Favourite Christmas Stories from Fireside Al

Susan Patrick is a librarian at Ryerson Polytechnical University.

Many readers will certainly identify with that quintessentially Canadian
experience of driving through a blizzard on Christmas Eve en route to a
loved one, and listening to Alan Maitland reading Frederick Forsythe’s
“The Shepherd” on CBC radio, as he has done for the last 15 years.
This new collection of short stories brings together favourite Christmas
readings selected from CBC’s “Fireside Al” story-reading series.
The selections range from classics like Dylan Thomas’s “A Child’s
Christmas in Wales” and Dickens’s “Christmas at Fezziwig’s
Warehouse,” to “found” stories by obscure writers, and include a
representation of Canadian writers such as W.O. Mitchell, Margaret
Atwood, and Stephen Leacock. The stories are united by the holiday theme
that runs through them. This is a collection that will appeal to a wide
range of readers, not only for its seasonal value, which will make it
popular, but for the high quality of the writing.