What We're Reading: Staff Writers' Picks, Fall 2023

There’s nothing better than a hot drink on a cool day with a great book. Here are some new and forthcoming titles that we are especially excited about.

On Community

by Casey Plett

Biblioasis, November 2023

“We need community to live. But what does it look like? Why does it often feel like it’s slipping away?

We are all hinged to some definition of a community, be it as simple as where we live, complex as the beliefs we share, or as intentional as those we call family. In an episodic personal essay, Casey Plett draws on a range of firsthand experiences to start a conversation about the larger implications of community as a word, an idea, and a symbol. With each thread a cumulative definition of community, and what it has come to mean to Plett, emerges.

Looking at phenomena from transgender literature, to Mennonite history, to hacker houses of Silicon Valley, and the rise of nationalism in North America, Plett delves into the thorny intractability of community’s boons and faults. Deeply personal, authoritative in its illuminations, On Community is an essential contribution to the larger cultural discourse that asks how, and to what socio-political ends, we form bonds with one another.”

Iron Flame

The Empyrean Book 2

by Rebecca Yarros

Red Tower Books, November 2023

“‘The first year is when some of us lose our lives. The second year is when the rest of us lose our humanity.’ – Xaden Riorson

Everyone expected Violet Sorrengail to die during her first year at Basgiath War College – Violet included. But Threshing was only the first impossible test meant to weed out the weak-willed, the unworthy, and the unlucky.

Now the real training begins, and Violet’s already wondering how she’ll get through. It’s not just that it’s grueling and maliciously brutal, or even that it’s designed to stretch the riders’ capacity for pain beyond endurance. It’s the new vice commandant, who’s made it his personal mission to teach

Violet exactly how powerless she is – unless she betrays the man she loves.

Although Violet’s body might be weaker and frailer than everyone else’s, she still has her wits – and a will of iron. And leadership is forgetting the most important lesson Basgiath has taught her: Dragon riders make their own rules.

But a determination to survive won’t be enough this year.

Because Violet knows the real secret hidden for centuries at Basgiath War College – and nothing, not even dragon fire, may be enough to save them in the end.”

Girls, Interrupted: How Pop Culture Is Failing Women

by Lisa Whittington-Hill

Véhicule Press, October 2023

“The past decade has seen a rise in documentaries, memoirs and podcasts that revisit the legacies of women wronged by pop culture. With movements like #MeToo and #TimesUp challenging long-standing narratives around female celebrities, it’s no surprise so many believe the representation of women in the media has improved. In her scathingly witty collection of essays, Girls, Interrupted: How Pop Culture is Failing Women, Lisa Whittington-Hill argues otherwise. Pop culture’s treatment of women, writes Whittington-Hill, is still marked by misogyny and misunderstanding. From the gender bias in celebrity memoir coverage to problematic portrayals of middle-aged women and the sexist pressure on female pop stars to constantly reinvent themselves, Girls, Interrupted critically examines how mainstream media keeps failing women and explores what we can do to fix it. A work of searing relevance, this candid and often cathartic debut marks Whittington-Hill as a cultural critic of the first rank.”

The All + Flesh

by Brandi Bird

House of Anansi, August 2023

“Brandi Bird's frank, transcendent poetry explores the concepts of health, language, place, and memory in this long-anticipated debut collection.

Brandi Bird’s long-anticipated debut poetry collection, The All + Flesh, explores the concepts of health, language, place, and memory that connect its author to their chosen kin, blood relatives, and ancestral lands. By examining kinship in broader contexts, these frank, transcendent poems expose binaries that exist inside those relationships, then inspect and tease them apart in the hope of moving toward decolonial future(s). Bird’s work is highly concerned with how outer and inner landscapes move and change within the confines of the English language, particularly the ‘I’ of the self, a tradition of movement that has been lost for many who don’t speak their Indigenous languages or live on their homelands. By exploring the landscapes the poet does inhabit, both internally and externally, Bird’s poems seek to delve into and reflect their cultural lineages – specifically Saulteaux, Cree, and Métis – and how these transformative identities shape the person they are today.

I am made of centuries & carbohydrates
the development of my molars
the hunger the teeth grew
has been with me since childhood
I can’t escape the mouths of others.”

