Maybe fiction ruined her memoir

Fallis’s comic thriller infiltrates book club

The Free Press Book Club and McNally Robinson Booksellers are pleased to welcome Toronto author Terry Fallis to the next virtual meeting on Tuesday, September 29 at 7 p.m. to read from and discuss his novel The Marionette.

Fallis, a former lawyer, bureaucrat and political consultant, is the author of 10 bestselling novels and the two-time winner of the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour (in 2015 for No Relation and in 2008 for The Best Laid Plans, which also won CBC’s Canada Reads in 2011).

His 11th novel, An End In Itself, will be published in November by McClelland & Stewart, who also published The Marionette in October 2025 (and which was also longlisted for the Leacock medal).

The Marionette follows James Norval, bestselling author of a series of thrillers featuring fictional CIA agent Hunter Chase. While in Tajikistan researching his next Hunter Chase novel, Norval is detained by local officials and subsequently freed and ferried away by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS).

Education minister’s reasons for revoking teacher’s licence ‘not good enough,’ judge decides

A Manitoba judge has rejected the education minister’s decision to end a teacher’s career because he repeatedly messaged with a 13-year-old girl on social media.

Artist’s inspired work brings Red River Métis story back to Portage and Main

Jennine Krauchi calls them the “grandmothers.” “They speak to you very silently. You never hear a word, but they speak,” Krauchi says, referring to the antique pieces of Métis needlework she’s carefully studied for years. But there are few precedents for her latest art project: a 85-foot-wide by 32-foot-high chain curtain of Métis needlework that drapes over the historic Bank of Montreal’s neoclassical facade.

Sex assault charges against basketball referee stayed

A Winnipeg basketball referee accused of sexual offences involving three men has had criminal charges against him stayed.

Michael Shane Maryk, 45, had been set to stand trial July 20 on five counts of sexual assault and two counts of committing an indecent act, but instead agreed to a one-year peace bond prohibiting him from having any contact with the three men.

Maryk was employed by the Manitoba Association of Basketball Officials at the time the offences were alleged to have occurred.

The peace bond requires that Maryk not come within 200 metres of the men’s homes, schools or places of worship and have no contact with their families.

Goodness alive, well in N.L.-set musical

I first saw Come From Away — the true-story musical about the incredible efforts of the residents of Gander, N.L. on Sept. 11, 2001, who welcomed nearly 7,000 travellers diverted to their remote town after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon — in 2022, when Broadway Across Canada brought it to the Centennial Concert Hall.

I went in cold, but with blunted expectations; it seemed, on premise alone, like it could tilt too far into shmaltzy sentimentality, that it would be too earnest in its goodness.

So, when I wept until my face was as wet and salty as though it had been slapped by the waves of the North Atlantic, I was pleasantly surprised. I loved it. It’s emotional, yes. It’s sentimental, yes. But you can’t help but feel both buoyed — and, dare I say, patriotic — by the end of it.

Written by Canadians Irene Sankoff and David Hein, Come From Away seemed an unlikely hit when it opened on Broadway in 2017. But there was, by then, an appetite for it.