Author’s Home Base: Los Angeles

Author’s Take: “My hope is that people do get a fuller sense of her. I think she’s got such a rich story that even when I wrote the oral history biography of her, it was such a sweep of her entire life that to slow it down to these four formative years, that was a very crucial decision my editor and I made early on.” 

Favourite Lines: “Janet might control her daughter’s deeds but she could never control her thoughts. Like all willful tyrants, Janet was blinded by her arrogance. She believed she was determining what her daughter was becoming. Yet, crafty as Jackie could be in giving the impression that she would follow the course Mummy laid out, Jacqueline Bouvier never relinquished her right to the larger future she intended to have. It drove her on.”

Review: Just when it seemed there could be nothing left to learn about one of the 20th century’s most intensely scrutinized women, along comes author Carl Sferrazza Anthony’s Camera Girl, essentially the origin story of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. Chronicling four critical years in the heralded former first lady’s life from 1949 to 1953, Anthony — author of multiple first lady histories — demonstrates where Jackie’s legendary gravitas came from (balancing an overbearing mother against a needy father) while proving “there was something beneath the pillbox hat” as Jackie herself allegedly observed after reading a previous Anthony portrayal of her. 

As other 20-something women in her rarefied orbit were jockeying for wealthy husbands, Jackie studied at the Sorbonne in Paris where she mastered French, later winning a rigorous but highly coveted Vogue junior editorship, graduating college, serving as a columnist for a Washington D.C. daily and basically upending every convention society and her family placed around her. Yet, she was also well aware that her status as an intelligent, ambitious, engaged woman would not advance her matrimonially in sexist mid-century America. Until it did, when she met dashing war hero, author and Democratic congressman John F. Kennedy at a dinner party in May 1951 (not 1952 as reported elsewhere). 

The rest, as they say, is history, though Anthony brings fresh nibbles to the buffet including a Bouvier family incest reveal and, perhaps more notably, details of how she helped Kennedy “formulate his views on the Vietnam question [by] writing a groundbreaking report for him in 1953,” the contents of which are examined here for the first time. That radically contradicts previous assertions by Jackie that she “got all my opinions from my husband.”

Exhaustive though occasionally exhausting — really, how much relentless physical, academic and filial perfection can anyone bear to read about? — Anthony’s book is a slam dunk for Camelot purists and obsessives alike, and a fascinating window into the early adult life of a woman who somehow managed to be intensely private and globally famous at the same time.  —Kim Hughes

Author’s Home Base: New York City

Author’s Take: “[Lou] didn’t want to do an autobio. We tried to make this like a handbook, a how-to, because he really wanted people to do [tai chi]. He genuinely wanted to help people. He was really driven by this need to make things better. Even on the smallest level, he was always asking, ‘How am I going to make things better?’ He tried to make everything as big, beautiful and fantastic as it could be.” 

Favourite Lines: “Tai Chi frees you from preconceptions — music or tempo, this, that, or the other thing. It is, I think, a pretty enabling kind of thing. I hate to use that word, ‘enabling,’ but there it is. It’s very, very useful for centering yourself, for experiencing these different kinds of disciplines, be it meditation, bodywork, tai chi, yoga, whatever. Or I like to just have it going all the time because it makes the outside sounds into a more musical environment.”

Review: Lou Reed loved tai chi. Really loved it. He practiced it, taught it, evangelized endlessly about it and pushed everyone in his orbit — from the leather-clad maulers in Metallica, with whom he cut 2011’s Lulu album to Canuck super-producer Bob Ezrin — to give it a go. 

In 2009, the one-time Velvet Underground lynchpin set his sights on writing a book about his beloved martial art. But “too many things intervened,” his widow, the artist Laurie Anderson writes in the foreword to The Art of the Straight Line, which she co-edited with a trio of Reed’s friends. Reed died in 2013 at age 71, leaving behind only “scattered notes.” Yet, Reed also left behind a small, vocal army of tai chi converts and cohorts, whose recollections make up this unusual book, which is organized like an oral history but with Anderson sometimes popping up as interlocutor. 

