In fiction, fall 2024 brings a nice mix of works by CanLit stalwarts Jane Urquhart, Heather O’Neill and Caroline Adderson; promising up-and-comers such as Anne Hawk and Andrew Forbes; and a gaggle of newly translated, award-winning novels by francophone Quebec writers Éric Chacour, Kevin Lambert and Fanny Britt. On the international front, look for novels by heavy-hitters Roddy Doyle, Rachel Kushner, Alan Hollinghurst and Sally Rooney.
It surely says something about the present moment that absurdity is making a comeback in fiction of all stripes, and that several novels in the list below involve sinister goings-on in communes and health retreats. Environmental anxiety, no surprise, continues to be a preoccupation in both fiction (David Huebert, Louise Erdrich, Richard Powers) and non-fiction.
Books we’re reading and loving this week: Globe staffers and readers share their book picks
Elsewhere in non-fiction, two new books by Timothy Snyder and Carol Off probe the evolving meaning of the word “freedom,” while a collection of Mavis Gallant’s early Montreal newspaper columns gives us glimpses of the literary powerhouse she was to become. The season is also strong for graphic and non-graphic memoirs and biographies, as well as letter collections: a massive one by the inimitable, late neurologist Oliver Sacks, and a recently unearthed (and much slimmer) one by a Scottish pacifist writing to her Canadian soldier brother during the First World War.
Happy reading!
CANADIAN FICTION
In Winter I Get Up at Night, Jane Urquhart (McClelland & Stewart) Urquhart’s first novel in nearly a decade (since The Night Stages) is narrated by a woman reflecting back on her unusual life. It’s strongly affected by the time she spent in a children’s ward after she was injured in an accident when she was 11, and by a series of powerful male figures she met during her early morning work commutes to her job as a music teacher in rural Saskatchewan.
Moon Road, Sarah Leipciger (Viking) The classic road trip gets a sombre twist in this novel by the author of Coming Up for Air, about divorced septuagenarians Kathleen and Yannick, who, two decades after their daughter goes missing, explore pains and joys past on a drive from Ontario to Tofino, B.C., after the discovery there of unidentified bones on a hiking trail.
Oil People, David Huebert (McClelland & Stewart) Huebert transposes the concerns explored in his Alistair MacLeod Prize-winning book of short stories, Chemical Valley – namely, of our troubled, Faustian relationship to the earth’s riches – to a larger canvas in this Gothic-tinged first novel about a Southern Ontario family whose decrepit oil farm is haunted by the acts of their Victorian forebears.
All You Can Kill, Pasha Malla (Coach House, October) Plugged as The White Lotus meets Shaun of the Dead, Malla’s absurdist fourth novel takes place in a setting fast supplanting remote cabins and empty asylums in the horror genre: the modern-day wellness retreat.
The Coming Bad Days, Sarah Bernstein (Knopf, October) This is the actual debut of last year’s Giller winner, which was originally published in 2021 in Britain, where she now lives. It shares Study for Obedience’s spare sense of ominousness in a tale about a female academic who starts to withdraw from society after moving to an unnamed city.
The Diapause, Andrew Forbes (Invisible, October) Touted by its publisher as White Fang meets Station Eleven, Forbes’s speculative first novel (after two well-received short-story collections) begins as 10-year-old Gabriel, a delicate only child, is heading to a cabin north of Peterborough, Ont., to weather a pandemic. It then moves quickly forward in time to chart the repercussions of the events that took place there on the rest of his life.
The Pages of the Sea, Anne Hawk (Biblioasis, October) This finely observed debut by the London-based writer who grew up in Canada and the Caribbean, tells (often in dialect) the coming-of-age story of a young girl. In the early 1960s, she is left with her sisters on an unnamed Caribbean island under the care of aunts and cousins after her mother (part of the so-called Windrush generation) sails to England in search of work.
May Our Joy Endure, Kevin Lambert (Biblioasis) “Febrile,” “provocative” and “incendiary” are among the breathless adjectives used to describe the novels of this young writer from Chicoutimi, Que., whose three books to date won or were nominated for multiple big awards in Quebec, France and English Canada (the latter for the translation of Querelle de Roberval). This latest (a Prix Goncourt finalist) is a social satire involving an architect who faces extreme unanticipated blowback for her plans for a major Montreal public works project.
