by jillmaclean | Jun 7, 2022 | Book Review, Novels I’ve Read
Ta-Nehisi Coates is an American journalist and award-winning non-fiction writer. The WaterDancer, about slavery in the 1850s, is his debut novel, and it has it all: momentum, density, ahost of interesting and well-developed characters, an impressive level of research...
by jillmaclean | Apr 7, 2022 | Book Review
Quite simply, I loved this book, which I came across while scrolling through the Coach House catalogue. Dominique Fortier has written a quiet novel, intelligent and multi-layered, its style, paradoxically, both spare and sensuous. She won the Governor General’s Award...
by jillmaclean | Mar 7, 2022 | Book Review, Novels I’ve Read
The following link gives the context for Old Soldiers Never Die by Frank Richards, of the Royal Welch Fusiliers (Parthian Library of Wales, 2016) www.walesartsreview.org/some-words-on-frank-richards/ Phil Carradice’s BBC blog, largely biographical, describes how...
by jillmaclean | Feb 7, 2022 | Book Review
There are many laudatory reviews of Canadian author Kathleen Winter’s Undersong (Alfred A.Knopf Canada, 2021), a novel rife with famous names, yet unassumingly presented through ahandyman’s eyes. The following link presents an interview with her:...
by jillmaclean | Jan 7, 2022 | Book Review, Novels I’ve Read
Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch, by the Canadian-American author Rivka Galchen, is an historical novel that is all-too relevant for our modern world. There are several excellent reviews of the novel (Harper Perennial, 2021) and I recommend the following link for...
by jillemaclean | Nov 30, 2018 | Book Review, Books Other Than Novels, Novels I’ve Read
Is one of the pitfalls of being a writer that you read differently? In the last couple of weeks, I’ve read Sarah Perry’s historical novel The Essex Serpent, two-thirds of Carlo Rovelli’s Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity – non-fiction,...
by jillemaclean | Nov 15, 2018 | Book Review, Novels I’ve Read
If The Dream of Scipio stirred me up, Days Without End almost wrecked me…what is it about a story that seizes you by the throat and won’t let go? First, a digression. After I heard Michael Ondaatje and Linda Spalding read in Halifax, I reread The English Patient and...
by jillemaclean | Nov 1, 2018 | Book Review, Books Other Than Novels
Imre Kertész, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002, chose first person for his semi-autobiographical Holocaust novel Fatelessness, published in 1975 as Fateless. In 1944, aged fourteen, he was one of the 440,000 Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz, where...
by jillemaclean | Oct 15, 2018 | Book Review
What can art do? And what can it not do? Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone asks both these questions, with an added dimension – can we make art when loneliness, to the point of extreme isolation, is the spur? Laing is a British...
by jillemaclean | Sep 30, 2018 | Book Review
Chris Cleave’s second novel, Little Bee, which goes by the title The Other Hand in the UK, is about a very serious subject and at no point as I read it did my eyes glaze over (his phrase). The brief blurb on the front cover is a ploy a publisher can use only rarely....
