Home Base: Kilburn, North London

Author’s Take: “Any writer who lives in England for any length of time will sooner or later find herself writing a historical novel, whether she wants to or not.”

Favourite Line: “No adventure, no drama, no murder, nothing to excite the blood or chill it!”

Review:  If you love Zadie Smith’s novels, the news that she has a new book coming easily stokes your anticipation. Doubly so when you learn that she has turned her hand to historical fiction. Just imagine if she could do for 19th-century England what she did for modern London in NW or Swing Time. Unfortunately, The Fraud never really gels.

The Fraud is foremost the story of Mrs. Eliza Touchet, a widow who runs the household of her cousin by marriage, William Ainsworth – a now-forgotten but real-life writer – with whom she has a BDSM-laced relationship. (She also has a thing for his first wife, Frances.) Eliza is very much a product of her time – an opponent of the slave trade and a proto-feminist. 

Smith has done a lot of research and she’s good at invoking the Victorian era, but it doesn’t take long before you start wondering: Is this going anywhere? One of the novel’s recurrent threads is the Tichborne Case, a famed 1871 legal action involving a butcher who claimed to be the long-lost Sir Roger Tichborne, heir to a vast fortune. The case captivated the British public, and a key reason for that was the testimony of Mr. Andrew Bogle (also a real person), a man born into slavery in Jamaica who testified in support of the claimant. The integrity he projected as well as his steadfast testimony captivated newspaper audiences. 

When Touchet first sees Bogle, about a third of the way (or 150-plus pages) into The Fraud, it feels as if the novel is finally getting started. But, in the end, it never does. The three separate threads – Mrs. Touchet’s story, the court case and the history of Mr. Bogle – never end up merging into a single narrative. There’s lots of great writing, and in the second Mrs. Ainsworth, Zadie Smith has created one of the most infuriatingly accurate pig-headed people in English literature. In the end it’s just not enough. — Ian Coutts

Author’s Home Base: Nashville, Tenn.

Author’s Take: “If this novel has a goal, it is to turn the reader back to [Thornton Wilder’s] Our Town, and to all of Wilder’s work. Therein lies the joy.”

Favourite Line: “The past need not be so all-consuming that it renders us incapable of making egg salad.” 

Review: Ann Patchett’s latest novel is her quietest, most meditative yet. Instead of an opera singer held hostage, as in Bel Canto, or a pharmacologist investigating miracle drugs in State of Wonder, we get a 50-something mother picking cherries — lots of them — on a family orchard in Michigan. Her three adult daughters have come home to help harvest, and, to entertain them while they work, Lara recounts a story they’ve often begged for about the summer she once dated a Hollywood film star. At the time, both were aspiring actors who appeared together in a summer stock run of Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town. (The novel takes its title from the name of the theatre company staging the production.) The fling doesn’t last, but her encounter with Peter Duke shapes the rest of her life.

Our Town, Wilder’s landmark play affirming the dignity of everyday human existence, looms large in the novel, which alternates between Lara’s present-day exchanges with her family and her account of that fateful summer. As a teenager, Lara seemed born to play the role of young, brighter-than-others Emily, Our Town‘s central character. Middle-aged Lara displays glimmers of Emily, too: Older now and staring down her own mortality, she’s jettisoned the prospect of stardom and come to appreciate the small, but deeply satisfying pleasures of life, like fruit-stained hands and a loving family.

Sweet (for me, sometimes cloying) and at times poignant, Tom Lake is a paean to the power of storytelling and literature. Patchett wants us to remember that the past lives on in the present, as well as in the stories we tell ourselves. The novel is also an elegy for a faltering planet; climate change is a constant preoccupation of the cherry farmers and so is the COVID-19 pandemic. But even as our world stumbles, there’s joy to be found. “I would say that there has never been such a beautiful day,” Lara says, “but I say that all the time.” — Carol Toller

Author’s Home Base: New York City

Author’s take: “I had used the phrase before — ‘growing up kidnapped’ — but somehow used it without it really sinking in. It was a thing that I was aware of as, ‘This is technically true, but without really understanding what that means.’” 

