LITERARY DELIGHTS

This season, books from best-selling scribes are piling up faster than the leaves in your front yard

Irish-Canadian author Emma Donoghue, whose last novel, Room, landed her on the Man Booker Prize shortlist and the Oscar red carpet for her adapted screenplay, returns with The Wonder, about a mysterious “miracle” in a 19th-century Irish village.

Atonement author Ian McEwan’s murder tale, Nutshell, is one of the most anticipated tomes of the season, while Louise Penny’s beloved Inspector Armand Gamache is back in A Great Reckoning. M.G. Vassanji may contest for his third Giller Prize with Nostalgia, a futuristic story of immortality and memory, while fans of Herman Koch’s literary sensation The Dinner will cheer his latest work about a washedup writer, Dear Mr. M.

Gail Anderson

Dargatz’s The Spawning Grounds spot- lights a white family, a native community and the river that runs between them; Canuck bestseller Anosh Irani’s The Parcel follows a 40-year-old transgender former sex worker who receives a very unexpected delivery; and News From the Red Desert by award-winning writer Kevin Patterson, a former Canadian Army doctor, takes readers inside the Afghanistan war. And for the kids, Canadian astronaut and former Zoomer cover subject, Chris Hadfield pens a tale based on his own childhood, The Darkest Dark.

For non-fiction fans, Alexandre Trudeau follows in the footsteps of his prime minister father Pierre Trudeau – who famously opened Canada to China after forging diplomatic relations with the nation in 1970, then became the first Canadian PM to make an official visit in 1973 – by chronicling his own time exploring China in Barbarian Lost: Travels in the New China. Meanwhile, Hollywood has already cast Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Kevin Costner and others to star in the film adaptation of Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race by Margot Lee Shetterly, about some of NASA’s most important and unheralded heroines. To round out the season, secret agent turned author John le Carré, 84, breaks the spy code and spills his incred- ible life story in the memoir The Pigeon Tunnel.