As the literary season unfolds, a striking mix of voices looks inward, backward and outward at once in settings that range from Beirut to Kolkata, Gaza to Trinidad and Montreal to the moon.
Books we’re reading and loving in October
In non-fiction, memoirs dominate, as is often the case these days, with major writers such as Margaret Atwood, Miriam Toews, Susan Orlean, Arundhati Roy and Elizabeth Gilbert offering up their personal histories. History, too, resurfaces in fresh light, from a reassessment of the influence of Shakespeare’s greatest rival to Tudor succession myths to the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Three books confront Donald Trump’s annexation threats – two by invoking patriotism, another by questioning whether current leadership is up for meeting the challenge.
In fiction, you’ll find three novels set on remote islands and another three in a not-so-far-off climactically compromised future. Giller winners David Bergen, Ian Williams and Souvankham Thammavongsa all have new offerings, while novelists Jon Fosse, Eimear McBride and Elise Levine continue to test the limits of form.
FICTIONLiterary Fiction
The City Changes Its Face, Eimear McBride (McClelland & Stewart) The writer whom Anne Enright declared a genius first burst on the scene with her Women’s Prize-winning A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing. Expect more innovative, syntax-defying prose in this new one, told largely in flashbacks, about the evolving relationship between a 20-year-old drama student and an older actor (both featured in McBride’s The Lesser Bohemians).
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You’ve Changed, Ian Williams (Random House) Williams’s second novel, after 2019’s Giller-winning Reproduction, follows Beckett, a struggling contractor, and his fitness-instructor wife, Princess, who undergo radical personal metamorphoses after a visit from friends exposes cracks in their marriage.
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Pick a Colour, Souvankham Thammavongsa (Knopf) This first novel by Thammavongsa (who won the Giller for her exquisite book of stories, How to Pronounce Knife) is set over a single day at a nail salon run by a retired female immigrant boxer whose smilingly bland public-facing persona hides a complex inner life. Her immigrant staff, like the “George” porters of early 20th-century train travel, all go by “Susan.”
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Self Care, Russell Smith (Biblioasis) More than 30 years after he started chronicling the sexual habits and proclivities of young urban professionals in his debut, How Insensitive, Smith is still at it in this story of a female journalist whose relationship with a man she’s ostensibly interviewing for an article on incel culture starts crossing into risky sexual and emotional territory.
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Property, Kate Cayley (Coach House) Though Cayley’s oeuvre is relatively small (two short-story collections, three poetry collections and plays), it has packed a big punch in the prizes department, having won the Trillium Book Award, the Mitchell Prize for Poetry, the O. Henry Short Story Prize and garnered several nominations. In her first novel, the lives of residents in a gentrifying Toronto neighbourhood intersect over a single spring day before culminating in a death foretold.
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Family Sagas
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, Kiran Desai (Knopf) Terms such as “masterpiece” and “magnificent” are already getting lobbed at this almost-20-years-in-the-making novel, which has made the Booker short list (her 2006 The Inheritance of Loss won the Booker). Sonia, an aspiring novelist returning to India from Vermont, and Sunny, a struggling journalist in New York, navigate love and the complexities of modern life across continents and generations.
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Starry Starry Night, Shani Mootoo (Book*hug) Like her previous work, this novel is about an individual on the edge; in this case a young girl named Anju – a child of privilege – navigating the shifting societal landscape in pre- and postcolonial Trinidad.
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The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother), Rabih Alameddine (Grove Press) The National Book Award finalist and PEN/Faulkner winner brings his caustic wit to this story, told over six decades, of a gay philosophy teacher from Beirut as he navigates his relationship with his mother, from his captivity during the Lebanese Civil War, through COVID and the Lebanese banking crisis.
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Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way, Elaine Feeney (Biblioasis) The Irish author’s follow-up to the Booker-nominated How to Build a Boat involves a woman who, in the wake of her mother’s death and her father’s cancer diagnosis, returns from London to her family’s struggling farmstead in western Ireland, where she confronts her past while adjusting to the rhythms of rural life during the pandemic.
