Books – Winnipeg Free Press

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Charlene Diehl

Thin Air director closes book on job

Ben Sigurdson 2 minute read Thursday, Dec. 4, 2025

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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.

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Smartphones deeply intertwined with our personal lives

Reviewed by Christopher Adams 4 minute read Preview

Smartphones deeply intertwined with our personal lives

Reviewed by Christopher Adams 4 minute read Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025

Consider for a moment the stress of misplacing your iPhone or Android device. Now compare this to 20 years ago, and how you might feel about misplacing a flip phone.

In Needy Media: How Tech Gets Personal professor Stephen Monteiro, who teaches in the department of communications at Concordia University, shows what has changed and why, illustrating how our lives are now intertwined with our personal devices. Losing one of these is much more than losing a flip phone.

Our devices now collect personal data while adjusting to our hour-by-hour activities. Like a suspicious spouse, these devices are needy; they track our activities via GPS, store our experiences through video and photos and even monitor our conversations. Depending on which apps we download, they know our musical likes and dislikes, our sleeping patterns, our calorie intake and when we exercise (or not). They also now recognize our faces and fingerprints. In other words, our personal devices have made us more “bionic” than ever before.

How did we get here? Monteiro provides a history of home computers and personal technologies. This includes hobbyists in the 1970s who purchased computer kits like the Altair 8800. These kits required a lot of effort to assemble, and often failed to work in the end. When they did function, they “computed” by the user flipping toggle switches rather than through a keyboard or mouse.

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Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025

Feline companion beguiling, insightful

Reviewed by Gordon Arnold 4 minute read Preview

Feline companion beguiling, insightful

Reviewed by Gordon Arnold 4 minute read Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025

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.

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Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025

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

Reviewed by Jill Wilson 5 minute read Preview

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

Reviewed by Jill Wilson 5 minute read Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025

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.

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Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025

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

Reviewed by Zilla Jones 6 minute read Preview

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

Reviewed by Zilla Jones 6 minute read Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025

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.

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Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025

Steph Martyniuk photo
Souvankham Thammavongsa cleverly breaks a cardinal rule of the novel in her full-length debut — rather than having the main character change, it’s the expectations of readers that are altered.

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

Reviewed by Chris Smith 5 minute read Preview

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

Reviewed by Chris Smith 5 minute read Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025

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.

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Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025

Matt Dunham / Associated Press files
Mick Herron

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

Reviewed by Morley Walker 4 minute read Preview

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

Reviewed by Morley Walker 4 minute read Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025

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:

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Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025

Rose Lincoln / Harvard University
Steven Pinker…TK

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New Toews novel coming in 2027: literary mag report

Ben Sigurdson 5 minute read Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025

Manitoba-born, Toronto-based Miriam Toews visited town recently in support of A Truce That Is Not Peace, her non-fiction musings on why she writes. And according to Publishers Weekly, Toews fans won’t have to wait too long for her next novel.

In a report on recent acquisitions of future books, Publishers Weekly notes that Bloomsbury, Toews’ longtime U.S. publisher, has picked up American rights for “an untitled novel by Miriam Toews, which sees a woman unpack the events leading up to her friend’s mysterious death in a religious town.” The book is slated to be published in fall 2027.

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Winnipeg Public Library writer in residence (and Free Press copy editor) Ariel Gordon has put out the call for those looking to join a new writing circle for scribes in any genre.

Renewal of widespread human-rights commitment key

Reviewed by Adele Perry 4 minute read Preview

Renewal of widespread human-rights commitment key

Reviewed by Adele Perry 4 minute read Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025

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.

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Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025

Icelandic literary legend Stefánsson making afternoon book club visit

3 minute read Preview

Icelandic literary legend Stefánsson making afternoon book club visit

3 minute read Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025

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.

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Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025

New in paper

2 minute read Preview

New in paper

2 minute read Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025

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

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Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025

Familiar fodder in dystopian coming-of-age novel

Reviewed by Alan MacKenzie 4 minute read Preview

Familiar fodder in dystopian coming-of-age novel

Reviewed by Alan MacKenzie 4 minute read Saturday, Nov. 1, 2025

“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.

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Saturday, Nov. 1, 2025

Trump’s return to the White House chronicled in Karl’s latest doorstopper

Reviewed by Matt Henderson 5 minute read Preview

Trump’s return to the White House chronicled in Karl’s latest doorstopper

Reviewed by Matt Henderson 5 minute read 2:01 AM CST

History teachers — teachers of historical thinking and how historians think — often invite learners to analyze the causes and consequences of certain individuals, movements and moments: what happened and why and, sometimes, what didn’t happen and why. These are rich questions that help us understand the human experience.

ABC News chief Washington correspondent Jonathan Karl models this type of inquiry in his latest book Retribution: Donald Trump and the Campaign that Changed America. The author of political tomes including Tired of Winning, Betrayal, and Front Row at the Trump Show makes an attempt to explain how Donald Trump won the 2024 U.S. election. Despite the odds and himself, Trump — a convicted felon who was caught on tape bragging about grabbing female genitals and who is linked to sexual terror Jeffrey Epstein — seemed to not only persevere, but thrive.