Yara

by Tamara Faith Berger

Coach House Books, October 2023

“From the author of Maidenhead, a reverse cautionary tale about a young woman exploring the boundaries of sex and belonging in the early 2000s.

Distraught that her teenage daughter is in love with a woman a decade older, Yara’s mother sends Yara away from their home in Brazil on a Birthright trip to Israel for Jewish youth. Freed from her increasingly controlling and jealous girlfriend, Yara is determined to forge her own path and follow her desires.

But Birthright takes a debaucherous turn, and Yara flees Israel for Toronto, where she begins to see her relationship in the new, uncertain light of sexual abuse; then California, where she plays with the line between erotic film and real life. As Yara wanders, she tries to keep her head above water, connecting the dots between the lands in which she finds herself, the places she has been, and the places she is headed.”

The Lost Supper: Searching for the Future of Food in the Flavors of the Past

by Taras Grescoe

Greystone BOoks, September 2023

“In the tradition of Michael Pollan, Anthony Bourdain, and Mark Bittman, an exciting and globe-trotting account of ancient cuisines – from Neolithic bread to ancient Roman fish sauce – and why reviving the foods of the past is the key to saving the future.

Many of us are worried (or at least we should be) about the impacts of globalization, pollution, and biotechnology on our diets. Whether it's monoculture crops, hormone-fed beef, or high-fructose corn syrup, industrially produced foods have troubling consequences for us and the planet. But as culinary diversity diminishes, many people are looking to a surprising place to safeguard the future: into the past.

The Lost Supper explores an idea that is quickly spreading among restaurateurs, food producers, scientists, and gastronomes around the world: that the key to healthy and sustainable eating lies not in looking forward, but in looking back to the foods that have sustained us through our half-million-year existence as a species.

Acclaimed author Taras Grescoe introduces readers to the surprising and forgotten flavours whose revival is captivating food-lovers around the world: ancient sourdough bread last baked by Egyptian pharaohs; raw-milk farmhouse cheese from critically endangered British dairy cattle; ham from Spanish pata negra pigs that have been foraging on acorns on a secluded island since before the United States was a nation; and olive oil from wild olive trees uniquely capable of resisting quickly evolving pests and modern pathogens.

From Ancient Roman fish sauce to Aztec caviar to the long-thought-extinct silphium, The Lost Supper is a deep dive into the latest frontier of global gastronomy – the archaeology of taste. Through vivid writing, history, and first-hand culinary experience, Grescoe sets out a provocative case: in order to save these foods, he argues, we've got to eat them.”

Misfortune and Fame: 10 Reasons You Don’t Want to be Rich (or Famous)

by Paul Berton

Douglas & McIntyre, July 2023

“Paul Berton takes aim at the waste and excess of consumer culture with a lively and satire-laced exposé of the rich, famous and totally miserable.

There is little argument that having enough money to meet your needs is important. But beyond that, what makes us happy? Is a lot of money the answer? Is a glamorous life actually glamorous? Must we have thousands of followers on social media, only to have the internet rabble criticize us at every turn? Amid all the fun and frivolity, there is inevitable misery and madness. A double-edged sword. A poisoned chalice. That’s what this book is about: In ten punchy chapters full of anecdotes about the miseries and misfortunes of the affluent, Berton offers readers ten reasons NOT to wish for fame or fortune.”

Starling House

by Alix E. Harrow

Tor Books, October 2023

“A gorgeously modern gothic fantasy from the New York Times bestselling author of Ten Thousand Doors of January.

I dream sometimes about a house I’ve never seen….

Opal is a lot of things – orphan, high school dropout, full-time cynic and part-time cashier – but above all, she's determined to find a better life for her younger brother Jasper. One that gets them out of Eden, Kentucky, a town remarkable for only two things: bad luck and E. Starling, the reclusive nineteenth century author of The Underland, who disappeared over a hundred years ago.

All she left behind were dark rumors – and her home. Everyone agrees that it’s best to ignore the uncanny mansion and its misanthropic heir, Arthur . Almost everyone, anyway.

I should be scared, but in the dream I don’t hesitate.

Opal has been obsessed with The Underland since she was a child. When she gets the chance to step inside Starling House – and make some extra cash for her brother's escape fund – she can't resist.

But sinister forces are digging deeper into the buried secrets of Starling House, and Arthur’s own nightmares have become far too real. As Eden itself seems to be drowning in its own ghosts, Opal realizes that she might finally have found a reason to stick around.

