April 15, 2021
Accidentally Engaged, by Farah Heron
I could not have loved Farah Heron’s sophomore novel Accidentally Engaged any more—I was already besotted by the end of the first paragraph when we first encounter Reena’s sourdough starter, whose name is Brian (obviously). It’s a very pandemicky novel actually, not in content in the slightest, but instead it’s wonderfully cozy, video content is important, and there is so much fresh baked bread. Which is what brings Reena and Nadim together in the first place, the aroma drifting from her apartment across the hall to where he’s just moved in. The attraction between them is instantaneous, but Reena can’t act on it—it turns out her overbearing parents have Nadim in mind as a potential husband for her, and she refuses to let them play this role in her life. And so she and Nadim become friends instead, as well as neighbours. They’re compatible, share the same East African background, and he sure loves her bread. And so when an opportunity comes along for Reena to make her cooking show dreams come true as part of a couples contest, she agrees to let Nadim pretend to be her fiance—but the whole thing is just an act. Or is it?
I loved this novel. Heron’s debut, The Chai Factor, was great, but this follow-up is even better, polished and so deftly plotted. (We also get to meet up with Amira and Duncan again in this book, as Reena is Amira’s best friend.) The humour is spot-on and so very fresh, and the complicated dynamic between Reena and Nadim is drawn out just the right amount, enough to be intriguing, not so much as to be preposterous. There’s a lot of cross-cultural romance going on in fiction right now, with books like The Chai Factor and Jane Igharo’s Ties That Tether, and so it was interesting for me to read a book where both characters come from the same background and even then the course of true love does not run smooth.
Heron challenges conventional notions of Muslim women—they have sex!—and Muslim families once again this second novel, and she writes beautifully about Reena’s pride in her identity as an Indian woman: “Reena loved being Indian. Loved the food, the glittery clothes, and today, she even loved the deep-seated traditions. Like sari shopping with aunties.”
This novel is such a delight.
April 7, 2021
The Relatives, by Camilla Gibb
I loved Camilla Gibb’s new novel, The Relatives, a slim book that reads up fast, but is also not remotely slight. It’s a single volume comprising stories of three different people who don’t know each other—Lila, an alcoholic social worker yearning for a child; Tess, sharing custody of a child after her breakup and disturbed by her ex’s plans regarding their frozen embryos; and then Adam, the American man who’s being held hostage in Somalia. Each of these stories worthy of a novel of its own, and the connections between them are subtle, but important, and the whole arrangement fits together so well, kind of seamlessly, which is a remarkable achievement.
And the seamlessness is the result of the plot and the pacing here, which never stops, and makes this easily a novel you could read in a day. Everything has gone wrong for Lila, who tells her story in first person. She has put her job on the line, overstepping bounds as she brings a young girl into her care who’d been found wandering in Toronto’s High Park and does not speak a word. Lila herself is adopted, never knew the woman who gave her to her, and her own mother has just died, reawakening old wounds but also suggesting new possibilities, and it’s clear that none of this is going to end well, as she tries to fill the hole in her world with the girl.
Adam, in third person, is just as cut off from meaningful ties, even before he’s taken hostage. He’s working for the State Department in Somalia at a refugee camp, undercover, as he investigates rumours of infiltration by militant recruiters…but maybe they’re on to him, and now he’s stuck in a hole, his body brutalized, and the worst of the torture is still before him.
Things are a little less dire for Tess (also first person), an academic who studies isolated islands and other isolated communities, though her personal life is in shambles, something of an island herself. Her ex’s one last chance at motherhood would be by implanting one of Tess’s embryos, but this is a lot of ask of anyone, and especially fraught for someone as prickly as Tess—is it even possible to navigate this situation with any grace?
These stories snowball, compelled by a sense of inevitability, though the specifics still aren’t clear, and this is the seamlessness I’d talking about, how one thing leads to another, and how our lives rub up against those of others, even against our will, and what it is to be related, to have a family, how we write our own stories onto those that belong to other people. Rich and absorbing,The Relatives is about the impossibility of islands, because connection is what humans do, for better or for worse, by accident and on purpose.
