If your anti-tariff activism includes buying books by Canadians, then you have plenty of great options to choose from this spring: the following list of titles publishing between March and May is over 60-per-cent Canadian-authored. In fiction, look for novels from Madeleine Thien, Emma Donoghue, Brian Thomas Isaac, David Szalay and Madhur Anand, or short story collections by André Alexis, Catherine Bush and newcomer Caitlin Galway.
On the non-fiction shelves you’ll find memoirs by Claire Cameron, Susan Swan and Tessa McWatt; a timely biography of Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, an account of one of Canada’s deadliest shipwrecks, a double biography of two great Montreal neurosurgeons, a history of the Irish famine and a blueprint for feeding the planet.
Rounding things out, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Colum McCann, Robert MacFarlane and Katie Kitamura are among the big names in international releases.
Happy reading!
Books we’re reading and loving this week
March
Broken Country, Clare Leslie Hall (Simon & Schuster) The first novel under her real name (she previously published a pair of domestic noirs as Clare Empson) tells a story of unrequited love as a murder trial unfurls in the background: In 1960s Dorset, England, a bookish farmer’s wife learns that an ex-boyfriend from her teens – now a divorced writer – has just returned to the community with a son roughly the same age as Beth’s, who died in an accident a couple of years earlier.
Dream Count, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Knopf) Four Nigerian and Nigerian-American women navigate personal and professional challenges against the backdrop of the COVID pandemic in Adichie’s first novel since her 2013 blockbuster, Americanah. Chiamaka is a travel writer; Zikora, a lawyer; Omelogor, a financial executive; and Kadiatou, a hotel maid clearly modelled on Nafissatou Diallo, the Guinean woman who accused Dominique Strauss-Kahn, then managing director of the IMF, of sexual assault in a New York hotel.
Flesh, David Szalay (McClelland & Stewart) After his relationship with a married older woman leads to tragedy, young István decamps from Hungary to London, where he lands a job chauffeuring the city’s uber-rich. As he did in his Booker-shortlisted breakout novel (All That Man Is), the Canadian-born, Britain-raised, Hungary-based Szalay probes themes of transience and modern masculinity in his trademark, coolly detached style.
How to Feed the World, Vaclav Smil (Viking) The Czech-Canadian scientist and University of Manitoba professor emeritus author of between 49 and 65 books (even the internet can’t keep count) – on energy, the environment, population and public policy, turns his interdisciplinary sights to the complexities of global food production, including key policy issues such as food inequality, sustainability and the future of agriculture.
How to Survive a Bear Attack, Claire Cameron (Knopf) Cameron’s bestselling novel, The Bear, was based on a shocking real-life black bear attack that resulted in the death of a couple in Ontario’s Algonquin Park in 1991. In this life-confronts-art memoir, Cameron explains what compelled her to return to the physical and psychological site of that book following her diagnosis with the same rare form of skin cancer that took the life of her father when she was nine.
Let Only Red Flowers Bloom, Emily Feng (Crown) An American journalist of Chinese heritage who reported from China for years, before she was barred in 2022, offers a rare glimpse into the realities of living in that country through the two dozen or so profiles of regular people, among them a Hong Kong bookseller, Uyghurs and ethnic Mongolians. Feng’s aim to understand “how the state controls expressions of identity, and who gets to be considered Chinese” has obvious personal resonance, given that she herself was once labelled a “race traitor.”
Rot, Padraic X. Scanlan (Basic) In this “imperial history” of the Irish potato famine, the University of Toronto prof (Slave Empire) explains why Ireland’s economic servitude to Britain turned a situation that, in Europe, had been a manageable setback, into a full-scale catastrophe: “Colonialism and capitalism made the British Empire,” Scanlan writes, “colonialism and capitalism made Irish poverty advantageous to Britain.”
Stag Dance, Torrey Peters (Random House) Peters’s well-received Detransition, Baby about three New Yorkers (one of whom, per the title, decides to detransition back to a man) attempting to co-parent while juggling various personal crises, was one of the first novels by a trans woman to be published by a major press. The jacket copy of this follow-up comprising one novella and three short stories, promises to “push the limits of trans writing.”