In my dream, I’m home.

And now she’ll have to fight.

Welcome to Starling House: enter, if you dare.”

Recommended by Jessica Rose and Jen Rawlinson

People You Know, Places You’ve Been

by Hana Shafi

Book*hug Press, October 2023

“The latest poetry and artwork collection from Hana Shafi examines the everyday connections we make to the people and places we encounter. Despite the infinite variations of our lives, every urban dweller has sparred with a neighbour they disliked, seen beautiful strangers on public transit, told secrets to their hairdresser. We interact with these supporting characters on a daily basis – and often we are them for others.

Shafi celebrates the Antiheroes of the world (the alcoholic at your local bar, teenage girls); examines those in Beautiful Leading Roles (the hot professor, the rich couple); lauds older generations of Wizards and Crones; and flags the Nemeses (men who think they’re allies, competitors for produce at farmer’s markets). We sink into recognition at depictions of Palaces such as the greasy spoon, Dungeons of public transit, and the Liminal Spaces of checkout counters or waiting rooms (including that one at the end of the cosmos).

People You Know, Places You’ve Been is an insightful, charming collection that offers a sense of shared recognition and nostalgia, ultimately asking: what if seemingly mundane places are actually the foundations of who you are?”

act normal

by nancy viva davis halifax

McGill-Queen’s University Press, October 2023

“Poems that evoke lives lost to our shared present, contesting normative claims that separate bodies into categories and institutions.

i might never be no-one that shiny / the beauty of a sequin’d self / what was stitched into heaven’s drop

The poems in act normal use illegibility and wilful uncertainty to evade the grasp of the normative, as endured by those institutionalized by, and through, the concept of normalcy.

act normal starts in an institution where children categorized and constructed as intellectually inferior are placed into custodial care. These poems are inquisitive, articulating the entanglements of lives across categories of difference - particularly the lives of those who as children were considered to be other or less than human. Drawing upon conversations, archival materials, court cases, legislation, transcripts, and case histories, among other sources, nancy davis halifax’s poems destabilize categories of meaning - understanding disability and difference as “undecidability.”

act normal is a movement of “feelingthought,” unsettling normative expectations and inviting readers to re-orient from the normative task of assuming the safety of consensual interpretation, while risking, cherishing, and performing non-indifference.”

Moon of the Turning Leaves

by Waubgeshig Rice

Random House Canada, October 2023

“Twelve years after the lights go out . . .

An epic journey to a forgotten homeland

The hotly anticipated sequel to the bestselling novel Moon of the Crusted Snow

It's been over a decade since a mysterious cataclysm caused a permanent blackout that toppled infrastructure and thrust the world into anarchy. Evan Whitesky led his community in remote northern Ontario off the rez and into the bush, where they've been living off the land, rekindling their Anishinaabe traditions in total isolation from the outside world. As new generations are born, and others come of age in the world after everything, Evan’s people are in some ways stronger than ever. But resources in and around their new settlement are beginning to dry up, and the elders warn that they cannot afford to stay indefinitely.

Evan and his fifteen-year-old daughter, Nangohns, are elected to lead a small scouting party on a months-long trip to their traditional home on the north shore of Lake Huron – to seek new beginnings, and discover what kind of life – and what dangers – still exist in the lands to the south.

Moon of the Turning Leaves is Waubgeshig Rice’s exhilarating return to the world first explored in the phenomenal breakout bestseller Moon of the Crusted Snow: a brooding story of survival, resilience, Indigenous identity, and rebirth.”

CURIOUS SOUNDS: A Dialogue in Three Movements

by Roger Mooking and francesca ekwuyasi

Arsenal Pulp Press, October 2023

“A collaborative, multi-faceted book by two extraordinary Black artists about finding beauty in the chaos.

Roger Mooking is well known as a celebrity chef and the host of such television shows as the Cooking Channel's Man Fire Food and Everyday Exotic; he is also a recording artist with five albums to his credit and a visual artist who creates immersive experiences that merge the visual, sonic, and culinary arts. francesca ekwuyasi is a writer and filmmaker who won wide acclaim for her award-winning, bestselling debut novel, Butter Honey Pig Bread. These two enormously talented Black artists join forces in Curious Sounds, a book of art, stories, and conversations that illuminate the journey to find solace and perspective in an increasingly hyperactive and distracting world.

