Bookends with Mattea Roach

What happens behind the closed doors of a strip club? Pole dancing, booming basslines … and in Nic Stone’s new novel, the chilling mystery of a missing exotic dancer. In Boom Town , the manager of a fictional Atlanta strip club sets out to find a missing dancer named Charm. The book offers a shadowy taste of Atlanta’s notorious adult entertainment scene … but it’s also a look into the lives of the...

Can you inherit fury? Kagiso Lesego Molope’s new novel, We Inherit The Fire , follows a mother and daughter at the end of apartheid in South Africa. Kewame is a famous freedom fighter who is haunted by the trauma of apartheid and her time as a political prisoner. Her daughter Kelelo is a regular teenager who resists being defined by her mother’s heroics … but is struggling to connect with her moth...

What do you know about Appalachia? Fancy Gap is the debut novel by Zak Jones, and it challenges the preconceptions we might have about the region. The story follows three generations of an Appalachian family as they navigate poverty, illness, extreme religion … and the eternal struggle of finding one’s place in the world. There’s no better person to tell the story than Zak, who grew up in the regi...

When Chris Kraus became fixated on a murder case in a Minnesotan town, she decided to try her hand at a true crime novel ... but the project soon evolved into something much bigger. The Four Spent The Day Together weaves together the stories of an impulsive murder carried out by three teens, a marriage torn apart by addiction and the reality of life in working class America. Much like Chris’s hit...

Did the Olympics get you in the hockey spirit? If not, here’s a book that certainly will. Searching for Terry Punchout by Tyler Hellard is a novel about small town life and Canada's favourite pastime … and it’s also one of this year’s Canada Reads picks. The story follows Adam, a failing sportswriter who goes back to his hometown to interview a notorious retired hockey goon. It’s the opportunity o...

Tamara Jong grew up going door-to-door for the Jehovah’s Witnesses … and her new memoir, Worldly Girls, is all about breaking away from the faith. For much of her life, the strict religious movement was Tamara’s only way of making sense of the world. But as she got older, Tamara began to reflect on her unconventional childhood, complicated relationships with her parents and mental health struggles...

Murder Bimbo is a new book about a sex worker-turned assassin … and it’s the debut novel by Rebecca Novack, a former priest-in-training. The story follows a sex worker nicknamed Murder Bimbo who is hired by the government to kill a right-wing politician. She does the deed, makes her escape, and tells her story in emails to a social justice podcaster. But things aren’t quite what they seem. So is s...

If you’re worried about being lonely in the afterlife, don’t worry. Just hire a corpse bride to keep you company in the coffin! In Lindsay Wong’s new novel, Villain Hitting for Vicious Little Nobodies, a university dropout is desperate to pay off her family’s debt … so she signs her life away to the ancient Chinese tradition of corpse marriage. But as she prepares to be auctioned off to the highes...

Carla Ciccone was 39 years old when she was diagnosed with ADHD. That diagnosis changed everything for her ... and she shares her experience in her new memoir, Nowhere Girl: Life as a Member of ADHD’s Lost Generation. Over the past few years, the rates of adult women receiving ADHD diagnoses have risen dramatically. So why were these women overlooked for so long? And where do they go from here? Th...

If you’re feeling jaded by money, politics and modern dating … you’re not the only one. Conor Kerr’s new novella, Beaver Hills Forever , follows the everyday lives of four Métis people in Edmonton. The odds are stacked against them and life is exhausting, but each person finds meaning in the small moments and the beauty of life in the Canadian Prairies. Beaver Hills Forever is a poetic love letter...

What would you do if there was a jellyfish in your eye? And what if it started multiplying, blocking your vision completely? That’s the premise of The Jellyfish , the latest graphic novel by the Montreal artist Boum. The Jellyfish is an allegory for learning to live with a degenerative condition and is based on Boum’s own experience with vision loss. It follows a young person named Odette as they...

The winner of the 2025 CBC Poetry Prize is the Vancouver poet Jordan Redekop-Jones. Jordan’s winning poem, Mixed Girl as Cosmogonic Myth , was inspired by her experience of becoming a caretaker in her 20s in the midst of reconnecting with her cultures and finding her place in the world. It’s a dreamlike ode to her journey and her mother, who she calls “the strongest, most beautiful woman I know.”...

