Just try saying the word “midwinter” without “bleak” – its adjectival companion in frigid despair (thanks, Christina Rossetti). You can’t, can you? This year, though, the books landscape is a good deal more cheering than the meteorological one, as evidenced by the 30 promising fiction and non-fiction titles listed here – all of which publish in those bleakest of midwinter months: January and February.
JANUARY
The Certainty Illusion, Timothy Caulfield (Allen Lane) With the language of science increasingly corrupted to promote misinformation in realms ranging from vaccines to online consumer reviews to food labelling, who, or what, can we trust these days? Caulfield, a University of Alberta researcher specializing in health and science policy issues, here aims to explain the phenomenon and to offer guideposts in an age of “sciencesploitation.”
Books we’re reading and loving this week: Globe staffers share their book picks
Near Distance, Hanna Stoltenberg (Biblioasis) Through flashbacks, and during an uncomfortable weekend trip to London, Stoltenberg’s novel – which won Norway’s prestigious Tarjei Vesaas first book award – probes the fraught relationship between fiftysomething Karin and her adult daughter, Helene.
The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World, David Graeber (McClelland & Stewart) When he died, suddenly, in 2020, at the age of 59, the anthropologist-anarchist-activist scholar – author, among many other works, of Bullshit Jobs and The Dawn of Everything (the latter with David Wengrow) – left behind a vast archive of writings. Those will inevitably start to trickle out over the next few years, but this collection of 18 essays offers a solid introduction to the ideas – around freedom, debt, culture and caring – that Graeber was best known for.
Hope, Pope Francis (Random House) Many public figures wait till retirement to write their memoirs, so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised, given the parameters of his job, that Francis is the first pope in 2,000 years (which is to say, ever) to do so. Originally intending to publish this book after his death, Francis apparently had a change of heart owing to “the needs of our times.”
The Loves of My Life, Edmund White (Bloomsbury) “I’m at an age,” writes the celebrated 85-year-old novelist and chronicler of gay life, “when writers are supposed to say finally what mattered most to them – for me it would be thousands of sex partners.” In this “sex memoir” he does just that by paying explicit homage to some of the most memorable of the latter.
The Harder I Fight the More I Love You, Neko Case (Grand Central Publishing) “I grew up believing I was nothing, and sometimes my own insignificance wracked me with pain. But luckily, somewhere down the line, I came to realize that if I’m nothing, and I have nothing, what is the real risk of putting myself out there?” In this freight train of a memoir, the American singer and erstwhile resident of Vancouver (where she co-founded indie supergroup the New Pornographers), shows that her voice is as unique and otherworldly on the page as it is on the stage.
The Legend of Kamui, Shirato Sanpei (Drawn & Quarterly Publications) Originally serialized between 1964 and 1971, and set in 17th-century feudal Japan (roughly the same period as Shogun, recently repopularized by the success of the FX TV series) Shirato Sanpei’s beautifully illustrated story (in black and white, and reading, in traditional Japanese style, from right to left) of an orphan who attempts to rise up in his stratified society by becoming a ninja, is considered a touchstone in Japanese counterculture and long-form graphic storytelling.
Catch a Fire, Ben Kaplan (Dundurn) The 16 Canadian cannabis startups with multibillion-dollar market capitalizations – many of them led by risk-taking amateurs, that emerged, explosively, around Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s 2018 legalization of marijuana – have since lost 97 per cent of their value, and none are now led by Canadians. In this “blaze and bust” story of Canada’s cannabis industry, Kaplan’s publisher promises “a swashbuckling business adventure … in the vein of The Wolf of Wall Street and Barbarians at the Gate.”
The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus, Emma Knight (Viking) The young Canadian entrepreneur’s buzzy debut novel (she previously published two cookbooks and co-founded Greenhouse Juice Co., a plant-based beverage company) already has the circular-sticker blessing of two major female tastemakers north and south of the border. It follows a Canadian university student in Edinburgh who, along with a friend, gets drawn into the orbit of the mysterious Lord Elliot Lennox, a local aristocrat and bestselling mystery writer with ties to her own family.