Favourite lines: “Before I saw it drift from my mouth, like my soul gone out of me, then pause midair before disintegrating, like my white soul gone out of me to die outside my black body, I had never seen my own breath.”

Review: How much one enjoys renowned American poet Shane McCrae’s memoir depends on their willingness to surrender to his free-form approach to language and, especially, to punctuation, as well as to the vagaries of memory, as the author narrates his fraught passage from boyhood into adulthood while coming to terms with some nasty family history. 

The story at the book’s core is certainly compelling. In 1979, at the age of three, McCrae — a biracial child born in Oregon to an 18-year-old white mother and a 20-something Black father — was kidnapped by his maternal grandparents, who claimed to be taking him on an overnight visit. McCrae’s father, Stanley, who had been caring for him, was left heartbroken and confused. His mother Denise, reluctant to commit to motherhood and dealing with her own filial anxiety, just kind of let it slide, buying into the narrative that her son would be better off.

McCrae’s racist grandparents convinced the child his father had abandoned him. As he grew up under their watch in Texas and California, McCrae was made complicit in their scheme via physical abuse, intimidation, and confusion about his true past, which was seeded by various relatives. Slowly over time, however, McCrae pieced together enough information to track his father down and, by age 16, had found him. It was then that this troubling tale began to unravel.

Pulling the Chariot of the Sun — the title alluding to the Greek myth of mortal son Phaethon perilously seeking out his godly father Helios — is, in the words of The New York Times, “a 250-page avant-garde prose poem that has more in common with Virginia Woolf’s (excellent, difficult) novel The Waves than with Hua Hsu’s (excellent, not difficult) memoir Stay True — or any memoir you might name.”

At once lyrical and jittery, full of run-on sentences and frequently sub-referencing itself, the book demands the reader’s full attention, but offers urgent prose that pirouettes on the page. “I wanted to be caught and banished from the community so I could move to a hovel just outside the community like a rueful outcast so I could stay near the community, I was nine, maybe ten, and thought in impossibilities.” Luckily for McCrae’s intrepid readers, things worked out much better for the author than they did for Phaethon. — Kim Hughes

Author’s Home Base: London

Author’s take: “One of the things I focused on in the book is self-acceptance. [It’s] really important for us to recognize that we are imperfect human beings, and we’re often going to encounter setbacks. Things are going to happen to us that are completely out of our control, and that’s OK.” 

Favourite lines: “Perfectionism isn’t a badge of honour, and it’s not holding you up in the world. At root, perfectionism is the response to deficit thinking so extreme that we live our entire lives in the shadow of shame. Shame about what we don’t have, how we don’t appear, and what we haven’t done. That’s not an emblem of success. That’s a loathing of the very things that make us so enlivening human: our flaws.”

Review: Chasing perfection is terrible for your health. Even more abhorrent to perfectionists: multiple major studies have shown that, over time, they tend to perform less well than their comparative slacker cohorts, falling victim to burnout, exhaustion and, perhaps counterintuitively, procrastination and self-sabotage.  

In The Perfection Trap, those findings are amassed and analyzed by author Thomas Curran, a professor of psychology at the London School of Economics and a confessed “recovered perfectionist.” As Curran argues, the behaviour so often cited by athletes, celebrities and captains of industry as the key to their success is a myth that’s been clinically debunked. Yet deeply entrenched conventional wisdom holds that tireless overachievement is the ticket to recognition, wealth and, most egregiously, personal peace. 

“Across hundreds of studies,” Curran writes, “perfectionism correlates with goodies like self-esteem and happiness, but it also correlates with a lot of very bad things, like depression, anxiety, hopelessness, body image worries and anorexia.”

Several Canadian researchers feature prominently in Curran’s admirably plainspoken book. These include professors Gordon Flett and Paul Hewitt, creators of the Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale evaluation test. First developed in 1991 and still widely used, it distinguishes and categorizes perfectionist types — for example, those who self-impose sky-high standards versus those struggling to meet perceived societal expectations — showing that “perfectionism is a living, breathing worldview starting with the core deficit belief that we’re not perfect enough and that our imperfections should be concealed from those around us.”

