You are about to read a review of Thomas Trofimuk’s new novel. Perhaps you’ve seen This is All a Lie reclining against the shelf at your local bookstore, its stark white cover a breath of sanity amidst more lurid neighbours. Hesitantly, you ease it off the shelf, for you’ve been hurt before. Still, you remain optimistic that, somewhere past the bland bestsellers and the remainder bin, the perfect paperback awaits you.
Steven Peters makes an impressive entrance into the world of speculative fiction with his debut novel, 59 Glass Bridges, which began as his thesis project while studying English at the University of Calgary. Inspired in part by Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, the fifty-nine bridges in Peters’ hometown of Calgary, and his memories, this story is dark, evocative, and compelling.
Waiting for Stalin to Die by Irene Guilford is a touching and thoughtful novel about post-war immigrants from Lithuania living and settling in Toronto from 1949 to 1953. Irene Guilford is a Canadian author whose work has been shortlisted for both the CBC Literary Competition and the Event Creative Non-Fiction Contest. She is also the author of The Embrace, another novel concerning the Lithuanian experience of exile and immigration. Waiting for Stalin to Die is Guilford’s second fiction novel.
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, artist and member of Alderville First Nation. Her writing extends from scholarly work grounded in twenty years of Indigenous land-based education, and extends to genre-bending creative forms of poetry, song, and short stories. Her debut collection of stories and songs, Islands of Decolonial Love, was chosen by Thomas King for the 2013 RBC Taylor Emerging Writer Award. This Accident of Being Lost was released by House of Anansi Press in April 2017 and has just been shortlisted for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. It is a spell-binding collection that shifts between lyric poetry and short stories using a fragmented, weaving narrative. From PRISM’s Executive Editor, Jessica Johns, are six reasons why reading This Accident of Being Lost will have you openly weeping in coffee shops and ignoring cute dogs at the farmers market.
It’s tempting to call Next Year, For Sure, a novel about a millennial couple that happens upon polyamory, a “light” read. Because in many ways, it is a light read. Award-winning short story writer and debut novelist Zoey Leigh Peterson’s prose is deceptively addictive, the kind of writing that can easily keep a reader up until two or three in the morning. (I read it twice; I stayed up late finishing it both times.) Her main characters, nine-years-and-still-going-strong couple Chris and Kathryn, are sensitive and self-aware yuppie Vancouverites who verge on being likeable to a fault. The novel opens with Chris telling Kathryn he has a crush on Emily, a woman he met at the laundromat. Kathryn suggests he take her out on a date, the plot takes off at a brisk pace, alternating between Chris and Kathryn’s point of view as they navigate opening their relationship up to a third person over the course of the year that follows.
On a dark night in 1920s Mississippi, the story goes, the bluesman Robert Johnson walked out to the crossroads and sold his soul to the Devil. He was gifted with a preternatural ability to play the guitar in return: the strings bending beneath his fingers, his voice filled with what sounded like the anguish of generations. When he died mysteriously at 27, he left behind almost nothing, just a scattering of records and a swirling fog of myths. Johnson’s songs feel bracingly authentic to this day, filled with the violence and repression facing blacks in the Depression-era South. But the stories told of his life are anything but authentic. Johnson’s identity was hijacked in the decades after his death, largely by white fans eager to spread legends and half-truths about the voice in their record player. This was not an unusual legacy for black, pre-war blues musicians. “White urbanites reshaped the music to fit their own tastes and desires,” the historian Elijah Wald has written, “creating a rich mythology that often bears little resemblance to the reality of the musicians they admired.”
Meticulous, Sad and Lonely Ian Roy BuschekBooks, 2015 Review by Samarra Goldglas A boy kills his brother for some peace and quiet, a baby regularly grows nickels behind his ear, and a neglectful father escapes a mugging by screaming...
Review by Carly Rosalie Vandergriendt The Orange Grove Larry Tremblay Sheila Fischman, translation Biblioasis, 2015 Brothers David Clerson Katia Grubisic, translation QC Fiction, 2016 Currently long-listed for the 2017 International Dublin Literary Award, Larry Tremblay’s The Orange Grove opens...
Review by Deborah Vail The Conjoined by Jen Sookfong Lee ECW Press, 2016 A Vancouver-based writer born and raised on the city’s Downtown Eastside, Jen Sookfong Lee coaxes her readers down the frightening alleys and street corners of this...
