I’m writing from a farm in Vermont where we have the particular pleasure of curling up in front of the woodstove to read during these short afternoons that turn dark so quickly. I love giving books as presents, and receiving them, and try to give Canadian books when I can, and luckily come from a family of both book givers and receivers.
I’d like to recommend Shyam Selvadurai’s new novel, The Hungry Ghosts, which I read this spring in a couple of great, eager gulps, immersed by its story and its worlds, as Shivan leaves his childhood in Colombo, Sri Lanka, for the bleak disorientations of Toronto, and Scarborough in particular. There’s wrenching and life-altering pain to be found in both places, but also love and possibilities for transformation. Beyond story, what carried me along was the sense of journey, and a deep liveliness to the characters and a writer risking himself in the portrayal of people blinded by trauma and anger and the repetitions brought on by both and yet alive to the amplitudes of love and change. Reading the novel made me feel moved and joyful and I’d hope to pass my own reading pleasure onto another.
On the receiving end: I know that since one of my sisters lives very close to the Gaspereau Press in the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia I often receive a Gaspereau Press book from her, beautiful in both contents and as an object. I won’t guess which one this year but know that it’s impossible to go wrong with a Gaspereau Press book whether prose or poetry or lyrical nonfiction, one of my most recent gifts being Stephen Marche’s Love and the Mess We’re In, a collaboration between Marche and Gaspereau publisher and master typographer Andrew Steeves, in which the visual inventiveness of the page combines with the innovations of the text itself.)
I’ll be back with more recommendations anon.
