Books

Books

Sophie Davidson photo Sophie Mackintosh’s debut novel The Water Cure was longlisted for the 2018 Booker Prize.

Adulterous couple adrift in life in Mackintosh’s moving new novel

Reviewed by Dave Williamson 5 minute read Saturday, Jun. 20, 2026

Adultery, fooling around, cheating, seeing someone on the sly — terms for the theme or plot or sub-plot of many a contemporary novel. In her latest novel Permanence, English novelist Sophie Mackintosh has come up with a rather different way of dealing with such indiscretions.

The author implies her story could happen anywhere by not naming the specific city where it takes place; one assumes that city is in England, as Mackintosh lives in London.

Permanence’s two main characters are Clara and Francis. Clara works in an art gallery, is unmarried and lives in the same home as a gay man, Arturo, who sometimes lines her up with one of his straight friends. Francis works at a university and is married to a woman named Iona; they have a four-year-old daughter, Elise. Iona seems resigned to Francis’s regular disappearances, while Elise does not treat Francis well, as if she knows about his other interest and is not happy about it.

Clara and Francis are involved with each other from the very first page. Here is how the first paragraph ends:

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Books

Linda Crosfield photo George Bowering

Literary legend waxes poetic on treasured Mexican village

Reviewed by Craig Terlson 5 minute read Preview

Literary legend waxes poetic on treasured Mexican village

Reviewed by Craig Terlson 5 minute read Saturday, Jun. 20, 2026

If you travel a lot, there’s usually one place that resonates with you more than all the rest — a place that isn’t home, but it feels like it.

For Canadian literary giant George Bowering that place is Mexico, specifically the small oceanside village of La Manzanilla. In what he calls his final book, Barefoot Gringo, the 90-year-old Bowering spins stories of his many travels, starting in 1963 with his first wife Angela and, after her passing, his partner Jean. Often they are joined by friends old and new, forming their own community within a community.

In this part-travelogue, part-memoir, the path of the telling is not linear. The stories meander through both geography and time. It’s easy to get lost trying to line up the narrative in a chronological fashion — so best to forget about trying to do that. Rather, this book is akin to sitting at a palapa (a Mexican beach bar with a thatched roof), drinking Pacificos (the best Mexican beer) and eating fish tacos while the sun makes a long orange slide into the ocean — all the while listening to an elder spin tales of food, music, birds, art, cribbage and, of course, books.

Food is always in the forefront, and if you’ve ever spent much time in Mexico, you understand why. The author is an adventurous and passionate eater who loves to talk about the bounty of the sea that is cooked and served by the many friends he’s made in La Manz. Bowering makes an interesting distinction between the tourist, or all-inclusive, crowds that visit Mexico, and his own group. He sees himself more as a local, especially on each subsequent trip — but as the title of his book reads, he knows that he is a gringo.

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Saturday, Jun. 20, 2026

Books

Treat Them As Buffalo

Sask. Métis village grapples with child abductions, North-West Rebellion

Reviewed by Susan Huebert 4 minute read Preview

Sask. Métis village grapples with child abductions, North-West Rebellion

Reviewed by Susan Huebert 4 minute read Saturday, Jun. 20, 2026

Major events and big personalities can overshadow the lives of ordinary people, but even the youngest and seemingly least important members of a society can help shape communities.

In Treat Them as Buffalo, Blair Palmer Yoxall has portrayed various characters in a Métis village in 1885 Saskatchewan through the life of a 12-year-old boy named Nikosis (Niko) Eriksen and his interactions with relatives and friends in the context of a community crisis and Louis Riel’s rebellion.

Yoxall is an Alberta Métis writer and poet with a master of arts in English in Indigenous literature and westerns. His fiction has won a range of prizes and landed on a number of short lists. His prose and poetry pieces have appeared in Glass Buffalo, the Fiddlehead and Carving Space: The Indigenous Voices Awards Anthology. Treat Them as Buffalo is his first novel.

