The Bibliophile: Welcome to work but not to remain

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An introduction to Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers by Marcello Di Cintio

In Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers, which publishes next Tuesday, Marcello Di Cintio travels across Canada (from the Okanagan, to Leamington, to Goose Bay, Newfoundland) to document the experiences of migrant workers, destabilizing the popular notion of Canada as a safe, welcoming space where migrants can escape the hardships of their home countries.

Contrarily, Di Cintio highlights a recent UN report that describes the Temporary Foreign Worker Program as a “breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery.”

Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers by Marcello Di Cintio. Cover designed by Kate Sinclair.

There was so much I didn’t know about migrant policy and programs, about the prevalent unsafe housing, constant harassment, and unstable pay experienced by the workers every day. Or I knew about some of it, but only vaguely, at the back of my mind, the way I imagine millions of Canadians “know” about these issues. Precarious is filled with many of the harrowing, chaotic stories of precarity that make up the modern migrant experience in Canada. In a time of heightened, near-propagandistic Canadian patriotism, Precarious feels like such an important book to recalibrate our sense of identity, and our sense of what can be done to improve, rather than abolish, migrant labour in Canada.

I recommend taking the time to read Di Cintio’s beautifully angry op-ed in today’s Globe and Mail, which he writes in response to Poilievre’s call to scrap the TFWP and deny visas to new migrants:

“I wonder . . . how many see the irony of being lectured about the ills of foreign labour by a recently unemployed man from 2,600 kilometres away—about as far from the riding as Chihuahua, Mexico—who showed up to take the job of a local resident.”

And I hope you’ll find the time to read the following excerpt from Precarious—taken from the introduction—which lays the groundwork for the book by pulling from Di Cintio’s familial experiences of migrant labour, and how these differ drastically from more recent experiences uncovered in later chapters.

Dominique
Publicity & Marketing Coordinator

An excerpt from Precarious

Introduction

My grandfather was a migrant worker before such a thing existed.

Amedeo Sorrentino was born in 1923 and hardly a man when Mussolini forced him into the Italian infantry. In my favourite photo of him, he is wearing his army uniform and holding a cigarette between his fingers. My grandfather never smoked, but the photographer told him the cigarette would make him look older. After the photo was taken, the army shipped Amedeo across the sea to North Africa, handed him a rifle, and sent him out into the desert. British soldiers quickly decimated his regiment, and Amedeo was taken prisoner. He spent the rest of the war in a London POW camp.

After the war, Amedeo returned to his hometown of Lanciano and learned that his mother had died. Shrapnel from a grenade struck her in the back and killed her instantly as she sat in the village square with Amedeo’s youngest brother on her lap. My grandfather never hesitated to retell his war stories, and they were harrowing, but he didn’t like talking about what his family endured during those years. “The real war was back home,” he’d say before growing quiet.

My grandfather met my grandmother, Giulia, a few years later. Amedeo was not the first suitor to come calling. There were “lots of boys to choose from,” she once told me. One was a police officer, but policemen were not allowed to marry until they were thirty, and Giulia didn’t want to marry an “old man.” She chose Amedeo because he was the only one to make her laugh. Their courtship involved walking back from church together with family chaperones following a few paces behind them.

An interview with Marcello Di Cintio in the Calgary Herald.

Because they were both poor, Giulia and Amedeo waited until after Easter to announce their engagement so they wouldn’t have to give holiday gifts to each other’s families. Giulia’s mother, Guiseppina, did not approve of the engagement. “Why do you want to marry someone poorer than you are?” she asked her eldest daughter. They married on a rainy day in 1948 after their borrowed car got stuck in the mud and had to be pulled free by an ox. The family ate the wedding dinner in Giulia’s parents’ bedroom, the largest room in the house. Afterwards one of Amedeo’s friends set off firecrackers he made from unexploded artillery shells he’d found in the fields.

Amedeo vowed never to leave home again. He’d found happiness with Giulia and wanted to raise a family with her in the country that he loved. Their first daughter, my mother, was born later that year, then two more girls in the years that followed. Amedeo toiled as a tenant tobacco farmer to support them. The landowner allowed Amedeo to keep and sell only half of the harvest. With no sons, Amedeo did most of the labour himself. He found extra work at his uncle Nicola’s olive oil press. Though Amedeo had little education—he’d reached only the fifth grade before leaving school—he was good with numbers and did his uncle’s accounting.

For all his love of Italy and his promise to never leave it, Amedeo knew he could never properly provide for his family by working on someone else’s farm. Men were leaving Italy every day to find work abroad, and Giulia persuaded Amedeo to follow his sister and brother-in-law to Canada, at least for a couple of years. Amedeo obliged and set off in 1956. He sent back a photo of himself waving from the deck of the Canada-bound ship. A note on the back written in black ink read: “As soon as I lifted my hand, my first thought was of returning soon to my family, and to my beautiful Italy.”

Before World War II and the Great Depression preceding it, most immigrant workers to Canada came to develop the agricultural economy of the Prairies. After the war, though, Canada’s booming industrial economy needed urban workers: people to build things, not just grow things. Many Italians ended up on construction sites in cities like Toronto, Montreal, and in my grandfather’s case, Calgary. Amedeo poured concrete during the day and tended to greenhouses at night. Years later, my grandfather would look out at the Calgary skyline and point to the buildings he helped build, including Foothills Hospital where I was born.

With the money Amedeo sent back to Italy, Giulia was able to buy a bicycle for her daughters and a record player for herself. One day, a vinyl record appeared in the mail from Canada: a recording of his cousins singing songs in a small Calgary studio. Amedeo was on the album, too. He had recorded a message for his wife and daughters, telling them that he loved and missed them. There were no telephones in Lanciano at that time, and this was the first Giulia had heard her husband’s voice in over a year. The arrival of the record was both a blessing and a tragedy. For all the marvellous joy it brought to hear Amedeo’s voice, the record reminded everyone that he was far away.

My grandfather didn’t want to stay in Canada. He wanted to save enough money to build a better life for his wife and daughters back home. Maybe buy some land and a bigger house. He wanted to be temporary. After two years, though, he and Giulia decided that it would be better for the family to live in Canada than to reunite back in Italy. Nonno resisted, but Nonna was stubborn. With the money Amedeo had sent them, Giulia and their daughters boarded the RMS Saxonia for the long, seasick journey west. The girls insisted on bringing their new bicycle with them. It lasted for decades, and I used to ride it around my grandparents’ neighbourhood when I was a child. Nonna left the behind the album that brought so much happiness for the family with Amedeo’s sister, Ersiglia. When Amedeo and Giulia returned to visit Italy years later and inquired about the album, Ersiglia claimed the mice ate it.

