On the Podcast.
New episodes each month sharing top book club recommendations, media and book reviews
Book Blogger Susan Matheson is back to discuss her top picks to stuff in your beach bag this summer.
Poet Samantha Reynolds is on the podcast to talk about her practice of writing one poem a day.
Bookstagrammer Danielle Peters joins the podcast to talk about her favourite genre: thrillers.
Photographer and friend Brian McConville is back on the podcast to talk about books and captivity. Amy and Brian discuss Our Country Friends by Gary Shteyngart. Bel Canto by Ann Patchett is also discussed.
Amy's resident artsy friend Myriam is back on the podcast. This time the topic is screenplays as literature.
Best selling author Susan Juby is on the podcast to talk about her delightful murder mystery Mindful of Murder.
Amy interviews bestselling author Katherine Heiny about her hilarious, big-hearted novel Early Morning Riser.
Geoff is in the house to discuss one of his favourite authors, Mr. Difficult himself, Jonathan Franzen.
Three magical realism novels, The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki, Parakeet by Marie-Helene Bertino and Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, are reviewed.
Fantasy Fiction aficionado and Instagram mixologist Jeanette Bruce joins Red Fern to discuss fantasy fiction and a classic thriller.
Historical novel The Mystery of Mrs. Christie by Marie Benedict delves into the mysterious, real-life disappearance of Agatha Christie. I compare this novel to Christie’s first book The Mysterious Affair at Styles.
Women and Literature expert Reema Faris is back to look at contemporary romance fiction and adaptations.
Women and literature academic Reema Faris joins Red Fern to discuss the enduring popularity of romance fiction. In this first of a two-parts series, the history of romance novels is examined.
Writer and academic Suzanne Scott drops by the podcast to discuss two books that inspire her as a writer.
English teacher Liz Kelsey is back in the house to discuss David Copperfield.
Friend and academic Liz Kelsey joins Amy in a two part episode on the classics. In the first episode Liz explores Jane Austen's lesser known work Lady Susan.
Amy reviews two books focused on 20th-century women who broke barriers in their careers and personal lives. Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead is a historical novel centred around the lives of famed aviator Marian Graves. The Barbizon: The Hotel that Set Women Free by Paulina Bren is a social history of the world's most famous women's hotel.
Amy reviews two of the biggest books of 2021: Who is Maud Dixon? by Alexandra Andrews and Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty.
Amy looks at two short story collections by well-known essayists and humourists Anne Lamott and David Sedaris.
Fellow bibliophile Lorraine Weir joins the podcast to talk about Vancouver Writers Festival event The Spectacular Complexity of Womanhood with authors Mona Awad, Zoe Whittall and Rachel Yoder.
Two memoirs by childhood idols Billie Jean King and Andrew McCarthy, one person surpasses expectations and the other does not.
Writer and poet Jen Sookfong Lee joins the podcast to discuss her debut poetry collection The Shadow List.
Fantasy Fiction enthusiast David Gates joins Amy in a discussion about Natasha Pulley's The Kingdoms.
Geoff is back living out his lifetime loves of surfing and music through fiction. The first book discussed is Paul Theroux's Under the Wave at Waimea.
Join Amy in her discussion with bestselling thriller writer Robyn Harding. Robyn's latest novel, The Perfect Family, is a twisty, addictively page-turning suspense novel about a perfect family's perfect facade.
Susan Matheson is in the house to discuss the best books of the season! This fall many big name authors, from Colson Whitehead to Amor Towles, have new books on offer.
Amy explores two darker novels that are not exactly thrillers or are they? The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz and When the Stars Go Dark by Paula McLain
Bestselling author Eileen Garvin drops by the podcast to discuss her debut novel The Music of Bees.
The summer is over and The Red Fern Book Review is back! In the first episode of Season 2, Amy explores two memoirs, both by feisty, young, creative women. Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted by Suleika Jaouad and Finding Freedom: A Cook's Story; Remaking a Life from Scratch by Erin French
For the season finale, I am joined by best selling author and ER physician Daniel Kalla to talk about his new release Lost Immunity.
Book blogger Susan Matheson is back with a curated list of summer reads just for Red Fern listeners.
