Sublime prose fuels story of expat’s flight

“The Mission House,” Carys Davies, Scribner Welsh author Davies is a singular voice; her 2017 short-story collection “The Redemption of Galen Pike” won multiple awards and was a Star Top 10 book of the year. This novel tells the story of an expat fleeing the U.K. for post-colonial India. Davies’ writing is sublime, taking us, in one instance, from a bomb explosion in London to India and saying something about life’s trajectory in a few lines: “he sounded distracted, as though he wasn’t actually listening; as if he was already thinking about something else entirely, and the only reason he’d been talking just now about his past was because it seemed so far away, and because even its halfanticipated explosions — like noisy librarians and vanishing dictionaries — no longer had any power to frighten him or make him unhappy.” Prose to disappear into.

“Night Watch: The Vet Suite,” Gillian Wigmore, Invisible Publishing Three novellas in quite different forms make up Wigmore’s portrait of rural veterinarians. “Love, Ramona,” “Bare Limbs in Summer Heat” and “Night Watch,” the latter comprised of small pieces, running from a few pages to just one line. The rural life of a veterinarian provides the backdrop to stories that delve deep into life, love, marriage. Wigmore’s father was a vet and she calls this — at just 142 pages, a compact volume of stories — “part of my effort to understand growing up near my dad’s rural vet practice, close to life and death.” Once again, Invisible has an eye for a quirky story and beautiful writing, which make so many of their books a delight to pick up.

Consent is a topic that’s being explored in a few new non-fiction books, like “Consent,” by Vanessa Springora (HarperCollins). In this memoir, French writer Springora takes back her own story.

She’s now in her 40s but 30 years ago, in 1990, the French writer Gabriel Matzneff spoke in an infamous interview about how he preferred having relationships with young women — namely, girls. In “Consent,” Springora talks about how Matzneff abused her but convinced her that they were in love. This book was published in French last year, but this is its first time in English.

In “Fired Up About Consent,” Canadian writer Sarah Ratchford takes a pragmatic, nonfiction approach aimed at young people “who want to learn how to build joyful, mutually satisfying sex lives and relationships,” according to the book’s publisher, the progressive Toronto-based Between the Lines. It begins with defining consent, rape and sexual assault, and also talks about the #MeToo movement, gender identity, virginity, etc. Exactly the sort of book young women need. This one’s out March 1.

Deborah Dundas is the Star’s Books editor. She is based in Toronto. Follow her on Twitter: @debdundas