• "A highly readable outing…A spy story well timed for the news’ current preoccupation with the both the Kremlin and the nuclear arms race."

    Tara Henley, The Toronto Star

  • "Philip Kerr is gone, but his historical thrillers live on. In Last Night of the World, Joyce Wayne mines this excellent plotline. A journalist and former editor at Quill & Quire magazine, Wayne has the added advantage of having been a “red Diaper baby” – her father was a committed member of the Communist Party of Canada with his own tales of the Igor Gouzenko affair. The novel also features a solid female character: Soviet agent Freda Linton is tasked with getting information out of Canada’s atomic base at Chalk River, Ont. We know that Freda didn’t succeed, but she came close, and that makes this story, drenched in true Canadian history, a real page-turner. Read it for the mystery, and learn a bit of history on the side."

    Margaret Cannon, The Globe and Mail

  • "Joyce Wayne’s riveting essay “And Change We Did” about her leftist youth was outstanding; I couldn’t put it down. The piece was all the more interesting for her reassessment of those times and her willingness to judge her past in a way so few of us are ready to do. It reminded me of the late Tony Judt’s wondering about his own past, how he had thought the 1968 student protests in Paris were so important, only to realize later that he had somehow overlooked the significance of the invasion of Czechoslovakia that same year."

    Antanas Sileika, author of Some Unfinished Business

Featured Essay: Clock Watching

They became more common after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: stories about Armageddon. But even as they appeared in the New York Times or the Washington Post, on CNN or CBC Radio, reports of Russia’s nuclear arsenal seldom made the front pages or led off the nightly broadcasts. Instead, prospects of atomic annihilation have hovered at the fringes of our consciousness, always discussed below the fold. A Third World War may be lurking, but let’s try not to think about it…