In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Governor General Award-winning author Sadiqa de Meijer about her new essay collection, In the Field (Palimpsest Press, 2025). 

In The Field, Sadiqa de Meijer's follow up to the Governor General's Award winning alfabet/alphabet, brings us essays that move searchingly through their central questions. What meaning does a birthplace hold? What drives us to make contact with a work of art? How do we honour the remains of the dead? This writing constitutes a form of fieldwork grounded in intimate observation. In The Field is an extraordinary book, one that invites readers to bring renewed attention to their own lives and to embrace the subjectivity in the experiences of others.

In The Field, Sadiqa de Meijer's follow up to the Governor General's Award winning alfabet/alphabet, brings us essays that move searchingly through their central questions. What meaning does a birthplace hold? What drives us to make contact with a work of art? How do we honour the remains of the dead? This writing constitutes a form of fieldwork grounded in intimate observation. In The Field is an extraordinary book, one that invites readers to bring renewed attention to their own lives and to embrace the subjectivity in the experiences of others.

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Howard Lovy is a journalist, book editor, and author with forty years of experience covering everything from Jewish issues and the Mideast conflict to nanotechnology and the auto industry. His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly, Longreads, The Jerusalem Post, The Jewish Daily Forward, and other publications.

Howard’s debut novel, Found and Lost: The Jake and Cait Story, follows two musicians who reconnect in middle age when their 40-year-old song goes viral. The book explores themes of music, faith, aging, and second chances.

In addition to writing and editing, Howard produces and hosts podcasts for the Alliance of Independent Authors. He lives in Northern Michigan with his wife, Heidi, and their dog, Henry.

About Found and Lost: "In 1985, they met by chance.
As a young guitarist and violinist, Jake and Cait created something transcendent each time they locked eyes and finished each other’s musical phrases.... until the music stopped.
Forty years later, the song that started it all brings them back together. But time changes everything."

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In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Aamir Hussain about his debut novel, Under the Full and Crescent Moon (Dundurn, 2025).

In a battle of words and beliefs, a young woman must defend her city against zealotry during the Islamic Golden Age.
After his long-time scribe retires, Khadija’s father, the city’s leading jurist, offers his introverted daughter the opportunity to take on the role of his assistant. In accepting, Khadija is thrust into her community, the medieval hilltop city of Medina’tul-Agham, where she, as a motherless young woman, has spent little time. Led by Imam Fatima and guided by the Circle of Mothers, it is a matriarchy — the only one in the empire. Though forced to set aside her quiet life among the books and parchments of her family home, Khadija thrives, finding her power and place in the world with the support of her new friends and strong female mentors.
Yet Khadija’s idyllic new life is shattered when fanatical forces weaponize Sharia law to threaten the very fabric of the society. Using only the power of her parchment and quill, Khadija must win the support of the people and write fatwas to fight against injustice, or the peace and prosperity of her city will be nothing more than a footnote in the annals of history.

About Aamir Hussain:

Aamir Hussain was born into a family of strong women in Pakistan, grew up in Saudi Arabia, and moved to Canada when he was fifteen years old. He works in the tech sector in Toronto. Under the Full and Crescent Moon is his debut novel. He lives in Milton, Ontario.

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One woman's deadly obsession with a haunted archival film precipitates her undoing in Black Flame (Tor Nightfire, 2025) from the USA Today bestselling author of Manhunt, Gretchen Felker-Martin. A cursed film. A haunted past. A deadly secret. The Baroness, an infamous exploitation film long thought destroyed by Nazi fire, is discovered fifty years later. When lonely archivist Ellen Kramer—deeply closeted and pathologically repressed—begins restoring the hedonistic movie, it unspools dark desires from deep within her. As Ellen is consumed by visions and voices, she becomes convinced the movie is real, and is happening to her—and that frame by frame, she is unleashing its occult horrors on the world. Her life quickly begins to spiral out of control. Until it all fades to black, and all that remains is a voice asking a question Ellen can’t answer but can’t get out of her mind. Do you want it? More than anything? Also by Gretchen Felker-Martin: Manhunt Cuckoo

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Hari Krishna Kaul’s short stories, shaped by the social crisis and political instability in Kashmir, explore – with a sharp eye for detail, biting wit, and empathy – themes of isolation, alienation, corruption, and the social mores of a community that experienced a loss of homeland, culture, and language. His characters navigate their ever-changing environs with humor as they make uncomfortable compromises to survive. Two friends cling to their multiplication tables while the world shifts around them; a group of travelers are forced to seek shelter in a rickety hostel after a landslide; a woman faces the first days in an uneasy exile at her daughter-in-law’s Delhi home.

In For Now, It Is Night (Archipelago Books, 2024), translated from Kashmiri by Gowhar Fazili, Gowhar Yaquoob, Kalpana Raina, Tanveer Ajsi, Kaul dissects the ways we struggle to make sense of new surroundings. These glimpses of life are bittersweet and profound; Kaul’s characters carry their loneliness with wisdom and grace. Beautifully translated in a unique collaborative project, For Now, It Is Night brings many of Kaul’s resonant stories to English readers for the first time.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Brandon Taylor is the author of the novels Minor Black Figures (Riverhead, 2025), The Late Americans and Real Life, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a Science + Literature Selected Title by the National Book Foundation. His collection Filthy Animals, a national bestseller, was awarded The Story Prize and shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. He is the 2022-2023 Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.

