Two White Queens and the OneEyed Jack, by Heidi von Palleske (Dundurn Press)
Von Palleske has had a career as an actress (David Cronenberg’s “Dead Ringers”), founded a small press and has now written a couple of books. It’s a resumé that means she gets blurbed by names as diverse as actor Jeremy Irons (“It captured me and I could not put it down.”) and author John Irving (“How the characters in this story are interconnected is a marvel of storytelling. This is a novel about the calamitous changes in history, in both personal and national history”). Two six-year-old-boys, Gareth and Jack, are caught up in an accident in which Jack loses an eye; two albino twins, Clara and Blanca, suffer a tragedy — and the story spanning from Canada to Germany takes off from there.
White Coal City: A Memoir of Place and Family, by Robert Boschman (University of Regina Press) Prince Albert, Saskatchewan — or PA as Boschman familiarly calls it throughout his memoir — is as inseparable from the fate and legacy of him and his family as is the legacy of a hit-and-run car accident and the aggressive tenor of the place itself. “Like many kids before me, I suffered chronic doubt over my ability to hack what Prince Albert dealt.” It’s a tough city, hockey is at its core and it sits on Treaty Six territory. Boschman lived in the back of the King Koin Launderette, between a residential school and a jail, a hub of a place, its patrons coming “from all over the city as well as from the farmlands and parklands, the bush and the reserves, that surrounded Prince Albert.” A beautifully written memoir that tells the century-spanning story of a family and of a place the rest of Canadians don’t know much about.
Instructor, by Beth Follett (Breakwater Books) Follett founded Pedlar Press, which she closed in November 2020 after coming under financial stress from COVID-19. But with every transition comes an opportunity, and after fostering the careers of many talented writers — including 2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Souvankham Thammavongsa — Follett is finally focusing her attention back on her own writing. “Instructor” is described by her publisher as capturing “the fluidity of the self, carrying readers away in the current of Follett’s inescapable prose.”