March 29, 2021
Summerwater, by Sarah Moss
Dread lurks in Sarah Moss’s Summerwater from the opening pages, from the book’s description on the inside cover, in fact. From the cover itself, which dark and foreboding, and this is such a pandemic novel, though not explicitly. The reference on Page 6 though: “There won’t be a plane this summer, or next. Who could afford to travel now.”—just a little uncanny. It’s a very contemporary novel in its immediacy, in the vein of Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet, but less overtly. There’s a Brexit backdrop though, and it matters a lot, questions of us and them, who belongs and who doesn’t. Set in Scotland, which complicates things even more, at a holiday resort with a handful of cabins nearby a loch, and the weather is dreadful. There is nothing to do but stare out the windows at the unceasing drizzle and also then at the other holidaymakers, each of them mysteries to each other (and to themselves). The skinny mother who insists on going running every morning, the old man who is frustrated by his wife’s increasing infirmity, the young couple on the cusp of a lifetime together, the couple with the little girl and the baby, the grumpy teenagers and their embattled parents, everybody more than faintly annoyed at the people staying in the one cabin—are they Romanian? Ukrainian?—where loud music plays into the night.
Isolation, paranoia, mistrust and frustration colour the various narratives, everybody isolated, far away from WiFi and phone signals. Moving between various dwellers of the resort, each character’s perspective is absorbing and fascinating (and also very funny, moving, illuminating, cringe worthy, etc.) Offering clues that suggest something foreboding, though I never called it right, what actually happened, and it was terrible, but also very satisfying, in the way that devastating conclusions aren’t always—and surprising too, casting the rest of this story in a very different light. Not a spoiler because I am quoting from the cover copy again: “It is the longest day of the year, and as the hours pass imperceptibly, twelve people shift from being strangers, to bystanders, to allies…”
I love a short book, one that can read in a day (especially a day that is rainy). Summerwater is a short novel that will never be called “slight,” and it might be just the thing for a reader finding their pandemic brain is having trouble with focus. I really loved Moss’s previous book, The Ghost Wall, and this one is similar in scope, though also its own creation entirely, and very much recommended.
March 26, 2021
Constant Nobody, by Michelle Butler Hallett
I loved this book. It was 438 pages long and demanded a lot of my attention, but I was so sorry when it ended (even though the ending was perfect!), because to read Constant Nobody, Michelle Butler Hallett’s novel set in 1937 Moscow against the backdrop of Stalinist purges when nobody could be trusted, is to just be so engrossed by the language, atmosphere, and plot.
And oh, and such plot—here’s how it goes. NKVD Agent Kostya, in the Basque region of Spain (there to do away with anti-Stalinist Communists) encounters a nurse who is actually British agent Temerity West who delivers the novel’s remarkable first line: “—Swallow each and every one, or your cock will fall off.” She’s given him pills to treat his gonorrhea, and he’s actually there to kill the doctor who works at the clinic, but he’s away, and a rapport grows up between the two, both of them polyglots. They pass a night together, chastely, recounting Russian fairy tales they both know because Temerity’s mother was Russian—and then when things come to a head the next day, Kostya lets her escape.
Which seems like something of very little consequence, but then everything has consequence in 1937 USSR, the very system a prison in which no one can be trusted and everybody fears for their life. Where punishment is arbitrary and can arrive at any moment, everyone just waiting for that knock on the door. Even Kostya, an NKVD officer who you’d imagine might be impervious to such threats, particularly as his adopted father is a powerful official in the agency. But Kostya is just as helpless as everybody else when he once again encounters Temerity West in a Moscow cell, not just to his feelings for this woman, but even still, he permits her escape a second time. A third seemingly random event bringing them together again, and now their fates are inextricably linked—Temerity is hiding out in Kostya’s flat, and it’s hard to envision a scenario in which this could possibly end well.
Temerity West is wonderful, akin to my favourite, Lane Winslow, their backgrounds uncannily similar, though of course Constant Nobody is less conspicuously delightful—except that it kind of is? Even amid the venereal disease and executions—this novel is brutal; there’s an awful lot of blood—there is a playful humour at work. And teacups! “Kostya raised his eyebrows in sympathetic dismay. How far might this hostility to teacups go? Would one’s loyalty be tested by tea? Could a man call himself Soviet if he preferred a cup and saucer? Samovar, zavarka and podstakannik: signals of orthodoxy? In these difficult days, might a man’s choice of how to drink his tea become the rubric which parted innocence from guilt?/ It’s just tea, Kostya wanted to say./ He knew better.”
