Books

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 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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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

Books

Ghosts of Fourth Street

Middle child of massive Minn. family retreated to books for solitude

Reviewed by Andrea Geary 4 minute read Preview

Middle child of massive Minn. family retreated to books for solitude

Reviewed by Andrea Geary 4 minute read Saturday, May. 9, 2026

Growing up the seventh child in a family of 10, and one of four sisters sharing a bedroom, leaves little space for private thought. Laurie Hertzel recalls her childhood struggles to forge her own identity within a rambunctious family and crowded house in her memoir Ghosts of Fourth Street: My Family, a Death, and the Hills of Duluth.

Hertzel worked as the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s books editor for 15 years and has reviewed for the Boston Globe, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. Her debut memoir, News to Me: Adventures of an Accidental Journalist, won a Minnesota Book Award. She teaches narrative non-fiction at the University of Georgia.

Hertzel spent most of her childhood in Duluth, Minn., growing up in the 1960s, when large families were common. With 10 children, however, her family exceeded the norm.

The relationship between her parents, Guv and Trish, and their many children also didn’t line up with that of a typical American family. Although half Irish and half German (not British), Hertzel’s father ordered his brood to call him Guv — short for Guv’nor — to show their respect for him as head of the household.

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Saturday, May. 9, 2026

Books

Inheritance

Timely themes in Korean-Canadian immigration story

Reviewed by Sharon Chisvin 4 minute read Preview

Timely themes in Korean-Canadian immigration story

Reviewed by Sharon Chisvin 4 minute read Saturday, May. 9, 2026

The inheritance referenced in the title of Jane Park’s novel has nothing to do with financial assets. Rather, the title refers to the inheritance of trauma, specifically the kind of generational trauma that is never defined, dealt with or even discussed among members of a family.

Park is a second generation Korean-Canadian author who currently lives in Calgary. Inheritance is her debut novel.

Park’s narrator is Anne Kim, the daughter of Korean immigrants to Canada, who mostly tells her story, and her family’s story, from two different vantage points — the early 1990s when Anne, her brother Charles and their parents move to the rural town of Crow Plains, Alta. to run a small grocery store, and 2014, when Anne returns home from New York, where she lives and works as a lawyer, to attend her father’s funeral.

Most of Anne’s narrative is an account of her childhood, one scarred by her parents’ monetary and cultural struggles, the overt racism the family faced in Crow Plains and her attempts to be seen, heard and appreciated by her exhausted and depressed mother and father. Anne’s frustration, fears and resentments are vividly described in these accounts, and they certainly make up the most compelling parts of the novel.

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Saturday, May. 9, 2026

Books

A Bad Bad Place

Late-’70s Glaswegian murder mystery brings punk grit

Reviewed by Alan MacKenzie 3 minute read Preview

Late-’70s Glaswegian murder mystery brings punk grit

Reviewed by Alan MacKenzie 3 minute read Saturday, May. 9, 2026

In her debut novel, 63-year-old Scottish writer Frances Crawford delves into the gritty world of her hometown of Glasgow for a murder mystery with a touch of late-‘70s punk rock aesthetic.

While walking her dog, Sid Vicious, 12-year-old Janey Devine comes across the body of a young woman who had been brutally murdered. Her memories of the traumatic moment are vague — and she desperately wants to bury the memories that do persist, especially of a particular “bad thing” she may have done at the crime scene.

Janey, of course, has to answer questions from the unsympathetic police, and is even taken back to the site where the body was found. But she also has to deal with the family of the victim, Samantha, whose father, Billy “The Ghost” Watson, is a notorious gangster in the community of Possilpark, one of the poorest and toughest neighbourhoods in the U.K. at the time.

While the mystery of who killed Samantha — and of the memories that Janey is trying to repress — make this a real page-turner, it’s the characters that really make the first-time novel success.

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Saturday, May. 9, 2026

Books

Victoria Black photo Multiple speculative elements are at play in Daniel Zomparelli’s imaginative, often snarky and at times poignant novel.

Online and offline narratives intertwine, with a ghostly chorus, in musings on isolation

Reviewed by David Jón Fuller 4 minute read Preview

Online and offline narratives intertwine, with a ghostly chorus, in musings on isolation

Reviewed by David Jón Fuller 4 minute read Saturday, May. 2, 2026

Are we amusing ourselves to death? That’s the risk some of the characters run in Daniel Zomparelli’s metatextual novel, Super Castle Fun Park.

Zomparelli, a Los Angeles-based poet and award-winning short story writer, interweaves narratives both online and off through prose, in-game chats and a periodic chorus of the dead.

The characters interact in what is only referred to as “The Game,” a multiplayer fantasy platform of battles and side quests, and in real life. But not all point-of-view characters are created equal.

Dario (User: @FliporFlop) has the most scenes and is (nearly) the only first-person narrator. He takes up indefinite residence at the fantasy-themed hotel in the titular theme park while he attends to his ailing aunt.

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Saturday, May. 2, 2026

Books

The Sacred Path of Simplicity

Musings on voluntary simplicity offer food for thought

Reviewed by Jennifer Robinson 4 minute read Preview

Musings on voluntary simplicity offer food for thought

Reviewed by Jennifer Robinson 4 minute read Saturday, May. 2, 2026

The latest book from Mark A. Burch, longtime educator, author and practitioner of “voluntary simplicity,” comes from a series of lectures he gave in 2005 to the Sisters of Mission Service — lectures based on a set of monastic rules written by St. Benedict in the sixth century that are ancient history, but relevant today.