The novel follows Nikosis (Cree for “my son”) as he attempts to sort out the events occurring in his home community, Lac-aux-Trois-Pistoles, Sask., in 1885. Several boys, including Niko’s cousin, have disappeared from the town, with some reappearing mutilated or dead. Niko’s mother, grandmother and aunt try to protect him, while other women in the community attempt to find their missing sons and grandsons. Meanwhile, a fierce fighting woman named Kate McCannon seeks to resolve the situation, offering to help with the search and rescue operations.

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Saturday, Jun. 20, 2026

Books

Lauded author Whitehead to visit Winnipeg

Ben Sigurdson 4 minute read Saturday, Jun. 20, 2026

Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author Colson Whitehead visits Winnipeg for the first time this summer in an event to celebrate the release of his forthcoming novel Cool Machine, which publishes July 21.

The latest by the author of The Nickel Boys and The Underground Railroad concludes his Harlem trilogy (which includes 2021’s Harlem Shuffle and 2023’s Crook Manifesto), dropping the reader back into the world of crook turned furniture salesman Ray Carney — this time in the 1980s.

The event takes place on Tuesday, Aug. 4 at 7 p.m. at the Muriel Richardson Auditorium at WAG-Qaumajuq (300 Memorial Blvd.) and is presented by McNally Robinson Booksellers. Tickets are $46 plus fees per person, and include a signed hardcover copy of Cool Machine.

For more information and to buy tickets, see wfp.to/iMM.

Books

Supplied drawing Tillie Walden

In choosing each other, same-sex couple in 19th-century Vermont defied convention

Reviewed by Nyala Ali 4 minute read Preview

In choosing each other, same-sex couple in 19th-century Vermont defied convention

Reviewed by Nyala Ali 4 minute read Saturday, Jun. 20, 2026

The front cover of Charity & Sylvia, the new graphic biography by acclaimed American cartoonist Tillie Walden, recreates the striking 19th-century portrait of two women, silhouetted in profile and framed by braided human hair carefully arranged in a heart-shaped detail, that inspired this volume. They are the eponymous Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake, an openly lesbian couple who quietly made a life for themselves in rural 1800s Vermont.

Stitched together from an extensive archive of letters, journals and poetry, Walden’s moving, sepia-toned volume is narrated through both women during their time together as they navigate questions of identity, community and faith.

The story begins when Charity, a family friend of the Drakes, arrives from Massachusetts to rural Vermont. As the relationship between Charity and Sylvia develops, Walden infuses the book with a visual language of the mundane, drawing the reader’s eye to household sundries and everyday minutiae as she builds the story world through wordless panels of homesteading, domestic tasks, sewing patterns (both Charity and Sylvia earn their living as tailors) and impending weather as the seasons change.

She also builds out family trees for both women through backstories (including standout sections chronicling their childhoods) and daily conversations that provide context for those appearing in later scenes. Through an array of vignettes locked into a 12-panel grid, the characters move from church pews to kitchens, bedrooms, dinner tables, gardens and carriages travelling to and from neighbouring towns and states.

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Saturday, Jun. 20, 2026

Books

Serpent’s sadness stymies monster doc

Harriet Zaidman 4 minute read Saturday, Jun. 20, 2026

Dot is a monster mender — a different kind of veterinarian — in Christine Baldacchino’s Monster Mender (Groundwood, 32 pages, hardcover, $22), treating gryphons with broken beaks and chimeras with the sniffles.

Dot is stymied when she can’t cure a sea serpent’s sadness with her usual bandages and salves. The story thoughtfully shows children ages 3-6 that anyone, no matter their size, can be struck by sadness. They’ll learn that time and just being present are helpful — that even when there is no cure, there can be “better.”

Ilona Iske’s representation of the sea monster’s swirling sadness depicts a realistic struggle.

