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What To Read: March & April 2018

Tuesday, Mar 06, 2018 at 3:03pm

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. Softcover. $22.95. Cora is a young slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. An outcast even among her fellow Africans, she seizes the opportunity when Caesar, a fellow slave, urges her to escape with him. But in this novel, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor: engineers and conductors operate a secret network of actual tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. As Whitehead re-creates the terrors of slavery, he weaves in the saga of the American nation, from the abduction of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of today. This is both the tale of one woman's will to escape bondage and a powerful meditation on shared history. (Anchor. February)

Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell. Softcover. $22.00. A young woman named Amanda lies dying in a rural hospital clinic. A boy named David sits beside her. She's not his mother. He's not her child. Together, they tell a haunting story of broken souls, toxins, and the power and desperation of family. Fever Dream is a nightmare come to life, a ghost story for the real world, a love story and a cautionary tale. If you think a novel should unsettle you once in a while then this is one to read. (Riverhead. March)

Look after the jump for more What To Read picks...


The Idiot by Elif Batuman. Softcover. $22.00. The year is 1995, and email is new. Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard. She befriends her Serbian classmate, Svetlana, and begins corresponding with Ivan, an older student from Hungary and with each email they exchange, the act of writing takes on new and mysterious meanings. For Selin, it becomes a journey inside herself: a coming to grips with the confusion of first love, and with the growing consciousness that she is doomed to become a writer. With great humour and style, Batuman dramatizes the uncertainty of life on the cusp of adulthood. (Penguin. February)

Compass by Mathias Énard, translated by Charlotte Mandell. Softcover. $24.95. As night falls over Vienna, Franz Ritter, an insomniac musicologist, takes to his sickbed and drifts between dreams and memories, revisiting the important chapters of his life: his ongoing fascination with the Middle East and his numerous travels there as well as the various characters who populate this dreamscape. At the centre of these memories is his elusive, unrequited love: Sarah, a French scholar caught in the intricate tension between Europe and the Middle East. This is a novel that pulls elements from disparate sources and rearranges them in magical ways. (New Directions. March)

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid. Softcover. $22.00. In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, two young people, Nadia and Saeed, meet. They embark on a furtive love affair and are soon cloistered in a premature intimacy by the unrest roiling their city. When it explodes, they begin to hear whispers about doors — doors that can whisk people far away, if perilously and for a price. As the violence escalates, Nadia and Saeed decide they no longer have a choice and they find a door and step through.... A familiar story in our age, they emerge into an alien and uncertain future, struggle to hold on to each other, to their past, to the very sense of who they are. (Riverhead. March)

The Knowledge Illusion by Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach. Softcover. $22.00. The human mind is both brilliant and pathetic. We’ve built complex societies and technologies, but most of us don't know how a pen or a toilet works. We have stood on the moon and sequenced our genome and yet each of us is sometimes irrational and often ignorant. The Knowledge Illusion contends that true genius can be found in the ways we create intelligence collectively. The communal nature of knowledge explains why we assume we know more than we really do, and why political opinions and false beliefs are so hard to change. But our collaborative minds also enable us to do amazing things. (Riverhead. March)

White Tears by Hari Kunzru. Softcover. $22.00. Ghost story, murder mystery, love letter to American music, White Tears is all this and as well as an investigation of race and appropriation in society today. Seth and Carter share an obsession with the blues. One day, Seth discovers that he's accidentally recorded an unknown blues singer in a park. Carter puts the file online, claiming it's a 1920s recording by a made-up musician named Charlie Shaw. But when a music collector tells them that their recording is genuine the two white boys, along with Carter's sister, find themselves in over their heads, delving deeper into America's dark, vengeful heart. (Vintage. February)

American War by Omar El Akkad. Softcover. $21.00. Sarat, born in Louisiana, is only six when the Second American Civil War breaks out in 2074 but even she knows that oil is outlawed, that Louisiana is half underwater, that unmanned drones fill the sky. When her father is killed and her family is forced into Camp Patience for displaced persons, she quickly begins to be shaped by her experiences until she is turned into a deadly instrument of war. Frightening because of its plausibility, this story asks what might happen if America were to turn its most devastating policies and deadly weapons upon itself. (Emblem. February)

The Kingdom by Emmanuel Carrère, translated by John Lambert. Softcover. $22.50. Gripped by the tale of a Messiah whose blood we drink and body we eat, the genre-defying Carrère revisits the story of the early Church. With an idiosyncratic take on the charms and foibles of the Church fathers, Carrere follows these early Christians through the faith's founding. Carrere blends fiction, nonfiction and autobiography and puts himself in the shoes of Saint Paul and Saint Luke, while revealing the obscure religious freak who died under notorious circumstances. An expansive meditation on belief, The Kingdom chronicles the advent of a religion, and the ongoing quest to find a place within it. (Picador. March)

A Separation by Katie Kitamura. Softcover. $22.00. A young woman and her husband have agreed: it's time for them to separate. For the moment it's a private matter but when she gets word that he has gone missing in Greece, she reluctantly agrees to go look for him, keeping their split to herself. As her search continues, she discovers she understands less than she thought she did about her relationship and the man she used to love. A meditative story of intimacy and infidelity, A Separation lays bare what divides us from the inner lives of others. With cool precision, Kitamura propels us into the experience of a woman with a mesmerizing story to tell. (Riverhead. February)

Categories: Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Literature, What To Read

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