Homegrown titles to keep your blood pumping in March

Spring is just around the corner, but some days are still cold enough to make us want to hunker down inside with a good book. Pat St. Germain suggests five new arrivals from Canadian authors to add to your reading list.

Truth is stranger than fiction in the tragic case of the Dionne quintuplets. Born to poor French-Canadian farmers Oliva and Elzire Dionne near North Bay, Ont., in 1934, sisters Annette, Cécile, Émilie, Marie and Yvonne were made wards of the Ontario government and put on public display, drawing millions of paying gawkers to “Quintland” during the Depression. Kelownabased author Shelley Wood’s novel, The Quintland Sisters (HarperCollins Canada) puts a fictional spin on the story, told from the viewpoint of a teenage midwife who becomes the girls’ nurse and keeps a journal as they grow up in a virtual fishbowl during a long custody battle. Readers will have to wait until September to get their mitts on the most highly anticipated Canadian book of the year, Margaret Atwood’s sequel to her 1985 dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale. The Testaments is set 15 years after handmaid Offred’s final scene (in the book, not the Hulu TV series), and has three female narrators from Gilead picking up the threads of her story. In the meantime, Penguin Random House is delivering a dramatic adaptation, The Handmaid’s Tale: The Graphic Novel, from Canadian illustrator Renée Nault. A timely, colourful refresher, it arrives on bookstore shelves March 26. A modern plague whose victims “don’t stay dead” strikes a Toronto family in World Fantasy Award-winning author Helen Marshall’s dystopian novel The Migration (Penguin Random House), out in trade paperback on March 26. When her sister falls victim to the disease, a young woman is faced with a heart-wrenching life-and-death dilemma. Hope springs eternal as Canadian gardeners gather seeds and plants and prepare their plots and balcony pots. Before you start digging, get some sage advice from celebrity landscaper Carson Arthur. His new book Vegetables, Chickens & Bees: An Honest Guide to Growing Your Own Food Anywhere (Random House) takes you from seeds to harvest — and most importantly, shows you how to avoid garden fails. Human rights activist, economist and founder of Brave Beginnings, a non-profit organization for abuse survivors, Samra Zafar has shared her inspiring life story with international audiences. A teenage bride coerced into an arranged marriage, she arrived in Canada in 2000 filled with hope. Instead, she found herself trapped in an abusive marriage with two young children. In her new book, A Good Wife: Escaping the Life I Never Chose (HarperCollins Canada), Zafar recounts her journey to freedom and her remarkable successes, including becoming the first mature student to receive the John Moss Award as most outstanding student at the University of Toronto.