Top Ten Fiction Picks for 2024
real ones
- katherena vermette 
Hardcover
$35.00
Reader Reward Price: $31.50
*LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 GILLER PRIZE*
From the author of the nationally bestselling Strangers saga comes a heartrending story of two Michif sisters who must face their past trauma when their mother is called out for false claims to Indigenous identity.
June and her sister, lyn, are NDNs--real ones.
Lyn has her pottery artwork, her precocious kid, Willow, and the uncertain terrain of her midlife to keep her mind, heart and hands busy. June, a Métis Studies professor, yearns to uproot from Vancouver and move. With her loving partner, Sigh, and their faithful pup, June decides to buy a house in the last place on earth she imagined she'd end up: back home in Winnipeg with her family.
But then into lyn and June's busy lives a bomb drops: their estranged and very white mother, Renee, is called out as a "pretendian." Under the name (get this) Raven Bearclaw, Renee had topped the charts in the Canadian art world for winning awards and recognition for her Indigenous-style work.
The news is quickly picked up by the media and sparks an enraged online backlash. As the sisters are pulled into the painful tangle of lies their mother has told and the hurt she has caused, searing memories from their unresolved childhood trauma, which still manages to spill into their well curated adult worlds, come rippling to the surface.
In prose so powerful it could strike a match, real ones is written with the same signature wit and heart on display in The Break, The Strangers and The Circle. An energetic, probing and ultimately hopeful story, real ones pays homage to the long-fought, hard-won battles of Michif (Métis) people to regain ownership of their identity and the right to say who is and isn't Métis.
Code Noir
- Canisia Lubrin
Hardcover
$34.95
Reader Reward Price: $31.46
Here is groundbreaking, dazzling debut fiction from one of Canada's most exciting and admired writers.
Canisia Lubrin's debut fiction is that rare work of art--a brilliant, startlingly original book that combines immense literary and political force. Its structure is deceptively simple: it departs from the infamous real-life "Code Noir," a set of historical decrees originally passed in 1685 by King Louis XIV of France defining the conditions of slavery in the French colonial empire. The original Code had fifty-nine articles; Code Noir has fifty-nine linked fictions--vivid, unforgettable, multi-layered fragments filled with globe-wise characters who desire to live beyond the ruins of the past.
Ranging in style from contemporary realism to dystopia, from futuristic fantasy to historical fiction, this inventive, shape-shifting braid of stories exists far beyond the enclosures of official decrees. This is a timely, daring, virtuosic book by a young literary star. The stories are accompanied by black-and-white drawings--one at the start of each fiction--by acclaimed visual artist Torkwase Dyson.
The Hunter
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Trade paperback
$25.99
Reader Reward Price: $23.39
A New York Times Bestseller o A New York Times Notable Book of 2024 o A New York Times Best Crime Novel of 2024 o A Washington Post Best Thriller of 2024 o An NPR Best Book of 2024 o A Parade Best Book of 2024 So Far
"Extraordinary."--Maureen Corrigan, The Washington Post
"Hailed as the queen of Irish crime fiction, French spins a taut tale of retribution, sacrifice, and family." --TIME
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Searcher and "one of the greatest crime novelists writing today" (Vox), a spellbinding new novel set in the Irish countryside.
It's a blazing summer when two men arrive in a small village in the West of Ireland. One of them is coming home. Both of them are coming to get rich. One of them is coming to die.
Cal Hooper took early retirement from Chicago PD and moved to rural Ireland looking for peace. He's found it, more or less: he's built a relationship with a local woman, Lena, and he's gradually turning Trey Reddy from a half-feral teenager into a good kid going good places. But then Trey's long-absent father reappears, bringing along an English millionaire and a scheme to find gold in the townland, and suddenly everything the three of them have been building is under threat. Cal and Lena are both ready to do whatever it takes to protect Trey, but Trey doesn't want protecting. What she wants is revenge.
From the writer who is "in a class by herself," (The New York Times), a nuanced, atmospheric tale that explores what we'll do for our loved ones, what we'll do for revenge, and what we sacrifice when the two collide.
Intermezzo
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Hardcover
$38.00
Reader Reward Price: $34.20
THE INSTANT #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER o An exquisitely moving story about grief, love and family, from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.
Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.
Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties - successful, competent and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father's death, he's medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women - his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.
Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.
For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude - a period of desire, despair and possibility - a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.
