Nativism and extremist politics are on the rise in many democracies. Dark times are coming.

Like many of my colleagues and friends, I’d been actively avoiding thinking about this. When I did, I felt numb. Or defeatist. Maybe these feelings spur other writers to creative heights, but they made me want to crawl into bed and pull the covers over my head.

In early November, by coincidence, I borrowed Clare Mulley’s fabulous The Spy Who Loved: the Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville from the Toronto Public Library. As soon as I read the final page I needed another fix. That came in the form of Code Name Lise: the True Story of the Woman Who Became WWII’s most Decorated Spy. I am now halfway through Sonia Purnell’s 2019 A Woman of No Importance: the Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win WWII.

They are all eye-opening books about women who made a difference. Women who, faced with dark times, did not despair. They acted.  

In a way, their actions saved me as well.

The Ministry of Time takes place in the near future. The British government has just discovered time travel and decides to pluck a handful of people from the past - men and women who died during tumultuous times in British history - and bring them to the present. The Ministry refers to them as ‘expats’, as in, expats from time. What can they learn from the expats, and about the effects of time travel? Unknown to them, the expats are guinea pigs in a scientific experiment, but, as the Ministry’s cold logic goes, they were going to die in their own time anyway. Will the expats survive?

Shelby Van Pelt’s Remarkably Bright Creatures is a treat. Exactly the kind of quirky, fun, wise, humorous, sad but ultimately uplifting novel I couldn’t put down.

The rescue of an ageing giant Pacific octopus named Marcellus kicks off events. Unhappy with the meals his keepers have been providing, Marcellus escapes from his tank, but his food run nearly turns fatal when his tentacles become entangled in power cords. His unlikely rescuer is the aquarium’s night cleaner - a tiny, seventy-year-old woman with a bad back named Tova Sullivan. Grateful for her life-saving assistance, Marcellus decides to help Tova solve the mystery of her son’s death.

I watched this year’s July 1 Memorial Day services live on TV. The remains of an unknown soldier, who died fighting with the Royal Newfoundland Regiment in WWI, had been returned to Canada from France and entombed at the Newfoundland National War Memorial in St. John’s. I’m not an overly emotional person, but at a few points I teared up during the ceremony. As to why I did that – watching remotely via an impersonal TV screen in a city half a continent away – well, that’s about story telling.