by prfire | Sep 2, 2015 | Book Reviews, Fiction
Margaret Sweatman’s fifth novel, Mr. Jones, is an atmospheric tour-de-force. The winner of the most recent Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction, Mr. Jones employs the conventions of a Cold War spy novel, engaging the big questions characteristic of the genre: loyalty,...
by prfire | May 6, 2015 | Book Reviews, Fiction
As I read Reading by Lightning, Joan Thomas’s first novel, I felt grateful to my parents’ generation for breaking ties with religious fundamentalism. As I read her second novel, Curiosity, I thought about feminist historians and the novelist’s gift for detail – that...
by prfire | Mar 9, 2015 | Book Reviews, Fiction
Aptly, the cautionary epigraph from Ecclesiastes (12:12) with which David Bergen frames this, his most explicit and richest inquiry to date into the fraught relations among living, reading and writing, love and lust, mind and body and human being, advises both the...
by prfire | May 2, 2013 | Book Reviews, Fiction
Hope Plett, the protagonist of David Bergen’s seventh novel, The Age of Hope, makes her first appearance at the tail end of a misguided attempt at aerial daredevilry. This incident leaves the pilot, a potential suitor, dead, and Hope saddened but not overly put out....
by prfire | Jan 24, 2013 | Book Reviews, Fiction
The protagonists in the short-story collection Leaving Berlin are typically failed romantics who have been forced to change their perception of the world. The reader is invited to look over the shoulders of characters at the same time as entering their point of view...
by prfire | Jan 24, 2013 | Book Reviews, Fiction
Think of the word “mongrel” and the image of a mixed-breed dog comes to mind. In this case, the term refers to the ethnically mixed protagonists in Montreal writer Marko Sijan’s debut collection of short fiction. Replete with sex, violence and moral ambiguity, his...