Theft, Abdulrazak Gurnah (Riverhead) Gurnah won the Nobel Prize in 2021 “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fates of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.” That makes the Tanzanian-born British writer’s work sound like a righteous slog— it isn’t. This latest involves two men abandoned as boys who embark on different life paths—one embracing his roots, the other rejecting them—including a complicated domestic situation, in 1960s Tanzania.
The Paris Express, Emma Donoghue (HarperCollins) Set over a single day, Donoghue’s new novel imagines the lives of the passengers onboard the Granville-Paris Express prior to the real-life disaster that occurred on Oct. 22, 1895. Captured in a famous, gobsmacking photo (Google it), the steam locomotive overran its buffer stop and, after crashing through the terminal’s concourse and stone exterior, fell 33 metres onto the sidewalk outside, killing its only victim.
Twist, Colum McCann (HarperCollins) Ever wondered what Heart of Darkness would be like rewritten in modern times, with Marlow cast as an Irish journalist sent to profile the Irish captain of a cable-repair vessel that roams the world’s oceans (and, naturally, the Congo river)? If so, no need to burden ChatGPT with the task: McCann (author of Let the Great World Spin, and a consistent purveyor of sublime prose) appears to have already completed it.
Wild Dark Shore, Charlotte McConaghy (Flatiron) In McConaghy’s thriller, part of a wave of recent climate-change influenced novels by Australians (among them Tim Winton and Charlotte Wood), four family members find themselves stranded with a mysterious stranger on a tiny, sinking subantarctic island (based on Macquarie Island, which was historically exploited for its oil, penguins and seals) where buried secrets arise, and inevitable tensions and a fight for survival, ensue.
April
Audition, Katie Kitamura (Riverhead) Kitamura writes plots that focus on existential uncertainty in prose so cold it cuts like a knife out of the freezer. Squarely in that mould, her high-concept latest, which is getting rave early reviews, teases out the murky relationship between a New York theatre actress and a young man who may or may not be her son.
Beneath Dark Waters, Eve Lazarus (Arsenal Pulp) Around a million Canadians can trace their immigration ancestry to the Empress of Ireland, which plied the ocean between Liverpool and Canada until 1914, when, after getting rammed by a Norwegian collier, it sunk in the St. Lawrence River, killing more passengers than either the Titanic or Lusitania. Lazarus’s name is apt given her aim here: to resurrect the disaster’s heroes and survivors, and to correct historical inaccuracies through firsthand accounts and expert insights.
Crumb, Dan Nadel (Scribner) Since emerging out of the underground comix movement of the 1960s with characters like Fritz the Cat and Mr. Natural, Robert Crumb has come to be seen as a foundational figure in modern cartooning, and an enabler of the graphic novel genre, so it’s surprising that it’s taken this long for a biography to be published (the excellence of the 1994 documentary Crumb possibly acted as a deterrent). Written with input from the now 81-year-old, Nadel’s 480-page book spans seven decades of Crumb’s life, beginning with his escape from a dysfunctional, abusive upbringing in the American suburbs.
Gabriële, Anne & Claire Berest (Europa) Originally published in France in 2017, this book predates Anne Berest’s bestselling novel-cum-memoir The Postcard, which explored her family’s Holocaust history. Using the same hybrid genre, and co-written with her sister Claire, Gabriële fictionally reconstructs the life of the girls’ great-grandmother Gabriële Buffet-Picabia, a “visionary art theorist” who, as the wife of Francis Picabia and mistress of Marcel Duchamp, was embedded, literally, in the heart of the European modernist avant-garde.
I Want to Die in my Boots, Natalie Appleton (TouchWood) The B.C.-based ex-journo melds fact and fiction in the picaresque story of the real-life figure Belle Jane, who, in the Canadian West of the 1920s, defied gender conventions both through her five marriages and her skillful running of one of Canada’s largest cattle- and horse-rustling rings (locals called her home “the Robber’s Roost”). Studded through with historical news clippings, the novel follows Belle from Montana to Saskatchewan and beyond.
