Books – Winnipeg Free Press

New book from Motley Fool co-founder urges some rule-breaking for long-term prosperity

Joel Schlesinger 5 minute read 2:00 AM CDT

Fooling around with investing is no joke.

That is unless, you’re reading the Motley Fool, which has infused a bit of foolhardiness into sound investment insight regarding stocks since the early 1990s.

Started by David Gardner (a former English literature major) and his brother, the Motley Fool has more than 600,000 paid subscribers today, seeking insights on up-and-coming and fast-growing publicly traded companies, powered by promising trends such as artificial intelligence, robotics and the commercialization of space.

Gardner goes by the title of chief rule breaker at the U.S.-based Motley Fool, and he has a new book out this month that urges investors to break a few rules themselves.

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Raised in a Mennonite community, Métis adoptee searches for a sense of self — and her biological family

Reviewed by Matt Henderson 5 minute read Preview

Raised in a Mennonite community, Métis adoptee searches for a sense of self — and her biological family

Reviewed by Matt Henderson 5 minute read 2:00 AM CDT

The notion of separateness is not foreign to Manitoba physician and author Brittany Penner. In her memoir Children Like Us: A Métis Woman’s Memoir of Family, Identity and Walking Herself Home, the quest to know and be known is all-consuming. Her separateness leads to a constant state of dissonance, one where she wrestles with a disconnect from her past, her identity and perhaps a sense of love. For, as she ponders, “If I could make sense of my story, find a reason for it, maybe I’d find a sense of belonging too. Maybe this book could give me that.”

Born in the early 1990s, Penner’s biological mother would or could not care for her new daughter — a tension that is an omnipresent undercurrent of the book — and she was adopted by a young Mennonite couple. Penner would spend her life growing up in a southern Manitoba family, disconnected from her Indigenous birth mother, family and community.

The Penner family, both immediate and extended, are fully committed to adopting and caring for children within the child welfare system. As the author tragically remarks, “In total, I will have twenty-one foster siblings before my seventh birthday. Everyone of them will be Native.”

And through this stark reality, Penner learns early on what many children in the care of Child and Family Services (CFS) know and believe: “we are the children people do not want around. Our lives are moveable. Transferable. An inconvenience that requires a solution.” The constant movement of young children into the family’s Manitoba farmhouse — one founded on a home life filled with an angry, detached father and a faith rooted in guilt — creates this sense of otherness or separateness.

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2:00 AM CDT

Michael Maren photo
Born in the early ‘90s, Brittany Penner’s biological mother would or could not care for her, a tension that is an omnipresent undercurrent of her memoir.

Foreign correspondent had front-row seat to political upheavals, famine and more

Reviewed by Douglas J. Johnston 4 minute read Preview

Foreign correspondent had front-row seat to political upheavals, famine and more

Reviewed by Douglas J. Johnston 4 minute read 2:00 AM CDT

Former CBC television reporter Brian Stewart’s memoir On the Ground doubles as a discerning take on recent Canadian and global history.

He both brings the reader inside his life and mental health, and invigorates accounts of his gigs as a foreign correspondent with on-the-ground analysis.

Apart from a brief stint with NBC, Stewart, now 83, spent his entire television reporting career with CBC television until his retirement in 2009. He chronicled pivotal global events: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, civil war in Lebanon, the struggle against apartheid in South Africa and the Gulf War.

But the story that touched him most, then and now, was the 1983-85 famine in northern Ethiopia.

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2:00 AM CDT

SUPPLIED PHOTO
In this photo taken in Tigray in northern Ethiopia, Brian Stewart (next to camera operator) listens to stories from refugees at a relief centre while covering the 1983-85 famine.

Dump trip helps lad part with beloved toy

Harriet Zaidman 4 minute read 2:00 AM CDT

In Tim Wynne-Jones’s King of the Dump (House of Anansi, hardcover, 32 pages, $22), Teddy resists his dad’s edict to give up his ride-em-daschund, even though he’s outgrown it.

On a trip to a garbage dump, Teddy learns how materials are recycled. He transfers these lessons when he and his dad visit a swap store, realizing his beloved toy will be well-used and cherished by a younger, smaller child, and that growing up is okay.

Scot Ritchie draws playful, accurate depictions of the complicated recycling processes. For children aged 3-5.

