Category: Book Reviews

The organ sits in an alcove by the fireplace where a green velvet love seat used to be, lit by a single wrought-iron lamp. It is carved with garlands and urns, it stands on clawed animal feet, and when Cynthia touches the keys nothing happens, because she has forgotten the bellows need pumping first. What […]

Traffic stops dead halfway across the Coronado Bridge. Rain hammers the minivan, the young driver is breathing into a paper bag, and the only edible thing anyone has found is a bag of hemp-laced dog biscuits meant to calm an elderly Pomeranian on flights. So three adults eat them, in solidarity. They are earthy, gluey […]

A superlative work of first-class mentorship  Garnet Morris’s second book, Do the Hard Things, transcends self-help to become something like a mentorship in book form. The distinction is subtle but important. Mentorship requires the author’s lived experience, depth of commitment, and a clear sense of responsibility for the message. In short, it requires palpable commitment […]

What happens when belief becomes humanity’s most dangerous technology? The Meme by Nicholas Rov Kent is a deliberately destabilizing intellectual experiment—in novel form. It may not be a traditional narrative, but it is speculative fiction that blends dystopian futurism, political philosophy, metafiction, and social satire. To call the book unconventional would be understating the matter. […]

A casserole hits the kitchen floor. Bazil Coutts has come in quietly, the way he always used to, and put his arms around his wife at the sink, and the dish is in pieces before either of them can speak. Geraldine looks at him, steps over the mess and climbs the stairs without a sound, […]

The killing frost has finally arrived in Tinker’s Cove, blackening the last chrysanthemums, and Lucy Stone takes her ageing black Lab out on the old logging road to enjoy it. At Blueberry Pond, newly sealed with smooth ice, she pauses to practise the mindfulness her yoga-teacher friend keeps recommending. When she opens her eyes there […]

Darkly funny and quietly brutal stories about the lives people build around the past The title of M.C. Schmidt’s short story collection, Tell Me Something Before I Show You, is taken from a conversation between thirteen-year-olds: a bargain. A secret for a secret. It’s an apt title for a book about the ambiguity of memory—the […]

The night before Mrs. Scarlatti is brought home from hospital, Ezra Tull takes a sledgehammer to her restaurant. He knocks through the wall between the kitchen and the dining room, and strips out the dark formal trimmings. He has something new in mind: a place where diners can watch the cooking, where the menu is […]

When the clock strikes nine on the night before the holiday, the eldest daughter tucks the little ones under extra quilts, kisses each of them the way her mother would, and climbs into her own bed without minding the small drifts of snow sifting onto her coverlet through the roof shingles. The old mastiff lies […]

The night after Thanksgiving, Elena Hood takes the turkey carcass out of the refrigerator and carves what is left of it onto three plates, with a block of frozen peas melting in its own synthetic butter. The meat is dry. She knows it is dry, and the knowledge feels to her like a moral failure. […]