I doubt Amedeo and Giulia knew the role their whiteness played in their journey to Canada. The entry of non-white immigrants was restricted until 1962 when the federal government expunged overt racial discrimination from our immigration policy. Even afterwards, though, bigotry proved a tough habit to break. Anyone from anywhere was now permitted into the country as long as they demonstrated they could succeed here, but preference was given to people from Europe. And only Canadians from the United States and certain European and Middle Eastern nations could sponsor the immigration of their siblings. In the early sixties, my grandfather sponsored his sister and two brothers to come to Canada, a privilege he wouldn’t have enjoyed had he been Black or Asian.

My nonno died in July 2020 during the first fraught COVID summer. He’d been living in an extended-care facility since a stroke felled him a couple of years earlier. Nonno received initial treatment at the Foothills Hospital, and during a particularly painful injection quipped to my mother, “I never should’ve helped build this place.”

Due to the pandemic restrictions, fewer than fifty invited family members, masked and distanced, attended his funeral mass. When I stood at the front of the church to give his eulogy and looked out at the sparse attendees, I knew that the church would have overflowed with mourners had Nonno passed even a few months earlier. My grandfather was one of the first links in an immigration chain that brought dozens of families to Calgary. No doubt hundreds of the city’s Italians can trace their history back to my grandfather’s reluctant passage across the Atlantic.

Circumstances have changed for workers from abroad since then. Even though my grandfather came to work and never intended to stay, Canada granted him landed immigrant status upon his arrival. He had a choice to immigrate or not. Had my grandfather made the same journey even a decade later, he’d likely be considered a “temporary foreign worker”: welcome to work but not to remain. A labourer, yes. Not a link.

Marcello’s recent op-ed in the Globe and Mail.

Nonno’s passing made me think of his contemporary counterparts. My grandfather only wanted the best for his daughters, and he was willing to sacrifice years away from them for the opportunities Canada would eventually provide. No doubt today’s migrant workers make the same bargain. But what does it mean to voyage far from family to a nation that wants you to work but doesn’t want you to stay? Bring your arms and backs, Canada pleads, but leave the rest on the other side of the border. We need your sweat. We don’t need your stories.

But I did. After my grandfather died, I set out to hear the stories of migrant workers in Canada. I knew nothing about these newcomers. I wondered about their days in our country, the lives and loved ones they left behind, and what compelled them to first make their long journeys here. I wondered, too, if they believed their time in Canada made up for their sacrifices and absences. Was our country worth it?

I spent the following three years travelling the country to meet workers and their advocates, pausing my wanderings for intermittent pandemic shutdowns and travel restrictions. I quickly learned that my image of a migrant worker was sorely limited. I thought I’d be spending all my time speaking to Latino farmhands and Filipina “nannies.” But I found that migrant labour exists within all aspects of Canadian society. Temporary workers are everywhere. They build our homes, drive our trucks, clean our offices, and pour our coffee. Many of Canada’s post-secondary institutions are propped up with the foreign tuition paid by international students who, most of the time, are also migrant workers. The complexity overwhelmed me at times. The more people I spoke to, the more threads emerged. I wish I could have followed them all, but the diverse workers I did manage to speak to expanded my perspective of what migrant labour encompassed.

For the most part, I heard the kinds of stories I expected to hear. I learned about how calamities back home—a sick child, a dying wife, a hurricane—compelled people from around the world to seek financial opportunities here. I heard stories of redemption, reinvention, and romance. I learned about workers sending their overseas families gifts of maple syrup and Toronto Maple Leafs caps to stand in for the physical embraces their long separation denies them. I smiled at the baby photos on their cellphones. I cheered workers on soccer fields and watched the dance videos they recorded in their greenhouses. I heard about lovers the workers had left back home, and the lovers they found here.

What I didn’t expect, though, was how often Canada itself was the source of the migrants’ trauma. Despite the sufferings many workers escaped, a sea of troubles awaited them here. Nearly every worker I spoke to had been done wrong. Cheated. Threatened. Beaten. The abuse nearly always came at the hands of my fellow citizens. I realized I wasn’t just looking into the lives of workers who’d long been invisible to me; I was seeing a Canada I didn’t recognize. The more I learned the migrants’ stories, the more I learned our own. And the portrait of Canada I started to see wasn’t flattering.

In awards news:

In good publicity news:

  • Marcello Di Cintio, author of Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers was featured in several outlets this week:
    • Interview in the Calgary Herald: “What started off being a book about other people, about these workers, really also became at the same time a book about us, a book about how Canada has treated these people . . . I feel I’ve written an unpatriotic book in a very patriotic time.”
    • Op-ed in the Globe and Mail: “For a half century, TFWs have recounted stories of filthy and crowded bunkhouses, unsafe working conditions, wage theft, humiliation, physical and sexual assault, and all manner of cruelty. I heard many of these stories first-hand. Penalties for these crimes are too soft and too rare. Victims have little recourse.”
  • Old Romantics by Maggie Armstrong was reviewed in Heavy Feather Review: “Brilliantly oscillates between a focus on the inner world of a flawed woman’s personal journey through the land of modern romance and a spitting commentary on what it even means to be a wife, mother, and woman in the 21st century.”
  • Best Canadian Poetry 2026 edited by Mary Dalton was reviewed in the Washington Review of Books: “Reading Dalton, one really gets the sense that there was a poetic process enacting the selection process . . . I thank [Molly] Peacock for bringing the series to life, and [Anita] Lahey and Biblioasis for keeping it alive.”
  • Self Care by Russell Smith was reviewed in That Shakespearean Review: “You can always count on Russell Smith for a straightforward technique that hits you in the solar plexus.”
  • We’re Somewhere Else Now by Robyn Sarah was reviewed in The Tribune: “This collection grapples with contemporary life in a way that is both stylized and vulnerable . . . Sarah’s ability to tie scenes of everyday life to highly abstract concepts and ideas results in compelling poems.”

CROSSES IN THE SKY shortlisted for the J.W. Dafoe Book Prize!

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We’re thrilled to share that on September 25, 2025, the shortlist for the 2025 J.W. Dafoe Book Prize was announced, and included Crosses in the Sky: Jean de Brébeuf and the Destruction of Huronia by Mark Bourrie! View the full shortlist and announcement on their website here.

The winner of the J.W. Dafoe Book Prize, valued at $12,000, will be announced on October 14.

