Books – Winnipeg Free Press

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Souvankham Thammavongsa

On the night table: Souvankham Thammavongsa

1 minute read Saturday, Nov. 1, 2025

Souvankham Thammavongsa

Author, Pick a Colour

I got an advanced reading copy of Salman Rushdie’s The 11th Hour: A Quintet of Stories, which comes out Tuesday (Nov. 4), but I haven’t finished it — in fact I just started it. So I wouldn’t be able to describe what it’s about, but I can only describe my excitement about it. I can’t wait to see how these five stories are put together, how they exist together.

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Harris recalls whirlwind presidential run in frank, gutsy memoir

Reviewed by GC Cabana-Coldwell 5 minute read Preview

Harris recalls whirlwind presidential run in frank, gutsy memoir

Reviewed by GC Cabana-Coldwell 5 minute read Saturday, Nov. 1, 2025

“The fight for our freedom will take hard work. But like I always say, we like hard work. Hard work is good work.”

During the last four months of the 2024 American presidential election campaign, Kamala Harris’ mantra dominated political rallies, stump speeches and nightly TV news sound bites. The “hard work is good work’”catch phrase became as much her trademark as the pant suits and pearls during an edgy election contest in which Harris, who served as vice-president from 2021-2025, and Republican candidate Donald Trump, the 45th U.S. president, duked it out for the keys to the White House.

The ending is now history. Harris, the first Black and South Asian-American woman to run on a major political party’s presidential ticket, lost that election battle almost a year ago. The 61-year-old took a few months to lick her war wounds, and then put pen to paper in 107 Days, which follows 2009’s Smart on Crime and 2019’s The Truths We Hold: An American Journey. Selling 350,000 copies in its first week following a late September launch, Harris’ book has already become one of 2025’s bestselling memoirs.

107 Days is her recap of the shortest presidential campaign in modern election history, a fact she partly blames for her loss at the polls. It was also the closest election in the 21st century, she recently told Good Morning America. “As history writes about (it), I wanted to make sure my voice was present in how that election is discussed and covered,” she explains of her rationale for the memoir.

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Saturday, Nov. 1, 2025

Saul Loeb / TNS
In her memoir, Kamala Harris owns her mistakes and miscues, including not acknowledging former president Joe Biden’s obvious inability to stage a successful election campaign.

Williams explores changing notions of racial identity, sexuality and more in new novel

Reviewed by Zilla Jones 5 minute read Preview

Williams explores changing notions of racial identity, sexuality and more in new novel

Reviewed by Zilla Jones 5 minute read Saturday, Nov. 1, 2025

Like his debut novel Reproduction, which won the Giller Prize in 2019, Ian Williams’ eighth book, You’ve Changed, plays with form and reader expectations.

You’ve Changed opens as if mid-sentence, with a list of mundane tasks such as “tapping screens, setting appointments, trimming fingernails…” written in lighter text as if highlighted by an editor for possible changes. Throughout the book, potentially controversial words such as “gay,” “porn,” “hell” and “dick” are partially blacked out. Despite this self-censorship, William tackles many taboo topics in detail, such as urination and sexual incompatibility, which he approaches with irreverent humour.

William’s latest was also named to the long list for this year’s Giller Prize. He has won the Hilary Weston Prize for Nonfiction, and was chosen to deliver the 2024 CBC Massey Lectures. He teaches English and Creative Writing at the University of Toronto.

On the surface, You’ve Changed is a simple domestic drama about an ordinary married couple, Beckett and Princess, who have no children. Beckett works in construction, and near the beginning of the novel is fired for trying to help a fellow employee, who is being bullied by the boss. Princess is a fitness instructor at a gym. When Princess’ childhood friend Keza and her husband arrive for a visit shortly before Keza is due to give birth to their third child, the cracks in Beckett and Princess’ marriage begin to show.

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Saturday, Nov. 1, 2025

Orlean’s life experiences and journey as a writer recalled in joyful memoir

Reviewed by Dave Williamson 5 minute read Preview

Orlean’s life experiences and journey as a writer recalled in joyful memoir

Reviewed by Dave Williamson 5 minute read Saturday, Nov. 1, 2025

American author Susan Orlean, who turned 70 on October 31, has done no other job but writing since she graduated in 1978 from the University of Michigan. In her new book, she cleverly interweaves her autobiographical details with the highlights of the books and articles she has worked on. The title reflects her belief that her life has been a joyride.

