The Suspension Bridgeby Anna DowdallPublished by Radiant PressReview by Brandon Fick$25.00 ISBN 9781998926121 Anna Dowdall’s mysterious, allegorical novel The Suspension Bridge has the subtitle, “A Sister Harriet Mystery,” but it could just as easily be subtitled “A 1962-1963 Mystery,” considering the early 1960s atmosphere and tensions percolating in every chapter. There are many supporting characters in the novel, but it revolves around Sister Harriet, a nun in her first year of teaching at swanky Saint Reginald’s Academy, a Catholic boarding school for girls in the fictional city of Bothonville, located in southern Ontario. Once three popular senior girls at Saint Reginald’s go missing, unease and suspicion ripple through the school and wider community, and Sister Harriet, in the midst of her own identity crisis, is both wittingly and unwittingly caught up in the mystery. Looming over everything is the under-construction suspension bridge, expected to “confer untold benefits on Bothonville” and create a world that “was practically a new dispensation,” yet the bridge is also a nexus of sinister and supernatural activity, along with regular old urban conflict. While this has elements of a fairy tale, and sardonic humour of the wry grin rather than laugh-out-loud variety, where The Suspension Bridge…

I Think We’ve Been Here Beforeby Suzy KrausePublished by Radiant PressReview by Brandon Fick$25.00 ISBN 9781998926220 The biggest compliment I can give to Suzy Krause’s I Think We’ve Been Here Before is that it is a comforting, fuzzy-sweater-type book about the bleakest topic imaginable: the end of all life on Earth. Spanning three months, mostly in southwestern Saskatchewan, partially in Berlin, the novel follows Marlen and Hilda Jorgensen and their daughter Nora, along with Hilda’s sister Irene and her husband and son, Hank and Ole, and Hilda and Irene’s father, Iver, as they grapple with news of an impending cosmic blast. Those expecting an apocalyptic, sci-fi disaster narrative will be disappointed. I Think We’ve Been Here Before is about love, family, and community, the fundamental things that matter to all of us. It is about forgiveness, acceptance, and making the best use of a finite – or perhaps not so finite – life. Krause also injects some high-concept physics that are eventually tied to the characters’ recurring sense of déjà vu. What grounds this potentially baffling story that raises concepts like quantum entanglement is the family unit. Marlen, already diagnosed with terminal cancer, has written a book that mirrors the…

A Life in Piecesby Jo-Ann WallacePublished by Thistledown PressReview by Brandon Fick$24.95 ISBN 9781771872560 Jo-Ann Wallace’s A Life in Pieces is a stunning memoir, brimming with wit, intellect, and poignancy. Wallace, who passed away in June, has left behind a book of gems, thirty short essays that map her life from childhood in a Montreal suburb to grad school in Toronto, onto years chairing a large English department at the University of Alberta, and her final chapter of life on the west coast. Wallace was a longtime academic, but she was also a poet, which is evident in the way these essays move associatively, back and forth in time, back and forth into ancestry, imagining, remembering, and questioning the life she lived, and the lives she did not. It is a challenge to select essays to highlight because each one offers something to ponder. Most start conversationally with an anecdote, then expand, retract, expand, like an accordion. “Whimsy” moves from the childhood memory of Wallace’s parents watching the Jimmy Stewart movie Harvey, about a man’s imaginary rabbit friend, to her own imaginary friend, to a friend’s distaste for “whimsy,” prompting her to theorize that beneath that “disavowal of whimsy” lies…

Because Somebody Asked Me To: Observations on History, Literature, and the Passing Sceneby Guy VanderhaeghePublished by Thistledown PressReview by Brandon Fick$25.95 ISBN 9781771872584 Because Somebody Asked Me To: Observations on History, Literature, and the Passing Scene is the first collection of nonfiction published by Guy Vanderhaeghe, one of Canada’s most distinguished writers. On offer are essays, reviews, vignettes, and lectures that explore Vanderhaeghe’s beginnings as a writer, the craft of fiction, amusing life anecdotes, the value of art in society, and the nature of historical fiction. It is a feast of compelling material, a peeling back of the curtain sure to enthrall existing fans of Vanderhaeghe, CanLit enthusiasts, and general readers. In his Author’s Note, Vanderhaeghe states that in gathering the pieces together, which span 1984 to 2023, “it struck me that they bore some resemblance to a spotty, desultory archive of my development as a writer and offered a record of my recurring literary obsessions and foibles.” Whether it is a short recollection or a lengthy lecture, each piece stirs the mind, and any reader of Because Somebody Asked Me To will come away with a strong sense of who Vanderhaeghe is. One of the most intriguing pieces is…

The Beech Forestby Marlis WesselerPublished by Thistledown PressReview by Brandon Fick$24.95 ISBN 9781771872546 The Beech Forest by Marlis Wesseler is a novel that combines day-to-day life in rural Saskatchewan with a gradual reckoning with the Holocaust on the part of its protagonist, Lisa Braun. Lisa is a middle-aged retiree, a wife and a mother – with all the attendant regrets and worries – who is mostly separate from her German husband, Gerhardt, throughout the course of the novel. This causes her to reflect upon her marriage and far-flung children, induces general restlessness, and transforms a semi-detached understanding of the Holocaust into a morbid, all-consuming fascination. The latter is incited by meeting Ben Meisner, an elderly Jewish man who was interned at Buchenwald. Meisner’s harrowing recollection of life under Nazi Germany, coming at the novel’s midpoint, is the hinge that pulls all the story’s disparate threads together. Wesseler’s writing is clear and understated. Much like the pristine German beech forest Lisa walks through in the opening scene, there is no “excess of any kind.” But while there are no rhetorical fireworks, secrets and ironies – familial, cultural, interpersonal – abound. The largest irony being that Buchenwald means “beech forest” in German….

The Rasmussen Papersby Connie GaultPublished by Thistledown PressReview by Brandon Fick$24.95 ISBN 9781771872539 Connie Gault’s The Rasmussen Papers is a precise work of psychological realism about one woman’s obsessive quest to gain access to the papers of a deceased poet, Marianne Rasmussen, in order to write her biography. Readers enter the mind of an unnamed narrator who bluffs her way into lodging with Rasmussen’s former lover, the almost-centenarian Aubrey Ash, and his eighty-year-old brother, Harry, who live in an aging townhouse in Toronto’s Cabbagetown. Gault’s novel toys with the premise of Henry James’ 1888 novella, The Aspern Papers, but no knowledge of that book is required to enjoy this deft look at a lonely soul. One of the book’s major strengths is the narrator’s observations of those around her, whether it’s Aubrey’s “shiny, scaly, scabby scalp, his dandruff sprinkled Ray-Bans, the blue vein like a snake at his temple,” or in a key turning point, a female addict with the “look of having been eroded from the inside.” But there is a limit to these observations. What does the narrator really see? There’s more to the situation with Aubrey and Harry, Marianne’s poetry, the marginalized people she encounters, and even…