Category: Reviews
My My, Drainie
Review of My Jerusalem: Secular Adventures in the Holy City (Doubleday 1994), paperback 287 pages. Reviewed by Debra Martens Bronwyn Drainie spent two years in Jerusalem (1991-1993) with Patrick Martin, […]
What then?
Remembrance Day. Is it enough to remember those who lost their lives fighting in the First World War? Sharon Johnston’s novel, Matrons and Madams (Dundurn 2015), asks us to consider […]
Ah Bon Delisle
The graphic book Chroniques de Jérusalem, by Guy Delisle (Éditions Delcourt 2011) is still relevant although it was published five years ago, and took place from 2009. The book is […]
Singing Her Way
This week Demetra Angelis Foustanellas reviews the historical novel The Goodtime Girl (Cormorant Books 2012) by Tess Fragoulis. You may recall that Foustanellas is our Canadian in Greece. Tess Fragoulis […]
Bones and Marrow
Poet laureate of Toronto from 2009-2012, winner of a Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry in 1997 and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award in 2003, Dionne Brand was born in […]
From Ruins to Hope
This book review by Sonia Saikaley is not about a new book, but Ann Charney’s Life Class (Cormorant Books 2013) is apt for Canadian Writers Abroad, hitting all the right […]
Cusk’s Writing Class
This review of Outline by Rachel Cusk is written by Kim Reynolds in Ottawa, who has launched an indie publisher, Bookgiddy. Rachel Cusk lives in England, and has done so […]
Three Lonely Men
The High Mountains of Portugal by Yann Martel (Knopf Canada 2016) 332 pages. Reviewed by Hubert O’Hearn In 1515, the Sultan of Cambay sent the gift of a rhinoceros to […]
Not Getting Married
Empire Girls: the colonial heroine comes of age by Mandy Treagus (University of Adelaide Press 2014) is an academic study of three novels: Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African […]
The Orenda
Joseph Boyden is a Canadian author (heritage part Anishnaabe, Irish and Scottish) who lives during the school year in New Orleans, where he teaches at the University of New Orleans, […]
Imagine
At the Remembrance Day ceremony for Canada in Green Park, London, the High Commissioner, Gordon Campbell, asked everyone to imagine what it would have been like to be in the […]
Flight Paths
“How do you tell someone that a man fell out of the sky and onto your car, like a Pakistani David Bowie, and that you felt compelled to bring him […]
Writer Two Kids
Michelle Smith’s piece on Devon appeared in CWA in July 2014. Author of the poetry book dear Hermes…, she and co-author Faye Hammill recently published the monograph Magazines, Travel, and […]
Saikaley Reviews Secrets
Review by Sonia Saikaley Secrets in a Jewellery Box by Demetra Angelis Foustanellas spans time and culture, shifting between the past and present. Foustanellas knows both worlds: she was born […]
Depraved World: Review of Planet Lolita
Who better to review Charles Foran’s Planet Lolita than someone young, for whom Facebook is as familiar as the telephone book was to her parents’ (and Foran’s) generation? University of […]
Colonial Moderns
Review of Modernist Voyages: Colonial Women Writers in London, 1890-1945 by Anna Snaith, Cambridge University Press 2014, 278 pp hardcover (ISBN: 9780521515450). Reviewed by Debra Martens. Modernism is loosely defined […]
Emily in England
Emily Carr was both artist and writer. Something I didn’t know: she took a writing course at Victoria College in the summer of 1934.* Bed-ridden by illness, she wrote towards […]
Get thee to a nunnery
CWA contributor Jane Christmas published her memoir, And Then There Were Nuns, in 2013. In the interval, I have been searching for the perfect reviewer. Found one. Both author and […]
Pascale Quiviger
Pascale Quiviger, from Montreal and author of several books and a young adult series, lived in Italy for ten years and now lives in Nottingham, the hotbed of creative writing in […]
Eliza
— Wallflower She’s Not — A Canadian (born 1987) graduates from the University of Victoria, comes to England in 2011 to study Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia […]
War That Ended Peace
Margaret MacMillan’s most recent book, The War that Ended Peace: How Europe Abandoned Peace for the First World War (London: Profile Books 2013) has been released in paperback (Penguin Random […]
Thomas’s Local Customs
Charlotte Stein is a long-time bookseller. Her first bookstore job, while a highschool student, was in the NAAFI Bookshop on the NATO military base in Rheindahlen, West Germany. In 1988 […]
Going Ashore with Mavis Gallant
I’ve been reading some of Mavis Gallant’s early stories, collected in Going Ashore (McClelland & Stewart 2009) with an introduction by Alberto Manguel. Manguel praises several of the stories: “brilliant, […]
Journey with No Maps
Review of Journey With No Maps: A Life of P.K. Page by Sandra Djwa (McGill Queen’s University Press) 2012: 418 pages. Reviewed by Debra Martens For the past few weeks […]
Christmas on Toy
Island in the Clouds by Susan M. Toy, IslandCat Editions (2012), 183 pp. Reviewed by Jane Christmas There’s a body face down in a swimming pool and a motley cast […]
Once You Break
Once You Break a Knuckle by D.W. Wilson has twelve stories and for that simple reason I will make twelve points in my review. This book is a must read. […]
Canadian Writers Abroad 