While enjoying being a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine since 1992, Orlean has written several books that have become popular for both their choice of topic and the writer’s lively style. She says, “I’m surprised over and over again by how solitary the experience of writing is — how the big conversation the writer conducts with the public… comes down, finally, to quiet moments alone.”

What makes her memoir a joy to read is Orlean’s ability to show how she determined the kind of writing she wanted to do, how she uncovered aspects of topics that were not obvious but were excitingly three-dimensional. Tirelessly, she’d pursue the kinds of details she wanted, often travelling. Somehow, she balanced all this with her personal life, which could be discouraging at some times and happily fulfilling at others.

In an appendix, Orlean offers five articles that appeared in five different periodicals early in her career. These are presented not as her best works, but rather as examples of the wide variety of her work.

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Saturday, Nov. 1, 2025

Unflinching essays meld coming-of-age story, travelogue

Reviewed by Rochelle Squires 3 minute read Preview

Unflinching essays meld coming-of-age story, travelogue

Reviewed by Rochelle Squires 3 minute read Saturday, Nov. 1, 2025

Fans of Tara Westover’s bestselling memoir Educated and Lydia Yuknavitch’s Chronology of Water will find much to love in this debut collection of essays from an exciting new Canadian voice. Danica Klewchuk’s memoir-in-essays, Standing in the Footprints of Beasts, explores similar themes of growing up in the shadow of abusive religious leaders, sexual violence and misogyny.

The northern Alberta writer weaves in what it means to be a girl among men and boys in a rustic oil patch town. Poverty, isolation and exposure to a fierce kind of sexism are examined through the lens of someone who came of age on the outskirts of industrial expansion, labour camps and rampant exploitation of women and girls.

“The town, with its transient crush of oilfield workers, grew ever more menacing,” Klewchuk writes, describing how men would often drop by their teenage parties to look for underage girls. “We never went off to pee by ourselves and even had a name for things that happened to you when you were passed out. We called it being ghost ridden.”

Klewchuk develops an eating disorder and body dysmorphia that coincides with the onset of puberty. She navigates a complicated relationship with her own bodily autonomy against a memory as a nine-year-old girl when she finds her father’s Penthouse magazine in the glove box of his truck and wonders, “Would I look like this one day?”

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Saturday, Nov. 1, 2025

Familiar fodder in dystopian coming-of-age novel

Reviewed by Alan MacKenzie 3 minute read Preview

Familiar fodder in dystopian coming-of-age novel

Reviewed by Alan MacKenzie 3 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

Hybrid memoir haunted by history

Reviewed by Douglas J. Johnston 4 minute read Preview

Hybrid memoir haunted by history

Reviewed by Douglas J. Johnston 4 minute read Saturday, Nov. 1, 2025

Stylistically excessive writing that impairs ready comprehension can torpedo a thought-provoking book.

Red Pockets is a case in point.

Author Alice Mah is a Chinese-Canadian professor of urban and environmental studies at the University of Glasgow who grew up in Cranbook, B.C. Red Pockets is her first book.

She’s of mixed race, her father being of Chinese descent, her mother Caucasian. Growing up in southeastern B.C., she and her siblings were often mistaken for local Wet’suwet’en Indigenous people by townspeople.

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Saturday, Nov. 1, 2025

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Windsor book fest shutters, citing lack of funding

Ben Sigurdson 4 minute read Saturday, Nov. 1, 2025

After over 20 years highlighting books and authors, BookFest Windsor announced on sociel media that 2024 was the last of the annual event.

“With funding decreasing and fewer people able to continue the stellar work of our founders, we are no longer able to mount a literary festival,” organizers said in the post, adding that grant funds will be returned and remaining resources donated to a local arts charity.

The festival, which launched in 2002, has moved its archives to a library at the University of Windsor.

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Palahniuk provides delightfully dark satire

David Pitt 4 minute read Saturday, Nov. 1, 2025

A new novel from Chuck Palahniuk? If you’re a fan, that’s pretty much all you need to hear.

