Home Base: Philadelphia, Penn. 

Author’s Take: “The book aims to tell a really good story, but underneath it is this theme of class tension. And so the Van Laars represent this wealthy family who’ve made a home of the land and who embrace the environment and who embrace conservation but only insofar as it serves them.” 

Favourite Line: “Until she had proof to the contrary, she allowed herself to imagine that her son might still exist in the world, someplace just out of sight, an actor in the wings who might at any moment walk on stage.”

Review: How does a rich and respected New York family recover when their only son disappears into the Adirondacks in 1961? And how can they cope 14 years later when their daughter – born to replace her brother – vanishes from the same woodland property? These questions are the jumping-off points for Moore’s latest book, which follows the Van Laar family and the working-class people who live in their shadow. 

Barbara Van Laar has grown up spending her summers at Self-Reliance, her family’s vacation home for generations, part of which is sectioned off into a children’s overnight camp. When the 13-year-old decides she wants to be the first in her family to attend the camp, her parents are only too happy to get her off their hands as they prepare to host a large celebration for Self-Reliance’s centennial. But when she goes missing under circumstances eerily similar to those of her brother all those years ago, it sends the community into a panicked search that unearths far more than anyone bargained for. 

The vibrant cast of characters includes Barbara’s troubled camp counsellor, willowy sedative-addicted mother, stoic father, tomboy-ish camp director and one of the nation’s first female police inspectors – each of whom take turns leading the story. The book seamlessly transitions back and forth between character perspectives and multiple time periods, weaving an intricate spider’s web of a tale. 

Following her 2020 bestseller Long Bright River, Moore’s latest novel explores different ways people can be lost to themselves and each other, and questions what a self-reliant existence on the land actually means. You’ll want to clear your weekend and possibly find your own cabin in the woods to hole up with this 470-page read, as it will hold you in a vice grip until the very end. —Hope Mahood

Home Base: New York, N.Y.

Author’s Take: “I love the idea of looking at the post-apocalypse. What happens to the people who lived on after Arthur? How do you live on after the center has not held and the sun has gone out? And how do you put things back together?” 

Favourite Line: “Adventures were quick and exciting when you heard about them, but when you were inside one they happened very, very slowly.”

Review: The stories of King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table have been a cornerstone of the English literary tradition for almost a thousand years. (The first expansive stories of Arthur appear in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s 12th-century Historia Regum Britanniae, although he figures in Breton and Welsh chronicles from 500 years earlier.) The tournaments, the chivalry, the quests, the Grail … countless writers have taken their turn at this material, with varying approaches (compare Monty Python and the Holy Grail to British author Mary Stewart’s 1970s Merlin trilogy) and varying degrees of success.

One of the key features of Arthurian lore is the death of the king, or, more properly, his removal to the mystical island of Avalon to be healed of his terminal wounds, where he waits to return when Britain is most in need of him. This is the landscape of The Bright Sword, the new novel from Lev Grossman, known for the bestselling Magicians Trilogy, which was adapted into a five-season television series. 

In The Bright Sword, we are introduced to Collum, a 17-year-old aspiring knight, “tall, ungodly strong, virtually ambidextrous, and terrifyingly quick on his feet,” who has journeyed from the far northern Island of Mull to Camelot to attempt to join the Round Table. He is, as many characters tell him, too late. Arthur is dead, Camelot has fallen and only a handful of knights remain. But there is, naturally, time for one final quest.

Grossman clearly loves this material, and The Bright Sword reads with a joyous embrace of the legends alongside a sly, biting humour to bring the story down to earth. “They left Dragonet behind, too,” Grossman writes, as the knights set forth, “because he didn’t want to come and nobody wanted him to.” It’s a neat trick, to make something fresh out of the most familiar tropes in English literature, but Grossman handles it with aplomb and verve. —Robert Wiersema

Home Base: London

Author’s Take: “I’ve been interested in the idea of something that explores relationships starting at the middle, that skips through all of the getting to know you and trying to impress each other bit and just puts the protagonist in the middle of a situation to try and figure out what’s good, what’s bad, what works, how happy she is.”

Favourite Lines: “It’s time to focus. No swingers. No open-mouth chewers. Just a nice man to keep for a week and take to a wedding. Not a perfect husband; just a perfect plus-one.”