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Books

RCA Doug and the Slugs frontman Doug Bennett (third from left) had a flair for interacting with audiences the more the band played. He died in 2004 at age 52.

Despite success in Canada, Doug and the Slugs couldn’t break through in the U.S.

Reviewed by Bill Rambo 4 minute read Preview

Despite success in Canada, Doug and the Slugs couldn’t break through in the U.S.

Reviewed by Bill Rambo 4 minute read Saturday, Jun. 20, 2026

Regional musicians, often dismissed as one-hit wonders, provide some great music most people have never heard. Pittsburgh’s Iron City Houserockers and L.A.’s The Call and Warren Zevon, as examples, undeservedly fell through those cracks.

In some ways, Canada is its own region for bands relatively unknown in the United States. Some of the country’s best bands, such as the Tragically Hip and Payola$, barely registered in the lucrative market south of the border.

Another example is Vancouver’s Doug and the Slugs who, like the Hip, never had a serious hit in the U.S. They are the subject of this thoughtful and engaging history by longtime Slugs keyboardist and musical director Simon Kendall and writer Aaron Chapman.

Touring Canada and occasionally dipping into the northeastern U.S. (they sold out the iconic Bottom Line in New York many times), Doug and the Slugs produced five consecutive top-50 albums in Canada, from 1980’s Cognac and Bologna to 1988’s Tomcat Prowl. Songs such as Too Bad, Making it Work and Day By Day garnered plenty of airplay in Canada as well as a handful of Juno award nominations.

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Saturday, Jun. 20, 2026

Books

Kirsty Anderson photo Even at his protagonists’ lowest points, Damian Barr can be wryly funny, and his clear-eyed love for his central characters never waivers.

Story of real-life Scottish painters turned lovers told in joyful, moving prose

Reviewed by Alison Gillmor 4 minute read Preview

Story of real-life Scottish painters turned lovers told in joyful, moving prose

Reviewed by Alison Gillmor 4 minute read Saturday, Jun. 20, 2026

In this gorgeously written novel, Scottish writer Damian Barr begins with real-life painters Bobby MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun, crafting a joyful, tragic, vital story of their love and art.

In Barr’s reimagining, which draws broad biographical outlines but fills those in with vivid novelistic colour, the two young working-class men meet in 1934, on their first day as students at the Glasgow School of Art.

“The two Roberts,” as they were often called, go on to become creative partners and lifelong lovers.

They are marked off first by their social class. In contrast to many of their art school classmates, who take for granted the cushion of inherited wealth, Bobby comes from a desperately poor family and Robert’s people are only marginally better off, his father’s promotion from the factory floor to a drafting desk at an engineering works having elevated them to “serviettes on Sunday.”

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Saturday, Jun. 20, 2026

Books

Enemies of All

New in paper

2 minute read Preview

New in paper

2 minute read Saturday, Jun. 13, 2026

Enemies of All: The Rise and Fall of the Golden Age of Piracy

By Richard Blakemore (Pegasus, $27)

Blakemore combines accounts of the ‘golden age’ of piracy (the 1660s to the 1730s) with an exploration of lesser-known names and exploits throughout The Caribbean and beyond.

Madman in the Woods: Life Next Door to the Unabomber

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Saturday, Jun. 13, 2026

Books

JP Lobos photo Kim Fu’s novel skilfully balances her protagonist’s interiority with the creepy setting and the jarring intrusion of other characters.

Tensions slowly rise as house falls apart in Fu’s fraught fiction

Reviewed by Zilla Jones 5 minute read Preview

Tensions slowly rise as house falls apart in Fu’s fraught fiction

Reviewed by Zilla Jones 5 minute read Saturday, Jun. 13, 2026

Kim Fu’s The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts has aspects of a literary psychological horror novel — in this case from the scenario of Eleanor, the protagonist, hastily purchasing a house after the death of her mother.

