We've got your August reading covered here with a fantastic round-up on beach-worthy fiction—and every single title will be up for giveaway until the end of August. The giveaways begin in August 1—don't miss your chance to win!
*****
Felt, by Mark Blagrave
About the book: A family’s history is woven, unravelled, and rewoven into a tapestry spanning three generations.
Museum curator Matthew Reade’s career and marriage are in crisis in the aftermath of a recent exhibition. When he gets a worrying phone call about his fiercely independent ninety-six-year-old mother, Penelope, Matt uses the excuse of a research project to return to the Maritimes to check on her for himself. Once home, he finds he must stay on to help navigate her new diagnosis of Alzheimer’s.
The more Matt talks to his mother while preparing to move her into the local long-term care home, the more she reveals about his grandmother’s emigration from Norway to New Brunswick before World War I, the murky origins of the family handcraft business, her own complicated past relationships, and Matt’s beginnings. But how much of it can he trust and how much has been rewritten by the disease?
*
Sugar Kids, by Taslim Burkowicz
About the book: Baby’s a skater girl trying to get through high school like everyone else. Except she loves Victorian gothic fiction, experiences violent tremors, and gets visits from the ghost of her twin. Ravi never really died for her, not like her mom did last year. When Baby gets kicked out of the house for not conforming with her Indo-Canadian family’s gender expectations, everything changes. Her new, glamorous friend Delilah introduces her to all-night parties held in exclusive clubs, abandoned warehouses, and magical cornfields — the underground rave scene in 1990s Vancouver.
But how will Baby fit into this new world?
Join Baby on her wild search for belonging through the landscape of acid house, complete with extraordinary music, retro fashion, and copious substance use. Alongside eccentric DJs, misanthropic skaters, and denim-clad ghosts, Baby explores her sexual and cultural identity. A coming-of-age tale, Sugar Kids is an homage to the subcultures animating the nineties.
*
The Outlier, by Elisabeth Eaves
About the book: 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?
Cate Winter, at 34, is a wildly successful neuroscientist and entrepreneur who has invented a cure for Alzheimer's that will improve the lives of millions. On the verge of selling her biotech company for an obscene sum, she is also about to become very rich.
But Cate has a secret that keeps her deeply uneasy about everything she is and does: she grew up at the Cleckley Institute, a treatment facility for the rehabilitation of psychopathic children. And, as far as she knows, she is the institute's only success: all of her peers have become thwarted, maladjusted or even criminal adults.
Then Cate discovers the existence of another ex-patient and outlier who might prove that her success isn't a fluke. He has not only stayed out of jail, but he's made a mark in business and science. Though his identity is confidential, she breaks the rules and drops everything to track him down. And when she finds him, living under an assumed name in Baja California, she is immediately obsessed. Like her, he is driven and brilliant, an innovator willing to do what it takes to perfect a new energy technology that will stop global warming. Here, at last, is her mirror, her ultimate collaborator, the possible answer to the enigma of her nature.
But in the wake of a mysterious death, Cate can't avoid suspecting him. If he is involved, do his ends justify his means? Ruthless herself, she's about to find out whether there are any moral lines she won't cross.
*
Til Death Do Us Part, by Laurie Elizabeth Flynn
About the book: 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?
Ten years ago, June’s beloved husband drowned on their honeymoon. Josh’s body was never found. Now, a decade later, June is finally ready to move on. She owns a natural wine bar in Brooklyn and is engaged to a patient, supportive man named Kyle. She’s excited to begin a new chapter in her life, enjoy a picture-perfect wedding, and start a family.
But out of the blue, she sees…him—Josh, her first husband. Is this just a hallucination from the guilt June carries about finally moving on, or is it possible that her husband never died in the first place?
June tries to forget about this vision, chalking it up to grief and nerves, but soon enough, she stumbles across a website for a winery in Napa, and the owner in the photo is identical to her dead husband. With her upcoming wedding looming and a fiancé who’s already worried she hasn’t left her past behind, June flies to Napa for answers. But she’s not prepared for all the secrets she’s about to unlock, because everything she thought she knew about her first love is a lie.
Till Death Do Us Part is a simmering, page-turning thriller brimming with revelations, betrayals, and shocking twists.
*
Yellow Birds, by Karen Green
About the book: Set just before the digital revolution, Kait is a young woman searching for identity and community among the cast-outs, cast-offs, and other “misfit toys” who refer to themselves as the Yellow Birds and follow a band called the Open Road from town to town.
