Summer Time Hotlist
The long, hot and hazy days of summer are here and the time is right to take a book to the park, the cottage, the beach, an air-conditioned café or a sun-soaked patio. The first half of the year has certainly yielded some gems in every genre under the CanLit umbrella. Here are our picks of the best books for your summertime reading.
BY JEFFREY DUPUIS
Chrysalis – Anuja Varghese
House of Anansi
Anuja Varghese proves that she is a powerful voice in Canadian fiction with this debut collection. Whether the stories are set amongst burning funeral pyres or in the local shopping mall, Varghese's strong characterization and ability to create real human desires builds a powerful emotional core at the centre of every story. This collection works for fans of genre fiction and literary fiction alike.
Varghese delightfully shatters whatever academic barrier exists between literary and genre fiction with stories of gods and monsters, wraiths and witchcraft and everyday people struggling. The layers to each story go so deep, the characters’ inner lives portrayed so vividly, that the fantastic elements take a backseat to the journey that we the readers are eager to follow. Chrysalis is sure to satisfy readers of all stripes.
Burr – Brooke Lockyer
Nightwood Editions
Grief is a subject so multifaceted that we will see thousands of permutations of it in literature. The trick for any author tackling the topic is to explore it in a way that is both unique and fresh, devoid of clichés, oversimplification or trauma porn. Lockyer presents grief (mainly) through the eyes and heart of her thirteen-year-old protagonist, Jane, an outlook very different from those of us fortunate enough to have only lost our nearest and dearest in our adulthood.
Lockyer also shows the world of Burr through other perspectives, that of Jane’s mother, Meredith, and even the town itself. The shifts between perspectives not only rounds out the setting of the novel, but adds layers and tension as the story builds to its climax.
Burr is a tense, nuanced portrayal of grief through the lens of adolescence and a fine addition to Southern Ontario Gothic literature. This very strong debut novel is subtly haunting yet thoroughly enjoyable.
Instructions for the Drowning – Steven Heighton
Biblioasis
Mortality and vulnerability are front and centre in Instructions for the Drowning, Steven Heighton’s posthumous short story collection. Accidents, unintended consequences, the best and the worst intentions drive these stories, which both revisit familiar themes in Heighton’s work and explore new territory. Those seeking a short story collection that will leave a mark on them for a long time to come need look no further.
Writing in his prose style that is both spare and electric, Heighton delivers keen observations on both the inner and outer lives of his characters, many of whom wear the scarlet letter of their pasts for us to see. As emphasized in the title story, the book reminds us that there is no roadmap to life, and we watch Heighton’s characters stumble haplessly, often confusing protecting themselves with protecting their loved ones. Heighton has left an indelible mark on the realm of Canadian words and letters, with his poetry, fiction and nonfiction. This collection further solidifies his importance to Canadian Literature.
Sunset and Jericho – Sam Wiebe
Harbour Publishing
It can be a challenge for crime writers to keep well-trod territory fresh. With hard-bitten PI stories, a staple of the genre, continuing to innovate while delivering what the audience demands is no easy feat. Sam Wiebe, with Sunset and Jericho, gives crime fiction fans everything they could want and more.
The fourth book in Wiebe’s Wakeland Series, Wiebe’s ex-cop turned PI takes on two gigs at once. First, he is hired by the mayor of Vancouver to locate her missing brother. Then, he is hired by a transit cop to locate her service weapon, which was stolen when she was assaulted during the course of her duties. It is always fascinating for fans of the genre to see how a PI or civilian gets roped into a murder investigation in these stories set in Canada, where PIs typically have nothing to do with murders. The way Wiebe fuses these two seemingly disparate storylines into a thrilling, page-turning plot about abductions, murder and a class war demonstrate a mastery on the author’s part.
Sunset and Jericho reads like a classic, hard-boiled detective novel in a modern setting, with sensibilities for a modern audience. Anyone looking for a detective thriller set on the mean streets of a Canadian city need look no further.
Circle Tour – Eva Tihanyi
Inanna Publications
Circle Tour is Eva Tihanyi’s ninth collection of poetry, and with it she pulls the reader along on a journey from the outer, material world into the something deeper, transcendent. This collection, separated into three parts, drills down into the soul, into the act of creation and creativity, as though boring into the Earth, breaking first through the crust, then the outer core and finally the core itself.
The first section, Outer Circle, sees an exploration of creativity and its effects on the outside world, the public sphere. Inner Circle, conversely, explores inner lives, personal relationships, the world behind closed doors.
Circle Tour collects poems written over a five-year period which encompassed the pandemic (some published originally in The Quarantine Review), a fitting time to look back on our public life as well as personal relationships and who we are as individuals in isolation. Tihanyi puts on a poetry master class with this collection, showing the versatility of the form.
Wait Softly, Brother – Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer
Wolsak and Wynn
With her fourth novel Wait Softly, Brother, Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer sets a trap for her readers. The book begins with a familiar premise. A writer returns home, her marriage in shambles, and hopes to discover about her life, family, existence by writing about family’s history. Immediately we think of a home in the country, quilts, steam rising from a cup of tea drank on a porch, a trunk filled with sepia-toned photographs in the attic. What we get is something else entirely.