Inspired by the fact that the average human attention span lasts 8.25 seconds, Curious Sounds is a collection of small bursts of light, colour, and words that explore how time shapes and defines the world, especially from a Black perspective. Comprising three parts, which mirror the arc of a life – the Learning, the Living, and the Leaving – the book is a series of fleeting moments and visuals that help us to discover the beauty in our own chaos.”

Baumgartner

by Paul Auster

Grove Hardcover, November 2023

“Paul Auster’s brilliant eighteenth novel opens with a scorched pot of water, which Sy Baumgartner – phenomenologist, noted author, and soon-to-be retired philosophy professor – has just forgotten on the stove.

Baumgartner’s life had been defined by his deep, abiding love for his wife, Anna, who was killed in a swimming accident nine years earlier. Now 71, Baumgartner continues to struggle to live in her absence as the novel sinuously unfolds into spirals of memory and reminiscence, delineated in episodes spanning from 1968, when Sy and Anna meet as broke students working and writing in New York, through their passionate relationship over the next forty years, and back to Baumgartner’s youth in Newark and his Polish-born father’s life as a dress-shop owner and failed revolutionary.

Rich with compassion, wit, and Auster’s keen eye for beauty in the smallest, most transient moments of ordinary life, Baumgartner asks: Why do we remember certain moments, and forget others? In one of his most luminous works and his first novel since the Booker-shortlisted tour-de-force 4 3 2 1, Paul Auster captures several lifetimes.”

Same Bed Different Dreams

by Ed Park

Random House, November 2023

“A wild, sweeping novel that imagines an alternate secret history of Korea and the traces it leaves on the present – loaded with assassins and mad poets, RPGs and slasher films, pop bands and the perils of social media

In 1919, far-flung patriots establish the Korean Provisional Government to protest the Japanese occupation of their country. This government-in-exile proves mostly symbolic, though, and after Japan’s defeat in World War II, the KPG dissolves and civil war erupts, resulting in the tragic North-South split that remains today.

But what if the KPG still existed – now working toward a unified Korea, secretly pulling levers to further its aims? Same Bed Different Dreams weaves together three distinct narrative voices with an archive of mysterious images, and twists reality like a kaleidoscope. Korean history, American pop culture, and our tech-fraught lives come together in this extraordinary and unforgettable novel.

Soon Sheen, a former writer now employed by the tech behemoth GLOAT, comes into possession of an unfinished book seemingly authored by the KPG. The manuscript is a riveting revisionist history, connecting famous names and obscure bit players to the KPG’s grand project – everyone from Syngman Rhee and architect-poet Yi Sang to Jack London and Marilyn Monroe. M*A*S*H is in here, too, as are the Moonies and a history of violence extending from the assassination of President McKinley to the Reagan-era downing of a passenger plane that puts the world on the brink of war.

From the acclaimed author of Personal Days, Same Bed Different Dreams is a raucously funny feat of imagination and a thrilling meld of history and fiction that pulls readers into another dimension – one in which utopia is possible.”

My Body Is Distant: A Memoir

by Paige Maylott

ECW Press, September 2023

“In My Body Is Distant, Paige Maylott writes about her life – both virtual and IRL – as she explores her authentic self and sexuality through dream-like virtual worlds. While Paige dances in online BDSM clubs and hurls spells on virtual battlefields, she is swept into a fairy tale romance that pushes her into discovery mode: How can she transcend her carefully curated computer universe and manifest that happiness in the real world?

As she discovers the person she is meant to be, Paige contends with a cancer diagnosis and an imploding marriage while struggling to convert an online love story into reality. When a humiliation at work provides the necessary push to transition, Paige finds the freedom to explore her new self.

Part trans woman’s coming-out story and part heartfelt romance, My Body Is Distant follows Paige from a childhood obsession with the 1980s game Zork, through a health crisis and divorce, to, ultimately, an affirmation of authenticity and self-love.”

Do You Remember Being Born?

by Sean Michaels

Random House Canada, September 2023

“Scotiabank Giller Prize-winner Sean Michaels' luminous new novel takes readers on a lyrical joy ride – seven, epic days in Silicon Valley with a tall, formidable poet (inspired by the real-life Marianne Moore) and her unusual new collaborator, a digital mind just one month old. It's both a love letter to and an aching examination of art-making, family, identity and belonging.

