the realities of immigrant life: fathers in their 50s, for example, who once held prestigious corporate jobs and are now working as fry cooks, unable to get the smell of cooking oil out of their clothing or to pay for health insurance.

American Hagwon is the Harlem-based author’s third novel. The second, Pachinko, was a finalist for the U.S. National Book Award and named one of 100 best books of the century by the New York Times. She is the 2024 recipient of the Fitzgerald Prize for Literary Excellence and has held a number of fellowships, including from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Harvard Radcliffe Institute.

American Hagwon describes a world where prestige, status and social standing are of supreme importance.

Social distinctions collapse in the U.S., where everyone is an immigrant — and in the wake of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, which destroys the fortunes of many families — but it is still a place where parents view other children as their children’s competitors rather than as their companions, and intense scheming takes place over the elections for leadership positions in Korean churches.

Soviet Union’s downfall chronicled in vivid narrative

The tumultuous politics of the final years of the Soviet Union, 1985 to 1991, are recounted by British academic historian Robert Service in a vivid, intense narrative.

Central to Service’s depiction of this period is the botched coup of August 1991. A coterie of plotters, dissatisfied with the rule of Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, sought to oust him from power. But the attempted coup was ill-advised and only accelerated the demise of the Soviet Union — the opposite of what the plotters wanted.

The most interesting aspect of The August Coup is Service’s account of the personality and policies of Gorbachev and his nemesis, Russian leader Boris Yeltsin (Russia was the largest of the constituent republics of the former Soviet Union).

When he assumed power as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1985, Gorbachev sought to remake what had become an ossified political and economic system.

Feline figures as frightening, furry muse

With his latest novel, Look What the Cat Dragged In, Philadelphia-based Jason Rekulak puts a cosy horror bent to some of the illustrated tricks he used in his previous bestselling novel, Hidden Pictures.

Penny Padgett, a cartoonist living in Philadelphia with her boyfriend, loves her cat. Her fans also love her cat, Popcorn, since she is the basis for Penny’s bestselling books.

But when Popcorn escapes the house through an open window during a snowstorm, Penny is left not only heartbroken but creatively hollowed out — and the deadline for her latest book is approaching fast.

To help break her out of her depressed funk, her boyfriend Dean convinces Penny to come with him to a party hosted by one of his extremely wealthy clients. While at the mansion, Penny bonds instantly with the client’s cat, Godfrey, and soon the couple agree to cat-sit Godfrey while the wealthy client is away.