A Way to Be Happy (September) is a new short story collection by Caroline Adderson, one of Canada's masters of the form. In A Lethal Lady (July), by Nekesa Afia, Louise Lloyd’s time away in Paris is everything she was hoping it would be...until a shocking murder turns her world upside down. And in Cotton Blues (August), Edem Awumey takes readers on a contemporary journey on the cotton road, from the African Savannah to the American South, from the luxurious salons of Berlin to the fields of Indian Rajasthan sprayed with glyphosate, from the valleys of Uzbekistan covered with white fibre to the spinning mills of Dhaka in Bangladesh.
All Hookers Go To Heaven (September), by Angel B-H, is a coming-of-age story following a working-class sex worker from a rural town in Eastern Canada. Valérie Bah follows up The Rage Letters with Subterrane (October), a speculative comedy comprised of a carousel of Black and Queer voices being pushed further underground by urban prosperity. Scandal at the Alphorn Factory (September) is a new collection of stories by Scotiabank-Giller Prize finalist Gary Barwin that put the fab in fabulist. And award-winner Gurjinder Basran returns with The Wedding (September), an electrifying novel about the joining of two South Asian families, and the secrets, resentments, and unspoken truths boiling just beneath the surface.
Giller-longlisted Arjun’s Basu’s novel The Reeds (October), set in Montreal’s west end, is about a middle class family navigating the shifting landscapes of commerce and fame in the age of the internet, office politics, gender dynamics, and sexuality in a moment of Brexit, Trump, and heightened climate anxiety. The Door in Lake Mallion (October), by S.M. Beiko, brings readers into a world of magic, monsters, and the folks who love them, telling a story of dazzling performers, glowing mushroom cities, and the power of shining our light for everyone to see.
In This Bright Dust (September), Nina Berkhout artfully brings into focus a story of hope and disillusionment, of disaster and the cultivation of joy, of the relationship between people and the land they inhabit. A penetrating portrait of feminine vulnerability and cruelty, Giller-winner Sarah Bernstein’s extraordinary debut, The Coming Bad Days (October), is intelligent, brutal, sure, and devastatingly funny. And Michelle Berry returns with another page-turner, Satellite Image (October), about a young couple who buy a house in the country to escape the close quarters and violence of the city, only to discover the home they have bought and the small town they’ve moved to have their own disturbing secrets.
The short story collection An Astonishment of Stars (October), by Kirti Bhadresa, charts the lives of racialized women as they navigate their relationships, aspirations, and the burdens of memory and expectations. In Catherine Black's Blessed Nowhere (October), winner of The Guernica Prize, Abby—after the tragic loss of her son—attempts to escape her grief by taking to the open road, only to find herself in Central Mexico in a hotel that’s home to other lost souls. And set against the backdrop of the Second World War, Andrew Boden’s When We Were Ashes (September) takes us to the chilling depths of Aktion T4, one of the darkest chapters in the history of Nazi Germany.
A young girl is abused by her priest, telling no one for years, but when she learns as an adult that she was not his only victim—there were dozens more—the ensuing criminal trial threatens to overwhelm her in [non]disclosure (October), by Renée D. Bondy. Amateur sleuth Flavia de Luce, along with her pestilent younger cousin, investigates the murder of a former public hangman and uncovers secrets that bring the greatest shock of her life in Alan Bradley’s What Time the Sexton’s Spade Doth Rust (September). And Felt (August), by Mark Blagrave—whose first novel was shortlisted for the 2009 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Novel, with his most recent longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award—is a novel about remembrance, what memories we cannot forget and what memories we lose, and the lengths to which we go to recover the forgotten and erase the unforgettable.
Winner of a Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction, Fanny Britt’s Sugaring Off (October) probes intimacy, denial, and how we are tied to others—whether those we love or exploit. Rod Carley is back with Ruff (September), another theatrical odyssey packed with an unforgettable cast of Elizabethan eccentrics in a madcap world more modern than tomorrow where gender is what a person makes of it (no matter the story beneath their petticoats or tights). And The Last Secret (September) is Maia Caron’s sweeping, dazzling novel centring two unforgettable women—a Ukrainian resistance fighter in 1944 Ukraine and a reclusive artist on Salt Spring Island in 1972—and their inextricable link to each other decades apart.
