GLOBE 100

Astra

Cedar Bowers

(McClelland & Stewart)

The story of Astra Brine, born and raised in a remote British Columbia commune, is told through the eyes of 10 people who’ve had intense encounters and relationships with her, revealing the different sides of one woman over a lifetime.

August Into Winter

Guy Vanderhaeghe

(McClelland & Stewart)

This suspenseful novel from the threetime winner of the Governor-General’s Award follows a man who flees his small Prairie town after committing an unspeakable act of violence on the eve of the Second World War.

Bewilderment

Richard Powers

(Random House Canada)

Climate catastrophe simmers under the surface of Powers’s Booker Prize-shortlisted follow-up to The Overstory. An astrobiologist attempts to control his nine-year-old son’s behavioural issues using an experimental neurofeedback technique that will make the boy’s brain activity mimic that of his late mother.

Cloud Cuckoo Land Anthony Doerr

(Scribner)

If the 2015 Pulitzer Prize-winning All The Light We Cannot See was a sort of love letter to museums, this new novel, nominated for the National Book Award and longlisted for the Carnegie Medal of Excellence, is most definitely a love letter to libraries – and this planet.

Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch

Rivka Galchen

(Harper Perennial)

In the early 17th century, 71-year-old widow Katharina Kepler – mother to Johannes, author of the planetary-motion laws – is accused of witchcraft. The novel follows the ensuing trial and the pile-on that occurs when mob mentality takes over.

Fight Night

Miriam Toews

(Knopf Canada)

The bestselling and award-winning author’s ninth book inhabits a world of strong female protagonists. Told from the perspective of Swiw, a nine-year-old girl living with her pregnant mother and feisty grandma, it will have you falling in love with its characters.

How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House

Cherie Jones

(HarperCollins)

This debut novel set in Barbados wins the best title of the year, but it’s also a moving story of intergenerational trauma that delicately explores the ripple effects of sexual abuse and domestic violence.

In Memory of Memory

Maria Stepanova, translated by Sasha Dugdale (Book*hug Press)

A genre-bending book: partly the story of the author’s Russian, Jewish family; partly about the author’s long-standing desire to turn her family into a story. Along the way, it delves into aesthetic history to scrutinize what we in the present ask of the past.

Klara and the Sun Kazuo Ishiguro

(Knopf Canada)

From the Nobel Prize–winning author of Never Let Me Go comes a reflection on humanity that asks: Could we love AI like we love humans? The tale is told from the perspective of a robot (or “Artificial Friend”) named Klara who finds new purpose in caring for her teenage owner, Josie.

Matrix Lauren Groff

(Riverhead Books)

Seventeen-year old Marie de France has been cast out of the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine and sent to be an abbess in England. A finalist for the National Book Award, the novel explores female creativity in a corrupt world.

No One is Talking About This Patricia Lockwood

(Riverhead Books)

Shortlisted for the Booker and the Women’s Prize for Fiction, this is the first novel from the American poet and essayist. It’s a first-person story of a woman addicted to Twitter who cuts off from it when faced with a personal loss.

Oh William! Elizabeth Strout

(Random House)

The Pulitzer Prize-winning American author probes the vagaries of human connection through her character Lucy Barton, revived here for the third time, as she reflects, often wistfully, on her long-standing relationship with the man who was once her husband, now her friend.

Our Darkest Night Jennifer Robson

(HarperCollins Canada)

To survive the Holocaust, a young Jewish woman must pose as a Christian farmer’s wife. Based on true events that happened in her in-laws’ Italian village during the Second World War, this novel tackles sacrifice, guilt and love.

Return of the Trickster Eden Robinson

(Knopf Canada)

Following Jared Martin – a shape-shifting, dimension-trotting teenager – as he faces off against his ogress aunt and her pack of coywolves, this final instalment of the Trickster trilogy raises the stakes and emulates the oral tradition of one-upmanship that shaped the stories on which the Haisla and Heiltsuk author was raised.

Ring André Alexis

(Coach House Books)

The final book published in Alexis’s quincunx cycle ( Fifteen Dogs, The Hidden Keys, etc.), this one draws everything together in a story about divine intervention and the everyday miraculous. As with the other books in the series, Alexis puts his own spin on genre fiction. This time: Harlequin romance.

Second Place Rachel Cusk

(HarperCollins Canada)

The Canadian-born (but very British) author has created a literary cover version of Lorenzo in Taos, a 1932 memoir by Mabel Dodge Luhan about D.H. Lawrence’s stay at her New Mexico artists’ colony.

Tainna: The Unseen Ones Norma Dunning

(Douglas & McIntyre)

Following Dunning’s 2017 collection, Annie Muktuk and Other Stories, these are six new stories about the dislocation of modern Inuk life in Southern Canada and the chance for reconnection through humour, creativity and spirituality.

