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Science fiction, Serious and literary fiction, General fiction
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READ WITH JENNA BOOK CLUB PICK AS FEATURED ON TODAY ● From Laila Lalami—the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award…
finalist and a &“maestra of literary fiction&” (NPR)—comes a riveting and utterly original novel about one woman&’s fight for freedom, set in a near future where even dreams are under surveillance.Sara has just landed at LAX, returning home from a conference abroad, when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, the RAA&’s algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most: her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for twenty-one days.The agents transfer Sara to a retention center, where she is held with other dreamers, all of them women trying to prove their innocence from different crimes. With every deviation from the strict and ever-shifting rules of the facility, their stay is extended. Months pass and Sara seems no closer to release. Then one day, a new resident arrives, disrupting the order of the facility and leading Sara on a collision course with the very companies that have deprived her of her freedom.Eerie, urgent, and ceaselessly clear-eyed, The Dream Hotel artfully explores the seductive nature of technology, which puts us in shackles even as it makes our lives easier. Lalami asks how much of ourselves must remain private if we are to remain free, and whether even the most invasive forms of surveillance can ever capture who we really are.
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Science and technology
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"Vaclav Smil is my favorite author."—Bill GatesAn indispensable analysis of how the world really produces and consumes its food—and a…
scientist's exploration of how we can successfully feed a growing population without killing the planetWe have never had to feed as many people as we do today. And yet, we misunderstand the essentials of where our food really comes from, how our dietary requirements shape us, and why this impacts our planet in drastic ways. As a result, in our economic, political, and everyday choices, we take for granted and fail to prioritize the thing that makes all our lives possible: food.In this ambitious, myth-busting book, Smil investigates many of the burning questions facing the world today: why are some of the world&’s biggest food producers also the countries with the most undernourished populations? Why do we waste so much food and how can we solve that? Could the whole planet go vegan and be healthy? Should it? He explores the global history of food production to understand why we farm some animals and not others, why most of the world&’s calories come from just a few foodstuffs, and how this might change in the future.How to Feed the World is the data-based, rigorously researched guide that offers solutions to our broken global food system.
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Environment, Science and technology
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The bestselling author of Your Inner Fish takes readers on an epic adventure to the North and South Poles to reveal…
the secrets locked in the ice about life, the cosmos, and our planet&’s future. Renowned scientist Neil Shubin has made extraordinary discoveries by leading scientific expeditions to the sweeping ice landscapes of the Arctic and Antarctic. He&’s survived polar storms, traveled in temperatures that can freeze flesh in seconds, and worked hundreds of miles from the nearest humans, all to deepen our understanding of our world. Written with infectious enthusiasm and irresistible curiosity, Ends of the Earth blends travel writing, science, and history in a book brimming with surprising and wonderful discoveries. Shubin retraces his steps on a &“dinosaur dance floor,&” showing us where these beasts had populated the once tropical lands at the poles. He takes readers meteor hunting, as meteorites preserved in the ice can be older than our planet and can tell us about our galaxy&’s formation. Readers also encounter insects and fish that develop their own anti-freeze, and aquatic life in ancient lakes hidden miles under the ice that haven&’t seen the surface in centuries. It turns out that explorers and scientists have found these extreme environments as prime ground for making scientific breakthroughs across a vast range of knowledge. Shubin shares unforgettable moments from centuries of expeditions to reveal just how far scientists will go to understand polar regions. In the end, what happens at the poles does not stay in the poles—the ends of the earth offer profound stories that will forever change our view of life and the entire planet.