I Remember Lights, Ben Ladouceur (Book*hug) The prizewinning poet’s first novel is a gay coming-of-age about a 19-year-old man from New Brunswick who travels to Montreal and finds sexual liberation among the pavilions of Expo 67, only to get caught up in the infamous (real) raid on the city’s Truxx nightclub a decade later: one of the largest mass arrests of gay men in Canadian history.
Notes to John, Joan Didion, (Knopf) Discovered among Didion’s effects after her death in 2021, this book began life as a journal (addressed to her husband, John Gregory Dunne) used to document a series of psychiatric sessions the writer undertook in late 1999 after “a rough few years.” With alcoholism, depression, guilt, Didion’s relationship with her mother and struggles with her daughter, Quintana, listed among its subjects, the book (embargoed until publication) promises to further pull back the emotional curtain on a famously aloof figure.
Old Romantics, Maggie Armstrong (Biblioasis) This debut collection of interlinked stories that skips through various phases in the life of Margaret, a woman desperately trying to maintain her romantic ideals despite years of awkward and disappointing relationships, was called “a dazzling snapshot of Dublin in the early 21st century” by The Irish Independent.
Ripper, Mark Bourrie (Biblioasis) This biography of Pierre Poilievre by Charles Taylor Prize-winning Bourrie (Bushrunner) delves into the federal Conservative Leader’s upbringing in 1980s Calgary, and his years “as the political equivalent of a hockey goon,” to help explain “how Canada made its own version of Donald Trump, albeit with fewer guns and less rioting, but with lots of trucks and lies.”
Skin, Catherine Bush (Goose Lane) Running the spectrum from realistic to surrealistic, many of the 13 tales in Bush’s first short-story collection (her five novels include Claire’s Head and The Rules of Engagement) deal with fragility – human, environmental – also the focus of her most recent novel, Blaze Island.
Small Ceremonies, Kyle Edwards (McClelland & Stewart) Edwards’s debut novel about a group of Indigenous hockey players from Winnipeg navigating personal and societal struggles during what may be their high school team’s final season was written while the Anishinaabe journalist from the Lake Manitoba First Nation, was enrolled in the prestigious Wallace Stegner Fellowship program at Stanford, and with mentorship from Percival Everett (who gives it a warm cover blurb)
May
A Song for Wildcats, Caitlin Galway (Rare Machines) The opening lines of the title tale in this surrealist-tinged collection of long-form stories – “I lived within a glass casket, off which the world glanced and glided away. Before me, sailboats lazed along the harbour” – goes a way to explaining why novelist Heather O’Neill has described Galway’s work as “a cross between Patricia Highsmith and Louisa May Alcott.”
Big Girls Don’t Cry, Susan Swan (HarperCollins) In 1950s Midland, Ont., Swan’s country-doctor father’s 6′5 height lent him effortless authority: He could disarm a threatening drunk with a mere frown. Swan – who was 6′2 by age 12 – had the opposite experience, with strangers and schoolmates alike taunting and publicly laughing at her. In this memoir about growing up tall and female, Swan lays out the meandering path she took toward self-acceptance in her 70s.
Bones of a Giant, Brian Thomas Isaac (Random House) Isaac’s childhood home on the Okanagan Indian Reserve near Vernon, B.C., provided the setting for All the Quiet Places, his bestselling, multiaward-nominated debut novel – published when he was 71 – about a young Sylix boy named Eddie Toma. Told from the perspective of Eddie’s brother Lewis, this sophomore effort picks up the family’s story in 1968, two years after Eddie’s disappearance.
Encampment, Maggie Helwig (Coach House) In 2022, Helwig, a priest at St. Stephen-in-the-Fields, in Toronto’s Kensington Market, controversially began opening her churchyard to the homeless, where they have remained ever since. In this memoir, she profiles occupants of the tent cities that have become shameful fixtures across the country, explaining her natural affinity for this population, and the frustratingly practical obstacles they face trying to get off the streets.