The Listeners

Jordan Tannahill

(HarperCollins)

A finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, playwright Tannahill’s propulsive novel about a family torn apart by a mother’s obsession with a sound that most people cannot hear examines some of the big themes of the year: conspiracy theories, faith and anxiety.

The Push

Ashley Audrain

(Penguin Canada)

Blythe Connor sits in her car, watching a family through the window. While the family seems picture-perfect, this psychological thriller brings us into a world that’s anything but. The debut novel from Toronto-based Audrain, which led to a bidding war and a record-breaking deal, takes twists and turns through the dark side of motherhood, postpartum depression and intergenerational trauma.

The Son of the House

Cheluchi Onyemelukwe-Onuobia

(Dundurn Press)

Two women from very different worlds – but with a crucial connection – are brought together by a kidnapping in Enugu, Nigeria. With no one else to talk to, they tell each other the story of their lives, turning this debut novel into a women’s history of four decades in Nigeria.

The Strangers

Katherena Vermette

(Hamish Hamilton)

After the poet and author’s debut novel,

The Break, this Writer’s Trust Prize-winning companion piece is a potent, audacious intergenerational saga that explores race, class, inherited trauma and the strength of matrilineal bonds.

We Want What We Want

Alix Ohlin

(House of Anansi Press)

One young woman learns her father is engaged to her childhood best friend. Another woman ventures to rescue her cousin from a cult. Imperfect families abound in this collection of 13 “glittering, surprising, darkly funny stories of people testing the boundaries of their lives.”

What Storm, What Thunder

Myriam J. A. Chancy

(HarperCollins)

The Haitian-Canadian writer and academic’s virtuosic fourth novel, which tells the story of the 2010 earthquake known locally as “Douze,” from the point of view of several finely drawn, interlinked characters, comes in the wake of other tragically seismic events in her country of birth, literally and figuratively.

What Strange Paradise

Omar el Akkad

(McClelland & Stewart)

The former Globe and Mail journalist and winner of the 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize tells a repurposed fable: Peter Pan reinterpreted as a contemporary child refugee. It follows nine-year-old Syrian refugee Amir, the only survivor from a shipwreck during a desperate, dangerous trip from Africa and the Middle East to the Greek Island of Kos, where he is helped by a 15-year-old Scandinavian girl.

THRILLERS April In Spain John Banville

(Hanover Square Press)

No more bothering with the Benjamin Black nom de plume for this Booker Prizewinning author. This elegant new novel has his sleuth, Quirke, a Dublin pathologist, confronting a ghost in idyllic San Sebastian, Spain. Unable to ignore his instincts, Quirke makes a call back home to Ireland and soon Detective St. John Strafford is dispatched to Spain.

Dark Roads Chevy Stevens

(St. Martin’s Publishing Group)

The Vancouver writer takes on the mystery of the missing and murdered women on the highways of Canada’s West Coast province. After months and years of deliberation and horror stories in the news, Stevens brings painful truth to fiction.

Exit Belinda Bauer

(Grove/Atlantic)

Felix Pink, a death doula, makes a mistake and ushers the wrong person into the afterlife, which sets off a chain of events that keeps suspense at a heart-taxing level.

Falling TJ Newman

(Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster) Definitely not the book to take on your first airplane trip after COVID isolation. The book begins with a shoed foot landing in your lap and never lets up from there. Insider airline info from Newsom, a career flight attendant, adds to the terror in this locked-plane thriller.

Harlem Shuffle Colson Whitehead

(Doubleday Canada)

The best of the best of any year, Whitehead takes us to a Harlem on the verge of social change that no one, as yet, sees coming. The dialogue snaps and crackles and the images flow like, in Whitehead’s own words, “black molasses.” There’s hope for a sequel but this one stands on its own.

“Canadian Netflix is a dead zone ... some of those movies are older than me”

network TV either, I just don’t think the scripts are very well done. I don’t think people are looking for this homogenized version of the world.

TH: I don’t watch television. What I watch obsessively is concerts on YouTube. Every great musician you’ve ever wanted to see is right there in your living room: progressive jazz, Keith Jarrett, rock ’n’ roll, R&B – oh my god, R&B is incredible – and Motown, country. I caught some Inuit Siberian punk. It’s extraordinary. I’ve always written songs in Cree, my native tongue, so stuff like that inspires me because if they can do it, I can do it. Country music is very tricky. The best songs have three or four notes. Same with popular music. You think of something like Going to the Chapel, and there’s five notes. A song I wrote was inspired by the one-note samba. It’s trickery, oral trickery, and learning how master musicians do that is a big hobby of mine.

I just entered the digital age with CDs. I’m still confused, but I’ve got great handlers and co-workers who made it very, very special, and I’m infinitely grateful to them. This [album] is going to be on Spotify, I think?

