Between 2010-2013, former journalist Greenwood was a correspondent in Jerusalem covering the Middle East for The Guardian. The resulting novel – dubbed “Catch-22 on speed” is a darkly piercing satire of the war news media industry. It’s unflinching at how unfolding crisis became just another entertainment (much as outlined in the stellar movie September 5), delivering moments of pause in between morsels of biting humour at media complicity through the lens of a young female journalist sent out to cover her first war. (Aug. 22)

“After 30 devoted years of marriage, Ellie Endicott is blindsided by her husband’s appeal for divorce.” This pivotal moment of duplicity begins in 1938 Surrey, in which the wronged wife takes the Bentley and heads to the South of France with her housekeeper and elderly friend in tow. Adventure awaits the trio when the car breaks down, stranding them in a fishing hamlet — providing the opportunity to rent a hillside villa. Bowen, the pseudonym of California-based British expat Janet Quin-Harkin, 82, better known for her mystery novels, offers a sublimely escapist stand-alone historical novel about second acts, resilience and loyalty. (Aug. 5)

Aspiring present-day novelist Jed Rosenthal begins exploring a tragedy lost in the wake of JFK’s 1963 assassination: the unsolved November 1963 murder of Cookie Kupcinet, a Hollywood starlet and daughter of Chicago newspaper columnist Irv Kupcinet. Jed’s a stand in for American writer Orner, chair of the English department at Darmouth, who has been obsessed with this real-life unsolved murder for 15 years. Orner uses the sensationalized elements episodically, utilizing the unconventional structure to explore the nature of storytelling and probe questions of friendship and family. “I decided to put myself into a situation where a narrator is obsessed with something that no one else is obsessed with,” he tells Publisher’s Weekly. “It’s a story of how a story can’t let you go.” (Aug. 12)

Michael and Frances Hawksby are among the many children sent away to safety during the London Blitz in 1940, dispatched to Canadian relatives to escape the German bombings. They’re never heard from again. An investigator is hired to find the missing children and finds they vanished in Northern Ontario after reaching their aunt and uncle’s remote lodge. A subtle ghost story, the psychological horror steadily builds as he explores the wilds and woods. It’s an unnerving debut from the seasoned Vancouver-born, Toronto-based showrunner and television writer (Cardinal, The Colony), most recently co-exec producer of police procedural Saint-Pierre. (Aug. 12)

In this unsettling novel-in-stories by Chinese Canadian author Ma, China is the last superpower. It has conquered America and renamed it Qin and in this near-future dystopia, other people’s memories are a hot product, bought and sold for pleasure and entertainment. With a pandemic in one interconnected story that leads to an interrogation of governmental abuse, and authoritarian regimes controlling interracial relationships in another, Ma raises timely, thought-provoking questions about how far people’s lives can be modified and commodified by technology. (Aug. 12)

Not only is this mind-bender bang on trend with book cover design (as the New York Times highlighted recently), it’s also startlingly in keeping with modern literary trends of domestic suspense. As married professors circle infidelity, their situation is fictionalized (barely!) by a graduate student in her thesis. Things get juicy as Adrian explores the boundaries of student-teacher intimacy and the nature of betrayal, and whose story they are to tell, making it one of the brainier poolside reads of the season. (Aug. 12)

Identity, belonging and the outsider perspective at the intersection of several complicated legacies form the crux of the award-winning CBC Radio host’s lush (and at times harrowing) coming-of-age story. Taking place in the hothouse environment of 1990s South Carolina, Ophelia Blue Rivers is a mixed-race Black girl growing up in a Cherokee community with her grandmother, before being whisked away to the city and another community she doesn’t quite feel part of either. The book is tipped as equal parts Queenie and Frying Plantain. (Aug. 19)

Now seems a good moment to return to this cult classic, a black comedy from 1981 about a dysfunctional married couple consciously uncoupling in the most destructive possible way. The 1989 film adaptation with Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner leaned into the era’s battle of the sexes in their bitter fight to the finish, whereas this month’s buzzy new reimagining (starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman, in theatres Aug. 29) sees it as a divorcing couple fighting to stay together. The reissue arrives just in time to make up one’s own mind. (Aug. 19)

The pleasures of Montefiore are as reliable as a warm summer breeze — and the Anne Murray song with which her latest shares a name. The first in a new series has time-travel sprinklings worthy of Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander, and the international bestselling British author combines gothic mystery, spirituality, and time-slip historical fiction. The dual timeline is set at a manor on the Cornish coast, casting a spell between the present day, when timeshifter Pixie is investigating the disappearance of a child a century prior. Downton Abbey and The Gilded Age creator Julian Fellowes has pronounced her work “remarkable and compelling.” (Aug. 19)

The Giller Prize-winning Canadian author follows up Reproduction with a glimpse into the workings of a fraying marriage, laid bare after a visit from wildly happy couple friends. Middle-aged construction worker Beckett and fitness instructor Princess think they need to recapture interest and set out too woo one another back into desire, one on a course of entrepreneurship, the other with physical self-improvement and drastic beauty interventions. They may, however, end up further apart. As slyly funny as it is humorous, the novel balances its dissections of intimacy, insecurity and the mysteries of love. (Aug. 26)

There finally arrives an English translation of this touching #1 bestseller in France (translated into 37 languages, including Braille). Every week for a year, 10-year-old Mona and her grandfather Dade visit a work of art at a Paris museum. Both have sight challenges: Dade lives with partial blindness and Mona has episodes of momentary vision loss. Their rendezvous over Klimt, Kahlo, Cézanne and other greats deepen their relationship to one another and the world around them in a thoughtful tribute to the power of art as a guide to self-reflection (doubling as a delightful art history session, which the author teaches in Paris). (Aug. 26)

With her fourth must-read, rule-breaking novel the renegade Irish writer goes back and forth in time, tracking a seismic event and its effect on the relationship between Eily and Stephen, who is twice her age. The couple’s story is told in observational, stream of consciousness style through her eyes, unconventional and frequently in metaphors (ones where emotions are written as elliptical thoughts). As ever McBride’s signature is language that is poetic and hypnotic. (Aug. 26)

I love a short read – especially in summer (such satisfaction!) – and doubly so when it’s ruminative. In this exquisite elegiac story Starnone, widely regarded to be Italy’s greatest living author (and who many suspect of being Elena Ferrante) has an 82-year-old Neapolitan author reflect on his life’s work and relationships. In his seaside town he is everywhere reminded of the past and people, prompting rueful recollections of his mother, his lovers and accomplishments. A deceptively simple slim masterpiece. (Aug. 29)