Determined to write about her brother, Wulf, who was stillborn, the protagonist embarks on a project of autofiction. This questionable endeavour is thrown off course when the protagonist’s mother, not understanding the project her daughter has embarked on, provides her with a collection of old letters from a relative who fought in the American civil war. The story of this relative begins to intermingle with the protagonist’s in strange and unexpected ways.
The novel plays with autofiction, metafiction, mythology and the human desire to dig up our roots, for better or worse. In this case, the result is technical marvel bursting with originality. Kuitenbrouwer, armed with a PhD in English and an encyclopaedically-long list of award nominations for her previous books, proves that she is continuing to offer fiction that expands our understanding and challenges our assumptions.
On Class – Deborah Dundas
Biblioasis
In a time of soaring wealth and income inequality, one would assume that class would be a frequent topic of discussion. Sadly, it seems the term has disappeared from the political discourse. It’s a subject we talk around, but seldom talk about. In On Class, Toronto Star books columnist Deborah Dundas tackles this tough subject with a two-pronged approach.
Most books on this subject are written by economists or political scientists, and they are filled with alarming statistics and academic jargon. This approach is helpful and has its merits, but it doesn’t tell us what it is like for those living just above, on, or below the poverty line. On Class provides the academic data (and the end notes to prove it), but also gives readers a glimpse into worlds they may be unfamiliar with.
Supplementing her own experiences of growing up poor with those of others, we get a very intersectional view of life not often represented, or at least, not represented by those who actually live it. Dundas takes apart the meritocratic myths foisted upon us by executives and the heirs of old money, using data and research to deconstruct the illusions that we have been taught to believe are objective reality.
The only drawback is the length. As part of Biblioasis’s Field Notes series, the book ends far too soon. If we hope to stem rising inequality and build a more just society where everyone can participate in the economy on more even footing, this book is a starting point to a conversation that must be had with as many people as possible. On Class might be a quick read, but it is definitely an important one.
The Supply Chain – Aaron Schneider
Crowsnest Books
Schneider’s debut novel is considered “experimental” for its mélange of prose and poetry, however it does not carry the baggage that often comes along with that term. The use of poetry in this novel is intuitive, not distracting from the narrative, but adding dimension to it. Those who shy away from experimental works in favour of a more conventional paperback will not feel left out from Schneider’s storytelling.
The Supply Chain tells the story of Matt Nowak, an employee at a weapons manufacturer in London, Ontario, where armoured personel carriers are assembled and sent overseas, mainly to Saudi Arabia. Although filled with a beautifully vivid prose style, we are given a technical breakdown of the supply chain involved in building these weapons in a small Ontario city and sending them to the other side of the world to be used against Yemen by a brutal regime. And rather skillfully, Schneider gives us a supply chain-style breakdown of his protagonist’s life, going back generations and bringing us to the present and the recent birth of his child.
The Supply Chain is an ambitious, swing-for-the-fences kind of novel that revitalizes the form. It feels like a stroke of luck to come across books like this, which don’t come by too often. Schneider’s next challenge, to inject such fresh and innovative writing into a sophomore release, will be daunting.
Rebellion Box – Hollay Ghadery
Radiant Press
Great writing, whether that be fiction or poetry, reaches deep inside the reader, implanting something visceral that wasn’t there before. Thoughts, feelings, experiences that might be completely foreign to their existence are somehow there now. It’s not that they now know what the author knows, but there is an impression, an image seen from the corner of the eye, an idea.
The poems in Hollay Ghadery’s recent collection Rebellion Box excel at that kind of transference. Although they lean away from universality and toward specificity, they convey the emotions and impressions of lived experience. Ghadery explores motherhood, womanhood, aging, family history and other subjects of a personal and intimate nature through verse.
Rebellion Box reminds us of the importance poetry still holds in our age of streaming services and doom-scrolling, where devices on our wrists remind us to stand up and go for a walk. The joys and sorrows, the wonder and the mess of modern life, are all laid bare in this collection, resonating deeply across demographic divides. The visceral impact of these poems is so strong that one almost doesn’t see the technical mastery that undergirds their beauty.
JAJ: A Haida Manga – Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas
Douglas & McIntyre
It might take as much text as this book contains to accurately describe it. Even then, that would not do justice to the experience of the book itself. “A Haida Manga,” a descriptor broad enough to span the Pacific, still offers only a hint as to what JAJ is.
JAJ tells the story of the first contact between the Indigenous Peoples of the Pacific Northwest and the European colonizers and the disastrous impacts of brutal colonial practices. However, one must consider the adage “the medium is the message.” Yahgulanaas blends traditional and modern art styles, drawing inspiration from Japanese comics, Chinese brush techniques and North Pacific Iconography. The traditional box form of the comic panels has been replaced by the flowing shapes commonly found in art forms of the North Pacific. In fact, if each panel were removed from the book and assembled into one image, it would resemble the woven Nakheen/Naaxiin robes used in ceremonies by the Haida, Tlingat, Chilkat and other Northwest Coast peoples.
There’s a dream-like quality to Yahgulanaas’s work, and the art and story flows like a river. The subject matter is often quite difficult, our history quite ugly, but the story the book tells is necessary and presented in an unprecedented way. The end result feels cathartic, changing the reader’s outlook and galvanizing them so seek change.