Dear Marian, the letter from the Company begins. You are one of the great writers of this century.

At 75, Marian Ffarmer is almost as famous for her signature tricorn hat and cape as for her verse. She has lived for decades in the one-bedroom New York apartment she once shared with her mother, miles away from any other family, dedicating herself to her art. Yet recently her certainty about her choices has started to fray, especially when she thinks about her only son, now approaching middle age with no steady income. Into that breach comes the letter: an invitation to the Silicon Valley headquarters of one of the world's most powerful companies in order to make history by writing a poem.

Marian has never collaborated with anyone, let alone a machine, but the offer is too lucrative to resist, and she boards a plane to San Francisco with dreams of helping her son. In the Company's serene and golden Mind Studio, she encounters Charlotte, their state-of-the-art poetry bot, and is startled to find that it has written 230,442 poems in the last week, though it claims to only like two of them.

Over the conversations to follow, the poet is by turns intrigued, confused, moved and frightened by Charlotte's vision of the world, by what it knows and doesn't know ("Do you remember being born?" it asks her. Of course Marian doesn't, but Charlotte does.) This is a relationship, a friendship, unlike anything Marian has known, and as it evolves – and as Marian meets strangers at swimming pools, tortoises at the zoo, a clutch of younger poets, a late-night TV host and his synthetic foam set – she is forced to confront the secrets of her past and the direction of her future. Who knew that a disembodied mind could help bend Marian's life towards human connection, that friendship and family are not just time-eating obligations but soul-expanding joys. Or that belonging to one’s art means, above all else, belonging to the world.”

Like Every Form of Love: A Memoir of Friendship and True Crime

by Padma Viswanathan

Random House Canada, August 2023

“From the Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist, a gripping exploration of class, race, friendship, sexuality, what an author owes her subject and what it means to be a good person – all wrapped up in a riveting Canadian true crime story.

Padma Viswanathan was staying on a houseboat on Vancouver Island when she struck up a friendship with a warm-hearted, working-class queer man named Phillip. Their lives were so different it seemed unlikely to Padma that their relationship would last after she returned to her usual life. But, that week, Phillip told her a story from his childhood that kept them connected for more than twenty years.

Phillip was the son of a severe, abusive man named Harvey, a miner, farmer and communist. After Phillip’s mother left the family, Harvey advertised for a housekeeper-with-benefits. And so Del, the most glamorous and loving of stepmothers, stepped into Phillip's life. Del had hung out with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in Mexico City before the Cuban revolution; she was also a convicted bank robber who had violated her parole and was suspected in her ex-husband’s murder. Phillip had long since lost track of Del, but when Padma said she’d like to write about her and about his own young life, he eagerly agreed. Quickly, though, Padma’s research uncovered hidden truths about these larger-than-real-life characters. Watching the effects on Phillip as these secrets, evasions and traumas came to light, she increasingly feared that when it came to the book or the friendship, only one of them would get out of this process alive.

In this unforgettable memoir, Padma reflects on the joys and frictions of this strange journey with grace, humour and poetry, including original readings of Hans Christian Andersen fairytales and other stories that beautifully echo her characters’ adventures and her own. Like Every Form of Love is that rare thing: an irresistible literary page-turner that twists and turns, delivering powerful revelations, right to the very end.”

From the Lost and Found Department: New and Selected Poems

by Joy Kogawa

McClelland & Stewart, November 2023

“A career-spanning volume that brings together new and selected works by an iconic voice in Canadian literature.

From the Lost and Found Department, by the trailblazing Joy Kogawa, is a profound work of spare, trenchant, and haunting poems that lets us stay with the quietest qualities of beauty and the sublime.

This essential volume brings together thrilling new work with selected poems from The Splintered Moon (1967), A Choice of Dreams (1974), Jericho Road (1977), Woman In the Woods (1985), and A Garden of Anchors: Selected Poems (2003).

Kogawa’s poems here are evidence that our every vulnerability can open into vast channels of grace.”

The Cobra and the Key

by Sam Shelstad

Touchwood Editions, October 2023

“Sam Shelstad’s brilliantly funny, slightly unhinged creative writing guide is How Fiction Works by James Wood meets Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov.