TK: I’m with Tomson, I’ve no idea what streaming or Spotify and all that stuff is. People were after me to do podcasts about a year and a half ago, and I just ran for the hills as soon as I heard the term. That you had to do it with a computer. I like to use my typewriter, or a pen and paper. I use a computer for a lot of my final writing, but if I have to depend on a computer my eyes glaze over and I go take a nap

You still use a typewriter?

TK: Yeah, it’s right over there [gestures]. A manual. When I was in high school my mother decided that maybe I could be the secretary to some rich guy. While the rest of the kids were playing sports she enrolled me in typing school. For two summers I learned how to how to touch type, and I’m pretty good: I can crank out about a hundred words a minute. I love my mother, and she didn’t have any money to buy me football helmets and whatnot. This was a free class, and I got to meet a whole bunch of young women who thought I was pretty cool for taking typing. I just had to keep it a secret from the rest of the guys that I ran around with. They would’ve torn me to pieces if they knew I was typing, and writing poetry, which I was also doing at the time.

Where do you gravitate as a reader – older stuff? Newer?

TK: I’ll read almost anything that I think will be good, and if I see that it’s not when I get to the third or fourth chapter, then I put it aside. I don’t waste my time on mediocre literature. I like mysteries, I will say that.

Who are your current go-tos?

TK: I like Donna Leon. I like Carol

O’Connell’s Mallory series. I like Craig Johnson’s Longmire mysteries. Walter Mosley is a great favourite of mine. They’re just fun to read – you’re sitting around, you’ve got nothing better to do, so you eat a bunch of potato chips. They’re not good for you but they’re enjoyable. Sometimes it’s more serious stuff. For years I’d reread Moby Dick. There’s just something about that book that caught my fancy. It’s some guy chasing a white whale trying to stick a spear into it. What’s not to love?

What about you, Tomson – do you read your neighbours on the Penguin Classics shelf?

TH: My relationship to reading is a bit bizarre, because I spend my entire day dealing with words. The last thing I want to do is read and absorb more words. But of course I do read because it’s good for you. I read a mixture of recent novels and old classics in French and English. I study narrative techniques, and stuff I missed growing up, because in in Northern Manitoba we didn’t have libraries, or bookstores. I recently read Wuthering Heights for the first time. I’m catching up, in a sense. It took me 15 years to learn and master English; it almost killed me. The last book I read was by a French writer, Philippe Bresson, called Lie with Me. It was a novella – beautifully written and structured, and I just fell in love with it. I like to read things to the end; I don’t care how awful it is, I don’t like not finishing books, especially when I’m on juries. No matter how dreadful the literature is, you have to soldier on. There are things to be learned in bad writing, too.

Who among the younger crop of Indigenous artists do you admire?

TK: I was teaching Native studies in the sixties and seventies in the States, and I had just a couple of books I could use: Navarre Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, Leslie Silko’s Ceremony, James Welch’s Winter in the Blood. I taught those over and over again because there wasn’t much else on the horizon. And then all of a sudden a whole new crop of Native artists came forward. Writers, playwrights, poets. That was amazing to watch, and very gratifying to see this very energetic generation coming in behind me. And it’s huge. I used to know every Native writer in Canada and the U.S., and now there are a whole bunch of them that I’ve never met and some that I’ve not even read, which is just my getting old and running out of gas. I like Tanya Talaga. I’ve been working with a young woman named Carleigh Baker on a short-story collection that I think is going to be very interesting. And of course people like Eden Robinson and Marilyn Dumont and some of the old timers. Drew Hayden Taylor, a good friend of mine. It’s a lovely landscape now. Before it was kind of desolate, and there wasn’t much to populate it, but now it’s so great that I can get out of the way and make room for the new voices. I’ve had my time. I’ve had my fun. It’s time for other people to get in there and do what they’re going to do.

TH: When I was 23 I did social work in the Native community for seven years. I was based in Toronto, but I criss-crossed Ontario. I noticed there was a spiritual blank in the life of communities that needed to be filled, to be expressed. When I was 30 and started writing for the first time, I stepped into a void. There was a theatre company in Toronto that had basically died. The first thing that they needed was scripts. So I started a new script development program and the playwrights started to multiply and the movement became bigger and bigger. All this I saw happening in front of me. I encouraged a number of those writers; I showed them tricks. And I produced a lot of them. And that’s how this wave came forward all of a sudden. I can almost say precisely: It was in 1980, right around that time, that the first spark was lit. And now it’s a raging fire. It’s very exciting and I’m proud of having been able to contribute to the movement. Of course I’m getting old like everybody else, and I could step aside if I wanted, but there’s just too much to be said, you know? There’s so much more celebrating to do, so many more stories to be written. I’m proud to be contributing and inspiring people in whatever way I can, while I’m still here.