The J.W. Dafoe Prize memorializes Canadian editor John Wesley Dafoe, and is one of the richest book awards for exceptional non-fiction about Canada, Canadians, and the nation in international affairs.

A huge congratulations to Mark from all of us at Biblioasis.

Grab a copy of the book here!

ABOUT CROSSES IN THE SKY

From the bestselling author of Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre Esprit-Radisson

This is the story of the collision of two worlds. In the early 1600s, the Jesuits—the Catholic Church’s most ferocious warriors for Christ—tried to create their own nation on the Great Lakes and turn the Huron (Wendat) Confederacy into a model Jesuit state. At the centre of their campaign was missionary Jean de Brébeuf, a mystic who sought to die a martyr’s death. He lived among a proud people who valued kindness and rights for all, especially women. In the end, Huronia was destroyed. Brébeuf became a Catholic saint, and the Jesuit’s “martyrdom” became one of the founding myths of Canada.

In this first secular biography of Brébeuf, historian Mark Bourrie, bestselling author of Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson, recounts the missionary’s fascinating life and tells the tragic story of the remarkable people he lived among. Drawing on the letters and documents of the time—including Brébeuf’s accounts of his bizarre spirituality—and modern studies of the Jesuits, Bourrie shows how Huron leaders tried to navigate this new world and the people struggled to cope as their nation came apart. Riveting, clearly told, and deeply researched, Crosses in the Sky is an essential addition to—and expansion of—Canadian history.

ABOUT MARK BOURRIE

Mark Bourrie is an Ottawa-based author, lawyer, and journalist. He holds a master’s in journalism from Carleton University and a PhD in history from the University of Ottawa. In 2017, he was awarded a Juris Doctor degree and was called to the bar in 2018. He has won numerous awards for his journalism, including a National Magazine Award, and received the RBC Charles Taylor Prize in 2020 for his book Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson. His most recent books include Big Men Fear Me: The Fast Life and Quick Death of Canada’s Most Powerful Media Mogul, the national bestseller Crosses in the Sky: Jean de Brébeuf and the Destruction of Huronia, and Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre.

The Bibliophile: In Memoriam: Elaine Dewar (1948–2025)

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On the Death of a Happy Warrior for the Public Good

I was walking into work the last week of August when Elaine Dewar called. She had just got back from holidays at a cottage with her daughters and grandchildren. I was waiting on the last round of edits for her new book, Growing Up Oblivious. But she was calling with much more dire news. She’d developed a pain on vacation, thought it might be gallstones or appendicitis, so went to emergency to get it checked out. They’d done a scan and it was cancer. There was no word on the origin or the extent of it yet, but she’d asked to see the ultrasound and had spent far too much time over her life as a science researcher looking at medical records not to know that it was almost certainly terminal. She hoped she’d have six months. She wanted to talk about the book. I demurred, said we didn’t need to now, that she had other things to worry about. But Elaine wasn’t having any of it. “Of course I’m going to worry about it, honey,” she told me gently. “It’s my last book, and it’s with you. So what are we going to do about this?” And with that, we got to work.

Elaine Dewar. Credit: Danielle Dewar.

When Sam Hiyate wrote to me in early December 2015 with a proposal for Elaine Dewar’s book The Handover, about the sale of Canadian publisher McClelland and Stewart to Random House in contravention of Canada’s cultural protection laws, I knew little about Elaine’s work or reputation. Nor was this book, a work of deeply-researched nonfiction, our usual fare at the time; Biblioasis was much more strictly a literary enterprise in those years, borne forward by the ignorant hubris necessary to lay claim to such a designation. How else to continue in a world, even a small, purportedly literary enclave of the same, which cares so little about what we do? Our list in 2015—it strikes me now, at a time that one year pushes into another with almost no distinction, that 2015 was our break-out as a publisher, with three Giller nominations, a Writers’ Trust shortlisting, and a GG win, among other accolades: perhaps we wouldn’t have been sent Elaine’s proposal if that hadn’t been the case—was almost exclusively fiction, poetry, and works in translation; our only experience with nonfiction was literary criticism, with a sideline of regional history and more commercial titles to try and pay the bills. Reading Elaine’s proposal, I was worried that we didn’t have the publishing chops to pull it off. I knew that we didn’t have the money to properly fund its writing: I don’t think we’d ever paid an advance of more than a couple thousand dollars at that point. But we thought Elaine’s was an important story, so I pushed my envelope and offered $4000, which seemed a big risk for a press consistently skirting insolvency, and was able to swing her an additional $3500 in Writer’s Reserve funding. And for that Elaine produced what Jack Stoddart justifiably claimed to be “the single most important book about Canadian publishing . . . published in fifty years.” It garnered her a Governor General’s Award nomination and reams of press coverage, and resulted in a range of important conversations among anyone who cared about publishing or culture in Canada. It’s probably no surprise to those who knew her that it garnered Biblioasis’s first serious threat of a lawsuit, by a former Minister of Culture who had signed off on the sale of M&S, though when they learned that Elaine had dug up government documents that showed exactly what Elaine had claimed, this person (& their lawyer) thankfully never again darkened my inbox.

Elaine’s office and desk, with the research for Growing Up Oblivious lined up chapter by chapter.

Because that was the thing about Elaine: she always had the receipts. There were times earlier in our working history that I doubted her claims, but I quickly learned that she always had the proof somewhere in a manila file folder on one of the multiple desks in her sprawling basement office; there was always a footnote. She taught me to read those footnotes with care as I read her manuscripts. She was a meticulous researcher, with a tenacity I’ve yet to see in another. Though she described herself, earlier this week, as being as “spiritual as an old sock,” she nevertheless believed her role as a journalist involved a sacred trust: to follow the facts as far as they would take her; to pursue the truth at all costs; to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. She did all three with regularity until the end.

Elaine, during our numerous editorial exchanges, offered me a first-rate education in how to edit and publish researched nonfiction, perhaps to the chagrin of those authors who’ve followed her. The key was to “never to be afraid to look stupid”; to clarify and keep pushing when you’re not clear on something; to keep asking questions until you’re satisfied. To fight over every word, every footnote, as the need arises. And we did, it seemed, fight over everything. Those initial Handover editorial rounds were bruising, unlike anything I’d experienced before as a publisher and editor. But as hard as it was, she never took it personally, as she trusted that we had her own, and her book’s, best interest in sight. She trusted in the process.

Poster for the Fourth Annual National Magazine Awards.