The Capital of Dreams, Heather O’Neill (HarperCollins) In this fable of a novel (inspired by her father and uncles’ experiences in the Second World War), O’Neill ventures far from the usual Montreal setting of her books. A small unnamed European country, famous for its arts, has just been invaded by a long-time enemy, prompting young Sophia to ferry her writer mother’s manuscript to safety by train, accompanied by – what else? – a talking goose.
What I Know About You, Éric Chacour (Coach House, September) Chacour’s first novel, about the forbidden, epic love between two men in 1960s Cairo that sends one of them, a doctor, into exile in Montreal, was a bona fide sensation in Quebec and France (Chacour calls both places home), where it won several high-profile prizes, including France’s Prix des libraires – making it the first Quebec novel to be so honoured since Anne Hébert’s Kamouraska in 1971.
Sugaring Off, Fanny Britt (Book*hug, October) The writer’s 2020 novel – about how the destinies of a wealthy white couple from Quebec and a young African-American woman take radically different courses after a surfing accident in Martha’s Vineyard – won the Governor-General’s Literary Award for French-language Fiction.
GRAPHIC MEMOIRS
All Our Ordinary Stories: A Multigenerational Family Odyssey, Teresa Wong (Arsenal Pulp, September) When her mother fell into depression after being hospitalized for a mild stroke in 2014, it sent Wong – who, like many children of immigrants, struggles to speak to her Chinese parents in their native language – on a path to better understand them. This included a past in which they suffered and starved under Mao’s failed socio-economic programs prior to their daring escape to Canada.
Beirut, Barrack Zailaa Rima (Invisible) The social and political tumult that has rocked much of the Arab world in the 21st century has, on the positive side, brought with it a flowering of the comic arts. One cartoonist (and filmmaker) working in this context is the Brussels-based Rima, whose portrait of post-Civil War Beirut, at once nostalgic and alienating, takes us from the mazes of the city’s alleys to the din of its public squares.
Something, Not Nothing: A Story of Grief and Love, Sarah Leavitt (Arsenal Pulp, September) “After her death, I continued living, which surprised me,” writes the Vancouver cartoonist (author of the acclaimed Tangles, about her mother’s early onset Alzheimer’s, soon to be an animated film starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Seth Rogen) at the beginning of this unique and devastatingly affecting collection of drawings and text fragments, which she produced in the two years after the death by assisted suicide of her partner of 22 years.
LETTERS
Letters from the Little Blue Room: An Intimate Portrait of World War I, Daisy Thomson Gigg (Barbican, October) First published anonymously, in 1917, by the controversial wartime publisher Charles Daniel – who was variously arrested and imprisoned for his pacifist publications – this recently unearthed (from the rare-books room of the British Library) collection of frank, funny and encouraging letters was written to a soldier fighting in the trenches as part of the Canadian Expeditionary Force by his Scottish-American sister.
Letters, Oliver Sacks (Knopf, November) The first entry in this 752-page collection of the motorcycle-riding neurologist’s missives to family, friends and colleagues – sent from Vancouver Island to the then 27-year-old’s parents in 1960 – offers a detailed, pages-long description of his recent travels by plane and train through Canada, whose natural wonders he admires but whose social prohibitions he finds confounding. Of Alberta, “Drinking is not gregarious here. It is hard and solitary”; of Quebec, “a woman cannot vote, cannot divorce her husband, cannot have a banking account of her own.”
SHORT STORIES
A Way to Be Happy, Caroline Adderson (Biblioasis) Though her writing is incisive, emotionally astute, slyly funny and award-winning, it still feels like Adderson hasn’t quite gotten her due as one of this country’s best short-story writers. The first story in this Giller-longlisted collection, about a couple who awkwardly try to burgle a Christmas party while posing as guests, sets the tone for the tales to come.
Every Night I Dream I’m a Monk, Every Night I Dream I’m a Monster, Damian Tarnopolsky (Freehand) Tarnopolsky’s novel Goya’s Dog was shortlisted for the Amazon First Novel Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book. Writer Mark Anthony Jarman describes the mood of this new collection of stylistically experimental stories, whose settings span from 1980s England to Renaissance France to present-day Canada, as “a pleasing chaos, like Nabokov on acid.”
Journey, Souvankham Thammavongsa and Alexander MacLeod, eds. (McClelland & Stewart) The Journey Prize (now The Writers’ Trust of Canada McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize) got its start from an unlikely source: an endowment from the American writer James A. Michener, who came up with the idea of donating the Canadian royalties from one of his novels to support fledgling Canadian writers. The prize’s continuing relevance is evident in the fine list of authors represented in this anthology, produced for its 35th anniversary, among them: André Alexis, Paige Cooper, Eden Robinson and Madeleine Thien.
