Literary critic Donna Bailey Nurse calls this debut novel by a social justice advocate who lives in Hamilton, Ont., “one of the most penetrating dramas of Black experience in all of Canadian literature.” It’s a stunning read, using split timelines that switch between Cyril Rowntree, a Jamaican immigrant studying at Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University), and Edward, a mixed-race child in the early 1920s whose story he is researching.

Bemrose, a Giller-nominated Canadian arts journalist, returns to the small southwestern Ontario mill town setting of his acclaimed 2003 debut, The Island Walkers. This time, he rewinds to explore the lives of local residents during the Great War and its aftermath, with a cast of characters profoundly changed from serving in the war and events at home.

This Ottawa writer’s immersive debut is the love child of Almost Famous and Daisy Jones & the Six. It follows college dropout Faun Novak on a Greyhound to Los Angeles in the summer of 1977, as she joins a group of women who follow the folk-rock band Holiday Sun. Faun obsessively snaps Polaroids to chronicle the seedy glamour of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll – and, like this novel, captures the dark corners and dangers of fame.

Emery, the B.C.-born, longtime film publicist (now in her mid-80s), co-writes this cozy mystery with Base, a retired showbiz journalist, inspired by Emery’s years working in the press office of London’s illustrious Savoy Hotel. The intrigue, set against the backdrop of celebrity-studded London in 1968, involves an inquisitive young Canadian PR gal (ahem) investigating the mysterious death of a hotel guest. This, while she navigates a shadowy protective detail that shields the Royal Family from scandal and, in between copious glasses of Buck’s Fizz, handles the comings and goings of Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and Noël Coward, who appear in sustained cameos. Imagine Agatha Christie’s At Bertram’s Hotel, if Jane Marple was a Swinging ’60s London lass in Mary Quant miniskirts.

In her sardonic memoir, the poet and essayist (daughter of notable Canadian actors/playwrights ) tackles the ups and downs of the gig economy. As she tries to make a living as a writer while preserving her soul, the various and extremely disparate jobs are fodder for her insightful and often-funny observations about artistic compromise and identity – questions that will resonate whether you’re a Millennial or a baby boomer.

English widow Florence, an artist, confronts long-buried secrets she shared with her old friend Lilli in the 1950s at a French finishing school. The British-Canadian author, who lives in Switzerland, has crafted a story about friendship, forgiveness and women who fight for their own path in life, especially with her eccentric and dynamic 80-year-old main character, who has lived a full and impactful life.

The Toronto-based author sets this suspenseful story in the 1970s in her native South Africa, where an elderly woman named Jacqueline recounts events from her previous life as a privileged white artist and homemaker living in suburban Johannesburg. Jacqueline divulges how she and her husband briefly harboured an anti-apartheid dissident in this deliberately paced novel, which grapples with the politics and fallout of resistance, guilt and silence.

The hives on the roof of the author’s high school in in Ottawa were the original inspiration for this novel that’s been called a “Canadian farmhouse gothic.” Melissa is trying to keep the family farm going when her boyfriend Beck returns after a brief but strange disappearance, and with only fuzzy memories of having lived in a bee colony. (Yes, you read that correctly.) The nature of Beck’s lost time is the central mystery in this unusual novel about truth, perseverance, co-operative societies and environmental themes, vividly told by Welch, who’s now based in Kamloops, B.C.

Peck, a North Vancouver-based editor and ghostwriter-turned-writer, chose the premise of a major earthquake rocking the city as the backdrop for her debut novel, in order to explore both the scientific what ifs (in consultation with a seismic researcher) and the effect it would have on residents in a city with such income disparity.

The chaos of catastrophe throws unlikely people together in a West Vancouver waterfront mansion, and touches a gay couple, a tech tycoon’s family and a Ukrainian caregiver who fled the 2014 Russian invasion of the Crimean Peninsula.

Dunn, an award-winning Toronto television writer for Degrassi and Little Mosque on the Prairie, has family ties to the community she writes about in this funny and wise novel that has been likened to the work of Anne Tyler. Avid birder Paisley, whose Toronto apartment building is about to be demolished, returns home to the tight-knight community of Amherst Island (on Lake Ontario between Kingston and Prince Edward County). The stress of the situation exacerbates her obsessive-compulsive disorder (counting in sets of eight features prominently), a thread the novel explores with empathy as it toggles between recent past and Paisley’s early-1980s teen years.

Charlie, a 13-year-old boy born with intersex traits, is living in downtown Winnipeg with his bohemian artist mother Jules and their chosen-family community when his beloved grandfather Oscar (a retired bespoke tailor) decides to throw him a bar mitzvah. Thanks to their interactions, both hilarity and heartwarming tenderness are sure to ensue in the latest novel by the Winnipeg poet and author, whose previous works have won the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction, the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award, and the Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award.

It has to be Malcolm McDowell and Son of a Critch’s influence that this humble saga of a dysfunctional working-class Newfoundland clan now tops my TBR pile. Sudden illness disrupts the family’s precarious balance, and I’m looking forward to how Doyle, a writer from the Goulds, N.L., unpacks the intricacies of masculinity in the family, and the community.