Horsefly, Mireille Gagné (Coach House) Loosely based on historical fact and family history, Gagné‘s ecological thriller-slash-parable gradually untangles the connection between a secret wartime mission to develop biological weapons on Grosse-Île in the St. Lawrence, and a violent heatwave that rocks the island eight decades later, unleashing massive swarms of horseflies and the disproportionate fury of local residents.
Is a River Alive?, Robert MacFarlane (Random House) Macfarlane, whose evocative writing seamlessly blends travel writing and environmental philosophy (Underland, Mountains of the Mind), here explores what it means to grant legal rights to bodies of water. Among his examples are Ecuador’s Río Los Cedros and Quebec’s Magpie River, which, thanks to Indigenous activists, was granted personhood protecting it from hydroelectric exploitation in 2021.
Margaret’s New Look, Katherine Ashenburg (Knopf) In Ashenburg’s dialogue-driven third novel, a museum curator organizing a controversial Christian Dior exhibition finds herself thrust into workplace politics, uncomfortable questions from the younger generation about the French designer’s Nazi-adjacent past, and revelations about her Jewish heritage. This, while couture pieces start mysteriously disappearing.
Other Worlds, André Alexis (McClelland & Stewart) As he has throughout his novelistic career, Alexis sprints the genre gamut in his newest short-story collection. The talking animals and parent-child relationships that have been a preoccupation are here, too, notably in the Jonathan Swift-inspired Houyhnhnm (previously published in the New Yorker), in which a son finds a new connection to his late doctor-father when he discovers that the latter’s beloved horse can speak.
The Book of Records, Madeleine Thien (Knopf) Thien’s first novel since the Governor-General’s and Giller Prize-winning Do Not Say We Have Nothing takes place in “the Sea,” a migrant-welcoming building that exists outside normal time and space. There, young Lina grows up caring for her sick father, connected to the outside world only by three books about the lives of great voyagers, and tales told by three of her neighbours: a poet, philosopher and Jewish scholar with notable similarities to Du Fu, Hannah Arendt and Baruch Spinoza.
The Snag, Tessa McWatt (Random House) Is there nothing a walk in the forest can’t fix? In this memoir, McWatt explains how – faced with personal and collective grief related to her Guyana-born mother’s advancing dementia, and her anxieties about the environment – she discovered hope, and a way forward, by studying and observing the life cycle of trees.
Things in Nature Merely Grow, Yiyun Li (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) “There’s no good way to say this,” the Chinese-American novelist writes several times at the beginning of this book about her bereavement following the deaths – by suicides seven years apart – of her two teenaged sons: “Words tend to take on a flabbiness or a staleness after a catastrophe, but if one has to live with the extremity of losing two children, an imperfect and ineffective language is but a minor misfortune.”
The Mind Mappers, Eric Andrew-Gee (Random House) Late-1950s Montreal, some have claimed, was to the brain what 19th-century Vienna was to the mind. In this dual biography, Andrew-Gee, The Globe’s Montreal correspondent, outlines the achievements and turbulent relationship of the two pivotal but temperamentally opposite figures responsible for the Montreal Neurological Institute’s stellar reputation in this period: the charismatic Dr. Wilder Penfield and the socially awkward Dr. William Cone, who would die suddenly, in his office, in 1959.
To Place a Rabbit, Madhur Anand (Knopf) The Borgesian plot of Anand’s new novel involves a scientist who, while attending a literary festival, impulsively offers to retranslate a novelist’s lost English novella manuscript – the novelist having ostentatiously published it only in French, a language she doesn’t speak – into English, inadvertently stirring up her own past and desires in the process. (Anand, NB, is a scientist and literary-festival-attending poet who bagged the Governor-General’s Award for her memoir This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart.)
Written on the Dark, Guy Gavriel Kay (Viking) Renaissance Italy, the Ottoman Empire, Justinian Constantinople, Viking-era Scandinavia, Tang and Song Dynasty-era China – the Saskatchewan-born erstwhile editor of Tolkien has been slowly conquering the world, and time, through his bestselling brand of historical fantasy. His newest returns us to medieval France (setting of A Song for Arbonne), where a tavern poet of dubious distinction (aren’t they all?) is drawn into the web of political intrigue, assassinations and war.