Dogs and Monsters, Mark Haddon (Doubleday, October) The author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time taps the current vogue for retellings of Greek myths in eight stories that play with time, narrative and moral choices. Transplanted to 16th-century England, for example, the tale of the minotaur becomes a parable about maternal love when the human mother of the gentle part-bull “mooncalf” – condemned as a monster by his monster of a father – does everything in her power to save him from his labyrinth-cum-dungeon.
INTERNATIONAL FICTION
Creation Lake, Rachel Kushner (Scribner) The Flamethrowers author is back with a brainy psychological thriller in which a daredevil American female secret agent starts to question her identity after she’s recruited to infiltrate a commune in rural, cave-strewn France. The commune’s elusive leader, Bruno Lacombe, communicates (relatably) only by e-mail, and is convinced the way to make the world great again lies in the Neanderthal past.
Elaine, Will Self (Grove, September) Self has been a polarizing figure – there are arguably as many admirers of his satirical, experimental and occasionally grotesque books as detractors – but he is rarely dull. The British writer drew on his late mother’s diaries from the mid-fifties, during a time when the family briefly moved to Ithaca, N.Y., to create this Mrs. Dalloway-adjacent portrait of a woman straining at the intellectual and marital confines of her existence.
Intermezzo, Sally Rooney (Knopf, September) The Normal People phenom moves from love triangles to sibling strife, and a revamped, more clipped style, in this tale of two Irish brothers – one a chess champ losing his edge, the other a progressive lawyer – whose relationship strains after their father’s death of cancer.
Playground, Richard Powers (Random House, September) Powers re-engages with the themes – art, memory, humanity’s interconnectedness with the nature, technology and ethics – that have infused his fiction and that helped win him a Pulitzer with The Overstory. This complex, ocean-spanning novel is about two men – one wealthy and white, one poor and Black – who bonded in private school over their love of the game Go, but who later fall out while designing an ambitious computer game named Playground.
Quarterlife, Devika Rege (Liveright) Canadian-American critic and Pulitzer finalist Vauhini Vara declared this sprawlingly ambitious, character-stuffed debut in the mould of Amitav Ghosh and Salman Rushdie – centred around the rise of Indian nationalism in 1914 – “India’s literary novel of the year.”
The Women Behind the Door, Roddy Doyle (Viking) Doyle here revisits his character Paula Spencer, first introduced in 1996′s The Woman Who Walked into Doors. A survivor of domestic violence, the recovering alcoholic and now widow must confront the simmering resentment of her middle-aged daughter during the COVID pandemic.
Lesser Ruins, Mark Haber (Coffee House Press, October) Haber’s three novels to date all feature characters who approach self-destruction in pursuit of their respective obsessions. In this mordantly absurd, virtually paragraphless book, a retired professor and recent widower does battle with endless intrusions – including his son’s electronic-dance-music album project – in the hopes of completing his magnum opus: a book on essayist Michel de Montaigne.
Our Evenings, Alan Hollinghurst (Knopf, October) The British writer and Booker winner (The Line of Beauty) has made a career of writing nuanced novels about LGBTQ characters against rich historical backdrops. Staying with his strengths in a novel called a “tour de force” in one early review, Hollinghurst here tells the intertwined stories of two men – a gay, biracial actor and the mentor who enabled his career by getting him into boarding school in the 1960s – in the decades leading up to Brexit.
The Mighty Red, Louise Erdrich (HarperCollins, October) The Red of the title would be the Red River; specifically, the northern one that runs between Winnipeg and North Dakota, where this expansive drama – about everyday humans whose foibles are set against a backdrop of environmental ruination (fracking, pesticides) – and so much of Erdrich’s other work takes place.
A Case of Matricide, Graeme Macrae Burnet (Biblioasis, November) The multiple Booker-nominated Scottish novelist has made a project of undermining the certainties and assumptions we bring to fiction by blurring truth and artifice. In this third book featuring the melancholic, insecure Inspector Gorski, the latter finds himself drawn to the case of a woman in a small French town who’s convinced that her novelist son is plotting her demise.
FICTION IN TRANSLATION
There Are Rivers in the Sky, Elif Shafak (Knopf) One of Turkey’s best-known and most prolific contemporary writers (and long-time exile) unites the disparate stories of three characters via the image of a raindrop and the reality of two rivers – the Thames and the Tigris – with The Epic of Gilgamesh thrown in for good measure.
