Home Base: Castlebar, Ireland 

Author’s Take: “I don’t think I knew from the outset how anything would unfold  – how any of the love stories would end, or how the relationship between the brothers would develop. But I really enjoyed being immersed in the world of the book.” 

Favourite Line: “Life itself, he thinks, every moment of life, is as precious and beautiful as any game of chess ever played, if only you know how to live.”

Review: The latest release from the acclaimed Irish author of Normal People and Conversations with Friends is her most mature and refined yet. It follows two brothers, a decade apart in age, as they cope with their father’s recent death. Ivan is a 22-year-old former chess prodigy struggling to find his way back to the game he loves. Peter is a successful human rights lawyer dating a college girl, but maintaining a suspiciously close friendship with a former flame. Both are struggling to connect with each other and the women in their lives, and grief is only making it harder. 

The book has all the rich character building and social commentary fans have come to expect from Rooney, but she delves deeper than ever into these characters’ emotional lives. Told in a third-person narration that switches its focus between the protagonists – much like Normal People – Rooney shifts her voice for each brother, drawing readers deeper into their troubled mental states. Despite their deep flaws and unsavory moments, Rooney’s unique gift is to make readers root for their happiness anyway. Intermezzo takes us to a world where fathers are gone and people struggle to care for one another, but also where chance encounters blossom into relationships that can define a lifetime.

It’s an emotional rollercoaster that will leave your heart so full that, at the end, you’ll want to go right back to the beginning. —Hope Mahood

Home Base: Nashville, Tenn.

Author’s Take: “To those who know nothing of their real lives … the only decent thing to do is offer a warning: there is much more pain and heartache ahead than there is happiness. Some of the things that happened here are horrifying. I have tried to make sure you will never, ever forget them.” 

Favourite Lines: “Tammy Wynette was about to stop standing by another man. [George] Jones was still drunk when he heard the news, still drunk when he found Tammy at their apartment by calling every phone number he could remember and still drunk when he arrived in Nashville, swearing he was ready to try to quit booze for good.”

Review: Tyler Mahan Coe knows his way around country music the way Waylon Jennings knew the inside of divorce court. The former touring musician is the son of singer/songwriter David Allan Coe, which explains why his podcast Cocaine & Rhinestones: The History of Country Music was a hit out of the gate in 2017. This book, an adaptation of the second season of the show – which charts the history of country music through the pop culture landscape of the 20th century – leverages the relatively brief but infamously combative relationship between country stars George Jones and Tammy Wynette as its throughline. There are diversions aplenty, all richly buoyed by Coe’s comprehensive and unfailingly insightful research and frequently hilarious turns of phrase. And it’s not just performers in the crosshairs. Coe goes behind the scenes to explore the peculiar mechanics of the industry; there’s a fascinating chapter on Pappy Daily, whose name might not ring a bell, but whose entrepreneurial chutzpah in the 1950s and ’60s ensured country music got stuck in the ears of unsuspecting Texans and stayed there until the last dollar was collected. It might not be everyone’s cup of bourbon, but anyone sporting a Stetson with a straight face will never want these stories to end. —Kim Hughes

Home Base: Toronto, Ont.

Author’s Take: “It was a science fiction novel, it was a mystery novel, it was a thriller, it was a romance, it was a spy novel – it was all these different things, and the only thing that stuck around from draft to draft was the sense of humour.”

Favourite Lines: “That’s real success: the freedom to be yourself. To have a private life. To not fear judgment. To get fat.”

Review: It’s no secret most writers have day jobs, but few have cooler ones than Toronto’s Madeline Ashby. While some may supplement their income with teaching gigs, arts journalism or office work, Ashby is a “freelance consulting futurist,” working with organizations on “scenario development and science fiction prototypes.” No, I don’t understand exactly what that is, but is it any surprise that a professional prognosticator would be one of the finest science fiction writers at work today? For readers new to Ashby’s work, her latest novel, Glass Houses, serves as a perfect introduction. 

It begins with a plane crashing on a deserted island. The aircraft – autonomous and free of pilots – is carrying the newly rich staff members of Wuv, who are celebrating the purchase of their start-up. It was created by Sumter Williams, an “orphaned billionaire and tech genius,” and specializes in “affective computing,” where one’s personal devices are able to determine other people’s emotions. The survivors include Sumter and Kristen Howard, Wuv’s “chief emotional manager,” whose main job, it quickly emerges, is managing Sumter. Like her boss, Kristen has tragedy in her past, and survival skills that will be sorely tested.

While there don’t seem to be any other people on the island, there is a building – a looming, black, brutalist structure – that may be a house. Or it may be something else. After an initial struggle, the survivors make their way into the building, only to find it’s even harder to leave than it was to enter, which is when the body count begins to rise.

