ON OUR BOOKSHELF

THE PAGES WE HAVE DEVOURED THIS MONTH... AND THINK YOU SHOULD TOO.

WALK IT OFF Hey, remember Darcy’s mom on Degrassi: The Next Generation? Well, the Canadian actress behind that character is out with a new memoir—not about her time on-set with Drake (they never overlapped, alas) but about a period in her own life with as many twists, turns, highs and lows as a sweeps-season episode of a teen soap. With frank humour, Ruth Marshall chronicles a mystery illness that began with a little tingling and rapidly progressed to a total loss of her ability to walk.

DANGEROUS CROSSING The next time you complain about a long-haul flight, consider the ocean-liner passengers in this novel by British suspense author Rachel Rhys. Not only does it take them months to get from London to Sydney but they have to contend with a grisly murder, several love triangles, tons of upstairs/downstairs class drama and the impending outbreak of the Second World War. But at least they don’t have jet lag.

ANATOMY OF A SCANDAL

This is an incredibly timely novel about power, consent and toxic privilege. Told from alternating perspectives, it’s about the trial of a golden-boy British politician accused of a brutal sexual assault on a staffer in his office...with whom he’d just broken off an affair. In her debut novel, former journalist Sarah Vaughan expertly teases apart the strands of a nuanced, complicated narrative that takes us from Oxford University secret societies to the halls of government via the darkest corners of a misogynistic culture we’re nowhere near past in 2018.

THE WOLVES OF WINTER What happens after the world ends? Well, according to this intriguing imagining of postapocalyptic modern society by Tyrell Johnson, it involves nuclear winter and an epidemic of disease that has wiped out pretty much everyone except Lynn McBride and her family. They’re barely hanging on somewhere in the frozen reaches of the Yukon—or at least that’s what she thinks until circumstances force her to venture beyond the horizon....