True crime stories offer a window into the past, transporting readers to another time and place. They reveal human behaviour at its worst and people striving to do the right thing. And the narrative is always dramatic and compelling, with mysteries to be solved, suspects to be captured, justice to be done. My books profile a Jazz Age con artist, a Victorian Era serial killer, and a gentleman jewel thief of the 1920s. I write a column of true crime stories and book reviews for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and I teach in the MFA in Creative Nonfiction program at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
What became of Ambrose Small? That’s the mystery at the heart of this riveting story of wealth, lies, and betrayal. The Toronto theatre magnate disappeared in 1919, on the day he made a fortune from the sale of his chain of vaudeville and movie houses. Was he kidnapped and murdered before he could cash in, or did he want to disappear? Daubs explores this century-old cold case and immerses readers in 1920s Toronto, a city with a straitlaced reputation—dubbed “Toronto the Good”—but no shortage of sinners and shady characters. This richly detailed account is as absorbing as any fictional whodunit.
This is a classic novel set in and beloved by readers across British Columbia, where I live. Like all my favorite novels, this one is full of heart.
It led me into the world of First Nations in a way that invited me to live it, too, which is what I love about any of my favorite reads.
I want to get into other minds and understand what and how they see and feel, and this tale of a son taking his dying father on a last journey did just that, recalling lost loves, lost chances, the toll of war, and a tender reconciliation that reminds me that we can always heal when we open ourselves to possibility.
In these difficult times when I flinch at the news daily, I need stories like this that give me hope and heart.
“A novel about the role of stories in our lives, those we tell ourselves about ourselves and those we agree to live by.” —Globe and Mail
When Franklin Starlight is called to visit his father, he has mixed emotions. Raised by the old man he was entrusted to soon after his birth, Frank is haunted by the brief and troubling moments he has shared with his father, Eldon. When he finally travels by horseback to town, he finds Eldon on the edge of death, decimated from years of drinking.
The two undertake a difficult journey into the mountainous backcountry, in…
The perfect title reflects how
imperfect life can be, so just accept it!
Is it a memoir or a cookery book? The
recipes are there to add to the background story, as we know how popular cookery
books are when we empathize with the person behind them. In this case, Anita’s
view that food is the basis of making and keeping friends shines through.
Anita’s story is of a professional,
mature Canadian relocating to rural Wales, with anecdotes about people and how they
interact when spread widely across a rural area. Anyone from this county (including
me) will instantly recognize characters and places!
It is a large, sturdy
coffee-table book to dip into with lots of full-color photographs and seasonal
recipes for entertaining friends, a nice, easy read.
I am the author of two books on distilled spirits and have been blogging at AlcoholReviews.com since 1998. I have written about drinks, drinks history, and drinks politics for the New York Times and the American Spectator magazine. Whiskey is my favorite distilled spirit—there are so many fantastic types and brands of it. For consumers, it can be really bewildering to navigate. So, I take it as my duty to help people navigate the wide and wild world of whiskey!
Canadians have been making whisky for a few centuries, but drinks experts long have given the nation’s hooch scant attention. This is understandable, as Canadian distillers spent much of the 20th century churning out an ocean of low-priced and bland-tasting blends like Seagrams 7 and Canadian Club. Times have changed, though, and Canada is producing single malts and various high-end, sophisticated whiskies that have garnered international acclaim. David de Kergommeaux is the preeminent expert on whisky in the Great North, and his book is an indispensable guide to anyone who wants to learn the what-and-how of Canadian whisky-making and its history through the current day. He also directs readers’ attention to the brands of Canadian whisky worth buying, and his recommendations are spot on.
Savour the bold notes and rich varieties of Canadian whisky with this fully revised, updated, and indispensable guide.
This fully updated and revised edition of the award-winning Canadian Whisky invites you on a journey across Canada and back through time to discover the story of this unique spirit. Independent whisky expert Davin de Kergommeaux weaves a compelling narrative, beginning with the substance of Canadian whisky—grains, water, and wood—and details the process of how it’s made and how to taste it. He traces the fascinating history of the country’s major distilleries and key visionaries, and introduces the present-day players—big and small—who…
I was born and raised on the rugged island of Newfoundland and am enthralled by the ocean, its rhythm, its power. The setting of The Kerrigan Chronicles is the setting for my early life: same area, different era. As a child, I was unaware of the sacrifices and struggles of my ancestors. During cross-country telephone conversations with my aging father, I heard stories of poverty, illness, and war. When Dad described the earthquake and tsunami of 1929, I was hooked. I have written other novels, modern-day suspense that could quite frankly have been written by other people butThe Kerrigan Chronicles are mine and mine alone.
