In this RTB and Novel Dialogue episode from 2021, Helen Garner sits down with John and Elizabeth McMahon, a distinguished scholar of Australian literature. Helen’s novels range from the anti-patriarchy exuberance of Monkey Grip (1977) to the heartbreaking mortality at the heart of The Spare Room (2008). She has also authored a slew of nonfiction, plus screenplays for Jane Campion’s Two Friends and Gillian Armstrong’s wonderfully Garneresque The Last Days of Chez Nous. After a reading from John’s favorite, The Children’s Bach, the trio discusses Garner’s capacity for cutting and cutting, creating resonant, thought-inducing gaps. Garner connects that taste for excision, perhaps paradoxically, to her tendency to accumulate scraps, bits and pieces of life. She relates her father’s restlessness to her own life-total of houses inhabited (27). “Why wouldn’t I write about households?” asks Helen, “They’re just so endlessly interesting.”

Who shaped her writing? Raymond Carver: packed with power, but the pages white with omissions and excisions. Helen offers an anecdote about her own pruning that ends with her “ankle-deep in adverbs.” That’s how to escape the “fat writing” that stems for distrust of the reader. She thoughtfully compares the practical virtues of keeping notebooks for the “music” of everyday life to the nightly process of diary-writing (more analytical). John raises the question of pervasive musical metaphors in Helen’s writing, and she reports her passion for “boring pieces” and the “formal” side of Bach, which makes a listener feel that there is such a thing as meaning. “There’s something about shaping a sentence, too, which can be musical.”

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Agnes Luthi is a police officer in Lausanne, Switzerland who transfers from financial to violent crimes just in time to investigate the death of a young art appraiser in a magnificent mountain chateau. An employee of a London auction house, the young victim is at the chateau to take inventory of a priceless medieval art collection and other historical treasures. She’s stabbed to death on the eve of a blizzard that shuts down all power and the roads heading in and out. Everyone has a story; some are newcomers, others go back generations, and no one is forthcoming. Agnes feels trapped, but she’s determined to solve her first murder case. This is the first novel in Tracee de Hahn’s Agnes Luthi mystery series.

Tracee de Hahn is a writer and educator. She is the author of traditional mysteries set in Switzerland: Swiss Vendetta and A Well-Timed Murder, both published by Minotaur Books, as well as several non-fiction works on historical topics. Prior to writing fiction, she began her career in the practice of architecture and later received an advanced degree in European history. Each of these of these play a role in her writing. Born in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, she grew up in Kentucky and currently lives in Virginia. Tracee is the immediate past president of the National Board of Sisters in Crime. When not working on her own manuscripts, she acts as a writing mentor and lectures on topics related to writing and publishing. Otherwise, she fills her time baking, and occasionally painting dog portraits.

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In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery interviews Michael Mirolla about his fascinating novel, How About This…? (At Bay Press, 2025).

It’s a little after the middle of the 21st century. Loving couple Elspeth and Marybeth are both shocked and excited when a stroller with identical twins is left on their back deck with a recorded message that warns them not to try to return the babies or they could face arrest for kidnapping. Using false starts, footnotes, direct approaches to the reader, lists, questions about who the author(s) might be, and even a dose of self-criticism, the story unwinds from that point as El and Mar work hard to create a family under the circumstances. This becomes even more difficult when they discover the babies come with unusual features that perhaps might explain why they were left in the first place. And it all takes place in a disintegrating world that may leave humans incapable of telling their own stories.

Michael Mirolla's publications include a novella, The Last News Vendor, winner of the 2020 Hamilton Literary Award for fiction, as well as three Bressani Prizes: the novel Berlin (2010); the poetry collection The House on 14th Avenue (2014); and the short story collection Lessons in Relationship Dyads (2016). His latest poetry collection, At the End of the World, was short-listed for the 2022 Hamilton Literary Award. In the fall of 2019, Michael served a three- month writer’s residency at Vancouver’s Historic Joy Kogawa House, during which time he finished the first draft of a novel, The Second Law of Thermodynamics. A symposium on Michael’s writing was held in Toronto on May 25, 2023. In September of 2023, Michael took part in a writers’ residency in Olot, Catalonia where he completed the latest draft of his novella, How About This …? In the summer of 2024, Michael will take part in a one-month writers’ residency in Barcelona where he hopes to tackle a new draft of The Second Law. When not busy writing, Michael helps run Guernica Editions, a Canadian independent literary publishing house. Born in Italy and raised in Montreal, Michael now makes his home outside the town of Gananoque in the Thousand Islands area of Ontario.

