Home Base: Boulder, Colorado

Author’s Take: “I didn’t set out to write about the Marias Massacre. I did set out to come at the buffalo hunters, and I knew that I wanted to take them down on the page over and over again, just punish them the way they had punished the herds, and by association, us.”

Favourite Line: “What I am is the Indian who can’t die. I’m the worst dream America ever had.”

Review: I have long been a fan of Blackfeet Native American writer and teacher Stephen Graham Jones – I firmly believe him to be one of the finest writers working in the horror genre today. Even that fondness, however, did little to prepare me for just how bowled over I would be by his new novel.

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is a nested novel. It begins in 2012, when “a day worker reaches into the wall of the parsonage his crew’s revamping and pulls a piece of history up.” It’s a journal written by Arthur Beaucarne, a Lutheran pastor in Miles City, Montana, preserved for a century. The journal makes its way to Etsy Beaucarne, his great-great-great-granddaughter, a struggling academic, who, after establishing some historical context, begins to transcribe the document.

Beaucarne the pastor, haunted by his past, writes of his encounters with a mysterious “Indian gentleman,” who attends services in black clerical robes and dark glasses, and who inveigles Beaucarne to hear his confession. The narrative then shifts between the visitor – Good Stab – who recounts the events of his life, and Beaucarne, who finds his own life increasingly affected by both the historical tragedies he is hearing about and by the monstrous entity that is Good Stab himself. Good Stab, you see, can’t die, and he can survive only by drinking blood, which he obtains, in the main, from the white hunters who are massacring the buffalo herds, taking their skins and leaving the meat to rot.

While initially somewhat daunting – Good Stab’s language and worldview may frustrate readers early on – The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is both a dazzling achievement, and a powerful, compelling read. While the novel is historical, documenting the western conquest from an underheard perspective, it manages to bring that history into the present. “The past,” as Faulkner once said, “is never dead. It isn’t even past.” Jones achieves this feat through a fidelity to both the history itself and to his characters: The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is at times brutally violent, while at the same time achingly sad, blood-soaked and tragic, horrifying and heartbreaking.

It’s not just Jones’ masterpiece, nor is it simply a horror masterpiece: it’s a full-fledged masterpiece, full-stop, and likely one of the finest novels you will read this year. —Robert Wiersema

Author’s Home Base: Grand Rapids, Michigan

Author’s take: “I’m standing there, and the professor says, ‘Look for signs of life and death and resurrection in the compost pile.’ Deep underneath all the rotting vegetables and mouldy fruit was something slowly transformed into good soil we could amend the garden with. That was a miraculous realization of something that happens in nature that we get to participate in.”

Favourite lines: “Partway through seminary, a friend planted a seed: What if you combined theological education with sustainable agriculture? It made sense. There were so many agrarian tales in the Bible, and so many of Jesus’ stories assumed an intimate relationship with farming. Perhaps a farm could double as a classroom.”

Review: It’ll be interesting to see where bookstores file Jeff Chu’s Good Soil. Part memoir, part philosophical rumination on land, food and faith with history lessons and Chinese lore salted in for good measure, the book checks many thematic boxes. But it hangs together thanks to Chu’s unfussy prose

and clear-sighted view of the world he occupies. In his late 30s, Chu quit his journalist job to attend Princeton Theological Seminary’s “Farminary,” a 21-acre working farm “where students cultivate the earth while examining life’s biggest questions.” There, alongside a group of spiritually inclined others, Chu did just that… while also pondering garlic, chickens, the vital importance of worms and his religion’s view of his homosexuality, among other things. Atheists might squirm at the book’s pervasive Christian bent, but it’s hard to argue with the author’s offbeat approach or with the insights his efforts yielded. —Kim Hughes

Home Base:Vienna, Austria

Author’s Take: “My aim was to try to be as honest as possible about what it’s actually like to be a male body in the world – to be a body that has its own demands, and how you manage, accommodate, satisfy and fail to satisfy those demands, and what experiences that leads you into.”

Favourite Line: “As long as no one knows about it, it’s like it isn’t really happening.”

Review: When readers first meet István, the protagonist of Booker-nominated writer David Szalay’s new novel Flesh, he is 15 years old, living in Hungary and talking with a friend about sex – namely that neither of them have had it yet. This quickly changes when István begins an affair, almost despite himself, with an older, married woman who lives in the same building. The affair leads to tragedy, which leads to István joining the army, and so his journey begins.

At every step in this rags to riches to rags story, István seems a helpless passenger in his life. A man of few words, and seemingly reconciled (or resigned) to the shifts and changes with which life confronts him, István is drawn from Hungary to London, from work as a doorman at a strip club to life as a member of the one percent, all seemingly without conscious thought or volition.

While this would normally be the recipe for a dull novel (I can hear my fellow creative writing instructors intoning “Your protagonist must be active”), Flesh is a dazzling exploration not only of contemporary manhood but of contemporary life and culture as a whole. It’s a picaresque novel, with each chapter almost a self-contained short story, focussing on one period of István’s life, a sweeping chronicle of a life experienced, rather than lived.

