The Sisters Sputnik: A Novel, by Terri Favro
Ingenious, smoothly written, and funny, at times bitingly so, Terri Favro’s The Sisters Sputnik is well worth a read.
Contemporary Fiction
Matters of Time: An Outliers Anthology
Five years after their initial meeting at a Lindsay coffee shop, a writing group known as The Outliers has released an anthology of their work, Matters of Time. This mixed-genre collection draws on an array of fantastically complex characters, drops them in strange and unusual places, and gives them free rein to explore Time.
The Swells by Will Aitken
In this darkly hilarious satire by the inimitable Will Aitken, class war erupts aboard a luxury cruise ship.
To See Out the Night by David Clerson
Visceral, surprising, and surreal, these twelve stories from David Clerson move from the charged darkness of the woods to the urban underground, while characters set a course to see out the night.
One Who Has Been Here Before by Becca Babcock
Contemporary Atlantic gothic fiction inspired by Nova Scotia’s notorious Goler clan.
How to Murder a Marriage by Gabrielle St. George
Gina Malone, a bestselling relationships advice author and expert on exes, meddles in other people’s affairs for a living. It makes for enemies. One of them is scaring her to death.
Just Like A Real Person by Doug Diaczuk
Just Like a Real Person is a story about broken cars and broken people. A story of intoxication, sobriety, and potent memories of a woman in a yellow sundress. But, it’s also a story about love that asks what it means to finally feel, after years of feeling nothing but numb.
Lullaby: Revisiting Ru by Kim Thúy
Ru. In Vietnamese it means lullaby; in French it is a small stream, but also signifies a flow–of tears, blood, money. Kim Thúy’s Ru is literature at its most crystalline: the flow of a life on the tides of unrest and on to more peaceful waters.
Open Your Heart by Alexie Morin, Translated by Aimee Wall
In this frank and unforgettable book, celebrated Québécois writer Alexie Morin becomes the subject of her own story as she places a childhood friendship under a microscope.
Fight Night by Miriam Toews
Those who enjoy appreciating cutting, witty, and sometimes dark humour with a dash of philosophical thought mixed in will find much to like in this Miriam Toews novel.
The Running Trees by Amber McMillan
A fervently comic debut, The Running Trees leads readers into a series of conversations — through phonelines, acts in a play, and a rewound recording of a police interrogation — to reveal characters in fumbling bouts of brutality, reflection, isolation, and love.
Fishnets & Fantasies by Jane Doucet
Well, well, well. Jane Doucet, you have done it again. Just like your first novel, …
Old Broad Road by Phyllis Humby
Sylvia Kramer flees two thousand miles from home and switches out her Jimmy Choo’s for rubber boots. She stubbornly adapts to the unique culture and dialect of Newfoundland, embracing diverse friends and east coast delicacies.
Dirty Birds by Morgan Murray*
In late 2008, as the world’s economy crumbles and Barack Obama ascends to the White House, the remarkably unremarkable Milton Ontario – not to be confused with Milton, Ontario – leaves his parents’ basement in Middle-of-Nowhere, Saskatchewan, and sets forth to find fame, fortune, and love in the Euro-lite electric sexuality of Montreal.
You are Eating an Orange. You are Naked. by Sheung-King
Love can be beautiful and disastrous at the same time. In Sheung-King’s debut novel You are Eating an Orange. You are Naked., he brilliantly evokes the complexities of an intense romantic relationship with the use of lyrical language and folk tales that draw the reader in.