And in the process, she helped to reshape the direction of the press. Having been through the fire with Elaine, we knew better how to do these kinds of books, and knew, from her research, that one of the primary consequences of the sale of Canadian publishing to foreign interests was the decline in researched nonfiction. There was a gap in the market that needed to be filled, but more importantly a gap of intellectual responsibility. She fervently believed, despite her noted concerns about Canadian nationalism, that Canadians should be in charge of which Canadian stories were told. And that it would take Canadian writers and publishers to hold the powerful within Canadian society accountable. Elaine felt an intense sense of duty to tell the truth, and hated, as she called them, lying liars who lied. She used her formidable intelligence and research skills to untangle those lies, and we’re all better for it, and as another journalist wrote to me this week, now far lesser for her loss.

Elaine’s writing desk, with more chapters of Growing Up Oblivious.

What drove her was her indomitable curiosity about just about everything. She loved to know things, and grew infuriated when the standard account didn’t make sense. This curiosity led her to begin digging into the origins of COVID when we were all in lockdown, reading the scientific papers, and discovering right away that there were things that didn’t add up; it led her to uncover connections between Winnipeg’s National Microbiology Laboratory and the labs at the centre of the COVID outbreak in Wuhan, and gather evidence of the Chinese government’s infiltration of this lab that would have national political ramifications thereafter. What amazes me about the research that became her On the Origin of the Deadliest Pandemic in 100 Years is that, though it was perhaps the first serious book-length enquiry into the origins of COVID in the English language (quite a feat, I must say, for a provincial publisher!), it has stood up remarkably well, with the consensus opinion moving closer and closer to Elaine’s own over the ensuing years. She followed the facts where they took her, and as usual, she ended up pretty close to the mark.

The Handover and On the Origin of the Deadliest Pandemic in 100 Years by Elaine Dewar.

Her last book started with a January 1st, 2022 email from psychologist and Native Studies professor Roland Chrisjohn asking her to investigate “‘the cover-up’ of the Canadian government’s ‘genocide’ of Indigenous people.” But in her research, she became pre-occupied by questions of what was known when, by whom; and how she, growing up in the prairies, hadn’t known about the plight of Indigenous people in the surrounding communities. She turned her sharp journalistic eye on herself, and in the process wrote a kind of journalist’s autobiography and an investigation into the mechanics of what she calls obliviousness. The book is also an investigation of Indigenous health, segregated hospitals, and how the government used the lure of health care to conduct unethical experiments on wide swaths of the Indigenous population. There are some very disturbing revelations that Elaine uncovered by doing what she did best: following the trails of footnotes to uncover what had up to now largely escaped notice. Growing Up Oblivious will be published at some point in early 2026; it may well be her most important book.

Poster from the Eleventh Annual National Magazine Awards.

When it became obvious that we didn’t have months but weeks, and then, really, days, I went up to Toronto to spend Monday and Tuesday with her in the Palliative Care Unit at Bridgepoint to work on the final edits and the conclusion. She was surrounded by family and friends who’d flown in from around the world to be with her. Though her body had completely failed by this time, and she was self-administering her pain medication as we spoke, she remained as sharp, funny, and caring as ever. We worked on a round of final edits and questions until she needed a rest; then did a second round; she did a long, wide-ranging audio interview with Marci McDonald about the book and what she uncovered, and was brilliant at it despite everything; then she shifted gears again, devoted to the attentions of her daughters and friends who were waiting for her. The next day she did another long interview with a national radio program and then we worked on the last paragraphs of her conclusion, arguing over word choices as if we had all the time in the world. She never, she told me, liked the word decency: it was a weasel word, could mean whatever you wanted it to mean. We needed something more specific to the issue at hand. We went back and forth for a while, and then it hit me. Dignity? “Yup. That’s it. Now let’s cut the rest of the fat and get it done.” And so we did.

There was so much love in that room, so much laughter, so much dignity, that it dispelled death’s shadow. It was a pleasure and honour to be there among her loved ones, if only for a little while. She seemed able to keep everything in those final days in perfect balance, the professional alongside the personal. Though perhaps, for her, that distinction wasn’t as sharp as it was for others. It didn’t seem possible that, when I took my leave, she’d be gone in less than 48 hours. And though I spent this morning watching her funeral, I still can’t quite believe she’s gone.

Family photos of a young Elaine Dewar.

Elaine once described herself as aspiring “to be a happy warrior for the public good.” She was that. She was fierce, and tough as nails. But she was also a warm, beautiful person, matriarch to what I’ve learned is an incredible family, and a very good friend. She was, always, inspiring, and never more than in the last days; she approached her fate with resolve. I still haven’t entirely processed these last, intense few weeks, those days alongside her and her family and friends at Bridgeport, but I’m grateful once more for the gift of her time, intelligence, care, and compassion, and we will all at Biblioasis try to live up to the example she set.

Dan Wells,
Publisher

In good publicity news:

The Bibliophile: The Scorpion and the Frog

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Next week is the Canadian publication of Russell Smith’s novel Self Care, his first book in a decade and first novel in fifteen years. Most of you may know Russell Smith as one of Canada’s sharpest satirists who first came on the scene with the Governor General’s Award–nominated novel How Insensitive (1994) and who followed it up with several more novels often poking fun at our contemporary culture. But my own introduction to Russell’s work was his last book, Confidence (2015), a collection of short stories about people in Toronto and their conflicting desires, loneliness, and disappointments. When I read it, I got hooked by his dialogue and his humour. I felt that each story had just the right balance of being both wickedly funny and rather sad, which, I think, is a lovely combination for a story to be.

Self Care by Russell Smith. Cover designed by Kate Sinclair.

Self Care is the long-awaited return of Russell Smith, and it is also somewhat of a departure from his earlier work. Here we still have that satirical edge and that perfect pitch dialogue, but it’s also a rather dark book focusing on the particular dissatisfaction affecting people today and the online communities and culture that enable it.

A provocative modern fable about sex and self-loathing, Self Care follows a young woman who, despite her better judgement, starts a relationship with an incel. It’s a dark twist on a love story (a “Romeo-and-Juliet tale for our cultural moment,” as Mark Kingwell put it), and a righteously funny and tragic novel about our desire to care and be cared for in return.

I got the chance to speak with Russell about his new book. Read on for that conversation.

Thanks for reading,

Ahmed Abdalla
Publicist

An Interview with Russell Smith

Could you start by telling me how Self Care came about?

