ORB Christmas Issue 2025
Season's greetings to all our readers! We hope you will enjoy some quiet time amid the festivities and perhaps pick up a good book to read. And there is still time to purchase some good reads for your loved ones. In our Christmas issue, we recommend three books that would make great gifts: The Grand Tour of Park Ex by Andreas Kessaris; The Whisperings by Joel A. Sutherland; and How About This...? by Michael Mirolla. If those don't meet your TBR criteria, simply scroll back
The Grand Tour of Park Ex by Andreas Kessaris
Reviewed by Ian Thomas Shaw The Grand Tour of Park Ex is the sequel to Andreas Kessaris’ debut collection of short fiction, The Butcher of Park Ex . Both books are set in the colourful, working-class, revolving-door immigrant neighbourhood of Park Extension in Montreal, where Kessaris grew up. In our Ottawa Review of Books review of the first collection, we noted that it had “a nice twist revealing the narrator’s personality in bite-size doses.” The same observation applies
The Whisperings by Joel A. Sutherland
Reviewed by Wendy Hawkin Reader Beware: This fast-paced Young Adult novel contains several graphic, disturbing scenes of indescribable gore and violence. Actually, I shouldn’t say “indescribable” because it’s Sutherland’s sensory play-by-plays that push it over the edge into the HORROR realm, giving Stephen King a run for his money. Quill & Quire’s called him Canada’s answer to R.L. Stine. If the macabre is not to your taste you might want to give it a pass, but if you’re int
How About This…? by Michael Mirolla
Reviewed by Ian Thomas Shaw Michael Mirolla’s twentieth published work demonstrates the sharp edge of storytelling shaped by many of the defining themes of our century. Artificial intelligence, gender fluidity, and the tension between individual identity and the collective self all find their place in this new novella. How About This…? is presented as a text produced by an AI collective that has taken upon itself the human endeavour of storytelling at a point when humans the
Welcome to the November 2025 ORB Issue
For those growing a Movember moustache, may the month be fruitful — and may the books we feature nurture more than follicular ambition. In this issue, we review an anthology that examines Palestinian activism and its repression in Canada, a speculative family saga set against the tightening grip of authoritarianism, poetry that carves a path from rupture to resilience, fiction steeped in gothic unease, and a bold "re-vamping" of incubi and succubi through a feminist, anthrop
Razing Palestine edited by Leila Marshy
Reviewed by Ian Thomas Shaw Before picking up a copy of Razing Palestine , it is worth considering what this anthology is—and what it is not. It is not a collection of literary short stories, nor a volume of meticulously footnoted analysis; readers seeking either of those will find them amply elsewhere. Instead, the book gathers first-hand testimonies from Canadians who have confronted what many consider the defining moral dilemma of our era: the destruction of Gaza and the s
Five Points on an Invisible Line by Su J. Sokol
Five Points on an Invisible Line , is the sequel to Cycling to Asylum (recently re-issued as The Invisible Line ). In it, author Su Sokol returns to the Wolfes, an American family of four, who had bicycled from Brooklyn, New York, across the border into Canada. The setting is the probably not-too-distant future, where the US, for many reasons, has become more authoritarian. The changes have been deep, and even its name has changed. It is now “United America.” In the first bo
Ajar by Margo LaPierre
Reviewed by Deborah-Anne Tunney I have always felt poems in the confessional tradition to be the most generous. Their honesty demands the poet takes the reader into their confidence and allows them to see something of the personal, culled from the poet’s own experiences. In this process, the reader’s perception is broadened, their empathy expanded. In her remarkable book, Ajar: Trauma Explored and Transformed, Margo LaPierre has accomplished this feat with insight and acumen
