“I am devastated to have finished it,” British cooking queen Nigella Lawson gushed about this charmer by a London-based, American author featuring Elizabeth, a research chemist (and her very smart dog) who supports herself by hosting a cooking show. The scientist and unwed single parent soon finds she is an overnight sensation, thanks to subversive content that encourages housewives to challenge the status quo and double standards of the 1960s. Think: Julia Child meets Mad Men. (Apr. 5)

Based on the true story of Chinese art disappearing from Western museums, this globe-trotting heist novel from a former New York high school teacher has been billed as Ocean’s 11 meets The Farewell, because the gang of thieves are Chinese Americans in their 20s. The page-turner about children of the diaspora can’t help but examine the shared roots, cultural plundering and the nature of identity. (Apr. 5)

The Scottish American author need not worry about the second-novel curse after the incredible success of Shuggie Bain, his Booker Prize-winning, and bestselling debut. Stuart returns to the brutal milieu of a north Glasgow public-housing tenement with an almost unbearably moving story of queer awakening and star-crossed lovers, surrounded by poverty, alcoholism and violence. Prepared to be emotionally gutted — again. (Apr. 5)

The American. author calls this tale of transition from an analog to a digital world a ‘sibling’ (rather than a sequel) to her 2011 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad. Egan picks up the story in the 2010s, and crosscuts between the main characters, their romantic partners and adult children, to look at the consequences of a new technology that allows people to share their memories in the cloud. (Apr. 5)

Her post-plague dystopian novel, Station Eleven, was a must-read of the early COVID-19 pandemic and, this year, an acclaimed adaptation on Crave. Now the Canadian author of the Giller Prize contender, The Glass Hotel, follows it up with another profoundly human, semi-hopeful, multi-voice story about a plague. This time it hopscotches around several centuries, from early 20th century Vancouver Island (where Mandel was born and raised) to the early 25th century on Earth’s lunar colonies. Life imitates art as readers follow Olive, an author who has written a bestselling pandemic novel, on a galaxy-wide book tour during another pandemic. (Apr. 5)

Wendy Wise has spent 40 years as a popular advice columnist and a lifetime as an interfering, but well-meaning help to her adult daughters. From a South African-born actor-turned-author, who grew up in Toronto, this breezy and heartwarming read gets at the complicated relationship dynamics between mothers, daughters and sisters. If this winsome novel were a movie, it would be by the late Nora Ephron. (Apr. 5)

This debut novel from Chadburn, a Los Angeles-based writer of Filipino heritage, is literary and visceral trauma embodied: a fictionalized dramatization of the notorious serial murders of Robert “Willie” Pickton, the B.C. pig farmer who claimed to have killed at least 49 marginalized women, many of them Indigenous. The novel’s 18-year-old protagonist, Marina, is throttled on the very first page. In death, Marina becomes an avenging aswang – a shape-shifting creature from Filipino folklore, channelling the voices and experiencing the harsh lives of the other victims, and that of the killer himself. (Apr. 12)

Two timelines entwine in this powerful novel from Perkins-Valdez, a Washington, D.C.-based writer. One focuses on 1973, when a young Black nurse who works at a family planning clinic in post-segregation Alabama exposes an involuntary sterilization program, run by the U.S. government on poor young Black girls, who are given experimental birth control shots; decades later, she reflects on her early and unwitting complicity. This affecting historical tale of racial justice and reproductive rights, at the intersection of eugenics, exploitation and poverty, is inspired by true events. (Apr. 12)

Following a life-altering car accident, a jobless and penniless son, who now uses a wheelchair, must move back home. Trainspotting writer Irvine Welsh praises this energetic novel about the fractured relationship between an estranged father and son, which is powered by grimly, cynical wit. The American author, who has a PhD in artificial intelligence, pulls vivid insight from his firsthand experience of living with a disability. (Apr. 12)

The gritty Los Angeles of 1963 comes to life in this new historical crime novel from master storyteller Phillips, 67, who has also written for Snowfall, the F/X series about the crack epidemic and the CIA in 1980s South Central, the neighbourhood where he grew up. Harry, an African-American freelance news photographer, is a shell-shocked Korean War veteran who listens to police scanners for scoops, and becomes embroiled in solving the death of a jazz-musician friend. It’s fast-paced and set against the backdrop of civil rights and racial tensions within L.A.’s Black communities in the days leading up to a visit from Martin Luther King, Jr. (Apr. 12)

Dance, an Ontario playwright and composer, draws on real-life experience as caregiver to her life partner for this novel about a family witnessing the decline of a matriarch with Alzheimer’s. It ventures into the mind of Mary, who lives in the past as she attempts to write a memoir about a long-ago lost love, set between England, Canada and Trinidad, and also examines the challenges and rewards of the so-called sandwich generation, with caregiving duties split between aging parents and their own children. (Apr. 19)

Writing with several collaborators – including award-winning, science-fiction author Sheree Renée Thomas – the U.S. singer-songwriter, style icon and performer Monae expands on themes from her Dirty Computer album. The speculative and all-too-plausible cautionary tales, à la Black Mirror, add up to thought-provoking, Afro-futurist stories about freedom, sentience, totalitarianism and technology. (Apr. 19)

This debut novel from an award-winning, Barbadia Canadian short-story writer based in Vancouver is a family saga, loosely inspired by Greek mythology, which travels from 1960s Barbados to present-day Scarborough, Ont. It explores four generations who run a beachfront hotel; their individual journeys are inspired by their mythical namesakes (Iapetus, Atlas, Calypso and Nautilus), and they each long to escape from the island in some way. (Apr. 26)

Life imitates art twice over this entertaining novel with a clever conceit (one of Kirkus Reviews’ 10 most anticipated in 2022) by the James Beard Award-winning writer Huneven, where readers go behind the scenes as a church search committee looks for a new minister. It takes the shape of an entertaining fictional memoir by a Southern California food writer (with recipes, naturally), who has – unbeknownst to the team – decided to chronicle and reveal the proceedings and inner workings of the team, politics and all. (Apr. 26)

“Come on now, don’t act like people!” is how beekeeper Sergey urges his hives to collaborate and work toward the greater good. The retiree, and his frenemy neighbor, Pashka, are among the last residents of the barren Grey Zone circa 2017 in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, where Russian-backed separatists have been fighting loyalist government forces since 2014 for control over the resource-rich strip of territory, and Sergey finds himself going to Crimea and back again. The Ukrainian author has been compared to Murakami, Bulgarov and Vonnegut with this portrait of modern conflict that originally had elements of fable but, as Kurkov recently pointed out: “now all of Ukraine is Donbas,” and the novel has taken on new and urgent resonance. (Apr. 29)