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Mysteries and crime stories, Gentle mysteries, Women sleuths
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'I'll read anything Uzma Jalaluddin writes' Kate Quinn'I am such a fan' Emily HenryWhen her daughter Sana is accused of…
murdering the unpopular landlord of her clothing boutique, Kausar Khan returns to Toronto for the first time in twenty years.Back in the Golden Crescent suburb she once called home, Kausar finds that the thriving neighbourhood she remembered has changed. The murder of Sana's unpopular landlord is only the latest in a wave of local crimes which have gone unsolved.With a keen sense of observation and a deep wisdom honed by her years, Kausar knows there is more to the story than Sana lets on. With the help of some old friends and her teenage granddaughter, Kausar digs deeper into the case to uncover the truth. Because who better to pry answers from unwilling suspects than a harmless, meddlesome aunty?But even Kausar can't predict the secrets, lies and betrayals she finds along the way...'A read as cozy and delicious as a cup of chai' Mia P. Manansala'Uzma Jalaluddin has once more hit it out of the park. I can't wait for the next Kausar Khan mystery!' Nalini Singh'Detective Aunty is a charmer from beginning to end...sure to delight any fan of Nita Prose or Alexander McCall Smith' Kate Hilton
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Journals and memoirs, Social issues
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"Striking, elegant." – Publishers Weekly, ★ STARRED Review"An activist priest provides sanctuary for an encampment of unhoused people in her…
churchyardThe housing crisis plaguing major urban centres has sent countless people into the streets. In spring 2022, some of them found their way to the yard beside the Anglican church in Toronto’s Kensington Market, where Maggie Helwig is the priest. They pitched tents, formed an encampment, and settled in. Known as an outspoken social justice activist, Helwig has spent the last three years getting to know the residents and fighting tooth and nail to allow them to stay, battling various authorities that want to clear the yard and keep the results of the housing crisis out of sight and out of mind. Encampment tells the story of Helwig’s life-long activism as preparation for her fight to keep her churchyard open to people needing a home. More importantly, it introduces us to the Artist, to Jeff, and to Robin: their lives, their challenges, their humanity. It confronts our society’s callousness in allowing so many to go unhoused and demands, by bringing their stories to the fore, that we begin to respond with compassion and grace.
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Laws and statutes, Environment
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From the celebrated writer, observer and naturalist Robert Macfarlane comes a brilliant, perspective-shifting new book, which answers a resounding "yes" to the…
question of its title.At the heart of Is a River Alive? is a single, transformative idea: that rivers are not mere matter for human use, but living beings, who should be recognized as such in both imagination and law. Macfarlane takes the reader on a mind-expanding global journey into the history, futures, people and places of the ancient, urgent concept.Around the world, rivers are dying from pollution, drought and damming. But a powerful movement is also underway to recognize the lives and the rights of rivers, and to re-animate our relationships with these vast, mysterious presences whose landscapes we share. The young "rights of nature" movement has lit up activists, artists, law-makers and politicians across six continents—and become the focus for revolutionary thinking about rivers in particular.The book flows like water, from the mountains to the sea, over three major journeys. The first is to northern Ecuador, where a miraculous cloud-forest and its rivers are threatened with destruction by Canadian gold-mining. The second is to the wounded rivers, creeks and lagoons of southern India, where a desperate battle to save the lives of these waterbodies is underway. The third is to northeastern Quebec, where a spectacular wild river—the Mutehekau or Magpie—is being defended from death by damming in a river-rights campaign led by an extraordinary Innu poet and leader called Rita Mestokosho.Is A River Alive? is at once a literary work of art, a rallying cry and a catalyst for change. It is a book that will open hearts, spark debates and challenge perspectives. A clarion call to re-centre rivers in our stories, law and politics, it invites us to radically re-imagine not only rivers but life itself. At the heart of this vital, beautiful book is the recognition that our fate flows with that of rivers—and always has.
