Richard Cumyn

The Tinsmith, Tim Bowling’s fourth novel, is a provocative, ambitious, exciting story. It opens on September 17, 1862, at the Battle of Antietam near Sharpsburg, Maryland: 23,000 Union and Confederate soldiers perished that day, the bloodiest in American history. Anson Baird, a young Union surgeon pushed to the point of exhaustion, treats casualties in…

Family is all we know of infinity, the insolence of fate. We are born to strangers we must learn to love, in a town or country we would not have chosen, into a tribe that defines and restricts our growth. We spend a lifetime overcoming the givens, only to turn back from the distant vantage point of fifty years when the parents are…

In 1981, after 20 years of teaching high school in Nanaimo, Jack Hodgins quit to spend more time writing. In 1984 I was on a similar path, starting my first year as an English teacher in rural Ontario. I lasted seven years. A few of my colleagues had two decades or more under their belts, an achievement of note given that the clientele never ages and pressure on the classroom teacher mounts daily from every…

Kenneth J. Harvey is a multifaceted bloke. Writer of violent, deeply unsettling fiction, now big-league author of prodigious literary output, he founded the ReLit Awards in 2000 to shine a light on those Canadian small-press books overlooked by such richer purses as the Giller, the Governor General’s and the Charles Taylor prizes. He made the news a few years ago when he and his daughters went out west to save wild ponies from…

Early in Consolation, Michael Redhill’s second novel (his first being Martin Sloane, 2001), two street urchins freeze to death on the Toronto waterfront while they wait to sneak aboard a ship. The year is 1856. As he pictures their consignment to Potter’s Field, dour Jem Hallam, newly arrived from England, muses “and so they entered…