Hotel a hub for chronicling the lives of Afghans through various regimes, conflicts

History — as a field, a craft, a way of thinking, a body of knowledge or a way of examining the human condition — fundamentally captures the human experience so that we might come closer to the truth of why we exist and how we might progress.

People’s histories take historical thinking one step further. Histories of everyday people and their experiences counter hierarchical and hegemonic narratives, which tend to silence critical voices while propping themselves up for political and economic gain.

In her latest, The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People’s History of Afghanistan, Canadian journalist and BBC correspondent Lyse Doucet has set out to point a spotlight on the history of Afghanistan through extraordinary people who might normally be overlooked in the tomes of history.

Through the backdrop of Kabul’s Inter-Continental hotel — the most storied and fabulous hotel in the city which, to this day, looks out onto the white-tipped mountains of the Hindu Kush — Doucet embarks on making spaces for the voices who worked and lived in the hotel between 1971 and 2021. It’s a 50-year expanse of time that bears witness to crowns, coups, communists, the Taliban, western puppets and the return of the Taliban.

Irving’s New England return feels like disjointed parody

You can’t go home again, Thomas Wolfe said.

Apparently, you also can’t go back to St. Cloud’s Orphanage, the setting of John Irving’s beloved 1985 novel The Cider House Rules — at least not in any satisfying way.

Queen Esther, the American-Canadian author’s latest book, has a tantalizing connection to that storied locale in Maine, home of orphan Homer Wells and Dr. Wilbur Larch, an ether-addicted, abortion-providing physician. (The Cider House Rules was made into a 1999 movie, starring Tobey Maguire and Michael Caine.)

St. Cloud’s is where the Esther of the title was dropped off as an infant by two antisemitic townspeople after her mother — a Jewish immigrant from Vienna — was murdered. The child grows up there, beloved by all the orphaned boys and girls, as well as the staff.

Author Rachel Reid on what the next ‘Heated Rivalry’ book will be about and tuning out the mania

As "Heated Rivalry" author Rachel Reid writes the latest instalment in the love story that served as the basis for the hit television series, she's trying to strike a delicate balance.

There's real-world inspiration to be found in how quickly her life changed following the Crave series' debut in November, but she's also trying to ignore the show's existence. 

"'I'm trying really hard not to think about the show versions of the characters while I'm writing this," she said on a video call Thursday. 

"I'm pretending there's no show, because if I start thinking that way, I start thinking about the possibility of what I'm writing being filmed, then I think about real people having to say and do these things, and then I'm just not going to be able to do it."

Rachel Reid to publish another book in ‘Heated Rivalry’ universe

TORONTO - The "Heated Rivalry" boys are coming back sooner than expected — at least in book form.

Harlequin announced Monday that Nova Scotia author Rachel Reid would publish the seventh instalment in her "Game Changers" series in September.

"Unrivaled" returns to the love story of Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov, the subjects of the Crave TV show and of the second and sixth books in the series, "Heated Rivalry" and "The Long Game."

The other books in the series follow different gay couples in the world of professional hockey.

On the night table: Shashi Bhat

Shashi Bhat

Author, Death by a Thousand Cuts

I’m reading Sarah Thankam Mathews’ novel All This Could Be Different — it’s really good. It’s so quick and smart — the sentences are so tightly written. It’s really funny and also quite devastating in parts as well; I’m only about halfway through right now, but so far it’s great.

New in paper

I Was a Teenage Slasher: A Novel

By Stephen Graham Jones (Saga/Simon & Schuster, $26)

Jones offers a fictional autobiography of Tolly, a 17-year-old in small-town Texas in the late ’80s who is cursed to kill for revenge.

Want: Sexual Fantasies by Anonymous

Committed, conniving housewife will stop at nothing to climb the social ladder

Can a cover make a book?

Liverpudlian M. K. Oliver, a new writer who openly confesses that he was less-than-addicted to reading as a youngster, here tackles the daunting task of crafting a book that meets the fierce promise of its clarion, clever cover.

Now a career educator, Oliver has diligently availed himself of writers-to-be camps and courses and here trots out his first novel, A Sociopath’s Guide to a Successful Marriage.

It is getting more than a little bit of attention. Oliver’s afterword verily preens about traipsing through Europe and its mountains, tirelessly fielding no fewer than 28 Zoom calls night and day as the film production courting intensified — even before the book launched. A Sociopath’s Guide will, undoubtedly, be a movie.

Wartime rescue mission movingly recalled

In the midst of the Second World War, the British army and the Jewish leadership in Palestine forged a tenuous partnership based on a shared need to infiltrate Nazi-occupied Europe.

