Welcome to the November 2024 ORB Review

November is Novel Writing Month, so first of all, good luck to all established, emerging and aspiring novelists putting pen to paper. In Ottawa, we continue to enjoy unseasonably mild weather, reminding us that climate change is very real. Fittingly, this is the subject of a forthcoming anthology of short fiction, Green to Grey, which we have chosen to review this month, well ahead of its release date of 1 April 2025. Two other reviews touch on humanity's abuse of the planet: Geoffrey Cole's short story collection Zebra Meridian and Jessica Johns' Bad Cree. Both highlight the growing importance of the clifi sub-genre in Canadian literature and, in Johns' novel, the intersectionality of environmental abuse and the lives of Indigenous peoples. In a different vein, Dimitri Nasrallah's latest novel, Hotline, explores the challenges of settling in Montreal in the 1980s after fleeing the murderous civil war in Lebanon—a brilliant story of resilience and renewal.