Arrivals
These new reads from Canada’s indie press blaze with originality
The Fiddler is a Good Woman, Geoff Berner, Dundurn
Dundurn, the Canadian publishing house, asks Geoff Berner to write a “quickie bio-book” about DD, an Indigenous violinist and songwriter who disappeared in Winnipeg in 2012. Berner fails to produce the biography but does assemble his research material, which takes the form of interviews and oral histories of 13 people associated with the missing woman, beginning with Campbell Ouiniette, the narrator of the last novel by both the real and fictional Geoff Berner, whose publisher just happens to be Dundurn. Meta, yes, but fun and eminently readable.
Ghost Warning, Kara Stanley, Caitlin Press
The narrator of Ghost Warning is 16-year-old Lou, who begins her story the morning she finds her beloved journalist dad dead following a heart attack. He has taught his daughter well — about writing, about reading, about taking life in stride and adapting to altered circumstances with bravery and resourcefulness. This coming-of-age story set in 1989 follows Lou from the small town in which she has grown up to Toronto, where her brother lives, and later Vancouver. Stanley’s first book was 2015’s Fallen: A Trauma, a Marriage, and the Transformative Power of Music, a well-received memoir about her husband’s catastrophic injuries following a fall.
Resort, Andrew Daley, Tightrope Books
Danny Drake and Jill Charles met in theatre school at Ryerson and later fell in love. When we meet them they are putting their training to use on the world stage, assuming fake identities and fleecing American tourists in Acapulco. Over the course of 12 days the larcenous pair lurch from one caper to the next as they dash across Mexico. Danny is the amiable narrator of this telegenic tale, part caper and part love story. Andrew Daley is a Toronto writer and this is his second novel.
You Are Among Monsters, Jon R. Flieger, Palimpsest Press
You Are Among Monsters introduces us to Ian, his wife Becky and a young woman named Athene. Ian’s job is to pick up corpses (“transfers”) and take them to the funeral home where he works in small-town Alberta. Into his life comes Athene, whom he met five years before when he removed the body of her mother, who had been strangled by her father. Becky is preoccupied by The Jetsons and its promise of a bright future while she doggedly researches bootlegging between Montana and Alberta in the 1920s for her PhD application. Fluid prose and shards of humour wrapped inside a thoroughly strange story.
Hunting Piero, Wendy MacIntyre, Thistledown Press
As a young woman, Agnes was drawn to the work of Piero di Cosimo, the Renaissance painter famous for his fantastical creatures, monsters not unlike Agnes, whose classmates call her Monkey-Girl. At university, where she studies art history, she becomes involved with The Ethical Ark, the meeting place for an animal-rights group. Among its members is Pinto, a philosophy student shunned for his unusual appearance. Agnes, Piero and Pinto come together in a fabulist tale that crosses the centuries with its themes of art, ethics and the natural world. Author Wendy MacIntyre lives in the Ottawa suburb of Carleton Place.
Sarah Murdoch, smurdoch49@gmail.com