December 13, 2023
Books That Won My Heart This Year
I adored Lisa Alward’s Cocktail, a short story collection whose compelling sepia tones (both on the cover and within the text) manage not to undermine how fresh and vibrant each and every single story is… (Read the rest)
Morse Code for Romantics, by Anne Baldo
For this is a book that is so steeped in summer, a collection of stories with sand between their toes, set along the shores of Lake Erie, scrappy cottages and rundown motels. With lines like “We don’t know it yet but we will never be bigger, or more real, than we are right here this summer. We will keep fading and shrinking, in small ways, forever always, after this.” (Read the rest)
This is the House That Luke Built, by Violet Browne
I love this book, just as heartbreaking as it is hilarious, full of gorgeous prose, and gutsy women, and so much love, even in the face of so much loss, maybe especially. Rose’s struggles to raise her kids and make a better life for herself are harrowing and awesome, and the flame that continues to burn for the husband she lost is sustaining, transformative, unforgettable…. (Read the rest)
Birnam Wood, by Eleanor Catton
But reader, I sped through it in two days. This book! This book! Speaking of plot… Like making one’s way through the weeds and the bramble, and then suddenly there I was at the heart of things and the novel was unputdownable. (Read the rest)
Penance, by Eliza Clark
Set in a desolate English seaside town (is there any other kind of English seaside town?) on the literal eve of Brexit, it’s the story of a teenage girl who is set on fire by a group of her peers, the novel framed as a Capote-esque true crime expose by a male author who has interviewed the girls involved in the incident, as well as the mother of the victim… (Read the rest)
The Light of Eternal Spring, by Angel Di Zhang
“My mother died of a broken heart, or so the letter said.” And this is the spectacular opening line of Angel Di Zhang’s dazzlingly dreamy debut novel, The Light of Eternal Spring, a story of love and loss, a story of finding and belonging, about seeing and knowing, all the gaps between what we remember and what really happened, and the curious nature of space and time. (Read the rest)
Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden, by Camille T. Dungy
This is a memoir about the labour (and setbacks) in cultivating diversity in our gardens, and beyond them. It’s also a story of receiving a Guggenheim grant to write a book whose progress is stopped up by the Covid-19 Pandemic and a ten-year-old child whose home schooling requires supervision…. (Read the rest)
The Clarion, by Nina Dunic
I really loved The Clarion, a strangely shaped novel about loneliness and connection, a quiet story of two siblings launched into the world from a difficult childhood whose adult trajectories (told in alternating chapters) are very different, the narrative reflecting that. (Read the rest)
The Observer, by Marina Endicott
Oh, how I loved this quiet, meditative book, which was not about quiet or meditative things, but instead about violence, abuse, trauma, PTSD, deprivation, loneliness, and LOVE… (Read the rest)
The Possibilities, by Yael Goldstein-Love
A Wrinkle In Time, by Madeline L’Engle, meets Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work? I adored this novel, which almost caused me to cancel Thanksgiving because all I wanted to do was sit down and read it straight to the end… (Read the rest)
Strange Loops, by Liz Harmer
Exquisite and propulsive are the first two words that spring to mind when I think about Liz Harmer’s latest novel, Strange Loops, which I read this weekend and found virtually unputdownable… (Read the rest)
We Meant Well, by Erum Shazia Hasan
We Meant Well is a novel of ideas (as well as part of a developing canon of works by Canadian writers about the complicated reality of NGOs), but also a terrific, fast paced, plot driven work that’s horrifying, fascinating, and absolutely gripping at once. (Read the rest)
Games and Rituals, by Katherine Heiny
Heiny gets compared to Laurie Colwin (I encountered her first as emcee of a literary event celebrated the reissue of Colwin’s work in 2021), but she also has Sue Miller vibes in mapping unconventional emotional terrain and reinvention of the family tree as family is made and remade. I love her. (Read the rest)
Gin, Turpentine, Pennyroyal, Rue, by Christine Higdon