There is a fascinating tension throughout the book—who is trustworthy? What does it mean to be loyal? And loyal to what? Temerity West is plucky as you like (and I like!) but Kostya is a flawed, troubled man. His adopted father too managing to gain the reader’s sympathy, although he does mighty little to deserve it, and I admire Butler Hallett’s ability to complicate our connections to these fictional people. Is Kostya admirable? Depends on your perspective. And will you root for him? Well, I did, in spite of my better instincts, and when the true extent of his harm is made clear later in the novel, I was gutted, but mostly because I felt how much it had surely broken this man to be the person he’d become. Butler Hallett complicates too our simple condemnation of people who are “just following orders” in an evil regime, where moral compasses have lost their poles, are spinning wildly really, where everyday life is a prison of the mind.
What a mash-up—Constant Nobody is a spy novel, a romance of sorts, historical fiction, a literary feat. It’s gripping, gorgeous, and unforgettable.
March 8, 2021
Half Life, by Krista Foss
Half Life, by Krista Foss, is a tricky book. The first three words: “Knock on wood.” It’s a door, and somebody is banging upon it, waking Elin from her sleep in the mid-afternoon. My expectations confounded at every turn, but then isn’t it fascinating, to think of knock on wood in the context of a knock at the door? A reframing. Wood and construction essential to the project here, but also fact of the fist’s effect upon the door, the disturbance of atoms, and a set of events that will be put into play by whoever it is doing the pounding.
I read this novel over two evenings last week, and found it wholly absorbing, though not in a comfortable sense, as a book to get lost in. Instead, it’s a novel full of booby traps and diversions, it’s tricky, as I say. As you would expect from a novel about trauma and abuse, although this description makes the book seem more dour and less interesting than it really is. Perhaps what I can say is that Half Life doesn’t ever sit still long enough to be about any one thing, and instead it’s about everything—family, physics, furniture, money, houses, glassware, explosions, mythology, motherhood, and the pleasures of pipe smoking.
Elin Hendrikson is a high school physics teacher whose methods are being constantly critiqued by the new principal, she fears her 19-year-old daughter is nearly lost to her, and she’s subject to her mother’s wrath with her more-favoured siblings living out of town, out of reach. But the whole family is coming together again for a ceremony in which a gallery will be named after Elin’s late father, a semi-famous modernist furniture designer, a household name in households where people know about such things.
It’s going to come to a head—it’s inevitable. And it’s hard to look away as Elin cruises for a reckoning with her past, her present and her future, and decides to finally stand up for herself and assert her independence from her mother and overbearing siblings. But of course, she’s not the kind of character for whom this will ever be graceful (which is why I love her—a scattered, messy, impossibly and achingly human kind of woman) so there will be drama, and lots broken glass, and wounded flesh and feelings.
I loved this book. I confess that I definitely owe it a second reading to get a full(er) grasp on the project, which seems to vast and ambitious, a novel that becomes its own universe, it seems, fully formed, down to every single atom, absolutely Woolfian in its attention to detail and nuance and destabilization. I found it fascinating, just as rewarding as it was a challenge, and ultimately such a triumph.
February 19, 2021
How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House, by Cherie Jones
Do not let the beautiful cover fool you, or the setting in paradise: How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House, by Cherie Jones, is a brutal book, violent and disturbing, but there’s nothing gratuitous about the violence, and the storytelling is absolutely stunning.
It’s a story told in pieces about a group of people on a beach in Barbados, away from the pretty tourist snapshots. The night Lala gives birth to her daughter, her husband kills a white man in a botched robbery at one of those big houses on the beach, and so begins the story, but it also stretches back years and generations before it, with Lala’s mother and her grandmother Wilma, who’d been the one to warn Lala away from the caves on the beach “where bad man go when they die…men that are too bad to rest easy in their graves down in those tunnels harvesting souls for the Devil.” The sister in the story goes exploring anyway, because “what is the use of a tunnel if you don’t get to see where it lead?” And she narrowly escapes with her life, but she loses her arm, and Lala scoffs at that:
“Well I bet it not so bad having one arm,” says Lala. “She can still do things like everybody else, she can still get a husband and some children and a house.” / “Stupid girl,” says Wilma, “how she’s she going to sweep it?”