Glass Houses is a terrific near-future mystery and a unique haunted house story (I will never look at my digitally connected appliances the same way again, and the sooner I can get them out of my apartment the better). It’s also a powerful examination of character, and what it means to be human in a post-human world. Ashby is a genuine talent, with a keen eye and an imagination that knows no bounds.  —Robert Wiersema

Home Base: Ashiya, Japan

Author’s Take: “Human time and the time of fiction are quite distinct in my mind. My goal is to write novels that have a life beyond that of the author.”

Favourite Lines: ”Did something move down there?” I asked, pointing at the spot.

“Oh, that’s Pochiko,” said Mina, her tone softening. “Our hippopotamus.”

Review: One of the great pleasures of reading fiction in translation is the possibility of “discovering” a writer who has already achieved a staggering level of success. Take, for example, Yoko Ogawa.

While English-language readers likely encountered her work in 2008’s The Housekeeper and the Professor or 2019’s The Memory Police, by that time she had won every major literary award in Japan and was one of the country’s most respected contemporary writers.

Ogawa’s latest book to be translated, the shimmering Mina’s Matchbox, is a treasure. Originally published in 2006, it is the story of 12-year-old Tomoko who, in 1972, is sent to live with her aunt’s wealthy family for a year after her father dies and her mother moves to Tokyo to study dressmaking. 

The household into which Tomoko is thrust is wondrous and strange, from her glamorous half-German uncle (whose aging mother lives with them) to the pygmy hippopotamus, Pochiko, the last survivor of the house’s small private zoo.

No one is quite so wondrous and strange, though, as Tomoko’s sheltered cousin Mina, who is a year younger than her, somewhat sickly and has an imagination and energy that takes the older girl by surprise.

Mina’s Matchbox follows the girls, and the family, over the course of that year. On the surface, it’s a small story, with intimate and low stakes, but the outside world creeps in, in ways that Tomoko is too young to fully understand. When the girls become fixated on the Japanese men’s volleyball team through a weekly Road to Munich television series in the run-up to the 1972 Olympics, it seems a wholesome enough obsession. The reader, however, is aware of the looming terrorist attacks on the Israeli team at the Munich games; it is a reminder that the world outside is a confusing, cruel place.

A powerful, and powerfully understated, coming-of-age story, Mina’s Matchbox is a perfect introduction to the work of Yoko Ogawa, and it’s heartening to realize that there are dozens of books by her still to be translated. —R.W.

Home: Edmonton, Alta.

Author’s Take: “There’s a whodunit and this one is kind of a how, but it’s also how do we prove it? That story was compelling to me, because Isobel – as a woman, as someone who’s economically disadvantaged – doesn’t have powerful friends in her corner.”

Favourite Lines: “Da-di-lah. Fainter than I’d ever heard it before, the pulse skipping along, borne on the line of music that had first helped me detect the cadence, back when Thomas’s heart was still inside his chest.”

Review: If you want to creep yourself out, head to the Surgeons’ Hall Museums in Edinburgh to see its fascinating but morbid collection, but don’t speculate too much on where those specimens came from. Jaima Fixsen, the Edmonton-based author of six books, did it for you in The Specimen, a dark tale of revenge set in Scotland in 1826, which centres on a tiny heart. 

Widow Isobel Tait takes her seven-year-old son to a highly recommended Edinburgh doctor, Conall Burnett, who notices that fragile Thomas, struggling with palpitations, has a damaged mitral valve. As fast as you can say, “cross my heart and hope to die,” the child goes missing. The frantic mom searches the city for several days with no luck, but when she visits Burnett’s specimen museum months later, she hears a phantom heartbeat in her head. There, floating in a jar, is a juvenile heart with a mitral valve defect. The field of anatomy is all the rage in Edinburgh, and so is dissection: A surgeon needs fresh bodies to train the growing field of students clamouring for access.  Isobel believes Burnett, a social climber who desperately wants to join a medical social club called the Aesculapians, hired someone to kidnap her son, and she is daring enough to try to prove it. 

The Specimen is roughly based on the true history of the men who “harvested” vulnerable people, most famously William Burke and William Hare in 1828, at a time when the medical fraternity relied on stolen corpses for teaching and research. The thriller moments slicing through this page-turner are cinematic and unnerving. Along the way, you will read about missing-person cases; effigy burnings; an Indigenous detective from Canada; and Edinburgh’s downtrodden. —Susan Grimbly

Home Base: New York, N.Y.

Author’s Take: “What effect does money have on us? And you don’t have to have billions of dollars to acknowledge that money has had an effect on your own life, on the shape of your life and, in fact, on your day-to-day interactions.”

