Home Base: Chicago, Ill.

Author’s Take: “I’ve never lost sight of the fact that, despite my contributions, this is Bill’s book.”

Favourite Lines: “[Carson’s] oversize life in the box transcended ordinary fame, no matter how ordinary he wished to be seen. That he was seen nightly — and collectively experienced — during hours most intimate and vulnerable only deepened his American meaning.”

Review: It’s impossible to overstate how deeply Bill Zehme admired Johnny Carson. Throughout his career as a magazine journalist and author, Zehme stockpiled Carson ephemera and interviews to create what is certainly the most comprehensive portrait ever assembled of the late, fabled Tonight Show host. (Twenty years in the making, the biography was finished by Zehme’s former research assistant, journalist Mike Thomas.) That depth is the book’s key strength and weakness. Arcane trivia – about Carson’s superstitious cufflink-wearing habits and his weekly salaries at various announcer gigs – illustrate Zehme’s plunge into his subject’s life, but drag down zippier bits about his relationships, creative process and towering influence over contemporary comedy. The prose can also be smidge flowery: “There he had risen and reigned as iconic king and cultural potentate – a smooth midnight sentinel possessed of Herculean fortitude and winking glimmer and other ineffable qualities mastered solely to resonate behind a glass picture screen.” So, Carson was good on TV? Although it’s more hagiography than conventional biography, Carson the Magnificent – its title is a riff on recurring Tonight Show character Carnac the Magnificent – is still solid gold for fans of the legendary Nebraskan. —Kim Hughes

Home Base: Bath, England

Author’s Take: “I wanted to write a celebration of the Earth’s beauty, but with a sense of sorrow or a pang of loss because of what we’re doing to it.”

Favourite Lines: “Pick a single creature on this earth and its story will be the earth’s story, he suddenly thinks. It can tell you everything, that one creature. The whole history of the world, the whole likely future of the world.”

Review: Orbital isn’t the sort of book I am usually drawn to; it has an air of the poetic about it – the lofty, the important. I assumed it would be slow, perhaps ponderous, and likely overwritten. I’m not proud of this preconception and I mention it only because I think it is perhaps the finest novel I have read this year.

Orbital is, at every level, a contradiction. It is a small book, with a cast of a half-dozen characters breathing in each others’ recycled air on the International Space Station. Yet it is also a sprawling book, incorporating the entirety of the planet as the astronauts orbit the earth every 90 minutes. It is beautifully written, but concerned with the banal and quotidian (how the characters eat, sleep and mourn). It is a contained novel, taking place in a 24-hour period, during which, because of their orbit, there are 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets.

More than anything, Orbital – which won the Booker Prize last month – is a subtly insidious book. It somehow weaves its way inside you, catching hold of your mind and, ultimately, your heart. There were moments I found myself wiping away tears I didn’t entirely understand.

My advice? Find an afternoon where you have nothing scheduled. Send your family away. Dim the lights. And read. Orbital is a gift, one that you deserve.—Robert Wiersema

Home Base: Tokyo, Japan

Author’s Take: “I felt that this work contained something vital for me. At the time, though, unfortunately I lacked the skills to convey what that something was.”

Favourite Line: “What in the world happened to me? Why am I, right now, here? I can’t take it in – including this reality I’m a part of.”

Review: Writers – the self-aware ones, at any rate – tend to be unhappy with their work. It doesn’t matter if it was published, became a bestseller or made into a celebrated movie, all they can see are the flaws. Most adhere to the belief that a book is never really finished, just abandoned.

Most writers tamp down these feelings. After all, it’s not like they’re going to get an opportunity to address these perceived shortcomings, right? Haruki Murakami is not like most writers.

In 1980, in the earliest stages of his career, Murakami published a short story called “The City and Its Uncertain Walls,” but he never felt he realized his vision for the piece (it has never been translated or anthologized). A few years later, he reworked the story into half of his novel Hard‑Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, which quickly became part of the celebrated writer’s canon. He now refers to that book as “one response to the original story,” but he still wasn’t satisfied.

More than three decades later, he revisited the material again, spending three years of the pandemic composing his new novel under the original title.

