An eclectic list of reads
The Historians Cecilia Ekbäck Harpercollins Canada
A densely plotted thriller set in Sweden during the Second World War, Ekbäck's third major novel combines a gruesome murder, a treacherous deep-state conspiracy and a series of mysterious disappearances — along with a whiff of budding romance for good measure. The title characters are a group of five university students whose close bond was broken when the war broke out. When one of them is murdered, protagonist Laura Dahlgren sets out to investigate, with help from her surviving schoolmates and a young bureaucrat, Jens Regnell, who works for the foreign affairs minister. The truth, when they discover it, is complicated, to say the least. It involves Sweden's precarious neutrality, a remote mining operation that supplies iron to Germany, a high-level Nazi who is a bit too chummy with Jens's girlfriend, Indigenous Sami reindeer herders and a brave young boy who risks his life to find his missing sister.
Through the Garden: A Love Story (with Cats) Lorna Crozier Mcclelland & Stewart
Raw and beautiful and heartbreaking, Through the Garden is a memoir of a life shared, in all its messy, maddening, passionate glory. Both married to others when they met at a rural Saskatchewan writing retreat in 1976 — and when they ran off together in 1978 — Lorna Crozier and fellow poet Patrick Lane's love affair lasted more than 40 years, until his death in the spring of 2019. They were years marked in turn by bickering, laughter, boozy battles and blissful harmony. Crozier recalls in loving detail their first home together, and their last. The kittens who came into their lives, and the old cats who left holes in their hearts when they departed. Sunny days spent working side by side in their Vancouver Island garden, and grim days spent in antiseptic hospital rooms as Lane slowly succumbed to a mystery illness.
Burden Douglas Burnet Smith University of Regina Press
Short, sharp and visceral, this slim collection of poems summons up a true tragedy of the First World War, capturing the spirit of a young British soldier who was executed by firing squad, as well as that of a haunted comrade who was ordered to fire on his friend. Prominent Nova Scotia-based poet Douglas Burnet Smith ( Voices from a Farther Room) breathes new life into old letters that were sent home to Canada during the war by a distant relative, Lance-cpl. Reginald Smith. The letters suggest that Smith was among the traumatized soldiers ordered to fire on Pte. Herbert Burden, the 17-year-old son of a British gardener.