Behind the mask
There’s a movie I love called The Red Violin, by Canadian filmmaker François Girard. I was in university when it came out in 1998, and watched it in one of those old theatres where the seats were upholstered in rough velour, the tickets were cheap and the popcorn stale. The Red Violin, if you’re not...
Enter Officer Anderson…
Cops are easy. All you have to do is show him your ID, explain you’re a congressman. There will be some perfunctory chit-chat, and you will make the officer feel important, for you know, like, providing the civil service that he provides, and he may or may not write you a light traffic ticket or...
Camilla Bruce: Away with the faeries
Camilla Bruce’s debut novel You Let Me In is a gripping, genre-shifting psychological thriller written in the form of a long letter-cum-memoir from missing, 74-year-old romance novelist Cassandra Tipp to nephew and niece Janus and Penelope – her only living heirs. In the letter, she tells dark parallel tales about a childhood spent in the...
Melanie Cantor: No regrets
Well what would you do if you found out you had 90 days to live? Death and Other Happy Endings is nothing like as grim as that sounds. I was reminded of the opening to that Richard Curtis movie in which we see a sequence of people all arriving at Heathrow Airport, hugging and...