Stephanie Cesca's debut novel Dotted Lines was shortlisted for University of Toronto's Marina Nemat Award. A bestseller in its original Quebec edition, and the recipient of several awards, including the Prix Femina, What I Know About You (September), by Éric Chacour, translated by Pablo Strauss, a heartbreaking tale of a family and an impossible love, torn apart by secrets and traditions in late-twentieth-century Cairo, is poised to be an international sensation. And Corinna Chong’s latest, Bad Land (September), is a slow-burning story exploring the generational effects of repression and transgression, set against the raw, eerie landscape of the badlands.
Psychological horror meets cyber noir in William (September), by Mason Coile (a pseudonym of bestselling author Andrew Pyper), a haunted house story in which the haunting is by AI. When the death of a child in a hit-and-run shocks the quiet seaside town of Oyster Hill, police officer Luci Miller is called in to investigate in Christine Cosack's Barcelona Red Metallic (October). And Nick Cutter returns with The Queen (October), a heart-pounding novel of terror about a young woman searching for her missing friend and uncovering a shocking truth.
Maxie Dara's debut is A Grim Reaper's Guide to Catching a Killer (October), about a modern-day grim reaper whose soul goes missing. Diamond necklaces, billionaires, Mafia bosses, and student loans—it’s all in a day’s work for Simi Chopra and her ragtag heist crew in Til Heist Do Us Part (August), the next romantic-comedy caper from Sara Desai. And after a lumberjack games competitor is found floating face down in a pool with an axe buried in the back of his head, former pro wrestler-turned-P.I. “Hammerhead” Jed Ounstead is back on the case in A.J. Devlin’s Bronco Buster (October).
Farzana Doctor’s latest novel The Beauty of Us (September) is a gripping novel about surviving hardship, the power of friendship, and growing up. A literary whodunit set in an unreliable 1962, Anna Dowdall’s The Suspension Bridge (October) takes place in a Canadian river city dreaming of fame as it sets about building the world’s biggest bridge. And The Outlier (August), by Elisabeth Eaves is an audaciously twisty psychological thriller in which finding the killer is only one of two mysteries its anti-heroine, Cate Winter, tries to unravel. The other: when pushed to extremes, what is she herself capable of?
Lies I Told My Sister (September), by Louise Ells, tells the story of two estranged sisters who meet again in a E.R. after an accident, and begin to unravel the lies of omission that pulled them apart. Award-winning author Anne Emery is back with another Collins-Burke team-up, Counted Among the Dead (September), in which the events of the Halifax Explosion are somehow a motive for murder in the 1990s. And Chinenye Emezie’s debut novel is Born in a House of Glass (July), one of our summer reading picks, and the vivid saga of a Nigerian family.
The Donoghue Girl (September), by Kim Fahner, is the story of Lizzie Donoghue, the spirited daughter of Irish immigrants who desperately wants to not only escape Creighton—the Northern Ontario mining town where her family runs a general store—but also the oppressive confines of twentieth century patriarchy. White World (September), by Saad T. Farooqi, is set in Pakistan, 2083 A.D. where the world is snow and blood, Avaan can only count on one thing: the gun in his hand. And the latest from Laurie Elizabeth Flynn—author of The Girls Are All So Nice Here—is Till Death Do Us Part (August), a sumptuous, shocking, steamy thriller set in the vineyards of Napa Valley—what happens when the husband you thought died years ago shows up alive?
McCurdle’s Arm (July), a novella by Andrew Forbes, is an account of a particular man in his particular time, playing a version of baseball devoid of the comforts of the modern game, rife with violence, his employment always precarious. Forbes also releases The Diapause (October), spanning nearly a half-century, a literary-speculative-fiction novel about the near future, family, isolation, heartbreak, climate change, how we keep each other safe, and all the things we don’t know about the people we know best. And bestseller Carley Fortune calls Matthew Fox's novel-in-stories This is It (October), a story of family and secrets, "nothing less than a modern masterpiece... [g]ut-wrenching, sharply observed, and deeply funny..."
From a variety of perspectives, through a symphony of voices, Widow Fantasies (September), the debut fiction from Hollay Ghadery, immerses the reader in the domestic rural gothic, offering up unforgettable stories from the shadowed lives of girls and women. With intellect and style, Rebecca Godfrey, in her final book Peggy (August)—completed by her friend, the acclaimed writer Leslie Jamison—brings to life a woman who helped make the Guggenheim name synonymous with art and genius, recasting her as, in the words of novelist Jenny Offill, "a feminist icon for our times." And, borrowing stylistic elements from the prose poem, faux memoir, online diatribe, and philosophical investigation, the 25 dramatic monologues in Spencer Gordon’s genre-bending collection A Horse at the Window (June) shine a light on the anxious, self-directed gaze that defines contemporary consciousness.
