Kelly Baron

In October 2020, the novelist Thea Lim organized the Book Auction to Support Prisoners, a stand-alone fundraising event to benefit a COVID‑19 relief fund for incarcerated Canadians. Sheila Heti donated a signed first edition of her 2010 book, How Should a Person Be? My bid won, and she sent me the novel together with a signed copy of her 2001 debut story…

Tara Sidhoo Fraser was born with a blood vessel condition known as an arteriovenous malformation. An AVM causes groups of blood vessels to become unusually interwoven, bypassing normal tissue and forming direct connections with each other. Most AVMs exhibit no obvious symptoms; they are like ticking time bombs in the body, waiting to explode. Typically they come to light in one of three ways: they are accidentally found when treating…

Katherena Vermette returns with The Circle, the final instalment of her Stranger trilogy. With twenty-one points of view, each in focus only once in the book, it’s easy to make a prediction: The Circle won’t achieve the commercial success of The Break, Vermette’s novel from 2016, or even that of The Strangers…

Marta Balcewicz’s debut novel, Big Shadow, begins with Judy, the seventeen-year-old narrator, describing her curious summer job before starting university: she has been entrusted by her cousin Christopher and his friend Alex to “watch the passing clouds.” She spends her days noticing how they “set themselves apart, by becoming shapes that had nothing to do with one another: wedding…

First, a warning: I am about to ruin a book for you. So if you happen to be a long-time fan of Ann-Marie MacDonald — the celebrated author and playwright of Fall on Your Knees and Hamlet-911, among others — and you plan to read Fayne, please just skip over these…

After Olivia Robinson hijacks the keynote presentation at a company conference to share her colleague Osman Shah’s story of a past “tangle” with airport security, she asks the room of upper managers, “Are we really valuing diversity? Are we channelling the fullness of the experience of our Osmans?” The hapless narrator of Naben Ruthnum’s acerbic…