Kayla Penteliuk

A fraught destination wedding brings together a trio of struggling friends in Leanne Toshiko Simpson’s genre-bending debut. This deeply felt story, set in an upscale Turks and Caicos resort and the suburbs of Toronto, masquerades as a lighthearted romantic comedy, even as it probes intimate, personal strife. With its perfectly deflective title, Never Been Better captures how treacherous it can be to confess to strong…

Conor Kerr’s Prairie Edge opens in the late 1870s with a hunting party searching for a new buffalo herd: “They’ll come back. They always do. It might not be this year. It might not be in my lifetime. It might not be in your lifetime. But they’ll come back. These prairies were meant for the bison and we were meant to follow…

Tomas Hachard’s debut novel, City in Flames, contemplates the power of those “fickle things” called words: “They can transform while travelling from mouth to ear. They can overflow with meaning or remain hollow.” In a near future, a charismatic politician known as P. rises from city council disrupter in Hillside, a thinly disguised version of…

If you embark upon a ghost tour of Old Quebec, you might hear the fabled history of Barbe Hallay, remembered for her unfortunate encounters with witches and demons. Though her possession is mythologized in the dimly lit back alleys of Place Royale, few scholarly publications exist on her life. Who was Barbe Hallay, and why is her story so often recounted by actors in face paint and period…