The Secret History of the Five Eyes, Richard Kerbaj (HarperCollins) If the best spy organization is the one no one’s heard of, then the Five Eyes – made up of the U.S,. Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – which only copped publicly to its own existence 60 years after its founding, in 2010, surely fit that bill. The author, erstwhile security correspondent for the U.K.’s Sunday Times, tells the story of “this non-binding marriage of convenience” through its most compelling personalities.
Death of the Author, Nnedi Okorafor (HarperCollins) Terms like “spellbinding” and “her best yet” are being thrown at the American Nigerian’s speculative meta-narrative about the Chicago-born paraplegic daughter of Nigerian immigrants who, right after her world seems to fall apart at her sister’s destination wedding (she is fired from her university teaching job and her 10-year-in-the-writing novel is rejected) impulsively pens a sci-fi novel that propels her to global fame and enables an unexpected physical transformation.
The Secret History of the Rape Kit, Pagan Kennedy (Vintage) Kennedy – herself a victim of two sexual assaults – spent four years uncovering the stranger-than-fiction story of Martha (Marty) Goddard, who, while working at a Chicago crisis centre for teens in the mid-1970s, invented a transformative forensic tool, the rape kit, before seemingly vanishing in 1988.
Playworld, Adam Ross (Knopf) Ross’s long-awaited follow-up to his breakout novel, Mr. Peanut, is a coming-of-age story that begins in the fall of 1980, with its 14-year-old child-actor protagonist getting seduced by his parents’ 36-year-old married female friend, Naomi, into a series of carnal encounters in her Mercedes. “Like so many things that happened to me that year, it didn’t seem strange at the time,” his adult says, looking back.
The First and Last King of Haiti, Marlene L. Daut (Knopf) Born into slavery in 1767 on the island of Grenada, Henry Christophe fought in the Haitian revolution under Toussaint Louverture before crowning himself king of the newly independent island nation and taking up residence in his grandiose palace, Sans Souci (a misnomer, given that a cascading series of soucis would eventually lead to his political downfall, and suicide). A Yale professor here offers up a thorough (656-page) biography of the controversial figure.
Mothers and Sons, Adam Haslett (Little, Brown) The queer protagonist, Peter, is an overworked New York asylum lawyer specializing in preventing deportations, but the two-time Pulitzer nominee isn’t really going for a hot take here. Peter’s profession serves, rather, as a springboard into the novel’s central concern: his long-troubled relationship with his mother, who years ago left his late father, to found a wellness retreat for women with her female lover.
Juice, Tim Winton (Pan MacMillan) Having made Australia the setting of nearly all his lauded, and variegated, fiction, Winton is as close to a national literary emblem as that country has. This, his long, ambitious first foray into climate fiction, begins in the vein of Mad Max: Fury Road, with a male fugitive protagonist hurtling across a burned-out landscape in a rig with a traumatized young girl, then morphs – after the two are apprehended by a menacing captor – into a kind of Aussie Nights, as the man tries to stave off probable violence by regaling his detainer with tales of how he, and the country, ended up in their current sorry state.
For the Love of a Son, Scott Oake (Simon & Schuster) In 2011, the Hockey Night in Canada broadcaster experienced what has become a searingly familiar personal tragedy: the death of his son Bruce, 25, from an opioid overdose. In this memoir, Oake tells Bruce’s story then goes on to explain how, in the decade following his death, he and family helped mitigate grief by founding the 50-bed Bruce Oake Recovery Centre in Winnipeg, a free addiction treatment facility staffed by recovered addicts.
We Do Not Part, Han Kang (Random House) The snow imagery is thick as a blizzard in Han’s first novel since becoming a Nobel laureate last October. Here, the South Korean once again confronts the various traumas of her country’s past through the story of a young writer who, plagued by dreams of a decades-old massacre, travels to an island to help a hospitalized friend, only to find the island itself haunted by the ghost victims of further atrocities.
FEBRUARY
On Book Banning, Ira Wells (Biblioasis) Though book banning is usually associated with repressive or conservative mindsets – ancient Rome, or Florida moms – even classic texts have fallen prey of late to a “censorship consensus” enforced by liberal-minded gatekeepers. In the latest in Biblioasis’s continuing Field Notes series, Wells seeks to define the controversial practice and explore its effects.