This is my tenth book and it’s a departure for me in that it’s not about my life at all. It is from the point of view of a young woman and it’s about a world of people much younger than I am. I taught creative writing for several years and I was inspired by talking to lots of young people. I stayed in touch with my students after I stopped teaching in that MFA program, mostly through social media. I became fascinated by certain problems that they had that I didn’t have when I was their age. In many ways I wanted to write about what it’s like being young today in North America. The main pressures that I wanted to describe were financial ones that these young people with degrees in the humanities just have no idea how to make a living. There are very few options available to them.

Also, one of the things I noticed women talked about a lot online were frustrations with men and particularly with “cool” boyfriends who wouldn’t commit to relationships. But another thing that really struck me was a couple of women in private conversations with me started talking about incels and incel culture. A couple of women admitted to having a fantasy of taking one of these guys and showing them what a true relationship could be like and changing him. And I think that’s a fantasy that all of us have. The idea that I can change him. I thought that was maybe not such an uncommon fantasy, so I thought I would invent a story around it.

You said Self Care is a departure for you because it’s not really about yourself anymore. Is part of that why you chose to write from a woman’s perspective? Most of your previous work up to this point has been from a man’s perspective.

I just really wanted to write about what I was seeing among the young women who were in my own circle who struck me as quite sad. I wanted to describe a particularly contemporary kind of sadness. I also think people are less and less interested in men. I’ve written a lot about men and their sex drives. I’ve really played that out. I’ve done enough of that lustful man character.

And there are satirical elements, but it’s not a full-on satire. Just like my last book, Confidence, a collection of short stories, this is a more serious book than my early works.

Confidence by Russell Smith. Cover designed by Gordon Robertson.

How satirical did you intend this book to be? Because it makes fun of a lot of different people, but also gets quite serious as the story goes on.

It’s a dark book, but there’s humour in it. There are various contemporary milieux or situations that I just find ridiculous. Primarily my own milieu. Satire is always written by insiders. I’m writing about me and my friends often in everything I write. The targets of satire here are the kinds of people who work for online health journals and the reason that they have to write nonsense is that they’re not paid enough to do any actual research. They just repeat faddish ideas and trends.

Another thing that I’m making fun of is the obsession with mental health that young people in university environments have at the moment that seems to be encouraged by social media. What I mean by that is that everyone is encouraged to think of themselves as mentally ill. You’ve heard the word neurodivergent suddenly rise in popularity over the last five years, when ten years ago we never heard that word at all, and now every single sensitive person claims to be neurodivergent. I think it’s more salutary to realize that if everybody is neurodivergent, then nobody is. If you’ve ever suffered from depression or anxiety, and who hasn’t, you’re neurodivergent. But that just means you’re normal. Also, there’s a million quizzes you could do online to prove you have ADHD. Anyone can come up with these quizzes. If you take one of these quizzes the answer will always be that you have ADHD. People are desperate to identify as disabled in this way. I’m amazed by how thrilled people are with this diagnosis.

Suicide is also a big part of this book, and suicides of artists in particular. Why is that?

There was a weird period in my life a couple of years ago where there were a couple of suicides close to me, in a cluster, and that was just a coincidence. But that gave me the idea of an imagined epidemic of suicide of people in the arts.

There is a strange fixation with suicide in the culture right now. The more that people say you have to be sensitive and cautious about the idea of suicide and you have to put trigger warnings on top of anything that mentions it, the more the idea is brought up and discussed and you are creating one giant trigger. This is one of these paradoxes. It’s like the Streisand Effect. The more you say “Don’t mention the war” the more you mention the war.

Gloria lives in a world in which there are literal, physical signs everywhere about suicide. Some of those really exist. The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto in the past did have big posters all over the city with the slogan “Not suicide. Not today.” I’ve quoted that in the book. So you’re trying to get people to be aware of the dangers of suicide and you’re putting up posters reminding people of the possibility of suicide all over the city. That struck me as paradoxical.

The idea that we should all be proud of being fragile and vulnerable, that we need to identify primarily with our limitations, that we need to label ourselves with them and notify everybody of them—this is a new pressure and I don’t think it’s healthy. The book is not an essay. I’m not lecturing anybody about anything. It’s a love story about two people that fails, but if we’re talking about the satirical aspects, I couldn’t help having fun with this.

Can you talk about how sex and intimacy has changed because of the internet? It seems as though all these characters are dissatisfied with their sex lives and they turn to the internet for something. Daryn with the incels and Gloria with her social media and wellness blog. But even they seem to get dissatisfied with that as the story goes on.

Daryn and Gloria’s dissatisfaction are very similar and they have similar complaints about the world, although their solutions are wildly different. Daryn is upset about income inequality, that he can’t get ahead. He works in a Best Buy and doesn’t come from a privileged class, so he has no advantages in the world. Gloria is preoccupied with the same things, just as her leftist friends are, but it’s just that Daryn’s solutions are different.

Daryn is dissatisfied and unhappy and so he turns to a community of unhappy men online for companionship, while Gloria is talking to women all the time who are disappointed in men because they’re on dating apps. The apps give everybody so many options that nobody’s willing to commit. Even the cool, sensitive, educated men that Gloria and her friends want to date, they know the right language, they know how to speak feminist language and they know the sensitive things to say, but they’re extremely insensitive about women. They like to have a bunch of women on the go at any time, and that makes all those women unhappy.

Although it should be pointed out that Gloria has refused to go on dating apps. Only her friend Isabel has been on the apps, but Isabel also posts a lot of sexy selfies. She has an anonymous Instagram account where she posts them and that’s simply for own self-esteem. She tends to post sexy selfies, as a lot of people do, when she is really down and lacking in self-esteem.

Seth’s Christmas Ghost Stories 2025 are available to preorder!

Why do you think more people are dissatisfied and unhappy?

The culture of the image is making people unhappy. The culture of competition around appearance is exacerbated by Instagram. It’s terribly unhealthy. There’s an instant gratification in being attractive. If you’re attractive and you’re having an attractive day, and I’m sure this applies to men too, you put an attractive photograph of yourself up and lots of people respond positively, it is validating and gratifying in the short term. There’s a little rush that comes with that that I’m sure can be very addictive but not fulfilling in the long run. And Daryn also needs validation from people to find that he’s not alone in feeling miserable and rejected and that the whole world hates him.

In a way they become isolated in their own online communities, where they get their insecurities or anger amplified. The more obvious one causing harm being that of the incels, but Gloria’s social media and online wellness culture can seem just troubling. Were you trying to compare the two?

Yes, and as I said Daryn’s concerns and Gloria’s concerns are very similar. They’re upset about inequality in the world, they’re both lonely and find it difficult to find loving, committed partners.

