Linda Leith

Michel Jean’s Ninan is mostly set in a Montreal park south of the old Forum, on the corner of Rue Ste‑Catherine and Avenue Atwater. This is Square Cabot, which is dominated by a statue of John Cabot — as Giovanni Caboto was known in English — who set sail from Bristol at Henry VII’s behest three times in search of a westward trade route to…

Margaret Atwood resisted autobiographical writing for years. “That would be tedious,” she says at the beginning of Book of Lives. “You’ve heard the bad joke about the old East Coast fisherman counting fish? ‘One fish, two fish, another fish, another fish, another fish . . .’ So, my ‘literary memoir’ would go, ‘I wrote a…