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)
November 30, 2023
My Books of the Year That Weren’t Published in 2023
As always, my reading goals involve reading books that aren’t new, and I think I did a respectable job of it this year. Here are my top picks, which include two novels I’d read before but loved in a brand new way.
December 12, 2022
2022: Books of the Year
A Convergence of Solitudes, by Anita Anand
Shrines of Gaiety, by Kate Atkinson
Cambium Blue, by Maureen Brownlee
What Storm, What Thunder, by Myriam J.A. Chancy
Marrying the Ketchups, by Jennifer Close
Susanna Hall: Her Book, by Jennifer Falkner
10 Days That Shaped Modern Canada, Aaron W. Hughes
The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, by Eva Jurczyk
Looking for Jane, by Heather Marshall
The Hero of This Book, by Elizabeth McCracken
Finding Edward, by Sheila Murray
Woman, Watching, by Merilyn Simonds
Francie’s Got a Gun, by Carrie Snyder
The School of Mirrors, by Eva Stachniak
This Time Tomorrow, by Emma Straub
Ezra’s Ghosts, by Darcy Tamayose
The Long Road Home: On Blackness and Belonging, by Debra Thompson
The Elephant on Karluv Bridge, by Thomas Trofimuk
Ordinary Wonder Tales, by Emily Urquhart
December 15, 2021
2021: Books of the Year
- Ghosts, by Dolly Alderton
- Phosphorescence, by Julia Baird
- The Most Precious Substance on Earth, by Shashi Bhat
- Constant Nobody, by Michelle Butler Hallett
- The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym, by Paula Byrne
- The Prairie Chicken Dance Tour, by Dawn Dumont
- Tainna, by Norma Dunning
- Half Life, by Krista Foss
- A Womb in the Shape of a Heart, by Joanne Gallant
- Instamom, by Chantel Guertin
- Early Morning Riser, by Katherine Heiny
- Accidentally Engaged, by Farah Heron
- How the One Armed Sister Sweeps Her House, by Cherie Jones
- Time Squared, by Lesley Krueger
- The Girl From Dream City, by Linda Leith
- The Souvenir Museum, by Elizabeth McCracken
- Summerwater, by Sarah Moss
- Big Reader, by Susan Olding
- Our Darkest Night, by Jennifer Robson
- Beautiful World, Where Are You, by Sally Rooney
- Wayward, by Dana Spiotta
- Lucky, by Marissa Stapley
- Fight Night, by Miriam Toews
- A Lethal Lesson, by Iona Whishaw
- The Fourth Child, by Jessica Winter
- Crying in H Mart, by Michelle Zauner
December 15, 2020
2020: Books of the Year
Books of the Year lists are so arbitrary, but they matter because they’re an excellent way to tell the stories of our reading year and also to shine some more light on those titles that moved us. (I also helped compile the Books of the Year list at 49thShelf, and you’ll notice a bit of overlap…)
These are the books that mattered to me.
The Vanishing Half, by Brit Bennett
Brighten the Corner Where You Are, by Carol Bruneau
How to Lose Everything, by Christa Couture
Seven, by Farzana Doctor
Butter Honey Pig Bread, by Francesca Ekwuayasi
The Searcher, by Tana French
A Bite of the Apple, by Lennie Goodings
Lean Out: A Meditation on the Madness of Modern Life, by Tara Henley
Writers and Lovers, by Lily King
Santa Monica, by Cassidy Lucas
Disfigured, by Amanda Leduc
Monogamy, by Sue Miller
Polar Vortex, by Shani Mootoo
Hamnet and Judith, by Maggie O’Farrell
The Smallest Lights in the Universe, by Sara Seager
Want, by Lynn Steger Strong
Misconduct of the Heart, by Cordelia Strube
If Sylvie Had Nine Lives, by Leona Theis
The Abortion Caravan: When Women Shut Down the Government in the Battle for the Right to Choose, by Karin Wells
A Match Made for Murder, by Iona Whishaw
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent, by Isabel Wilkerson
Field Notes from An Unintentional Birder, by Julia Zarankin
June 10, 2020
Black Writers Matter
I don’t recall the catalyst for my decision to make a point of seeking out Black women authors in my reading (it might have been The Turner House, by Angela Flournoy), but only that I kept on doing it because the rewards were plenty. And I too have been frustrated by a lack of Black female voices in Canadian literature, which critic Donna Bailey Nurse addresses here, mostly because if the American example is any indication, then CanLit is missing out on so much—although there have been incremental changes on this front and I can now list Black Canadian women authors on more than one hand. (Note: this is still not enough, thank you.)
