Elizabeth Hay

I first opened Alastair Sweeny’s richly detailed biography while at home in Ottawa, on day 12 of the occupation of the city, February 8, 2022. Snow was falling gently and the distant past was a welcome place. Thomas Mackay (pronounced Mac-EYE) arrived in what would eventually become Canada’s capital in the summer of 1826, when it was “a wilderness construction camp run by the British Army.” He was thirty-four years…

At the enviable age of 28, Robert McGill, a Rhodes scholar from Wiarton, Ontario, has published an impressive first novel. He and I have Wiarton in common. I left when I was ten, he left as a young man. And therein lies a world of difference. In my own personal mythology, leaving Wiarton was a true fall from…