Cathy Stonehouse

Set in 1940s Budapest, Joseph Kertes’s 2009 novel Gratitude followed the fates of various members of the Beck family, Hungarian Jews caught in the storm of Nazi invasion. His new novel, The Afterlife of Stars, picks up the story of the Becks eleven years later, during the 1956 Hungarian uprising against the…

“The morning of September 11 was sunny and bright.” In 1973, on that fateful date, the Chilean government was violently overthrown in a military coup led by Augusto Pinochet, in the aftermath of which thousands of Chilean citizens were murdered, tortured and “disappeared.” In her debut novel, Retribution, Chilean-Canadian writer Carmen Rodríguez returns to that…

We tell each other stories in order to remember who we are, but sometimes the stories we tell can imprison, not liberate. British novelist and biographer Victoria Glendinning, writing in the Financial Times about her experience as a juror for the 2009 Giller Prize, commented wickedly on the prevalence of a certain kind of Canadian novel featuring “families down the generations with multiple points of view and flashbacks to Granny’s youth in the Ukraine.” Reading this as a transplanted…