There’s no better description of scent in the Arctic than in Tanya Tagaq’s Split Tooth: “The air is so clean you can smell the difference between smooth rock and jagged. You can smell water running over shale.”
Obviously the Ibo people in Nigeria are pretty different from anyone living in the (now) Canadian Arctic, but Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart is a beautiful story of one worldview giving way to another, with pretty drastic consequences.
Richard Van Camp’s stories in this 2009 collection feel easy and conversational, and are carried along by dark humour, detailed descriptions of sexual conquest, and 1980’s era imagery, writes our reviewer Sarah Swan.
Northreads 