Our Paperback Picks
A handpicked selection of our favourite recent paperback books.
The Circle
- katherena vermette 
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"The Circle is a polyphonic masterpiece." --Erika T. Wurth, author of White Horse
From the award-winning and #1 bestselling author of The Break and The Strangers comes a poignant and unwavering epic told from a constellation of Métis voices that consider the fallout when the person who connects them all goes missing
The concept was simple. You sit a bunch of people in a circle--everyone who hurt, everyone who got hurt, all affected--and let them share. Some people, it helped them heal, for sure. Others went in angry and left a different kind of angry. Learned how the blame belonged on the system, the history, the colonizer, the big things that were harder to change than one bad person.
The day that Cedar Sage Stranger has been both dreading and longing for has finally come: her sister Phoenix is getting out of prison.
The effect of Phoenix's release cascades through the community. M, the young girl whom she assaulted, is triggered by the news. Her mother, Paulina, is worried and her cousin is angry--all feel the threat of Phoenix's release. When Phoenix is seen lingering outside the school to catch a glimpse of her son, Sparrow, the police get a call to file a report--but the next thing they know, she has disappeared.
Amid accusations and plots for revenge, past grievances become a poor guide in a moment of danger, and the clumsy armature of law enforcement is no match for the community. Cedar and her and Phoenix's mother, Elsie, continue down different paths of healing, while everyone in their lives form a circle around the chaos, the calm within the storm, and the beauty in the darkness.
Fierce, heartbreaking, and profound, Vermette's The Circle is the third and final companion novel to her bestsellers The Break and The Strangers. Told from various perspectives, with an unforgettable voice for each chapter, the novel is masterfully structured as a Restorative Justice Circle where all gather--both the victimized and the accused--to take account of a crime that has altered the course of their lives. It considers what it means to be abandoned by the very systems that claim to offer support, how it feels to gain a sense of belonging, and the unanticipated cost of protecting those you love most.
A History of Burning
- Janika Oza
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Four generations. Three sisters. One impossible choice. A profoundly moving debut novel spanning India, Uganda, England, and Canada, about how one act of survival reverberates across generations of a family and their search for a place of their own.
Instant bestseller. Winner of the 2024 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature. Finalist for the 2024 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. Finalist for the 2024 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Finalist for the 2023 Governor General's Award for Fiction.
A New York Times Notable Book of 2023. One of The New Yorker's Best Books of 2023. One of Kobo Canada's Top 20 Best Books of 2023. Named a Best Canadian Fiction Book of the Year by the Globe and Mail, CBC Books, and 49th Shelf.
India, 1898. Pirbhai is the thirteen-year-old breadwinner for his family when he steps into a dhow on the promise of work, only to be taken across the ocean to labour on the East African Railway for the British. With no money or voice but a strong will to survive, he makes an impossible choice that will haunt him for the rest of his days and reverberate across generations.
Pirbhai's children go on to thrive in Uganda during the waning days of British colonial rule. As the country moves towards independence and military dictatorship, Pirbhai's granddaughters--sisters Latika, Mayuri, and Kiya--come of age in a divided nation, each forging her own path for the future. Latika is an aspiring journalist with a fierce determination to fight for what she believes in. Mayuri's ambitions will take her farther away from her family than she ever imagined. And fearless Kiya will have to bear the weight of their secrets.
Forced to flee Uganda during Idi Amin's brutal expulsion of South Asians in 1972, the family must start their lives over again in Toronto. Then one day news arrives that makes each generation question how far they are willing to go, and who they are willing to defy, to secure a place of their own in the world.
A masterful and breathtakingly intimate saga of colonialism and exile, complicity and resistance, A History of Burning is a radiant debut about the stories our families choose to share--and those that remain unspoken.