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Historical
Anarchists in Love, Robert Hough (Douglas & McIntyre) His novels have often been based on memorable real-life figures, among them the pioneering tiger trainer Mabel Stark, the goat-gland transplant peddler John R. Brinkley and Welsh privateer Henry Morgan. His latest finds the multitasking revolutionaries Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman in the midst of a passionate love affair in Gilded Age New York while plotting to avenge the violence committed against industrialist Henry Frick’s striking factory workers.
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Letters to Kafka, Christine Estima (Anansi) This debut novel (following a book of short stories, The Syrian Ladies Benevolent Society) brings to light Franz Kafka’s first Czech translator, Milena Jesenská, who carried on an emotionally and intellectually charged two-year epistolary relationship with the tubercular, German-speaking writer.
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The Wayfinder, Adam Johnson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Set in the South Pacific during the Tu’i Tonga Empire, Johnson’s historical epic follows a young girl from a remote Tongan island whose quest to save her people from starvation leads her to the Kingdom of Tonga – an empire at war and on the verge of collapse – where she becomes entangled in political intrigues and cultural upheaval.
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The Book of I, David Greig (Europa) A Viking, a mead-maker and a monk are stranded together on the remote Scottish island of Iona, in the year 825, after a Viking raid: Sounds like the set-up for a joke at a medievalists’ convention. Rather, it’s the premise of this debut novel by Scottish playwright Greig, which was shortlisted for the Highland Book Prize and the Bookmark Book Festival Book of the Year.
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Queen Esther, John Irving (Viking) Irving’s 20th-century-spanning 17th novel returns, after 40 years, to the Maine orphanage that was the setting of his massively bestselling The Cider House Rules to follow the fate of a Jewish Viennese-born orphan who ends up working as a nanny for a kindly New Hampshire couple while tracing her roots back to Jerusalem.
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Beasts of the Sea, Iida Turpeinen (Little, Brown) Originally published in 2023, Turpeinen’s widely translated novel traces the sad fate of Steller’s sea cow: from the gentle beast’s discovery during Captain Bering’s Great Northern Expedition of 1741, to its postextinction reconstruction in a 1950s museum. The most internationally successful Finnish debut ever, the novel was nominated for and won a slew of prizes overseas.
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Psychological & Metaphysical
Days of Feasting, David Bergen (Goose Lane) Known, till now at least, for character-driven novels that probe the quiet tensions and moral dilemmas of everyday life (exhibit A: Giller Prize-winning The Time in Between), Bergen has veered in a decidedly new direction with his latest: a psychological thriller in the vein of The Talented Mr. Ripley and Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen, in which a female expat American living in Thailand assumes her wealthy landlady’s identity after the latter drowns.
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Mother of God, Sara Peters (McClelland & Stewart) This sophomore effort, after her experimental novel I Become a Delight to My Enemies, is a work of psychological horror (the publisher’s comparables are Carmen Maria Machado and Heather O’Neill) that follows Marlene, a self-described psychic wound healer whose lifelong visions of her mother compel her to take a road trip from Vancouver to Nova Scotia.
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The Ferryman and His Wife, Frode Grytten (Little, Brown) Grytten has won the Brage Prize (considered Norway’s Booker) twice: once for his novel Song of the Beehive, and for this book, his first translated into English. Plugged as being “in the spirit of Amor Towles and George Saunders,” it’s about a ferryman joined by visions, memories and spirits of the dead as he embarks on what he knows will be his last fjord crossing.
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We Love You, Bunny, Mona Awad (Scribner) Her 2019 novel Bunny – which revolved around interactions between Samantha, a New England graduate student, and a clique of hyperfeminine peers, known as the Bunnies, who engage in surreal and occult practices – was that rare thing: a commercial and critical hit. This return to the “bunnyverse” shifts the narrative perspective from Samantha to the Bunnies themselves.
