Tag Archive: Recipe For Hate

Recipe for Hate in Quill and Quire: “suspenseful page-turner”!

Quill and Quire has published, online and elsewhere, their review of Recipe For Hate.  Here’s what they have to say:

  • “Kinsella skilfully blends convincing depictions of both the punk scene and the racist underground…”
  • “The novel is a suspenseful page-turner that also gives considerable food for thought, anchored in realistically drawn characters and an eye for significant detail.”
  • “…its significance to contemporary life and social schisms is powerful and impossible to ignore.”
  • “…Kinsella captures the political underpinnings of the [punk] movement – a surprising reminder of hope in these dark days.”

You can get your copy of Recipe For Hate  here and here. Meanwhile, the book tour hits Montréal next month!


New Dark Ages, now

I just returned from a major book fair at the Metro Convention Centre – and, whilst I was there signing copies of Recipe For Hate (Humblebrag Alert: we ran out of copies), I saw this for the first time, in Dundurn’s 2018 catalogue:

What’s it about? Well, it’s about to get me in a lot of trouble, I reckon. It’s the most controversial book I’ve ever written, I’d say. (And it’s the second instalment in the X Gang trilogy.)  Recipe For Hate has been well-received – as seen here and here and here – and I’m hoping New Dark Ageswill be, too.

Pumped.  Now, back to writing the final book in the series.


Globe and Mail: Recipe For Hate “shines…Kinsella nails it…absorbing, jarring and raw”!

Wow! This is a great way to end 2017.

And, I am honoured. The Globe and Mail has reviewed Recipe For Hate – and they like it! Their review:

Recipe for Hate

by Warren Kinsella

Dundurn, 304 pages, $14.99

Warren Kinsella’s many professions include author, political strategist and commentator. Is YA author now on the list? Yes and no. Kinsella’s latest book is published for teens and, in many ways, shines as a book for mature younger readers. It focuses on two teenage best friends – Kurt Blank and X – leaders in Maine’s burgeoning 1978 punk scene. When their friend is brutally murdered outside of a club, it’s the beginning of a very dark, violent time for Kurt, X and their punk crew. Portrayals of rebellious and non-conforming teens can feel reductive or contrived but Kinsella nails it without any stereotyping or embellishment. Though this authenticity will have big teen appeal, the novel is also part police procedural, part detailed history on the emergence of punk and part gritty murder mystery, all elements that skew more adult. Classification aside, it’s absorbing, jarring and raw.


#RecipeForHate featured in Publisher’s Weekly!

Their story below – and their review, which called my new book a “riveting, unflinching page-turner,” here.

YA Novel Inspired by 1980s Punks Who Brought Down Neo-Nazis

Warren Kinsella has been a persistent figure in Canadian politics and media for decades, as a strategist for various Liberal Party politicians, and even working for Hillary Clinton’s campaign during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. He has also been a commentator in newspapers including the Globe and Mail and the National Post, and is now a partner with Daisy Consulting Group, a consulting and crisis management firm in Toronto. But as a teenager in mid-’70s Calgary, Kinsella was deeply entrenched in the punk music scene, as a member of a band called the Hot Nasties.

He has written a handful of adult nonfiction books over the years — Web of Hate: Inside Canada’s Far Right Network and Fury’s Hour: A (sort-of) Punk-Rock Manifesto, among others — whose titles form a logical path to his newest book, his first young adult novel. Recipe for Hate (Dundurn), available now in Canada and next month in the U.S., is a murder mystery set in Portland, Maine, about a group of punks in the ’70s dealing with their community’s “anti-punk hysteria” and the fallout after two of their friends are murdered by a gang of neo-Nazis.

According to Kinsella, the book is inspired by the Silent Brotherhood, a white supremacist terrorist group that he covered in the 1980s as a reporter for the Calgary Herald. The theme of neo-Nazis, however, is one that he’s unfortunately seeing echoes of again today.

“The election of Trump and the passage of Brexit have obviously made it easier for these hate groups to be active and prominent. They’re bolder now than ever before,” Kinsella said. “And that’s because, in my opinion, Trump is a white supremacist and a bigot, and many of the people who supported him and are involved with him have the same views. The book’s timing is perfect to warn people about how these groups work and how they are a danger to civil society.”

Recipe for Hate — named for a Bad Religion song — launches a trilogy of books, with the second title, New Dark Ages, expected next fall. Kinsella said it takes place with the same group of people at a later period in time, and features a character “who looks and sounds an awful lot like Donald Trump.”