The Bee Sting
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One of The New York Times Top 10 Books of the Year
Winner of the An Post Irish Book of the Year, the Nero Gold Prize, and the Nero Book Award for Fiction
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Writers' Prize for Fiction
Finalist for the Kirkus Prize for Fiction
One of The New Yorker's Essential Reads of 2023. One of The Washington Post's 10 Best Books of 2023. One of TIME's 10 Best Fiction Books of the Year. Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, The Guardian, The Economist, New York Public Library, BBC, and more.
From the author of Skippy Dies comes Paul Murray's The Bee Sting, an irresistibly funny, wise, and thought-provoking tour de force about family, fortune, and the struggle to be a good person when the world is falling apart.
The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie's once-lucrative car business is going under--but Dickie is spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman. His wife, Imelda, is selling off her jewelry on eBay and half-heartedly dodging the attention of fast-talking cattle farmer Big Mike, while their teenage daughter, Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge drink her way through her final exams. As for twelve-year-old PJ, he's on the brink of running away.
If you wanted to change this story, how far back would you have to go? To the infamous bee sting that ruined Imelda's wedding day? To the car crash one year before Cass was born? All the way back to Dickie at ten years old, standing in the summer garden with his father, learning how to be a real man?
The Bee Sting, Paul Murray's exuberantly entertaining new novel, is a tour de force: a portrait of postcrash Ireland, a tragicomic family saga, and a dazzling story about the struggle to be good at the end of the world.
The Fraud
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AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
From acclaimed and bestselling novelist Zadie Smith, a sprawling work of historical fiction set against the legal trial that divided Victorian England, about who gets to tell their story--and who gets to be believed.
It is 1873. Mrs. Eliza Touchet is the Scottish housekeeper--and cousin by marriage--of a once famous novelist, now in decline, William Ainsworth, with whom she has lived for thirty years. Mrs. Touchet is a woman of many interests: literature, justice, abolitionism, class, her cousin, his wives, this life, and the next. But she is also sceptical. She suspects her cousin of having no talent; his successful friend, Mr. Charles Dickens, of being a bully and a moralist; and England of being a land of facades, in which nothing is quite what it seems.
Andrew Bogle meanwhile grew up enslaved on the Hope Plantation, Jamaica. He knows every lump of sugar comes at a human cost. He knows that the rich deceive the poor. And that people are more easily manipulated than they realize. When Bogle finds himself in London, star witness in a celebrated case of imposture, he knows his future depends on telling the right story.
The "Tichborne Trial"--wherein a lower-class butcher from Australia claimed he was in fact the rightful heir of a sizable estate and title--captivates Mrs. Touchet and all of England. Is Sir Roger Tichborne really who he says he is? Or is he a fraud? Mrs. Touchet is a woman of the world. Mr. Bogle is no fool. But in a world of hypocrisy and self-deception, deciding what is real proves a complicated task... Based on real historical events, The Fraud is a dazzling novel about truth and fiction, Jamaica and Britain, fraudulence and authenticity, and the mystery of "other people."
Tremor
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An "extraordinary, ambitious" (The Times UK) novel that masterfully explores what constitutes a meaningful life in a violent world--from the award-winning author of Open City
New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice o "Cole's mind is so agile that it's easy to follow him anywhere."--The New Yorker
WINNER OF THE ANISFIELD-WOLF BOOK AWARD o FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD o A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Time, The Washington Post, Financial Times, Vulture, Chicago Public Library, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal
Life is hopeless but it is not serious. We have to have danced while we could and, later, to have danced again in the telling.
A weekend spent antiquing is shadowed by the colonial atrocities that occurred on that land. A walk at dusk is interrupted by casual racism. A loving marriage is riven by mysterious tensions. And a remarkable cascade of voices speaks out from a pulsing metropolis.
We're invited to experience these events and others through the eyes and ears of Tunde, a West African man working as a teacher of photography on a renowned New England campus. He is a reader, a listener, a traveler, drawn to many different kinds of stories: stories from history and epic; stories of friends, family, and strangers; stories found in books and films. Together these stories make up his days. In aggregate these days comprise a life.