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Vaim, Jon Fosse (Transit) The Norwegian author, who became a Nobel laureate in 2023, is known for stylized “slow prose” that often delves into themes of spirituality and the human condition. Like his seven-part novel Septology, this new one – about a trio of characters in a remote fishing village – is composed as a single sentence (with commas, mercifully).
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Short Stories
Big of You, Elise Levine (Biblioasis) Reading the still criminally underappreciated Levine is a visceral experience that seems to demand engagement of all one’s senses. Her latest, a collection of nine short stories, runs the settings gamut from the realistic to the fantastical to the cosmic.
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Princess Nai and Other Stories, Jamal Saeed (ECW) Most of the stories in this collection by the Kingston-based, Hilary Weston Prize-shortlisted author of My Road from Damascus – which explore “love, beauty, despair, hope, the longing for freedom, the search for lost time” – were written during his 12 years as a prisoner of conscience in Syria. (Others were penned after the Syrian uprising in 2011.)
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The Eleventh Hour, Salman Rushdie (Knopf) No surprise that the septuagenarian writer, who barely survived the violent public attack on his life in 2022, finds himself pondering mortality, the subject that presides over this collection of five stories, all of which are set in the places where Rushdie produced his work: India, England and the U.S.
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Sacred Rage, Steven Heighton (Biblioasis) Though his poetry established him as a leading figure in contemporary Canadian fiction, Heighton – who also wrote five novels and some non-fiction – apparently told his long-time editor John Metcalf, a few years before the author’s sudden death by cancer, in 2022, that he believed the short story was his greatest contribution to literature. For this collection, Metcalf assembled 15 of what he deems the author’s best.
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Suddenly Light, Nina Dunic (Invisible) The short stories in this collection by Dunic – whose 2023 novel, The Clarion, won the Trillium Book Award and made the Giller long list – are about people at various stages of life whose routines are disrupted by loss, violence or unexpected encounters.
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Speculative & Dystopic
What We Can Know, Ian McEwan (Knopf) McEwan’s future-set novel – a place he previously visited in novels Solar and Machines Like Me – involves a humanities scholar (his breed having somehow survived climate disaster and nuclear war, albeit barely) who is researching the origins of a lost poem read at an intimate 2014 dinner party more than a century ago.
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The Trial of Katterfelto, Michael Redhill (Knopf) In 18th-century England, a conjurer and his assistant discover a metal horn that carries the voice of a woman from a future Toronto beset by climate and civil upheaval. The pair quickly work the horn into their act – who wouldn’t? – while simultaneously trying to understand its origins and message.
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Other Evolutions, Rebecca Hirsch Garcia (ECW) A young Ottawa woman from a Jewish-Mexican family, scarred by a childhood accident, encounters an uncanny figure from her past in this novel by the O. Henry Prize winner and author of a previous collection of short stories (The Girl Who Cried Diamonds).
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The Unveiling, Quan Barry (Grove Press) In this literary horror novel, a Black film scout who takes a luxury cruise (for some, that’s horror enough) to find locations for a coming big-budget movie about Shackleton’s failed expedition ends up stranded with some of her privileged fellow passengers on a remote Antarctic island, where she confronts inner demons and outer unpleasantness (the remains of stranded explorers, violent birds).
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Aliens on the Moon, Thomas King (HarperCollins) The unexpected landing of aliens on the lunar surface occasions King’s return to his humorous explorations of small-town Ontario life (see also: Indians on Vacation), where daily routines and local quirks continue largely undisturbed.
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A Guardian and a Thief, Megha Majumdar (McClelland & Stewart) With pestilence, fever and drought plaguing near-future Kolkata, Ma is preparing, along with her young daughter and father, to emigrate to the U.S. when the theft of their passports alters their fate, binding it to that of the thief who took them. Majumdar’s previous novel was the critically acclaimed A Burning.