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Jenny Mustard is a writer and content creator, born in Sweden but living in London. Jenny and her work have featured in the Observer, the Independent, Vogue, Stylist, the Evening Standard and elsewhere. She has over 600k followers, and more than 50 million views on YouTube. Her acclaimed debut novel, OKAY DAYS, was published in 2023 and her novels have been translated to ten languages. What a Time to Be Alive (Pegasus Books, 2025) was a New York Times Editors Pick.

Recommended Books:

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is published with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.

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Delhi is haunted—by its ghosts, its ruins, and its unending capacity for rebirth. In the shadow of medieval mosques and Mughal tombs, the past refuses to stay buried. Saints, Sultans, poets, and lovers—all linger in the city’s imagination, their stories shaping how we remember what once was.

In Ghosted, historian and storyteller Eric Chopra journeys through the capital’s most beguiling sites—Jamali-Kamali, Firoz Shah Kotla, Khooni Darwaza, the Mutiny Memorial, and Malcha Mahal—to unearth a Delhi that exists between worlds: a palimpsest where Sufis bless kings, jinn listen to grievances, and begums occupy dilapidated hunting lodges. What begins as a search for Delhi’s haunted monuments becomes a meditation on why we are drawn to the dead and how ghost stories become vessels of collective memory.

Blending archival research with folklore, myth, and reflection, Chopra paints an intimate portrait of a city forever in dialogue with its former selves. Through invasions and rebirths, he reveals that Delhi’s spirit resides not just in its monuments but in the unseen presences that linger among them.

Ghosted is a lyrical, haunting journey through the city’s spectral landscape— an invitation to listen to what its echoes tell us about memory and identity.

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In this NBN episode, award-winning and celebrated author Farzana Doctor interviews Hollay Ghadery about her novel, The Unravelling of Ou (Palimpsest Press, 2026).

Moving on is hard. Even harder when it’s from a make-believe friend—someone, or in this instance, some thing—who’s been your strongest source of support. On what should be one of the happiest days ever, the day her granddaughter is born, Minoo is faced with a terrible choice: make a clean break from her constant companion, a sock puppet named Ecology Paul, or lose her daughter and granddaughter, and maybe all of the people she loves. On an emotional drive home from the hospital, Ecology Paul shares the story of how Minoo got to this point, recalling Minoo’s early teenage pregnancy in Iran, her exile to Canada, her questions about her sexuality, and how a ragtag sock puppet came to her when she desperately needed to be seen. Full of imagination, whimsy and heart, The Unravelling of Ou follows Minoo’s struggles to justify the puppet’s existence and untangle herself from her dependence on it, and reconnect with the people she loves.

About Hollay Ghadery:

Hollay Ghadery is an Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, (Guernica Editions 2021) won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. She is the author of Rebellion Box (Radiant Press, 2023) and Widow Fantasies (Gordon Hill Press, 2024). She is a host on The New Books Network and HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM, and the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay here. The Unraveling of Ou, is her debut novel.

About Farzana Doctor:

Farzana Doctor is a writer, activist, and Registered Social Worker/Psychotherapist. Her ancestry is Indian, and she was born in Zambia while her family was based there for five years, before immigrating to Canada in 1971. Learn more here

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In the early years of the twentieth century, in what was then British India, culture thrived in the city of Allahabad. In this vibrant hub of musicians, poets, scholars and freedom fighters, Janki Bai Ilahabadi was a musical star, counting among her fans maharajas, poets, judges, nawabs, government officials and multitudes of ordinary people. Popularly known as Chhappan Chhuri, Janki Bai’s career, originating in a nautch house and vexed by many trials and torments, soared to stellar heights lifting her from penury to palaces and even the Delhi Durbar of 1911.
Based on the real-life story of Hindustani singer Janki Bai Ilahabadi (1880–1934), Requiem in Raga Janki (Penguin Viking, 2018) by Neelum Saran Gour is the beautifully rendered tale of one of India’s unknown gems. Moving from Hindustani classical music’s earliest times to the age of the gramophone, from Baiju’s mysticism and Tansen’s magic to Hassu Khan’s stringent opposition to recordings, this is a novel that brings to life a tapestry of music lore through the eyes of a gifted performer.

