Home Base: Toronto

Author’s Take: “It’s old-school chicklit, like you’d have read at the beginning of this decade. Think Gemma Townley or Jane Green only edgier because I’m incapable of writing characters who aren’t, at their core, completely messed up.” 

Favourite Line: “The opulence of the packages and what was inside them was not lost on me – big, luxurious packages expertly wrapped by the elves at Holt Renfrew, boxes that contained far too much tissue paper and were filled with exquisite objects made out of cashmere.” 

Review: This rom-com is like a beach read, only sunshine and mojitos are replaced with wind in slushy downtown Toronto streets. Told from the point of view of Kelly, an unhappy publicist in an otherwise glam job at a cable-television conglomerate, the narrative revolves around two lovely men in her life. Rob, her longtime, live-in boyfriend, comes from money – BIG money – and works in finance. He is reliable, loving and (thankfully) very, very calm. Garrett, her work crush, is fun and teasy, seems to get her, but has his own longtime girlfriend (natch). 

“Kels,” to her close pals, is always late, a giveaway that her life is off-kilter. We watch with bemusement and curiosity as Kelly zings her way through scene after scene of “should I?/shouldn’t I?” – liberally lubricated with “drink,” caffeine and occupational hiccups. As she teeters through the Christmas festivities leading up to the New Year’s grand finale, the pressure is on to marry, all oiled up with super formal dinner parties at Rob’s parents’ home, which ends in a giant diamond moment complete with haughty (potential) mother-in-law. 

Mardon (the pen name for Deanna McFadden, executive publishing director at Wattpad Books) writes with sympathy for her young heroine, who is a white-hot mess. While the most entrancing passages are lively, goofy scenes with friends at the office, and family at home, the author’s writing shines in the subplot. She captures, accurately, what it is like growing up with a mother who changes partners rather, um, often, with Kelly and her sister Meghan moving frequently. That heart-wrenching sense of instability underpins her heroine’s indecision. A love letter to a busy partying season, The Work Boyfriend just may seduce you, whether you swoon, cry or laugh. It’s light, sassy, flirty and includes lots of great shoes. – Susan Grimbly

Home Base: Bristol, England

Author’s Take: “When I began to think about writing this book, I knew I wanted to explore money as a motive for crime.”

 Favourite Line: “It can’t be that doing such a wonderful thing could have caused him an injury. That wouldn’t be right. Life isn’t that unfair.”

Review: Childhood sweethearts Nicole and Tom hit the jackpot in a lottery and have just finished building a mega-mansion called the Glass Barn, which is all tricked out with the latest tech and the most stylish of furnishings, on a parcel of land purchased from Olly and Sasha, who live next door in the Manor House. When Nicole finds Tom dead in the swimming pool, she runs to Olly and Sasha and their housekeeper, Kitty, who lives in the coach house, for comfort. Then Tom’s best friend, Patrick, shows up to help. Nicole’s dream life turns into a nightmare as the story unfurls, told through alternating points of view. As the characters are introduced and their history is unravelled, it brings chaos and questions instead of answers. The police find themselves with more suspects and loose ends than manpower as they try to determine whether they are looking for a killer, or if Tom just died after bumping his head.

Macmillan, the New York Times bestselling author of What She Knew and The Nanny, is back with another psychological thriller that will make readers question how well they really know their neighbours, their friends and even their spouses. The Manor House and the Glass Barn are central to the twisted plot, and while they sometimes provide refuge, there are complications, too. For example, the walls inside the old Manor House provide the perfect spot to eavesdrop on conversations, but all that new technology in the Glass House backfires when it’s needed the most.

 The power of manipulation, coercion, self-doubt and fear are all at play as the reader discovers Olly and Sasha are not the kind, young couple helping a widow out of her depression, Patrick’s intentions are not honest and that Kitty may not be who she says. My favourite part of this easy-to-read but compelling novel is the plot twist at the end. I dare say you will not see it coming. – Caroline Gdyczynski

Home Base: Los Angeles, Calif.

Author’s Take: “It is finally time for me to raise my voice and speak out, and my fans deserve to hear it directly from me. No more conspiracy, no more lies — just me owning my past, present and future.” 

Favourite line: “The conservatorship stripped me of my womanhood, made me into a child. I became more of an entity than a person onstage. I had always felt music in my bones and my blood; they stole that from me.”

