The adage that travel broadens the mind is tested in a comic, thoughtful fashion in Vincent Chu’s novel "Nice Places". Feeling aimless, Georgie quits his dead-end technology job to travel the world for a year and learn about himself.... Read More

Susan Cormier’s "Dead Bees Still Sting" is a poignant, often surprising collection of nature essays about rural life and beekeeping. These essays concern five seasons on a small farm on the edge of suburban Vancouver. Several focus on... Read More

A noblewoman uses her wits to secure the man she loves, their child, and the future of her duchy in Kim Rendfeld’s resplendent novel "Duchess of the New Dawn". In 740 CE, Lady Chiltrude is the only daughter of one of Francia’s most... Read More

Irena Smith’s intricate memoir-in-vignettes traces her Soviet Jewish family’s history during a memorable California road trip. During an atypically wet California January, Smith, her seventy-seven-year-old mother, and her young adult... Read More

About home and migration in the face of displacement, Elin Anna Labba’s haunting, elegant novel "The Home of the Drowned" memorializes indigenous Sámi culture in Lapland. Three Sámi women—Iŋgá; her mother, Rávdná; and her Aunt... Read More

The road to peace and love is paved with poise and self-discovery in Juda Bennett’s coming-of-New-Age memoir "Qtopia". Bennett was expected and encouraged by his nuclear family parents to join the military upon his high school... Read More

Rod Phillips’s Cats: A History is an exhaustive and engrossing survey of the millennia-long relationship between cats and people. Humans first kept cats to protect grain stores from rodents, Phillips notes, while ancient Egyptians... Read More

A playful collection, Maria Giesbrecht’s "A Little Feral" invokes her religious background. Born in Mexico and of Mennonite ancestry, Giesbrecht found release in writing: “A safe / rebellion. A poem. / It’s the way I have... Read More