It is rooted in a teenage love story, in which an unnamed young woman (addressed as you by the narrator) describes to her paramour a mysterious, walled town, awash in contradictions, where her true self lives. Shortly after this conversation, she disappears without a trace. The narrator journeys to the town, where he is stripped of his shadow to gain admission, takes a job as a dream reader and meets the object of his affection, who, as she promised, has no memory of him. And that’s just the beginning.

So, is the third time the charm? That’s impossible for readers to determine. Murakami seems satisfied, writing in the afterword, “honestly, I feel relieved.” What I can say is the new novel has much to offer Murakami fans and newcomers alike.—R.W.

Home Base: Sendai, Japan

Author’s Take: “I don’t have any feeling of wanting people to understand Japanese literature or culture. It’s not like I understand that much about Japan, either.”

Favourite Line: “But honestly, what’s going on in this hotel?”

Review: It should be a simple job. All Nanao has to do is deliver a painting to a guest in his room at the tony Winton Palace Hotel in Tokyo. The guest’s daughter has painted his portrait as a gift for his birthday.

What could possibly go wrong? That could be the – ironic – motto for Nanao, a.k.a Ladybug, the unlucky assassin readers first encountered in Bullet Train. (In the film, he was portrayed by a dynamically befuddled Brad Pitt).

True to form, things go wrong almost immediately. During the handoff, Nanao realizes the man in the hotel room is not the man in the painting, and the man in the hotel room quickly ends up dead.

That’s just the opening of a gleefully unhinged novel that will have you turning pages as fast as humanly possible, because Nanao isn’t the only assassin in the hotel that day. Among many others, readers are also introduced to The Six, a group of sadistic easy streeters (think: rich, popular, good-looking kids from high school, but with lethal blowguns) who are searching for Yuka Kamino, because her perfect memory holds the passwords for an underground controller with a dissection fetish (don’t ask). There are Blanket and Pillow, killers and cleaners, whose day keeps getting busier. And there’s a former politician, meeting in the hotel’s restaurant with a journalist, each of whom has a story to tell.

Hotel Lucky Seven is a hilariously ultra-violent thriller, like Looney Tunes on meth with a body count. It’s virtually impossible to take seriously, and you shouldn’t even try. The novel works best when you strap in and enjoy the ride.—R.W.

Home Base: Sag Harbor, N.Y.

Author’s Take: “I very much wanted my book to be not just a suspenseful unfurling of a police manhunt for a killer, but also I wanted it to be a fitting memorial to the four young lives that were lost all too soon.”

Favourite Lines: “He retraces his steps, making his way back up the hill. He is transformed. He has become what he had to become. In little more than 8 minutes, 10 at most, he killed four people. He gets back in the white car and drives off as the faint light of the new day begins to filter through the lead-gray sky, and the blood spreads in thin red rivulets through the house on King Road.”

 Review: In the tradition of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, the Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist and author offers an immersive look into one of the most gripping, if perplexing, true crime stories of the decade: the so-called “Idaho student murders” on Nov. 13, 2022. An expansion of Blum’s definitive coverage in the digital journal AirMail – and required reading for anyone interested in the long-awaited trial set to commence in the summer of 2025 – it runs the gamut: from the shocking stabbings of Kaylee Goncalves, Maddie Mogen, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin to the cross-country manhunt that followed, leading to the arrest of key suspect Bryan Christopher Kohberger (a criminology student!), to the unexpected dark side of Moscow, Idaho, where the killings occurred, to the manner in which the murders have rippled through the lives of their loved ones.

When the Night Comes Falling, written with tightly coiled prose, relies on court documents and Blum’s original interviews, plus imagined monologues. It’s bookended by the stories of two fathers: the first, told through the eyes of Michael Kohberger, and closing with Steve Goncalves. Blum settled on this literary device when he decided the narrative needed to begin with the cross-country trip Bryan took with his dad, mere weeks after the murders, as they returned to Pennsylvania for the Christmas holidays. “A road trip from hell, a father slowly coming to the realization, I believe, that his son might very well be a monster – and yet he is unable to confront his fears,” he writes.

Was Maddie the target, and the others collateral damage? In one of the more provocative parts of the book, Blum, a former Vanity Fair correspondent, makes the case. But what was Bryan Kohberger’s actual connection to this group? And what was his motive? Even with such a richly woven narrative, there are more questions than answers when it comes to this all-too-true tragedy.—Shinan Govani

Home Base:  London, England

Author’s Take: “Each time I publish a book, I find myself looking back further, and different periods of my earlier life – periods I hadn’t ever really focused on – suddenly open up. I used to think the problem would be running out of ideas as you got older. But the opposite is true: there is too much to write about.”

