Saskatchewan's excitement around Chappell Roan lands on late-night TV circuit
Roan has created a buzz in Saskatchewan with the release of 'The Subway,' the star's newest single about post-breakup frustration, where she name-drops Saskatchewan.
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Winnipeg Free Press
a day ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
Brit mob, Bulgarian thugs go toe to toe
Young London bobby Philomena McCarthy rescues a five-year-old in the middle of the night — and discovers the child's murdered mother, while Bulgarian thugs have taken her father to rob the family's jewellery store. Philomena is in huge, undeserved trouble when the evidence points to her estranged father and three uncles — basically, east London's Sopranos — having links to the stolen jewels and maybe even to the murder. Michael Robotham's The White Crow (Scribner, 368 pages, $25) is a humdinger of a murder mystery, one of the year's best so far, with likable characters and some despicable villains — though having classic vicious English mobsters emerge as the good guys against evil foreign immigrants isn't the coolest of images. Buy on ● ● ● Widowed retired San Diego homicide cop Chase Chasen sets off on another idyllic group walk in the U.K. with sisterly librarian Billie — and, alas, an obnoxious squabbling American family full of adult siblings and partners all looking as though they're about to murder or be murdered. Really, the only true difference from the first book in the series (A Deadly Walk in Devon) is that in Nicholas George's A Lethal Walk in Lakeland (Kensington Publishing, 304 pages, $37, published January 2025), it further develops Chase's budding romance with coroner Mike. Savour the enticing details of the walks, the near-erotic descriptions of English country ales and the alluring pub foods, but just wish they'd get a little further down the trail. Buy on ● ● ● Two brilliant academics walk into a remote New Mexico desert without water, shedding clothing until they die of heat stroke — dumping yet another gruesomely icky and mysterious murder mystery on archeologist Dr. Nora Kelly and FBI agent Corrie Swanson. Could it be that there's some cultish madness among professors and PhD aspirants acting most scandalously, somehow involving an ancient desert people wiped out centuries ago after they moved to the dark side and claimed to have raised demons in their drug-addled rituals? Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child's Badlands (Grand Central, 368 pages, $40) is an OK entry in the long-running series of characters associated with special agent Pendergast, but it feels by-the-numbers. Buy on ● ● ● Rural Northern Minnesota Sheriff Red Hammergren searches desperately for a missing high school girl — whose father was gunned down, still unsolved — as a huge snowstorm whomps the region and an isolated cabin goes up in flames, leaving a high school drug dealer dead. Shady characters and buried secrets abound as Red sleuths with the help of three colourful nurse friends, battling the snow, secretive teens, MAGA wannabe town officials and even a D-level Hollywood actor and pro wrestlers doing a little (ahem) ice fishing. Linda Norlander's And The Lake Will Take Them (Severn River Publishing, 264 pages, $23), published in March, is an entertaining murder mystery set in familiar territory with extremely likable main characters. ● ● ● Detective Chief Inspector Freddie Troy of Scotland Yard sleuths a gangland murder and a suspicious dive off a high roof by an underworld figure in postwar London, troubled all the while by his brother's sharing a bed with the paramour of Mr. Big. That mysterious fashion model/concubine woman, from somewhere exotic, started life as a working class girl in Wales, having the least life-shattering of the devastating secrets in John Lawton's Smoke and Embers (Atlantic Monthly Press, 416 pages, $44). Play the zither music from The Third Man as you ponder whether a mobster is a Soviet plant, the 'Jewish' professor a Nazi, or how many people doing whatever it took to survive the fall of Germany stole another person's life. Gritty history. Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin once used family connections to break the name of a $10 million secret donor to the University of Manitoba, asking a professor emeritus which of his former students could write a $10-million cheque that wouldn't bounce.
Winnipeg Free Press
a day ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
Class issues central in quest for immortality
Toward the end of the poem The Epic of Gilgamesh, the brilliant, demagogic protagonist dives down to the 'Ocean Below' to retrieve the 'Plant of Heartbeat' that will turn him young again. Gilgamesh's best friend, the hero Enkidu, has died — not in the glory of battle, but of mundane illness. Faced with a mirror of his own ordinariness, Gilgamesh flees to the edge of the world in search of eternal life. Briefly, his quest succeeds. But on his way home, he takes a nap and a snake steals his plant. While his greatness takes him pretty far toward immortality, his everyday humanity — the need to sleep — asserts itself. American novelist Austin Taylor makes frequent reference to Gilgamesh in her debut, Notes on Infinity, which explores contemporary biotech's obsession with extending life. Taylor graduated from Harvard in 2021, majoring in chemistry and English, but she's from central Maine. Notes on Infinity, inspired by her time at the Ivy League school, captures the wonder and alienation felt by anyone outside the centre of scientific power who one day finds themselves there. Noes on Infinity Set largely on Harvard's campus, and then in Boston on Kendall Square around MIT, this energetic, observant novel follows the rise and fall of young chemistry students Zoe and Jack, who from the moment they meet form an intense bond rooted in shared brilliance. The child of a respected MIT professor, Zoe, like Gilgamesh, is ingenious, gorgeous and dissatisfied and striving — in her case, after growing up in the shadows of masculine excellence, her father's and her brother's. When she meets shaggy-haired, working-class Jack, she discovers not only an intellectual equal, but someone just as hungry. The two start as competitors and then become inseparable partners on a quest to do what has never been done before: reverse aging. Taylor sweeps up her characters in a well-rendered, exhilarating wave of money and fame, and then brings it all crashing down. Taylor beautifully conveys the excitement of intellectual delight. 'There was no greater joy than to be consumed by such an obsession, to be successful in inquiry, to stretch the mind to its fullest extent in service of understanding a problem no person had ever understood before,' she writes. She also beautifully conveys the danger of living in abstract 'greatness.' Zoe and Jack are so immersed in their rapidly growing project, there is much they don't know about each other. 'They'd skipped all of that to get to the deep stuff, like, How does your mind work and What do you believe in, and it'd be ridiculous to go back now.' Weekly A weekly look at what's happening in Winnipeg's arts and entertainment scene. For the most part Taylor's novel stays close to Zoe's perspective and its focus on the luminous Jack. However, in a move that offers the same narrative satisfaction as seeing a mystery solved, the end of the novel shifts into Jack's perspective, which takes place in rural Maine. Here Taylor's exploration of class, one of the novel's core themes, becomes more grounded. Rather than reversing aging, Taylor suggests, the real quest is knowing another person. Taylor revives Gilgamesh's wisdom in a smart, propulsive novel that feels very present. Think of our own 'immortalists,' like billionaires Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel, who invest millions in longevity start-ups and non-profits such as Altos Labs and The Methuselah Foundation. It can be tempting to glory in the fall of those who venture so high, but Taylor's treatment of her characters is deeply sympathetic. Despite their ambition and brilliance, Zoe and Jack are just regular people. This is what makes them fascinating. Seyward Goodhand is a Winnipeg writer and instructor.