As Karl eerily points out following the election night, “despite it all, Trump had won — and won big. By any objective measure, his victory was stunning.” How could the man behind the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection not only win the election, but decisively secure the popular vote? And what might the impact of a more politically savvy president be who now holds a greater mandate?

Retribution is an examination of conditions that rocketed Trump back to the presidency, where we have already witnessed egregious human rights abuses, dangerous foreign policy, the destabilization of the world economy and threats of Canadian annexation. Troops in the streets have become normalized and ICE operatives with masks are commonplace.

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2:01 AM CST

Associated Press files
In this February 2025 photo, Trump (centre) and Vice-President JD Vance (right) meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office of the White House. The beleaguered Ukrainian president was mocked by Trump and Vance.

Patti’s Smith’s new memoir a wide-ranging look at life on and off the stage

Reviewed by Bill Rambo 5 minute read Preview

Patti’s Smith’s new memoir a wide-ranging look at life on and off the stage

Reviewed by Bill Rambo 5 minute read 2:01 AM CST

Patti Smith’s career as a punk rocker blazed in the late 1970s. Her debut album, Horses, just reissued as a 50th-anniversary edition, regularly appears on lists of all-time top albums and inspired the likes of, among many others, Michael Stipe and Peter Buck of R.E.M.

Smith, now 79, has released multiple memoirs — 2010’s Just Kids, about her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, and 2015’s M Train — as well as numerous books of poetry and other art. Bread of Angels is more a full autobiography, often quite effectively melding her interior thoughts with important events and people.

A short preface introduces a recurring theme: rebel hump. The idea of not quite fitting in may help Smith “disguise the miniature Quasimodo trapped inside an awkward child’s body.”

Rambling chapters chronicle her Philadelphia upbringing, a sickly child determined to make her own way. “I did not want to grow up,” she says, and rejects the Bible study in her mother’s Jehovah’s Witness experience.

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2:01 AM CST

Wikipedia founder’s treatise on trust lacks spark

Reviewed by Jordan Ross 4 minute read Preview

Wikipedia founder’s treatise on trust lacks spark

Reviewed by Jordan Ross 4 minute read 2:01 AM CST

Wikipedia turns 25 in January, making this a fitting time for its founder, Jimmy Wales, to explain how his free internet encyclopedia went from being the butt of jokes to being hailed as a “ray of light” (the Guardian), “the last best place on the internet” (Wired), “the good cop of the internet,” (the Washington Post) and “the last bastion of shared reality” (the Atlantic). Indeed, Wikipedia may be the only institution people trust more than they did a decade ago.

Volunteer-driven, ad-free, independent and not-for-profit (not to mention charmingly nerdy), Wikipedia is cut from a different cloth than its contemporaries — social media platforms such as Instagram, search engines such as Google and sharing economy apps such as Uber — which are now mostly interested in appeasing politicians, pushing unwanted AI (artificial intelligence) features and harvesting users’ data for advertisers. “There are no Facebookians, but all over the world there are Wikipedians,” Wales observes in Seven Rules of Trust — and it’s hard to argue with what that says about community and identity online.

One might assume Wales, 59, is a product of Silicon Valley or the Ivy League. In fact, he was born and educated in Alabama. A self-described “pathological optimist” who loves facts and espouses the virtues of classical liberalism (curiosity, reason, tolerance, good-faith debate), he is quite likely the only tech titan who would be pleasant company on a three-day fishing trip.

Beginning his career as a financial trader, there was little to suggest Wales would one day establish one of the web’s most popular websites and oversee its gradual evolution from, as he puts it, “a ridiculous idea that could never work to a globally trusted source of information.” He says that happened because Wikipedia was able to hammer out rules that fostered trust among readers and editors.

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2:01 AM CST

Families’ fates linked in struggle to survive

Reviewed by Susan Huebert 4 minute read Preview

Families’ fates linked in struggle to survive

Reviewed by Susan Huebert 4 minute read 2:00 AM CST

In a crisis, people have the chance to see what they are really like under pressure. In A Guardian and a Thief, Megha Majumder explores what can happen when people are faced with temptation during a major crisis that threatens communities and a whole way of life.

Majumdar is a former editor-in-chief of Catapult Books and the author of A Burning, which was nominated for three awards, including the American Library Association’s Andrew Carnegie Medal, and was named one of the best books of the year by Time, the Washington Post and others. She was born and raised in Kolkata, India, and has degrees in anthropology from Harvard and Johns Hopkins universities, and lives in New York.

A Guardian and a Thief is set in Kolkata sometime in the future, when climate change has brought about a severe famine in India. A toddler named Mishti, together with her mother and grandfather (called Ma and Dadu), are among the lucky ones, as they have plans to join Mishti’s father in Michigan.

When a thief breaks into their home and steals their new passports, along with a large stash of food and money, their future is in jeopardy.

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2:00 AM CST

January 3, 2026

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