“You’ve changed” isn’t necessarily something you want to hear … especially when you’re trying to keep a marriage alive. That’s the premise of Ian Williams’ new novel, You’ve Changed . The book follows a couple named Beckett and Princess who are dealing with their mid-life crises in some questionable ways. While Princess turns to plastic surgery, Beckett throws himself into his work and explores a...

Would you steal? Would you kill? In Megha Majumdar’s new novel, A Guardian and a Thief , a mother prepares to escape a city in the midst of climate collapse. She’ll do anything for her family … and she’s driven to desperation when their immigration documents are stolen just days before they're set to leave. But is the thief a monster? Or is he merely trying to help his own family? With survival on...

To be a good cult leader, you’ll need some natural charisma and a pathological desire for control … and according to Rob Benvie, it might also help if you're a bit of a buffoon. Rob explores this personality mix in his latest novel, The Damagers . The book follows a 15-year-old girl named Zina in 1950s America. After a tragic event, she becomes entangled in an isolated spiritual commune ... in oth...

Louise Penny is one of the biggest mystery novelists alive today … but it didn’t start out that way. Her latest novel, The Black Wolf , is the 20th in her bestselling Armand Gamache series. So how did Louise go from empty book events to packed concert halls? This week, Bookends brings you on-stage at Toronto’s historic Massey Hall. Joined by nearly 2000 of her fans, Louise told Mattea Roach about...

Jane Austen is one of the most enduring novelists of all time. But what do we know about the woman behind the stories? To celebrate Austen’s 250th birthday, we’re revisiting Eleanor Wachtel’s conversation with Carol Shields about her 2001 biography, Jane Austen: A Life. Carol Shields herself was a writer and a lifelong Austen fan, and she talks about how Austen’s stories about marriage, money and...

After releasing her breakout hit My Sister the Serial Killer in 2018, Oyinkan Braithwaite struggled to write under the pressure of high expectations. She worried about being a one-hit wonder … but her new novel, Cursed Daughters , proves otherwise. The book follows three generations of women from a family that is believed to be cursed, dooming them all to remain single forever. To make matters wor...

Christmas is a time for togetherness, good food … and lying to your family about your love life. At least, that’s the case in Uzma Jalaluddin’s new holiday rom-com, Yours for the Season . The book stars Sameera and Tom, whose career ambitions lead them into a fake-dating situation. The holidays get even messier when Sameera and Tom’s families decide to spend Christmas together … and to top it all...

Video games make you violent. Video games corrupt the youth. Video games rot your brain! You’ve probably heard that narrative before … but Kawika Guillermo offers a fresh take in their new essay collection, Of Floating Isles: On Growing Pains and Video Games. The book is part memoir, part cultural analysis about the roles that video games play in our lives. For Kawika, games aren’t just a mindless...

What’s more horrifying than slashers, monsters … and Vancouver real estate? This week, Bookends brings you on-stage at the Vancouver Writers Fest. Back in October, Mattea Roach was joined by writers Mona Awad, Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Jen Sookfong Lee for a special panel about how the horror genre reflects our lived experiences. All three authors have written horror stories that go deeper than jum...

… and they can’t keep their hands off each other. That’s the premise at the centre of Brandon Taylor’s latest novel, Minor Black Figures. It’s about a painter named Wyeth who’s struggling to find his voice in New York’s politically charged art scene. It only gets messier when Wyeth has the perfect meet-cute at a bar … and starts falling for someone who has already devoted himself to God. Brandon j...

What’s more romantic than planning an assassination together? You’d have to ask the radical activist Emma Goldman, who did just that with her revolutionary partner and lover, Sasha Berkman. Emma was a real historical figure and one of the best known anarchists and orators of all time … and the Canadian author Robert Hough fictionalizes her life in his latest novel, Anarchists in Love . The bo...

John Irving’s books are on many readers’ list of favourites. He’s written novels like The World According to Garp and The Cider House Rules , which you also might recognize from their beloved screen adaptations. John is known for writing generation-spanning novels about family, identity and contemporary issues. His latest book, Queen Esther , delivers on that promise. It follows a Vienna-born Jewi...

It’s a bit of an understatement to say that Canisia Lubrin has a way with words. Last year, she took home the Carol Shields Prize for her debut novel, Code Noir. Now she’s back with a long-form poem called The World After Rain . The poem is an epic tribute to her mother and the passing of time, and it poured out of Canisia over the span of 16 hours. This week, Canisia joins Mattea Roach to talk ab...