Familiar names like rocker Iggy Pop, filmmakers Wim Wenders and Julian Schnabel, magician Penn Jillette and Kirk Hammett from the aforementioned Metallica offer anecdotes about the late musician. So do multiple tai chi practitioners, among them Reed’s most important teachers: Master Ren GuangYi — a key figure in Reed’s tai chi development who sometimes performed with him onstage — plus Peter Morales, brother of Reed’s second wife, Sylvia, who introduced Reed to tai chi on the cusp of the ’80s when his much-abused body was in serious need of rehabilitation. 

Tai chi, Reed contends, allowed him to age gracefully while meditatively making peace with the world. “Not to get too flowery here, but I want more out of life than a gold record and fame,” he writes. “I want to mature like a warrior.” The Art of the Straight Line — the title a sly reference to the “circles within circles” propelling practice, which forces one to “move through circles without losing your sense of direction” — is essential reading for fans of Reed, tai chi or, ideally, both. But it’s difficult to recommend more generally. Yes, it’s enlightening and occasionally funny and there are some detours into Reed’s songwriting process. But mostly, it’s really, really focused on tai chi. Enough said.  —Kim Hughes

Home Base: Palm Beach, Fla. (Patterson); New York, N.Y. (DiLallo)

Authors’ Take: “The idea is to move beyond just being just mothers and daughters and really become best friends”  —Susan Patterson

Favourite Lines: “I cite various people I know who’ve just come back from India, Vietnam, the Galapagos, Manitoba, Newfoundland. My mother’s reaction to all of these: “Why would anybody want to go there?”

Review: This is a fun romp through Paris (and later, Norway), as newly divorced ad exec Laurie Margolis and her mother, the esteemed ob-gyn Dr. Elizabeth Ormson, tour the Catacombs, visit the burnt remains of Notre Dame and shop the French clothing boutiques on Rue Saint-Dominique. The authors really dig into the sights and sounds of the city, but Canadian readers may be a little annoyed by the random deployment of French words and phrases (“it’s just the vendeuse, followed closely by ma mère”) and translations of common French words like confiture and miel. 

As the title suggests, it’s really about a mother-daughter relationship, and a fraught one at that. Laurie is still licking her wounds when she rashly suggests the trip to her mother, after Dr. Liz, an exacting A-type, has a health scare. Laurie feels she can never live up to her mother’s high expectations, so they clash on the trip, but, as the pages turn, they learn more about each other’s hopes and dreams, and eventually come to a rapprochement.

Thrown into the mix is a hotel bar meet cute for Laurie, who spends a good part of the book pining for her hunky English paramour, and a twist at the end one should expect, given it was written with James Patterson, Susan Patterson’s husband and the world’s bestselling author of myriad thrillers. It’s the perfect novel to blow through on a red-eye to Paris or sunning on a beach in the French Riviera.  —Kim Honey

Home Base: Vancouver

Author’s Take: “I’m seeing some folks struggle with Adrift because it’s a slow burn… so to clarify: Adrift isn’t really a thriller. Categorizing it has always been a challenge but I’d say it’s a speculative suspense-y mystery. If you’re looking for a high-octane thriller, this isn’t that!”  —Lisa Brideau

Favourite Line: “Maybe the safest way to avoid the temptation of looking for answers was to be with someone who didn’t care about the questions.”

Review: It might not be a ‘high-octane thriller’, but Brideau doesn’t waste any time throwing the reader right into the soup. In the first few pages, she hooks us in by creating a scenario in which the main character — who we come to know by many names, mainly Ess — embarks on a journey into the unknown that has the potential to end any number of ways; with little at her disposal except determination and blind faith. 

The book starts as Ess wakes up on an anchored sailboat in the archipelago of Haida Gwaii off the coast of British Columbia with a blinding headache and no who she is or how she got there. There is a cryptic note warning her off looking for answers, and telling her not to ‘look back’. What follows is a psychological mystery as Ess defies the notes advice; acting on that innately human desire to solve a riddle — which is Ess’ case involves putting the pieces of her past back together, all the while knowing she might not like what she finds.