Theory & Practice, Michelle de Kretser (Catapult) Ever since her first book, The Rose Grower, appeared in 1999, de Kretser has proven herself one of the most relentlessly inventive and interesting writers around. In what’s being called her most experimental novel to date (saying something), a graduate student in 1980s Melbourne – a Sri Lankan immigrant and Virginia Woolf specialist – navigates the gap between the literary theories she’s being taught and her lived reality, which includes a polyamorous relationship.
How to Share an Egg, Bonny Reichert (Appetite by Random House) Growing up Jewish in Edmonton in the seventies as part of a restaurant-owning family, Reichert and her sisters – whose Polish father survived the Holocaust on little more than potato peels – knew that “food was connected to the meaning of life itself; an understanding woven into our very being.” In this “culinary memoir,” the chef-journalist interweaves her and her father’s life stories while seeking to reconcile their respective themes of abundance and scarcity.
Summer of Fire and Blood, Lyndal Roper (Basic Books) Roper, an Oxford professor, has written a visceral history of what was, prior to the French Revolution, the greatest popular uprising in Europe: the German Peasants’ War of 1524-25. Inspired, in part, by the Christendom-splitting writings of Martin Luther (who supported the movement until he didn’t), the rebellion, at its peak, involved more than 100,000 people campaigning for economic injustice in modern-day Austria, France and Switzerland.
We, the Kindling, Otoniya J. Okot Bitek (Knopf) War, trauma and the African diaspora have oft been the focus of Okot Bitek’s scholarly work and award-winning poetry. In this first novel, the Kenyan-born daughter of Ugandan refugees (who has lived in Canada for decades) interweaves folk tales with flashbacks, as she tells the story of three women attempting to forge new lives after surviving capture, as schoolchildren, by the Lord’s Resistance Army in northern Uganda.
Windfall, Tim Falconer (ECW) Falconer (Bad Singer) offers up the cautionary tale of Viola MacMillan. For decades Canada’s most successful (and pretty much its only) female prospector, MacMillan’s quixotic quest, in her later years, for a big strike in Northern Ontario via her misleadingly named company, Windfall Oils and Mines, resulted in Canada’s biggest mining scandal and landed her – albeit briefly – in prison for stock manipulation and fraud.
Gliff, Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton) The Scottish wordsmith’s dystopian latest carries over some of the themes of her Brexit-themed “seasonal quartet” of novels – otherwise disparate individuals connecting against a backdrop of government control, misinformation and climate change – this time in a non-specific near-future in which two young siblings struggle for survival in the wake of their mother’s sudden disappearance.
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, Omar El Akkad (McClelland & Stewart) Titled from a tweet he posted in October, 2023, shortly after Israel’s bombardment of Gaza began following Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks, and which was viewed more than 10 million times, the Egyptian Canadian’s new book – a “heartsick breakup letter with the West” – draws on his experiences reporting from war zones and as an emigrant who came to Canada full of hope in the late nineties.
Nesting, Roisín O’Donnell (Little, Brown/Algonguin Books) If Claire Keegan wrote long-form thrillers, they might read something like O’Donnell’s turbo-charged debut (she previously published a well-received book of short stories) about an Irish mother who, in a spur-of-the-moment decision, decides to leave her gaslighting, controlling husband with her two young children to take up residence in a hotel populated with women in similarly dire straits.
No Fault, Haley Mlotek (McClelland & Stewart) Almost 50 years after Kramer vs. Kramer, with divorce no longer the societal flashpoint it once was, Mlotek – a Concordia professor and third-generation divorcee whose first job was answering phones for her divorce-mediator mother – here makes it the subject of what reads like an extended essay combining memoir and commentary.
Covert Joy: Selected Stories, Clarice Lispector (New Directions) In 2015, New Directions published Lispector’s 640-page Complete Stories, to the delight of her many hard-core, completist fans. For those coming later to the late Brazilian writer’s work, this nicely curated volume of selected stories – which includes stalwarts such as The Smallest Woman in the World and The Egg and the Chicken – offers a less-daunting starting point.
Stone Yard Devotional, Charlotte Wood (Riverhead) In Wood’s seventh novel, shortlisted for the 2024 Booker prize and several others in her native Australia, an unnamed narrator (starting to feel like the norm these days), despairing of her climate-affected work as a conservationist, retreats to a convent in rural New South Wales, only to find herself confronting past traumas and, on top of it all, a plague of mice.
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