And in the last two weeks since the murder of George Floyd, as many white readers and white bloggers have been made suddenly conscious of the lack of diversity on their bookshelves (or cringe-worthingly hyper conscious of what diversity is there—yikes. Stop it, guys!), I’ve thought about posting a list about the Black writers I love, and the reason I’ve decided to partake in this kind of performance is because I’ve not written about so many of those books here on my blog, posting on the far more ephemeral Instagram instead, and so much gets lost that way.
And also because at this moment when so many readers are looking to add Black writers to their to-be-read lists, I can offer many excellent authors and books to start with—because this is only the beginning.
December 17, 2019
2019 Books of the Year
I am officially over Books of the Year lists. Part of this is because last year I was charged with writing three of them, which kind of underlined the arbitrary nature of the exercise, and also because seeing the same titles listed over and over is decidedly boring, and undermines the value these lists might possibly have. And finally because I have so many different kinds of connections to the books I’ve read this year, and it’s these connections that matter to me more than any hierarchical ranking. (Also: what about all the Best Books I haven’t read yet?)
So it’s the connections that I’m celebrating in my year-end books list for 2019, not THE best books, as much as MY best books, which also function as a record of how I spent my year, literary and otherwise. It was a good one.
The Coven Books
My friend Jennifer Robson’s smash hit The Gown was the first book I read in 2019, and it set the standard high for my literary year. I was also happy to celebrate the June arrival of our pal Marissa Stapley’s latest, The Last Resort, and had the great pleasure of interviewing both authors at events this year.
The January Books
January is hard. These were the books that delivered some light in the darkest time of year.
The Big Book
Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club, was big, bold and brave, like nothing I’d ever read before (except for Megan Gail Coles’ 2014 short story collection, which I loved). That it ended up on the Giller Shortlist was one of my favourite literary stories of the year. Maybe not a book for everybody, but what a better world we’d live in if it was. I loved this book (and Coles on CBC Q was radio gold.)
The Madeleine L’Engle Reading Project
The most significant part of my literary year was a deep dive into Madeleine L’Engle’s non-Wrinkle bibliography. In February, I stumbled upon attractive new editions of her Austins series, which I’d read without focus when I was young, but encountering them again was such a revelation. I read all the Austin books (which are realism, in comparison to her Wrinkle series) and the O’Keefe series (which bridges the other two), and then The Small Rain, L’Engle’s first novel, because decades later she’d written a sequel to it, A Severed Wasp, whose characters include Suzy Austin as a grownup. (I also took A Severed Wasp tour of New York City in May.)
It was the best.
Read my blog posts about the reading project here.
The Blew-My-Mind Book
This book would come to mean a lot to me, my most recommended title of the year, I think. I’d already chosen three titles for Briny Books before I read Crow, but knew as soon as I finished it that Crow would have to be part of the mix.
If you haven’t read this book yet, you’re missing out. I loved it. Oh, that epilogue. Still not over it.
The Briny Books
For the first half of the year, Briny Books was my TOP SECRET PROJECT. I wanted to find a way to take my book reviews and recommendations further, to put excellent fiction directly into the hands of readers. Featuring these titles has been an absolute pleasure, and such a joy too to have such a fantastic reader response, that other people love these books as much as I do.
The Lived-Up-To-All-The-Hype Book
Alicia Elliott is a treasure, and her debut essay collection is as generous as it is brilliant. I loved this collection for its craft, its analysis, and wide-ranging ideas, as well as its honesty and candour. Essay at their finest, and deserving of all its praise and acclaim.
