The Seaboard Review of Books: Monday Edition
April 20, 2026
In this issue:
The Fall-Down Effect by Liz Johnston (Fiction)
The Usual Desire to Kill by Camilla Barnes (Fiction)
Good Guys by Sharon Bala (Fiction)
Hooked by Asako Yuzuki (Fiction)
Rum Diary: Canada, Alcoholism, and the Colonial Sweep (Non-Fiction)
Interview with Naomi MacKinnon, an Independent Bookstore Owner
Thanks for reading this issue of The Seaboard Review of Books!
James M. Fisher, editor-in-chief
Celebrate Spring!
We are offering 20% off an annual subscription until April 30th, 2026! That’s $24 to help support our site and team of volunteer reviewers.
Fiction
The Usual Desire to Kill by Camilla Barnes
“It has to be said, they may be barking mad, but I always come home with some good anecdotes.” (27)
Good Guys by Sharon Bala
Claire Talbot has spent most of her career working in reputation management for large corporations. She has recently swapped this soulless work, which her ex-husband criticizes her for, for a small NGO where she can put her talents to use. The NGO, started by former musician turned philanthropist, Crispin St. Onge, whom Claire first met when she was a s…
Hooked by Asako Yuzuki
Loneliness is often framed as a personal failing, a lapse in character or effort. In Hooked, Asako Yuzuki encourages readers to consider a more troubling idea: loneliness as a basic social condition, generated by the expectations that shape adult life. Written before her widely celebrated English-language debut,
Non-Fiction
Rum Diary: Canada, Alcoholism, and the Colonial Sweep
At one point during the regrettable blur of my twenties, I was a dishwasher at a bar off the Sea to Sky Highway in British Columbia. Perks included a ten-percent discount on all drinks and food, and after every shift, we were allowed one free pint. Most of the staff would keep drinking until close, circling the coin-operated pool table, hollering incomp…
Interview
Interview with Naomi MacKinnon, an Independent Bookstore Owner
Saturday, April 25th, 2026 is Independent Bookstore Day in Canada, so we thought the best way to celebrate —other than buying books from one— is to interview a bookshop owner. One of the newest stores in the Maritime provinces is The Happy Duck Bookshop & Readery
The Fall-Down Effect by Liz Johnston
Not until about two-thirds of the way through Liz Johnston’s debut novel do we find an explanation of her title: “She’d learned the concept of the fall-down effect in school, how timber production declined as the old growth was depleted – logged.” The character in question here is Sylvia, one of three children named after a connection to nature in Briti…
Subscribe to Canada's oldest continuously published literary magazine and help sustain us into the future! A subscription to The Fiddlehead brings you issues packed with new work from the best of emerging and established writers in Canada and the world. Previous work that has appeared in The Fiddlehead has won National Magazine Awards, has been shortlisted for the Journey Prize, and has appeared in Biblioasis' Best Canadian anthologies.
The Seaboard Review of Books is proud to be a sponsor of The New Brunswick Book Awards!