Tremor is a startling work of realism and invention that engages brilliantly with literature, music, race, and history as it examines the passage of time and how we mark it. It is a reckoning with human survival amidst "history's own brutality, which refuses symmetries and seldom consoles," but it is also a testament to the possibility of joy. As he did in his magnificent debut Open City, Teju Cole once again offers narration with all its senses alert, a surprising and deeply essential work from a beacon of contemporary literature.
Penance
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One of Granta's Best Young British Novelists 2023
"Eliza Clark's writing embraces the socially unacceptable and wryly explores themes of gender, power, and violence."--Granta's Best of Young British Novelists 2023
"Chilling, clever, and unputdownable."--Guardian
From the author of the cult hit Boy Parts comes a chilling, brilliantly told story of murder among a group of teenage girls--a powerful and disturbing novel as piercing in its portrait of young women as Emma Cline's The Girls.
On a beach in a run-down seaside town on the Yorkshire coastline, sixteen-year-old Joan Wilson is set on fire by three other schoolgirls.
Nearly a decade after the horrifying murder, journalist Alec Z. Carelli has written the definitive account of the crime, drawn from hours of interviews with witnesses and family members, painstaking historical research, and most notably, correspondence with the killers themselves. The result is a riveting snapshot of lives rocked by tragedy, and a town left in turmoil.
But how much of the story is true?
Compulsively readable, provocative, and disturbing, Penance is a cleverly nuanced, unflinching exploration of gender, class, and power that raises troubling questions about the media and our obsession with true crime while bringing to light the depraved side of human nature and our darkest proclivities.
The Book of Rain
- Thomas Wharton
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FINALIST, ATWOOD GIBSON WRITERS' TRUST FICTION PRIZE
"Audaciously imaginative. . . . I wish more books surprised me as much as this one did."--Omar El Akkad, author of What Strange Paradise
"Wondrous."--Eden Robinson, author of the Trickster trilogy
A groundbreaking, deeply affecting work of environmental literary suspense for fans of Cloud Atlas, The Overstory, and Greenwood.
The northern mining town of River Meadows is one of three hotspots in the world producing ghost ore, a new source of energy linked with slippages of time and space that gradually render the area uninhabitable. After the town is evacuated, the whole region is cordoned off, the new no-go zone wryly nicknamed "the Park."
Three intertwined stories flow from that disaster.
Years after Alex Hewitt and his family were forced to leave, Alex returns to River Meadows to search for his sister, Amery, who has disappeared while rescuing animals trapped in the restricted zone.
Claire Foley, a young woman from River Meadows who now traffics in endangered wildlife, arrives in an island nation under threat of environmental catastrophe to retrieve her greatest prize yet, only to find herself facing a life-altering choice.
And, finally, in a future as distant as myth, a flock of birds sets out on a dangerous journey to prevent the extinction of their ancient enemy, humanity.
As sweeping in scope as a world of its own, The Book of Rain is a novel of epic reach, beautifully multi-layered, haunting and profound.
Mansions of the Moon
- Shyam Selvadurai
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A breathtaking reimagining of ancient India through the extraordinary life of Yasodhara, the woman who married the Buddha--from the bestselling, award-winning author of Funny Boy and The Hungry Ghosts.
In this sweeping tale, at once epic and intimate, Shyam Selvadurai introduces us to Siddhartha Gautama--who will later become "the enlightened one," or the Buddha--an unusually bright and politically astute young man settling into his upper-caste life as a newlywed to Yasodhara, a woman of great intelligence and spirit. Mansions of the Moon traces the couple's early love and life together, and then the anguished turmoil that descends upon them both as Siddhartha's spiritual calling takes over and the marriage partnership slowly, inexorably crumbles. Eventually, Yasodhara is forced to ask what kind of life a woman can lead in ancient India if her husband abandons her--even a well-born woman such as herself. And is there a path she, too, might take towards enlightenment?
