December 2, 2025
Simple Creatures, by Robert McGill
My true confession is that wide-ranging short story collections don’t always do it for me, that I like a book to be A Book, complete with common threads and cohesion, but I really liked Robert McGill’s Simple Creatures—a nominee for this year’s Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Partly because his publisher, Coach House Books, knows a thing or two about how to make A Book (the very fibres of their pages are interesting), and also because it was my introduction to his delightfully ever-so-subtly off-the-wall narrative voice which never fails to be surprising, whether he’s writing from the point of view of a wife watching her 76-year-old philandering husband run races from her wheelchair parked on the sidelines, a PhD candidate writing her thesis on an iconic author whose chronicles of small town Ontario have created their own mythology (and then some), an ASMR Youtuber, or a third person story about an endocrinologist reincarnated as a chimpanzee.
Some of these stories go way back—two of them were published in The Journey Prize Stories in 2003. And while others, no doubt, are of similar vintage, each story in the collection reads as fresh, infused with empathy and curiosity for the human condition, and a warmth and humour that sit in balance. Which is not to suggest that these stories are as simple as the creatures that people them. There’s an uneasiness to their cadence, an uncertainty at their core, and McGill’s willingness to let his characters—and his readers—sit with that is why the collection is so rich and engaging.
November 25, 2025
Small Ceremonies, by Kyle Edwards
As I said a couple of months ago, literary prizes are a scam, AND YET. They’re at their best when they inspire me to read a book I might not have picked up otherwise, in the case of Small Ceremonies, by Kyle Edwards, winner of the 2025 Governor General’s Award for Fiction for English language, and not to be confused with another novel called Small Ceremonies, by a Winnipeg author, Carol Shields’ debut, which isn’t even set in Winnipeg. But in Edwards’ novel, the backdrop is essential, the north end in particular, where friends Clinton Whiteway and Tomahawk “Tommy” Shields are making their way through their final year of high school and playing for the Tigers, their school hockey team, famous for never having won a game, and now the league is trying to push the Tigers out, which makes the prospect of winning more enticing than ever.
The boys have been friends since elementary school, but each one has a different and complicated relationship with the city. Clinton comes from a remote First Nation that his family was forced to leave behind years before after catastrophic flooding destroyed the community, while Tommy grew up in the city and has no experience of rez life, both boys feeling like misfits for different reasons. And the novel follows them and other characters over the course of the school year—Tommy’s sister, a university student; Clinton’s brother, who has just gotten out of jail and back into trouble; Tommy’s mother, adrift in Vancouver’s downtown east side; Clinton’s father, who watches his sons from afar; Clarissa, the intrepid student journalist writing who refuses to stop asking questions about the hockey league’s decision; and Pete Mosienko, who runs the arena, who clears the Tigers’ ice with a shovel and is saving up to finally buy himself an actual Zamboni.
Fierce with humour and heart, this is also a novel that is probably going to break yours, but just let it, and you’ll be glad you did.
November 21, 2025
Future Boy, by Michael J. Fox
I thoroughly enjoyed Michael J. Fox’s new memoir Future Boy: Back to the Future and My Journey Through the Space Time Continuum, written with Nelle Fortenberry. Fox as Alex P. Keaton on Family Ties was my very first crush around the age of 6—the P was an ad lib, the book tells us—and while I didn’t see Back to the Future right away, I became obsessed with it once I finally caught it on VHS, and it’s remained one of my favourite movies ever since, perhaps the beginning of my fascination with time travel stories and a weird relationship with nostalgia that my therapist and I are still working through.
In Future Boy, Fox tells the story of the movie role that launched him to stardom which he nearly didn’t get—he was a last minute replacement for another actor to play Marty McFly, after six weeks of filming had already been completed (although the part was originally written with him in mind!). And in order to fulfill his contract to Family Ties, which rehearsed all day Monday to Thursday, and filmed in front of a studio audience on Fridays, Fox worked on Back to the Future evenings, overnight and on the weekends, all of which made for a schedule that would have been impossible for anybody who wasn’t in their 20s.