Set on a Canadian prairie plain in the 1930s, Who Has Seen the Wind tells the coming-of-age story of a young Saskatchewan boy, Brian O’Connal, as he seeks meaning in life, death, and God. I love this book for its lyrical use of the wind which constantly sweeps across the prairie and through every aspect of the story. This book influenced me as a writer because I hoped to personify the sea the way W.O Mitchell did the wind.
Hailed as “one of the finest Canadian novels ever written” by The Globe and Mail, W.O. Mitchell’s Who Has Seen the Wind is a beloved mainstay of Canadian literature. This new, abridged audio edition is read by the author himself.
Mitchell’s novel follows Brian O’Connal, a young boy growing up in Depression-era Saskatchewan. Curious and eager to explore the impossibly vast Canadian prairie, Brian guides the listener through the inner workings of his small, rural town and its quirky characters. As Brian grows up, navigating faith, loss, and his relationships with his grandmother and his friends, we see him evolve…
A Canadian academic, Michael J. Prince is an award-winning author in the field of modern politics, government, and public policy. The Lansdowne Professor of Social Policy at the University of Victoria, he has written widely on issues of disability activism and social change, including on veterans and their families. He is co-author, with Pamela Moss, ofWeary Warriors: Power, Knowledge, and the Invisible Wounds of Soldiers, New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2014.
The development of military neuropsychiatry in the Mediterranean and European theatres of operations in World War II, through the work of the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps is vividly recounted through interviews and primary documents of those involved. The immediately pressing concepts of battle stress and exhaustion and a soldier’s breaking point are addressed by scientific methods, including personnel selection interviews by psychiatrists to determine the emotional and temperamental stability of recruits and thus their assumed effectiveness as soldiers. Fundamental tensions between military imperatives and clinical practices are particularly revealed. I highly recommend this book for its insights into the tensions between medical intentions and military imperatives at times of intense, sustained combat.
At the outset of the Second World War Canadians wanted to avoid the horrors encountered on the western front in 1914-18, one of the most significant of which was "shell shock." Most medical personnel preferred not to assign to combat those who showed neurotic symptoms during training, but this approach was challenged by the Canadian Psychological Association and by the new Personnel Selection Directorate established in 1941. Personnel Selection claimed to be able to distinguish, before training, between those suited and those unsuited to combat duty. However, when Canadian troops went into battle in Italy, the preparatory work seemed to…
I’m an author who’s published historical nonfiction, science fiction, and poetry—all genres that are represented in the five books I’ve recommended! I also lived in Winnipeg between 1993 and 2002 and loved being there. It’s a great city with lots of history, a thriving arts community, two beautiful rivers, lots of diverse cultures, and a determination to undo some of the wrongs that have happened there. (Admittedly, Winnipeg also gets to minus 40 in the winter and has a tad too many mosquitoes in the summer!). But it’s also where I met my amazing wife! ☺
This is a book of poetry written by one of Winnipeg’s many Indigenous authors.
I love the poems—their economical lines and vivid imagery—but the poems also don’t shy away from some ugly truths about Winnipeg: Namely, the centuries of racism that have devastated the Indigenous people who gathered for thousands of years where the city’s two rivers meet—the Red and the Assiniboine. The same racism that contributed to the death of the poet’s brother and led the police to dismiss his disappearance for months as simply being due to drunkenness.
Vermette’s poems tackle these hard truths and challenge the reader not to look away. This book of poetry helped me see that not everything about Winnipeg is the way we’d like it to be.
Katherena Vermette's award-winning poetry collection North End Love Songs is an ode to the place she grew up, where the beauty of the natural world is overlaid with the rough reality of crime and racism. When a young girl's brother goes missing, she learns what prejudice and discrimination mean, as the police and the media dismiss his disappearance because he is young and Indigenous.