Review: Lauren comes home drunk from her BFF’s stagette to find a strange man in her London flat, and, in a hungover haze the next day, realizes – after seeing a wedding photo on the wall – he is her husband. When he goes to the attic to change a lightbulb, a new “startlingly good-looking” man comes down the ladder. He, too, is wearing a wedding ring. After Lauren figures out her magic attic supplies an infinite stream of men, she sends most of them back, hoping the next one will be a better match. The wallpaper, the contents of the fridge and her hair style change with each new arrival, but her home, job, family and friends remain the same. 

In this farcical debut rom-com by Gramazio, a London video game designer, Lauren is initially horrified by the idea of sharing a bed with some of them but soon leans into it and even sleeps with a few. Her main concern is finding a suitable date for her friend’s wedding, because she wants to show her ex, Amos, she has traded up. Amos also appears out of the attic, only to be banished. 

Lauren hits paydirt with Carter, a hot American. Sadly, she loses that baseball-playing, perfect spaghetti eater when, unbidden, he goes to the attic to look for their wedding photos. After eight men, Lauren is struck by a realization: “All of her husbands are men that some version of herself might have chosen to marry … none of them are going to be radically dissimilar from the husband who already visited.”

The novel will prompt laughs of recognition as Lauren evaluates potential partners – at one count, she’s had 160 – and finds most of them wanting. On her list of perfect-mate attributes are “forearms” and “owns scarf.” The book ends with a cataclysmic denouement that satisfactorily ties the plot together, but the hilarity is in the interstitial scenes: Lauren dissing the wallpaper only to find out she chose it;  having sex with the amateur actor who shows up in an embroidered doublet and tights; and finding out she is a swinger who had a dalliance with her beloved neighbours.

Gramazio has said Lauren’s journey of self-discovery was prompted by friends’ dating apps, as well as her future husband’s profile, which was so dull the author – who met him in real life –  never would have swiped right. The moral of the story is there are plenty of suitable fish in the sea, if only we weren’t paralyzed by choice and dazzled by the superficial. —Kim Honey

Home Base: Louisville, Ky. 

Author’s Take: “It’s a very different book from The Wishing Game, a little darker and weirder and more fantastical. But the heart of it is love and acceptance and, again, the power of stories to save us and change us.” 

Favourite Lines: “Beautiful and dangerous and dark and strange West Virginia. Why didn’t they get to have magic here, where the hills rolled like ocean waves and the morning mist was as thick as the silence of a family keeping secrets?”

Review: This book has everything you could want from a fairy tale: magical creatures, a lost princess and a brave knight on a quest to save a kingdom and his one true love. Inspired by C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia, Shaffer’s sophomore novel is a tale for grown-ups set deep in the woods of West Virginia, with all the whimsy of your childhood favourites. 

It tells the story of Jeremy and Rafe, who disappeared into a vast forest as teenagers, only to turn up unharmed six months later with no explanation of how they survived. Fifteen years later, Jeremy is working as a missing persons investigator and Rafe is a recluse artist, when they’re drawn back together by a young woman’s request to help find her older sister – who went missing in the same forest. Rafe has no memory of their time in the woods, and only Jeremy knows the truth. While their parents were desperately searching for them, they were living the high life in a magical realm. 

Shaffer pays homage to fairy tale tropes and childhood classics while adding twists and reveals that keep the story fresh. With a slow build, roaring adventure and romance for the ages, this is the perfect read for any adult who still checks the back of wardrobes – just in case.  —Hope Mahood

Home Base: Vancouver, B.C.

Author’s Take: “Thirteen, and my father hollered at me to come outside. He showed me a colony of ants, all of which had sprouted wings, iridescent across the lawn. It was the first short story I loved.”

Favourite Lines: “Each decade has its own style of magician. The eighties were the time of the red-cheeked comedian, most tricks ending with a daisy squirting you in the face. … Y2K had the ice-eyed illusionist.”

Review: The year 2024 has Richard Kelly Kemick, whose wild imagination and fresh insights cast a spell in Hello, Horse; every entrancing story casts off in a different direction, with a genuine “wait? what?!” moment you did not see coming. Be prepared for talking dogs, feral horses and escaped Bengal tigers. Love and lust preside over everything.

