The Seaboard Review: April 28th, 2025
Volume 2, Issue 17
Last Chance!
This is the last chance to enter the final two giveaways, exclusively for our Substack subscribers.
The first giveaway is of a six-book bundle from Penguin Random House for our paid subscribers (all paid subscribers are automatically entered). These are six of their top-selling titles from 2024 and a paid subscriber will win them all!
Here One Moment by Liane Moriarty
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney
This Summer Will Be Different by Carley Fortune
Who We Are: Four Questions for a Life and a Nation by Murray Sinclair
Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI by Yuval Noah Harari
Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie
If you are not a paid subscriber, then let this be the incentive you need to sign up! If that’s not enough, we’ve discounted annual subscriptions by 50% for April, our anniversary month.
The second giveaway is sponsored by Breakwater Books, and it is for our many free Substack subscribers:
Hides by Rod Moody-Corbett
The Weather Diviner by Elizabeth Murphy
Called by Mother Earth by Greg Naterer
Both giveaway winners will be announced Wednesday April 30th/May 1st. The winning subscriber must have a Canadian mailing address.
TSR’s Social Media Links
Poetry Month Review:
Forecast: Pretty Bleak by Chris Bailey
Chris Bailey’s Forecast: Pretty Bleak is a poetics of hard weather, hard work, and the quiet devastations of rural life on Prince Edward Island. With a voice defined by vernacular resilience, Bailey maps the emotional topography of lives shaped by labour, migration, and the slow, often invisible erosion of hope.
Other Reviews
Skin: Stories by Catherine Bush
Catherine Bush’s prose in Skin is sleek and immersive. Bush is a masterful storyteller with an utterly confident style that allows a reader to disappear inside her words and worlds, like slipping into body temperature water. You don’t even notice the moment you go under, nor the shift in pressure against your skin.
Miss Matty by Edeet Ravel
Sometimes, as a break from heavy literature or a serious non-fiction title, I turn to a YA (young adult) novel, depending on the content and theme. When I saw this offering from Linda Leith Publishing, I was intrigued not only by the cover but also by the synopsis and the setting of the story.
Beneath Dark Waters by Eve Lazarus
In May 1914, the RMS Empress of Ireland embarked from Quebec City, on her 192nd crossing of the Atlantic, secure with her water-tight compartments and a complement of lifeboats far exceeding her needs. Less than 24 hours into the Ireland’s planned journey, while still in the safe waters of the St. Lawrence River, the fog rolled in suddenly, and a Norweg…
Imagining Imagining: Essays on Language, Identity and Infinity by Gary Barwin
Imagining Imagining: Essays on Language, Identity and Infinity is a genre-busting, super-Jewy mash-up of the Hebrew alphabet, music, poetry, philosophy, sleeplessness, dog-walking, language, body parts, ageing parents, childhood, and death. Essay is a bit of a stretch—I only agreed to review the book because of my own preconceived notion of what an essa…
Michael Greenstein Reviews:
In The Capital City of Autumn by Tim Bowling
From the Elizabethans to the Romantics and Modernists, Tim Bowling swallows centuries in his latest collection of poems, In The Capital City of Autumn. The second part of his book looks back exactly 100 years to The Great Gatsby, while his titular poem returns to Keats’s ode “To Autumn,” two hundred years ago. Bowling’s ode repeats the refrain “In the c…
Montreal Standard Time: The Early Journalism of Mavis Gallant
Like Charles Dickens or Ernest Hemingway, Mavis Gallant began her writing career in journalism before turning to fiction. Her apprenticeship of reporting for the Montreal Standard begins with “Meet Johny” (September 2, 1944) and ends with the story of Johny Young (October 7, 1950). Although these two Johnys are different people, the bookended characters…
5 questions with Caitlin Press
(Editor’s note: this instalment is taken from Booknet Canada’s 5 questions with series, and was originally posted on their website. It is reproduced here with their kind permission)
Hot Takes: Brief Notes on Books Present & Past
(Note: clicking on the underlined link takes you to the book’s publisher page or Amazon.ca for more information or for purchasing purposes)
I believe this to be one of the best (if not THE best) entry in the popular Thief 4 Hire series. Mr. Bowie goes “bare bones” on this one, with Sean Donovan hired to find a friend's “missing” daughter in London. Sean is pretty much on his own, as he prefers to be, leaving his wife Beth in Niagara to run the winery. With less baggage, Sean can do what he does best. Great adventure awaits the reader, but it's helpful to have read the previous 5 books to know the reoccurring characters. (James)
THE LAST CHAIRLIFT by John Irving
In The Last Chairlift, John Irving offers a sprawling, deeply felt meditation on identity, family, and the ghosts—literal and figurative—that shape a life. The novel is slow to start, its first chapters thick with exposition and digression, but once it finds its rhythm, it becomes an unexpectedly moving and immersive experience. I’ve been listening to the audiobook throughout the winter on my commutes, and gradually, its meandering pace began to feel like a feature rather than a flaw—a kind of literary snowfall that accumulates meaning over time. At the centre is Adam Brewster, a writer raised by a fiercely private ski-racing mother, whose coming-of-age is shaped by questions of origin, sexuality, and belief. Familiar Irving motifs abound—unconventional families, gender nonconformity, the collision of personal and political—but here they are delivered with a quiet, elegiac sincerity that makes this novel feel like a summing up of a storied career. Expansive, tender, and often strange, The Last Chairlift rewards those willing to go along for the long ride. (Selena Mercuri)
News
For folks out Toronto way, once a month The Caledonian Pub at 856 College St is home to Drunk Fiction, an irreverent night of readings, where readers, listeners, authors and those who love them can gather, drink and nosh! May 27 is Dennis E Bolen touring his new book, along with Marianne Miller, Aviva Rubin and Sydney Hegele. Check in at https://emilyweedon.com/drunk-fiction for more info!
If you can't be there in person but would like a copy. it's only $10 (TEN DOLLARS!) plus postage. Contact John via Facebook.
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Thanks for reading this issue of The Seaboard Review!
James M. Fisher, editor-in-chief
