Mark Frutkin

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…

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…

Most Canadians will admit to considerable ambivalence in their feelings about America. As a former American (I became a Canadian citizen in 1976), I share that ambivalence. A complex nation, America is also a land riddled with contradiction. In Breakfast at the Exit Café, an engaging travelogue by two of Canada’s esteemed writers, we gain a front seat…