My book launch last week was held in an important place: Gabby’s, the favorite bar of our friend Michael Finlay. Michael was a former CBC radio producer who died in Toronto last February after being assaulted only metres from Gabby’s. While walking down Danforth Avenue, Michael was pushed into a large concrete planter. He suffered […]
My new novel, Far Creek Road, was launched into the world last night at lovely pub gathering. That’s Michelline behind the bar at Gabby’s in Toronto, the enthusiastic host of the launch. Huge thanks to all my family and friends who gathered at Gabby’s to raise a glass. Major thanks as well to ECW Press, where […]
Sitting in a restaurant on a sunny evening. Outside is a man wearing shorts, a jacket and a black top hat like a magician’s. Both the jacket and the top hat are sewn with shards of mirror, sparkling with them, scintillating. The man is parading back and forth on the sidewalk. Back and forth. Another […]
The second and final excerpt from my journal about meeting with Dutch writer Mies Bouhuys in April, 2000, this time about the betrayal of Anne Frank. That’s her photo above. I’ve written a number of pieces about the issue lately, and a link at the bottom of this page will take you to the first. […]
Below is an excerpt from my journal of April, 2000, about my meeting with Dutch writer Mies Bouhuys, who told me that Anne Frank and her family were betrayed to the Nazis by a man named Willem van Maaren. I’ve written about her claim over the past couple of weeks, starting here. This has led to […]
I’ve been taking long and winding roads in my reading lately, and as I wrote last week, the latest one brought me back to the name of the man I was told had betrayed Anne Frank to the Nazis. A Dutch writer told me his name, and I’d written it in a journal I kept […]
When I was in Amsterdam researching my third novel, a writer who had known Otto Frank told me that in 1963 he’d found out who had betrayed his family, including his daughter Anne Frank, to the Nazis. I wasn’t expecting to hear this and was startled that the writer, Mies Bouhuys, had brought it up, […]
More than a year before the Second World War ended, the Dutch government in exile did a very smart thing. The minister of arts and sciences went on the clandestine Radio Oranje to ask people throughout the country to preserve their diaries and papers about everyday life during the war, documents that detailed their struggle […]
That’s Jessie Barfoot looking away from us on the new cover of my third novel, The Corner Garden. I love the designer’s portrayal of Jesse, and I’m launching the revamped cover today with a story about what inspired the book. Jesse narrates the novel, and she introduces herself by saying, “I think I’ll call myself Gretel […]
The Vikings were mostly younger sons, footloose men whose older brothers were heir to the family farms in Scandinavia, and whose poverty left them with a tendency to pillage. The first Vikings banded together in about the year 900 to man speedy boats built by prosperous local chieftains who gave them a cut of the […]
Today I’m celebrating the lovely new cover on my travel memoir, Foreign Correspondences: A Traveller’s Tales—and reflecting on the increasingly fraught idea of travel in a climate-changed world. I’ve got a new novel out this fall. Far Creek Road is set in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis and will be marketed as historical fiction. Apparently […]
She was born Karen Dinesen in 1885, although she used different names and lived in vastly different places throughout her life. Tanne, Tania, Isak Dinesen was brought up on her family’s estate in Denmark, went to Switzerland and France for her education, then moved to a coffee farm in British East Africa with her aristocratic […]