The house Eleanor buys seems too good to be true — and it is. Built in what was to be a new development in an isolated valley, the fully finished, picture-perfect show home is one of only two houses completed before the builder went bankrupt and died by suicide in the other house. The house is beautiful but poorly constructed — it represents aspirations and the keeping up of appearances.

Torrential rains begin as soon as Eleanor takes possession, and very quickly the house deteriorates. The front door key stops working because the lock has no protection from water. The house leaks. The shower drips into the light fixtures. A series of expensive and vaguely threatening repairmen traipse through the premises as Eleanor, a therapist, tries her best to continue her client’s appointments online.

Eleanor is also still trying to process the circumstances of her mother’s death and her feelings about it. Her mother was over-involved in her life, to the point of feeding her by hand when she was busy writing her thesis for graduate school. Though way past the age when she should have become independent, Eleanor is inexperienced at paying bills and making decisions for herself. Her new house provides her with a crash course in adulting. This is a coming-of-age story with an edge.

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Saturday, Jun. 13, 2026

Books

The Visionaries

Stability, prosperity pivotal in postwar landscape

Reviewed by Graeme Voyer 3 minute read Preview

Stability, prosperity pivotal in postwar landscape

Reviewed by Graeme Voyer 3 minute read Saturday, Jun. 13, 2026

Acclaimed British popular historian James Holland has written numerous memorable works of history about the Second World War.

But his latest effort, The Visionaries, is a disappointment. It is essentially a narrative of events of American and European history from 1913 to the immediate post-Second World War era.

Holland has nothing original to say; he tells a familiar story that has been told many times before. The only justification for this book seems to be to pad Holland’s lengthy list of publications.

And his subtitle is a misnomer. The conference at Bretton Woods and the Marshall Plan are each addressed in brief chapters; neither is the focus of his narrative.

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Saturday, Jun. 13, 2026

Books

The Things We Never Say

Beloved high-school teacher struggles with detachment in Strout’s poignant new prose

Reviewed by Greg Klassen 4 minute read Preview

Beloved high-school teacher struggles with detachment in Strout’s poignant new prose

Reviewed by Greg Klassen 4 minute read Saturday, Jun. 13, 2026

American Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Strout is a master at excavating the extraordinary from the lives of ordinary people.

Strout’s specialty is creating characters that her readers feel like they know in real life. The two best known are the irascible Olive Kitteridge (rendered perfectly by Frances McDormand in the HBO series) and Lucy Barton of My Name is Lucy Barton, who struggles to put poverty, COVID and two husbands behind her to make it as a big-city writer.

Strout’s fiction is primarily set in rural American towns (usually in Maine or the Midwest) and is preoccupied with family secrets, small-town gossip and the kind of quiet grief that rips apart families. Her characters are governed by rigid social boundaries that shape and isolate them.

The Things We Never Say leaves her previous set of characters behind. This book offers a fresh perspective, introducing 57-year-old Artie Dam, a much-loved high school teacher from Massachusetts, nicknamed “Damn Dam” by his students.

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Saturday, Jun. 13, 2026

Books

Endling

Endling wins Amazon’s $60K first novel prize

Ben Sigurdson 4 minute read Preview

Endling wins Amazon’s $60K first novel prize

Ben Sigurdson 4 minute read Saturday, Jun. 13, 2026

Ukraine-born, Vancouver-based author Maria Reva has landed another prize for her debut novel Endling, which follows a snail scientist in Ukraine who teams up with a pair of sisters to break up a mail-order bride operation in the country before Russia’s invasion throws them all for a loop.

Reva’s novel, which was published in June 2025 and released in paperback in May 2026, won the $60,000 Amazon Canada First Novel Award at a June 4 ceremony in Toronto which revealed the winner. Endling also won Reva the $60,000 Writers’ Trust Atwood Gibson Fiction Prize, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction and was long-listed for the Booker Prize.