James
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Hardcover
$37.99
Reader Reward Price: $34.19
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER o NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER o ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW'S 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR o SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE o KIRKUS PRIZE WINNER o A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and darkly humorous, told from the enslaved Jim's point of view
In development as a feature film to be produced by Steven Spielberg o A Best Book of the Year of the Year so Far for 2024: The New York Times Book Review, TIME, Esquire, W Magazine, Bustle, LitHub
"Genius"--The Atlantic o "A masterpiece that will help redefine one of the classics of American literature, while also being a major achievement on its own."--Chicago Tribune o "A provocative, enlightening literary work of art."--The Boston Globe o "Everett's most thrilling novel, but also his most soulful."--The New York Times
When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.
While many narrative set pieces of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place (floods and storms, stumbling across both unexpected death and unexpected treasure in the myriad stopping points along the river's banks, encountering the scam artists posing as the Duke and Dauphin...), Jim's agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light.
Brimming with the electrifying humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a "literary icon" (Oprah Daily), and one of the most decorated writers of our lifetime, James is destined to be a cornerstone of twenty-first century American literature.
Long Island
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Hardcover
$36.00
Reader Reward Price: $32.40
OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK * Named a Most Anticipated Book by The Globe and Mail, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Financial Times, Good Housekeeping, and more.
From the beloved, critically acclaimed New York Times bestselling author comes a spectacularly moving and intense novel of secrecy, misunderstanding, and love, the story of Eilis Lacey, the complex and enigmatic heroine of Brooklyn, Tóibín's most popular work twenty years later.
Eilis Lacey is Irish, married to Tony Fiorello, a plumber and one of four Italian American brothers, all of whom live in neighboring houses on a cul-de-sac in Lindenhurst, Long Island, with their wives and children and Tony's parents, a huge extended family that lives and works, eats and plays together. It is the spring of 1976 and Eilis, now in her forties with two teenage children, has no one to rely on in this still-new country. Though her ties to Ireland remain stronger than those that hold her to her new land and home, she has not returned in decades.
One day, when Tony is at his job and Eilis is in her home office doing her accounting, an Irishman comes to the door asking for her by name. He tells her that his wife is pregnant with Tony's child and that when the baby is born, he will not raise it but instead deposit it on Eilis's doorstep. It is what Eilis does--and what she refuses to do--in response to this stunning news that makes Tóibín's novel so riveting.
Long Island is about longings unfulfilled, even unrecognized. The silences in Eilis' life are thunderous and dangerous, and there's no one more deft than Tóibín at giving them language. This is a gorgeous story of a woman alone in a marriage and the deepest bonds she rekindles on her return to the place and people she left behind, to ways of living and loving she thought she'd lost.
My Friends
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Trade paperback
$23.00
Reader Reward Price: $20.70
LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE o One of Publishers Weekly Top Ten Books of the Year o A "masterly" (The New York Times), "riveting" (The Atlantic) novel of friendship, family, and the unthinkable realities of exile, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Return.
"Quite possibly Hisham Matar's best work yet. . . . Very few writers alive can converse with negative space the way Matar does, and My Friends is stunning, beautiful proof." --Omar El Akkad, Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning author of What Strange Paradise
The trick time plays is to lull us into the belief that everything lasts forever, and although nothing does, we continue, inside our dream.
One evening, as a young boy growing up in Benghazi, Khaled hears a bizarre short story read aloud on the radio, about a man being eaten alive by a cat, and has the sense that his life has been changed forever. Obsessed by the power of those words--and by their enigmatic author, Hosam Zowa--Khaled eventually embarks on a journey that will take him far from home, to pursue a life of the mind at the University of Edinburgh.
There, thrust into an open society that is miles away from the world he knew in Libya, Khaled begins to change. He attends a protest against the Qaddafi regime in London, only to watch it explode into tragedy. In a flash, Khaled finds himself injured, clinging to life, unable to leave Britain, much less return to the country of his birth. To even tell his mother and father back home what he has done, on tapped phone lines, would expose them to danger.
When a chance encounter in a hotel brings Khaled face-to-face with Hosam Zowa, the author of the fateful short story, he is subsumed into the deepest friendship of his life. It is a friendship that not only sustains him but eventually forces him, as the Arab Spring erupts, to confront agonizing tensions between revolution and safety, family and exile, and how to define his own sense of self against those closest to him.