Adrift takes place in 2037, and so the catastrophic effects of climate change and global heating loom large over the novel: Canada has become a safe haven for people fleeing extreme weather and infrastructure collapse south of the border, Bangkok is almost completely underwater, global food insecurity is high and the world is facing a crisis of climate refugees. Key moments in the book are set in Nanaimo as the city becomes caked in smoke from nearby forest fires, record high temperatures and later, a severe flood. 

And yet, amid all the action and plot twists are thoughtful ruminations on ‘the self’ — in other words, what makes a person a person in the absence of memories and experience with which to base the idea of who they are on. “… without a sense of self, memories have no meaning, yet the self is a product of our memories. But memories are fluid and easily modified, just the act of recalling a memory reshapes it, so how can they be the basis for sense of self …” Despite other characters thinking Ess’ lost memory is a fresh start, she’s determined to put the puzzle together, even if in the end, some of those pieces are never found.   —Kisha Ferguson

Home Base: New York

Author’s Take: “… when I found the story of the Wager, it seemed like here you could really see the way people were shading their stories, but then also how nations and empires shade their stories and create their own narratives and their own mythic tales.”

Favourite Line: “Five and a half years. That’s how long the three men had been gone from England. Presumed dead, they had been mourned, and yet here they were, like three Lazaruses.”

Review: New York writer David Grann is probably one of the foremost writers of popular history at work today. From his pieces for the New Yorker (included those collected in The Devil & Sherlock Holmes) to his breakthrough book The Lost City of Z and the international bestseller Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorcese’s film adaptation of the latter debuts in Cannes this month), Grann has been able to find overlooked or forgotten stories and, through scrupulous (and often dangerous) research, bring them to vivid life. He’s part writer, and part treasure hunter.

With his new book, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder, trains his skilled eye on actual treasure hunters. In 1740, The Wager and her crew joined a small squadron of ships charged with chasing down a Spanish galleon loaded with treasure, part of the colonial conflict between England and Spain. From their much-delayed start, everything seemed to go wrong with the hunt, The Wager was lost rounding Cape Horn, and eventually shipwrecked. What follows is a story of mutinies and death, culminating in the return of two groups of sailors to England, each with very different accounts of what actually happened. When a court martial is called, those stories take on the weight of life or death.

In Grann’s hands, this largely forgotten chapter in nautical history comes to vivid life almost three centuries later. From the carefully developed personalities of the captain and his crew to the agonizing accounts of scurvy, starvation and sea battles, The Wager is an utterly compelling and powerful read.  —Robert Wiersema

Home Base: Rome

Author’s Take: “I last visited the Sistine Chapel in February. I wanted to make one last visit before the book would be published and the winter is usually a quieter time. I was surprised to find that I’m still having new reactions to it. I see more in it with each visit”  —From the foreword

Favourite Line: “In trying to explain the Sistine Chapel frescoes to myself in words, I am translating one form of communication to another. And this process makes it apparent that visual art is a way of communicating the things that words alone cannot convey.”

Review: While the Vatican Museums and, in particular, the Sistine Chapel, are usually near the top of any visitor to Rome’s must-see list, expatriate Canadian writer Jeannie Marshall (who moved to Rome with her boyfriend, now husband, in 2002) had been living in the city for a dozen years before she paid her first visit, in the wake of her mother’s death in 2014. “My first experience,” she writes in All Things Move, “was not pleasant and was certainly not what I expected.” In fact, that visit was so “unsatisfying” she knew she had to return.

Those early visits set the groundwork for All Things Move, a breathtakingly frank and insightful account of the unanticipated value of looking at art over time. It might seem something of a strange approach for a book, but Marshall guides the reader through crowds and frustration to get at the heart not only of Michelangelo’s frescoes, but also of the inherent power of art to touch something within each of us that words fail to address. Part art history, part social history, part art analysis, part memoir, All Things Move is a genuinely powerful work, incorporating photographs by Douglas Anthony Cooper, which explores the deepest of mysteries: how best to feed the human soul. Ideally, one should have a copy of this in their bag when they visit Rome, but the experience of reading it at home is one of vicarious delight and deep contemplation.  —Robert Wiersema

Home Base: Toronto/Yorkshire, England

Author’s Take: “I usually begin a book — at least in my mind — with a body in a specific place. I invent many places when I write a novel, of course, but that first place is always real.” 