If you’re unfamiliar with the author or recognize his name as the guy who wrote the book they made that movie Fight Club out of, then here’s what you need to know: Palahniuk is unique. There’s really no one like him writing today.

Palahniuk’s new book, Shock Induction (Simon & Schuster, 240 pages, $25), asks the question: why are high-school students, the best and the brightest, apparently killing themselves? The answer will shock you.

The novel is set in a near future in which the super-rich follow the lives of certain children, pretty much from the moment they’re born, to determine which will eventually be offered jobs — and, in essence, a life of servitude to their wealthy masters.

Zadie Smith muses on art, politics, culture and late authors in new essay collection

Reviewed by Alison Gillmor 4 minute read Preview

Zadie Smith muses on art, politics, culture and late authors in new essay collection

Reviewed by Alison Gillmor 4 minute read Saturday, Nov. 1, 2025

Bursting onto the literary scene in 2000 with White Teeth, Zadie Smith has gone on to write five more novels, including 2023’s The Fraud. The London-based writer is also an untiring essayist, having released several agile, insightful and far-ranging collections.

This latest batch, Smith’s fourth, includes reviews, articles, columns and talks. Some pieces feel like brief and breezy conversations with the reader; others are deep dives into fraught cultural and political intersections. As suggested by the title, there’s a particular focus on the way the past frames and forms our present moment.

Grouped under the headings Eyeballing, Considering, Reconsidering, Mourning and Confessing, the essays cover visual art, film, performance and, of course, books. Smith eulogizes Toni Morrison, Joan Didion, Philip Roth, Martin Amis and Hilary Mantel, all writers who have died in the last few years, and brings up many more.

Smith includes forewords she has written for the reissue of two crucial historical works, Gretchen Gerzina’s Black England and James Weldon Johnson’s Black Manhattan. She considers the labour and craft of writing, the serendipitous pleasures of urban walks — in New York City and her beloved northwest London — and the lures and risks of being Extremely Online.

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Saturday, Nov. 1, 2025

Ben Bailey-Smith photo
While Zadie Smith’s writing style is sharp, clear and specific, her thoughts are exploratory and open-ended.

Shoalts digs into British explorer’s life and disappearance in Canada’s breathtaking north

Reviewed by Chris Smith 5 minute read Preview

Shoalts digs into British explorer’s life and disappearance in Canada’s breathtaking north

Reviewed by Chris Smith 5 minute read Saturday, Oct. 25, 2025

Canadian explorer Adam Shoalts, author of a half-dozen books about his northern adventures, expands his range in this new volume by combining wilderness trips, biography and cold-case detective work in an intriguing tale of little-known but well-respected solo early 20th-century explorer Hubert Darrell.

It was while reading historical records in 2011 that Shoalts first encountered a reference to Darrell, who disappeared in the uncharted wilds of the Northwest Territories in 1910; he became enchanted by the life of the solo prospector, guide and explorer, and drawn to solving the mystery of how he died.

“I often felt as if I were chasing a ghost,” Shoalts writes. “He’d vanished not only literally, but from the pages of history.”

A cold case in a cold, cold land, if you will.

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Saturday, Oct. 25, 2025

Adam Shoalts / Penguin Random House Canada
Author and explorer Adam Shoalts captures the exceptional beauty and sheer danger of the northern wilderness as he traces lost explorer Hubert Darrell’s route in his latest book.

True grit lacking in Canadian collection

Reviewed by Morley Walker 4 minute read Preview

True grit lacking in Canadian collection

Reviewed by Morley Walker 4 minute read Saturday, Oct. 25, 2025

Some things sound great in theory but flop in practice.

Take this mixed bag of patriotic Canadian essays responding to Donald Trump’s obnoxious “51st state” taunts last winter.

At the time it was a no-brainer: collect the musings of a range of cultural figures as they react to the “existential threat” to our national sovereignty posed by the trolling of the newly installed U.S. president.

And what better title to use than the hockey metaphor Toronto-born comedian Mike Myers employed on NBC’s Saturday Night Live: “Elbows Up.”