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Graphic novels and illustrated
The Once and Future Riot, Joe Sacco (Metropolitan) Though there’s been renewed interest in Sacco lately for his two full-length graphic novels about Gaza and the Israeli-occupied territories, the journalist/cartoonist’s latest – which was delayed by Chinese printers’ refusal to print it owing to its maps not aligning with China’s territorial claims – is about something entirely different: the deadly sectarian riots that took place in Uttar Pradesh, India, in 2013.
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Cannon, Lee Lai (Drawn & Quarterly) The Australian-born, Montreal-based cartoonist – whose work has appeared in The New Yorker – made a splash with her first graphic novel, Stone Fruit. This second outing, set during one of Montreal’s notorious heatwaves, traces the events that led to a queer Chinese-Canadian woman with family issues purposefully destroying the kitchen of the restaurant where she works.
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The Cree Word for Love: Sâkihitowin, Tracey Lindberg, George Littlechild (HarperAvenue) An elder’s claim that there was no Cree word for the settler notion of romantic love was the spark for this collaboration between the Birdie author, who supplies words in various forms (poetry, prose, fragments), and Littlechild, who created the vivid, colourful art that intersperses them.
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NON-FICTIONBiography & Memoir
A Truce That Is Not Peace, Miriam Toews (Knopf) The question of why she writes provides the springboard for this memoir by the Women Talking author that looks, among other things, at how her creative process continues to be affected by the suicides of her father and sister.
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All the Way to the River, Elizabeth Gilbert (Penguin) “It is my way […] to become captivated by other people’s charisma and madness and wildness and beauty,” writes Gilbert in her first memoir since the Eat, Pray, Love phenomenon (which did its fair share of captivating thanks to Gilbert’s own not-inconsiderable charisma). That quote alludes to Rayya, the New York hairdresser for whom Gilbert left her marriage, and whose cancer diagnosis, and eventual death, would lead both women deep into the maw of addiction.
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The Trouble with Fairy Tales, Plum Johnson (Viking) Ten years after winning the 2015 RBC Taylor Prize for They Left Us Everything, about the family history she uncovered while clearing out her late parents’ 23-room home, Johnson is back with a memoir that critiques the patriarchal stories shaping women’s lives while tracing her journey through daughterhood, marriage, motherhood and artistic reinvention.
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Mother Mary Comes to Me, Arundhati Roy (Scribner) The focus of Roy’s memoir is her complicated relationship with her mother, the titular Mary (the inspiration for her character Ammu in the novel The God of Small Things), a teacher and activist who challenged inheritance laws in India and conducted herself, in the conservative Keralan town where she lived, “with the edginess of a gangster.”
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Book of Lives, Margaret Atwood (McClelland & Stewart) “You can’t avoid the time-space you’re living in. … Your writing will always be done in it and will be connected to it, even if your book is set on another planet or in another century,” writes Atwood at the beginning of this memoir exploring how her life experiences connect with the books that made her one of the few Canadian, and global, literary rock stars.
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The Eyes of Gaza, Plestia Alaqad (Little, Brown) Written in the form of diary extracts, the book by the young Palestinian journalist known online as “The Eyes of Gaza” provides an on-the-ground eyewitness account of the first weeks of Israeli retaliation after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, as she and her family navigate bombardments, destruction and displacement.
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John Candy, Paul Myers (Anansi) The author (who has also written books on the Kids in the Hall and Barenaked Ladies) spoke to a long list of figures in the late comedians’ orbit, including Candy’s fellow SCTV and Planes, Trains and Automobiles alums, for this biography. But don’t expect any revelations of monsters-lurking-within: “It is virtually impossible to find anyone with a bad word to say about him,” Myers writes in the book’s opening pages.
