If your summer travels aren’t taking you far this year, books from authors within the Western community have you covered – whisking you from the highlands of Scotland to a historical train ride in France or off into a mystical forest and on to the fairways of golf courses across North America.
Death at a Highland Wedding
Kelley Armstrong, BA’91
In the fourth installment of her Rip Through Time series, bestselling author Kelley Armstrong takes readers 150 years into the past with modern-day homicide detective Mallory Atkinson in Death at a Highland Wedding.
Embracing her new life in Victorian Scotland as housemaid Catriona Mitchel, Atkinson has come to love her role as assistant to undertaker Dr. Duncan Gray and Detective Hugh McCreadie.
When murder ensues at McCreadie’s younger sister’s wedding, the trio is on the case, working swiftly to uncover the murderer before another life is lost.
For romcom fans, Armstrong’s novel Writing Mr. Wrong will be released later this month.
We Could Be Rats
Emily Austin, BA’11, MLS’13
In We Could Be Rats, best-selling author Emily Austin offers readers a “love letter to childhood” in a moving story about two very different sisters, growing up and the power of imagination.
An instant best-seller, the book is drawing critical acclaim as a “must-read” with a twist.
“Emily Austin’s latest is a masterclass in voice, unreliable narrators, and unknowable characters you get to know anyway because their small town and weird family and struggles with the world are so recognizable and so intimately detailed.”— Laurie Frankel, New York Times bestselling author of This Is How It Always Is
Austin’s novel Interesting Facts About Space was recently long-listed for the 2025 Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour.
The Manor in the Forest
Maia Aqui, fourth-year student, media and communication studies (MACS), Faculty of Information and Media Studies
In Maia Aqui’s debut novel, 15-year-old Alex Banks has only wanted one thing since her mother died—answers. Answers to the whereabouts of the rest of her family, to her dreams of a burning castle in a familiar forest or to the many strange encounters she’s had with nature.
Aqui was born and raised in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where the 2017 hurricane and her high school environmental science class helped inspire her first draft of The Manor in the Forest.
Her book’s central themes of magic and environmental protection take readers into the secret world of the Patroni, a hidden society spanning all corners of the globe, striving to maintain the balance between humans and nature with the future of the earth at risk.
The image that inspired Emma Donoghue’s latest book, The Paris Express: The wreckage of the Gare Montparnasse station in France in 1895, photographed by Studio Lévy (Wikipedia)
The Paris Express
Emma Donoghue, LLD’13, Western writer-in-residence, 1999–2000
A photograph of the Montparnasse train derailment in France in October 1895 inspired award-winning author Emma Donoghue’s latest historical fiction thriller, The Paris Express.
Donoghue set out to make the novel “as much like a train journey as possible,” putting readers on a fast-moving locomotive amongst a cast of characters en route to danger.
Set over a single day, as the morning train travels from the Normandy coast to Paris, men, women and children take their seats in the passenger cars, which are divided by wealth and status. Among the passengers is an anarchist intent on destruction, a young boy travelling alone, a pregnant woman fleeing her home village for the anonymity of the big city, a medical student who suspects a girl may have a fatal disease and the railway men, devoted to the train, to the company and to each other.
“Donoghue establishes an intricate web of human relationships as the narrative speeds toward an unexpected yet plausible finale. Readers ought to jump on board.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
The Paris Express is also the upcoming read for the Western Alumni Book Club, where graduates can connect and discuss the book on moderated private forums.
Look Ma, No Hands: A Chronic Pain Memoir
Gabrielle Drolet, BA’20, Western student writer-in-residence, 2020
Imagine being a successful journalist and cartoonist, regularly contributing to the New Yorker, the Globe and Mail and the New York Times. Now imagine developing a condition that impedes the use of your hands, causing chronic and life-altering pain.
Such was the reality for Gabrielle Drolet, who in Look Ma, No Hands writes about every aspect of life touched by disability: how she learned to write when she couldn’t type, to cook when she couldn’t chop and manage the most mundane daily tasks.
With candour and a “wonderful sense of the absurd,” Drolet reflects on her journey in her “chronic pain memoir” – one that CBC radio host Elamin Abdelmahmoud describes as “hilarious, overflowing with beauty, heartbreak and intimacy.”
101 Fascinating Golf Facts
David McPherson, BA’96, MA’98
Author, historian and award-winning journalist David McPherson will never forget Christmas morning, 1984. His father announced one last gift for the family. Hidden in the back of his grandparents’ artificial tree, was an envelope with a note from his father announcing McPherson and his family were now members of the Westmount Golf and Country Club.
“Starting that spring, this private club in Kitchener, Ont., perennially ranked as one of the top 20 golf courses in Canada, became my home away from home. This is where I learned to love the game.”
McPherson draws on that favourite memory in the opening of his new book, 101 Fascinating Golf Facts.
What follows is a collection of short tales illustrating golf’s rich history, with sprinklings of trivia about the game. Did you know a Canadian coined the term “mulligan” — a noun meaning “do-over” — which many recreational golfers take on the first tee after an errant drive? Or that the creators of one of the greatest board games ever, Trivial Pursuit, also built a devilish golf course north of Toronto? Readers may also be surprised to learn that playing on the world’s most expensive public golf course will cost them $1,000 to play just one round.
101 Fascinating Golf Facts follows McPherson’s 2023 release 101 Fascinating Canadian Music Facts.