He’s the royal bodyguard. She’s the royal nanny. The annoyingly hot attraction that simmers between them—that’s a royal pain in bestseller Karina Halle's The Royals Upstairs (September). Anne Hawk's debut novel is The Pages of the Sea (September), set on a Caribbean island in the mid-1960 as a young girl copes with the heavy cost of migration. And in Jenny Haysom’s Keep (October), Harriet, an eccentric elderly poet recently diagnosed with dementia, is being moved into a care facility against her wishes, and when stagers Eleanor and Jacob are hired for the job, they quickly find themselves immersed in Harriet’s brimming and mysterious world, struggling as their own lives are unravelling.
Drawn from author Benjamin Hertwig’s experiences as a soldier in Afghanistan, Juiceboxers (September) tenderly traces the story of a young man’s journey from basic training, to the battlefields of Kandahar, to the oil fields of Alberta, braiding together questions of masculinity and militarism, friendship and violence, loss and trauma, ideology and innocence. Part generational saga, part eco-gothic fable, Oil People (August), by David Huebert, is a luminous debut novel about history and family, land and power, and oil as an object of toxic wonder. And The Majestic Sisters (August), by Jessica Ilse, is a dual-timeline historical fiction novel following the lives of two estranged sisters, once the most famous performers in mid-century Halifax, who now must come together to save their beloved theatre from ruin.
Irehobhude Iyioha, whose work has been long-listed for the CBC Short Story Price, releases A Place Beyond The Heart (August), a collection of stories exploring issues at the intersection of war and love, terror and (dis)order, as well as identity, gender, and sexuality. A taut tale of female friendship and betrayal set between the 1970s and 2010, I Never Said That I Was Brave (September), by Tasneem Jamal, examines the complicated relationship between two women as they navigate a culture vastly different from their parents’. And Amy James’ A Five Letter Word for Love (December) is a heartwarming and humorous romance in which an unlikely couple fall in love over Wordle.
Maureen Jennings is back with March Roars (October), in which March roars in, and Charlotte Frayne, P.I. must resolve “a grave miscarriage of justice” to save the lives of two young men. Dietrich Kalteis’ latest is Crooked (September), a page-turning crime tale based on a true story. And a timely and riveting story of reclamation, matriarchies, and the healing ability of traditional teachings, Nauetakuan: a silence for a noise (June), by Natasha Kanapé Fontaine, translated by Howard Scott, underscores how reconnecting to lineage and community can transform Indigenous futures.
Bestseller Suzy Krause returns with I Think We’ve Been Here Before (September), the coziest and most life-affirming novel about the end of the world you’ve ever read. In seven-and-a-half interlinked stories, Aaron Kreuter’s Rubble Children (July) tackles Jewish belonging, settler colonialism, Zionism and anti-Zionism, love requited and unrequited, and cannabis culture, all drenched in suburban wonder and dread. And in spicy workplace romance Knives, Seasoning, and a Dash of Love (August), by Katrina Kwan, a hotheaded celebrity chef finds himself drawn to his inexperienced new hire, but when her bubbly attitude collides with his sharp edges, can they handle the heat, or will their love be a recipe for disaster?
Winner of the 2023 Prix Médicis, Prix Décembre, and Prix Ringuet, Kevin Lambert's May Our Joy Endure (September) is a shrewd examination of the microcosm of the ultra-privileged and a social novel that depicts with razor-sharp acuity the terrible beauty of wealth, influence, and art. The End of Her (August) is another gripping domestic suspense novel from bestseller Shari Lapena. Intense and immersive, in Kiss the Undertow (June), by Marie-Hélène Larochelle, translated by Michelle Winters, a nameless swimmer watched obsessively by her guru-like coach battles the element of water in a gruelling physical regimen, a psychologically gripping account of endurance pushed to extremes.
Susan LeBlanc’s debut is The Nowhere Place (September), an incisive, skilful debut historical novel tracing the lives of a middle-aged woman and a teenaged girl through one pivotal year (1979-80) in North End Halifax. Sarah Leigciger’s Moon Road (August) captures the wonderment and grief of seeing children grow up; of recovering from long-buried pain, and rediscovering those most familiar to us; of learning to live and love in a whole new way. And The Champagne Letters (December), by Kate MacIntosh, is historical fiction novel following Mme. Clicquot as she builds her legacy, and the modern divorcée who looks to her letters for inspiration.
