ONE OF THE GLOBE AND MAIL'S BEST BOOKS OF 2025WINNER OF THE 2025 TORONTO BOOK AWARD"Striking, elegant." – Publishers Weekly, ★ STARRED ReviewAn activist priest provides sanctuary for an encampment of unhoused people in her churchyardThe housing crisis plaguing major urban centres has sent countless people into the streets. In spring 2022, some of them found their way to the ...

An activist priest’s sermons remind us that one of the first social justice frameworks was the Bible.When lifelong activist and celebrated author Maggie Helwig became an Anglican priest, she brought both her hard-earned social justice wisdom and her incomparable literary prowess to the role. Where the homily – the weekly act of taking biblical texts and making them speak to one's time, place, and community – can easily become a rote exercise, Helwig takes the langu...

We think, maybe, that homelessness is some kind of stable state, like being housed except without housing. Without really considering it, most people do imagine that people who are homeless live in, if not one place, at least in one condition, that their days are in some way predictable. But homelessness is, more than anything else, a life of constant displacement.The housing crisis plaguing major urban centres has sent countless people into the streets. In spring 2022, so...

An activist priest’s sermons remind us that one of the first social justice frameworks was the Bible.When lifelong activist and celebrated author Maggie Helwig became an Anglican priest, she brought both her hard-earned social justice wisdom and her incomparable literary prowess to the role. Where the homily – the weekly act of taking biblical texts and making them speak to one's time, place, and community – can easily become a rote exercise, Helwig takes the langu...

Poison? Paranoia?: this 2008 novel of love and fear is more relevant than everA girl faints in the Toronto subway. Her friends are taken to the hospital with unexplained rashes; they complain about a funny smell in the subway. Swarms of police arrive, and then the hazmat team. Panic ripples through the city, and words like poisoning and terrorism become airborne. Soon, people are collapsing all over the city in subways and streetcars and malls.Alex was witn...

Maggie Helwig's stunning British debut is an extraordinary war novel, a poignant and gripping story about the ripples that carry on long after the fighting is over, and about two people kept apart by history, ethics and human frailty.Daniel is a war correspondent in Bosnia, a loner and a truthteller, up to a point, careless with everything except his sources. Lili is an interpreter, based in Paris, careful and meticulous. But when she finds herself working for the war crimes tribun...