In this bitingly smart, often funny, consistently challenging collection, the Tuscarora writer Alicia Elliott tells her own story alongside that of Canada’s Indigenous peoples. She comes at matters of trauma, racism and reconciliation with dazzlingly fresh perspectives. A piece about the killing of Colten Boushie in Saskatchewan, for instance, links surprisingly to the discovery of dark matter. In another piece, she looks at the exclusion of First Nations writers from the Canadian literary canon through the lens of the Indian Act. Each one is candid and compelling, simmering with an underlying call for change.
Less than a month after this wonderfully weird novel was published in English, Tokarczuk—a national treasure in her native Poland—was awarded the Nobel Prize. Despite its highbrow laurels, Tokarczuk’s novel reads more like a Slavic episode of Murder, She Wrote than a literary homework assignment. At its heart is Janina Duszejko, an eccentric old woman who’s drawn into a murder mystery when the men in her remote Polish village begin showing up dead. While investigating the case, she muses beautifully and bluntly on subjects as wide-ranging as aging, environmentalism, astrology and the poetry of William Blake. She’s the most memorable character you’ll meet this year.
By the time Jesse Thistle was a teenager, his parents had abandoned him, his grandparents had kicked him out, and he was living on the streets. His memoir is equal parts harrowing and hopeful, documenting his struggles with alcoholism and drug use, his petty thefts and the years he spent homeless in Ottawa. It wasn’t until he arrived at a court-ordered rehab stint that he began to see a way out, researching his Indigenous ancestry and embarking on a career devoted to Métis scholarship; he now works at York as an Indigenous Studies professor. Thistle’s memoir is excruciating but powerful, distinguished by his clear-eyed self-reflection.
The Globe and Mail reporter Robyn Doolittle spent two years digging into how police in Ontario handle sexual assault cases, discovering that a staggering number of reports are dismissed as unfounded. She uses her investigation to launch an epic survey of the #MeToo movement. Doolittle is one of Canada’s best reporters, and the book is packed with facts, case studies and data. Anchoring all that hard news is Doolittle’s curious, compassionate voice, which provides nuance and context as she goes beyond the big-name cases and examines how sexual assault allegations play out in courthouses and interrogation rooms, how consent is informed by psychology, law and ethics, and how the generational disconnect between boomers and millennials is cleaving the feminist movement.
A lot of contemporary writers have been compared to Jane Austen, but the 27-year-old Irish prodigy Sally Rooney truly merits the hype: not since Jane have we encountered novels that so achingly depict the miscommunications, unspoken longings and class tensions that complicate young romance. What makes the love story between teen classmates Marianne and Connell so fascinating is how they’re constantly shifting the balance of power in their relationship: Marianne comes from an affluent family but suffers as an outcast at school, while Connell, whose mom cleans Marianne’s house, holds all the social capital but struggles in the real world. It’s a brilliant rendering of young love: heady, self-destructive and as tender as an exposed nerve.
Vuong made his name as a poet before publishing his first novel this year—though we’re using the term “novel” loosely. The book is an uncategorizable experience, a hypnotic blend of lightly fictionalized memoir and stream-of-consciousness snippets, all told in the form of a letter to his illiterate mother. A child of the Vietnam War, born to a farm girl turned sex worker and an anonymous American GI, she moved her son from Ho Chi Minh City to Connecticut when Vuong was a child, and now works backbreaking hours performing pedicures on wealthy women. The passages where Vuong tries to understand his mother—her immense sacrifice, her staggering trauma and the growing gulf between them as he assimilates into American society—are the most moving parts of the book.
The death of Toni Morrison in August was the biggest literary loss of the year, but before she died, she left us with one final work of wisdom. This book collates four decades’ worth of lectures and essays, offering Morrison’s take on every subject you ever wanted to hear her on: jazz, fascism, philosophy, folklore, how she writes, how she thinks, who she reads. Many of the pieces are adapted from speeches she gave in the ’90s and 2000s, which makes her hyper-compassionate point of view all the more prescient and surprising: she urges compassion for migrants, for newcomers, for displaced populations, reminding us that it’s not otherness we need to fear but ignorance.
The blockbuster book of the year was undoubtedly this long-marinating sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, which shattered Canadian sales records in its first week on shelves, won the Booker Prize and immediately got snatched up by Hulu for a TV adaptation. Atwood maniacs have been waiting 34 years to find out what happened to Offred, and they’ve finally gotten their wish: the new novel picks up about 15 years after the end of the first book and tracks the fates of several characters, including her two daughters. But true Handmaid’s fans will be more interested in how Atwood treats the villainous Aunt Lydia, the Supreme Matriarch who, in the grand tradition of Wicked and Maleficent, gets her own morally complex backstory. The novel is just as angry as its 1985 forebear, but somehow lighter on its feet, powered by a spy-thriller conceit and a glimmer of hope for a Gilead-free future.
The literary market is saturated with books about how millennials live online; if you only read one, make it Tolentino’s bracingly smart essay collection. Tolentino, a New Yorker staff writer, crafts blistering social commentary about the online crucibles that shape us—the Instagram wedding industry, the commerce of feminism, how social media activism gets in the way of real activism. But her best essays are the ones that dip into her autobiography: in one, she writes about her brief career as a teenage reality TV contestant on a series, and in another she delicately grapples with the legacy of her alma mater, the University of Virginia, in the wake of a discredited Rolling Stone story about a gang rape.
Ta-Nehisi Coates is a huge superhero fan. He grew up on Marvel comic books, and has even written his own stories for Black Panther and Captain America. It makes sense, then, that his debut novel blends the supernatural adventure of a Marvel comic with the scaffolding of a traditional slavery narrative. The book is about a young enslaved Black man named Hiram Walker, the illegitimate son of a tobacco farmer in Antebellum Virginia, who discovers a miraculous ability to teleport himself across great distances in the water—here it’s called “conduction.” Everything about this book is inventive: the rip-roaring plot, the magic and even the language, which Coates has reworked into a clever new idiom.
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