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Hunter’s poignant, linked stories mull love, loss and meaning

Reviewed by Rory Runnells 4 minute read Preview

Hunter’s poignant, linked stories mull love, loss and meaning

Reviewed by Rory Runnells 4 minute read 2:00 AM CDT

Winnipeg poet and novelist Catherine Hunter’s new collection of 10 linked stories, Seeing You Home, is about longtime married couple Clare and Richard as it weaves through their time together, his death from cancer and her discovery of moving on in life.

Time is fluid in these stories — the present often suddenly abuts the past — but the subtle underlying theme is that though death always stalks the living, we are touched with the simple grace of life inviting us, as it does Clare, to move forward no matter how difficult.

The ritual of discovering this insight fuels the great story Romeo, Illinois, when Clare re-discovers “I.” The mixing of first and third person is complex, but Hunter manages it with clear, measured prose. Its use shows how we are seen, and who we really are inside.

Here remembrance joins the daily grind as Clare/I, almost immediately after Richard’s death in the dead of winter, deals with home heating troubles, funeral home business intrigue gumming up Richard’s cremation, the pressures of academic life and well-meaning friends and relatives.

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2:00 AM CDT

Theatre student’s death sets outcast teen to sleuthing in retro graphic novel

Reviewed by Nyala Ali 4 minute read Preview

Theatre student’s death sets outcast teen to sleuthing in retro graphic novel

Reviewed by Nyala Ali 4 minute read 2:00 AM CDT

Secrets and intrigue are folded into old-school notes and high-school playbills in this neo-noir graphic novel by Canadian comics powerhouse Mariko Tamaki and acclaimed illustrator Nicole Goux.

Set in the late 1980s at the fictitious Wilberton Academy, This Place Kills Me centres around the death of budding theatre ingenue Elizabeth Woodward. Though her demise is ruled a suicide by local police, outcast new girl Abby Kita is determined to find out what really happened to her classmate, even though her efforts won’t win her any points with the popular crowd.

As the mystery unfolds, reluctant bonds are forged and broken as Tamaki and Goux deliver a fast-paced, timely whodunit that uncovers the sinister side of an outwardly pristine all-girls prep school.

The intricacies of teen-girl social dynamics, especially as viewed through an ostracized peer, have become a signature of Tamaki’s work (see: Skim, This One Summer and Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me). The cliques at Wilberton are no exception; one gets the feeling that since she transferred there, Abby has been donning headphones not only as a reminder of what she left behind, but also as an antidote to the constant stream of gossip permeating every room in the school.

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2:00 AM CDT

Writer’s Trust, Giller Prize post fiction finalists

Ben Sigurdson 5 minute read 2:00 AM CDT

With fall books season having properly kicked off, the last week saw two of Canada’s big fiction prizes unveil lists of finalists for the awards.

On Sept. 17, the Writers’ Trust of Canada shared its list of five finalists for the $70,000 prize, which will be presented at a ceremony on Thursday, Nov. 13. (Shortlisted authors who don’t win take home $7,500.)

And the finalists are: Tim Bowling for Graveyard Shift at the Lemonade Stand: Stories, Robert McGill for Simple Creatures: Stories, Otoniya J. Okot Bitek for We, the Kindling, Maria Reva for Endling and Aurora Stewart de Peña for Julius Julius.

Okot Bitek’s We, the Kindling also made the 14-book long list for the 2025 Giller Prize, which was announced Sept. 15. Among others on the long list: André Alexis for Other Worlds, Souvanhkam Thammavongsa (who own the prize in 2020) for her novel Pick a Colour, Amanda Leduc for Wild Life, 2019 Giller winner Ian Williams for his novel You’ve Changed and Mona Awad for We Love You, Bunny.

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Booker winner explores fraught relationship with mother in memoir

Reviewed by Andrea Geary 4 minute read Preview

Booker winner explores fraught relationship with mother in memoir

Reviewed by Andrea Geary 4 minute read 2:00 AM CDT

Arundhati Roy’s mother, Mary, was an extremely strong-willed woman who was loved, feared or both by those who knew her. In her memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me, Roy recounts her struggles to meet her mother’s expectations and win her love — an epic task.

In 1997 Roy won the Booker Prize for her first novel, The God of Small Things, a semi-autobiographical account of her childhood. The book’s depiction of a sexual relationship between members of conflicting Indian castes caused public outrage, a legal challenge and eventually resulted in Roy spending a day in jail. She’s also known for her second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, and has written essays on Indian societal and political issues. While Mother Mary Comes to Me is a memoir, it’s written in a lyrical style similar to Roy’s fiction.

Mary founded and ran a co-educational school in Kerala, a state in southern India. This was an unheard-of undertaking for a woman in a male-dominated society.