Favourite Lines: “There are men with this much money and it’s not that they control the world. They’ve defeated it. They’ve left it. They live somewhere above the rest of us and we spend our days not knowing this because if we did we would all lose our minds.”

Review: Charitable foundations are a cunning byproduct of American capitalism: The ultra-wealthy, who have more money than they could ever spend, give it away to those with the least. In Entitlement, Brooke Orr, a 33-year-old Black woman, lands a front-row seat to this vast wealth gap when she begins working at a foundation in New York. Instead of feeling proud for helping others or unnerved by the staggering inequality, Brooke starts believing that she – like the foundation’s beneficiaries – deserves a slice of that billion-dollar pie.

Not that Brooke is struggling. With a Vassar art history degree and a lawyer mother who leads a reproductive justice organization, she’s had her share of privilege. But she still can’t afford a down payment on an apartment. Meanwhile, her boss, Asher Jaffee, an octogenarian billionaire, treats her to lavish dinners, $400 bottles of wine and a Mozart concert. One of Brooke’s first tasks is to decide whether to give millions to a project that aims to reintroduce oysters to New York Harbour. Later, she advocates for funding a Brooklyn community school teaching African dance. Then it hits her – if she’s handing out money for oysters and kids who want to dance, then why shouldn’t she claim a piece for herself? 

Brooke’s bitterness grows, especially when her best friend inherits enough to buy a $2-million apartment. Being so close to immense wealth but unable to fulfill her own desires starts to unravel her. Rumaan Alam’s prose mirrors this descent, which is manic and frenzied in the way it slides in and out of everyone’s thoughts.

Following his 2020 bestseller Leave the World Behind, which became a Netflix film starring Julia Roberts and Mahershala Ali, Alam once again tackles themes of race, class and social tension. The brisk 256-page novel is more philosophical than emotional, forcing readers to reflect on their own unfulfilled wants. Alam’s keen eye on middle-class desperation and the twisted logic of capitalism is both biting and painfully relatable. —Alyanna Denise Chua

Home Base: Galway, Ireland

Author’s Take: “All of my books are inspired by the world of the unseen and so it was only a matter of time before I explored Irish folklore and the superstitions I grew up believing in.”

Favourite Lines: “She held the sketchbook up to the light of the small window and realised on closer inspection that the smudge had eyes. Defying all belief, there was a creature peeking out from behind the tree truck. A creature she hadn’t drawn.”

Review: It is an odd fact of human culture that as we modernize, we manage to diminish the old ways that meant so much to our ancestors. Take the Fairy-Faith. At this point, we scoff, since a fairy is considered a childhood notion or a role played by Julia Phillips (1991’s Hook). But in Celtic times, fairies were mythic heavyweights. In the early 1900s, a young American anthropologist travelled from the U.S. to the Celtic regions, including the West Coast of Ireland, to collect stories on fairies and beliefs.

In the mesmerizing new novel from the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Lost Bookshop, American scholar Harold Krauss shows up in County Clare, in the early 1900s, on the same mission. A farm girl named Anna, 18, takes him to characters with tales to tell, each one a little darker than the last. We follow the two via Anna’s diary, discovered 100 years later by an American named Sarah who is fleeing a bad marriage in New York and takes a spur-of-the-moment trip to Ireland. There, she meets a young man suffering from the loss of his wife. 

Through these twinned stories, we will be amused, distressed, enlightened … and fall in love. Fairies – not the sweet Tinkerbell characters we accept as the status quo – and the seer who knows of them will account for plot points. And, of course, there will be nobility to scorn, through the haughty twins Anna meets at Thornwood Hall, who are considered cursed. A key feature in this part rom-com, part historical fiction is the ancient hawthorn tree that embraces all. —S.G.

Home Base: Strasbourg, France

Author’s Take: “Leonard Cohen’s art derives from a very specific visual acuity: he sees men fall. And, with them, women, saints, and angels. Hence, a fascination for falling bodies and a career devoted to a methodical and quasi-amorous exploration of the laws of gravity.

Favourite lines: “By the early ’70s, Leonard had seen all types of wars. Except, of course, a real one. Surely, he had heard bullets fly and seen some scuffles in Cuba, but that didn’t count. In 1973, history comes to his rescue.”