Just as Kait believes she has found her place among a group of Birds travelling together in a messy van, a young man with the eye-roll worthy name of Horizon sits beside her one night and alters her fragile plan for the foreseeable future.
Amidst the whirlwind of the Open Road Tour, their growing feelings for one another soar to ecstatic heights, while propelling them toward an impending reckoning with their troubled pasts.
Filled with sex, drugs, music, and even cults, readers won't be able to get enough of this bohemian love story, the groupie lifestyle, and the party within the party.
*
We Were the Bullfighters, by Marianne K. Miller
About the book: Sent to cover bank robber Red Ryan’s daring prison break, a young Ernest Hemingway becomes fascinated with the convict.
In 1923, Ernest Hemingway, struggling with the responsibilities of marriage and unexpected fatherhood, has just made a big mistake. He decided that for the baby’s first year he would interrupt his fledgling writing career in Paris and move his family to North America. No longer a freelancer, he now has a gruelling job with a difficult boss, as a staff reporter for the Toronto Daily Star. On his first day, already feeling hemmed in by circumstances, he’s sent to cover a prison break at Kingston Pen.
The escaped convicts, led by notorious bank robber Norman “Red” Ryan, are on the run, making their way from the bush north of Kingston, to the streets of Toronto, and then through towns and cities across the United States. Their crimes become more brazen, their lifestyle increasingly glamorous. Growing more and more preoccupied with Ryan and his willingness to risk everything to be free, Hemingway ponders duty, freedom, and what stops a man from pursuing his dreams
*
Waiting for the Long Night Moon, by Amanda Peters
About the book: In her debut collection of short fiction, Amanda Peters describes the Indigenous experience from an astonishingly wide spectrum in time and place—from contact with the first European settlers, to the forced removal of Indigenous children, to the present-day fight for the right to clean water.
These intimate stories meld traditional storytelling with beautiful, spare prose that portray the dignity of the traditional way of life, the humiliations of systemic racism, and the resilient power to endure. A young man returns from residential school only to realize he can no longer communicate with his own parents. A young woman finds purpose and healing on the front lines as a water protector. An old man remembers his life as he patiently waits for death. And a young girl nervously dances in her first Mawi’omi. The collection also includes the Indigenous Voices Award–nominated story “Pejipug (Winter Arrives)" as well the Indigenous Voices Award-winning title story.
At times sad, sometimes disturbing, but always redemptive, the stories in Waiting for the Long Night Moon will remind you that where there is grief there is also joy, where there is trauma there is resilience and, most importantly, there is power.
*
We are the Medicine, by Tasha Spillett, illustrated by Natasha Donovan
About the book: Miikwan and Dez are in their final year of high school. Poised at the edge of the rest of their lives, they have a lot to decide on. Miikwan and her boyfriend, Riel, are preparing for university, but Dez isn’t sure if that’s what they want for their future.
Grief and anger take precedence over their plans after the remains of 215 children are found at a former residential school in British Columbia. The teens struggle with feelings of helplessness in the face of injustice. Can they find the strength to channel their frustration into action towards a more hopeful future?
We Are the Medicine is the moving final volume of the best-selling Surviving the City series.
*
Anomia, by Jade Wallace
About the book: In Euphoria, a small, fictional town that feels displaced in time and space, an affluent but isolated couple have vanished from their suburban home. Their estranged friend, Fir, a local video store employee, is the only person who notices their disappearance. When the police refuse to help, Fir recruits Fain, who moonlights as a security guard, and they set off on a seemingly hopeless search for the lost lovers. Their chance at an answer, if they can ever find it, lies on the wooded edge of Euphoria, where Slip, an elderly trailer park resident, finds a scattering of bones that cannot be identified. Distrusting everyone, Slip undertakes a would-be solitary quest to discover the bones’ identity. Yet secretly, Limn and Mal, two bored, true crime-loving teenagers from the trailer park, are dogging Slip. Determined to bring justice to the dead, Limn and Mal will instead bring the lives of all seven characters into fraught and tangled confrontation.
Beneath the familiar surface of this missing-persons novel lies an unparalleled experiment: the creation of a folkloric alternate reality where sex and gender have been forgotten. Expanding on the work of Anne Garréta’s Sphinx and Jeannette Winterson’s Written on the Body, and joining gender-confronting contemporaries like Joshua Whitehead’s Jonny Appleseed and Akwaeke Emezi’s The Death of Vivek Oji, Anomia is an atmospheric exploration of a possible world, and a possible language, existing without reference to sex or gender.