Review: I’ve never been a big Britney Spears fan, but there was no escape from her memoir, it was just that … in-toxic-ating. Marketed as the star “telling her own story, on her own terms, at last,” The Woman in Me is the first time the multiplatinum, Grammy Award-winning pop star has spoken about her career in depth, including the 13-year-long conservatorship that left her under the control of her “reckless, cold” and alcoholic father. It’s a slim, 275-page book, with wide margins and plenty of white space, but it packs a punch. 

By now, Spears’ story is pretty well-known. After a series of psychotic episodes and involuntary hospitalizations in 2008, and amid an intense custody battle for her infant sons, her father petitioned a court for conservatorship, which was granted. For the next 13 years, the star was blocked from choosing her own meals, driving a car and even removing her IUD. Troublingly, while her conservators argued in court the star was too unstable to make decisions for herself, they had her continue a rigorous performing schedule, going on tour and completing a Las Vegas residency. Fans became concerned for the pop icon’s welfare and, following the viral #FreeBritney movement, she successfully fought her father in court and ended the conservatorship in 2021. 

The memoir traces Spears’ life from her under-privileged childhood in Louisiana, through roles as a child star in The All-New Mickey Mouse Clubhouse and well into her teen pop-icon career. The memoir glosses over many of her career-defining moments — the aftermath of the release of her breakout single … Baby One More Time and her 2001 MTV Video Music Awards performance with a live Burmese python get less than a few paragraphs each — but what’s left is a poignant portrait of a sensitive woman’s inner and family life. 

The book often falls back on cliches, and many of the lessons she tries to pull from her experiences seem to fall short of the whirlwind life she describes. But Spears thoughtfully explores the impacts of her early rise to stardom on her own mental health and critiques the double standards at play when she was criticized for reckless behavior in her youth that was ignored in her male contemporaries. You can’t help but feel that, with the release of a memoir in her own words, Spears is free at last. – Hope Mahood

Home Base: Sudbury, Ont.

Author’s Take: “It gave me the opportunity to reconnect with the characters I’d grown to love many years ago. I was thrilled to be able to imagine their situation and surroundings once again, and determine a new set of stakes for them. It was also a chance to speculate on what the future could hold for this community — and more broadly, my people the Anishinaabek — more than a decade after the end of society as we know it.” 

Favourite line: “Twelve years on, the violence of that time haunted them all in different ways. For the younger ones, it was a ghost story pieced together through fragments. A story tinged not only with horror but with their elders’ shame.”

Review: Waubgeshig Rice returns with a much-anticipated sequel to his 2018 post-apocalyptic thriller, Moon of the Crusted Snow. While the first novel followed a remote Anishnaabe community’s response to a mysterious disaster that causes a permanent blackout at the start of a long winter, the second installment from the author and former CBC journalist from Wasauksing First Nation near Parry Sound, Ont., branches out to explore what has become of this world. 

Moon of the Turning Leaves delivers an Indigenous twist on a genre well-defined by the likes of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven and HBO’s The Last of Us. The book follows the hero of the first novel, Evan, and his now 15-year-old daughter Nangohns as they join a scouting party that sets out from from their northern community to search for their ancestral homeland on the shores of the Great Lakes, and to find out what caused the world to fall into anarchy 12 years earlier. 

In branching out beyond the characters’ settlement, the sequel lacks the tightly-contained narrative structure of the first, but Rice’s writing is more developed and richer, and the novel provides a similar slow-burn suspense to keep readers on the edge of their seats. Much like Moon of the Crusted Snow, Rice elegantly weaves Anishnaabe language and culture into the story (the new protagonist’s name, Nangohns, for example, means “little star” in Anishinaabemowin). The sequel can also be read as a parable of first contact, delving much deeper into the complexities of Indigenous identity than the first. Rice describes how, within a few generations, culture and language can be scrubbed from a community due to the brutal impacts of colonialism, and explores a reversal of those losses and the flourishing of Anishnaabe culture in a younger generation. 

Rice hasn’t ruled out a third installment, but says he wants to take a break from the post-apocalyptic genre and write something comedic. Whatever comes next, Rice is a rising star of Canadian literature whose ascent you don’t want to miss. – H.M.

Home Base: Los Angeles, Calif.

Author’s Take: “As a novelist, of course, my most comfortable method of storytelling is fiction, so I wanted there to be enough truth in the story, enough actual touchstone, so that they would ring with the memory of what the Dozier School was, without it actually being the Dozier School.” 

Favourite Lines: “Well, I’ll tell you the same thing I tell the rest: there’s no such thing as ghosts. That’s an absolute fact. And even if there were, ghosts would be the last worry on my mind if I were on my way to the Reformatory.”

