Theresa Kishkan, poet, novelist, essayist and co-owner of Highground Press, has written a memoir based on trees she has known. The conceit is clever, and the result is a real sense of telling a life by fingering a grand rosary of tree species, recalling anything that goes. The book begins with a gesture to Dante’s dark wood, but Kishkan’s wood is of her own planting. In the Prelude, Kishkan asks whether she can write her life “by remembering the groves, imaginary or real, of my childhood, my girlhood, the painful years of young adulthood, of motherhood?”

Recipient of several literary prizes, including the Governor General’s Award for Literature, Ru is the autobiography of Kim Thuy. Under the name of Nguyen An Tinh, the author recounts her story: from her childhood in a palatial Saigon home, which her family is later forced to share with the invading Communist forces, to the squalor of the Malaysian refugee camp where she and her family fled before coming to Canada by boat. Starting out in Granby, Quebec, in the late 1970s, her parents work in menial jobs so that their children may one day live their “American” dream. As an adult, the protagonist returns to her native Vietnam where she is told that she is too fat to be Vietnamese and is mistaken for both an escort and a Japanese tourist.