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Joyride, Susan Orlean (Simon & Schuster) Orlean’s quirkily rigorous non-fiction is often deeply personal (see: The Orchid Thief, On Animals, The Library Book) so it may come as a surprise that this is her first official memoir. In it, the New Yorker writer describes a wildly successful writer’s life that has been by turns exhilarating and isolating.
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Last Rites, Ozzy Osbourne (Grand Central) The title of Osbourne’s posthumously published memoir about the life-threatening health crisis that led to the cancellation of his 2019 No More Tours II tour carries less irony than would first appear, themes of darkness and death having long permeated the Black Sabbath front man’s songs and persona.
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The Many Lives of James Lovelock, Jonathan Watts (Greystone) This biography of the originator of the once-scoffed-at, now largely accepted Gaia theory – the notion that Earth’s living and non-living systems interact to regulate the planet’s environment in life-sustaining ways – is based on extensive interviews Watts conducted with Lovelock before his 2022 death, at 103, and arrives with a strong plug from Robert MacFarlane (“utterly fascinating”).
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Welcome to the Family, Barry Hertz (Grand Central, November) Globe film critic Barry Hertz takes readers inside the unlikely rise and turbulent future of the Fast & Furious franchise, drawing on extensive behind-the-scenes research to trace its evolution from street-racing roots to global entertainment juggernaut.
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History & Politics
He Did Not Conquer, Madelaine Drohan (Dundurn) Though he might like to think otherwise, Donald Trump isn’t the first American president to have designs on Canada: that would be Benjamin Franklin, who was determined to make Canada the 14th colony. His failure to do so (“Go fly a kite, Ben” might have been the “Elbows up!” of his day) is the subject of this book by a former Canada correspondent for The Economist.
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Breaking Point, John Ibbitson and Darrell Bricker (McClelland & Stewart) Canada was already facing profound political, economic and social fractures – from housing costs and regional tensions to immigration and defence – before Donald Trump started rumbling about making us the 51st state. In their third outing as co-authors (after The Big Shift and Empty Planet), Bricker and Ibbitson ask whether, “in the midst of the greatest political crisis Canada has ever faced,” traditional leadership and approaches can rise to the moment.
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The Finest Hotel in Kabul, Lyse Doucet (Allen Lane) A history of Afghanistan filtered through the lens of Kabul’s landmark Intercontinental Hotel, which, since its hope-filled 1969 opening as Afghanistan’s first luxury hotel, has borne witness to the many upheavals the country has experienced since. The author, a BBC correspondent, lived there for nearly a year while covering the 1989 Soviet withdrawal from the country and returned multiple times in the years to come.
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The Romans, Edward J. Watts (Basic) Intransigents take note! This 2,000-year, cradle-to-grave history attributes the longevity of the Roman state – which began in the eighth century BCE as a Latin-speaking monarchy on the seven hills of Rome and ended up a Greek-speaking, Christian empire in 13th-century Constantinople – to “the willingness of Romans to adapt to the world around them by incorporating new ideas and new approaches to every aspect of their personal and political lives.”
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The Stolen Crown, Tracy Borman (Atlantic Monthly Press) In tracing the history of the rival claimants, secret letters, and palace intrigues that marked the tumultuous end of the Tudor dynasty and start of the Stuart, Borman – thanks to newly uncovered material – lays bare the 400-year lie (zounds!) of Elizabeth I’s supposed deathbed naming of James I as her successor (“I’ll have none but him” she was purported to have declared).
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The Gales of November, John U. Bacon (Liveright) As well as a detailed account of the circumstances that led to the 1975 wrecking of the Edmund Fitzgerald – the freighter that was the “pride of the American side” but which attained immortality through Gordon Lightfoot’s improbable hit – Bacon’s book is also a history of the wartime and postwar Great Lakes shipping boom fuelled by industrial expansion in cities such as Detroit, Cleveland and Chicago.