Overstaying, Ariane Koch (NYRB) In this absurdist comic novel – which won Germany’s most prestigious prize for first fiction – a woman returns to her childhood home in a small town, where her parents have been supplanted by a strange, shapeshifting “visitor” whom she initially welcomes, but whose continuing presence and idiosyncrasies eventually start to oppress her.
The Empusium, Olga Tokarczuk (Riverhead, September) The Polish Nobel winner channels Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain in this 1913-set tale of a young Pole who goes to a sanitorium in the Silesian Mountains to recover from tuberculosis only to end up, after finding it full, at a nearby “Guesthouse for Gentlemen.” There, among other sinister goings-on, the all-male residents drink hallucinogenic liqueur while debating the philosophical questions of the day (one of which isn’t men’s innate superiority over women, that being a given).
The City and Its Uncertain Walls, Haruki Murakami (Knopf Doubleday, November) It feels like some species of Murakami book (a new translation, his recent Manga stories or collections of literary or film criticism) appears every few months; but for the Japanese author’s die-hard fans, the publication of a new novel, the first in six years – billed as “a love story, a quest, an ode to books and to the libraries that house them, and a parable for these strange post-pandemic times” – is a very big deal indeed.
HISTORY
The Knowing, Tanya Talaga (HarperCollins) The Seven Fallen Feathers author uses a personal lens to examine the still-raw history of colonialism’s impact on Indigenous people: namely, her search to find out how her maternal great-great-grandmother, Annie Carpenter, ended up buried in an unmarked grave on the grounds of a “lunatic asylum” by the side of Toronto’s Gardiner Expressway, thousands of kilometres from her home in Sioux Lookout, Ont.
The Siege, Ben Macintyre (McClelland & Stewart) The author of Agent Sonya and Operation Mincemeat, among many others, relates the story of the tense, six-day siege of the Iranian embassy in London in 1980 that resulted in the taking of 26 hostages, and which, as the first such incident to play out in real time on TV, marked, according to Macintyre, “a turning point in the relationship between breaking news and the viewing public.”
Dangerous Memory, Charlie Angus (Anansi, October) The 1980s’ outrageous gelled hairdos and synth dance tracks are fuelling the latest nostalgia cycle, and yet it’s within that decade, the punk-rocker-turned-politician argues, that we can find the root of much of our current socio-economic malaise, from the rise of income inequality and billionaire oligarchs to the climate crisis.
Four Points of the Compass, Jerry Brotton (Grove/Atlantic, November) We take for granted that north always sits atop of our maps, yet this hasn’t always been the case; some societies used south and east as their cardinal directions, an orientation that, according to the author, a British historian and broadcaster, continues to affect their languages and beliefs.
Give Me Winter, Give Me Dogs, Kenn Harper (Inhabit, November) The Arctic historian gives an account (supported by wonderful photos and maps) of Knud Rasmussen’s famed Fifth Thule Expedition, in which the Danish-Inuit explorer undertook, between 1921 and 1924, a 20,000-mile journey by dog sled from his native Greenland to Siberia. Along the way, he collected data, artifacts and oral histories from Canadian Inuit that would have a lasting impact on our understanding of the latter’s culture and history.
The White Ladder, Daniel Light (Norton, November) George Mallory’s famous utterance – “Because it is there” – turns out to be just one of many reasons that humans have sought the Earth’s highest places, as the author, a London-based mountaineer, shows in this comprehensive history of mountaineering.
LITERARY CRITICISM
Salvage, Dionne Brand (Knopf) Brand’s first major work of non-fiction in more than 20 years combines memoir and literary criticism as she revisits the English novels – by Bronte, Austen, Defoe, Thackeray, et al. – that once shaped her thinking, but which, she came to realize, served to normalize slavery and colonialism.
The Position of Spoons: And Other Intimacies, Deborah Levy (Hamish Hamilton, October) Famous for her luminous trilogy of “living autobiographies,” the British novelist and poet here compiles a series of brief observations on her favourite writers (Marguerite Duras: “a reckless thinker, an egomaniac, a bit preposterous really. I believe she had to be”) and on her life and thoughts (“It has always been very clear to me that men and women who wear shoes without socks are destined to become my friends and lovers”) that collectively serve as a kind of Cubist character self-study.