Each party had different strategic motives, and these differences would be a source of tension. But each party needed the other to realize its objectives.

In Crash of the Heavens, Douglas Century, a veteran investigative journalist who grew up in Canada, elaborates the politics of this uneasy alliance in an admirable, substantive account.

By 1943, Britain faced a shortage of pilots. Thousands of Allied airmen had been forced to bail out over Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, where they tried to evade capture but could not speak the local language.

Giller Prize shakes up jury with indie bookstore staffers as it seeks new sponsors

TORONTO - The Giller Prize is shaking up its jury selection process this year, tapping representatives from five independent bookstores as it searches for new sponsors.

Giller Executive Director Elana Rabinovitch says the change lends a "people's choice" quality to the $100,000 prize, Canada's richest fiction purse.

In previous years, authors and artists have sat on the jury, but this year, seven people from five bookstores across Canada will select the long list of contenders before whittling it down to a short list, and finally, choosing a winner.

The jurors include Dan Macdonald and Lori Cheverie from Bookmark, which has locations in Halifax, Charlottetown and Fredericton; and Danielle and Rupert McNally from Ben McNally Books in Toronto.

Feuding factions seek clues from mysterious manuscript

From Josephine Tey’s classic 1951 novel The Daughter of Time through to Peter Watson’s 1989 book Landscape of Lies to Dan Brown’s 2003 mega-hit The Da Vinci Code, mysteries featuring books and works of art hold an enduring appeal for many readers. With The Burning Library, Gilly Macmillan — a former art historian and U.K.-based author of eight previous thrillers — has added a new entry to this genre.

Her protagonist Anya Brown (surely a nod to the Da Vinci Code author) is a paleographer who, having made her reputation deciphering a mysterious manuscript, is hired by a group of women to study a collection of priceless volumes held in the Institute of Manuscript Studies in St. Andrews, Scotland. Anya is not only an expert in ancient handwriting, she also possesses an eidetic memory which (she claims) allows her to remember everything she sees in detail.

(In an odd turn, Anya is a first-person narrator surrounded by a large cast of characters whose actions are described in the third person — an authorial choice that doesn’t seem to have any justification).

Anya soon learns that her employers are part of a secret society of women calling themselves the Fellowship of the Lark, which has for centuries been engaged in a shadowy and often lethal conflict with another female-led cabal known as the Order of St. Katherine. While the “Larks” are glass-ceiling-shattering career women seeking power in corporations and governments, the “Kats” foreswear careers to care for their families and husbands — the latter of whom they secretly manipulate to their own ends.

Apatow’s literary scrapbook a treasure trove of Hollywood ephemera

In his second book, filmmaker, comedian and self-proclaimed hoarder Judd Apatow digs through his archives to share photos, mementos and his overall love of comedy in a heavy tome covering his childhood and career.

Growing up in Long Island, N.Y. as a child of divorced parents, Apatow was obsessed with comedy and celebrity culture from an early age. In his early years, he collected actors’ and comedians’ headshots and autographs, dressed as Harpo Marx for Halloween and kept a book of joke ideas in the sixth grade.

As a teenager, he was interviewing some of the day’s biggest comedians for his high school radio station — including Jerry Seinfeld, Martin Short, Howie Mandel and Jay Leno. Pictures and autographs are all included here.

He also shares extensive photos and articles from his many projects over the years.

Book club gets wild with fantastical fiction

The Free Press Book Club and McNally Robinson Booksellers are pleased to welcome Hamilton author Amanda Leduc to the next virtual meeting on Tuesday, Jan. 27 at 7 p.m. to read from and discuss her Giller Prize-longlisted novel Wild Life.

Published in March 2025 by Random House Canada, Wild Life follows the journey of two walking, talking hyenas over the course of decades, documenting their various interactions with humans all over the world.

Leduc’s story starts with the hyenas seeking out Josiah, a young man in 19th-century Scotland whose father sends him off on a religious mission; it is there Josiah meets the hyenas, who he believes are god in animal form, and they save him from a natural disaster which kills the rest of his party. Josiah then begins to develop his own religion, Church of the Wild, the crux of which is god giving the ability of speech to animals as a way to exalt the human race.

Josiah rises to an almost cult-leader status, but then mysteriously dies. The hyenas continue on their journey — though their true mission or motivation remains unclear throughout the novel. They take a train ride over an ocean, they learn how to make shortbread, they are kept in a zoo, they are given names — Barbara and Kendrith — and live in an apartment, they make friends and enemies and pique the interest of everyone in between.