The Opposed-to-Boxes Book
You’ve never read a novel like Bina, even if you’ve read Malarky and Martin John, all part of Anakana Schofield’s literary universe. A novel whose structure is a series of warnings scrawled on the backs of envelopes, warnings which must be considered in their specificity. Schofield’s work is proof that fiction can innovate without alienating its readers.
The Book that Changed How I Live in the World
I’ve never looked at a tree the same way since reading Treed, by Ariel Gordon, and I look at trees all the time. A book that dares to make sense of complicated ideas—what it means that death and decay are natural, forests in the city, loving nature at a moment of climate crisis. To me, this book was like a balm.
The Book I Spent My Birthday With
I turned 40 in June, and spent the weekend on the beach and in a hammock reading this terrific book by Atkinson, who I always love, from the series that awakened my love of detective fiction. I loved it so much.
The Cottage Reads
Does it even count as a holiday unless you’ve managed to read a book a day? I don’t think so. Luckily, my cottage week in July did not disappoint. I finally read Pachinko, became a Sally Rooney devotee after finding Conversation With Friends a bit meh, and indulged in some old school Meg Wolitzer. It was perfect.
You can read my round-up here.
The Stole-My-Heart Book
Honestly, she came out of nowhere, the novel about a woman who is obsessed with 19th century literature, set at the West Edmonton Mall. An obvious set-up? Right. Ha ha, no—but it was perfect. I loved this book, and while I think that it is meant for a more specific kind of readership instead of readers in general, I can count myself and some of the best people I know in that circle.
The Covered in Bugs Book
I took this novel camping in August and wasn’t sure about it at first, but then it grew on me—and did it ever—I couldn’t stop reading… Reading with my flashlight in the tent after everybody had gone to sleep, which attracted all the midges that got stuck between the pages. The book is now absolutely and disgustingly covered in bugs, but I loved it, and I am also really proud of the review I wrote about it, which begins, “I had an oddly optimistic revelation about the world the other day…” I KNOW.
The Perfect Summer Day Book
Watermark, by Christy Ann Conlin, was already pretty special to me even before I held an impromptu literary salon in my living room to celebrate it (which was definitely my favourite literary event of 2019!!). I read it over the course of a weekend in August, on the beach, at the playground, walking to the bakery to buy provisions for friends imminent arrival for dinner. I was compelled by its momentum, and enjoyed it start to finish. So yes, then it was such a pleasure to get to celebrate it IRL!!
The Freaked Me Out Book
This was one of those books that kept creeping onto my radar—I think it was a recommendation by Mary Laura Philpott that finally did it, after seeing it mentioned elsewhere. A sci-fi book for those who don’t necessarily like sci-fi. Oh, and it was on a recommended summer reads shelf at Book City in the Beaches, which was where I finally bought it, and with the first few pages, I was gripped. One of the weirdest and best novels about parenthood I’ve ever read.
The Hard to Track Down Book
My second favourite thing (after waiting in long lines at the bookstore till) is when a book is sold out everywhere. It took me two weeks and multiple bookstores to finally track down a copy of Trick Mirror, and what a good thing then that the essay collection turned out to be everything I’d hoped it would be. So worth the trouble.
The Gripping Plot Book
I adore Lynn Coady’s work, so it was no surprise that I ended up loving her latest novel so much. As always with Coady, the actual surprise was in the wonderfully strange and unexpected direction she pushes her work in, in the way she insists on writing unexplored corners and resisting expectations of what a woman should be writing about, or (at least) coming at these ideas from an innovative angle.
The So-Glad-I-Read-it-Twice Book
I had the opportunity to read Rebecca Fisseha’s debut novel as a manuscript last spring, and then to come back to it again in the fall in preparation for her book launch, where I interviewed her. And I am so grateful for a reason to read Daughters of Silence again—it’s such a puzzle of a novel, and to read it for a second time was a fascinating process of discovery.