Amy's old reporter buddy Myriam stops by the podcast to share her loves of languages and books. Amy and Myriam discuss part medical, part psychological novel Mend the Living by Maylis de Kerangal.
Music teacher and facilitator Cynthia Friesen drops by the podcast to chat about music, memory and healing. The phone rings, the doorbell chimes, but Amy's dogs are eerily silent this episode.
Join host Amy Mair as she explores three novels by English authors: The Midnight Library, Klara and the Sun and Hamnet.
Whistler Public Library Program Coordinator Jeanette Bruce is in the virtual house to discuss two favourite reading genres: short fiction and fantasy.
Amy's husband Geoff drops by the podcast to discuss two contemporary novels or should we call them memoirs? You be the judge.
Host Amy Mair dives into the elegant and sometimes sordid world of fine art with My Rembrandt, a quirky and compelling documentary about a Dutch aristocrat and his race to find the first new Rembrandt in 40 years, An Object of Beauty by Steve Martin, The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt and The Art Forger by Barbara Shapiro.
Spring is here and with it a new season of books! Longtime book blogger Susan Matheson unpacks her top picks of the season.
Join host Amy Mair and Simon Fraser University professor Reema Faris as they explore cultural heritage, identity and memory through the memoir What the Ocean's Remember: Searching for Belonging and Home by Sonja Boon.
The Green Light (not to be confused with Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey!) is that mysterious light at the end of the dock in The Great Gatsby that represents Jay Gatsby's hope for the future.
Attending festivals and large events in person may be in our distant future, but one of the largest literary events in North America has found a way to pivot with new programming and a virtual lineup.
A poisoned aristocrat. A fledgling reporter. A scandal to die for. Join host Amy Mair as she meets up with mystery writer Lisa Zumpano to discuss her historical mystery series.
Host Amy Mair looks at two food memoirs: Save Me the Plums: My Gourmet Memoir by Ruth Reichl and The Measure of My Powers: A Memoir of Food, Misery, and Paris by Jackie Kai Ellis.
Amy interviews Vancouver night photographer Brian McConville who does his best work when most law abiding citizens are asleep.
In this inaugural podcast, host Amy Mair shares an email from her Mom, selects her top new book release picks for January and February and selects two books that will cure your Pandemic blues.
After fifty years of guilt over his brother's brutal murder in Civil Rights-era Mississippi, Warren Williams decides to renew his fight to bring the men responsible to justice. His efforts put him face-to-face with one of the murderers, Earl Olsen, in a remote Ontario town, where a contest of wits will end in death.
Set in late 16th-century Africa, India, Portugal, and Japan, The African Samurai is a powerful historical novel based on the true story of Yasuke, Japan's first foreign-born samurai and the only samurai of African descent--for readers of Esi Edugyan and Lawrence Hill.
"I have been standing on the side of life, watching it float by. I want to swim in the river. I want to feel the current."
So writes Mamah Borthwick Cheney in her diary as she struggles to justify her clandestine love affair with Frank Lloyd Wright.
Nancy Horan, author of the million-copy New York Times bestseller Loving Frank, returns with a sweeping historical novel, which tells the story of Abraham Lincoln's ascendance from rumpled lawyer to U.S. president to the Great Emancipator through the eyes of a young asylum-seeker who arrives in Lincoln's home of Springfield from Madeira, Portugal.
Mitford modeled her characters on her own famously unconventional family. We are introduced to the Radletts through the eyes of their cousin Fanny, who stays with them at Alconleigh, their Gloucestershire estate. Uncle Matthew is the blustering patriarch, known to hunt his children when foxes are scarce; Aunt Sadie is the vague but doting mother; and the seven Radlett children, despite the delights of their unusual childhood, are recklessly eager to grow up.
Between the World Wars, the six Mitford sisters--each more beautiful, brilliant, and eccentric than the next--dominate the English political, literary, and social scenes. Though they've weathered scandals before, the family falls into disarray when Diana divorces her wealthy husband to marry a fascist leader and Unity follows her sister's lead all the way to Munich, inciting rumors that she's become Hitler's mistress.