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On Thursday at 6:30 p.m., retired Concordia University film and sexuality scholar Thomas Waugh will be at the Cornish Library (20 West Gate) to read from his memoir Writing in the Flesh: Essays on My Lives, My Bodies, My Families, My Place, My Movies, published in December 2025 by McGill-Queen’s University Press.

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Saturday, Jun. 13, 2026

Books

Michael Lionstar photo Jay McInerney… TK

COVID-era novel a fine, fitting coda to McInerney’s Calloway books

Reviewed by Morley Walker 4 minute read Preview

COVID-era novel a fine, fitting coda to McInerney’s Calloway books

Reviewed by Morley Walker 4 minute read Saturday, Jun. 13, 2026

Devotees of American novelist Jay McInerney’s Russell Calloway series will enjoy this concluding volume in what is now officially a quartet.

Granted, these fans account for a small subset of the reading public. Novels about trendy New York City literary publishers, who are also gourmands and wine snobs, do not generate Harry Potter-esque sales figures.

That said, the Calloway novels are far from esoteric in their unpretentious prose and humanistic themes about the enduring importance of family and friends.

They are easy-to-digest commercial fiction for readers who prefer literary name-dropping to, say, locating murder clues in detective novels.

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Saturday, Jun. 13, 2026

Books

Cleo Dang Would Rather Be Dead

Grieving mom mulls life after infant loss

Reviewed by Andrea Geary 4 minute read Preview

Grieving mom mulls life after infant loss

Reviewed by Andrea Geary 4 minute read Saturday, Jun. 13, 2026

Despite today’s well-trained medical staff, cutting-edge modern equipment and medical procedures, babies can sadly still die at birth or soon after. In Cleo Dang Would Rather be Dead, Toronto writer Mai Nguyen examines with honesty the deep grief parents endure when this tragedy strikes.

Cleo Dang is Nguyen’s second novel. Her debut, Sunshine Nails, was long-listed for CBC’s Canada Reads.

During her birth, Cleo and Ethan’s daughter Daisy experiences asphyxia, and her reduced oxygen supply causes severe brain damage. She’s kept on a ventilator for a short time so Cleo and Ethan can hold and bathe her, speak and read to her. Surrounded by a ward filled with crying babies, the couple never hear their child cry.

The fact that Paloma, her best friend from childhood and now a neighbour, gives birth to a healthy baby soon after Daisy’s death intensifies Cleo’s grief. Intellectually she knows she should be happy for Paloma, but her simmering rage and wayward emotions take over. She’s unable to be thankful for Paloma’s help in arranging Daisy’s funeral, where the room and small casket are thoughtfully decorated with white daisies.

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Saturday, Jun. 13, 2026

Books

Dreamer’s Daughter

Father-daughter relationship offers love amid chaos

Reviewed by Deborah Bowers 4 minute read Preview

Father-daughter relationship offers love amid chaos

Reviewed by Deborah Bowers 4 minute read Saturday, Jun. 13, 2026

In a time when the patriarchy is often condemned, it’s interesting to read a memoir that challenges the matriarchy.

Dreamer’s Daughter: Surviving My Childhood and Raising My Father is Lori Thicke’s first book. It’s an entertaining but not necessarily quick read, as the subject matter can result in re-reading passages to counteract one’s disbelief. It’s the implausibly true and lovingly told memoir of how the author grew up.

Thicke was born in Toronto and raised (in part) in Kirkland Lake, Ont. She has an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia and received the CBC Writing Prize for “exceptional promise.” She currently lives in the south of France.

Thicke’s chronicle of family life flips the notion of parenthood on its head, exposing the hard truth that not all women are meant for motherhood. When she was 10 and her brother five, they were abandoned by their mother. With father Dacker Thicke left to be the sole provider, the family unit shifted into his free-spirited and wildly unorthodox orbit. Thicke and her brother may not have known where they would live next week or next month, but they knew they were loved.

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Saturday, Jun. 13, 2026

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