The mother of a young son and daughter, she was also viewed askance because she divorced her husband, an alcoholic who had isolated the family on a remote tea plantation, describing her ex-husband as a “nothing man.”

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2:00 AM CDT

Mayank Austen Soofi photo
Having a famous (or infamous) mother caused Arundhati Roy anxiety and a desire to hide from the public eye in her younger years.

Old, new cases clash in Hannah’s whodunit

Reviewed by Nick Martin 4 minute read Preview

Old, new cases clash in Hannah’s whodunit

Reviewed by Nick Martin 4 minute read 2:00 AM CDT

The brutal murder of Frankie Oliver’s teenaged sister Joanna almost three decades ago has haunted her family ever since — and remains unsolved.

Horrific enough, but dad Frank was the senior police officer on the scene, unaware he was about to find his own daughter’s bloody corpse.

And now Frankie (the younger) is detective inspector Oliver, and yet, still, her sister’s killer is likely alive and out there, somewhere.

Suddenly, a chance remark from a drunken man, caught by detective chief inspector (DCI) David Stone — improbably, tenuously, just maybe it’s a clue that police have been waiting to stumble upon for the last three decades.

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2:00 AM CDT

Mysterious child offers hope in a grim future

Reviewed by Owen White 3 minute read Preview

Mysterious child offers hope in a grim future

Reviewed by Owen White 3 minute read 2:00 AM CDT

The world is dying, and all that’s left are the poisonous mosses and the unrelenting sea. The last of humanity is living pinched between the two in the Colony.

In The Drowned Man’s Daughter, Canadian author C.J. Lavigne paints a dreary picture of a hopeless future in the wake of ecological disaster.

The only way for anyone to have children is to succumb to the moss and eat its berries, which mentally and physically changes them. One day, months after finding an unknown drowned man on their shores, they find a baby.

The Colony, desperate for any sliver of hope, assumes she’s the drowned man’s daughter and, by extension, daughter of the sea. They look at her with awe and fear, and ask her to do impossible things like command the weather and the waves.

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2:00 AM CDT

Longtime Thin Air director handing reins to new team at writers festival

Ben Sigurdson 8 minute read Preview

Longtime Thin Air director handing reins to new team at writers festival

Ben Sigurdson 8 minute read 2:00 AM CDT

Since 1997, Winnipeg has played host to an annual writer’s festival virtually without fail — even through the COVID-19 pandemic.

And since 2003, Charlene Diehl has been at the helm of that fest — from its days as the Winnipeg International Writers Festival through to its recent rechristening as Thin Air/Livres en fête.

This year, with the help of a young, enthusiastic crew, Diehl has been able to step back a bit, doling out many of the festival’s responsibilities to the eager Plume Winnipeg team while offering advice and insight.

“I’m in my 60s, and at some point I just need to stop doing this,” she says. “I’m not going to be retiring from this at 75, and you can’t really move someone into very active roles if you don’t get out of the way.”

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2:00 AM CDT

MIKE DEAL / FREE PRESS
Charlene Diehl (left), executive director of Plume Winnipeg, and Épiphanie Muyenzi, administration co-ordinator at Thin Air / Livres en fête.

Non-fiction prize finalists include Toews, El Akkad

Ben Sigurdson 4 minute read Saturday, Sep. 13, 2025

The three-person jury for the 2025 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for nonfiction has chosen the five finalists for the award, to be presented at a ceremony on Nov. 13.

And the nominees are: Miriam Toews for A Truce That Is Not Peace; Omar El Akkad for One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This; Tessa McWatt for The Snag: A Mother, A Forest, and Wild Grief; Leanne Betasamosake Simpson for Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead; and Vinh Nguyen for The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse.

The jury was comprised of Winnipeg author and Free Press columnist Niigaan Sinclair alongside Winnipeg-born, Nova Scotia-based poet Lori Nielsen Glenn (The Old Moon in Her Arms, Following the River) and Toronto’s Matthew R. Morris (Black Boys Like Me).

The winner takes home $75,000, while each of the finalists receives $5,000.

Winnipeg novelist’s evocative murder mystery harkens back to classic thrillers

Reviewed by Craig Terlson 5 minute read Preview

Winnipeg novelist’s evocative murder mystery harkens back to classic thrillers

Reviewed by Craig Terlson 5 minute read Saturday, Sep. 13, 2025

After reading award-winning Manitoba writer David Bergen’s latest book, Days of Feasting and Rejoicing, you may want to research the difference between a sociopath and psychopath. The definitions won’t matter in terms of enjoying this enthralling and wickedly addictive novel, but the distinction between the personality disorders adds another layer to the themes Bergen explores.