The Read-A-Thon Winner
One of the highlights of this year for me as a reader was the opportunity to take part of the Turning the Page on Cancer read-a-thon. With generous support, I helped to raise more than $1500 and got to read for eight straight hours (!!!). Fortunately for me, quite a few of those hours were spent on Cherie Dimaline’s Empire of Wild, which I loved so much. I couldn’t put it down because I really couldn’t (and that was fine).
The As-Good-As-I’d-Hoped Book
“Should I buy The Dutch House?” was an honest-to-goodness dilemma for me—because I like Patchett well enough, but am not a devotee, and wondered if I wanted to buy the book just because everybody else was. Would I be disappointed? Mercifully, I wasn’t. The Dutch House was a delight, worth every single penny, and I loved it.
The Should-Be-On-Your-Radar Book
I’m honestly kind of sorry on behalf of Canadian readers coast-to-coast that we weren’t having Five Wives, by Joan Thomas forced in front of our faces all the time, especially after it was awarded the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. Because it’s so great and I didn’t read it for ages—but Stephen Henighan on Twitter singing its praises and Thomas’s interview at 49thShelf made me finally pick it up. Good thing too. It’s terrific.
The More-Than-a-Feat-of-Endurance Book
What’s that quote by some guy about why he climbed a mountain? “Because it was there.” No, that is not the reason you ought to read Lucy Ellmann’s Everest of a novel, which for me was a three month project. No, you ought to read it because it’s fascinating, an exercise in blurring the line between fiction and reality (not just in the way the book gets into your head), and the preposterousness of modern life and the impossibility (or not?) for literature/fiction to contain it.
The Only Booker Winner We Need
There are a number of contenders for the title of BOOK I CAN’T SHUT UP ABOUT this year, but I think Evaristo’s Booker-winning novel takes the cake. Another book that, like Ducks, opens up wide to contain so many many stories—but I read this one in two days. It was DELIGHTFUL. If you put this title at the top of your holiday reading list, I promise you won’t be sorry.
Bonus Book
And one more—I haven’t had a chance to write about this book yet, but Sheree Fitch’s You Won’t Always Be This Sad is one of the most remarkable titles I’ve read this year. And yes, it is sad—poet Fitch is writing about the recent death of her adult son—but Fitch’s gift has always been to explore all sides of things, and she shares that with us here—there is so much love, and even joy. This book is a revelation.
December 13, 2018
2018: Pickle Me This Books of the Year
- The book that was a balm for my broken spirit after my democratic rights were recklessly undermined by an authoritative government during the recent municipal election
- Not the best Kate Atkinson book ever, but even an okay Kate Atkinson book is better than most books. I LOVED IT.
- A book about who gets to be us and who gets to be them, and how we refuse to learn the lessons of history over and over again.
- So gorgeous and riveting—and so few books manage to be both.
- The book I was reading for six months, and could have kept reading forever
- There was no better summer read than this one.
- For those who know that the inner life of a woman is the most fascinating place of all for exploration
- Lord of the Flies turned inside out—and fascinating in terms of narrative
- Lauren Groff has never managed to not be excellent. I love her.
- Essential reading for anyone who has known grief, and those who love them.
- The history of feminism through the history of swimming? Okay!
- Hauntingly beautiful. So happy to see this book get the love it deserves
- Linked short stories inspired by Alex Colville paintings! And they’re amazing.
- Still not over those stories. Lisa Moore defies all expectations here, except to write really really well
- My first Jodi Picoult novel—and I loved it
- The book we need right now
- The book I’ve been recommending to everyone
- The story of a marriage and a century in a single book. SO GOOD.
- I can’t wait until Spring.
- A funny, poignant and original exploration of family life
- This book is hard work, but it pays off, and is full of quiet profundities
- My new manifesto.
- Discovering the Lane Winslow Mysteries was one of the best parts of my year. I LOVED THEM.
- Oh. feminism, and all its waves. Wolitzer is not afraid to show how complicated and glorious is the tangle
- Imagine a world where women weren’t permitted reproductive freedom. Sounds a bit far-fetched…
December 10, 2017
2017 Books of the Year
January seems like a long time ago now, when I was reading Hot Milk, by Deborah Levy, and drinking out of a mug that broke in October. Do you remember? I don’t even remember who that reader was really, or all the readers in between, but all the same, I am grateful to all the books and authors who made my 2017 so rich, bookishly speaking. The following titles are the ones that have particularly stayed with me.
