Author: Daniel Gawthrop

Book review by Daniel Gawthrop posted on British Columbia Review on January 25, 2024 Zulaikha, by Niloufar-Lily Soltani Toronto: Inanna Publications, 2023  $24.95 / 9781771339568 For readers with little more than news cycle awareness of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Vancouver’s Niloufar-Lily Soltani offers an intriguing glimpse into a country whose people have endured no end of suffering from the dark legacies of colonial rule and religious extremism. The title character accounts for much of this…

Book review by Daniel Gawthrop posted on British Columbia Review on October 30, 2023. Outsider: An Old Man, a Mountain and the Search for a Hidden Past, by Brett Popplewell Toronto: Harper Collins, 2023, $25.99 / 9781443457859 British Columbia has long been a magnet for eccentric new settlers with mysterious backgrounds who come here seeking to reinvent themselves. Thanks to an investigative journalist from Ontario, we now have another whose fascinating back story has been captured for…

Book review by Daniel Gawthrop posted on British Columbia Review on September 10, 2023 New Millennium Boyz By Alex Kazemi New York: Permuted Press, 2023 $37 / 9781637583913   In some ways, Brad Seela is a typical seventeen-year-old white boy coasting through an apathetic life in the suburban North America of 1999: bored with school, indifferent about the future, disillusioned with his yuppie parents, susceptible to peer pressure, vulnerable to excessive drug use, and constantly horny.…

              Book review essay by Daniel Gawthrop posted on British Columbia Review on June 21, 2023 Trickster Trilogy by Eden Robinson Son of a Trickster Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2017. $21.00 / 9780345810793 Trickster Drift Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2018. $21.00 / 9780735273443 Return of the Trickster Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2021. $21.00 / 9780735273474 * I’ve never been a big fan of magical realism in fiction. While I get what it’s trying…