But Fox was in his 20s, and he writes about how filming a movie and TV concurrently didn’t really seem any more impossible than the amazing things that were happening to him around that time, when he’d only recently just stopped being a struggling actor eating out of dumpsters. Apparently the Delorean was a bitch to drive and everybody hated it. He writes about being looked down upon by his film colleagues for being a TV actor, and how he challenged the film’s direction by bringing in ad-libbing and making suggestions as he’d become accustomed to doing on Family Ties. Because of his height or lack thereof, they ended up replacing the actor originally cast as Marty’s girlfriend in the film. And he might never have been able to make the movie at all if it weren’t for Meredith Baxter’s pregnancy (she and Michael Gross played his parents on Family Ties, but were only fifteen years older than he was!) which shifted the scheduling of the show.
In the first paragraph of the book, Fox concedes that he understands precisely nothing of Einstein’s theory of relativity or the space-time continuum, but has fun considering the idea that time was played with during the absolutely bonkers scheduling of his life while making the film, and also that time travel may well be a thing, because how else could a 40-year-old movie seem like it was made just yesterday?
November 18, 2025
Sisters of the Jungle, by Keriann McGoogan
In Sisters of the Jungle: The Trailblazing Women Who Shaped the Study of Primates, Keriann McGoogan—herself a scientist whose adventures have included studying howler monkeys in Belize and two years in Madagascar deep into lemurs—considers the question of why so many primatologists are women, especially in comparison with other scientific fields. McGoogan takes the stories of the world’s best known primatologists (I was going to specify female, but I think they’re the best known, full stop)—Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Birute Galdikis—and weaves in others from the scientists who’ve built on their legacies in more recent years, along with her own perspective of experiences in the field, and draws a rich history of the evolution of primatology so that the book becomes (amusingly) a study the study of primates. The anecdotes are fascinating and the prose evocative and absorbing, McGoogan effectively balancing the personal and professional in her subjects’ experiences, all the while understanding how the lines are particularly blurred when one is in the field for months at a time.
She shows that while the women she writes about had to contend with sexism and limited opportunities due to gender, they also benefited from male mentors who took them seriously (Louis Leakey’s complicated legacy notwithstanding). And it is especially refreshing to read about the women whose male partners were supportive of their scientific endeavours, and who’ve been able to achieve some element of equality in their relationships, which has also been McGoogan’s experience.
The readability and engagingness of Sisters of the Jungle might belie just what a huge project it must have been to write—this is the history of a scientific field, a biography of at least six different people, plus memoir, and reportage. You get a lot of book in this one book, and it manages to be fantastic and inspiring from start to finish.
November 14, 2025
The Seaside Cafe Metropolis, by Antanas Sileika
“How is it possible to live under tyranny? One must create a sort of fantasy world to shield at least part of oneself from the oppression. And under this shield, people can make alternative lives for themselves, real or imaginary ones.”
There is no seaside at the Seaside Cafe Metropolis, and there is no metropolis either, instead Khrushchev-era Vilnius, Lithuania, to which Toronto-born Emmett Argentine has followed his idealistic socialist mother and still can’t seem to be unravelled from her apron strings, never mind that he’s the one in the kitchen now, or at least overseeing the kitchen, and the rest of his restaurant, the Seaside Cafe Metropolis, which is indeed a cafe, if nothing else. And also the centre of Bohemian life in Vilnius, although there isn’t much competition for that distinction, and Antanas Sileika’s The Seaside Cafe Metropolis is a rich, funny, and quietly poignant chronicle of this most distinguished undistinguished establishment, where KGB agents listen from the basement to microphones installed at the tables so that nobody can ever say in so many words just how much the Soviet reality has failed to lived up to its promise, but also everybody knows, so nobody has to. And in the meantime, Argentine (not in fact from Argentina) contends with informants trolling for dissidents, securing a jazz band, the mediocrity of Soviet champagne, the dramas of his young patrons (the poet, the philosopher, the sculptor, the artist), a visit from Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, protecting his employees from the terror of the state, and a one unforgettable chain of tragedies involving a lion, each chapter complete with a recipe (“Buckwheat Groats,” “Potato Kugel,” “Herring and Onion on Warm Potatoes”) rounding out this culinary experience, which turns out to be a celebration of community, solidarity, and the transformative power of imagination.
November 11, 2025
The Dad Rock that Made Me a Woman, by Niko Stratis
“Dad rock is a guiding principle more than a sound or a guitar tone. Dad rock is comfort in the darkest part of ourselves.”