To the untrained eye, Sam Shelstad may look a lot like a Value Village cashier who shares an apartment with his Uncle Herman and has just emerged from a failed relationship with a woman forty years his senior whom he met at his mother’s book club. But Sam is a successful novelist – or will be soon, he’s certain. The manuscript of his debut novel, The Emerald, is currently on the desk of a celebrated indie publisher. While he waits to hear back, he’s hard at work on two ambitious writing projects. The first is the Molly novel, a fictional rendering of Sam’s newly defunct relationship. The second is a guide for aspiring fiction writers like yourself. The two have much to teach one another, and much to teach you.

Drawing on examples from the work of greats like George Orwell, Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Alice Munro, Kazuo Ishiguro, Clarise Lispector, and Sam Shelstad, The Cobra and the Key takes the novice through aspects of character, detail, plot, style, point of view, dialogue, and meaning. Before long, you’ll be ready to print off your first draft and embark on revisions. Then it’s time to learn some of the tricks of the publishing biz. Having just been threatened with legal action by his soon-to-be publisher for stalking said publisher’s son via Instagram, Sam knows a thing or two about that too. Are you ready to get serious about your writing?”

The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart

by Astra Taylor

House of Anansi Press, September 2023

“These days, everyone feels insecure. We are financially stressed and emotionally overwhelmed. The status quo isn’t working for anyone, even those who appear to have it all. What is going on?

In this urgent cultural diagnosis, author and activist Astra Taylor exposes how seemingly disparate crises – rising inequality and declining mental health, the ecological emergency, and the threat of authoritarianism – originate from a social order built on insecurity. From home ownership and education to the wellness industry and policing, many of the institutions and systems that promise to make us more secure actually undermine us.

Mixing social critique, memoir, history, political analysis, and philosophy, this genre-bending book rethinks both insecurity and security from the ground up. By facing our existential insecurity and embracing our vulnerability, Taylor argues, we can begin to develop more caring, inclusive, and sustainable forms of security to help us better weather the challenges ahead. The Age of Insecurity will transform how you understand yourself and society – while illuminating a path toward meaningful change.”

A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, a history, a memorial

by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Grove Atlantic, October 2023

“With insight, humor, formal invention, and lyricism, in A Man of Two Faces Viet Thanh Nguyen rewinds the film of his own life. He expands the genre of personal memoir by acknowledging larger stories of refugeehood, colonization, and ideas about Vietnam and America, writing with his trademark sardonic wit and incisive analysis, as well as a deep emotional openness about his life as a father and a son.

At the age of four, Nguyen and his family are forced to flee his hometown of Ban Mê Thuột and come to the USA as refugees. After being removed from his brother and parents and homed with a family on his own, Nguyen is later allowed to resettle into his own family in suburban San José. But there is violence hidden behind the sunny façade of what he calls AMERICA™. One Christmas Eve, when Nguyen is nine, while watching cartoons at home, he learns that his parents have been shot while working at their grocery store, the SàiGòn Mới, a place where he sometimes helps price tins of fruit with a sticker gun. Years later, as a teenager, the blood-stirring drama of the films of the Vietnam War such as Apocalypse Now throw Nguyen into an existential crisis: how can he be both American and Vietnamese, both the killer and the person being killed? When he learns about an adopted sister who has stayed back in Vietnam, and ultimately visits her, he grows to understand just how much his parents have left behind. And as his parents age, he worries increasingly about their comfort and care, and realizes that some of their older wounds are reopening,

Profound in its emotions and brilliant in its thinking about cultural power, A Man of Two Faces explores the necessity of both forgetting and of memory, the promises America so readily makes and breaks, and the exceptional life story of one of the most original and important writers working today.”

Evil Eye

by Etaf Rum

HarperCollins, September 2023

“‘A moving meditation on motherhood, inter-generational trauma and how surface appearances often obscure a deeper truth. . . . A stunning second novel from a writer who set the bar very high with her first!’ – Tara Conklin, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Romantics and Community Board

The acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of A Woman Is No Man returns with a striking exploration of the expectations of Palestinian-American women, the meaning of a fulfilling life, and the ways our unresolved pasts affect our presents.