The Forgotten (October), by Robert W. Mackay, is the story of 19-year-old Charlie Black who, in 1950, desperate to prove himself to his father, joins the Canadian Army’s Special Force as part of the United Nations forces defending South Korea from an attack by the North. In All You Can Kill (October), Pasha Malla, with his inimitable absurdist style, collides horror and humour into an utterly unforgettable satire of the wellness retreat. And The stories in Linda Martin's fiction debut, Customer Service and Other Stories (October), examine the human struggle for meaning.
Giller-winner Suzette Mayr’s first novel—nominated for the Henry Kreisel Award for Best First Book and the Georges Bugnet award for Best Novel—returns in a new edition: Moon Honey (October) A genre-bending noir, and perhaps the squiddiest novel ever written, False Bodies (October), by J.R. McConvey, creates a horror/thriller blend of the renowned Newfoundland culture seen in shows like Come From Away with the heart-pounding tension and creeping fear of Alien. Through stories taking the form of YouTube monologues, pet-care instructions, school reports, or the unspoken thoughts of a young scholar obsessed with Alice Munro, Robert McGill's Simple Creatures (October) shows us the sometimes hilarious, often poignant ways in which our use of language shapes our relationships with others and ourselves.
The Holiday Honeymoon Switch (October) is a sweet smart rom-com from Julia McKay, the pen-name for bestseller Marissa Stapley. Hannah Mary McKinnon's latest Only One Survives (July) is a twisty thriller about the rise and bloody demise of an all-female pop rock group, and the lengths some of the members go to hold on to their fame. And composed with a poet’s eye for detail and ear for rhythm, the brief stories in rob mclennan’s in On Beauty (October) play with form and language, capturing the act of record-keeping while in the process of living those records, creating a Polaroid-like effect.
The dark journey begun in Ordinary Monsters surges forward in Bringer of Dust (September), by J.M. Miro, from the sinister underworld of the London exiles, to the roar of the street markets in nineteenth-century Alexandria, to the sunlit silences of the Dalmatian coast. Moving through rape culture, beauty myths, and the perils women face in a society that stigmatizes them just for being female, Other Maps (October), by Rebecca Morris, traces a path to courage, solidarity and hope. And Strange Water (September), the debut collection by acclaimed translator Sarah Moses, is rooted as much in sound and language as it is in story, 75 tiny fictions that are evocative soundscapes, seascapes, skyscapes, landscapes, often magical and mysterious, sometimes unsettling.
Set in a tragic, transformative year in an extraordinary place with larger-than-life characters, The Weather Diviner (September), by Elizabeth Murphy, is a story of self-discovery—not just for one young woman, but for Newfoundland itself. Packing the punch of a novel, the 13 deftly interwoven stories in Sue Murtagh’s We’re Not Rich (October) scrutinize the lives of everyday people with surgical precision, while finding connection and community in the unlikeliest of places. And dripping with 1970s nostalgia, Wayne Ng's Johnny Delivers (October) is a gritty and humorous standalone sequel to the much-loved and award-winning Letters From Johnny.
Heather O’Neill returns with The Capital of Dreams (September), a breathtaking dark fairy tale of survival and betrayal. Syringa (October), by Ian Orti, is a literary thriller set on New Year's Eve in Berlin where the labyrinthine story of a decades-long love affair is retold by an ex-journalist as he awaits his own assassination. And Rajinderpal S. Pal, a critically acclaimed writer and stage performer, releases his debut novel However Far Away (August), a sweeping family saga set against the backdrop of a Sikh wedding.
Susan Palumbo’s Countess (September) is a queer Caribbean anti-colonial Count of Monte Cristo set in space in which a betrayed captain seeks revenge on the interplanetary empire that subjugated her people for generations. Fawn Parker, the Scotiabank Giller Prize–longlisted author of What We Both Know, explores the bewildering relationship between the living and the dead in Hi, It's Me (September). And Shane Peacock launches a new detective series with As We Forgive Others (September), about a predicted crime, a lack of justice, and a desperate need for forgiveness—what else will detective Hugh Mercer find in a sleepy northern town?
