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From the archives

Here Be Dragons

The misadventures of Bill Morneau

Ho, Ho, No!

There arose such a clatter

Primus extra pares

The evolution of the job of PM

Mark Frutkin

Mark Frutkin’s most recent historical fiction is A Message for the Emperor (Véhicule, 2012), which takes place in Song Dynasty China. His novel Fabrizio’s Return (Knopf, 2006), set in 17th-century Italy, won the 2006 Trillium Award. He lives in Ottawa.

Articles by
Mark Frutkin

Of Music and Espionage

The man who played the theremin for Lenin is the unlikely hero of Sean Michaels’s first novel October 2014
Since Michael Ondaatje’s 1976 novel, Coming Through Slaughter, and Timothy Findley’s 1977 work, The Wars, historical fiction in Canada has no longer been considered a species of genre writing. Following the publication of those two works in particular, many historical novels are counted among the best of literary fiction. More recently Guy…

Colombia North circa 1978

Smugglers and undercover cops in Newfoundland's amateur drug trade September 2013
In a start appropriate to a thriller, Caught, Lisa Moore’s latest novel, opens with young David Slaney escaping from a Nova Scotia prison in 1978 where he has been serving a long sentence for drug smuggling. Some years before, Slaney and his old friend and fellow smuggler, Hearn, had been caught in an unexpected fog off the coast of Newfoundland and had failed in their attempt to bring to shore two tons of marijuana from…