Bergen’s prose is so smooth you might not see the spell it casts. It’s as if a dark magic propels the main character, Esther Maile, into the increasingly immoral acts she commits in taking over the identity of her friend Christine during a vacation in Thailand.

It’s not much of a spoiler to say murder is involved, which lands the novel into Patricia Highsmith territory, notably The Talented Mr. Ripley. The first third of Bergen’s book feels like a cover version of Highsmith’s novel, or at least an homage, but then something fascinating begins to happen.

The novel’s atmosphere brings to life the sounds, tastes and smells of Southeast Asia, where Bergen has spent considerable time doing volunteer work. The descriptions of food and drink are rich and evocative, and add to the authenticity of the prose — the book’s title gives an ironic nod to this focus toward feasting.

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Saturday, Sep. 13, 2025

Phil Broomfield lectures on Thomas Hardy’s horticultural history

Colleen Zacharias 6 minute read Preview

Phil Broomfield lectures on Thomas Hardy’s horticultural history

Colleen Zacharias 6 minute read Saturday, Sep. 13, 2025

It’s September, and just as the kids are back in school to gain knowledge, garden clubs and horticultural societies are planning program evenings that provide learning opportunities for their members and the gardening public.

Prior to the pandemic, few garden clubs used video conferencing services such as Zoom. But lockdown changed everything. Virtual programming not only allowed learning opportunities and networking to continue during COVID, but has since opened doors to a greater audience for both garden clubs and public speakers like Phil Broomfield.

Broomfield is a United Kingdom-based garden historian and storyteller who gives lectures to women’s institute groups, garden clubs, horticultural societies and other organizations whose members are interested in exploring the evolution of gardens, horticulture and design.

Broomfield, 44, is also a horticulturalist and owner of The Garden Doctor, a garden maintenance service in Bournemouth on the south coast of England.

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Saturday, Sep. 13, 2025

Phil Broomfield photo
A traditional cottage garden frames Thomas Hardy’s birthplace cob and thatch cottage, built by his great-grandfather in 1800.

Aglukark recalls struggles, trauma of loss on her unlikely path to stardom

Reviewed by Rochelle Squires 4 minute read Preview

Aglukark recalls struggles, trauma of loss on her unlikely path to stardom

Reviewed by Rochelle Squires 4 minute read Saturday, Sep. 13, 2025

For many of us living in urban Canada during the 1990s, our first introduction to Inuit culture was through the songs and videos of Susan Aglukark. The four-time Juno-Award winning musician had her first breakout success in 1995 with the re-release of an album called Arctic Rose. The hit single O Siem turned the humble singer into the first Inuit performer to achieve a Top 40 hit.

Yet as Aglukark’s musical career grew by leaps and bounds throughout the ‘90s and early aughts, her private life told another story. She was waging an internal battle against trauma after losing a friend at a young age to suicide — an unfortunate theme that would underscore much of her early adult life — and the unrelenting loneliness that stemmed from being an adolescent sent hundreds of kilometres away from home just to stay in school. As a kid growing up in the Kivalliq Region (now known as Nunavut), there was no other choice but to move to Yellowknife if she wanted to earn a high school diploma.

Further, the forces behind Aglukark’s love of music was also once a relentless source of bullying. Her parents were preachers in a community unaccustomed to Christianity, and while the gospel music that filled her home may have influenced the talent that would propel her to stardom, it also made her school days a living hell.

“Our religion made us a bit of a target,” the 57-year-old artist recalls in her new memoir Kihiani: A Memoir of Healing, co-written with Andrea Warner.

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Saturday, Sep. 13, 2025

DENISE GRANT / THE CANADIAN PRESS FILES
Susan Aglukark

Women’s deaths in Highlands no accidents

Reviewed by Nick Martin 3 minute read Preview

Women’s deaths in Highlands no accidents

Reviewed by Nick Martin 3 minute read Saturday, Sep. 13, 2025

After reading Neil Lancaster’s When Shadows Fall, you’ll never be so glad that Winnipeg is flat.

Fall off Garbage Hill? You might roll down a ways, you might smell, but you’re not going to plummet dozens of metres from narrow trails onto craggy, unforgiving Highland rocks.

As do people herein, most of them women — women of certain characteristics, of a certain appearance.

Let’s not go any further without clearly understanding just how hard When Shadows Fall is to read at times.

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Saturday, Sep. 13, 2025

September 20, 2025

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