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Journals and memoirs, Disabilities
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A humorous, profound debut memoir about chronic pain, accessibility, and young adulthood, by an acclaimed essayist and cartoonist.In 2021, Gabrielle…
Drolet developed a condition that made her unable to use her hands. It only worsened over time, and as a writer and artist, she had to learn new ways of creating and expressing herself. The experience completely changed her life and her outlook. Look Ma, No Hands explores both the difficulty and the humour of developing chronic and life-altering pain in her twenties. Each chapter looks at a different aspect of her life touched by her disability: how she learned to write when she couldn&’t type; how she learned to manage the most mundane daily tasks. She moves cities and as her work as a writer and cartoonist builds has to navigate different byzantine health systems without the privilege or security of having a family doctor, even as she moves into her new apartment and embarks on first dates. And she does all of this with the most wonderful sense of the absurd. Look Ma, No Hands is utterly charming and shares profound reflections on life&’s curveballs, and explores how, in Drolet&’s words, &“you can live a full—even funny—life in a disabled body.&”
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Fantasy, Ghost and horror stories
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In 1912 a strange confession is given, over several nights, to a Lutheran priest who transcribes the life of a…
vampire who haunted the fields of the Blackfeet reservation, looking for justice.A diary, written in 1912 by a Lutheran Pastor is discovered within a wall and what it unveils is a slow massacre, a chain of events that go back to two hundred and seventeen Blackfeet dead in the snow. Told in transcribed confessions by a Blackfeet named Good Stab, who shared the narrative of his peculiar life over a series of confessional visits, this is a bloody history of the American West that has remained untold until now.
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Medicine, Science and technology, General non-fiction
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John Green, the #1 bestselling author of The Anthropocene Reviewed and a passionate advocate for global healthcare reform, tells a…
deeply human story illuminating the fight against the world’s deadliest infectious disease. “This highly readable call to action could not be more timely.” –Kirkus, starred review. “Memorably probes the intersections of medicine and human emotion.” –Bookpage, starred review. Tuberculosis has been entwined with humanity for millennia. Once romanticized as a malady of poets, today tuberculosis is seen as a disease of poverty that walks the trails of injustice and inequity we blazed for it. In 2019, author John Green met Henry Reider, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone. John became fast friends with Henry, a boy with spindly legs and a big, goofy smile. In the years since that first visit to Lakka, Green has become a vocal advocate for increased access to treatment and wider awareness of the healthcare inequities that allow this curable, preventable infectious disease to also be the deadliest, killing over a million people every year. In Everything Is Tuberculosis, John tells Henry’s story, woven through with the scientific and social histories of how tuberculosis has shaped our world—and how our choices will shape the future of tuberculosis. New York Times Bestseller
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Historical fiction, Serious and literary fiction
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In his first new novel since winning the 2021 Nobel Prize, a master storyteller captures a time of dizzying global…
change. At the turn of the twenty-first century, three young people come of age in Tanzania. Karim returns to his sleepy hometown after university with new swagger and ambition. Fauzia glimpses in him a chance at escape from a smothering upbringing. The two of them offer a haven to Badar, a poor boy still unsure if the future holds anything for him at all. As tourism, technology, and unexpected opportunities and perils reach their quiet corner of the world, bringing, each arrives at a different understanding of what it means to take your fate into your own hands.
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Customs and cultures, Lifestyle, General non-fiction
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From Atlantic critic and Pulitzer Prize finalist Sophie Gilbert, a blazing critique of how early-aughts pop culture turned women and…
girls against each other—and themselves—with disastrous consequences. An urgent read that addresses questions around the current regression of feminism.When did feminism lose its way? This question feels increasingly urgent in a moment of reactionary cultural and legislative backlash, when widespread uncertainty about the movement&’s power, focus, and currency threatens decades of progress. Sophie Gilbert, a staff writer at The Atlantic and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism, provides one answer, identifying an inflection point in the late 1990s and early 2000s when the energy of third-wave and &“riot grrrl&” feminism collapsed into a regressive period of hyper-objectification, sexualization, and infantilization. Gilbert mines the darker side of nostalgia, training her keen analytic eye on the most revealing cultural objects of the era, across music, film, television, fashion, tabloid journalism, and more. What she recounts is harrowing, from the unattainable aesthetic of Victoria&’s Secret ads and explicit music videos to a burgeoning internet culture vicious towards women in the spotlight and damaging for those who weren&’t. Gilbert tracks many of the period&’s dominant themes back to the explosion of internet porn, tracing its widespread influence as it began to pervade our collective consciousness. Gilbert paints a devastating picture of an era when a distinctly American confluence of excess, materialism, and power-worship collided with the culture&’s reactionary, puritanical, and chauvinistic currents. Amidst a collective reconsideration of the way women are treated in public, Girl on Girl is a blistering indictment of the matrix of misogyny that undergirded the cultural production of the early twenty-first century, and how it continues to shape our world today.
