Minnesota paddler’s many adventures in Boundary Waters, Canadian Shield chronicled

Minnesotan Bob O’Hara was a young lad when he fell in love with camping and canoeing on the Boundary Waters that stretch from northern Minnesota to the Canadian Shield.

He first launched a canoe as a Boy Scout in the 1950s, and as of last summer you could still find him on the border lakes, his 67th consecutive year on the waterways that launched his 50-year odyssey of Far North expeditions. In Where the Green Light Shines, author Ryan Rodgers describes it as “an astonishing run, every year from the age of 18 to 84.”

As remarkable as that seems, it is the five decades O’Hara spent paddling through northern Canada — mostly as a leader, dealing with often horrendous weather, one set of rapids after another, food shortages and a myriad of other concerns while living in the exhilaration of discovery and of communing with nature — that tell the real story of a life lived large, outside the constraints of everyday urban existence.

Not that O’Hara didn’t have to work for a living and to finance his adventures. He began a teaching job in 1963 and started what he’d continue throughout his career: taking students canoeing and camping in the Boundary Waters. During the first five years of the job, he taught for 180 days and camped for 125.

Serial killers’ kids convene in dark psychological thriller

Guilt by association or inherited guilt are contentious issues, even if they are rarely openly stated. For Nicola Fischer and a small group of people attending a retreat in V.A. Vasquez’s debut novel The Death Row Club, being the son or daughter of a serial killer opens their lives to exploitation, distrust and loneliness that only people who have gone through the same kinds of experiences can really understand.

Vasquez was born and raised in New York, and is currently a teacher of English in Buffalo. She spent five years in Scotland teaching at the University of Glasgow.

Connections among retreat attendees begin on the plane when Nicola meets another member of the new club, Zach. She also hopes to renew her friendship with a second member of the group, Greer, the maker of a true-crime TV miniseries called To Catch a Killer, about Nicola’s investigation into several murders committed by someone the media has dubbed the Ellicott Creek Ripper. When the filmmaker identifies Nicola’s father as the guilty party, she is torn between the guilt of not discovering her father’s actions sooner and a sense of betrayal about the tone and content of Greer’s commentary on the case.

The question of how much the sons and daughters of the murderers knew about their parents’ crimes, and how much influence they had over what happens, runs throughout the book. Nicola believes that she influenced her father to stop killing for 20 years, but is still struggling with the question of whether she could have stopped him altogether. Similarly, the other members of the group consider their own influence over their parents’ actions and wonder if they could have ended the killings.

Socialite dying to die can’t find a killer

Agnes Maurer wants to die. And she wants someone to do that for her.

Agnes Lives!, the debut novel of screenwriter Hallie Elizabeth Newton — her first screenplay credit, At Any Price, screened at TIFF in 2013 — covers 24 hours in socialite Agnes’s life as she seeks someone to murder her.

Would it be her boss, editor of the anti-fashion magazine Whorl, where Agnes, a former model, is listed as “cultural council”? The editor has a very attractive knife Agnes thinks could do the job, but editor Justine does not use it. Agnes takes the knife, full of hope she will find someone else to use it.

Will that be Agnes’s famous writer-director boyfriend? No, it won’t. The murderer won’t be the gun dealer she finds on Craigslist, nor the operator of a gun club who insists Agnes watch a video on gun safety. Nor is it the old politician from a previous life, nor a security guard who watches Agnes pee in an alley, nor the apparent Chinatown thugs she tries to buy a gun from, nor is it the famous director, nor the avant-garde artist.

Cusk’s brief new novel skirts conventional storytelling in musings on celebrity, authenticity

Can a novel hold up without a conventional reliance on plot and characterization? Do abstract observations and commentary offer enough intrigue to replace concrete storytelling? These are questions readers may ask while turning the pages of Rachel Cusk’s latest novel, Life of M.

Cusk, who is a Canadian-born author living in the U.K. and best known for the Outline trilogy, is back with an idiosyncratic, slim novel. In it, we meet a mega-celebrity who bears an uncanny resemblance to Natalie Portman. The celebrity, known only as M, allows an unnamed author, whose gender and other defining characteristics are withheld, to follow her around to gain insight for an autobiography.

The actions of M are observed from an impassioned distance, and the author in the book relies mainly on on-screen performances and a public persona to create the contents of the autobiography. Themes of life imitating art and art imitating life are dramatized in ways that illustrate how stardom can obfuscate a person’s true self while diminishing their capacity for emotional connection.

“Acting involved pretending to be other people, whose own emotional states — such as (M) understood them — could preoccupy her for a time. Once they were completed, she was as locked out of these recordings as the millions of other eyes that watched them,” Cusk writes.

Former MLA details early years, struggles with alcohol and his path forward in earnest new memoir

Kevin Chief, the former two-time MLA for Point Douglas, is very unusual for a politician. In casual conversations with Manitobans of various voting flavours over the past decade and change, this reviewer can’t recall one single person ever saying they didn’t like the guy. On two occasions, acquaintances mused that they would cross party lines (in opposite directions) to vote for Chief if he ever ran for office in their riding.

Granting that these observations are anecdotal, how does one account for such broad appeal?