‘After Yara is placed on probation at work for fighting with a racist coworker, her Palestinian mother claims the provocation and all that’s come after were the result of a family curse. While Yara doesn’t believe in old superstitions, she finds herself unpacking her strict, often volatile childhood growing up in Brooklyn, looking for clues as to why she feels so unfulfilled in a life her mother could only dream of. Etaf Rum’s follow-up to her 2019 debut, A Woman Is No Man, is a complicated mother-daughter drama that looks at the lasting effects of intergenerational trauma and what it takes to break the cycle of abuse.’ —Time magazine, ‘The Most Anticipated Books of the Year.’”

The Clarion

by Nina Dunic

Invisible Publishing, September 2023

“‘We all lined up for our whipping by the shouting beauty and tender traumas of life. All of us so sensitive, and now this beautiful girl, with soft brown hair that was shot with gold in the sun. Another one of us starting to stumble.’

Peter plays the trumpet and works in a kitchen; Stasi tries to climb the corporate ladder and lands in therapy. These sensitive siblings struggle to find their place in the world, seeking intimacy and belonging – or trying to escape it.

A promising audition, a lost promotion, intriguing strangers and a silent lover – in rich, sensual scenes and moody brilliance, The Clarion explores rituals of connection and belonging, themes of intimacy and performance, and how far we wander to find, or lose, our sense of self.

Following the literary realist traditions of Mavis Gallant and Alice Munro, Dunic’s debut novel captures the vague if hopeful melancholy of any generation that believes it was never ‘called’ to something great.”

The Antiracist Kitchen: 21 Stories (and Recipes)

Edited by Nadia L. Hohn, Illustrated by Roza Nozari

Orca Book Publishers, April 2023

“What's on your plate?

An anthology featuring stories and recipes from racialized authors about food, culture and resistance

What if talking about racism was as easy as baking a cake, frying plantains or cooking rice? The Antiracist Kitchen: 21 Stories (and Recipes) is a celebration of food, family, activism and resistance in the face of racism. In this anthology featuring stories and recipes from 21 diverse and award-winning North American children's authors, the authors share the role of food in their lives and how it has helped fight discrimination, reclaim culture and celebrate people with different backgrounds. They bring personal and sometimes difficult experiences growing up as racialized people. Chopped, seared, marinated and stewed, The Antiracist Kitchen highlights the power of sitting down to share a meal and how that simple act can help bring us all together.

Featuring recipes and stories from S.K. Ali, Bryan Patrick Avery, Ruth Behar, Marty Chan, Ann Yu-Kyung Choi, Hasani Claxton, Natasha Deen, Reyna Grande, Deidre Havrelock, Jennifer de Leon, Andrea J. Loney, Janice Lynn Mather, Linda Sue Park, Danny Ramadan, Sarah Raughley, Waubgeshig Rice, Rahma Rodaah, Andrea Rogers, Simran Jeet Singh, Ayelet Tsabari and Susan Yoon.”

Plundering the North: A History of Settler Colonialism, Corporate Welfare, and Food Insecurity

by Kristin Burnett and Travis Hay

University of Manitoba Press, October 2023

“Food insecurity in the North is one of Canada’s most shameful public health and human rights crises. In Plundering the North, Kristin Burnett and Travis Hay examine the disturbing mechanics behind the origins of this crisis: state and corporate intervention in northern Indigenous foodways.

Despite claims to the contrary by governments, the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), and the contemporary North West Company (NWC), the exorbitant cost of food in the North is neither a naturally occurring phenomenon nor the result of free-market forces. Rather, inflated food prices are the direct result of government policies and corporate monopolies. Using food as a lens to track the institutional presence of the Canadian state in the North, Burnett and Hay chart the social, economic, and political changes that have taken place in northern Ontario since the 1950s. They explore the roles of state food policy and the HBC and NWC in setting up, perpetuating, and profiting from food insecurity while undermining Indigenous food sovereignties and self-determination.

Plundering the North provides fresh insight into Canada’s settler colonial project by re-evaluating northern food policy and laying bare the governmental and corporate processes behind the chronic food insecurity experienced by northern Indigenous communities.”

The House of Doors

by Tan Twan Eng

Bloomsbury Publishing, October 2023

“From the bestselling author of The Garden of Evening Mists, a spellbinding novel about love and betrayal, colonialism and revolution, storytelling and redemption.

