9 books you heard about recently on CBC Radio
Check out some of the books discussed on national CBC Radio programs between Nov. 19-26 2024.
All Our Ordinary Stories by Teresa Wong
Heard on: Bookends with Mattea Roach
In the graphic memoir All Our Ordinary Stories, Teresa Wong uses spare black-and-white illustrations and thought-provoking prose to unpack how intergenerational trauma and resilience can shape our identities.
Starting with her mother's stroke a decade ago, Wong takes a journey through time and place to find the origin of her feelings of disconnection from her parents. The series of stories carefully examine the cultural, language, historical and personality issues that have been barriers to intimacy in her family.
Wong is the author of the graphic memoir Dear Scarlet: The Story of My Postpartum Depression, which was a finalist for The City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize and longlisted for Canada Reads 2020. Her comics have appeared in The Believer, The New Yorker and The Walrus. She teaches memoir and comics at Gotham Writers Workshop and was the former writer-in-residence at the University of Calgary. CBC Books named her a writer to watch in 2019.
The Blue Hour by Paula Hawkins
Heard on: Bookends with Mattea Roach
At the Tate Modern in London sits a unique sculpture by the famous artist Vanessa Chapman. It's made up of all kinds of materials — wood, ceramic, wire, gold leaf, deer bone — all enclosed in a glass box.
But when a forensic anthropologist happens upon the piece, he's convinced that the bone in the sculpture is actually human, sending the exhibit's curator into a frenzy.
The thrilling mystery of the bone — and the dark look into the art world that surrounds it — is the story told in British author Paula Hawkins' latest novel, The Blue Hour.
Paula Hawkins is the London-based writer of the novels Into the Water and The Girl on the Train. The Girl on the Train sold 23 million copies worldwide and was adapted into a film starring Emily Blunt.
Batshit Seven by Sheung-King
Heard on: The Next Chapter
In Batshit Seven, Glen "Glue" Wu has a general apathy toward his return to Hong Kong from Toronto. As a lacklustre, weed smoking, hungover ESL teacher, Glue watches passively as Hong Kong falls into conflict around him. He cares only for his sister, who is trying to marry rich, and for both an on-and-off-again relationship and the memory of a Canadian connection now lost. Government control hardens, thrusting Glue into a journey that ultimately ends in violence.
Sheung-King's first novel, You Are Eating an Orange. You are Naked., was a finalist for multiple awards, including the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction and the Amazon Canada First Novel Award. It was also longlisted for Canada Reads 2021. Sheung-King splits his time between Canada and China.
The Positions of Spoons: And Other Intimacies by Deborah Levy
Heard on: The Next Chapter
There's a kind of alchemy with books where the personal becomes the universal. A writer pours their personal obsessions and idiosyncrasies into a book, and when we read it, even though we don't share those fixations, we still find ourselves there in their work.
Deborah Levy is a novelist, poet, playwright and one of the most celebrated writers of her generation. Her latest book is called The Positions of Spoons: And Other Intimacies. It's about her creative compulsions.
Each piece is an invitation to her deep engagement with artists, their art, imagination, memory and heartache.
Levy was born in South Africa in 1959, to parents who were active in the anti-apartheid movement. After her father's release from prison, the family relocated to England, an experience she writes about in the first volume of her "living autobiography," Things I Don't Want to Know. The second volume, The Cost of Living, was published to critical acclaim in 2018. Levy has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, for her novels Swimming Home and Hot Milk.
The Pages of the Sea by Anne Hawk
Heard on: The Next Chapter
The Pages of the Sea tells the story of Wheeler and her older sisters on a Caribbean island after their mother moves to England to find work. As she waits for her mother to send for her, Wheeler feels alone and must navigate the tensions between her aunts who took her and her sisters in.
Anne Hawk is a writer who grew up in the Caribbean, the U.K. and Canada. The Pages of the Sea is her first novel. She previously worked as a journalist, paralegal and school teacher. She is currently based in London, U.K.
Jaj by Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas
Heard on: Q with Tom Power
In Jaj, watercolour, a mix of traditional and modern art and an unconventional approach to panelling come together to tell a version of the history of first contact between the Europeans and Indigenous peoples and early colonization.
Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas is an artist who blends Asian manga with Haida artistic and oral traditions. His other books include War of the Blink, Red and Carpe Fin.
Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love by Julie Sedivy
Heard on: The Sunday Magazine
Julie Sedivy was speaking five languages by the time she was four-years-old. The Calgary-based linguist and author has come to understand that language isn't just something we speak and write in, but something we live and breathe, and is essential to who we are. Her memoir Linguaphile, takes readers on a journey of language love — from inside the womb, where we first start to recognize the rhythm of our mother tongue, to old age where words begin to escape us.
Julie Sedivy is a linguist and adjunct professor at the University of Calgary. She has written for outlets such as Nautilus, Scientific American, Discover and Literary Hub. She has written books including Memory Speaks, Language in Mind, Waiting and Sold on Language.
1934: The Chatham Coloured All-Stars' Barrier-Breaking Year by Heidi L.M. Jacobs
Heard on: Ideas
More than a decade before Jackie Robinson became the first Black player to take the field in Major League Baseball, a ball team from a small city in Southwestern Ontario was breaking colour barriers. Ninety years ago, on May 17, 1934, the Chatham Coloured All-Stars opened their season at a packed Stirling Park – the community hub of Chatham's largely Black East End.
Five months after their opener, in October 1934, the Chatham Coloured All-Stars became the first all-Black team to win the Ontario Baseball Association championships, then known as the Ontario Baseball Amateur Association.
The story of the team's title-winning season is told by Heidi L.M. Jacobs in the 1934: The Chatham Coloured All-Stars' Barrier-Breaking Year.
Heidi L.M. Jacobs is currently the English and history librarian at the University of Windsor. She is also the co-author of the nonfiction book 100 Miles of Baseball and the author of the novel Molly of the Mall, which won the 2020 Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour.
Held by Anne Michaels
Heard on: Commotion
Weaving in historical figures and events, the mysterious generations-spanning novel Held begins on a First World War battlefield near the River Aisne in 1917, where John lies in the falling snow unable to move or feel his legs. When he returns home to North Yorkshire with life-changing injuries, he reopens his photography business in an effort to move on with his life. The past proves harder to escape than he once thought and John is haunted by ghosts that begin to surface in his photos with messages he struggles to decipher.
Based in Toronto, Anne Michaels is a poet and author who has previously won major literary awards including the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the Trillium Book Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Before taking home this year's prize, she was shortlisted for the Giller Prize twice: in 1996 for Fugitive Pieces and in 2009 for The Winter Vault.
