Toronto Star publisher joins Facebook program paying Canadian media orgs for news

Family account spiced with magic realism, geopolitical intrigue and a ghost story

Tom Lin’s second novel Babylon, South Dakota moves beyond a historical account of an immigrant family’s struggle, delightfully blending and bending genres.

Lin is a Chinese-born novelist whose family emigrated to the U.S. when he was four years old. His debut novel, The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu, won the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, making him the youngest ever recipient of that award. He earned a PhD in English from the University of California Davis and is currently an assistant professor of English and creative writing at the University of Iowa.

Babylon, South Dakota takes place in an unspecified time period that can be understood to be during the Mao era — likely the 1950s or ’60s. A young Chinese couple, the Hsuis, immigrate to the rural community that gives the book its title. They take the names Saul and Mei and settle on a 160-acre homestead left to them by a distant relative.

Saul’s dream is to breed and sell chrysanthemums from seeds he brought from China, while Mei wants to raise livestock. They speak no English, know nothing of life in the United States, are unprepared for the harshness of winter and the isolation of the farm and bring nothing with them except some gold, which Mei hides around the house for emergencies. Their only link to the outside world is a discarded and marginally functioning TV set, which Saul rescues and rigs up.

Day 1 of Jets training camp in the books with pairings essentially cemented

Nearly six minutes into his question-and-answer session, Scott Arniel took a welcome detour from the news of the day.

After exhausting the discussion around the goalie who wasn’t in training camp, the head coach of the Winnipeg Jets finally got a query about the line combinations and defensive pairings that were unveiled in training camp.

And unlike past years, when exhibition games were more frequent and the training camp wasn’t this condensed, Arniel conceded these groupings were intentional and were likely staying together for some time.

The expansion to an 84-game regular season brings with it a reduction to four pre-season games and a much shorter training camp, which could limit the amount of experimentation that Arniel can do during the next two weeks.

Give-and-take relationship of Roman leaders takes centre stage in Harris’s historical fiction

British novelist Robert Harris’s latest work is a reflection on tyranny, corruption and betrayal among all-powerful political leaders.

You might be forgiven for thinking it’s a contemporary thriller — it’s actually historical fiction set in ancient Rome.

A former BBC journalist, Harris debuted as a novelist in 1992 with Fatherland, an alternative history where Nazi Germany won the Second World War.

Since then, the prolific author has become best-known for his works of historical fiction, especially his ancient Rome trilogy released from 2006-2015 and the novel Conclave, which was published in 2016 and was made into the film of the same name in 2024.

Klein has burned bridges with PM, Gillingham says

One mayoral candidate accused another of writing a column so critical it could compromise his ability to work with the federal government.