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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Caskey Russell’s novel The Door on the Sea (Solaris, 2025) follows Elan, the youngest member of once revered Flicker Clan, on a journey to find a weapon that can defend his people from the shapeshifting Koosh invaders threatening their existence. To reach his goal, Elan must captain a canoe crewed by an unlikely team and force the cooperation of a raven who is the only one who knows the weapon’s location. Throughout their journey, the crew must navigate an increasingly hostile political landscape, as the Koosh invasion throws old laws and alliances into disarray.

In this interview, Russell describes the process of developing the novel over several years and the ways that he built a world inspired by nineteenth century Tlingit culture. We discuss survivalist elements in fantasy, shifting relationships with violence, and the role of journeys and quest in fantasy.

The Door on the Sea is an engaging, thoughtful story and it was so much fun discussing it with the author.

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Lady Anne is in the Cotswolds with her 8-month-old son, there to restore a famous walled garden. The magnificent home has been hosting a television cooking special over the summer, and Anne’s husband, Lord Terrence Reid, is there to enjoy a “Summer of Chefs” week with his wife and baby son. Reid’s parents have also been invited to spend the week and are looking forward to delicious food, although Reid’s father is recovering from a recent heart attack. Each week, a new chef prepares magnificent meals, and the mystery chef that week turns out to be the former lover of Reid’s mother. Theirs is not the only family Gareth Talbot has affected with his sly machinations. He’s there to settle old scores and cash in on decades-old grudges. Although the setting is serene and the food fantastic, Lord Terrence Reid is called upon to uncover a murderer in their midst, and his family members are among the suspects. The menu is the last thing on their minds.

Mary Birk is a former trial lawyer and avid gardener who lives and writes in Colorado. After graduating from law school, she moved from North Dakota with her late husband to Colorado where they raised their children and dogs and together worked to turn two and a half acres into a high-country garden retreat. Ms. Birk has been named a Library Journal SELF-E Select author. Her Terrence Reid/Anne Michaels mystery series combines her love for gardening and passion for all things Scottish. The first book in the series, Mermaids of Bodega Bay, was a finalist for the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers’ Colorado Gold award in the mystery/suspense category and was named by Library Journal as a SELF-e Top Book of the Year. The First Cut, the second book in the series, won the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Colorado Gold Award in the mystery/suspense category. A founding member of the Colorado chapter of Sisters in Crime, Ms. Birk served as treasurer from 2016-2023 and is currently Vice President. She also serves as social media director for the Rockky Mountain Chapter of Mystery Writers of America.

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A TRAGIC DOUBLE HOMICIDE, OR A HIDDEN SERIAL KILLER? SERGEANT ALICE MORROW IS DETERMINED TO SOLVE A MYSTERY SPANNING SIXTY YEARS.

When Evelyn Massey is found dead in her home, it seems like an open-and-shut case: Evelyn was one hundred years old — natural causes. But Sergeant Alice Morrow learns that traces of poison were found in Mrs. Massey’s blood. Then the remains of a body some sixty years deceased are discovered in the dead woman’s basement.

Two murders, decades apart. Are they connected?

In the second book in Shane Peacock’s award-winning Northern Gothic Mystery series, Morrow and former nypd homicide detective Hugh Mercer unearth stunning truths about Evelyn Massey’s life and learn of other disappearances over the past sixty years. Was a serial killer quietly at work in this Ontario town? Could the murderer still be among its citizens, hidden in plain sight?

About Shane Peacock:

SHANE PEACOCK has been published in twenty languages in eighteen countries. The first book in the Northern Gothic Mystery series, As We Forgive Others, was published in 2024 to great acclaim and won the Crime Writers of Canada Award of Excellence for Best Crime Novel Set in Canada. He has won the Junior Library Guild of America Selection seven times, the Arthur Ellis Award / cwc Award of Excellence three times, and has been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award and the td Canadian Children’s Literature Award. His young adult novels include the Boy Sherlock Holmes series, the Dylan Maples Adventures, The Dark Missions of Edgar Brim trilogy, The Book of Us, and Show. He lives in Cobourg, Ontario, with his wife, journalist Sophie Kneisel.

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In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery interviews award-winning author Bruce Hunter about his CanLit masterpiece, In the Bear's House (Frontenac House Press, 2025).

So many different worlds emerge and converge in this lyrical, expansive novel from Bruce Hunter that we need two narrators: Trout, the deaf boy from Ogden, whose vivid imagination and wise pragmatism enhance and stimulate his unhearing world, and his young, artistic mother, Clare, a Scottish-Canadian lass from a rambunctious and sometimes unlucky but loving family of resilient pioneers at the cusp of old and new worlds in the Alberta of the early 1960s.

Calgary and its recent subdivision Ogden are glorious places for a childhood. Trout and his one friend, the tragic hero Kenny Dawes, roam the prairies with temerity, and revel in a young city poised for explosive growth. When one of their early adolescent adventures turns sour, Trout faces a looming downfall that could echo the past trajectory of his father, a good but flawed man who loves him deeply.

This is a new edition of the book previously published by Oolichan Books in 2009.

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