Over 200 people attended the County of Brant Public Library’s One Book One Brant author event at the TF Warren Group Cainsville Community Centre on Sunday, April 12, 2026.
Now in its 21st year, One Book One Brant is an annual County-wide reading event celebrating Canadian literature. Every year, the library selects a book from a Canadian author and encourages the community to read the book together. This year’s selection was Linwood Barclay’s Whistle.
The story follows a grieving mother and her young son after they move to a small town seeking a fresh start. While there, they encounter unsettling visions, eerie sounds and a mysterious train set that appears to have a life of its own.
Barclay, who is known for novels such as No Time for Goodbye, The Accident, Take Your Breath Away, and Elevator Pitch, is a Canadian, New York Times best selling author, former newspaper editor and columnist.
To celebrate the culmination of the 2026 One Book, One Brant program, Barclay made the trip to Cainsville to speak about Whistle.
“What a wonderful place to be celebrating 21 years of reading together and being able to connect over Canadian literature. It’s such a pleasure to be here and to see all of my fellow readers joining us today,” said Emma Johnston, program and outreach coordinator with the Brant County Public Library. “Linwood is the author of over 20 novels. He came from the newspaper business and has a lot of other writing behind him. He is also the author of a memoir and has done screenwriting as well. So we have quite a large amount of talent in our presence right now.”
Johnston then went on to interview Barclay about the premise and writing style of Whistle and the characters within it.
“Whistle was a bit of a departure for me. I typically do thrillers based in the real world, but I wanted to do something a bit different and do a kind of horror, supernatural thriller. Typically, in horror fiction, when you have toys that become evil, it’s usually something like Chucky the doll, or it’s the little monkey in Stephen King’s The Monkey. …I thought, ‘I wonder if you could do this with toy trains? I wonder if you could do for toy trains what Chucky did for dolls?’” said Barclay. “The challenge was, ‘Can you pull this off?’ and I thought I would give it a try. So I wrote this book, and I had more fun writing this than just about anything I’ve done in the last ten or 15 years. I just had a blast writing it, it was so much fun to do.”
Johnston also asked Barclay about his career in journalism and his transition into writing novels.
The author said that as a child, he was obsessed with television and that he used to write 30- to 40-page novels inspired by his favourite shows between the ages of 11 and 14.
“By the time I was in my late teens and early 20s, I had written two or three of my own novels, and when I was 23 or 24, I was sending them out to publishers; thankfully, none of those were published,” he said with a smile.
With a dream to become a published author after university–but with no such luck–Barclay said he decided to find a job where he could get paid to write everyday and began working at the Peterborough Examiner.
“I was there for a couple years, then I went to a small paper in Oakville. When I went to the Toronto Star in 1981, I applied for a reporting job,” he explained. “They said, ‘Well, we don’t need reporters but we’re desperate for copy editors.”
Barclay took the editing job and from there, quickly moved through the ranks.
“I did all these editing gigs for 12 years, and then an opportunity came up to write a column,” he said. “I applied for it and I got it, so in 1993 I started writing three columns a week; a humour column.”
The column experience eventually led to writing and publishing four humour-based novels, but it wasn’t until 2007, with the thriller No Time For Goodbye that he finally got his big break. The following year, the novel was the top-selling novel of the year in the UK.
“That’s when I quit the Toronto Star,” he said. “Ever since then, I’ve been doing a book a year, and some years there were two.”
As far as what makes a great story, Barclay said there needs to be a few things.
“I think in a thriller, maybe one of the most important things is that there has to be something at stake. There has to be something important that matters; there has to be something that is so serious that it would make average people rise to the occasion,” he said. “I like to write about extraordinary things happening to ordinary people. That, in part, is because I don’t know a hell of a lot about secret agents and spies, and I don’t know anything about smuggling plutonium or anything like that, so I like to put ordinary people in extraordinary situations. But in addition to all of that, you need really good characters, you need that sense of momentum and I think you need great dialogue; you need all of those things to make it work.”
As the sit-down interview wrapped up, Barclay then read a quick excerpt from Whistle and answered some questions from the audience.
Afterwards, those in attendance lined up to have their copies of Barclay’s work signed.
Brantford resident Kim Lancaster, who had the author sign her copies of Whistle, A Tap on the Window and Parting Shot, said she was happy to have gotten to attend the event.
“I’ve been a fan of his for probably 25 years, going back to the writing he did at the Toronto Star, and I was actually sort of surprised that he was such a warm, natural guy,” she said. “To hear him talk and be so funny, it was just a heartwarming afternoon for me. I’ve been to a couple events like this, and you can usually tell that the author is just there to promote the book, but this didn’t feel like that at all. He came off very comfortable with us.”
Lancaster said that she originally read Whistle last year, but recently reread it and found she enjoyed it even more the second time around.
“Even though I already knew the ending, I had kind of forgotten what led up to it,” she said. “So I read it again, and I found I loved it even more the second time around because you see all the sneaky hints in his writing, it’s amazing.”
As far was what she thought of the overall event, Lancaster said she enjoyed it.
“Look at how many nice, book-loving people are here!” she said. “I’m just amazed at the attendance and the building is amazing too, I really enjoyed it.”
Kimberly De Jong’s reporting is funded by the Canadian government through its Local Journalism Initiative.The funding allows her to report rural and agricultural stories from Blandford-Blenheim and Brant County. Reach her at kimberly.dejong@brantbeacon.ca.
