Miriam Toews on her new memoir, and the surprising truth of good comedy
Release Date: 12/10/2025
The best books we read in 2025
Kobo in Conversation
It's no spoiler to say that Kobo is full of avid readers. So every year we get together to share the best books we read in the past year. Some of the books are new. Some are very old. All were beloved to a Kobo staffer. So across 2 whole episodes (follow to make sure you don't miss the second one!), join us as we hear from the staff of Kobo about the best books they read in 2025.
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Miriam Toews on her new memoir, and the surprising truth of good comedy
Kobo in Conversation
Michael Tamblyn spoke with Miriam Toews, author of many novels including , , and , to name just a few. Her latest book is a memoir called, . Spurred by the question “why do you write?”, posed by a distressingly persistent literary festival organizer, it’s a work of nonfiction that delves into the author’s feelings around the deaths by suicide of both her father and her sister.
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Charlotte McConaghy found fear on the Wild Dark Shore
Kobo in Conversation
Nathan Maharaj spoke with the novelist Charlotte McConaghy. Her latest book is . It’s the story of the Salt family, the stewards of a vast seed bank on a remote island that’s in danger of being washed over by rising sea levels. As they’re making the hard decisions about what can be saved in the course of their evacuation, a vicious storm tears across the island and leaves a woman washed up on the shore—and she’s alive.
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Julian Brave NoiseCat on storytelling in the trickster tradition
Kobo in Conversation
Nathan Maharaj spoke with the Oscar-nominated filmmaker and journalist Julian Brave NoiseCat. He co-directed the 2024 documentary Sugarcane which investigated abuses at a residential school in western Canada. He is also the author of a new book called . It’s about his dad, and also his upbringing, and a mythical character named Coyote.
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Mona Awad on returning to the world of Bunny
Kobo in Conversation
Nathan Maharaj spoke with novelist Mona Awad. Her debut book, was a Giller Prize finalist. Its follow-up was set in an Ivy League creative writing program and blended horror and suspense with wicked satire. is her fifth novel, and it’s a return to that creative writing program, revisiting the story through the perspectives of characters who apparently want to set the record straight but end up pulling us even further down this dark and twisting rabbit hole.
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Booktalking - Authors v. Anthropic (and Apple), indie booksellers in & out of trouble, and more
Kobo in Conversation
Hosts Michael Tamblyn and Nathan Maharaj caught up on a landmark legal decision about books and AI, the perils of bookstore merch, plus a whole lot more. This episode covers: Anthropic AI v. Authors and Authors v. Apple How Powell's Books' new mugs got them into hot water Barnes & Noble buying Books Inc. C-suite changes at Simons & Schuster and Harper UK A novel approach to creative writing this November Somehow, neither of them mentioned a specific book this time. They've been spoken to and have promised to do better in the future. More author interviews coming soon to
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Brian Stewart reports on the golden age of being a foreign correspondent
Kobo in Conversation
Michael Tamblyn spoke with journalist Brian Stewart, whose career spanned decades, covering the US-Iraq Gulf War, famine in Ethiopia, and countless other historical events for CBC and NBC. He tells us about all of it—including what was going on in his life off-camera—in a new book: On the Ground: My Life as a Foreign Correspondent.
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Antonio Michael Downing's literary journey into the South
Kobo in Conversation
Host Nathan Maharaj spoke with Antonio Michael Downing, author of the 2021 memoir , as well as the illustrated children’s book . For just about a year now he’s also been the host of CBC’s The Next Chapter, where every week he talks to authors (and once in a while an opinionated bookseller) about books they want people to pay attention to. He joined us to talk about his first novel: . It’s the story of Ophelia Blue Rivers, a girl growing up in South Carolina where her mixed ancestry leaves her struggling for acceptance amidst the Cherokee community where her grandmother raised...
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Scott Alexander Howard on border-crossings across time
Kobo in Conversation
Host Michael Tamblyn spoke with novelist Scott Alexander Howard, winner of the and author of . It’s the story of Odile Ozanne, a young girl who lives in a small village in a valley. In the next valley over, in the west, there is an identical village where events from 20 years ago are taking place, and in the valley to the east there is another village where it’s 20 years in the future. Occasionally, and under the strictest controls and in a disguise rendering them unidentifiable, people will visit the other valleys, looking forward, or backward in time. One day, visitors...
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Rob Franklin's upwardly-mobile, downwardly-spiraling Great Black Hope
Kobo in Conversation
Host Nathan Maharaj spoke with novelist Rob Franklin. His debut novel is about a young man, named Smith, who gets arrested for cocaine possession on his way home from a party at the end of an oppressively hot New York summer. Smith is Black, and he’s queer; he’s also a Stanford graduate and his family back in Atlanta is, as they say, not without means. As Smith’s court date looms and he enters treatment for addiction, he’s grieving the sudden and tragic death of a friend.
info_outlineMichael Tamblyn spoke with Miriam Toews, author of many novels including A Complicated Kindness, All My Puny Sorrows, and Women Talking, to name just a few. Her latest book is a memoir called, A Truce That Is Not Peace. Spurred by the question “why do you write?”, posed by a distressingly persistent literary festival organizer, it’s a work of nonfiction that delves into the author’s feelings around the deaths by suicide of both her father and her sister.
Miriam Toews on her new memoir, and the surprising truth of good comedy