Dr. Edith Crane and the Hares of Crawley Hall, by Suzette Mayr
F-Bomb: Dispatches From the War on Feminism, by Lauren McKeon
December 11, 2016
2016 Books of the Year
As always, I’ve failed in both my efforts to read everything I wanted to read in 2016 and also to keep my top ten to a number below twenty. Still, I think I’ve failed quite successfully here, and I’m really happy with how the year has read up. Thanks to the authors and readers who inspire me and make my reading life so much.
*
Rich and Pretty, by Rumaan Alam
“I loved its humour, its prose, its quietness and detail. I loved its subtle subversions—second abortions and pregnant women with a drink. I loved the difference between the two characters’ voices, how richly the two were delineated, and that the title is tongue-in-cheek—in a Mad Men fashion, Alam’s novel takes the idea of “types” of women and a binary approach to womanhood and complicates the idea entirely to show that women can be whole, flawed, inexplicable and fully realized people whose lives and experiences are worth writing about, thinking about. Which really shouldn’t be such a revelation, and this is still a completely excellent book for those of us who already know.”
*
The Mothers, by Brit Bennett“Bennett nicely situates the personal against the political, Nadia’s experience with anti-abortion politicking by church members (although not so avidly—these are reasonable people) and also about how one’s convictions become flexible when an unwanted pregnancy is a fact instead of an idea. She shows how a woman can choose an abortion and know it’s the right choice, but still mourn what she’s lost and wonder at the could-have-beens. That an abortion, like a lot of things that happen to people over the course of their lives, is a complicated, multi-faceted thing.”
*
Busker, by Nisha Coleman“I kept laughing out loud, which is a mark of literary achievement. Though I also cringed—as one who has never mastered air-kisses, I recoiled at Coleman’s recounting of her first bisous and how she actually made cheek contact. She writes about being asked to play her violin in a hair salon, but how her own unruly do caused a great upset when she arrived. Or the man she met who wanted to perform songs he’d written, which turned out to be “sex songs” with lyrics like, “The horny bull wants a bouncy ride.” And she meets a lot of men, Coleman, and in the beginning, being lonely, takes them up on their invitations, until she realizes that she’s setting herself up for a lot of awkward interactions. She longs for the company of women friends as well, but these kind of relationships are harder to find. Not to mention that at the beginning of her time in Paris, Coleman hardly speaks French.”
*
Becoming Lin, by Tricia Dower“It’s a novel about the 1960s, about idealism and reality, about the narrow confines of a wife’s identity and that of a mother. Familiar themes, all of these if you’ve read books like Margaret Laurence’s The Fire Dwellersor watched Mad Men, but themes made fresh with the nuances of the novel’s point of view, the carefulness with which these ideas are examined. In Becoming Lin, the prose is mostly inconspicuous, but what grips the reader is the evolution of Lin’s consciousness, and the complexity that arises from the absence of polarities—unusual for a history of a decade so constructed of extremes.”
*
Experimental Film, by Gemma Files
“I spent Thanksgiving weekend—as summer turned into fall, the leaves turned into reds and oranges, as everything started to wither and die—reading Gemma Files’ Experimental Film, which was so fitting for the season. I absolutely loved it, and was not the only one to do so—the novel won the Shirley Jackson Award in the summer and the Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic in September. It’s a book about horror movies, and the history of Canadian cinema, and motherhood, and parenting a child with autism, and there are ghosts and it gets creepy, and it gave me bad dreams—which I mean as a testament to the book’s power.”