A devastating meditation on friendship and family, and the ways in which time tests--and frays--those bonds, My Friends is an achingly beautiful work of literature by an author working at the peak of his powers.
There Are Rivers in the Sky
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Hardcover
$36.00
Reader Reward Price: $32.40
This is the story of one lost poem, two great rivers and three remarkable lives--all connected by a single drop of water.
In the ruins of Nineveh, that ancient city of Mesopotamia, hidden in the sand, lie the fragments of a long-forgotten poem: the Epic of Gilgamesh.
In Victorian London, an extraordinary child is born at the edge of the dirt-black Thames. Arthur's only chance of escaping poverty is his brilliant memory. When his gift earns him a spot as an apprentice at a printing press, Arthur's world opens up far beyond the slums, with one book soon sending him across the seas: Nineveh and Its Remains.
In 2014 Turkey, Narin, a Yazidi girl living by the River Tigris, waits to be baptized with water brought from the holy city of Lalish in Iraq. The ceremony is cruelly interrupted, and soon Narin and her grandmother must journey across war-torn lands in the hope of reaching the sacred valley of their people.
In 2018 London, brokenhearted Zaleekhah moves to a houseboat on the Thames to escape the wreckage of her marriage. Zaleekhah foresees a life drained of all love and meaning--until an unexpected connection to her homeland changes everything.
A dazzling feat of storytelling from one of the greatest writers of our time, Elif Shafak's There Are Rivers in the Sky is a rich, sweeping novel that spans centuries, continents and cultures, entwined by rivers, rains and waterdrops. It asks who gets to control memory. And it tells a powerful story about the cost of forgetting.
What I Know About You
- Éric Chacour , Pablo Strauss
Trade paperback
$23.95
Reader Reward Price: $21.56
CBC BOOKS CANADIAN FICTION BOOKS TO READ IN FALL 2024
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 GILLER PRIZE
FINALIST FOR THE 2024 DAYNE OGILVIE PRIZE FOR LGBTQ2S+ EMERGING WRITERS
FINALIST FOR THE ATWOOD GIBSON WRITERS' TRUST PRIZE
STARRED REVIEWS IN KIRKUS, BOOKLIST AND QUILL & QUIRE
A heartbreaking tale of a family and an impossible love, torn apart by secrets and traditions in late-twentieth-century Cairo.
As a boy in 1960s Cairo, Tarek knows that his entire life is written in advance. He'll be a doctor like his father, marry, and have children. Under the watchful eyes of his mother and his sister, he starts to do just that - until Ali enters his life and turns it upside down. The two men, from very different worlds, embark on an unsayable relationship that threatens to tear apart Tarek's family.
Years later, as Tarek is living a solitary life in Montreal, someone starts writing about him and to him, piecing together a past he wants only to forget. But who is the writer of this tale? And will he figure it out in time?
A bestseller in its original Quebec edition, and the recipient of several awards, including the Prix Femina des Lycéens, What I Know About You is poised to be an international sensation.
"This novel is a searing love story that moves between Egypt and Montréal, that shifts between hearts, highlighting the sacrifices the characters feel they have to make for the ones they love. Romantic, surprising, mesmerizing, and so devastating, What I Know About You examines the terrible costs of family secrets and toxic shame." - Suzette Mayr, author of The Sleeping Car Porter
Your Absence Is Darkness
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Trade paperback
$26.95
Reader Reward Price: $24.26
A spellbinding saga about the inhabitants and inheritors of one rural community, by one of Iceland's most beloved novelists.
A man comes to awareness in a cold church in the Icelandic countryside, not knowing who he is, why he's there or how he arrived, with a stranger staring mockingly from a few pews back. Startled by the man's cryptic questions, he leaves--and plunges into a history spanning centuries, a past pressed into his genes that sinks him closer to some knowledge of himself. A city girl is drawn to the fjords by the memory of a blue-eyed gaze, and a generation earlier, a farmer's wife writes an essay about earthworms that changes the course of lives. A pastor who writes letters to dead poets falls in love with a faraway stranger, and a rock musician, plagued by cosmic loneliness, discovers that his past has been a lie. Faced with the violence of fate and the effects of choices, made and avoided, that cascade between them, each discovers the cost of following the magnetic needle of the heart.
Incandescent and elemental, hope-filled and humane, Your Absence Is Darkness is a comedy about mortality, music, and the strange salve of time, and a spellbinding saga of death, desire, and the perfect agony of star-crossed love.
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