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History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides (Basic) For his easy mixing of fact with folklore, travel tales and cultural observations, Herodotus is often seen as more accessible than his successor, Thucydides (though “Thucydides” is far more fun to say). That may change with Robin Waterfield’s new idiomatic translation of the Greek historian’s chronicle of a brutal (but ultimately inconsequential) conflict between Athens and Sparta in the fifth century BCE, which one reviewer calls “a magnificent achievement.”
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Dark Renaissance, Stephen Greenblatt (W. W. Norton) This biography by a pre-eminent Shakespeare scholar makes the case for Christopher Marlowe, the Bard’s greatest rival, as the true catalyst of the English literary Renaissance. Greenblatt traces Marlowe’s brief but impactful rise, from modest beginnings as a cobbler’s son to becoming a Cambridge scholar, then a spy for the Crown, before meeting his violent end in a tavern brawl at the age of 29.
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Essays & Ideas
Fan Mail, Jason Guriel (Véhicule) This collection of Guriel’s writings on the nature and meaning of fandom focuses, first and foremost, on the long list of things the poet and critic loves (Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill, Truman Capote’s blurb for A Separate Peace), and loathes (Carl Wilson’s defence of Celine Dion, Bob Dylan’s Nobel prize). Read it to find out why.
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Dead and Alive, Zadie Smith (Penguin) Best known for her novels, Smith has quietly become one of the best – as in, clear and unpretentious – essayists out there. This roaming new collection includes pieces on movies, the visual arts, student protests as well as obituaries and appreciations of various fellow writers (Joan Didion, Toni Morrison, Hilary Mantel).
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When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . ., Steven Pinker (Scribner) Continuing along the trajectory of his previous books about how human minds and communication shape societies and historical outcomes, the latest from the Montreal-born psychology prof (and occasional cultural lightning rod) explains how common knowledge (not to be confused with common sense) influences how we think and organize ourselves socially and politically.
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Canadian Society
A School for Tomorrow, Mark Dickinson (Cormorant) Canada World Youth was founded in 1971 by civil rights activist Jacques Hébert, in part to confront rising global economic inequality. Dickinson here recounts the history of the global cross-cultural exchange program that would prove transformational in the lives of the approximately 30,000 young people (including him) who participated in it until its 2012 demise due to withdrawn government funding.
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Elbows Up!, edited by Elamin Abdelmahmoud (McClelland & Stewart) In 1968, at the height of civil rights unrest and the Vietnam War, publisher Mel Hurtig and poet Al Purdy released The New Romans, an anthology of writing whose aim was to capture prominent Canadians’ unfiltered – and decidedly negative – views of the U.S. Inspired by that book, and by recent Trumpian provocations, this new anthology, whose contributors include Omar El Akkad, Atom Egoyan, Jay Baruchel and Canisia Lubrin, is, in the words of editor Abdelmahmoud, decidedly “more combative.”
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Sorry, Not Sorry, Mark Critch (Viking) Subtitled “An unapologetic look at what makes Canada worth fighting for,” the book by the This Hour Has 22 Minutes star offers a satire-tinged assessment of Canadian identity that touches on, among other things, our continuing relationship with the monarchy, the specter of provincial separation, the Freedom Convoy and Kevin O’Leary.
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We Breed Lions, Rick Westhead (Random House) In writing this exposé of hockey culture – based on survivor accounts, interviews with former players and other insiders – in the wake of the 2018 sexual-assault allegations against Team Canada junior players, the TSN correspondent ran up against what amounts to the pervasive attitude summed up by Stephen Brunt in the book’s foreword: “To critique hockey culture is to be anti-hockey. To be anti-hockey is to be anti-Canadian.”
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Vanished Beyond the Map, Adam Shoalts (Allen Lane) Shoalts sets out to crack the cold case (though “frigid” might be more accurate) of fellow explorer and guide Hubert Darrell, who became a legend in his day – Roald Amundsen was a fan – for the mindbogglingly epic journeys he undertook on foot across the Canadian far north until his sudden disappearance in the Northwest Territories wilderness in 1910.
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