Niko Stratis’s The Dad Rock that Made Me a Woman is a memoir and a mix tape, an essay collection that weaves music writing and autobiography to tell the story of how songs can be the lights that guide us home—or sometimes just one headlight, in the case of The Wallflowers. I only knew about a third of the songs that inspired the essays in this book, and wondered if I’d be that interested in the essays about songs that were unfamiliar to me, but it turned out that I burned through the whole book like a fire. Each essay is not only about the song that inspired it anyway, just like dad rock is not really about dads, except that sometimes it really as, as Stratis writes about growing up in the Yukon and learning the art of mix-tape making from her dad, along with the glass-making business that would eventually become her trade before she came out as trans in her 30s, and so much else in her life changed.
But before that, she was a kid growing up, watching the world around her to learn what men were, what women were, how gender was performed, how each understood the other. The gendered divisions of labour in the grocery store where she found her first job would eventually come to inform her understanding of all of this, plus her understanding of music as well: “It’s easy to poke fun or mock grocery store radio rock but to me and my heart it always feels like home. Songs live and breathe in stores like this, contain all the breadth of their emotions played through shitty speakers hidden away in the ceilings. The music that moves around bodies as they search for something, lost in thought, walking through the world…”
Like the best mix tapes, this collection is full of wonderful twists and surprises, along with the mainstays—such as what a line like “I want to change my clothes, my hair, my face” might mean to someone who is coming into an understanding of their gender identity. Other connections are less straightforward, and all the richer for it. This is a book with which to broaden your horizons, musical or otherwise.
November 6, 2025
Cover Story, by Mhairi McFarlane
I don’t consider myself a romance reader per se, not because I don’t read romance (I do!), but because there is a culture to romance fandom that I just don’t understand, catalogues of tropes and subgenres, and a fervour along the lines of “Name five songs” demands, and I probably can’t. I don’t know. My most shameful secret is that I used to read romance novels and think that these books would be really great if they weren’t so formulaic, not understanding that for so many readers the formula is most of the draw. I get it now, even if I still don’t get it entirely, but still. And of all the romance writers in the land, Mhairi McFarlane is my favourite.
Her latest is Cover Story, about Bel, an investigative journalist in Manchester, UK, whose new intern turns out to be surprisingly handsome…and her age? But he’s snooty and arrogant, and she’s too busy following up on a lead that may out the city’s mayor as a predatory creep. Which Bel knows something about, having just fled a bad situation with a former colleague who refuses to leave her alone. She’s got things on her mind, but then so does the intern, Connor, who is not remotely as put together as he seems at first. But when he stumbles upon Bel in a bar on an undercover mission, the two are forced to pretend to overcome their mutual dislike and pretend to a couple (this is a trope! I know that much. Take THAT, romance aficionados!) and you’re not going to BELIEVE what happens next. Okay, just kidding, but you will be so thrilled when it does.
An ode to feisty fearless journalists and the taking down predatory powerful men? What is not to love? All this AND happily ever after.
November 4, 2025
John Candy: A Life in Comedy, by Paul Myers
I read John Candy: A Life in Comedy, by Paul Myers, during my TPC readathon last Sunday (thanks to everyone who helped me reach my goal!) and it was just a pleasure to learn more about this actor whose work—from SCTV to The Great Outdoors to the Camp Candy Saturday morning cartoon, and more—was such a big part of my childhood, and whose generous heart seems to have been as important to his legacy as film and TV roles. Myers’ biography is a big picture view of a remarkable life that ended too soon, and its focus is primarily his creative projects and the partnerships that served as these projects’ foundations. Candy was a complicated man who faced his own demons, but Myers keeps such analysis at a distance and minds his own business about the details of Candy’s personal life—though most of these details are that Candy was a faithful husband and a loving father anyway, so it’s not like we’re missing a lot of dirt. I learned about aspects of Candy’s personality I’d not been aware of before—his strong sense of justice, how he’d stick up for others, that everyone who talks about him speaks to his excellent character, that beneath his cuddly comedian persona were some serious acting chops. His acting career from the ’70s to his death in 1993 was a whirlwind, full of highs and lows, an unstoppable machine that might have been part of Candy’s downfall—he suffered stress and anxiety, he worried about providing for his family, every crowning glory would deliver the challenge of surpassing or even just sustaining it. There was a never enoughness to Candy’s creative pursuits, a sense that he too was never enough, much of this coming from the trauma he carried from his own father’s early death and the pain of that experience that he never really was able to process. Time was something else that Candy felt he didn’t have enough of as well, and it would turn out he was right. Myers’ compelling biography, however, shows that he filled up every moment he had and then some, and gave this world his all. We’re lucky for it!