Gin, Turpentine, Pennyroyal, Rue manages to be everything all at once: action-packed, artful, playful, timely, timeless, weighty, light, compelling historical fiction that maps so beautifully onto right now…. (Read the rest)
Pebble & Dove, by Amy Jones
Tangled histories, family secrets, a kitschy backdrop, one spectacular marine mammal, and so much love—Pebble & Dove has everything, including crackling prose and an unforgettable story that will grab your heart. This is Amy Jones’s best novel yet, and I could not have loved it more. (Read the rest)
Doppelganger, by Naomi Klein
In Doppelganger, Naomi Klein comes as closer as I’ve ever seen anyone come to explaining just what the heck is going on here, connecting the dots on a vast canvas, making sense of the nonsensical, in a way that will be familiar to anyone who’s read Klein’s work before, but also weaving in elements of memoir that are new to her work and which add a real sense of humanity to these stories in which so many of our fellow humans have come to seem almost alien. (Read the rest)
Yellowface, by R.M. Kuang
So, I can’t say I’d necessarily recommend R.M. Kuang’s Yellowface to anyone else who has a new novel coming out in 28 days, because it’s just a little too on the nose, a satire that’s so real about the pressures and cutthroat competition of the publishing industry, the high stakes and low odds which “have made it impossible for white and nonwhite authors alike [emphasis mine] to succeed…” (Read the rest)
Wait Softly Brother, by Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer
The pieces of Wait Softly Brother culminate in the richest and most satisfying kind of story, a deep literary mystery. On dwellings, and dwelling, and wells and welling. So so excellent. (Read the rest)
I Have Some Questions for You, by Rebecca Makkai
What a marvelous, absorbing, complicated world of a book this is, a literary mystery, and a mirror. (Read the rest)
The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, by James McBride
The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, set in a Pennsylvania community that’s home to Black Americans and Jewish European immigrants, is just as strange and wonderful, a story to get lost in. A novel I’m finding it hard to find words to describe, arriving at “spectacular,” with emphasis on “spectacle,” because there’s just so much going on here…. (Read the rest)
The Rachel Incident, by Caroline O’Donoghue
I read this one over the August long weekend, partly on the beach, and it was incredible, twisty and full of surprises… A story of class, love, and friendship. I loved it. (Read the rest)
Tom Lake, by Ann Patchett
I bought the hype, and the book lived up to it, but also I wasn’t resisting, and I think that’s key…. Read the rest)
The Damages, by Genevieve Scott
As with the best books inspired by #MeToo, Scott doesn’t come to neat conclusions, but instead engages with the mess of it all, teasing out the multitudinous threads, asking questions instead of claiming to have all the answers. A terrific read… (Read the rest)
What Remains of Elsie Jane, by Chelsea Wakelyn
Chelsea Wakelyn’s debut novel WHAT REMAINS OF ELSIE-JANE reads a bit like Joan Didion’s THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING, but narrated by someone who is not a cool customer, instead a human being wracked with pain and grief and lust and longing after the death of a partner from drug poisoning, a loss that has left Elsie Jane with a backyard full of weeds, an addiction to dating apps, and two small children who need feeding and caring day-after-day, and Elsie Jane is hanging on, just barely. (Read the rest)
Denison Avenue, by Christina Wong and Daniel Innes
What I loved about this book was how it told the story of a changing Toronto from the perspective of a person of colour, a person who speaks very little English (in the book, Wong writes her dialogue in the Toisan dialect), which is a perspective I’ve never heard before. And similarly, though elderly women collecting bottles and cans are as ubiquitous in my neighbourhood as they are in Innes’s drawings, I’ve spent very little time considering these women’s perspectives, what brought them here, why they’re doing this—for Cho Sum, it’s to earn a bit of money, and give shape to her days, and for exercise. In so many ways, for me, Denison Avenue was absolutely a revelation… (Read the rest)
