1.I
love this book for so many reasons. First off, the language is exquisite. Each
sentence is crafted beautifully and with utter simplicity.
You know from the
first pages that you are in the hands of a gifted storyteller and that, much
like Coleridge’s wedding guest, you will be unable to turn from the tale once
it begins. Without giving anything away I think the ending of this 114-page
novella is perhaps the most moving thing I have ever read. I couldn’t believe
the writer was going to go where she went. It left me reeling.
"A hypnotic and electrifying Irish tale that transcends country, transcends time." —Lily King, New York Times bestselling author of Writers & Lovers
Small Things Like These is award-winning author Claire Keegan's landmark new novel, a tale of one man's courage and a remarkable portrait of love and family
It is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man faces into his busiest season. Early one morning, while delivering an order to the local convent, Bill makes a discovery which forces him…
This book, by the Indigenous storyteller Michelle Porter, is one that I savoured for its beauty and audacity.
The book does not arbitrarily differentiate between the human world and the animal world. Everything is invited in and has a voice. It is a beautifully told, magical story. I am finding great pleasure in reading new Indigenous voices and am grateful that there is growing diversity in who is being published these days.
Voices we rarely hear from are now inviting people into worlds that have always existed but have not always been accessible.
Written like a crooked Metis jig, A Grandmother Begins the Story follows five generations of women and bison as they reach for the stories that could remake their worlds and rebuild their futures.
Carter is a young mother, recently separated. She is curious, angry, and on a quest to find out what the heritage she only learned of in her teens truly means.
Allie, Carter's mother, is trying to make up for the lost years with her first born, and to protect Carter from the hurt she herself suffered from her own mother. Lucie wants the granddaughter she's never met…
My
third favorite book was a book of prose poetry that delighted, inspired, and
awed me with its astonishing leaps and playfulness.
I write prose poetry so the
joy of finding a poet who excels in this form and from whom I have much to
learn was a true pleasure. I keep this book close to me in the way you keep a loved
one close. The poems literally reveal the world in new ways and make me want to
write. Perhaps a marker of any good book is how it inspires the reader.
Charles Rafferty's latest collection of prose poems turns philosophical. In A Cluster of Noisy Planets, Rafferty captures the rhythms and patterns of life as a lover, father, and poet, distilling each moment to its essence and grounding them collectively in the wider perspective of a changing world, the constant turning of the stars and the changing seasons of the New England countryside. With a knowing nod to the passage of time-day to day, year to year, epoch to epoch-these lyrical poems form a record of the profound, ephemeral joys, losses, and echoes of commonplace moments.
Using the threads of her brother's early death and her twenty years of work in hospice care, Eve Joseph utilizes history, religion, philosophy, literature, personal anecdote, mythology, poetry, and pop culture to discern the unknowable and illuminate her travels through the land of the dying. This is neither an academic text nor a self-help manual; rather, it is a foray into the land of death and dying as seen through the lens of art and the imagination.
Rather than relying solely on narrative, In the Slender Margin gains momentum from a build-up of thematic resonances. Joseph writes toward thinking about death and in the process finds the brother she lost as a young girl. She wrote the book as a way to understand what she had seen: the mysterious and the horrific.
