> HISTORICAL FICTION: TARA HENLEY
OUR ANIMAL HEARTS By Dania Tomlinson Anchor Canada, 352 pages, $24.95 This gem from recent University of British Columbia MFA grad Dania Tomlinson took 10 years to write, seeing the debut author “through university, marriage, motherhood, and into my nine-to-five adulthood.” The ambitious novel opens in 1905 in Winteridge, a town in the Okanagan region of B.C., on the edge of a lake haunted by a monster.
The magic realism-tinged outing follows12-year-old Iris Sparks, daughter of a working-class Welsh spiritualist and a blue blood British adventurer, as she comes of age, confronting the evils of the First World War and prejudice against Japanese and Indigenous neighbours, and grappling with love, loss and betrayal along the way.
Written with much lyricism, the narrative proves both riveting and moving. But perhaps the most striking element of Our Animal Hearts is its devotion to setting. Tomlinson grew up in the area, and clearly possesses a deep love for the land, in fact dedicating this book to “anyone who calls the Okanagan home” and paying respect to the Syilx/Okanagan people, on whose ancestral and unceded territory she is a grateful guest. THE GHOST KEEPER By Natalie Morrill, Patrick Crean Editions, 368 pages $22.99 Another recent UBC MFA grad — and winner of HarperCollins/ UBC Prize for Best New Fiction — Natalie Morrill has penned a standout debut with The Ghost Keeper. The beautifully written novel, set in Vienna and America in the 1930s and 1940s, is a folklore-infused tale that follows Josef Tobak, a loyal husband, father and amateur cemetery caretaker, as war separates him from family, strains his closest friendships, threatens to expose dark secrets and robs him of all that matters most.
A gut-wrenching novel that probes the very heart of evil and lands on the side of redemption and healing. Asign of great things to come from this Ottawa-based writer. LAST NIGHT OF THE WORLD By Joyce Wayne, Mosaic Press, 320 pages $24.95 Oakville resident Joyce Wayne, a former editor of Quill & Quire, draws on her own family history for this gripping Cold War novel about Freda Linton, a Soviet operative in Canada in the 1940s whose movements are apparently documented in FBI and M16 files. Growing up, Wayne’s father told her stories of the Red Cavalry storming his Belarus village during the Russian Revolution, and later of becoming a Communist and a labour organizer in Montreal garment factories.
His recollections of this pivotal time in Canadian history — and of Linton herself, whom he recalls as “a great beauty and the bravest of women” — provided the seed of inspiration for this highly readable outing, which follows Linton’s journey from a rural, religious town in Belarus to gritty cold-water flats in Toronto, opulent homes in Ottawa, and beyond. A spy story well timed for the news’ current preoccupation with both the Kremlin and the nuclear arms race. THE SUMMER I MET JACK: A NOVEL By Michelle Gable, St. Martin’s Press, 528 pages $24.99 America’s charismatic 35th president is re-imagined here, through a romance with a refugee maidturned-Hollywood starlet. Based on true events, this novel from the New York Times’ bestselling author Michelle Gable follows Alicia Darr ( later known as Alicia Corning Clark), who arrives in Hyannis Port, Mass., in the early 1950s after escaping a displaced persons camp in postwar Europe. There, she meets a young, charming John F. Kennedy, embarking on an affair that shapes both their destinies, pushing each to the limit and ultimately threatening the presidency.
Clark — who gallivanted with the likes of Gary Cooper, and later wed the heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune, leaving millions to her Fifth Ave. doormen when she passed away — proves as fascinating a figure as JFK, and both are explored here with much imagination. A must-read.