Award-winning writer Shyam Selvadurai examines these questions with empathy and insight, creating a vivid portrait of a fascinating time and place, the intricate web of power, family and relationships that surround a singular marriage, and the remarkable woman who, until now, has remained a little-understood shadow in the historical record. Mansions of the Moon is an immersive, lively and thrilling feat of literary imagination.
Death Valley
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Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times ("incandescent...hilarious...a triumph"), Oprah Daily ("surreal, absurd, lucid, and wise"), Vanity Fair ("Broder [is] a genius and a sorceress"), and more!
From the visionary author of Milk Fed and The Pisces, a darkly funny novel about grief and a "magical tale of survival" (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
In Melissa Broder's astonishingly profound new novel, a woman arrives alone at a Best Western seeking respite from an emptiness that plagues her. She has fled to the California high desert to escape a cloud of sorrow--for both her father in the ICU and a husband whose illness is worsening. What the motel provides, however, is not peace but a path discovered on a nearby hike.
Out along the sun-scorched trail, the narrator encounters a towering cactus whose size and shape mean it should not exist in California. Yet the cactus is there, with a gash through its side that beckons like a familiar door. So she enters it. What awaits her inside this mystical succulent sets her on a journey at once desolate and rich, hilarious, and poignant.
Death Valley is Melissa Broder at her most imaginative, most universal, and finest, and is "a journey unlike any you've read before" (Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Friday Black).
Old God's Time
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LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE
Named a Best Book of 2023 by the New Yorker, Washington Post, NPR, and Kirkus Reviews
"You should be reading Sebastian Barry. [He] has a special understanding of the human heart." --The Atlantic
"A prose stylist of near-miraculous skill. . . Barry reaches deep into the messenger bag of mystery fiction and turns the whole business inside out . . . marvelous." --The Washington Post
"An unforgettable novel from one of our finest writers." --Douglas Stuart, author of Shuggie Bain
From the five-time Booker Prize nominee and 2018-2021 Laureate for Irish Fiction, a virtuosic, profound novel exploring love, memory, grief, and long-buried secrets
Recently retired policeman Tom Kettle is settling into the quiet of his new home, a lean-to annexed to a Victorian castle overlooking the Irish Sea. For months he has barely seen a soul, catching only glimpses of his eccentric landlord and a nervous young mother who has moved in next door. Occasionally, fond memories return of his family: his beloved wife June and their two children, Winnie and Joe. But when two former colleagues turn up at his door with questions about a decades-old case, one which Tom never quite came to terms with, he finds himself pulled into the darkest currents of his past.
A beautiful, haunting novel in which nothing is quite as it seems, Old God's Time is about what we live through, what we live with, and what may survive of us.
Kairos
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WINNER OF THE 2024 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE LONGLISTED FOR THE 2023 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE An epic storyteller with the most powerful voice in contemporary German literature, Jenny Erpenbeck has created an unforgettably compelling masterpiece with Kairos. The story of a romance begun in East Berlin at the end of the 1980s: the passionate yet difficult long-running affair of Katharina and Hans hits the rocks as a whole world--the socialist GDR--melts away. As the Times Literary Supplement writes: "The weight of history, the particular experiences of East and West, and the ways in which cultural and subjective memory shape individual identity has always been present in Erpenbeck's work. She knows that no one is all bad, no state all rotten, and she masterfully captures the existential bewilderment of his period between states and ideologies." In the opinion of her superbly gifted translator Michael Hofmann, Kairos is the great post-Unification novel.
My Father's House
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From best-selling author Joseph O'Connor comes a gripping and atmospheric World War II literary thriller set in occupied Rome.
A WASHINGTON POST BEST BOOK OF 2023
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 WALTER SCOTT PRIZE
Inspired by the true story of Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty, who, together with his accomplices, risked his life to smuggle thousands out of occupied Rome right under the nose of his Nazi nemesis, My Father's House is a "potent blend of excitement, suspense and intrigue" (The Washington Post).
