Alharthi’s work is careful and honest, written with respect for this grandmother character and the familial gravitas she represents. While the readers may feel a tinge of sadness for Bint Aamir and the life she could have lived, there is solace in knowing Zohour’s carries on.
Originally published in French by Mémoire d’encrier in 2017, Manikanetish is the second novel by Innu writer Naomi Fontaine. A finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award, it now appears in English-language translation by Luise von Flotow, a professor at the University of Ottawa’s School of Translation and Interpretation.
Julietta Singh’s The Breaks is at once a letter, a memoir, and a work of narration. In addressing her six-year-old daughter, Singh’s storytelling is, for the next generation, “a map of broken things, a recyclable archive that will spur you to fashion other ways of being alive, of living.”
In the respective epistolary novels The Color Purple and The Quintland Sisters, authors Alice Walker and Vancouver native Shelley Wood enlivened a genre that many literary scholars had dismissed as anachronistic. Both works probed the exploitation of girls within their families and in greater society.
Silmy Abdullah’s Home of the Floating Lily begins and ends with the idea of ‘home.’ The stories focus on characters wrestling with migration, containment, and forging new identities as ‘foreigners’ on Canadian soil.
Drawing on Filipino horror and mythology, Estacion turns to monsters, ghosts, and beasts to navigate her personal pain and grief. Mirroring the loss of her own reproductive organs, she weaves in supernatural imagery of The White Lady, who weeps over the “dead uterus lying sadly on a / pillow looking very much like / the burnt pork belly at breakfast no one wants to touch.”
In the six-page preface, Principe takes great care to write that her book is not: an apology for suicide, a comprehensive review of suicide, a history of suicide, an argument for or against suicide, judgment, or a response to suicide that is without love.
Grace Lau’s debut poetry collection, The Language We Were Never Taught to Speak is a love letter to the narrator’s younger self. Throughout the book, learning the language of care is embedded in the literal act of learning a second language as immigrant children.
Tainna, pronounced Da-e-nn-a, features five stories that centre Inuk characters living in the Canadian South. Dunning’s tone throughout the book is candid and colloquial. However, since Tainna is a series of short stories, each story uses a slightly different voice, and that’s where we see the elegance in Dunning’s craft as a writer.
Louise Bernice Halfe – Sky Dancer’s sixth book, awâsis – kinky and dishevelled, shimmers and cackles on each page. “awâsis” is the nêhiyawêwin word for “child,” but, as Halfe states in the acknowledgements, the word translates beyond the concept of a child to mean “being lent a spiritual being.” Halfe lends the reader a spiritual being throughout the text: the title figure appears in each of the fifty-three poems.
ROOM 47.4 FULL CIRCLE
Step back with Room into the past, to parents, to childhood homes, and to people once known and loved; dig into themes of grief and healing; and ultimately explore what it means to come full circle in literature.
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