*
The Trespasser, by Tana French
I’d preordered The Trespasser, French’s first book since 2014, and it seems fitting that my year of Tana French should have a new release by her within it. (I was in Barbados when I learned this new book was forthcoming. Imagine my joy: that there would be another Tana French when the books in the Waitrose bag were done!). And it was everything I’d hoped it would be—a return to tradition of the first four books, a narrator on the edge who doesn’t know how close she is, a strange and tricky murder whose solution is not immediately in sight. I love her plots, her characters, her humour, and that I learn insults like “wankstain” (which shows up in two books). I love her complicated women and men, and their aloneness, and the awkward ways her characters connect with each other. I love her prose, her twists, and her portrayal of Ireland post-boom. Can you tell that I love everything?
*
Little Labours, by Rivka Galchen
“These fragments are preoccupied with the poster for a Keanu Reeves flop; the tiresome anecdotes we tell our friends about our babies presuming they’ll be interested (and once those friends have babies, they even actually are); a mention of the woman who drowned her five children; a horrible woman whom Galchen regularly encounters in her building’s elevator who has strong feelings she must articulate about her baby’s size; on head shapes, their remarkability and otherwise; about troubling proclivities toward orange; one piece beginning, “Literature has more dogs than babies, and also more abortions.”; about Frankenstein, Godzilla, Rumpelstiltskin, Lucille Ball, and The Tale of Genji (but not all in the same essay); about screen time, and what writers had children and who didn’t, and why writers’ children keep writing about closed office doors (and Galchen wonders why these doors are more troubling than the doors at Daddy’s work, downtown in a high rise building); about babies in art; and her complicated feelings about women’s writing and “women’s writing,” which she fascinatingly teases out.”
*
The Dancehall Years, by Joan Haggerty
“Joan Haggerty is an extraordinary writer, her prose Woolfian in its stream of consciousness, its immediacy. This is a saga sweeping four decades written in the present tense. And it’s true that when we talk about summer books, we sometimes mean that they’re a bit light in substance, but this is a different kind of summer book. It’s not difficult, and it’s got its own kind of lightness (strung together by summers as it is), but it’s not a “beach read.” Which isn’t to say it would be wonderful to read it at a beach, but still, it’s not the kind of novel that would blow away in the breeze.”
*
The Little Communist That Never Smiled, by Lola Lafon
“On the surface, Lola Lafon’s novel The Little Communist Who Never Smiled (translated from French by Nick Caistor) is a fictionalization of the life of Nadia Comaneci, but that (of course) is just a cover. What the book is really about is messaged in between the lines (or, quite literally, between the words). The Little Communist… is a book about the Cold War, the politicization of sport and womanhood, about deciphering codes and, fundamentally, this is a novel about punctuation.”
*
The Party Wall, by Catherine Leroux
“It’s always a good sign when the blank pages inside a book become riddled with notes and diagrams, as has been the case with my copy of the Governor-General’s Award/ Giller-nominated The Party Wall, by Catherine Laroux, prize-winner in its original French, translated into English by Lazer Lederhendler (Nikolski!). Not because the stories themselves in the novel are so difficult to figure out—in fact, they read beautifully with luminous prose (“Fall is approaching and the warmth of the South throbs on the horizon like a sack of gold at the foot of a rainbow”)—but because the challenge and the pleasure is discovering how all of it fits together. While the shape of most narratives is a horizontal line (with the inevitable bump for a climax), the shape of The Party Wall is multi-dimensional, arrows pointed in all four directions and connections that hold the whole thing fast.”
*
Birdie, by Tracey Lindberg“Surprisingly, Birdie is not a heavy book, even with all the violence and tragedy. It’s as funny as it is sad, and more than that, it’s vibrant—powered by the voice of a woman who seemingly lies unconscious, which is kind of ironic, but there’s a lot going on inside Birdie’s mind, even as she’s got one half-opened eye on The Frugal Gourmet. As a character she’s rich and realized, and Lindberg never makes her a victim of her circumstances, her agency retained even in her lowest moments. Her very act of retreating into her mind, while passive from the outside, is a powerful gesture, and necessary for healing, for the possibility of a future.”