CLIMATE & ENVIRONMENT
Our Green Heart, Diana Beresford-Kroeger (Random House) Laying out the profound, ancient relationship between humans and trees has been the botanist’s life’s work. It’s a result of a sui generis education: After her parents died when she was a child, Beresford-Kroeger was fed both works of modern science and ancient Druidic knowledge by the Irish aunts and uncles who raised her, before going on to train in botany, physics and medical biochemistry. In what’s being billed as a “culminating” book of essays, she lays out here how we can and must save ourselves from climate catastrophe.
Climate Hope, David Geselbracht (Douglas & McIntyre, October) If the only sin is despair, then, in this time of climate crisis, surely we’ve all been sinners. Aiming to mitigate the pervasive ennui, Geselbracht – a B.C.-based lawyer who has worked on climate-change issues in the context of academia, journalism and government – travelled the globe to meet the diverse people leading the charge on reducing carbon emissions.
Latitudes, Jean McNeil (Barbican, November) After 30 years of planet-roaming – she’s penned a Lonely Planet guide to Costa Rica, spent four months at a research station in Antarctica (leading to the prize-winning book Ice Diaries), led safaris in Africa, and spent time in the Falkland Islands and Canada’s boreal forest – the Nova Scotia-born writer found that she kept hearing a “voice,” familiar from long ago, that she felt strongly was related to the land. She wrote this book to find out what it was saying.
Power Metal, Vince Beiser (Riverhead, November) When he bought his first electrical vehicle, Beiser, a Canadian-American journalist, was filled with a crusading sense of virtue; until, that is, he started probing the source of the raw materials – lithium, cobalt, nickel – needed to power it and his digital devices. It was a rude awakening to learn that the hunt for the resources necessary for a “clean” future are “spawning massive environmental damage, political upheaval, mayhem, and murder.”
The Serviceberry, Robin Wall Kimmerer (Simon & Schuster, November) Her first book since her unlikely 2013 blockbuster, Braiding Sweetgrass, continues the Indigenous botanist’s focus on sustainability with a look at how the reciprocity, interconnectedness and abundance embodied in the serviceberry shrub offers an antidote to an economy that encourages the opposite.
JOURNALISM
A Nation’s Paper: The Globe and Mail in the Life of Canada, John Ibbitson, ed. (McClelland & Stewart, October) Thirty essays by Globe writers and staff explore the role the paper has played, since its founding by George Brown 180 years ago, in the life of the nation through its coverage of issues such as the environment, the General Motors strike of 1937, as well as its failures, including paying inadequate attention to topics such as the treatment of Indigenous people in residential schools, and to the plight of Nova Scotia’s Africville.
Montreal Standard Time: Early Journalism, Mavis Gallant (Véhicule, October) For six years, starting in 1944, before she moved to Paris to fulfill her destiny as one of the greatest short-story writers in the English language, Gallant was the most widely read columnist at the Montreal Standard newspaper. “We can discern,” writes co-editor Neil Besner of this curated selection of pieces from that period, “her first steps towards developing what was to become her singular narrative style – that rich alloy of irony, deadpan humour, minutely reported detail, and lyrical intensity that is hers alone.”
What She Said: Conversations About Equality, Elizabeth Renzetti (McClelland & Stewart, October) Renzetti’s first piece for The Globe (then sometimes referred to as “The Globe and Old White Male”) was a furious rebuttal to an anti-feminist screed in the paper’s then extant “Men’s column.” The variations she wrote on that column, here collected and selected, over the next 30 years – on topics ranging from the pay gap to IPV to the MeToo movement – are what she calls “the world’s longest and most irritating Groundhog Day.”
MEMOIR/BIOGRAPHY
The Beautiful Dream, Atiba Hutchinson with Dan Robson (Viking) This is the life story of the humble man widely regarded as one of the best and most accomplished soccer players in Canadian soccer history. Hutchinson rose from humble beginnings in suburban Brampton, Ont., where he was born to Trinidadian immigrant parents in 1983, to playing for European teams, and captaining Canada’s national soccer team.
The Traitor’s Daughter, Roxana Spicer (Viking) Growing up in her tiny Saskatchewan town (population 80), the documentary filmmaker and CBC journalist says there were plenty of signs her secretive mother was unusual. She listened to the Red Army Choir while sipping Black Russians at night, and pitched kitchen knives across the room into a perfect circle on the wall. In this history-laced memoir, Spicer gives an account of her decades-long effort to string together her mother’s past as a Red Army combat soldier, and as a prisoner in a Nazi POW camp before marrying Spicer’s father, a Canadian soldier.