November 3, 2025
First Time, Long Time, by Amy Silverberg
I picked up Amy Silverberg’s debut novel after Maris Kreizman called it “this year’s Margot’s Got Money Troubles, a book that poses big questions with both confidence and a breeziness and that will keep you wanting to turn the pages.” And First Time, Long Time, did not let down, though I wasn’t entire sure about it as I was reading, sure of what all the pieces would add up to. Because indeed this a novel comprised of fragments, just as protagonist Allison’s entire life is. She works various jobs—hosting book clubs for rich ladies, and teaching junior college among them—while living in a studio apartment in Los Angeles where she’s trying to launch her writing career and make a fresh start after the death of brother, which looms large in her mind, all the while her divorced parents continue to torment her in their own ways. And one night when she’s out at a bar, she meets a man she at first pretends not to know, but knows him, she does. He’s Reid Steinman, a famous radio DJ whose voice haunted her childhood from when her father was a fan. Inspired by Howard Stern, Steinman is a similarly complicated character who contains multitudes, as Allison learns for herself once they get together and begin a relationship, the daddy issues only multiplying once Allison also gets somewhat involved with Steinman’s 20-something daughter.
“Wait, did you just give away the whole plot?” asked a friend in my group chat where I’d been recommending this book, and I replied that I sure hadn’t. Silverberg, who is also a comedian, turns out to the a master of the set-up, one I’d spent the novel wondering about even as I was breezily turning the pages as Kreizman predicted. Where could this novel of twisted, broken and mirrored family ties, and unsatiated appetites possibly be leading, I’d wondered, but oh, just you wait. The climax is unforgettable, impeccable, perfect, and it leads to the most wonderful final paragraph I’ve encountered in any novel ever.
October 29, 2025
6:40 to Montreal, by Eva Jurczyk
After establishing herself writing thrillers set in libraries (she’s a librarian by day!), Eva Jurczyk leaves the stacks behind in her third novel, 6:40 to Montreal, a locked room mystery set on a train that comes by its literary allusions honestly—the protagonist is a novelist called Agatha, a character is the first literary Dorcas I’ve encountered since reading The Affair at Styles, the setting of a stopped train during a terrible winter storm has Murder on the Orient Express as its precedent. But don’t think that all this means that Jurczyk’s novel is in any way derivative—instead, it’s a deeply layered work that manages to be dark and twisty, strange and absurd, gross and bloody, and also richly poignant and hilarious at the very same time.
The layers are peeled back over the course of a day that novelist Agatha St. John was supposed to spend sans WiFi on the train from Toronto to Montreal travelling in first class, a writing retreat on wheels that’s a gift from her husband who knows that she’s been struggling to write the follow-up to the runaway bestseller that changed her life. But when a terrible storm strands the train in the wilds outside Cobourg, Ontario, as the snow piles up, and then a passenger dies, Agatha and everybody else in first class—including an unflappable customer service agent, a man who appears to be a lumberjack, a doting mother and the young man who’s her son, and finally Cyanne, the wannabe yoga influencer obsessively stalking Agatha since her book came out who’s convinced that Agatha stole her life for fiction, which she’s not entirely wrong about—is confined to the car with the body and no phone signal, a situation that sends every one of them over the edge, and not all of them are going to get out alive.
And it turns out that Agatha too has something to hide, the plan for her arrival in Montreal not remotely what her husband had in mind, and also that her writer’s block has been courtesy of a harrowing diagnosis that’s sent an current of dread through every aspect of her—in particular her relationship to her young son. And what does it mean that she’s using the carnage around her now for creative fodder? Is Agatha actually the thief that Cyanne accuses her of being, stealing other people’s stories to claim as her own?
6:40 to Montreal is a rollicking ride, wild and a bit nuts, all the while weighted with real emotional heft, and sprinkled with the most wicked and wonderful humour (Blundstones fans, leave your feelings at the door). In a genre too wedded to templates and tropes, Jurczyk’s thrillers read as off-kilter in the very best way, and this latest is no exception.