It’s not charisma so much as sincerity. When Chief speaks about his experiences and his hopes for the world (and, as a public speaker and presenter, he has given a lot of speeches both in and out of office), it comes across as both heartfelt and thoroughly ruminated upon. The same is true, as it turns out, in his new book.

With a Name Like Chief, co-written with Stu Slayen, is not a political memoir. While Chief’s political career did the most to put him in the public eye, the five years he spent in the Manitoba legislature starting in 2011 make up only a small percentage of his life, and receive a commensurate page count. Instead, two of the major throughlines of the book are the intertwined roles of alcohol and Canada’s horrific colonization project, and how they impacted his life experiences.

On the night table: Ryan Boldt

Ryan Boldt

Singer/guitarist, The Deep Dark Woods

What I’m reading right now is a very depressing novel called Babi Yar, by A. (Anatoly) Kuznetzov, the story of the massacre in Ukraine in 1941, when the Germans came into what was then the Soviet Union. It’s really good, but very insane.

I read a lot of classics. I just finished Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. The dialogue is a little weird, but then it gets so good. The ending is just … wow. I read a lot of history, or historical novels — war novels, that sort of thing. Lots of travel writing, too. Eric Newby was a travel writer from the 1940s and ’50s; I’ve been reading a lot of his stuff. He did books on climbing the mountains of Afghanistan, he fought in the war for the British in Italy … His books are amazing. Or people like Bill Bryson, I love all that stuff — every now and then I have to go away from the war stuff to a funny book.

Manitoba Book Awards

releases short list

The Manitoba Book Awards has unveiled the short lists for the literary prizes to be presented this year.

For the 2026 awards, jurors evaluated 42 submissions in both English and French, and will present six prizes in total for best first book as well as best fiction, non-fiction and poetry, plus the Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award and a prize for French literature.

Creepy, poignant graphic novel a small-town coming-of-age horror story

If you’ve been to Sackville, N.B., you might have wondered what’s inside the huge, windowless, white steel cube on the edge of this small town of 6,000. The fact that “the Sackville Cube” is a huge cold storage facility for frozen fruit, and has the unremarkable name of the Atlantic AutoCold facility, does little to diminish the strangeness of this landmark that seems straight out of a science fiction movie.

So when Jon Claytor’s creepy and poignant new graphic novel, Nowhere, begins with the arrival overnight of a giant white cube on the edge of a small town called Beauséjour, it is natural to assume this is a thinly disguised version of his hometown, and that this coming-of-age horror story bears some resemblance to his own experiences of the weirdness of small town life.

Claytor is a U.S.-born, Sackville-based painter, illustrator, graphic novelist and writer and one of the founders of Sackville’s acclaimed SappyFest independent music and arts festival. His graphic memoir, Take the Long Way Home, depicted his eight-week road trip across Canada shortly after achieving sobriety. He has also published a number of non-fiction online comics, including a series about the effects of the opioid epidemic in the rural Maritimes (ruralharmreduction.com) and short comics for the CBC about interesting Maritimers.

Nowhere begins with the arrival of the white cube in Beauséjour, where it introduces an element of mystery to the lives of people who otherwise know everything about each other’s mundane business. Drawing on some classic horror tropes, Claytor then introduces the protagonist, 12-year old Joel, as he, his mother and his stepfather (along with the family cat, dog and two turtles) wind up in Beauséjour when their ancient Chevy Impala dies just outside town in the middle of the night.

Survival guide offers a frightening perspective on life in U.S. prisons

Canadian criminal sentencing guidelines identify “three traditional utilitarian goals — deterrence … incapacitation and rehabilitation.”

In spite of lofty intentions, fiction and film have identified North American incarceration in general as largely negative, incapacitating most inmates only while they are actually behind bars. Prison often leads to more crime, teaching criminal behaviour.

Tom Nelson spent more than 17 years in medium and maximum security facilities in the U.S. for such pasttimes as auto theft, armed robbery and drug dealing. Then he turned that life of crime around and became a successful physical trainer and gym owner in Los Angeles.

Nelson met and formed a friendship with Taylor Sheridan, creator and writer of such series as Yellowstone, Landman and the prequels 1883 and 1923. When COVID devastated the gym business and Nelson’s health was failing, Sheridan suggested turning Nelson’s attempt at a screenplay about prison life into a book.

Rise of computer program Lean has changed the field of mathematics — and how we assess the truth

There are two age-old laments about mathematics which persist to this day. The first is that either ourselves or someone we know will express that they are not a math person — an admission that we are not good at math, or that somehow we are not hardwired for it. But we don’t tend to admit the same for reading, writing, child rearing, cooking or other skills that we deem inherent to the human experience.

The second lament is one that asks why we even learn math. “We’ll never use this in the real world,” goes the saying, particularly within the context of pre-calculus mathematics or calculus itself.

Both of these laments are regrettable, and most certainly need to be corrected by the public education system. Because, as author Kevin Hartnett argues in his latest work, The Proof in the Code: How a Truth Machine is Transforming Math and AI, mathematics is not only the language of the universe, but also a pathway to learning how to reason and seek truth.

Mathematics, ergo, is the language, both the physical and the metaphysical.