Review: This powerful new novel by Los Angeles writer Tananarive Due begins in the summer of 1950 outside the fictional town of Gracetown, Fla., where Robert Stephens Jr. and his older sister Gloria live. Their mother has died, and their father – a trade unionist and general rabble rouser – has fled to Chicago to avoid false charges of battery involving a white woman. Robert, who is 12, instinctively steps in to protect his sister from the attentions of their neighbour, Lyle McCormack, the son of the most powerful man in the small town. Robert lands an ineffectual kick on the older boy’s knee and, within hours, he has been sentenced to six months at the Gracetown School for Boys. The segregated facility casts a dark shadow over the town; it’s known as an evil place, where several boys died in a mysterious fire years earlier, and where Boot Hill serves as a final resting place for those who try to escape, or who perish under the yoke of the school’s superintendent, Haddock.

The reformatory is harder for Robert than for most boys. It’s not just his father’s legacy that haunts him (community members use Robert’s incarceration to try to draw his father back to town), but he has the ability to see “haints,” in this case, the spirits of boys who have died at the facility. One strand of the novel follows Robert as he struggles for survival, faced with beatings in the Fun House and the prospect of Boot Hill as he works in the fields or the kitchen, with only his friends, Blue and Redbone, for support.

The other strand of the novel follows Gloria, who is touched with a bit of clairvoyance, as she struggles to free her brother. When everything fails – from an appeal to McCormack’s powerful father to a meeting with an NAACP lawyer – Gloria and her compatriots begin to consider more desperate measures.

The Reformatory is a high-tension, high-stakes read on multiple levels. Based on the real-life Dozier School, which also served as inspiration for Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Nickel Boys, it’s a close examination of a literal hell on earth. Things aren’t much better on the outside, and Due explores the racism of the pre-Civil Rights movement in the American south with a painful clarity. The supernatural elements are never overplayed – you don’t need to be a horror fan to adore The Reformatory – and add to the novel’s epic and timeless feel. It’s a stunning read. – Robert Wiersema

Home Base: London

Author’s Take: “As I started reading more high-quality true crime, as well as listening to more slightly dubious podcasts that were engaged with a lot of the muddier areas around true crime, my relationship with the genre shifted a lot. I wanted to do something more critical.”

Favourite Line: “Confessions were quick, but the story was messy. There was no doubt they were guilty – but the who, what, why and how of the attack was complicated.”

Review: We live surrounded by true crime. From podcasts to non-fiction books to Netflix miniseries, the “true crime industrial complex” is a dominant force in the media we consume. Along with that force, however, comes a series of ethical questions, which the astute consumer must, somehow, reckon with: what is the value of true crime works? What is their societal cost? How do we accord the real-world nature of these stories – with real victims, and real perpetrators – with their role as entertainment?

As a true crime aficionado, it’s no accident that two of my favourite books of 2023 face these questions head-on. The first of those books is Rebecca Makkai’s I Have Some Questions for You, published last winter. The second is Penance, the stunning, twisting new novel from English writer Eliza Clark, who was named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists earlier this year.

The novel begins with a crime: in Crow-on-Sea, a crumbling seaside Yorkshire town, 16-year-old Joan Wilson is tortured in a beach chalet for several hours by three classmates. Presumed dead by her attackers, she is “doused in petrol and set on fire.”

The event is horrifying, but largely overlooked: the crime happens on the same night as the Brexit vote, which consumes all the media space for weeks. It is only after it is “discovered” by a true crime podcast that Wilson’s fate receives any attention. Years later, disgraced journalist Alec Z. Carelli moves to the town to research and write an authoritative account. Penance is, it seems, that book.

But it’s not that simple. The novel begins with a disclaimer: a previous edition of Carelli’s book was pulled from the shelves owing to questionable reportage and possible criminal breaches. The disclaimer ends, however, by stating that “despite the controversy attached to this book, we have chosen to republish it in its original form.”

What follows hits the beats one would expect from a true crime account, with Carelli visiting scenes around Crow, interviewing family members of the victim and the perpetrators, quoting from correspondence and online sources. With that disclaimer in mind, however, one begins to see the gaps and the questionable nature of Carelli’s writing, which serves to foreground larger concerns about true crime as a genre. (The transcripts from the fictional podcast I Peed on Your Grace are cringe-inducing and offensive, and will be recognizable to anyone who has spent time in the true-crime podcast world). As the book proceeds, however – and I wouldn’t dream of spoiling what happens – even larger questions around the nature of storytelling and the possibility of truth come into focus.