The year is 1921. Lesley Hamlyn and her husband, Robert, a lawyer and war veteran, are living at Cassowary House on the Straits Settlement of Penang. When ‘Willie’ Somerset Maugham, a famed writer and old friend of Robert's, arrives for an extended visit with his secretary Gerald, the pair threatens a rift that could alter more lives than one.

Maugham, one of the great novelists of his day, is beleaguered: Having long hidden his homosexuality, his unhappy and expensive marriage of convenience becomes unbearable after he loses his savings – and the freedom to travel with Gerald. His career deflating, his health failing, Maugham arrives at Cassowary House in desperate need of a subject for his next book. Lesley, too, is enduring a marriage more duplicitous than it first appears. Maugham suspects an affair, and, learning of Lesley's past connection to the Chinese revolutionary, Dr. Sun Yat Sen, decides to probe deeper. But as their friendship grows and Lesley confides in him about life in the Straits, Maugham discovers a far more surprising tale than he imagined, one that involves not only war and scandal but the trial of an Englishwoman charged with murder. It is, to Maugham, a story worthy of fiction.

A mesmerizingly beautiful novel based on real events, The House of Doors traces the fault lines of race, gender, sexuality, and power under empire, and dives deep into the complicated nature of love and friendship in its shadow.”

Rouge

by Mona Awad

Hamish Hamilton, September 2023

“From the critically acclaimed author of Bunny comes a horror-tinted, gothic fairy tale about a lonely dress shop clerk whose mother's unexpected death sends her down a treacherous path in pursuit of youth and beauty. Can she escape her mother’s fate – and find a connection that is more than skin deep?

For as long as she can remember, Belle has been insidiously obsessed with her skin and skincare videos. When her estranged mother Noelle mysteriously dies, Belle finds herself back in Southern California, dealing with her mother’s considerable debts and grappling with lingering questions about her death. The stakes escalate when a strange woman in red appears at the funeral, offering a tantalizing clue about her mother’s demise, followed by a cryptic video about a transformative spa experience. With the help of a pair of red shoes, Belle is lured into the barbed embrace of La Maison de Méduse, the same lavish, culty spa to which her mother was devoted. There, Belle discovers the frightening secret behind her (and her mother’s) obsession with the mirror – and the great shimmering depths (and demons) that lurk on the other side of the glass.

Snow White meets Eyes Wide Shut in this surreal descent into the dark side of beauty, envy, grief, and the complicated love between mothers and daughters. With black humor and seductive horror, Rouge explores the cult-like nature of the beauty industry – as well as the danger of internalizing its pitiless gaze. Brimming with California sunshine and blood-red rose petals, Rouge holds up a warped mirror to our relationship with mortality, our collective fixation with the surface, and the wondrous, deep longing that might lie beneath.”

Death Valley

by Melissa Broder

Scribner , October 2023

“The most profound book yet from the visionary author of Milk Fed and The Pisces, a darkly funny novel about grief that becomes a desert survival story.

In Melissa Broder’s astounding new novel, a woman arrives alone at a Best Western seeking respite from an emptiness that plagues her. She has fled to the California high desert to escape a cloud of sorrow – for both her father in the ICU and a husband whose illness is worsening. What the motel provides, however, is not peace but a path, thanks to a receptionist who recommends a nearby hike.

Out on the sun-scorched trail, the woman encounters a towering cactus whose size and shape mean it should not exist in California. Yet the cactus is there, with a gash through its side that beckons like a familiar door. So she enters it. What awaits her inside this mystical succulent sets her on a journey at once desolate and rich, hilarious and poignant.

This is Melissa Broder at her most imaginative, most universal, and finest. This is Death Valley.”

imagining imagining: essays on Language, identity and infinity

by gary barwin

wolsak & wynn, November 2023

“Award-winning author Gary Barwin has written poems, novels and books for children. He’s composed music, created multimedia art and performed around the world. Now he has turned his talented pen to essays. In Imagining Imagining: Essays on Language, Identity and Infinity Barwin thinks deeply about big ideas: story and identity; art and death; how we communicate and why we dream. From his childhood home in Ireland to his long-time home in Hamilton, Barwin shares the thoughts that keep him up at night (literally) and the ideas that keep him creating. Filled with witty asides, wise stories and a generosity of spirit that is unmistakable, these are essays that readers will turn to again and again.”