Sweeping a house is important when you live by a beach, for keeping up appearances, but it’s also a metaphor for the practical matters of day-to-day life, those things that provide safety and security, for taking care of oneself. And the women in this novel have all started out with disadvantages, as we discover as the story gets put together, piece-by-piece. What caused Wilma, her daughter Esme, and then Lala to be the way they are, the violence and trauma in their pasts which meant that they’ve never been able to count on anybody really, that their lives are tough and hardscrabble, and they’d take any avenue out of it, except that none of the avenues really tend to lead anywhere at all.
Take Lala, for instance, who ends up with Adan, who dotes on their baby, but beats her—he was her getaway from Wilma and her husband who’d preyed on Esme and driven her to her own sorry fate. And her connection to Adan’s friend Tone, which stretched back years, when she first discovered him working in the garden at the house her grandmother was cleaning, Tone suffering from something we don’t know what until the end of the book. Breadcrumbs, are what Jones offers her reader, clues and hints. The book is a mystery, but not in the conventional way, because we know who did it from the novel’s first pages. It was Adan in the big house with a handgun. But what happens next? And the way the rest of the story unfolds is tragic, mesmerizing, twisty and surprising, Jones managing a complex and nuanced treatment of even the most despicable characters (and her most sympathetic characters get to behave despicably).
There’s also the wife of the dead man in the big house, herself from the island and her husband had been her getaway, but now he’s been murdered and here she is, right back where she started. The police officer with the digestive issues who thinks he’s putting the pieces together, but the pieces are all wrong. The sex worker who’s fed up with the cop who’s been threatening to arrest her since she stopped sleeping with him. Tone, who’s been running his whole life and can’t catch a break, and it doesn’t look like his fate’s due to change anytime soon.
The ending of this book is devastating, but perfect. Literally uplifting, and I’d say spiritually as well, and it’s hardly heartwarming, but instead heartsoaring, propelled by the power of story, the magic of Cherie Jones’ characters and prose.
February 3, 2021
And This is the Cure, by Annette Lapointe
So you could pitch it like this: imagine every Miram Toews book you have ever read—A Complicated Kindness, Irma Voth, The Flying Troutmans, All My Puny Sorrows, Women Talking, Summer of My Amazing Luck, Swing Low, I mean everything—all packed together in a single volume. Which is only misleading, because it makes it sound derivative, which it isn’t. So how about this instead: former cult member turned riot grrrl writes a tell-all memoir and finds fame as house of a Canadian broadcasting culture flagship pop culture radio show after its former host (a noted sexual predator) flames out in disgrace, but then her past life comes back to haunt her when her ex-husband is murdered and her estranged 11 year-old daughter is returned to her care, which means she’s forced to confront her ex’s conservative, religious family and their disdain for her, all the while she’s trying to stay on her meds and keep as stable as possible as she avoids confronting the trauma buried in her past, which does not necessary lie where she thinks it does…and then her band goes on tour in Japan.
And This is the Cure is the third novel by Annette Lapointe, whose first book Stolen was nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2006. I also really appreciated her second White Tail Shooting Gallery in 2013, writing in a blog post that the book, “baffled me throughout, disturbed and troubled me, but it also intrigued me, continually surprised me, never stopped me wondering what would happen next…” And the same stands for her latest, which I loved. A book that ostensibly should be too much—how can a person fit so many things into a single novel?—but which works, is eminently readable. Mostly because of Allison Winter, Lapointe’s stunning fictional creation, a woman who is shattered and still standing, flawed and perfect, terrified and brave, smart and ridiculous, loving and fierce, damaged and whole, missing and present. A singular creation: regarding her daughter as a baby, she says, “I’d happily have killed things for her, but I would have preferred her to stay at home, in someone else’s custody, while I did it… I’d have made a decent, if absent, father.”
She’s the trickiest narrator, withholding information about her story until the present drags it out of her. She’s also unapologetic with a ferocity that never wavers, and I love that. Her unreliability turns the novel into the most fascinating, many-sided shape, but her perspective is still a steady one, the compass point that guides the reader through so much stuff. A lesser writer would have had this whole book come off its rails, but Lapointe nails it, unbelievably. I loved it.