Clark is a brilliant writer, weaving a compelling fiction that holds the reader’s attention and simultaneously forces them to confront their own complicity. Did I mention this was one of my favourite books of the year? – R.W.

Home Base: Las Vegas, Nev.

Author’s Take: “Understanding why we tend to overeat, overbuy, or overscroll can lift some guilt – you’re not a bad or lazy person. Rather, you’re doing what our species has always done. But we’re now on a different playing field.” 

Favourite Lines: “Everyone knows any behavior is fine in moderation. But why do we suck so bad at moderating?”

Review: With Black Friday behind us and the holiday season looming, we are firmly in the season of excess. At some point, most of us will wake to a feeling of amorphous regret: Why did we eat so much? Why did we drink so much? Why did we spend so much? Not only will many of us have these questions, but it won’t be for the first time. The season of excess is the time of regret, as much a tradition as festive cocktails and turkey. And, as we do most years, many of us will wave those questions away, funnel our regret into resolutions, and move on for another year.

But now we live in an age of excess, where most of our desires are a phone call or mouse click away from fulfillment, and that accessibility is ruining our lives. It may be killing us.

We’re victims, as Easter writes in his thought-provoking new book, of evolution. All of our excesses are responses to what he calls the “scarcity loop.” We evolved to seek out and hoard things – initially, food and shelter – that would improve our lives. As conditions have improved and technology has advanced, most of us experience very little primal scarcity (we have jobs, food and a roof over our heads), but the mindset hasn’t gone away. Instead, “it leads us to believe we don’t have enough. We then instinctually fixate on attaining or doing that one thing we think will solve our problem and make us feel whole.”

This isn’t especially new information, but Easter does a powerful job explaining the nature of both the mindset and the scarcity loop, exploring elements as disparate as slot machines in Las Vegas (which are designed to take advantage of the loop) and drug raids in Baghdad. The book itself is breezy and enthralling, and Easter doesn’t stop with an exploration of the problem. Rather, through his experiences at a Benedictine monastery and his conversations with people who have figured out a way to break (or bend) the scarcity loop, he charts a course for those who seek just enough to satisfy, without falling victim to excess. It’s the perfect book for the start of a new year. – R.W.

Author’s Home Base: New York City

Author’s Take: “For some people, the years between when they learn how to read and, say, leave home, consist of reading. To others, that idea is perplexing.”

Favourite Lines: “Snow is falling down around both of them. A jangle of bells. There is nothing more beautiful, said Frank O’Hara, in a poem whose name she cannot now remember, a poem with long lines, like telephone wires, than the lights turning from red to green on Park Avenue during a snowstorm.”

Review: Inverno is the first novel from Cynthia Zarin, author of An Enlarged Heart: A Personal History, a New Yorker contributor since 1983 and award-winning poet. She also writes children’s books (What Do You See When You Shut Your Eyes?), and so she is similarly invested in (addicted to?) children’s stories and fairy tales. Inverno, Italian for “winter,” throws to the overarching mood of the book – cold, bleak, but magical. 

The story opens, and continually references, the main character Caroline waiting in Central Park for Alastair: as an adult, aching for a tryst, and 30 years earlier, when they were children, and he was hiding from his mother in the woods. Caroline continually tries to connect with Alastair, a thematic play on the supreme fairy tale The Snow Queen. Hans Christian Andersen’s story tells the tale of an evil mirror shattering and, after a piece lodges in a young boy’s heart, he is stolen by the Snow Queen and turned into an icy creature, cut off from warm family affections. Like Caroline with Alastair, Kai’s young companion, Gerda, wants to save him. 

The novella is an ice storm of feeling wrapped in a snowglobe. Emotionally flattened by her early, abusive family life, Caroline yearns for the man she has loved for decades – the one who was once her childhood companion, and also struggled with an unhappy home life. As an adult, he is not necessarily a kind man; an alcoholic, he self-sabotages himself, and by extension, Caroline. Alastair, a journalist, is constantly on the move, while Caroline, a mother of two, marries unhappily twice.

The tale of broken love is strikingly original in style and approach: not remotely conventional in its narration. Zarin’s poetic instinct is front and centre in Inverno, whose  themes – broken telephone lines, knives, mirrors, snow, trapped children  – are interwoven throughout. This book, which enchantingly conveys its message, is one to savour, not rush through. Magnificently crafted sentences take the reader forward and backward in time, through the prism of snow. A perfect read, for a winter’s day; a book to think upon. – S.G.