Robert J. Penner, whose Strange Labour was one of Publisher’s Weekly’s Best Science Fiction Books of 2020, releases The Dark King Swallows the World (October). Priya Ramsingh's The Elevator (October) is a fresh and entertaining modern romance seen through the eyes of two people who still believe in happily ever after, despite the pitfalls of modern dating technology. And The Book of Elsewhere (July), by ACTUAL Keanu Reeves and China Miéville, is a mind-blowing epic unlike anything these two genre-bending pioneers have created before, inspired by the world of the BRZRKR comic books
Tom Ryan’s The Treasure Hunter’s Club (October) is a rollicking mystery about a secret society, nautical charts, cryptic clues, and a fabulous treasure to die for. Spanning several decades and three countries, the stories in I Left You Behind (September), by Nazneen Sheikh, dwell unsentimentally on shifting homes and lost ancestral homelands, distant memories and fragmented family ties. And Jake's life is shaped by the Spanish Civil War and the not-so-civil wars that go on within families and intimate relationships in Keefer Street (October), by culture writer/political organizer David Spaner,
Marissa Stapley, the author of New York Times bestseller and Reese’s Book Club pick Lucky returns with her best book yet, The Lightning Bottles (September), a spellbinding story of rock ’n’ roll and star-crossed love—about grunge-era musician Jane Pyre’s journey to find out what really happened to her husband and partner in music, who abruptly disappeared years earlier. From John Elizabeth Stintzi, the mind that created the daringly bizarre novel My Volcano, comes Bad Houses (September), an electrifying collection of strange and dark tales. And Thyme Travellers (September), edited by Sonia Sulaiman, collects 14 of the Palestinian diaspora’s best voices in speculative fiction which, as a genre, invites a reconfiguring of reality, and here each story is a portal into realms of history, folklore and futures.
From the tangled threads of a messed-up family to the timeless themes of consciousness, love, art, and death, Damian Tarnopolsky’s narrative journey takes readers through past, present, and future with Every Night I Dream I'm a Monk, Every Night I Dream I'm a Monster (September), with stories spanning from 1980s England to Renaissance France to present-day Canada to a world yet to come. Award-winner Ayelet Tsabari’s third book and debut novel is Songs for the Brokenhearted (September), about a young Yemeni Israeli woman who learns of her mother’s secret romance in a dramatic journey through lost family stories, revealing the unbreakable bond between them. And restaurateur Teo Wolf’s culinary fame is peaking just as a series of scandals and reckless decisions threaten to destroy everything in Timothy Taylor’s The Rise and Fall of Magic Wolf (September).
Set in her ways at 60, Jeannie must learn to open her mind—and her heart—in her quest to find a killer, all while grappling with ghosts from her past and wrestling with the question of land transfer and ownership in Betty Ternier Daniels’ debut novel Grounds for Murder (September). The House of the Spirits meets Mexican Gothic in Celestina’s House (September), by Clarissa Trinidad Gonzalez, a tale of love and betrayal, belonging and exile, and the supernatural forces that pervade life in the Philippines. And in In Winter I Get Up at Night (August), with luminous prose, and with exhilarating nuance and depth, Jane Urquhart charts an unforgettable life, while also exploring some of the grandest themes of the 20th century—colonial expansion, scientific progress, and the sinister forces that seek to divide societies along racial and cultural lines.
From Katherena Vermette, author of the nationally bestselling Strangers saga, comes real ones (September), a heartrending story of two Michif sisters who must face their past trauma when their mother is called out for false claims to Indigenous identity. In Hiroshima Bomb Money (September), through the lives of three siblings living in Hiroshima, Japan, Terry Watada explores the sweep of history during the years 1930 to 1945, known in Japan as the Fifteen Year War. And a guarded punk-rocker-turned-barista meets a big-hearted sound tech who charms his way into her life and helps her revisit her musical past in Jennifer Whiteford’s truly charming, cozy romance Make Me A Mixtape (October).
Hair for Men (August), the second novel by Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist Michelle Winters, teems with hot towel shaves and the steady thrum of female rage. What are the best ways to support political struggles that aren’t your own? What are the fundamental principles of a utopia during war? Can we transcend the societal values we inherit? Jacob Wren’s Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim (September) is a original, literary page turner that explores such pressing questions of our time. And Alice Zorn returns with new novel Colours in Her Hands (September), a witty, layered and compelling novel about a woman with Down Syndrome, exploring textile art, sibling relationships, good intentions gone awry, and friendships.