Favourite Line: “The pitch of his voice, glancing light of his accent on English words, wove itself through the air, and the air itself had the shimmer of his presence as he moved behind us – then a neutral feeling, of interest removed, till the waft of the kitchen door and his tart little laugh brought him back in range.” 

Review: Smooth as satin, fine as mohair: a new novel by Alan Hollinghurst, widely regarded as England’s finest living stylist, is an event in the literary world. Our Evenings, his first in seven years, is no exception. Spanning decades, from the 1960s to the recent pandemic – as it traces the twists and travails of Dave Win, a dark-skinned, half-Burmese actor from a humble-stock beginning – it is, in my estimation, his finest since the Booker Prize-winning ruby, A Line of Beauty.

It is bursting with some of the hallmarks of that earlier novel – here, again, we have a fish-out-of-water bloke, bumping into phosphorescent British society and the swirl of old-school gay – but Hollinghurst adds another twist to the braid: sexuality, plus the baggage of race.  It is a story that presents as an elegy, an effortless reminiscence, told episodically and not always linearly: from the hamlet where David grows up with his single mother, Avril (who enters into a same-sex partnership herself); the boarding school that puts him on a certain path, courtesy of a life-changing scholarship; the spires of Oxford; the stages and screens he slips in and out of; parties, too. Along the way? A life intersecting with that of Giles Hadlow, the rather unappealing son of the otherwise benevolent family who provided for David’s education. The two men never become friends. In fact, Giles remains a whisper of a character, but still somehow ubiquitous, even as he becomes a prominent Tory MP and arch-Brexiteer. 

The sequence in the book I found the most evocative, and the moment it truly won me over? When 14-year-old David takes a seaside holiday in Devon with his mother and her new “friend,” Esme. You can feel England’s salty air in this section. The deep feelings of both longing and dislocation are stirring inside our unsure protagonist. 

As the novel picks up speed in the latter part – with life itself becoming more urgent – it hurtles towards the truly heartbreaking. In the process, of course, the novelist who’s been compared to Henry James in his sly characterizations, scatters any number of observations. Life, love and, of course, class. Leave it to Hollinghurst to write: “I couldn’t tell if it was the sort of poshness inseparable from good manners, or the sort that absolves you of any such thing.”—S.G.

Home Base: Kingston, Ont.

Author’s take: “Angus Goes to Austin [is] about a half-billionaire stoner en route to pick up his niece’s commie best friend ahead of an expected nuclear war.”

Favourite Lines: “He knows the actual apocalypse will not be as much fun as the one for which he is now preparing. It will probably be more of the same only he’ll be sitting alone at a different table.”

Review: The first adult novel from the Governor General-nominated YA author is a rollicking road trip that unfolds as nuclear armageddon is nigh. The world powers-that-be have decided to push the button any day now, so the roads are clogged with “war-threat pilgrims” fleeing America’s cities and towns. 

Angus is a pudgy, 50-year-old, pot-smoking, half-billionaire tech wizard with an addiction to fast food and Diet Coke, which explains his excruciating gallstone attacks. He’s built a bunker underneath his Malibu pile, but he’s also hedged his bets with a custom-made, solar-powered, bullet-proof, self-driving RV with drones on the roof. “He knows the actual apocalypse will not be as much fun as the one for which he is preparing,” Withrow writes.

Angus is utterly alone, given he’s screwed over too many friends, lovers and employees, so when intruders break into his mansion, he decides it’s time to accept his beloved niece Merry’s invitation to meet his sister and her husband at their Texas farm, with a detour to Austin to pick up her friend, so they can all decamp for “the cave without a name.” By the time Angus heads out, the reader understands his eccentricities, flaws and the vastness of his marijuana consumption, but, as the ribbon of highway unspools and his apocalypse denial fades, it’s time for a reckoning. His life and its attendant disappointments point to one source, and that’s the obnoxious guy behind the wheel of the armoured RV. 