Add pervasive social media to the mix, and you wind up with an entire generation of young people who believe they are lesser than, as recent studies quoted by Curran show. Further compounding this “hidden epidemic” are wildly successful, self-proclaimed perfectionists like Olympian cyclist Victoria Pendleton, whose “inability to recognize her achievements… spills over into the exhausting obligation to be perfect and nothing but perfect.” 

The solution, as you might glean from the book’s subhead, is to chill out, share your feelings with trusted others, pursue a social life outside of work, and find a way of practising self-love and acceptance. Easier said than done, sure. But Curran — sent on this path of study via a terrifying panic attack in the wake of a messy breakup he gravely suppressed for fear of seeming weak — is living proof that less really can be more. And he’s got the graphs, statistics and expert opinions to prove it. — Kim Hughes 

Author’s home base: Winnipeg 

Author’s take: “When I finished Five Wives, I wanted to write something completely different. A timely urban novel that captured the current moment, with a scaled-down cast of characters I could have fun with. Isla emerged first, a young chef walking the streets of downtown Toronto. Curious, confident, open-hearted. She’s privileged, and not just in the way we normally define the word. She has the wonderful privilege of moving into adult life not burdened by self-doubt or ideology or childhood trauma, she’s not spending years recovering from her childhood.”

Favourite lines: “I might be required to build up what I know about the world bit by bit from scratch. That the property of rain is to wet and of fire to burn, that good pasture makes fat sheep, that a great cause of the night is lack of the sun.”

Review: Joan Thomas, winner of the Governor General’s Award, is back with her fifth novel, Wild Hope, a multi-layered mystery within whose pages come proof that no matter how hard you try, you can never escape your past.

It’s a love story and a deep dive into humanity’s psychological well-being that brings three people together and then proceeds to rip them apart.

Thomas spends a great deal of time developing the background of the book’s two main characters, Isla and Jake, and describing their very different childhoods and, subsequently, their principles and beliefs. This is important to the reader as it gives them deep insight into what makes each of them tick; something they themselves haven’t managed, or been able to share with each other.

As their storylines interweave, we’re given a comprehensive view into how education, wealth and family history form two very different people who are in deeply love, but unable to communicate and fully allow the other to know their true selves – especially Jake, who is both haunted and proud of the fact that he never lived up to his father’s unrealistic expectations.

But jealousy is the real factor at play, tying Jake’s past, present and future together as he discovers his childhood best friend – Reg Bevaqua – a wealthy water tycoon and enemy, has been holding on to a number of dark secrets that ultimately lead to his disappearance.

Isla is all but ready to call it quits on the relationship when she learns Jake is missing, and this rapidly changes not only her reality but her feelings, as she quickly discovers she’ll stop at nothing to get to the truth about his disappearance. 

As the title suggests, it really is about having wild hope. Hope to come to terms with yourself, hope for the success in your relationships and career. And that hope is threatened as you battle wild demons, planted in childhood, and some that you didn’t dare dream possible. – Caroline Gdyczynski

Author’s Home Base: Los Angeles, Calif.

Author’s Take: “This is a beautiful place that’s still so controlled by certain power dynamics and old ideas. I was really curious about what would happen to a character in that community who really didn’t belong? How would they move through that world? I realized that there is a weird power that you get when people don’t really see you, either — they kind of fill in the blanks about who you are. You could be anyone.” 

Favourite Line: “Surely, if Alex had been in any real danger, someone would have reacted, one of these people would have stepped in to help.”

Review: If Emma Cline’s The Guest is ringing a bell — but you haven’t read it yet — it’s probably because it became something of a pop-culture phenomenon this summer. Everyone in the Hamptons, for example, was apparently reading the book, and eagerly looking for familiar faces and settings. And then there are the many long internet pieces discussing just what, exactly, the novel’s ambiguous ending actually means. Somewhat lost in all this discussion, however, is how good The Guest is, as a reading experience. 