*
Double Teenage, by Joni Murphy
“It’s heavy, but it’s not. I read this book all day on Sunday, a few hours in the afternoon in my hammock. I devoured it, and loved the shape of the project—that this is a novel gesturing outwards, pointing to the world, using the world and its threads to build something new, offering structure, frameworks, where we hadn’t seen such a thing before. Daring to state that girlhood is significant, even if it’s a stage, and even if it’s a stage. I loved the poetry of Murphy’s prose, the power of her language. The power of the book full stop—it’s both the story of my life and also unlike anything I’ve ever read before.”
*
Frankie Styne and the Silver Man, by Kathy Page
“Frankie Styne is a new edition of Page’s novel, first published in 1993, and it put me in mind of my favourite Hilary Mantel novels, her first two, Every Day is Mothers Day and Vacant Possession, dark comedies about the dark edges of humanity and their successful attempts to outmaneuver meddling social workers. Page’s social worker is Annie Purvis, who we know first from the point of view of her client, Liz Meredith, who’s just been moved into a terrace house with her baby. Liz has spent her time most recently living on a railcar after becoming estranged from her family, but since her baby’s birth (compounded by the fact that he has developmental abnormalities) she’s become tangled up in “the system”. Although she diverts all attempts to get her installed with a phone (living as she does by her grandmother’s advice to “Always avoid ties that bind”), she could do with a television, but in the meantime, she contents herself by listening to conversations between the troubled couple next door and imagining a different kind of reality existing on a planet far away, that life itself is merely the plot of a cheap pulp novel she’s somehow been stuck in.”
*
I’m Thinking of Ending Things, by Iain Reid
“Clear the decks if you’re thinking about picking up this book, because you’re not going to be able to put it back down again. Don’t start reading it at night though or it’s going to be hard to fall asleep. I was intrigued by this psychological thriller, the debut novel by Iain Reid who’s previously been known for two award-winning heartwarming memoirs. Could he really pull off such a literary change of pace? But he does, and it’s breathtakingly good. Best of all, no one is going to compare this book to Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train, but it’s something altogether different. It also manages to be completely creepy but actually free of gore and violence, which is an incredible literary feat. And finally, that a book can be so enthralling and disorienting at once is just incredible.”
*
Today Will Be Different, by Maria Semple
“There are writers who sit down and painstakingly plan their books before they start writing, a mess of post-it notes and index cards, and one gets the feeling that Maria Semple is not one of them. The plots of her books resemble those dotted lines on maps in Saturday morning cartoons in which small children navigate space with curious and often dangerous diversions. Which is kind of a funny way to plot a book, but think of the joy you once got in running your finger along that line, and also of the momentum inherent in this kind of narrative, the briskness with which the reader is brought along for the ride. It also turns out that plot isn’t really the point is, but voice is, and Eleanor Flood’s is the kind of voice that’s hard to get out of your head.”
*
Swing Time, by Zadie Smith“For me, Smith has always been a masterful novelist whose works just kind of peter out before the end, and my explanation for that is that her stories are so excellent that the endings are always going to be a let-down and/or do we really expect her to come up with a novel like that and properly end it too? But in her fourth book, it seems she’s finally got the conclusion that comes with a gut punch, the last fifty pages or so finally bringing the pieces together, the patterns emerging. The conclusion of Swing Time is wonderful, devastating, and ambiguous in the most engaging fashion. Yes, the book is a bit bloated in the middle, but reading any of Smith’s prose is a pleasure. And all of it matters—you just don’t know how until the end.”
*
On the Shores of Darkness, There is Light, by Cordelia Strube
“At nearly 400 pages, the novel is long, but swiftly paced and never dull. The bleakness of its considerations are broken up with incredible humour, from the cacophony of the voices in its background to the sheer audacity of Harriet herself, her nerve, all the things she is willing to do and say. There is a humour too in the contrast between the child’s point of view and the world around her, and—in the case of Harriet’s friend, Darcy, in particular—the person she is trying to to be. The sheer naïveté of these would-be old souls. Darcy likes to go on about, “that Caitlin whore,” a friend from her old neighbourhood, and we learn about what Caitlin did to her at Guides: “I was a Sprite and she was a Pixie. That ho bag made like all the cool girls were Pixies….Then the skank fucked up my puppetry badge.””
