the corrosive affect of secrecy on three generations of a prominent Cape Breton family
Fiction
He’s the out-of-town writer hanging around the bar at last call
The tiny sets and props are perfectly constructed to delight children and grownups alike.
A highly recommended, challenging, rewarding and moving work by an under-appreciated Canadian author.
Finely crafted stories that contain seeds of much more
a good historical mystery, to better understand a lesser-known period in Canada’s multi-cultural, multi-ethnic history
Turpin is also a natural storyteller, with a flair for offbeat characters, comic dialogue and droll situations.
The Motorcyclist is a novel of Halifax in the Jim Crow era and shows the clearest of colour lines as itmaps the city and its late 1950s landmarks. Yet, the issues Carl and the women he loves and hurts remain as current as asphalt.
Several contrasting themes are debated throughout the plot, such as being a single parent versus marrying someone you don’t love, arranged marriages and love-based matches, setting Sri Lankan customs beside Canadian ones, overcoming challenges vs. succumbing to them. Priya is writing for a New Age magazine; Suresh is a journalist for a Christian publication.
An autofiction novel is part hospital chronicle, part will – imagined as a series of documents distributed to friends on USB drives after her death. Gendreau’s style is magic realism of that which is anything but magical: Dollarama, hospital corridors, bland mushed-up food.
Accompanied by full production details, it both preserves the texts of ephemeral theatrical experience and provides the mechanics for re-staging them.
Miranda’s angst is believable, as are the behaviours and motives of all of the book’s characters. And Hull has the dialogue down pat: her characters talk to each other as real people do, Maritimers in particular.