Now Daryn’s hasn’t really tried. He doesn’t try because that’s what incels are like. They don’t try and they’re subject to a kind of delusion. They feel they’re unattractive. I was inspired here by reading a lot and watching documentaries about incels. You can actually see some video interviews with young men who are incels online and they say “I’m so ugly. I’m unattractive.” And they’re absolutely normal looking guys. They’ve got a kind of body dysmorphia. They look in the mirror and they see someone ugly and the rest of the world doesn’t, but they’ve convinced themselves that they are ugly. They’re convinced that women don’t like them, but they don’t associate with women at all. They don’t know women. They don’t try, I think, for fear of rejection, for this decision that they’re not the right kind of guy. They don’t know women enough to know that women aren’t looking for what they think they’re looking for.

What links Gloria and Daryn is a sense of dissatisfaction with the world generally.

It’s almost like Daryn thinks his appearance is also out of his control too, similar to how he feels like he can’t get ahead financially. And Gloria starts her relationship with Daryn almost as an experiment in control, of wanting a sense of control because every other part of her life is in flux.

Control is a great word, because that’s the problem with both of them. They have no power in their lives. Gloria feels powerless in her career and her love life, and the same with Daryn.

Gloria doesn’t really know what she wants. She’s very confused. She doesn’t know why she’s going after Daryn. At first she thinks it’s just because she hates him and wants to punish him. But then she realizes she’s actually intrigued by the idea of a boy falling so helplessly in love with her. She tries to resist the idea, but it’s a very attractive idea since all of her hipster boyfriends have been unable to do that. She finds that there’s something in Daryn’s twisted worldview that is actually appealing to her and that’s the idea of traditional gender roles, his idea of a monogamous relationship in which a man takes care of a woman, like a knight and a princess. Something about that idea really lights up her brain because that’s the absolute opposite of what all the boys in her life were too cool to give her.

Now why did she start first having sex with Daryn? Well she wants sex, but she’s nervous about him. She doesn’t know if he could be an actual violent man. It’s funny enough, but the men who scared her with possibly violent acts during sex are all the cool, sensitive hipster boys. Those are the ones who know that some women like to be choked during sex and so they’ll do it without asking your consent. That’s how the novel opens. Gloria is really nervous about power imbalances in sex with someone who’s declared himself an incel. So she puts herself in the role of a dominatrix, which doesn’t come naturally for her. She’s not really turned on by the sex, but that’s the only way she can feel safe in having sex with him. But also, she wants to teach him a lesson. She’s mad because when she first saw him, he was participating in a neo-nazi, anti-immigrant demonstration. In her mind, she can’t separate the desire to love and the desire to punish. She wants control of him, and the only way she can do it is through this particular kind of sex.

Coming soon: Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers (Sep 30), Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way (Oct 7), Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide (Oct 14), and The Sorrow of Angels (Nov 4).

Is there anything you would like people to take away from reading this?

That you read books just to find out what happens in the story, not to learn a lesson about anything. But if there’s any one message it’s possibly just that you can’t change people. In a way, Self Care can be seen as a modern retelling of the tale of the scorpion and the frog. Are you familiar with that?

No, I’m not. Can you explain it?

You’ve maybe heard some version of it with different animals, or sometimes it’s a young girl and snake, but it goes something like this with different variations depending on what people or animals are involved:

There’s a forest fire on one side of the river, and the scorpion wants to flee the forest fire by crossing the river, except he can’t swim. But he’s next to a frog who obviously can swim. The scorpion says to the frog “Listen, would you do me a big favour? Can you carry me on your back and swim me across the river?” and the frog says “Why would I do that? I know you’re dangerous and that you sting and kill frogs. You’re going to hurt me.” Then the scorpion says “No, absolutely not. Why would I do that? If I sting you as we are crossing then we both drown. So it wouldn’t help me. We both need to get out of here. Just do me this one favour and I’ll never harm you or your family as long as we live.” So the frog agrees. He puts the scorpion on his back and swims him across the river. As soon as they get to the other bank, the scorpion bites the frog and poisons him. As the frog is dying he says “Why on earth would you do that?” and the scorpion says, “You knew what I was when you picked me up.”

Sometimes the punch line is simply the line “It’s in my nature.” It’s a parable that applies to Gloria and the incel.

You don’t think Daryn could have ever changed?

No, I don’t. Daryn is messed up. He gives hints at his violence from early on, but she’s blind to them because she’s desperate for love. And we’ve all done that. We’ve all ignored red flags, and I’ve even been the red flag, and we all kick ourselves and say “What was I thinking?”

In good publicity news:

  • Scout Magazine featured several Biblioasis titles in their Scout Book Club: Revolution issue:
    • Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers by Marcello Di Cintio: “One of the most engrossing and activating books I’ve read so far this year . . . both thoroughly researched and deeply nuanced.”
    • Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide by Batool Abu Akleen, Nahil Mohana, Ala’a Obaid, and Sondos Sabra: “It’s impossible not to be moved by these devastating, honest human accounts dispatched from on the ground.”
    • On Oil by Don Gillmor: “Gillmor covers an impressive amount of ground in this slim 134-page volume.”
    • On Book Banning by Ira Wells: “A compelling and jam-packed argument against the banning of books . . . Long live literature and reading for pleasure!”
  • The 2025 Seth’s Christmas Ghost Stories were featured in Guelph Today.
  • We’re Somewhere Else Now by Robyn Sarah was reviewed in The Woodlot: “Robyn Sarah’s work is powerful, visceral, but also elegant and pared down when it needs to be . . . Her poetry collections are consistently lauded, and this one I believe will be no different.”
  • Ira Wells, author of On Book Banning, wrote an op-ed in the Toronto Star on the ongoing Alberta censorship campaign.

The Bibliophile: “Arnhem”

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***

Elise Levine’s Big of You comes out next Tuesday, September 9 in Canada. I’ve been waiting, with anticipation, for about six months—ever since reading that first story on my work computer between emails—for everyone else in the country to pick up this unsettling, strange, beautiful book.

Big of You ranges across Europe, North America, and space. It includes all sorts of characters, from a mythological, millennia-old creature, to a nineteenth-century inventor and photographer, to a group of older women vacationing in the desert. What I find most stunning about Levine’s writing is her ability to convey the expressive interiority of each character. Tonally, her characters are wildly, humourously, iconically individual. These are some of the realest people I’ve ever encountered in fiction (and by real, I mean so exceptionally unique they border on the surreal).