The novel follows 22-year-old Alex, a New York City sex worker, who has accompanied her older “boyfriend” to a beach community on Long Island (it’s never specifically called the Hamptons, but the locale is fairly plain). Alex is not only deeply attached to Simon (a middle-aged rich guy who buys her clothes he wants to see her in and controls her behaviour), but she is also on the run; her roommates have kicked her out for stealing their drugs and refusing to pay rent, and just generally being a terrible roommate. At the same time, she continuously get threatening texts from Dom, who may be her pimp, or just another man she has ripped off. The action of the novel really begins when Simon kicks her out after she embarrasses him (and herself) during a party. Rather than going back to the city, however, Alex decides to stay in the not-Hamptons, having convinced herself that Simon didn’t really want to break up with her, and will welcome her back if she shows up at his end-of-summer party less than a week later. The book becomes a small-scale odyssey, as Alex moves from beach to party house to club to mansion, manipulating everyone in her path (she specializes in telling people what they want to hear, and ingratiating herself in their lives, when she is not observing the world from the sidelines, seemingly invisible), in an increasingly druggy and delusional haze.

The Guest is a special sort of book; while seemingly simple and straightforward, its glossy surface masks a considerable depth. Both suspenseful and compelling, it’s also funny and smart, and I can see why it made such a splash this summer. – Robert Wiersema 

Author’s Home Base: Houston, Texas

Author’s Take: “There’s a moment when, retroactively, everything in the story suddenly makes sense in ways you did not realize. That’s the kind of moment I wanted to create. I always wanted to write the ultimate holy sh-t moment when the reader throws the book across the room in a kind of pleasure.” 

Favourite Line: “My name is Proctor Bennett. Here is what I’ve called my life.”

Review: With the publication of The Passage in 2010, Justin Cronin threw his readers something of a curve ball. Previously known as a highly regarded literary novelist, no one was expecting Cronin’s next project to be an apocalyptic vampire novel, spanning centuries. No one expected it to be the first of a trilogy. And certainly no one expected it was going to be as successful as it was. Each book not only became a bestseller, but drew the praise of writers like Stephen King, who called the trilogy “one of the great achievements in American fantasy.” Cronin’s latest novel, The Ferryman, isn’t quite as significant a departure, but it’s definitely doing a bit of a swerve.

The novel is set in an “archipelago state called Prospera … hidden from the world.” The main island — also called Prospera — is a thriving, glossy utopia, where the privileged live. A second island, the Annex, is home to Prospera’s support staff, “men and women of lesser biological and social endowments,” who commute to the main island to work. And there’s a third island, the Nursery, serviced by a ferry, “a journey that each Prosperan takes twice per iteration, once at the beginning, once at the end.” Each Prosperan has a ticking clock: when their strengths and abilities begin to fade with age, they ride the ferry to the Nursery to be “regenerated,” and returned to Prospera as a new person, about 16 years old, with their lives ahead of them once again.

From the start, Cronin is playing with ideas of utopia and dystopia, of privilege and its cost. These philosophical concepts are thrown into stark relief when Proctor Bennett, who works as a ferryman, is charged with taking his father to the Nursery. Normally, this is a smooth process, but Proctor’s father does not go quietly, crying out, “the world is not the world,” and repeating a single word, “Oranios,” which will unlock the secrets hidden below the surface of the world.The Ferryman is a delight, from start to finish, a smart, creative examination of the nature of reality and humanity threaded through a compelling narrative that will keep the pages turning almost on their own. – R.W.

Author’s Home Base: New York, New York

Author’s Take: “I lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan for quite a long time and was fascinated by the idea that I’d been living in this neighborhood for decades and knew nothing of what was essentially a secret utopian society that had existed for 30 years in our midst that functioned according to its own laws and its own precepts and was at variance with mainstream society.” 

Favourite Line: “Saul Newton was in many ways a classic American type: a self-invented figure whose shadowy biography is a blend of myth and fact, a kind of Jay Gatsby of psychotherapy.”

Review: It might seem somewhat strange that journalist and professor Alexander Stille, perhaps best known for his compelling examination of the mafia in Italy in Excellent Cadavers, would turn his attention to a New York City-based cult, but it actually does make sense. Both are, in broad terms, “extremely secretive … a parallel world, living by precise rules and precepts almost entirely at odds with those of mainstream society.”