Millions of people climb the grand marble staircase to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art every year. But only a select few have unrestricted access to every nook and cranny. They're the guards who roam unobtrusively in dark blue suits, keeping a watchful eye on the two million square foot treasure house. Caught up in his glamorous fledgling career at The New Yorker, Patrick Bringley never thought he'd be one of them. Then his older brother was diagnosed with fatal cancer and he found himself needing to escape the mundane clamor of daily life. So he quit The New Yorker and sought solace in the most beautiful place he knew.
Every summer for the past ten years, six awe-struck bakers have descended on the grounds of Grafton, the leafy and imposing Vermont estate that is not only the filming site for "Bake Week" but also the childhood home of the show's famous host, celebrated baker Betsy Martin.
Seventeen-year-old Victoria Nash runs the household on her family's peach farm in the small ranch town of Iola, Colorado--the sole surviving female in a family of troubled men. Wilson Moon is a young drifter with a mysterious past, displaced from his tribal land and determined to live as he chooses.
One autumn morning, Jia Jia walks into the bathroom of her lavish Beijing apartment to find her husband dead. One minute she was breakfasting with him and packing for an upcoming trip, the next, she finds him motionless in their half-full bathtub. Like something out of a dream, next to the tub Jia Jia discovers a pencil sketch of a strange watery figure, an image that swims into Jia Jia's mind and won't leave.
An Yu's enchanting and contemplative novel of music and mushrooms follows a former concert pianist searching for the truth about a vanished musician.
A deliciously funny, sharply observed debut of family, love, and class, this zeitgeisty novel follows three women in one wealthy Brooklyn clan.
All the Pretty Horses is the tale of John Grady Cole, who at sixteen finds himself at the end of a long line of Texas ranchers, cut off from the only life he has ever imagined for himself. With two companions, he sets off for Mexico on a sometimes idyllic, sometimes comic journey to a place where dreams are paid for in blood. Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction.
A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food--and each other.
1972, BLACK RIVER FALLS, WISCONSIN: Alicia Western, twenty years old, with forty thousand dollars in a plastic bag, admits herself to the hospital.
1980, PASS CHRISTIAN, MISSISSIPPI: It is three in the morning when Bobby Western zips the jacket of his wet suit and plunges from the Coast Guard tender into darkness.
Mary Shelley's timeless gothic novel presents the epic battle between man and monster at its greatest literary pitch.
Inspired by Fleetwood Mac, the Manson murders, and the infamous summer Percy and Mary Shelley spent with Lord Byron at a Lake Geneva castle--the birthplace of Frankenstein--The Villa welcomes you into its deadly legacy.
This is the age of vice, where money, pleasure, and power are everything, and the family ties that bind can also kill.
Burning slums and five-star hotels, romantic love and prison agonies, criminal wars and Bollywood films, spiritual gurus and mujaheddin guerrillas--this huge novel has the world of human experience in its reach, and a passionate love for India at its heart.
Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life.
Margaret Laurence's most celebrated novel introduced readers to one of the most memorable characters in Canadian fiction.
Told through the lives of four people over fifty years, this novel provides a nuanced, moving portrait of the little-known world of Tibetan exiles.
How does memory become myth? How do lies become family lore? How do we escape the trauma of the past when the truth has been forgotten?
In the stark expanse of Northern Alberta, a queer Indigenous doctoral student steps away from his dissertation to write a novel, informed by a series of poignant encounters: a heart-to-heart with fellow doctoral student River over the mounting pressure placed on marginalized scholars; a meeting with Michael, a closeted man from his hometown whose vulnerability and loneliness punctuate the realities of queer life on the fringe.
What if you could see yourself as others see you? Astra is a beguiling debut novel that reveals the different faces of one woman, as seen through the eyes of ten people over a lifetime. Longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and named a Best Book of the Year by the Globe and Mail, Winnipeg Free Press, and CBC Books.
The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time travel, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.
Traveling from a repressive finishing school to a vibrant brothel, taking readers firsthand into the brutality of factory life and the opulent lives of Montreal's wealthy, When We Lost Our Heads dazzlingly explores gender, sex, desire, class, and the terrifying power of the human heart when it can't let someone go.
From #1 international bestselling author Ami McKay comes The Virgin Cure, the story of a young girl abandoned and forced to fend for herself in the poverty and treachery of post-Civil War New York City.

