Sina Queyras’ Autobiography of Childhood (Coach House Books) dissects a family forever coming to terms with loss. Blending snappy observations on the banal everyday with affecting reflections on relationships, Autobiography traces the lives of the five Combal siblings and their father, from the childhood death of a brother to the impending loss of cancer-stricken sister Therese. The novel moves through six different characters’ perspectives, each of whom takes a turn attacking Adel, the family’s harsh matriarch. We don’t hear Adel’s side of the story, but Queyras never turns her into a one-dimensional monster—instead, Autobiography’s troupe comes to quietly accept its own dysfunction. Queyras, who lives in Montreal, fills the novel with wistful odes to Vancouver, but it’s far from sentimental; she navigates the heavy subject matter with brisk, Faulkner-esque aplomb.
—Eric Mutrie

A few years ago, Quebec was in the grips of an ugly public argument over religion and immigration, and the forces of reaction seemed poised to win the debate. But when the province’s so-called “reasonable accommodation” commission released its final report in 2008, it was surprisingly harsh on Quebec’s xenophobes and open to democratic pluralism. One of the commissioners responsible, philosopher Charles Taylor, returns to the question of faith and the public sphere in Secularism and Freedom of Conscience (Harvard University Press), with fellow philosophe Jocelyn Maclure. The two thinkers make an eloquent case for why we should accommodate religious practice, while outlining their own generous interpretation of secularism. But they spend so much time unpacking secularism’s manifold contradictions that they inadvertently undermine it. The authors cite philosopher John Rawls’ “fact of reasonable pluralism” as a “recognition of the limits of rationality”; now that we recognize the limits of liberal pluralism, perhaps we need a new way of relating to each other—an entirely new ethics of difference.
—Drew Nelles

Paul Brenner is detached from reality. The middle-aged lawyer has just lost his son to a brutal homophobic attack, and, in Stephen Gauer’s Hold Me Now (Freehand Books), his desperation and grief leave him prone to self-destructive coping strategies: he wanders the streets of New York, hires prostitutes, drunkenly visits his son’s grave and even stalks the killer. Gauer has created a rich psychological profile of a mourning, alcoholic father, but the novel is also rife with momentary breaks in character. Some lines and questions seem to come from the author, not the people in the novel, undercutting their depth. The protagonist may achieve catharsis, but the reader is left wishing Gauer would show, not tell.
—Sara McCulloch

In Grunt of the Minotaur (Insomniac Press), Toronto native Robin Richardson’s lyrical poems engage two, even three senses at a time: “She may wait / for dinner, patient in salted sachet / or smoked artichoke negligee.” Richardson, who is currently pursuing an MFA at Sarah Lawrence College, is also an illustrator, and her experience as a visual artist is evident in the way she paints her world: crushed pearl left between teeth, injured cotton, chunks of old cedar “damp with odours.” Richardson’s poems offer alternative methods of organizing one’s environment and categorizing objects, while hovering over a menacing underpainting.
—SM

“If the entire jackal-pack of journalists was yipping and howling the same tune, it must be that male sexual entitlement was under fire,” reflects Michele Landsberg in Writing the Revolution (Second Story Press), a collection of her Toronto Star columns. But Landsberg has never been afraid to shout over the din, and her column, spanning 1978 to 2003, was wry, relatable and unapologetically feminist. Whether she was walking the picket lines with rural union women or covering court battles over abortion and sexual harassment, her convictions were only rivaled by her openmindedness. Although some arguments seem painfully dated now—in one 1987 entry, she blithely lumps together “Nazis, rapists and pornographers”—those missteps are valuable too: they remind us that progress is not, and never has been, neatly defined.
—Madeline Coleman