He starts dialling everyone on his do-not-call list, who reinforce his end-times realization that he is not a nice person. Angus apologizes for his cruel and unsympathetic treatment, but the more serious self-actualization arc is tempered with outlandish set pieces. At a rest stop, for example, Angus launches a drone only to see teenagers flinging the contents of a porta-potty over his RV. 

Withrow’s inventive writing is a delight, full of wordplay and witticisms that have never met a cliché.  I just ordered Scavenged Earth, the second book in the trilogy, which promises post-apocalyptic hijinks as Angus and his family fend off boredom with an imaginary intergalactic dance party and go on a mission to rescue a wall of hair. —Kim Honey

Home Base: Seattle, Wash.

Author’s take: “Cate was really fun to write. She is a psychopath, even though she’s not a killer.”

Favourite Lines: “I didn’t search for the case history on the other peculiar dot on the scatter plot, the other callous and unfeeling child who’d attained a high level of education and income. That one, I knew, was me.”

Review: Neuroscientist Cate Winter, 34, is on the brink of an epic deal to sell her biotech company, which invented a cure for Alzheimer’s, for billions of dollars. Journalists are circling like hawks for any scrap of insight into the reclusive entrepreneur and, in the opening pages, she seduces one of them in a hotel bar. When she discovers who her one-night stand is, she stifles the impulse to kill him.

Cate’s protective of her life story, because she was raised at the Cleckley Institute by neuropsychiatrist Dr. Archibald Montrose, who was trying to prove early intervention could rehabilitate troubled children before they became full-fledged psychopaths. Cate calls herself a “walking proof of concept.”

She thought she was the only Cleckley success story, until Dr. M., her confidante in matters of the heart and mind, shares a new study revealing another outlier, a male identified as No. 98. Told in chapters that alternate points of views from Cate, her ex-boyfriend, Gabriel, and a marine biologist, Luciana, the plot lines converge as Cate tracks No. 98 to Baja California, she alerts Gabriel – a fisheries conservationist – to Luciana’s investigation into mutilated fish showing up Baja waters and Luciana becomes embroiled in an eco-terrorism plot to save the Sea of Cortez from factory fishing. Oh, and there’s a murder in there, too. This psychological thriller delivers several mysteries in one: who is No. 98, who killed a journalist and why are all the fish being slaughtered?

You can tell Eaves, who was born and raised in Vancouver, is a travel journalist, and I loved this book for its twisty plot and insights into psychopaths, but its vivid description of the Baja peninsula and the teeming waters around it was a treat. I’ve never been there, but, at times, I felt like I was seeing moray eels, damselfish, barracuda, porkfish and boxfish through a snorkel mask. —K. H.

Home Base: New York, N.Y.

Author’s Take: “I called my agent and I said, I’m thinking of writing a sequel to The Plot. And she said, “Yes, and we’re going to call it The Sequel. And I just started laughing. It was such a great title and such a great idea that I almost had to do it as a result.”

Favourite Line: “She was alone in the Ripley Inn, a failing establishment in a failing town beside an already failed college that once employed and pretended to educate failed writers, and all was right with the world.”

Review: When I read about The Sequel, the concept was so ingenious I ran out and bought The Plot, and what a treat to read the two novels back to back. In the first book, which came out in 2021 and is now being made into a TV series, Jacob Finch Bonner dies by suicide after someone threatens to expose him as a plagiarist. He stole the idea for his wildly successful third novel, Crib, from Vermont creative-writing student Evan Parker, who died before he could publish it. At the end, Anna, widowed after an all-too-brief marriage to Jake, goes on the Crib book tour in his stead, mainly to ensure the royalties keep rolling into her, the beneficiary of his literary estate. For lack of anything new to say at one book event, she mentions she might try her hand at writing, too. 

“First of all, it wasn’t that hard,” Anna Williams-Bonner explains in the first line of The Sequel, which picks up as Jake’s agent, the much sought-after Matilda Salter, delivers good news: not only will she publish The Afterword, Anna is a “gifted writer.”

As The Sequel unfolds, it becomes increasingly clear someone still knows about Parker’s unpublished manuscript when, a few weeks into Anna’s book tour for The Afterword, the anonymous accusations start up again. That’s when Anna’s backstory starts to unravel. 