Favourite Line: “When Banks assessed the damage the following morning, he realised that he didn’t feel too bad, despite the very large Highland Park he had drunk out in the conservatory before going to bed. It had seemed like a good idea at the time.”

Review: The death of Peter Robinson last October was a tremendous loss for Canadian letters. He was not only an internationally bestselling author, with multiple prizes to his credit, but his Inspector Banks also had become an iconic figure in mystery fiction, a character who had aged (roughly) along with his creator, from his mid-30s as a Detective Chief Inspector in his 1987 debut Gallows View to the Detective Superintendent in his late 60s in 2021’s Not Dark Yet.

This spring brings us Standing In the Shadows, what the publisher is calling “the final installment” of the Banks series. The book, as has become common with the series, follows two separate timelines. 

In the first, Nicholas Hartley, a student, is considered a suspect in the death of his upstairs housemate (and former girlfriend) Alice Poole. This being Yorkshire in 1980, he is also suspected of being the Yorkshire Ripper. Hartley, however, suspects that Mark, Alice’s new boyfriend, may be involved in her death. Mark, however, has disappeared.

In the second storyline, set in 2019, a skeleton is found in an archeological dig near the A1 highway. The remains aren’t Roman, however, they’re no more than a decade or so old. Enter DS Banks and his team.

The storylines interweave and alternate, gradually coming together with a resolution which one could call “classic Robinson”: the sins — and crimes — of the past are never far from the surface in Banks’ world. Standing in the Shadows is also what one could call “classic Robinson,” a top-notch mystery, and a welcome chance to touch base with an old friend, for the final time. Let’s raise a glass of Highland Park to Banks and to Robinson.  —Robert Wiersema

Home Base: Brooklyn, New York

Author’s Take: “I’ve always been drawn to stories that are in some way claustrophobic. I love a locked room mystery, the Agatha Christie-style whodunit, but my favorite play in college was ‘No Exit.’” – from L.A. Times

Favourite Line: “The scent of his sneakers left by the door, after a jog in the rain, their tongues pulled down like two panting dogs, fills the apartment with a fetid tang.”

Review: You know you shouldn’t go down to the woods. You are sure to be in for a big surprise. Yet, The Eden Test sends a not very happy New York couple straight to the back of the forest, to a cabin in Plain, N.Y., where they spend a week (without cellphones) under the auspices of the Edenic Foundation. Couples work on their marriage via seven questions: one envelope delivered a day, with the Q1 through Q7 written in “florid gold script.” From there, Edgar-award finalist Adam Sternbergh, who has written three well-received novels, plays cat and mouse with Daisy of the dirty-blond hair and sexy overalls, and Craig of the too-many-conquests to count. Or are they playing with each other?

“Cat and mouse. Cat and mouse. Who’s the cat? And who’s the mouse?” is a line I kept thinking of, from the 1948 Hitchcock thriller Rope, which sums up the games afoot in The Eden Test as Sternberg wires suspense like shimmering electricity throughout. As the week drips by, we learn about past histories, numerous indiscretions, hidden troubles and secrets. So many secrets. There is a plot twist a day, along with the obligatory standoffs with scary town louts, who hate the “cidiots” from New York. There is also the amusing struggles to find cell phone bars in the middle of nowhere, as the two deal with outside relationships, strangers with blaze orange hunters caps, and each other.

Theatre imagery takes front and centre stage in the book, and watch for the Adam and Eve references, paid out like Macintosh apples. It’s an assured deployment of thematic devices from Sternbergh – formerly of Toronto Life magazine; now an editor at The New York Times. Craftily inventive, The Eden Test is a part-romance, part-thriller and all-fruitful tale for our times.