Signposts for reading
It was a very good year for literature, to the point where any attempt to list the best is bound to start strong arguments. So consider this less a definitive ranking than a signpost to further riches. And feel free to argue. Postmedia’s Ian McGillis offe
David Chariandy McClelland & Stewart The Giller jury nailed it this year in giving the nod to this short, note-perfect novel about the different paths taken by two sons of Trinidadian immigrants as they come of age in The Park, a working class housing project in suburban Toronto. Chariandy shifts from lyricism to tragedy, often combining both, with stunning ease. Autumn Ali Smith Hamish Hamilton
Scotland’s Smith is the perennial Man Booker bridesmaid — she’s been shortlisted four times, and probably would have won this year were the award still following its old Commonwealth-only remit. Showing her customary flair for atmosphere and counterintuitive narrative leaps, Autumn channels Britain’s post-Brexit malaise while depicting the unlikely bond between a disaffected young girl and a retired actor.
In a Wide Country Robert Everett-Green Cormorant
The fiction debut from the Globe and Mail writer is a remarkably assured road novel and comingof-age tale, powerfully evoking Western Canada at the dawn of the ’60s as it follows the adventures of a mother and her 11-yearold son over a single summer, circling around family secrets as they flee their past.
Little Sister Barbara Gowdy HarperCollins
Unaccountably overlooked at awards time, Gowdy’s first novel in 10 years finds her in peak form, working a seamless blend of realism and the supernatural for a tale of a Toronto woman running a repertory cinema whose responsibility for her dementia-suffering mother is complicated by the seeming fact that thunderstorms cause her to assume someone else’s identity.
Dr. Bethune’s Children Xue Yiwei, translated by Darryl Sterk Linda Leith Publishing
The immigrant novel is probably the defining fiction form of our time, and Chinese Montrealer Yiwei finds a fresh way into a well-worn theme. A protagonist bearing a strong resemblance to the author explores recent Chinese history and the diaspora experience through the device of a series of letters to the Canadian surgeon who became a folk hero to the Chinese.
I Don’t Want to Know Anyone Too Well: Collected Stories Norman Levine Biblioasis
Reading from this huge, one-stop gathering of stories by Canada’s great lost master of the form, you wonder how they could ever have fallen into obscurity. Levine portrays his mid-century loners and underachievers with an economy of style and refusal of sentimentality that feels contemporary.
The Original Face Guillaume Morissette Esplanade/Véhicule
With a deft blend of humour and pathos, Morissette writes his second novel from the coal face of the gig economy. Young urbanites with artistic aspirations — however vague those may be — work jobs they hate, rationalizing that they’re clearing space for their true passions. They also party a lot. This is Bohemia in the 21st century, and Morissette has it down.
The Lonely Hearts Hotel Heather O’Neill HarperCollins
The prolific two-time Giller finalist — although not this time, strangely — continues to hone her unique style to a fine edge in a formally ambitious tale of orphans raised, separated and reunited in Depression-era Montreal. O’Neill gives as much pleasure, sentence for sentence, as anybody writing in English.
Be My Wolff Emma Richler Knopf
A Russian émigré family in London adopts a pugilistic young boy who forms a deep bond with his stepsister; together the two go off on imaginative flights of fancy influenced by Dickens, Cocteau, Russian folk tales, Victorian boxing lore and much more. A précis can’t do justice to Richler’s dazzling display; like the best fiction, it has to be read.
Lost in September Kathleen Winter Knopf Canada
A young, homeless former soldier’s struggle with PTSD is the jumping-off point for a meditation on history and identity that also manages to read like a thriller — with bonus time-travel to the Battle of the Plains of Abraham. Winter pulls off the wild mix with aplomb.
NON-FICTION Too Much and Not in the Mood: Essays Durga Chew-Bose HarperCollins
You start a Chew-Bose essay having no idea where you’ll end up, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t know exactly what she’s doing: with an attentive eye and a free-ranging sensibility, she literally has us looking at the world afresh. Fans of Charles D’Ambrosio can dive in with total confidence.
Arrival: The Story of CanLit Nick Mount House of Anansi Press
Mount’s anecdotally rich account will be especially valuable for readers too young to remember a time when the term the term “Canadian literature” was dismissed as an oxymoron even by Canadians themselves, and when our space on the world stage had to be fought for.
We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy Ta-Nehisi Coates OneWorld
Gathering Coates’ eight groundbreaking Atlantic essays, one written for each year of the Obama administration, would have been service enough; what makes this book truly essential are Coates’ new context-setting interstitial pieces, widely varying in subject but each striving to understand how those eight years turned into what the United States has now got.
Game Change: The Life and Death of Steve Montador, and the Future of Hockey Ken Dryden Signal
To be a hockey fan at this point in history is to do a daily conscientious grappling with what the game has done to the brains of so many of its participants. In the case of the late NHLer, Montador, the ultimate price was paid. Dryden, Hall of Famer and author of the classic book
The Game, is well-placed to tell the story of Montador and his death’s rippling implications.
Bookshops: A Reader’s History Jorge Carrión, translated by Peter Bush. Biblioasis
If you’re reading this list at all, there’s a very good chance you’re in Carrión’s wheelhouse. The Spaniard, a diehard bibliophile, made it a two-decade project to visit and imbibe the essence of as many bookshops as he could — mostly in Europe, but further afield too. We’ve been seeing signs, faint but encouraging, that the decline of the bookshop may be levelling off; Carrión’s love letter to an ancient tradition is a reminder of why we should fight for their survival.
Grant and I: Inside and Outside the Go-Betweens Robert Forster Omnibus
You don’t need to be a fan of the titular Australian cult band to appreciate this book, though you may well become one by the end. Think of this instead as a study in lifelong friendship where the friends happen to be brilliant if under-recognized artists, and what happens when one of the friends dies too soon. Forster’s portrait of his musical partner, a doomed romantic, is indelible.
Life on the Ground Floor: Letters from the Edge of Emergency Medicine James Maskalyk Doubleday
Doctor and activist Maskalyk draws on his experience in ER rooms in the contrasting settings of Toronto and Addis Ababa, placing the reader smack in the visceral middle of emergency procedures and showing that, no matter the place, the front lines in the fight to save a life are very much the same.
POETRY My Ariel Sina Queyras Coach House Books
Montreal poet Queyras performs an experiment in influence and artistic inheritance, borrowing the titles (and original cover design) from Sylvia Plath’s seminal 1965 book Ariel and taking the poems in an intensely personal direction that both honours Plath and shows that her battles are still very much being fought by women today.
GRAPHIC LITERATURE Uncomfortably Happily Yeon-Sik Hong Drawn & Quarterly
Hong’s autobiographical work, at once intimate and epic, fully exploits the immersive potential of the graphic novel form. As a young urban Korean couple’s attempt to make a home in the countryside unfolds at a leisurely pace over 500-plus pages you feel like you’re witnessing their personal growth in real time. In a good way.
Boundless Jillian Tamaki Drawn & Quarterly
While this list is perhaps sneaky in putting Yeon-Sik Hong into non-fiction, Tamaki’s book is here on its own because it truly is beyond genre. A past master of narrative graphic lit in collaboration with cousin Mariko Tamaki, here Jillian goes solo and gives her experimental impulses free rein, creating short pieces that play loose with formal and thematic constraints, and indicating multiple tantalizing next directions she might take.