Winnipeg Free Press
a day ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
Bent but not broken
'My story is of broken men, each of whom, at one time, had to transform their legacy and in doing so transform themselves and the inheritance of those to come.' So begins Michael Thomas in the opening lines of The Broken King, his powerful memoir that breaks and heals hearts simultaneously. It's a blunt but beautiful treatise on fatherhood, addiction, intergenerational trauma, mental illness, police brutality and being Black in America. Ben Russell photo Michael Thomas burst onto the literary scene in 2007 with Man Gone Down, a searing novel about an African-American man trying to reunite with his white wife and their three children. Thomas boasts an impressive background, with roles in theatre, hospitality and writing, and now as a professor at New York's Hunter College. He burst onto the literary scene in 2007 with Man Gone Down, a searing novel about an African-American man trying to reunite with his white wife and their three children. Retroactively described by Thomas as a 'suicide note,' it's a semi-autobiographical story about the hopelessness of trying to achieve the American dream as a Black man. In The Broken King, Thomas goes further, telling his history through five interlocking narratives exploring his complex relationships with himself and four of the men around him. Thomas's brother David moves in and out of Thomas's life, caught up in money-making schemes that often leave Thomas and his wife to bail him out. Thomas's father, a voracious reader, philosopher and Boston Red Sox fan, endows Thomas with a love of learning and sports, yet abandons Thomas both emotionally and, later, physically. Determined to do better by his children than his own father, Thomas dedicates as much time as he can to them, but finds himself struggling to meet their needs when his own childhood scars are unhealed. 'I often feel that because I have not completely freed myself from what my father bequeathed me, I will always endanger my son,' Thomas writes of his relationship with his oldest child. Thomas links the segments with his overarching story of self-doubt, artistic development and struggles with mental health. After he finally achieves success with the publication of Man Gone Down, the pressure and undiagnosed depression overwhelm him, leading to what he terms his 'madness.' This is no summer beach read; Thomas spares readers from none of the pain he has experienced. He bluntly states the complexities and often brutalities of living as a racial minority, especially one married to a white woman of a well-meaning but often misfiring family. Thomas notes that his white family members always gave his oldest son 'politically correct toys, games, and books' that they thought 'melanin appropriate,' while being unequipped to actually understand racial identity: '(T)he white people who wanted to claim him as their own hadn't any means or methods to protect him in the world in which they were trying to indoctrinate him,' he recalls. The Broken King While the narrative focuses on Thomas's relationships with key men in his life, the women in his life, especially his wife and sister, appear as powerful sources of strength and support. Even his volatile mother inspires him, with Thomas recognizing that while her own unresolved trauma held her back as a mother, 'she still fed us and loved us with as much of herself as she could offer.' The most brutal scenes — assaults by strangers and, frequently, police and security guards and the like — take place mostly off the page, and Thomas keeps the focus on the effect they had on him. Readers may be reminded of the work of pivotal African-American author James Baldwin, who explored many of the same topics (and whom Thomas references frequently as an inspiration). The Broken King richly pulls references from writers such as Shakespeare, Mark Twain, W.E.B. DuBois, Charles Dickens, W.H. Auden, Frederick Douglass and T.S. Eliot, whose poem Little Gidding gives Thomas his book's title. Meanwhile, Thomas's command of language brings to mind the work of American novelist Vladimir Nabokov — someone else Thomas cites as a writing influence. Like Nabokov's controversial 1955 novel Lolita, Thomas's gorgeous, lush prose overlays a dark subject. But despite that darkness, Thomas infuses his memoir with a powerful, beautiful hope, noting, 'I've come to believe that the effort to make something beautiful — and only the most sincere effort, unaffected by potential outcome, material gain or loss — is the only thing that can prevent us from falling into darkness.' Kathryne Cardwell is a Winnipeg writer.