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In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Sunny Dhillon about his book, Hide & Sikh: Letters from a Life in Brown Skin (Wolsak & Wynn, 2025). In 2018, Sunny Dhillon resigned as a journalist with the Globe and Mail. His blog post announcing his departure went unexpectedly viral. It was a decision that had been long brewing and Dhillon posted the piece with the hope that it would lead to “meaningful reflection on the lack of diversity in Canadian journalism and the problems therein.” But he was not optimistic.

In this sharply funny memoir, shaped as a series of letters to his daughter, Dhillon explains why he was not hopeful. From his earliest memories, his experience of being Canadian was shaped by race, and as a child he’d often found himself confused by what he should do when the fact he was “different” was raised. His first reaction was to hide – from his skin colour, from his native tongue and even from his name. Until he realized he didn’t feel the need to hide anymore, that he didn’t want to hide anymore. With warmth, honesty and lots of humour, Dhillon shares his journey so that his daughter will not have to struggle through the lessons he took too long to learn, so that she will know who she is and be proud.

Sunny Dhillon is a former news reporter whose viral essay “Journalism While Brown and When to Walk Away” highlighted the significant challenges that journalists of colour can face. Sunny worked as a print reporter for ten years. He has also appeared on television and radio and has spoken at conferences. He is passionate about racial justice and continues to write on that theme. He holds a master’s degree in journalism from the University of British Columbia. He and his young family now live in Ontario, where Sunny attends law school. This is his first book.

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Iida Turpeinen is a literary scholar writing a dissertation on the intersection of the natural sciences and literature. Her short stories exploring the relationship between humans and animals won the J. H. Erkko Young Writers’ Competition in 2014. Her 2023 debut novel, Beasts of the Sea (Little, Brown, 2025), was published in Finland to wide acclaim, won the Helsingin Sanomat Literature Prize for best debut novel, and was a finalist for Finland’s biggest literary award, the Finlandia Prize. Translation rights have been sold in twenty-six territories to date. Iida is currently writer in residence at the Helsinki Natural History Museum writing her second novel not far from the skeleton of sea cow. Turpeinen lives in Helsinki, Finland.

Recommended Books:

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is published with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.

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Three people—two enslaved, one indentured—living beside each other, struggling against their circumstances, trying to bend destiny.

As the seventeenth century burns to a close in Tidewater, Virginia, America’s character is wrought in the fires of wealth, race, and freedom.

Young Bless, the only child left to her enslaved mother, stubbornly crafts the terms of her vital existence. She stands as the lone bulwark between her mother and irreparable despair, her mother’s only possibility of hope, as Bless reshapes the boundaries of love.

David is a helping child and a solace to his parents, and he gave a purpose to their trials. His survival hinges on his mother’s shrewd intellect and ferocious fight, but his sustenance is his freed Black father’s dream of emancipation for the entire family.

Jack Dane, a Scots-Irish boy, sails to Britain’s colonies when his father sells him into indentured servitude as an escape from poverty. There Jack learns from the rich the value of each person’s life.

A breathtaking, haunting, and epic saga, This Here Is Love (W.W. Norton, 2025) intimately intertwines us with these beautifully drawn, unforgettable American characters. Bless, taken to serve the slaveowner’s daughter, must decide where she belongs: with the enslaved or above them. David, sold away from his people, retreats into himself even as he yearns to unite with others. Jack, acting impetuously, changes his fortune, but will doing so sacrifice his humanity?

All three come together on Jack’s land. As they face and challenge each other, they will relinquish and remake beliefs about family and freedom, even as they confront the limits of love.

Princess Joy L. Perry is the recipient of a Virginia Commission for the Arts Fellowship and a winner of the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Award. Her short stories have appeared in All About Skin, African American Review, and Kweli Journal. She lives in Norfolk, Virginia. You can find her on Instagram.

Host Sullivan Summer is at her website, Instagram, and on Substack, where she and Princess went to continue their conversation.

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