Bookends with Mattea Roach

Julian Barnes says his new novel is his final. It’s called Departure(s), and it’s about two people who fall in love when they’re young and then meet again decades later. The story is told through the perspective of a writer named Julian … who has a lot in common with the author himself. The book was released on Julian’s 80th birthday, and after four decades of writing and a Booker Prize win under his belt, Julian is finally putting down the pen. This week, he joins Mattea Roach to reflect on his literary legacy, why he feels less afraid of death and his recent secret wedding.

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For Michael V. Smith, the answer is a resounding yes … and he explores that in his new book, Soundtrack: A Lyric Memoir. It’s a collection of poems about snapshots in his life, each named after a different song or album. He dives into growing up gay during the AIDS crisis, finding his first love and coming of age on the dance floor. The book celebrates music and memory, and is a deeply personal look into the songs that send us back in time. This week, Michael tells Mattea Roach about the albums that made him, reading old journal entries and what it really means to be a man.

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This week, Bookends is celebrating libraries with a special Canada Reads event at the Hamilton Public Library.

Morgann Book truly lives up to her name. As one of Canada’s biggest book influencers, she shares her love of literature with millions of followers … and she’s taking that to the next level as a contestant on this year’s Canada Reads. Morgann is championing It’s Different This Time, the debut novel by Joss Richard. It’s a second chance romance about two former roommates with some very unresolved feelings, and it draws from Joss’s own experiences as a TV producer in LA. Joss and Morgann joined Mattea on-stage to talk about exes, preparing for Canada Reads and why there are so many chefs in romance novels.

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In Tara Gereaux’s new novel, Wild People Quiet, a Métis woman works tirelessly to hide her identity for years … until everything starts to come crashing down. It’s the early 1900s when Florence realizes she can pass as white. Longing for a comfortable life free of discrimination, she decides to leave her entire family and culture behind. Decades later, her carefully constructed facade is challenged by a group of Métis farmhands who come through town, and she begins to wonder if her rigid, lonely life was worth it after all. This week, Tara joins Mattea to talk about Florence’s complexity, life for Métis people in the mid-20th century and exploring the beauty of beadwork in the novel.

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What does family mean to two motherless daughters? That question is at the centre of Kin, a new work of historical fiction by Tayari Jones. It’s about the bond between two girls in the American South as they end up on starkly different paths, and a deeply human look into life for Black Americans on the brink of the civil rights movement. You might know Tayari from her novel An American Marriage, which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2019. Until Kin, Tayari called herself a “committed” contemporary novelist. But when those two characters from the 1950s came to her, she had no choice but to write a historical novel that ended up on Oprah’s list.

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