Adding to the unsettling feeling of the narrative, Szalay writes with a pared, almost surgical minimalism. Sentences are stripped of ornamentation (there are few, if any, adjectives or adverbs in the entire book), lending a cool austerity to a novel stripped of sentimentality or overt emotion. The effect is powerful, forcing the reader to respond, to fill in the emotional context of each individual moment, to read into István’s minimal dialogue. It’s a unique approach, resulting in a novel unlike anything I have read in recent memory.—RW

Author’s Home Base: New York

Author’s take: “The book chronicles the years it took for me to finally grow up. I guess it took me 25 years to become an adult.”

Favourite lines: “Ferran Adrià had the distracted, put-upon air of a guy who was three pegs down the org chart from the Dalai Lama.”

Review: Hilarious and heartbreaking are prized attributes in a memoir. Both are hallmarks of chef and author Laurie Woolever’s breathtakingly candid new book, which is narratively propelled by her stint working with celebrity chef Mario Batali prior to his #MeToo comeuppance; by her role as assistant to (and cookbook co-author with) food/travel TV superstar Anthony Bourdain until his suicide; and perhaps most searingly, her descent into addiction which detonated her marriage as Woolever slept, indiscriminately and frequently, with other men, some strangers or of highly dubious distinction, like the deodorant-averse cook who smelled “like an old sausage left in a hot car.” Care and Feeding is packed with dishy stories of kitchen malfeasance – ergo the hilarious parts – and stoned and drunk crashes, which Woolever, 50, recounts with a naked self-loathing that’s sometimes hard to bear. Luckily, she took copious notes and lived to tell, creating what might be described as a cross between Mary Karr’s aching alcoholic memoir Lit and Stephanie Danler’s saucy kitchen confidential Sweetbitter. In other words, absolutely riveting.—KH

Home Base: Phoenix, Arizona

Author’s Take: “From the first novel that I wrote, I wanted to write about the Nigerian American experience because I don’t feel like it’s discussed enough.”

Favourite Line: “I can’t be normal, so I’ll be something else.”

Review: It seems strange to consider Death of the Author to be Nnedi Okorafor’s break-out novel. After all, the Nigerian-American writer (she refers to herself as “Naijamerican”) has won or been nominated for all of the major science fiction and fantasy awards (including the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy and Locus) for works like the bestselling Binti trilogy, Remote Control, Who Fears Death and others. But Death of the Author isn’t a genre book; rather, it’s a straightforward, literary, metafictional novel, which sold to William Morrow in a seven-figure deal. 

It is, to put it frankly, an amazing book.

Zelu, the protagonist of Death of the Author, is “a 32-two-year-old paraplegic woman with an MFA in creative writing,” daughter of Nigerian immigrants, prone to smoking too much weed and sleeping with too many different men. When she attends her sister’s wedding in Tobago, she hits a new low – fired by phone from her adjunct teaching job (she had the temerity to tell a student the truth about his work), and sidelined, as usual, by her family. She responds by smoking a joint and starting to write. The result is a novel called Rusted Robots which – to her shock – not only sells at auction in a seven-figure deal, but is also made into a film (another seven figures) and becomes a bestseller.

And then things start to get strange.

Death of the Author is a novel about the weirdness that happens when we get what we want (especially if we feel – or have been made to feel – that we don’t deserve it), and a scathing examination of modern wired-in culture. It’s also a wonderfully complex novel. Incorporating passages from Rusted Robots, Okorafor is able to deftly (and subtly) explore the way fiction is a reflection of the writer (the novel is a rebuke to Roland Barthes’ essay “The Death of the Author” which refuted biographical roots and authorial intentions for a text) as elements of Zelu’s life appear, in fractured form, in her novel of a world populated solely by robots.

The novel becomes more interesting – and even more effective – when one pauses to consider its overlap with Okorafor’s own life. Her experience with paralysis following a spinal fusion surgery when she was 19, for example, is refracted into Zelu’s experience as a paraplegic. And one can’t help but assume that at least some of the family dynamics Zelu faces are drawn from the writer’s own experience. The result is a delightful nesting box of a book, a fictional hall of mirrors that simultaneously folds in on itself and explodes outward.—RW

Home Base: Cincinnati, Ohio
Author’s Take: “These survival tactics that we develop and that come out in our relationships are not actually serving us. I think every time I write a new heroine, I’m kind of trying on a new survival tactic in a way and seeing the flaws in that.”

Favourite Lines: “How many of your girlfriends have been under five three?” He stares at me for a second. Longer than a second. I think I might have broken his brain…” “Like if you’re an exceptionally tall person, does biology just kind of nudge you toward being with someone who takes up less room?”

Review: Whether it’s friends to lovers, nemesis to lovers or exes to lovers, Emily Henry has got the market cornered on contemporary will theys or won’t theys. In her latest, Great Big Beautiful Life, she returns with a competitors-to-lovers story, in which two writers, Alice and Hayden, are vying for the opportunity to pen the memoir of a reclusive media heiress. The novel switches back and forth between the time Alice spends interviewing her subject (which steps pretty heavily into the territory of Henry’s own BookTok competitor Taylor Jenkins Reid) and scenes where Alice and Hayden run into each other – and try to deny their attraction – in the small town they’re temporarily calling home. And throughout both storylines we learn how their respective family dynamics led them to where they are now while continuing to hold them back. Henry’s always had a way with witty dialogue and flirty banter, but this book sees her upping her game in the steaminess department as Alice and Hayden’s run-ins lead to roaming hands, making the interview chapters something you race through in order to savour the scenes of the mounting sexual tension as it builds to a great big beautiful finale. —Shanda Deziel