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Literature biography, Journals and memoirs, Women biography
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“[Swan’s writing offers] not only an enjoyable read, but also the chance to think and reflect on the vast complex…
living entity that is the world." —Nobel Prize-winner Olga TokarczukWhere do we belong if we don’t fit in?A memoir about what it means to defy expectations as a woman, a mother and an artist, for readers of Joan Didion and Gloria Steinem and listeners of the podcast Wiser than MeSusan Swan has never fit inside the boxes that other people have made for her—the daughter box, the wife box, the mother box, the femininity box. Instead, throughout her richly lived, independent decades, she has carved her own path and lived with the consequences.In this revealing and revelatory memoir, Swan shares the key moments of her life. As a child in a small Ontario town, she was defined by her size—attracting ridicule because she was six-foot-two by the age of twelve. She left her marriage to be a single mother and a fiction writer in the edgy, underground art scene of 1970s Toronto. In her forties, she embraced the new freedom of the Aphrodite years. Despite the costs to her relationships, Swan kept searching for the place she fit, living in the literary circles of New York while seeking pleasure and spiritual wisdom in Greece, and culminating in the hard-won experience of true self-acceptance in her seventies.Swan examines the expectations of women of her generation and beyond using the lens of her then-unusual height as a metaphor for the way women are expected not to take up space in the world. Inspiring and thought-provoking, Big Girls Don’t Cry invites us to re-examine what we’ve been taught to believe about ourselves and ask how it could be different.
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Serious and literary fiction, General fiction
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Lyrical and swashbuckling, tender and surreal, Gabriela Cabezón Camara’s new novel finds glimmers of hope for the future in the…
brutal history of colonial Latin America Deep in the wilds of the New World, Antonio de Erauso begins to write a letter to his aunt, the prioress of the Basque convent he escaped as a young girl. Since fleeing a dead-end life as a nun, he's become Antonio and undertaken monumental adventures: he has been a mule driver, shopkeeper, soldier, cabin boy, and conquistador; he has wielded his sword and slashed with his dagger. Now, caring for two Guaraní girls he rescued from enslavement, and hounded by the army he deserted, this protean protagonist contemplates one more metamorphosis, which just might save the new world from extinction… Based on the life of Antonio de Erauso, a real figure of the Spanish conquest, We Are Green and Trembling is a queer baroque satire and a historical novel that blends elements of the picaresque with surreal storytelling. Its rich and wildly imaginative language forms a searing criticism of conquest and colonialism, religious tyranny, and the treatment of women and indigenous people. It is a masterful subversion of Latin American history with a trans character at its center, finding in the rainforest a magical, surreal space where transformation is not only possible but necessary.
