16 Jan, 2025
KW Science Fiction and Fantasy
Sarah Tolmie’s The Fourth Island is a stand-alone historical fantasy novella.
Drowned men are no novelty on the island of Inis Mór1. What made this corpse unusual was the clothing it was wearing.
20 Feb, 2024
KW Science Fiction and Fantasy
Sarah Tolmie’s 2023 Sacraments for the Unfit is a diverse assortment of short pieces inspired by the Covid-19 pandemic. More specifically, by that short, very transient period in which society was taking it seriously.
27 Jan, 2022
Miscellaneous Reviews
Sarah Tolmie’s 2022 All the Horses of Iceland is a historical fantasy.
The nameless horse’s 9th century1journey from Central Asia to Iceland began with religious conversion. More exactly, it began because a conversion was refused. Eyvind of Eyri, an Icelandic pagan and a sailor, finds Christian attempts to covert him unconvincing. When the captain of Eyvind’s ship converts to Christianity while docked in the Volga river trading community of Helmgard (modern Novgorod), only Eyvind refuses to follow the captain’s lead. Feeling out of place on the now Christian ship, Eyvind cashes in his shares and looks for other opportunities.
13 Oct, 2020
Miscellaneous Reviews
Sarah Tolmie’s 2020 Disease is a fictional non-fiction collection of treatises on fantastical medical conditions.
26 Jul, 2017
A Year of Waterloo Region Speculative Fiction
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(Sarah Tolmie) is a medievalist trained at the University of Toronto and Cambridge and is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Waterloo.
Her website can be found here.
Tolmie’s 2015 NoFood is a collection of linked satirical tales. It was published in the Aqueduct Press’ Conversation Pieces series.
13 Jan, 2017
A Year of Waterloo Region Speculative Fiction
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Sarah Tolmie is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Waterloo. Her first spec-fic novel, 2014’s The Stone Boatmen, won a starred review in Publishers Weekly and a glowing blurb from Ursula K. Le Guin. Since The Stone Boatmen, she has published four other books: 2014’s NoFood andSonnet in a Blue Dress and other poems, 2015’s Trio, and the subject of today’s review, a 2016 collection titled Two Travelers.
Two Travelers is a single-author collection containing two short pieces, a novelette (Dancer on the Stairs) and a novella (The Burning Furrow).
15 Sep, 2014
KW Science Fiction and Fantasy
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It is a sad truth that a life spent reviewing books, particularly genre fiction, particularly fantasy, involves reading a lot of terrible books. Worse, reading variations of the same terrible book, over and over. There is a benefit, which is that a gem of the first water like Sarah Tolmie’s The Stone Boatmen stands out against the rest that much more.