Below is an excerpt from Big of You’s opening story, “Arnhem.” Coincidentally, this piece also appeared in Best Canadian Stories 2021 (edited by Diane Schoemperlen). I hope you’ll love this one—and the others—as much as I do.

Happy reading,

Dominique
Publicity & Marketing Coordinator

Photo: Big of You by Elise Levine. Cover designed by Ingrid Paulson.

An excerpt from “Arnhem”

My husband leaves—I asked him to, or I didn’t, I can’t keep it straight—and I’m thinking, two girls on a hill. Heidelberg, or Conwy in North Wales where there’s also a castle. Two girls, telepathic as ants, making fast along a wet street. Oxford or Bruges. One girl’s freezing in her white summer dress. The other girl’s clad in army surplus pants and a baggy turtleneck sweater. Both of them seventeen, smug as cats, having blown off the archaeological dig on Guernsey, for which they’d secured positions six months earlier by mail. Mud labour, fuck that shit. On the appointed start date they simply hadn’t shown. Instead they thumb around, do all the things.

In a fancy café in Brussels, they order frites, which arrive on a silver platter, grease soaking into the paper doily. North of Lisbon they sleep on a beach one night. They run out of money in Paris and panhandle, not very well but they get by.

Who do they think they are?

Who did I?

I think we went to the zoo in Arnhem. I think we met a composer at some youth hostel who was from Arnhem. We met two young Italian men at a hostel in Mons. No one else was around and they tried to kiss us near the bathrooms when we went to brush our teeth that night. One of the young men forced one of us against the wall of the repurposed army barracks and thrust his pelvis a few strokes, while the other man stood back with the other one of us and watched. One night in the hostel in Amsterdam there was a phone call for one of us, and we both trundled barefoot down the stairs to the hostel office in our prim cotton nighties. Turns out one of our grandmothers was dying, the grandmother of the one of us who still had a grandmother.

I was the friend. We were friends.

I slept beside her in a roomful of older young women, all of us on cots half a foot off the damp floor. This was Cambridge. Dew on the windows all night, late June. The women were real diggers, by day excavating a nearby pre-Roman site. The men diggers, including my friend’s older brother who we were visiting, and the reason we’d dreamed up the scheme of ourselves volunteering on a site, slept in another large room, down the hall—so much for the men. But the women—solid, practical, tough. Intimidating to the extent that when I say I slept, the truth is I barely did, cold, legs aching, bladder wretched because I was too scared to get up. To be weak. To even think it. Be that person.

Which one was I?

Not the one in the summer dress. The one in the Shetland turtleneck.

*

If I were telling this to my husband, I’d say: the next morning in Mons the sky was clear. Awake for much of the night, my friend and I rose early and packed and picked through the continental breakfast array in the main hall. Individual portions of spreadable cheese wrapped in foil. Crisp rye flatbreads. Ginger jam. I’d never seen anything like it. The Belgian couple who managed the hostel, in their mid-thirties probably, kindly asked how we’d slept. We spilled the beans about the young men and the couple’s eyes grew round and their foreheads pinched. They would have a word with those guys.

By the time the couple did, if they did, and it’s true we believed them, my friend and I were gone.

*

We left Lisbon broke and caught rides up the coast. Mostly guys, some with their own ideas. Sometimes a woman who’d ask if we were okay. We were okay.

*

The beach was small with large-grained sand. We didn’t bother to take our shoes off.

The man who drove us there was slight of build. His mustache was light brown. At dusk he parked on the street and led us down to the water where we thanked him and said goodbye. He’d asked if we wanted to sleep on a beach that night and we’d said yes, please. Anything for an adventure to recall later in life. To say, How cool was that?

The sea frothed at our feet and the air smelled of brine. We toed a few half-circles and the sea erased them. We stretched our backs, yawned. He refused to take the hint. Thank you, okay?

He made himself understood then. He was spending the night with us. He’d called a buddy from the roadside café he’d taken us to earlier, where under his guidance we’d eaten squid in black ink very cheap and drunk cheap wine. Soon his friend would be here to meet us too.

It’s not like the driver had a tent or sleeping bags. Was there even a moon that night? There was a family camping nearby. A woman, a man, a child maybe eight-nine years old. They had a tent. Sleeping bags, no doubt. Judging by the track marks, they’d dragged a picnic table over, and the fire on their portable stovetop burned brighter while the sky grew darker and the man and my friend and I sat on the sand waiting, he for his friend, my friend and I for some notion of what to do, clueless as sheep.

It grew dark-dark. A flashlight made its way toward us. It was the woman. With her nearly no English and our no Portuguese and a little French between us, she ushered my friend and I into the tent with her husband and son.

How did we all fit? I must have slept the sleep of the dead, for all I can remember of the rest of that night.

Check out Elise Levine’s interview with Katherine Abbass in The Ex-Puritan!

*

When we first got together, my husband complained I slept like a swift. When things went from infrequently to occasionally bad to totally the worst between us, he said I slept like a fruit fly.

I pull the covers over my head. He’s not here to stop me, he’s at a friend’s—his, not mine. A week since yesterday. Good thing I brought my phone with me, light in darkness, all that. Especially with the news bulletins the past few days. Will I be okay? Will he? I hit his number and hang up when he answers. He immediately calls back, probably to yell, and I press piss off.

I ferret my arms out from beneath the covers. Stop calling me, I text-beg. Please.

For the next hour, while I still have my phone on, and for the first time in several years, he does as I say.

*

Around midnight I run a bath. I’m thinking again about the beach in Portugal, the family’s tent—the next morning my friend and I woke and stretched and crept back out. The driver lay curled like an inchworm on the sand near the waterline, no friend in sight.

He did drive us back to the highway, game of him. We girls, young women, once again stuck out our thumbs. Auto-stop, they call it there.

I switch off the bathroom light and climb in the tub for a long soak. My phone is still off, but I’ve got it holding down the toilet seat, in case.

My husband is in IT. He’s never once in his life hitchhiked. Like never even tried? No, he said on our first date, dinner at a pasta bar before a movie. Pale noodles, pale sauce, what can you expect for Cleveland, I thought, having recently moved there for the second of what turned into a seemingly endless stream of visiting assistant professor gigs. Before adjunct was what I could get. Now, not even that.

Like not even once? I’d pressured him that night over dinner. Never ever?

My date—who became my husband, at least for awhile, if I understand his intent by hightailing it to a friend’s, if I understand my own intentions—said no in a way that I knew to shut up about it for good.

*

Before he left us that morning by the side of the highway, the Portuguese driver tried to kiss me. I bit his lip to stop him. Where had I ripped that idea from? Some movie or book.