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Saturday, Oct. 25, 2025

King’s love of architecture largely ignored

Reviewed by Douglas J. Johnston 4 minute read Preview

King’s love of architecture largely ignored

Reviewed by Douglas J. Johnston 4 minute read Saturday, Oct. 25, 2025

“Give this much to the Luftwaffe: when it knocked down our buildings, it didn’t replace them with anything more offensive than rubble. We did that.”

So spoke our present king, Charles III, to a British audience in 1987.

Constitutional norms dictate that the British (and thereby, Canadian) monarchy doesn’t involve itself in political or commercial matters.

Charles, when monarch-in-waiting as Prince of Wales, honoured that protocol — except when it came to architecture.

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Saturday, Oct. 25, 2025

King Charles III: 40 Years of Architecture

Albom’s magically uplifting love story melds fantasy, time travel and suspense

Reviewed by Cheryl Girard 4 minute read Preview

Albom’s magically uplifting love story melds fantasy, time travel and suspense

Reviewed by Cheryl Girard 4 minute read Saturday, Oct. 25, 2025

Alfie’s story begins when he’s in his 50s in an interrogation room with a determined and hardened detective. He had just been arrested for allegedly cheating at a casino in the Bahamas and suspiciously winning millions of dollars. Also, it turns out, Alfie is dying.

His life story unravels slowly through a journal Alfie has meticulously kept for his unnamed boss to read upon his death. But he gives it to the detective to read as his only means of trying to defend his actions.

And so this magical, uplifting and mysterious story begins — part fantasy, part time travel, part suspense and mostly about a woman Alfie loves.

Twice is the newest of about a dozen works of fiction and non-fiction by Michigan-based Mitch Albom. One of Albom’s most beloved books is the beautiful Tuesdays With Morrie, reported to be the bestselling memoir of all time.

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Saturday, Oct. 25, 2025

Gino Domenico / The Associated Press files
Mitch Albom continues to write with his heart in his latest work, Twice.

Poetry project shines light on Rooster Town

Ben Sigurdson 4 minute read Saturday, Oct. 25, 2025

A new little-free-library-sized literary installation featuring poetry is a personal reconciliation project of Winnipeg writer Bernie Kruchak.

The Rooster Town Poetry Shed is located at 939 Dudley Ave., not far from the final site of Rooster Town, where a number of Métis families lived until they were forced out to make way for Winnipeg’s expansion.

The poetry shed is currently featuring work by poet (and Free Press poetry columnist) melanie brannagan frederiksen, whose collection The Night, The Knife, The River will be published by At Bay Press in fall 2026.

For more on the project see roostertownpoetryshed.ca.

Couple’s emotional stakes put to the test

Reviewed by Barbara Romanik 4 minute read Preview

Couple’s emotional stakes put to the test

Reviewed by Barbara Romanik 4 minute read Saturday, Oct. 25, 2025

London-based Irish author Eimear McBride pulls no punches in her latest novel The City Changes Its Face. Set in a London flat over a long autumn night in 1996, two lovers — the book’s protagonist, acting student Eily, and her actor and filmmaker partner Stephen — expose the foundations or architecture (including sex, family trauma and addiction) of their relationship, re-living meaningful events, conversations and revelations over their first two years together. The novel is a gritty ode to the early passion of a lasting love affair.

At the novel’s outset Eily is particularly fragile; while many readers may intuitively anticipate the open secrets that shadow and conclude the book, the journey that takes us there is never easy or boring. Eily’s interior life is as embodied and as real as the tip-tapping of nervous fingers on the Formica counter, the fought-over ripped duvet, the city noises outside of the couple’s Camden flat and the tube, the Underground, shuddering below their feet.

Shirking convention, McBride presents her characters’ dialogue without tags and with unusual line breaks and spaces, forcing the reader to slow down and backtrack, to hang and consider the words and the heightened emotions and meaning that permeate these words. She also uses smaller font for interior monologue or asides that complement and contradict the words Eily shares with the other characters and the reader.

McBride revels in the subterfuge and esthetics of the performance that Eily and Stephen — as actors and artists — engage in presenting to each other and the world at large.

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Saturday, Oct. 25, 2025

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