Review: Christophe Lebold is an associate professor at the University of Strasbourg, where he teaches literature, performance studies and rock culture. That academic rigour shows in this sprawling biography that is both deeply researched and occasionally speculative, although Lebold – who describes himself as both fan and friend of Leonard Cohen – is uniquely qualified to hazard some guesses about the late poet and musician’s motivations, after working for 20 years to compile this book. As he deconstructs what he calls “Cohenian treatments” of songs, novels, poems and even the artist’s lifestyle choices, Lebold brings readers into his subject’s orbit, often quite intimately. And he is generous with his observations: Cohen, he writes, basically invented alt-rock. “Rebellious as they were, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, and Janis Joplin were also to some extent the obedient children of the Woodstock ideology. … Cohen’s great dissidence – the one that Rolling Stone would never be able to forgive – was to become the tireless champion of the minor mode.” That passage is illustrative both of Lebold’s novel thought process and his declarative writing style. Organized by decades, exhaustively footnoted and with many images included, The Man Who Saw the Angels Fall is nobody’s idea of breezy reading. But if Cohen is your man, this is your book.—K.H.

Home Base: Montreal, Que.

Author’s Take: “The book grew out of my Twisters [micro-fiction on Twitter]. … Sometimes, a ‘character’ kept reappearing, a kind of office tyrant, and I used him as an easy way to critique office life/corporate culture and what work can do to the soul.”

Favourite Lines: “Where do you want to be in five years? That’s what I hate,” Reed says. “I hate that question.” 

Review: The cover’s illustration, resembling the broad brushstrokes of Impressionism, or possibly a tongue-in-cheek close-up of a shag carpet, hint at recurring themes in this complicated new story from Arjun Basu. As one character will ask his best friend, “Why did van Gogh die poor? Where does art begin?”

Basu, the author of the Giller-longlisted Waiting for the Man and the 2008 short-story collection Squishy, returns with a tale that underlines the challenges facing a contemporary middle-class family – and the power of art. The novel opens with Bobby Reed, the father, a hated corporate executive, cast as a misogynistic, slave-driving villain. The reader will be tempted to give up on him and this extraordinary novel, but that would be a mistake. Then there is his wife Mimi, who sells teak furniture and costly Hummel figurines online, working long hours in the back of a warehouse to meet demand. Her dream of success has come with a price. 

With husband and wife off in their own worlds, their adopted teenage son Abbie spends all his time taking “pictures,” his father’s condescending term. Regardless, cloistered in the garage – which he uses as a darkroom – Abbie remains devoted to his photography. Dee, two years younger, agonizes over her body image and fitting into society. “She hates that she’s popular with the wrong people.”

When Bobby is escorted out of his office by security and propelled into forced retirement, he retreats to the comfort of that shag rug hinted at in the cover: “…he rubs the carpet, caressing it, drawing patterns, losing himself….” He eventually tells his wife he was fired, ashamedly admitting he heard some of his staff cheer. A light of self-awareness begins to dawn.  

Thus, over the course of one summer, this loving family will drift apart, yet remain defiantly intertwined, as they inhabit Montreal’s downtown corporate towers, ruined industrial yards by the river’s canal, and a languishing west end strip mall, just a few of the backdrops described fondly by the author. Wry comedic passages – layered with undertones of self-doubt and envy – fuel the dialogue in this fast-paced, compelling story of change and acceptance. —Mary Jackman

Home Base: Montreal, Que.

Author’s Take: “It is about a very depressed writer, a little bit like myself, who becomes obsessed with the idea that his tax money is being used to fund foreign wars. So, he spontaneously buys a plane ticket to go walk through the war and see it for himself.  While he is there, he stumbles upon a utopian city state primarily run by women, and he lives with them for a year.” 

Favourite Lines: “Then someone said: ‘What if we were to look at this problem as an artwork? … Let’s not only propose concrete practical solutions. Let’s propose any sort of solution our minds can fancy.”

Review: Part Catch-22, part Gulliver’s Travels, part Homage to Catalonia, this novel slides easily into the tradition of literature that challenges the boundaries of what is politically feasible. 

The Montreal writer’s unnamed narrator – white, male, Western – travels abroad to witness a war zone. When he first arrives in the region, he stays with a friend who tries to convince him to go home because it is too dangerous. The narrator insists he feels worthless in his country, unable to change the suffering around him. He is willing to risk his life to experience what he imagines is liberation from his bland, middle-class reality. 

After walking across landmine-strewn fields, dodging bombs and witnessing airplanes explode mysteriously mid-flight, he arrives at his destination, an unspecified revolutionary enclave described as a grassroots, feminist, egalitarian utopia. The narrator’s tone is a mix of matter-of-fact reportage and meditative self-reflection. 

Through his work, Wren – the author of Polyamorous Love Song (2014), Rich and Poor (2016) and an artistic director of the interdisciplinary Montreal group PME-ART – probes the injustices of contemporary life while imagining alternatives. Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim continues this anarchistic spirit. The CBC called it “an intricate study of our complicity in violent global systems and a celebration of the hope that underpins the resistance.” —Michael Bryson