Voluntary simplicity, initially defined as “the deliberate organization of life for a purpose,” was popularized in the 1930s by Quaker activist Richard Gregg. Burch has continued the tradition of invoking a Christian belief system to support engagement with this movement, though it is not clear the two need be entwined.

Voluntary simplicity advocates for a movement away from the thoughtless pursuit of money and material goods in favour of a life lived in accordance with deeper values such as healing, community, sustainability and a sense of meaning or purpose.

It is not about self-control or rigid restraint or avoiding life’s pleasures, but does ask us to resist the lure of consumer culture and to face the harmful consequences of capitalism. It is about doing as little harm as possible; not contributing to systems that perpetuate violence; making ethical decisions; and simplifying our lives so that the things we truly value have more room within them.

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Saturday, May. 2, 2026

Books

File photo Grigori Rasputin entwined himself in the lives of Czar Nicholas II and his family.

Rasputin’s role in Tsar’s fall from grace explored in well-researched account

Reviewed by Julie Kentner 5 minute read Preview

Rasputin’s role in Tsar’s fall from grace explored in well-researched account

Reviewed by Julie Kentner 5 minute read Saturday, May. 2, 2026

Pilgrim, master manipulator, schemer, zealot, womanizer, pious, mystic, debaucher: all of these words perfectly describe Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin, but none so much as the word notorious.

Noted British army officer, writer and historian Antony Beevor has used previously unpublished reports, interviews, interrogations, the Czaritsa Alexandra’s letters and interviews with Rasputin’s family members to dive deeply into Rasputin’s life and how his actions helped bring about the downfall of the Romanov empire.

“How on earth could a barely literate peasant from Siberia have had such a devastating effect on the course of history?” Beevor asks. “He had no official position. He had no forces at his command. He was a devoted monarchist, not a revolutionary. And yet, unintentionally, he contributed more than any other individual to the collapse of the greatest autocracy in the world.”

While limited by the rumours, inaccuracies and downright lies told about Rasputin throughout his lifetime and in the years after his death, Beevor has done his absolute best to find accurate information and sources to tell his story.

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Saturday, May. 2, 2026

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ANDREA SACHS / WASHINGTON POST Adelie penguins chill out on an iceberg in Antarctica. Author Susan Blight spent the summer of 2003 with thousands of the penguins in their habitat.

Canadian biologist chronicles life among Antarctic penguins — and warns about perils of climate change

Reviewed by Barry Craig 5 minute read Preview

Canadian biologist chronicles life among Antarctic penguins — and warns about perils of climate change

Reviewed by Barry Craig 5 minute read Saturday, May. 2, 2026

They have the loopy waddle of Charlie Chaplin strolling; in Edwardian times, they were called “comical little men in dinner jackets.”

And Canadian scientist Louise Blight went halfway round the world to study them for over three months in our winter and their summer.

Blight was in Antarctica scanning the thousands of penguins around her when she and one of them locked eyes.

“To be held in the gaze of a wild animal remains a primordial thrill,” says Blight in Where the Earth Meets the Sky, “and the trusting nature of the animals, who have not evolved a fear of humankind, had such a transformative effect that the feeling of it remains in my bones.”

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Saturday, May. 2, 2026

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Steve Parsons / Associated Press files In this 2022 photo, Whit Fraser (right) and Governor General Mary Simon (centre) meet Queen Elizabeth II at Windsor Castle. Fraser first met Simon in Nunavut in 1973; they married in 1994.

Veteran journlist recalls big stories and life as the Governor General’s spouse

Reviewed by Susan Huebert 4 minute read Preview

Veteran journlist recalls big stories and life as the Governor General’s spouse

Reviewed by Susan Huebert 4 minute read Saturday, May. 2, 2026

A lifetime of experiences provide useful perspective, and in his new memoir From Ragged Ass Road to Rideau Hall: Stories of Canada, retired journalist Whit Fraser offers his thoughts on some of the issues facing Canada while reflecting on his life as a reporter and as the husband of Canada’s Governor General, Mary Simon.

Fraser has worked as a journalist and broadcaster, as well as writing several books, including True North Rising and Cold Edge of Heaven. During his career with the CBC, he covered Arctic news before moving to a job reporting on Parliament Hill, later working as a primetime anchor for CBC Newsworld. He currently lives at Rideau Hall in Ottawa.

The book begins with a preface reflecting on Fraser’s early life in Pictou County, N.S., and the circumstances that brought him to Yellowknife (where the Ragged Ass Road of the title is located) before taking him to the four corners of Canada and finally to Rideau Hall in Ottawa. As he says, he still has many stories to tell about his life as someone who “has been blessed with luck and has ‘married well.’”

News stories are at the core of this book. Fraser begins with the crash of a Soviet satellite near Yellowknife in 1978. Faulty communication kept then-prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau and the people of the Yellowknife area uninformed about the potentially deadly consequences of the crash.

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Saturday, May. 2, 2026

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Writers’ Trust event to see authors mull connections

Ben Sigurdson 4 minute read Saturday, May. 2, 2026

As part of recognizing 50 years of literary programming, the Writers’ Trust of Canada has announced a four-city series of author talks — and Winnipeg is one of those cities.

The Conversations in Trust Winnipeg: Canadian Authors Make Sense of Our World event takes place Thursday, May 21 at WAG-Qaumajuq (300 Memorial Blvd.) from 6-8 p.m.

The event feature Winnipeg author (and Free Press reviewer) Zilla Jones (The World So Wide), Toronto-based author Tanya Talaga (The Knowing, Seven Fallen Feathers) and Winnipeg Michif author katherena vermette (The Break, The Strangers) hashing out what connects us as Canadians, who we are and who we might become.

Tickets are $20 and are available at wfp.to/ias.

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