The Strength of Many

The Métis writer Katherena Vermette’s first poetry collection, North End Love Songs, was a stark and sensitive meditation on Winnipeg’s darkest, toughest, and most violent neighbourhood. “To me,” Vermette reflected in a CBC interview, “the North End is family, it’s elm trees and old houses, it’s people getting by and sometimes not getting by a lot, but getting there. To me, the North End is home.” The 2012 book won a Governor General’s Award.

A few years later, she set her debut novel, The Break, in that same distinct neighbourhood. (Vermette still lives along the Red River.) The story opens in an isolated landscape just west of McPhillips Street, where a young mother witnesses the rape of a thirteen-year-old girl. In a series of shifting narratives, ten characters offer their perspectives on the incident. The various voices of girls, women — some friends and family of...