Hope by Terry Fox, Barbara Adhiya, ed. (ECW, September) Adhiya creates a panoptic view of Fox through this collection of stories, some never before told, by the people in his direct orbit – including medical staff, childhood friends, a girlfriend and Fox’s training partner – all of whom remain, even 40 years later, profoundly affected by their contact with the Marathon of Hope runner.
Leonard Cohen, Christophe Lebold (ECW, September) Adding to the growing corpus of Cohen biographies comes this newly translated one by a French academic and friend of Cohen’s that takes a more free-roaming metaphysical and philosophical approach to its subject. Lebold is particularly taken with the metaphors of gravity and falling that run through Cohen’s life and work, and with the many dualities in Cohen’s persona: romantic/monk; poet/musician etc.
Raising Hare, Chloe Dalton (Canongate, October) The discovery, while she was spending the pandemic lockdown in the country, of a tiny, barely alive leveret (the very satisfying word for a baby hare), and her subsequent raising of it in preparation for its release back into the wild compelled the author to reassess her priorities, including her addiction to her travel-filled, adrenalin-fuelled job as a foreign policy expert. In this tender, but in no way sentimental account (the hare throughout remains “the hare” or “leveret”), Dalton describes the remarkable bond she developed with this wild creature.
i heard a crow before i was born, Jules Delorme (Goose Lane, October) In this raw, stream-of-consciousness memoir, Delorme, a Mohawk who grew up on the Akwesasne Reserve near Cornwall, Ont., describes himself as having been “an abnormally quiet and serious child diagnosed as autistic later as asperger’s that’s what they called it then and dyslexic and very very angry.” He goes on to describe a violent, abusive childhood (related to the intergenerational trauma of residential schools), and the two things that helped mitigate it: his beloved tóta (grandmother), and his lifelong connection to animals.
The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV, Helen Castor (S&S, October) The Cambridge historian and broadcaster’s hefty four-part book serves as both a twinned psychological portrait and a chronicle of the decades-long power struggle – “a moment of political masculinity in crisis” – between not-kissing cousins Richard II, a tyrannical narcissist with birthright on his side, and Henry IV, a natural leader inconveniently lacking said birthright.
Didion & Babitz, Lili Anolik (Scriber, November) Anolik had already written a biography of the hotwired Eve Babitz when she discovered a letter Babitz wrote to her fellow writer and temperamental opposite, Joan Didion. In this dual portrait, she describes the women as frenemies who once both lived in a derelict rental building that was a hotbed for artists and writers in late-sixties L.A., and whose relationship came to an official end in 1974, when Babitz fired Didion over edits to one of her books.
SOCIETY AND SCIENCE
I Heard There Was a Secret Chord, Daniel J. Levitin (Norton) Though it’s something many of us likely feel intuitively, a belief in the healing powers of music can be traced back as far 20,000 years, to the Upper Paleolithic era. Levitin (This Is Your Brain on Music), a leading cognitive psychologist, here shares the cutting-edge scientific research backing up those feelings and offers inspiring examples of how music therapy has helped those suffering from afflictions ranging from Parkinson’s disease to PTSD.
At a Loss for Words, Carol Off (Random House) Language is by nature fluid, but around 2020 the long-time journalist became unnerved by what she saw as an increased stridency in the political discourse undermining a once-shared vocabulary. This book is a deep-dive look at six words – freedom, democracy, truth, woke, choice, taxes – that Off believes have been “hijacked, weaponized or semantically bleached.”
On Freedom, Timothy Snyder (Crown) The word “freedom” has been everywhere in this current U.S. election cycle; including, notably, in the Beyoncé track U.S. presidential hopeful Kamala Harris has been using as a walk-up song at her rallies. In a bookend to his 2017 On Tyranny, the Yale historian (who wrote much of it while in Ukraine, where freedom is far from an abstract concept) attempts to define the term, and in doing so suggests that Americans reframe freedom from a negative (freedom from) to a positive (freedom to).
Invisible Prisons, Lisa Moore and Jack Whalen (Knopf, September) Moore was introduced to Whalen through a friend, who told her he had a story to tell. That story concerned the extreme physical and sexual abuse that he and many other children suffered at the Whitbourne Training School for Boys in Newfoundland in the early seventies – one to which Whalen, who is suing the government of Newfoundland and Labrador while battling cancer, wanted the world to bear witness.
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