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Serious and literary fiction, Suspense and thrillers
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A pulse-pounding novel of class, privilege, sex, and murder, from the New York Times bestselling author of Two Nights in…
Lisbon and The Expats.Chicky Diaz is everyone’s favorite doorman at the Bohemia, the most famous apartment house in the world, home of celebrities, financiers, and New York’s cultural elite.Up in the penthouse, Emily Longworth has the perfect-looking everything, all except her husband, whom she’d quietly loathed even before the recent revelations about where all the money comes from. But his wealth is immense, their prenup is iron-clad, and Emily can’t bring herself to leave him. Yet.And downstairs in 2a, Julian Sonnenberg—who has carved himself a successful niche in the art world, and led a good half-century of a full and satisfying, cosmopolitan life—has just received a devastating phone call that does nothing at all to alleviate his sense that, probably for better and worse, he has aged out and he’s just not that useful to anyone any more.Meanwhile, gathered in the Bohemia’s bowels, the building’s almost entirely Black and Hispanic, working-class staff is taking in the news that that just a few miles uptown, a Black man has been killed by the police, leading to a demonstration, a counterdemonstration, and a long night of violence across the tinderbox city.As Chicky changes into his uniform for tonight’s shift, he finds himself breaking a cardinal rule of the job: tonight, he’ll be carrying a gun, bought only hours earlier, but before he knew of the pandemonium taking over the city. Chicky knows that there’s more going on in his patch of sidewalk in front of the Bohemia than anyone’s aware of. Tonight in the city, enemies will clash, loyalties will be tested, secrets will be revealed—and lives will be lost.
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Animals and wildlife, Environment, Politics and government
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An intimate account of an epic walking journey through a tense and shifting Europe in the footsteps of one extraordinary…
wolf.In the winter of 2011, a young wolf, named Slavc by the scientists who collared him, left his natal pack's territory in Slovenia, embarking on what would become a two thousand kilometre trek to northern Italy. There, he found a mate—named Juliet—and they produced the first pack in the region in a hundred years. A decade later, captivated by Slavc's journey, Adam Weymouth set out to walk the same route. As he made his way through mountainous terrain, villages and farmland, he bore witness to the fears and harsh realities of those living on the margins of rural society at a time of deep political and social flux, for whom the surging wolf population posed an existential threat. In Lone Wolf, Weymouth interrogates how the wolf—loved and loathed, vilified and romanticized throughout history—is re-emerging in wild and cultivated landscapes; how the borders between us and them are slipping away; and what our deep-rooted fear of the mysterious creature really means.Sharply observed, searching, poetic and revealing, Lone Wolf is a story of wildness and of the human desire for order in an ever-evolving world.
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Family stories, Serious and literary fiction, Humourous fiction
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In the absurdist literary tradition of George Saunders and Percival Everett comes a brilliant debut novel by a writer who…
is "bang-on brilliant" (Miriam Toews), about a biologist in Ukraine battling to save the country&’s snail species from the brink of extinction. One of Literary Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2025 • One of 49th Shelf's Most Anticipated 2025 Spring FictionUkraine, 2022. Yeva is a loner and a maverick scientist who lives out of her mobile lab. She scours the country&’s forests and valleys, trying and failing to breed rare snails, while her relatives urge her to settle down and finally start a family of her own. What they don't know: Yeva already dates plenty of men—not for love, but to fund her work—entertaining Westerners who come to Ukraine on guided romance tours believing they'll find docile brides untainted by feminism and modernity. Nastia and her sister, Solomiya, are also entangled in the booming marriage industry, posing as a hopeful bride and her translator while secretly searching for their missing mother, who vanished after years of fierce activism against the romance tours. Together they embark on the journey of a lifetime across hundreds of miles: three angry women, a truckful of kidnapped bachelors, and Lefty, a last-of-his-kind snail with one final shot at perpetuating his species. But their plans come to a screeching halt when Russia invades. In a stunningly ambitious and achingly raw metafictional spiral, Endling brilliantly balances horror and comedy, drawing on Reva's own experiences as a Ukrainian expat tracking her family's delicate dance of survival behind enemy lines. As fiction and reality collide on the page, Reva probes the hard truths of war: What stories must we tell ourselves to survive? To carry on with the routines of life under military occupation? And for those of us watching from overseas: Can our sense of normalcy and security ever be restored, or have they always been a fragile illusion? Endling is a tour de force from an author who weaves a story of love, loss, humor, and hope that only she can tell.