This debut collection opens with Perfection, which is set in the world of dog-track racing (not horse racing), about a white greyhound named God Speed, and the young man who mucks out the kennels. In Sea Change, two Canadian teachers (one married, the other with a girlfriend) meet at an education conference in Cuba and dally with the idea of an affair, as Havana blows up beyond the gates of the conference’s luxury resort. 

One speculative-fiction short story, Satellite, details weird, sad nuns who enjoy playing hockey and ferociously winning against young teens on the ice, high up a mountain in an old hunting lodge. This one has a Big Moral Question at its heart that is beyond unnerving (you don’t want to be around during a certain birthday year).

My heart broke with Ghost Town, a marvellous and unsettling feat of narration set in Saskatchewan, where two young men (one may be gay?) work as tour leaders telling the boring ghost stories of farmers around Prince Albert. When Parks Canada withdraws financial backing for the tourism project, the tour guides are free to make tips by inventing stories so elaborate, so crowd-drawing, you know something uncomfortable is afoot. Kemick, a poet and playwright and National Magazine Award gold medal-winner, is one to watch (but with a wary eye). —Susan Grimbly

Home Base: St. Andrews, N.B.

Author’s Take: “As I mapped Penelope’s Alzheimer’s path during the months my own mother was following hers, Felt became a way of trying to understand memory’s failures as well as of celebrating its adaptations, quirks, triumphs and fascinating inventions.” 

Favourite Lines: “Some people say that memory provides the continuity necessary for us to establish an identity – even a soul, if you like. Losing your memory means losing those things. Not to mention how hard it becomes to keep your teeth clean.” 

Review: What might it feel like to lose your grasp of time and place to Alzheimer’s? In Felt, Mark Blagrave considers that question, while contemplating the ways we all grapple with the idiosyncrasies of memory, both our own and our family’s. 

After a troubling phone call from a family friend, museum curator Matt returns to his hometown in New Brunswick to spend some time with his mother, Penelope. At 96, she is still living independently, but has begun to notice her memory is faltering in an ominous way. Matt is distracted by other personal troubles – marital strife and a gaffe at work – that contribute to his own sense of displacement and disorder. 

Blagrave expertly intertwines Matt and Penelope’s story by alternating the narrative perspective between them, giving us intimate access to their memories even as the story unfolds in the present. As Penelope’s disease progresses, she shifts between her own experiences and those of her mother, introducing us to another character and time period. Matt begins to play along with these opposing identities, supposing that his grandmother’s stories “have become, through repetition over the years, as real to [his mother] as her own memories.” Indeed, his grandmother’s legacy looms large over the family, revealing more than just buried secrets about Matt’s past. 

Despite spanning more than 100 years, two World Wars and three generations, Felt is both concise and understated; this is no sweeping saga of epic proportions. Instead, Blagrave treats us to a provocative and heart-rending story of remembrance as a mother and son try to make sense of their new reality. I was captivated by Blagrave’s portrayal of Penelope’s slippery hold on the present day, made even more poignant by moments of lucidity when she knows her independence is under threat. 

While there’s no way to reverse Penelope’s fate, there is potential for Matt: Will he repair his marriage? Deepen his relationship to his mother? Uncover the truth about his family? The novel ends where it begins: with Penelope’s faltering mind. The path it follows in between will not disappoint you. —Jennifer Wilson

Home Base: Brooklyn, N.Y.

Author’s Take: “There’s nothing wrong with wanting to see intimate stories told publicly. It’s … the crueller or more exploitative or more deceptive parts of it that do raise questions [for] me. Because there are other reasons people watch as well – they want to judge people and they want to be entertained by people’s humiliation.” 

Favourite Lines: “…taking a failed tycoon who was heavily in hock and too risky for almost any bank to lend to, a crude, impulsive, bigoted, multiply-bankrupt ignoramus, a sexual predator so reckless he openly harassed women on his show, then finding a way to make him look attractive enough to elect as the president of the United States? That was a coup, even if no one could brag about it.”

Review: When we think about the history of reality TV as a genre, we tend to recall the groundbreaking first season of Survivor in 2000 (if Richard, Gervase and Sue Hawk’s “rats and snakes” speech at the final Tribal Council doesn’t ring a bell, you’re in a definite minority), and, later, The Apprentice, which in many ways paved the way for the Trump presidency.

This is, it turns out, far too limited a perspective.

