Edisson and Jeremiah by Michael Carin
Guernica Editions, 2025
Michael Carin’s *Edisson and Jeremiah, *winner of the 2024 Guernica Prize for Literary Fiction, is a fascinating work of speculative fiction. Carin, a Montreal author of both fiction and non-fiction, sets the story a few decades after the COVID-19 pandemic. The novel explores humanity’s tangled interconnectedness and its potential to heal physical, emotional, scientific, and societal ills.
The main drama of Edisson and Jeremiah centres on a magic show staged by Edisson, a teenaged prodigy who insists on performing despite a blizzard that leaves only eight people in attendance. Those few who gather that night at the Rialto Theatre in Washington, D.C. (the same stage where Harry Houdini once performed) becom…
Edisson and Jeremiah by Michael Carin
Guernica Editions, 2025
Michael Carin’s *Edisson and Jeremiah, *winner of the 2024 Guernica Prize for Literary Fiction, is a fascinating work of speculative fiction. Carin, a Montreal author of both fiction and non-fiction, sets the story a few decades after the COVID-19 pandemic. The novel explores humanity’s tangled interconnectedness and its potential to heal physical, emotional, scientific, and societal ills.
The main drama of Edisson and Jeremiah centres on a magic show staged by Edisson, a teenaged prodigy who insists on performing despite a blizzard that leaves only eight people in attendance. Those few who gather that night at the Rialto Theatre in Washington, D.C. (the same stage where Harry Houdini once performed) become bound together through Edisson and the evening’s supernatural events.
At the novel’s outset, when Edisson approaches the venue’s owner Nathan “Nat” Goldstein to pitch his magic show, Nat is immediately taken by the boy. This reaction becomes a pattern: Edisson possesses a raw magnetism and deep sincerity that draws people in, with whom he forges immediate bonds.
The magic show sequence in particular is compelling, and its build-up and aftermath shape the narrative of the novel. Over the course of the show, Edisson connects with and stuns each audience member in profound, alarmingly personal ways. Notably, as the evening progresses, Edisson’s performance gradually unravels the life of Jeremiah, one of the attendees, revealing the origins of his tragic decline. Through Jeremiah’s subplot, Carin deftly demonstrates how extremist ideologies, especially reactionary or fundamentalist movements, can corrode democracy, intellectual inquiry, and the good of mankind.
Carin’s characters are constructed with attention to detail, each marked by idiosyncrasies, and they speak with voices that balance eloquence with humanity. His prose mirrors this duality: it is whimsical yet literary. *Edisson and Jeremiah *is a highly engaging, thought-provoking, and enjoyable read.
A Place for People Like Us by Danila Botha
Guernica Editions, 2025
A Place for People Like Us, the latest novel by author Danila Botha, a Toronto writer born in South Africa, is a fast-paced page-turner that is at times thriller, romance, and bildungsroman.
Hannah, a business student at the prestigious fictional Webb University in Toronto, has a chance encounter with the enigmatic Jillian. Immediately infatuated, they move in together, and the two develop a tumultuous relationship as roommates, lovers, and best friends. Some time later, Hannah meets Mark, an Orthodox Jew whom we soon learn also goes by the name Naftali. In what is both a slow burn and whirlwind, they fall in love. But there’s a hitch: Hannah’s mother isn’t Jewish. As she navigates the Orthodox conversion process, her relationship with Jillian becomes increasingly fraught. Meanwhile, Naftali’s powerful and wealthy family, the Goldwaters, weave their own web of secrecy, concealing the wide gap between their public image and unsavoury private lives.
*A Place for People Like Us *is ambitious and disorienting by design. From the outset, readers are warned that Jillian, while incredibly enchanting (no one can seem to resist her charm), is pure chaos. Yet the true scope of this chaos is only revealed near the novel’s shocking climax, when we discover Jillian to be genuinely dangerous. Hannah, too, is haunted: born into a cult led by her father, recovering from addiction, and a survivor of rape, she is dangerously vulnerable. (A content warning is warranted: this novel contains graphic descriptions of child sexual abuse and other distressing material.)
The novel’s depiction of Orthodox Jews and Judaism, however, is at times careless. The community is cast as hypocritical and morally suspect, and the conversion process is framed as yet another form of cultlike entrapment and control, rather than a possible path to spiritual meaning or personal growth.
Still, the book remains highly engaging, offering a fascinating character study of toxic co-dependency through the lens of Hannah and Jillian’s entwined lives. It is sure to be enjoyed by admirers of Botha’s earlier works.
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