January 5, 2021
Our Darkest Night, by Jennifer Robson
In her first four novels, Jennifer Robson proven herself as a master of popular historical fiction, her books about strong independent women’s self-discovery against a backdrop of World Wars 1 and 2, weaving fascinating historical detail (Robson holds a doctorate in British economic and social history from Saint Antony’s College, University of Oxford) with scintillating narrative. Her books are huge bestsellers, and many writers, having achieved that kind of success, might determine that they’d found their formula and should probably stick to it, but not Robson, whose smash hit fifth novel The Gown did something a little different, set in 1947 as Queen Elizabeth and Prince Phillip, bringing to light stories of craftspeople who’d worked the embroidery on the wedding dress and posing vital questions about the devaluing of craft and art in general that tends to be created and appreciated by women.
And now, two years on, Robson—who: full disclosure, is a friend of mine!—has continued to demand more of herself as a writer and also of her readers, releasing Our Darkest Night, which I read on New Year’s Day and think is her finest novel yet. Set in World War Two Italy as Nina, a secular Jew, leaves her home in Venice to hide in the countryside, disguised as a the wife of Nico, a Catholic farmer, as Italy’s fascist government continues to escalate deadly laws targeting the country’s Jewish population—her father has already lost his medical practice, she is not permitted to study, local Jewish associations are being called on supply officials with lists of people they’re connected with.
And so Nina agrees to go, desperately missing home and her family, and Robson does a wonderful job of creating a beautiful dynamic between them of respect and friendship…that has the potential to blossom into something more. The goodness of both these characters and the relationship between them creating a necessary balance to the backdrop of their story, the cruel and brutal reality of racism, persecution, and genocide. Robson doing nothing to blur the sharp edges of the truth of these matters, their violence and devastation. This is not an easy read, but to make it so would be to dishonour the stories of the real people who lived through and were victims of the Holocaust. And how does a writer whose novels feature plucky heroines and smoochy covers manage to do justice to the weight of the history she is telling? But Robson does, deftly, gorgeously.
Nina isn’t plucky—she’s a survivor. And I was trying to think of what the distinction might be exactly, which perhaps is that she comes to the story without naivete and with such a profound sense of who she is and where she comes from—there is a gravitas to her boldness that makes her absolutely unpluckable. She’s a remarkable fictional creation, and Our Darkest Night is a masterpiece.
December 11, 2020
Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson
Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste is one of the smartest, most illuminating and important books I’ve read this year—or ever. A rich, engaging and fascinating text that draws a connection between India’s caste system, the Nazis’ plans for Germany’s Jews, and America’s racial hierarchy—matter-of-factly, she shows that India and America’s hierarchies are parallel, and also how the Nazis drew on America’s example for their own purposes, though there were certain examples where the Nazis wouldn’t go that far (one instance: the one-drop rule.) And just think of it—when the Nazis think you’ve gone too far.
Americans are not widely known for using examples of other cultures to better understand or even benefit themselves—see: the reasons people come up with as to how measures to fight Covid all over the world couldn’t work in a place like Nebraska; or how while public healthcare functions just fine in Canada, in Florida it would be impossible (I SPEND TOO MUCH TIME READING SOCIAL MEDIA COMMENTS)—and so what Wilkerson is doing here is really radical and profound.
Caste, Wilkerson writes, is like grammar. Not explicitly taught, but absorbed, until it becomes part of the atmosphere, or perhaps foundation is a better metaphor, because everything else is built upon it, and she shares her observations for being able to tell what caste Indians are from by watching their interactions, the natural superiority one might assume to another, even somebody with very good intentions.
I found this book useful in a way that not all books on race and anti-racism have been to me. For the way it illuminating the questions I’ve been having for the last five years (why does the white working class keep voting against their interest? Because perpetuating the hierarchy is in their interest, even if they have to suffer for it.)