Read alone, or as a companion to Vermette's award-winning novel, The Break and its follow-up, The Strangers, North End Love Songs is a moving tribute to the people who make the North End their home.
All our lives are shaped by the things we desire, what happens when we get them and when we don’t, and the loops and patterns we get tangled up in as we do.
In Liz Harmer’s Strange Loops, twins Francine and Philip suffer the after-effects of what each of them feels is the other’s betrayal. It’s a novel about intimacy, sex, faith, acceptance, and it burns and pulses and slithers.
That thing great master sculptors could do, where they could make cold, hard marble look like soft, pliable flesh? Here Harmer does that with words, and it conjures similar feelings of wonder and reflection.
"Enthralling. . . . A story that burns with intensity and daring." —Iain Reid
A propulsive novel about the power and paradoxes of desire, from the acclaimed author of The Amateurs.
As small children, Francine and her twin Philip shared a seemingly unbreakable bond—but in adolescence the connection frayed, and in adulthood the siblings are locked in a repeating loop of complex, destructive emotions. Matters have reached a breaking point, and Francine, now in her thirties and the married mother of two small boys, is convinced that Philip’s teenaged infatuation with religion and subsequent, ongoing obsession with his sister’s “moral…
Research Professor of Psychology at Bryn Mawr College. Since the 9/11 attacks I have tried to understand how normal individuals, people like you and me, can move to terrorism in particular and political violence more generally. I retired from teaching in 2015 to have more time to write. I’ve written about genocide (Why Not Kill Them All? The Logic and Prevention of Mass Political Murder), about self-sacrifice (The Marvel of Martyrdom: The Power of Self Sacrifice in a Selfish World), and about terrorism (Friction: How Conflict Radicalizes Them and Us).
Mowat’s title is taken from John Keats’ poem La Belle Dame Sans Merci: “O what can ail thee, Knight in arms, Alone and palely loitering? The sedge has withered from the Lake, And no birds sing!”
Best known for his books People of the Deer and Never Cry Wolf, Farley Mowat here turns his naturalist’s eye to the experience of war. His brief memoir describes joining, training, and fighting as part of Canadian forces in WWII. He led a rifle platoon in the invasion of Sicily and up the spine of Italy against fierce German resistance. From humorous to horrible, from youthful fervor to enormous weariness, Mowat takes us with him. He was relieved of combat duty after crying over the unconscious body of a friend brought in with an enemy bullet in his head. I love this book for its vivid observations of men before, during, and after…
Turned away from the Royal Canadian Air Force for his apparent youth and frailty, Farley Mowat joined the infantry in 1940. The young second lieutenant soon earned the trust of the soldiers under his command, and was known to bend army rules to secure a stout drink, or find warm -- if nonregulation -- clothing. But when Mowat and his regiment engaged with elite German forces in the mountains of Sicily, the optimism of their early days as soldiers was replaced by despair. With a naturalist's eyes and ears, Mowat takes in the full dark depths of war; his moving…
I’ve been reading hockey books since I was a kid and could usually count on finding one under the Christmas tree. I still keep many of those books from my childhood on the shelves in my office. Eventually, I was old enough to buy my own books, some of which are about hockey (and, lucky for me, I continue to receive hockey books as gifts on occasion). When I started to write books, I knew that someday I would write one about the game I love to play, watch and read about.
This book by an award-winning Canadian novelist mixes memoir and essay. The memoir is set in New Brunswick’s Miramichi region in 1961. Richards has no use of his left arm; his best friend is going blind due to diabetes. They are in their last year of playing hockey. Woven into that story are other memories—including of distasteful meetings with people who don’t like the sport—as well as his thoughts on the game and its place in the Canadian psyche. Hockey Dreams is highly personal, so it may not be for readers, but I loved it.
With a voice as Canadian as winter, David Adams Richards reflects on the place of hockey in the Canadian soul.
The lyrical narrative of Hockey Dreams flows from Richards' boyhood games on the Miramichi to heated debates with university professors who dare to back the wrong team. It examines the globalization of hockey, and how Canadians react to the threat of foreigners beating us at "our" game.
Part memoir, part essay on national identity, part hockey history, Hockey Dreams is a meditation by one of Canada's finest writers on the essence of the game that helps define our nation.