The Sequel’s slow drip of small reveals stopped me in my tracks, so much so that I would go back and reread sentences to see if I had imagined the clues. On the first page, as Anna explains how she learned about the publishing industry by watching Jake write Crib, Korelitz writes, “she’s come away from it with a highly nuanced understanding of how that extraordinary book had been made, its specific synthesis of fiction (his) and fact (her own).” Her own fact? Wait! What? Then this: “It had been years since a living person on the planet had been fully aware of who she was, and that she was not a childless woman in her late thirties brought up in Idaho, named Anna Bonner-Williams, and before that, Anna Williams.” 

The writing is sly, hilarious and meta-referential. When Matilda suggests Anna should write a sequel to The Afterword, Anna replies, “but they’re never as good as the first books, are they?” 

As Anna’s story is revealed and – like Jake in The Plot – she embarks on a quest to expose their tormentors, the bodies pile up and the suspense builds to a denouement I didn’t see coming, even though it was right there in front of my eyes, all along.—K.H.

Home Base: London, U.K.

Author’s Take: “The hard part about writing this book is that at any given time my tastebuds are triggered, I must run to the kitchen to eat.”

Favourite Line: “Before I hobnob at the palace, here I am scrubbing pots and pans and wrangling a five-year-old into a school uniform.”

Review: Author, actor and gourmand Stanley Tucci beckons us to sit at his table. Over the course of one year, we join him in this engaging chronicle of gastronomic delights and disappointments, from attending a formal tea with HRH King Charles at Buckingham Palace to the open-air food markets of Rome where, while on location for the movie Conclave, he followed co-star Isabella Rossellini to a secret dining room run by Carmelite nuns.

A seasoned traveller, Tucci reveals a hatred for flying. “The food on the plane was not even food.” He cheekily advises that five-star hotels often mean one star: “The next time you travel to the Italian peninsula, be on the lookout for a twenty-five-star hotel.” There are rules to partaking in his hospitality, too. Actor Sam Rockwell arrives early with an unexpected guest and is ordered to wait in his car, “until the appointed time of dinner.”  

When in-laws Emily Blunt (his wife Felicity’s sister) and husband John Krasinski bring their children to the Tucci family home for birthdays and holidays, the kitchen – complete with a personally designed line of cookware – is where the celebrations begin and end. A quiet moment is captured when, late at night, the author admits to eating by the light of the fridge.  

Surprisingly, Tucci is a survivor of throat cancer and so he is limited to what he can digest. He avoids rich meat dishes, but Marinara tomato sauce is a household staple and artichokes, especially fried and served in a paper bag, are his passion. 

A brush with his own mortality, aging parents and devotion to his loving family make him thoughtful. He believes food not only brings people together but makes life better. The reader is bound to agree. —Mary Jackman

Home Base: New York, N.Y.

Author’s Take: “A Hitchcock fan, this book gave me an excuse to delve deeper into his oeuvre. Everybody is a suspect and the reader is warned, disastrous things ensue.”

Favourite Lines: “He turns the light back on and peers around the room, logging every detail. His stomach flips when he reaches the window. Peeking out beneath the curtains is a pair of boots.”

Review: With hand-over-heart suspense, the Hitchcock Hotel, set in the New England mountains, demands your careful attention to clues and misdirection. Danger is quickly promised when the hotel’s devoted manager assures the nervous proprietor, who is waiting in the parking lot for his former best friends, “I won’t let them hurt you.” But, Alfred Smettle is not afraid. On the contrary, he thinks of them as playthings – “dolls in his dollhouse.” And from then on, the reader is afraid.  

National bestselling author and finalist for the Edgar award for Darling Rose Gold, Stepahnie Wrobel has crafted this, her third thriller/murder mystery, with talented ease. She chooses to let each of the seven characters narrate their own story. Secrets and simmering grudges are slowly revealed through flashbacks to college days spent closely together and – 16 years later – the truth of guilty personal struggles. A pall hangs over the reunion. 

In a classic Hitchcockian move, when a crow flies into the dining room and attacks Julius, one of the friends invited for the three-day festivities, he questions what the other characters must be thinking, “Is Alfred getting even with us?”  

With clever references to the suspense genre, a secret attic, locked closets, a leaf-filled pond in the woods and darkening fall days, clues are dropped and unpredictable events take place. A neverending creeping sensation continues to swell until the last chapter when we can breathe again. Or, can we? – M.J.