September 1943: German forces have Rome under their control. Gestapo boss Paul Hauptmann rules over the Eternal City with vicious efficiency. Hunger is widespread. Rumors fester. The war's outcome is far from certain. Diplomats, refugees, Jews, and escaped Allied prisoners flee for protection into Vatican City, a neutral, independent state nestled in the city of Rome. A small band of unlikely friends led by a courageous Irish priest is drawn into deadly battle of wits as they attempt to aid those seeking refuge.Suspenseful and beautifully written, My Father's House tells an unforgettable story of love, faith, sacrifice, and courage.
The Postcard
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A BEST BOOK OF 2023
TIME Magazine?NPR?Library Journal?The Globe and Mail?Lilith?Forward Magazine?Toronto Star?The New Yorker
"A testament to the power of imagination and an investigation of empathy."--Vogue
"Stunning."--Leslie Camhi, The New Yorker
"A can't-miss novel."--Chicago Review of Books
"Compelling."--The Washington Examiner
Anne Berest's The Postcard is among the most acclaimed and beloved French novels of recent years. It is at once a gripping investigation into family trauma, a poignant tale of mothers and daughters, and a vivid portrait of twentieth-century Parisian intellectual and artistic life.
January, 2003. Together with the usual holiday cards, an anonymous postcard is delivered to the Berest family home. On the front, a photo of the Opéra Garnier in Paris. On the back, the names of Anne Berest's maternal great-grandparents, Ephraïm and Emma, and their children, Noémie and Jacques--all killed at Auschwitz.
Years after the postcard is delivered, the heroine of this novel is moved to discover who sent it and why. What emerges is a moving saga of a family devastated by the travails of the twentieth century and partly restored through the power of storytelling.
Signal Fires
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On a summer night in 1985, three teenagers have been drinking. One of them gets behind the wheel of a car, and, in an instant, everything changes.
A TIME Best Fiction Book of the Year o A Washington Post Notable Work of Fiction o A Real Simple Best Book of the Year
Signal Fires opens on a summer night in 1985. Three teenagers have been drinking. One of them gets behind the wheel of a car, and, in an instant, everything on Division Street changes. Each of their lives, and that of Ben Wilf, a young doctor who arrives on the scene, is shattered. For the Wilf family, the circumstances of that fatal accident will become the deepest kind of secret, one so dangerous it can never be spoken.
On Division Street, time has moved on. When the Shenkmans arrive--a young couple expecting a baby boy--it is as if the accident never happened. But when Waldo, the Shenkmans' brilliant, lonely son who marvels at the beauty of the world and has a native ability to find connections in everything, befriends Dr. Wilf, now retired and struggling with his wife's decline, past events come hurtling back in ways no one could ever have foreseen.
In Dani Shapiro's first work of fiction in fifteen years, she returns to the form that launched her career, with a riveting, deeply felt novel that examines the ties that bind families together--and the secrets that can break them apart. Signal Fires is a work of haunting beauty by a masterly storyteller.
Trespasses
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NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION
"Brilliant, beautiful, heartbreaking."--J.Courtney Sullivan, New York Times Book Review
"TRESPASSES vaults Kennedy into the ranks of such contemporary masters as McCann, Claire Keegan, Colin Barrett, and fellow Sligo resident, Kevin Barry." --Oprah Daily
Set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, a shattering novel about a young woman caught between allegiance to community and a dangerous passion.
Amid daily reports of violence, Cushla lives a quiet life with her mother in a small town near Belfast, teaching at a parochial school and moonlighting at her family's pub. There she meets Michael Agnew, a Protestant barrister who's made a name for himself defending IRA members. Against her better judgment, Cushla lets herself get drawn in by him and his sophisticated world, and an affair ignites. Then the father of a student is savagely beaten, setting in motion a chain reaction that will threaten everything, and everyone, Cushla most wants to protect.
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