The set‑up of Scott Alexander Howard’s debut novel, The Other Valley, is wonderfully simple. His characters live in a world of valleys, each identical in geography but separated from the others by increments of twenty years. Travel to the east, and they will find themselves twenty years in the future. To the…
André Forget
André Forget is the author of In the City of Pigs. His new Substack is called Oblomovism.
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André Forget
A novel that opens with a kidnapping invites certain questions. Who is the victim? Why have they been put in this unfortunate position? Who are the kidnappers? Are they simple villains acting out of greed or spite, or is there (at least in their own minds) a higher motivation at work? The conventions of the crime novel dictate that these questions must be answered in such a way that the…
Anne Michaels’s third novel, Held, opens on a scene of carnage. A man named John lies in the mud of the Western Front in 1917, wounded during the battle of Cambrai. As John gazes at the ruins of the French city around him, he contemplates the mysteries of life and death in brief, poetic bursts. He remembers meeting his…
The basic plot of Falling Hour, Geoffrey D. Morrison’s first novel, can be easily summarized. A youngish man, Hugh Dalgarno, goes to a park in London, Ontario, on June 11, 2019. He brings with him a picture frame that he has found hanging from a fire hydrant. He intends to sell this picture frame to a buyer he’s met…
It is not easy to write fiction about the Anthropocene. How do you tell a story that grapples with the scope of this epoch and the dizzying changes it has brought using an artistic form that prioritizes the struggles of individuals and their small social worlds? For this reason, Jaspreet Singh’s decision to subtitle his latest…
On the southern edge of Sarnia, Ontario, lies a cluster of more than sixty oil refineries and petrochemical plants, an industrial wasteland known as Chemical Valley. In the 164 years since Lambton County became the site of North America’s first commercial oil well, this small city at the mouth of the St. Clair River has turned into one of the most polluted places in…
The promotional jacket copy for Kevin Hardcastle’s new novel In the Cage comes out swinging: “A feared cage fighter in mixed martial arts, Daniel is closing in on greatness—until an injury derails his career,” we are told. “Out of work in his country hometown, Daniel slips into the underworld, moonlighting as muscle for a childhood-friend-turned-mid-level gangster.”
Advertising this as unabashedly generic has its own kind of…
In Book IX of The Iliad, Achilles tells Ajax and Odysseus that his mother, the goddess Thetis, has revealed to him a choice of fates: if he stays in Ilium and continues the siege of Troy, his life will be cut short but his fame will live forever; if he returns home, he will live a long life but his name will die with…