*
The Break, by Katherena Vermette
“The family tree at the beginning of the book is useful, but the reader soon becomes acquainted with the women of this family, so it won’t be referred to throughout. Momentum is strictly forward as the pieces begin to come together, Vermette deftly moving in and out of time to create a three-dimensional feel to the narrative—we come to feel we know this story from all sides. Four generations of a family, and how tragedy trickles down with all the goodness, the former not negating the latter though. As Vermette has made clear, this is a novel about women and about survival, a story that complements but also takes issue with stories and statistics about First Nations and Metis women as victims before they’re even people proper. But her characters are people here, people with flaws and foibles, strengths and weaknesses, and it’s the strength that endures: “‘It’s okay, my girl. It’s okay.’ Her answer to everything.”’
*
We Oughta Know, by Andrea Warner
In her book, We Oughta Know: How Four Women Ruled the ’90s and Changed Canadian Music, Andrea Warner articulates that whole scene, and the remarkable fact that four Canadian women were leading the charge of women in song: Celine Dion, Sarah McLachlan, Shania Twain, and Alanis Morissette. These four women too are (along with Diana Krall) are the only Canadians on Canada’s best-selling artists lists, coming in above the Beatles. And even more remarkably, they all made their mark during a five year period in the mid-1990s. What was going on exactly, Warner wonders? How did they do it?
*
Shrill, by Lindy WestFrom Shrill: ““Everything happened in those five years after my abortion. I became myself. Not by chance, or because an abortion is some kind of mysterious, empowering feminist bloode-magick rite of passage (as many, many—too many for a movement ostensibly comprising grown-ups—anti-choices have accused me of being), but simply because it was time. A whole bunch of changes—set into motion years, even decades, back—all came together at once, like the tumblers in a lock clicking into place: my body, my work, my voice, my confidence, my power, my determination to demand a life as potent, vibrant, public, and complex as any man’s. My abortion wasn’t intrinsically significant, but it was my first big grown-up decision—the first time I asserted unequivocally, “I know the life that I want and this isn’t it”; the moment I stopped being a passenger in my own body and grabbed the rudder.”
*
The Best Kind of People, by Zoe Whittall
While the entire book is fantastic, Whittall gets full points for her spectacular ending, however, which turns the story inside out and disturbingly rips us away from the singular perspectives of characters to reflect the wider culture of rape and sexual violence against whose context the entire novel has been taking place. Which is to say that this is not just a story about a family. And then the final sentence, which will haunt you long after you’ve finally finished reading, quiet, subtle, devastating and terrible, just like the injustice that is Justice, which isn’t anything like justice at all.
*
Notes From a Feminist Killjoy, by Erin Wunker
Notes is a way of starting. Trying. Essai. If a manifesto is a red rag, then a note is a building block, a puzzle piece. The reader responds not by charging, but by saying, Yes and, or Yes but. She doesn’t respond by tearing the whole thing down.
I love the way the narrative thread of Wunker’s book makes its way with seeming effortlessness. There is nothing laboured about how a discussion of rape culture leads to the Jian Ghomeshi trial leads to women coming together leads to a chapter on friendship. (Which references The Babysitters Club. Yes, and!!) Why are so few of our formative texts about female friendship? “What is it about female friendship that inspires such insipid descriptors?” What are relationships between women often so fraught?
“Is it too hard to write your own narrative and witness another’s, simultaneously?”
*
Five Roses, by Alice Zorn“I loved Alice Zorn’s Five Roses, a novel that’s a love letter to Montreal, its neighbourhoods, and to the magic and serendipity of city life that is inevitably born from the fact of so many characters living in close proximity. It’s a bit of a mess, it is, city life, what with different cultures, and types of people, and old traditions and new traditions, and money and poverty, home and commercial enterprise, and history and the moment, which is now, and impossible to capture anyway…because the only thing that ever stands still in the city is the force of change. Zorn’s novel, however, manages to convey all this and not be a mess, disparate narratives woven together in a way that sparks magic but is left just untidy enough to still ring true.”