With Cue the Sun!, Pulitzer Prize-winning television critic Emily Nussbaum traces the history of reality TV back to the inception of television itself, with shows like Queen for a Day and Candid Camera making the transition from radio to the new visual medium. From the beginning, unscripted shows were winners from both a production standpoint – no writers and no actors meant lower costs – and in terms of public reception. People apparently liked watching regular people do strange things.

With hundreds of interviews and thousands of hours of viewing, Nussbaum weaves an enthralling and at times disturbing history of reality TV, a form that ranges from the sublime to the ridiculous. Having now learned of PBS’s 1973 series An American Family, for example (an embedded documentary that followed a Californian family for almost a year, featuring an on-screen divorce and the introduction of Lance Loud, one of the first explicitly gay and gay-coded characters on television), I’m saddened to be unable to binge it on one of my streaming services – the series has virtually disappeared. My childhood obsession with The Gong Show, though, was enough viewing of that series for a lifetime (according to Nussbaum, I missed a lot as a 10-year-old viewer).

Through the book, Nussbaum balances the professional, almost scholarly approach readers will recognize from her criticism with an irresistibly gossipy quality that the genre seems to provoke. You might not think you need to read a book-length history of reality TV, but you do; Cue the Sun! is one of the most delightful – and insightful – reads of the year. –Robert Wiersema

Home Base: Brooklyn, N.Y.

Author’s Take: “Everything in this book is on the extreme end of possible. It’s improbable, but still possible. It takes its elements from this very magical Grimm’s fairy tale, Snow White and Rose Red, which I was obsessed with.”

Favourite Line: “She understood better, now, what [pain] actually was – not a glass dropped onto a tile floor, one terrible burst, but a tree required to grow over years in a space that limited it.” 

Review: In 1976, Marian Engel’s Canadian classic about a woman’s erotic relationship with a bear was published. In 2024, the American writer Julia Phillips’ novel about a woman’s infatuation with a bear has just appeared. Both books are called Bear. Margaret Atwood wrote that Engel’s novel was “plausible as kitchens, but shapely as a folktale.” The same could be said of Phillips’ dark, involving novel, her second. (Her debut, Disappearing Earth, was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction).

The new Bear tells the story of two working-class sisters doing service jobs in Washington’s San Juan Islands to support their dying mother. In spite of the islands’ beauty, Sam, the younger sister, dreams of leaving and making a new life with her sister. But Elena upends that fantasy by falling in love with a bear and expecting Sam to join her: “It’s magical. It’s the best thing that ever happened to us.” Be prepared for acutely seen characters, a knowing description of the islands’ class structure and a plot that pulls the rug out from under the reader when you least expect it. —Katherine Ashenburg

Home Base: Toronto

Author’s Take: “A book starts as a sense perception. A fleeting thought or a feeling, lasting for a few nanoseconds. Then it gets wrapped up in all sorts of thinking – big, compounded, entangled delusions.”

Favourite Lines: “Not much about being alive makes sense. It’s like awareness. It’s like dark matter and stigmata, like Zeno’s arrow or rebirth, like the wave particle paradox or a clichéd cat in a box, neither living nor dead.”

Review: Spencer Gordon is back with A Horse at the Window,  a flame-throwing series of 25 dramatic monologues. The author of a previous short story collection, Cosmo (2012), and a poetry book, Cruise Missile Liberals (2017), Gordon is not afraid to take chances in his writing.

Flame-throwing? Check the cover, which features a man in a brown suit whose head has turned into a hose of orange fire. Readers may experience something similar as they pace themselves through the collection’s shining, often shocking pieces, navigating the dense outrageous complaints and linguistic ramblings of Gordon’s assembled narrators.

To enter A Horse at the Window is to enter the world of dreams and visions, of funhouse mirrors and social-media terrors.  Over four pages, for example, the narrator confesses all he was “not nice enough to” do in Reasons for My Success, a portrait of a bizarre dude. The longest piece, The Garbage and Oil Thread, is a meditation on environmental crisis that so self-consciously piles words upon words that the crisis feels as if it consists of language as much as microbes and atoms. Throughout, prepare for sharp waves of word flow often depopulated from bodies and context, polished to an eerie sheen. 

That Gordon connects these “stories” to ancient Buddhist writings (among other intertextual hoodwinks) highlights his talent, frequently profound, sometimes miraculous. —Michael Bryson