This is the kind of book whose reading only deepened the furrows on my brow, because I spent the whole time reading and wondering, “What the fuck?” Did you know that lynchings were once commemorating with wildly popular postcards? And when the postal service finally got wise and banned these, people just stuck the images in envelopes. People who threw glass into pools to keep Black people from swimming in them, and the district that just did without public schools altogether instead of segregating. Bull Connor paying a Black man to shake hands with the mayoral candidate he did not support, and a photographer to capture the moment, because it was unacceptable for a white man to shake hands with a Black man. And the legacy of Robert E. Lee, for whom schools across the nations are named, who got to become a university president after the Civil War (Wilkerson compares this to how Nazi Generals were NOT remembered after World War Two) and Wilkerson recounts a story of his torture of three of the people he enslaved: “Had these and even more gruesome atrocities occurred in another country, at another time, to another set of people other than the lowest caste, they would have been considered crimes against humanity… But the slaveholders…were not only not punished but were celebrated as pillars of society.”
And that this is the culture we are steeped in. (I am not American, but we are still steeped in American culture AND the history of my nation is not so vastly different even if we weren’t). It just seems like such a powerful way to explain the situation, and also to explain why racism is so hard to tackle, which is that racism is underlined by a caste system upon which not only institutions are built but which also informs our sense of self. Racism is just a symptom of a deeper and more insidious problem, which Wilkerson illuminates through a blend of anthropology, history, cultural studies, memoir, and reporting. A framework that has so long been invisible, but once you see it there, you realize it’s everywhere. You realize why the backlash to America’s first Black President, say, has been so awful and vicious, because of how so many are willing to gamble everything to keep that hierarchy intact.
Identifying a problem is the first step toward finding a solution, no matter how difficult finding that solution might be, and to that end, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Wilkerson has done something so powerful with this, her second book after the acclaimed The Warmth of Other Suns. This is a book that continues to shift our understanding of race and white supremacy in a moment where we’ve never needed it more.
December 2, 2020
Butter Honey Pig Bread, by Francesca Ekwuyasi
One more title that I am glad I got to before the year was out was the debut novel by Francesca Ekwuyasi, Butter Honey Pig Bread, which was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. It was fantastic, a debut that was so polished and assured, hugely ambitious in its reach and just as successful in execution…and by page 19 it was clear I’d be baking the cake Taiye makes to celebrate the occasion of her twin sister’s homecoming, salted caramel chocolate. Which was baked before the day was out.
It’s a hugely evocative novel, gorgeous and sensual, rich with foods and cooking, and also with sex. Although it begins with something more unearthly, the birth of Kambirinachi, a Nigerian woman presented as an Ogbanje, “a spirit that plagues a family with grief by dying repeatedly in childhood and being reborn.” Except that Kambirinachi cheats the system and clings to her life, but she will pay a price for this. Which is how she explains tragedies that befall her when she loses her parents, and her husband dies, and then something terrible and traumatic is suffered by her twin daughters that tears the rest of their family apart.
The three strands of this novel belong to Kambirinachi and her daughters, Taiye and Kehinde, who grow up estranged from each other and head out into the world apart. Taiye goes to London, and then studies cooking in France, and eventually arrives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, before returning home to care for her ailing mother. Meanwhile, Kehinde is left behind when her sister moved to London, and makes her own way to study in Montreal and build a life there.
At the beginning of the novel, Kehinde is arriving home to Lagos with her new husband, meeting her mother and sister again for the first time in years. We learn her story in the first person, seeking to make sense of her traumatic past and move forward in her life. Similarly, Taiye’s tells a story that blends the present day experience with what she’s been through in her life, and finally their mother’s story is told chronologically, adding necessary context to the twins’ experience—for the twins themselves and the reader alike.
The progress of the novel is these three strands becoming re-woven together, braided tighter and tighter throughout the narrative. It’s a novel that in many ways reminded me of Saleema Nawaz’s Bone and Bread, for themes of family estrangement, loss and mystery, and also food, and I would definitely recommend it for anyone who enjoyed that book.
I also appreciated its treatment of Black communities among the diaspora, Nigerian Taiye in Halifax visiting the Africville museum commemorating that city’s historic Black community, and the other Africans she meets in London. And that a novel creates such a powerful sense of place in so many different places—Lagos, London, Montreal, Halifax—is also a remarkable achievement.
Butter Honey Pig Break is a standout debut, and as much as it will make you hungry, it will also more than satisfy.