The Sullivan Institute for Research in Psychoanalysis was opened in the 1950s by Dr. Jane Pearce and her husband, Dr. Saul Newton. Although it was named for Dr. Harry Stack Sullivan, a neo-Freudian analyst under whom Pearce had been a student, Sullivan himself was not involved (in fact, he died years before its founding). Rather, the institute’s psychoanalytic approach was outlined in Newton and Pearce’s book The Conditions of Human Growth. The pair believed that the nuclear family was a destructive influence, and the root of mental illness, and that people (including children) would thrive in a more communal setting. In their practice, they eschewed marriage and committed relationships in their patients (referred to as Sullivanians), encouraged polyamory and removed children from their parents, prioritizing nurture over nature.

The Institute attracted hundreds of followers, all participating in analysis and, eventually, living in same-sex communal situations in a number of residences owned by the institute on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Art critic Clement Greenberg was an early adopter, who drew artist Jackson Pollock and other abstract expressionists into the fold. Other Sullivanians included singer Judy Collins, members of Sha Na Na, and novelist Richard Price. Free love and psychological exploration were the draw, but as time passed, Newton began to exert more and more control, along with, as one might expect, an escalating succession of abuses. 

The Sullivanians is a transfixing, powerful account of the building and eventual dissolution of the group, set against the social changes of the late twentieth century and the more intimate shifts in New York City over the same time period. The book is exhaustive (Stille interviewed more than sixty “former patients … and their family members,” as well as performing a deep-dive into documents, letters, financial information and testimony provided, largely, as a result of numerous lawsuits), but never exhausting. The story is compelling, and Stille more than does it justice. Easily one of the best non-fiction titles I’m likely to read this year.  — RW

Author’s Home Base: Yokohama, Japan

Favourite Line: “Together we are setting ourselves in motion, pulling on the invisible threads of our connections. There are so many things to do, but I won’t make the excuse that I have no time anymore. Instead I will think about what I can do with the time I have. One day is going to become tomorrow.”

Review: “What are you looking for?” It might seem like a run of the mill question to most, but when asked by the indomitable Sayuri Komachi – librarian at the Hatori Community House — the query inevitably sets off a series of events that alter the lives of the book’s five main characters. 

Each is at a crossroads in their lives: 21-year-old department store clerk Tomoko, who feels like her life is going nowhere;  35-year-old Ryo, an accounts manager for a furniture company who dreams of opening an antique shop; Hiroya, an unemployed 30-year-old who still lives at home and longs to be an illustrator but is too scared to draw; Natsumi, a 40-year-old former magazine editor and mom who feels unfulfilled since leaving the workforce; and 65-year-old Masao, who feels he has lost his identity now that he is retired.

In a series of intertwined vignettes, each stumbles into the library, encounters Ms. Komachi standing under the Reference sign, engaged in the act of felting. After answering Ms. Komachi’s question, each is given a list of books on their desired topics, plus one they didn’t expect. When Masao asks for titles on how to play Go, he’s given a book of poetry. When Ryo is given a list of titles on opening a store, his list included a book on gardening. And before they leave, Ms. Komachi also gives each of them a small felted item she has made, that is even farther removed from what they asked for. 

If it appears I’m being sparse on details, it’s because I don’t want to give too much away. In the same way that “it’s the little things in life that matter,” the joy in this book lies in its diminutive details; even a tiny felted frying pan comes to have a meaning far greater than the object itself.

What You Are Looking For Is In The Library is soaked in the Japanese literary tradition of magical realism — exemplified by writers like Haruki Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto — whereby extraordinary events are introduced into the framework of people’s ordinary lives. In the book, the reader’s belief is suspended just enough to transport us into a realm close to one we recognize, without venturing into fantasy fiction territory.

What You Are Looking For Is In The Library at times feels like a love letter to those places that are more than just repositories for books, but in many cases contain the beating hearts of the local communities. 

And I dare say, it also reads like a warm hug on a cold day. It reaffirms the belief that even ordinary lives can have meaning and are unique in their own way, just as long as we open our eyes a little wider to the wonder that surrounds us. – Kisha Ferguson