He got mad. Pushed me from him and fingered his mouth. Looked like he was considering options.

Later, in the back seat of our next ride that day—a Spanish couple returning from holiday, non–English speakers—my friend turned to me and said, I thought he was going to hit you. Why on earth would you do that?

I shrugged her off. But I’d also thought he was going to deck me. Some memorable story, one for the ages, something to one day tell the kids.

*

Weeks before Portugal, immediately after the phone call at night to the hostel in Amsterdam—when my friend learned her grandmother had cancer, and might not make it, and I took this news in grave solidarity, assumed a mournful expression that said I understood, I was by my friend’s side forever in all things—we sat on the floor outside our hostel room, nighties tucked around our legs. The old woman. The fights she fought with my friend the raging vegetarian, she of the curly hair she refused to tame. The stubborn fact of the fierce old creature—gone? Weird to think. But I nodded, weird I knew. The previous summer my father had an affair, and my mother told me about it, and now I told my friend about it. How the woman called my mother on the phone and said she and my father were in love. You’re only in love with his credit cards, my mother told the woman.

My friend put her feet flat on the hostel floor and rocked back against the hallway wall, she laughed her ass off. My god, she gasped. What a stupid cliché.

Earlier on the trip, fresh off the plane, well before we’d hit the road thumbs out, we’d stayed in London, and things hadn’t gone so well between us. At Trafalgar Square, on our third afternoon away from home, my friend undertook a spat with me. Talk to me, she semi-shouted. You literally dumb bitch. You need to tell me what you’re thinking, share your thoughts. Otherwise I might as well have left you at home.

The sun is nice today, the sun is too hot. Another beer, why not. Look at that old man over there. In Madrid, I told her I was afraid of morphing into one of the numerous homeless some day. You won’t, she said airily, you have family, friends. This sun is too hot.

Photo: The chapter title page for “Arnhem.” Interior by Ingrid Paulson.

*

I will share this: after my friend’s first suicide attempt, when we were fifteen and she was in the hospital over March break, I declined her single working mom’s invitation to host me at their house so I could help my friend through this difficult period. Instead I went to Myrtle Beach with my parents and little brother. Every afternoon the sib and I rode the Monster, tentacled and huge, at the sleazy mini-fairgrounds down the street from our efficiency motel room. Mornings we crossed the street to the hotel that actually was on the beach and baked in the sun by the heated pool. We swam too, hotfooting across the sugar sand to plunge in the icy waters, before reverse scampering and jumping in the pool to feel our skin burn. What else? I got mild sunstroke on our last day. For six bucks in a tourist shop, I bought my friend a pickled octopus jammed into a small jar.

You bet it was expired. Worse, by fifteen my friend had already gone vegetarian. When I got back home, more red and blistered than tanned, I paid her a visit in the hospital, and presented my gift. The look on her face. The shapeless blue gown, the big bandage around her wrist.

This was before Europe. I had no excuse. It was before my friend told me, that night on the Portuguese beach—sitting on the sand beside the driver who spoke little to no English, waiting for his friend to arrive, and before the family with the tent rescued us, that time in between, when the scope of our situation was beginning to sink in—that I really did not want to lose my virginity this way. Believe her, she knew all about it, having lost hers that spring, in the sleeping bag she’d borrowed from me, so she could go camping with this guy from our history class. He’d been a child actor in popular TV commercials and evolved into a cute teen actor doing same. Years later, years after this night in Portugal, he became a handsome adult actor, with a dimple so deep it nearly cleft his chin, and portrayed a cooped up astronaut in a popular show, and penned screenplays about the world wars, assigning himself the tortured-hero roles.

The night my friend and I slept in the tent in Portugal, I hadn’t heard the ocean waves, though they couldn’t have been more than twenty, thirty feet away. I hadn’t felt the pounding. Like I said: sleep of the dead. Those waves crashing closer, shuffling farther out, and neither my friend nor I possessing a clue about tides.

In good publicity news:

CROSSES IN THE SKY longlisted for the J.W. Dafoe Book Prize

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We’re excited to share that on September 2, 2025, the longlist for the 2025 J.W. Dafoe Book Prize was announced, and included Crosses in the Sky: Jean de Brébeuf and the Destruction of Huronia by Mark Bourrie! View the full longlist and announcement on their website here.

The shortlist will be announced on September 25, and the winner of the J.W. Dafoe Book Prize, valued at $12,000, will be named on October 14.

The J.W. Dafoe Prize memorializes Canadian editor John Wesley Dafoe, and is one of the richest book awards for exceptional non-fiction about Canada, Canadians, and the nation in international affairs.

Congratulations to Mark from all of us at Biblioasis.

Grab a copy of the book here!

ABOUT CROSSES IN THE SKY

From the bestselling author of Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre Esprit-Radisson

This is the story of the collision of two worlds. In the early 1600s, the Jesuits—the Catholic Church’s most ferocious warriors for Christ—tried to create their own nation on the Great Lakes and turn the Huron (Wendat) Confederacy into a model Jesuit state. At the centre of their campaign was missionary Jean de Brébeuf, a mystic who sought to die a martyr’s death. He lived among a proud people who valued kindness and rights for all, especially women. In the end, Huronia was destroyed. Brébeuf became a Catholic saint, and the Jesuit’s “martyrdom” became one of the founding myths of Canada.

In this first secular biography of Brébeuf, historian Mark Bourrie, bestselling author of Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson, recounts the missionary’s fascinating life and tells the tragic story of the remarkable people he lived among. Drawing on the letters and documents of the time—including Brébeuf’s accounts of his bizarre spirituality—and modern studies of the Jesuits, Bourrie shows how Huron leaders tried to navigate this new world and the people struggled to cope as their nation came apart. Riveting, clearly told, and deeply researched, Crosses in the Sky is an essential addition to—and expansion of—Canadian history.

ABOUT MARK BOURRIE

Mark Bourrie is an Ottawa-based author, lawyer, and journalist. He holds a master’s in journalism from Carleton University and a PhD in history from the University of Ottawa. In 2017, he was awarded a Juris Doctor degree and was called to the bar in 2018. He has won numerous awards for his journalism, including a National Magazine Award, and received the RBC Charles Taylor Prize in 2020 for his book Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson. His most recent books include Big Men Fear Me: The Fast Life and Quick Death of Canada’s Most Powerful Media Mogul, the national bestseller Crosses in the Sky: Jean de Brébeuf and the Destruction of Huronia, and Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre.