Steven Hayward

In the summer of 1977 Toronto was a city on the move, a boomtown rising out of the ashes of the Big Smoke. Finishing touches were being placed on an improbably ambitious building in the south of the city that, when completed, would be the tallest freestanding structure in the entire world. The glittering Eaton Centre had just opened its…

Plots are as much subject to the vagaries of fashion and taste as anything else. Some seem to have a definite shelf life (if you are working furiously on a novel about a Parisian time traveller’s wife you should probably stop; that ship has sailed) and others disappear because they cease to be plausible (it is…

It is early October 2010, and I am in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on my way to a session about planning city budgets, at not quite six in the evening. The sun has just set behind Pikes Peak, and the dying light throws a purple glow off the mountain. This is the same luminescence that Katharine Lee Bates noted in 1893 when she lived here and taught English at The Colorado College—the same department and university that employ me now—and that she remembered two years later in her famous poem about majestic purple mountains and amber waves of…

The Honey Locust, Jeffrey Round’s novel about the siege of Sarajevo, is structured on a juxtaposition: it lays the disagreements and resentments that tear a family apart alongside the historical hatreds, political machinations and horrendous violence of war. There is something familiar about this sort of set-up; it is the cloth from which several recent action movies have been…

As most readers probably already know, Asylum is Andre Alexis’s second novel. It follows Childhood, which won the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Trillium Book Award and was short listed for the Giller Prize. Second novels are notoriously difficult to judge on their own merits, particularly those issued in the wake of such…