Rose Hendrie

With a book like The Box, a reader has two choices: go along with its games or drop their forehead to the table and groan. To choose the former is to enter a puzzle of six distinct narratives that revolve around an enigmatic white paper box as it is, at various points,…

It makes sense to set a book about emotional well-being in a time before the internet: Before social media waged psychological warfare on our tender self-worth. Before the comments section became the place where fellow feeling goes to die. Turn back half a century to the blazing hot spring and summer of 1971. Sweat drips down spines as cigarette smoke curls into the…

At this point, every corner of the British Isles has been so hiked, biked, horse-ridden, and driven round by writers, so scraped for meaning and musings, that it’s a wonder the countryside isn’t studded with signs that read: “No littering; no travelogues.” It’s a well-trodden literary landscape, to say the least. Yet here we go…

A hamburger is not necessarily the thing one turns to for spiritual sustenance, yet this is where Stuart Ross — an atheist and a vegetarian — has found himself. It is an unusual predilection, one that he has had since he was a teenager. Whenever his writing becomes too heavy, its subject matter too emotional, he will throw in a burger to lighten the…

The far northern reaches of Audrée Wilhelmy’s Quebec pulse with humus, lichen, roots, and creatures, with death and decay, with birth and the strong current of the Farouk River. Spring turns to summer and summer to fall, before an icy grip envelops the land. Then the cycle begins anew. It is a time before the invention of cars but after the railway has carved a path through the dense…

Undoubtedly philosophers are in the right when they tell us, that nothing is great or little, otherwise than by comparison.— Jonathan Swift We lived in our grown-up dollhouses completely unaware that, at any moment, a hand might come in and change around everything we’d become accustomed …

A woman, with all we consider beautiful decaying, her blond hair faded, her frame bone-thin and her pale skin as waxy as death, quietly drops herself from the fourth-floor terrace of a four-star hotel near the Mediterranean coast. The last person to speak to her, Claire Halde, watches, frozen, as she clutches the falling stranger’s purse — a purse that whispers to…

Some have called George Bowering a “rear-view mirror guy,” but he’s no such thing. He is looking everywhere, at the world and his pieces of it, with his head slanted and the corners of his mouth raised. Bowering is the grinning boy who turns life over and takes it apart to see if the centre is…

Don’t you see that whatever enters the mouth goes into the stomach and then out of the body?— Matthew 15:17 The wiser course would undoubtedly have been to admit its existence and to dignify it as much as its nature will allow.— Sigmund…

Often when I board a plane, there is a moment when I find myself entertaining the unpleasant notion of it falling out of the sky. So I check the exits, yes, pay half-attention to the safety video, try to remember how Tom Hanks managed in Cast Away. But there remains the unavoidable question: Have I put myself in danger by taking this…

A black man, a trans woman, and an Irish immigrant walk into a gallery. It sounds like the beginning of an off-colour joke, the type that makes its audience wince in anticipation. The type of joke that in these modern (hopefully more enlightened) times one might hesitate to tell. Uh-oh, we think, alarm bells ringing. But this isn’t the set-up to some dodgy…

Silence enfolds the Borya family and the small, sparse world that they inhabit, wrapping around them tightly, constricting them. “The Boryas don’t speak much in the lighthouse,” as the sound of the waves is too loud. Neither do they speak much outside of it: “No one speaks of these things, evident to those in the know.” But what is not said holds more significance…

Bina is a busy woman. She is a ­practical woman. An older woman. Bina is “a modern woman with modern thoughts on modern things,” and she is tired of not being heard. That’s “Bye‑na,” not “Bee‑na,” she’ll have you know. “Beena” is some other woman off living some happy life, and “Bye‑na” has little time for such…