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Journals and memoirs, Death and bereavement, Nature
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In her memoir The Snag, the acclaimed, award-winning author of Shame on Me, Tessa McWatt, takes on personal and collective…
grief, and the solace and inspiration to be found in connecting with nature—and each other.Every day, we hear about and experience griefs, large and small, in our families, friendships, communities, and worldwide. The grief of a loved one passing. The grief of a way of life ceasing to exist. The grief of global pandemic, war, climate collapse.As her mother&’s dementia advances and she can no longer live independently, Tessa McWatt confronts personal and political losses, and finds herself wandering in a forest asking, how do we grieve? And what can we learn from nature and those whose communities are rooted in nature about not only how to grieve but also how to live?From the newest seedling to the oldest snag in the forest, there is meaning to be found in every stage of a tree&’s life, all of which contribute to a thriving forest community. In this forest thinking, Tessa begins to find answers to her questions about how to live (for each other), how to grieve (radically), and how to die (with love and connection).The Snag is an essential book about living and dancing and singing and praying, even in the face of unimaginable sadness, and in this way, growing together and supporting one another, like the trees in the forest.
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Serious and literary fiction, General fiction
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Named a 2025 Most Anticipated Release by Toronto Star • Literary Hub • Esquire • The Washington Post • 49th…
Shelf • She Does the City The sublime, long-awaited, major new novel from the beloved author of the Governor General's Literary Award-winning, Booker Prize-shortlisted bestseller Do Not Say We Have Nothing.The Book of Records opens inside "The Sea," a mysterious shape-shifting enclave, a staging-post for waves of migrants coming and going, a building made of time where pasts and futures collide. Here, a girl named Lina cares for her ailing father.Having arrived carrying her few possessions by hand, Lina grows up with only three books to read—a trio taken from a grand 90-volume series about the lives of famous "voyagers" throughout history. As she goes about daily life in the building, finding food and necessities for herself and her father, she befriends three eccentric neighbours, each with a story to share. There's Bento, an ex-communicated Jewish scholar from seventeenth-century Amsterdam (who resembles voyager Baruch Spinoza in one of Lina's books); Blucher, a philosopher from 1930s Germany who escaped Nazi persecution (and whose life mirrors that of Hannah Arendt, from another of Lina's books); and Jupiter, a brilliant but impoverished poet of Tang Dynasty China (whose story shadows that of voyager Du Fu). As Lina grows up, she spends hours with these three, listening to their fascinating tales. But it is only when her father, his strength fading, reveals how he and Lina came to seek refuge in The Sea that she begins to understand her own story, and the acts of love and betrayal shaping her life.Exquisitely written with extraordinary subtlety of thought, The Book of Records leaps across centuries as if eras were separated by only a door. It holds a mirror to the role of fate, shows how a political moment may determine the course of an individual's life, and suggests the longings and consolations of a voyaging mind and heart. This is Madeleine Thien at her most exciting, sublime and engaging.
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Serious and literary fiction, Ghost and horror stories, Short stories
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The award-winning author of Fifteen Dogs conjures up worlds – real, invented, uncanny – in this ingenious, electrifying collection.A Trinidadian…
Obeah man finds himself reborn, a hundred years after his death, in the body of a Canadian child. A writer takes up a seasonal job as the caretaker of a set of mysterious large sacks hanging from the rafters of the houses in a small town. A woman starts a relationship with the famous artist who painted portraits of her mother. The contents of a sealed envelope upend a woman&’s understanding about a tragic crime she committed at the age of six.In this dazzling collection of stories, André Alexis draws fresh connections between worlds: the ones we occupy, the ones we imagine, and the ones that preceded our own. He introduces us to characters during moments of profound puzzlement, and transports us from 19th century Trinidad and Tobago to small-town Ontario, from Amherst, Massachusetts to contemporary Toronto.These captivating stories reveal flashes of reckoning, defeat, despair, alienation, and understanding, all the while playfully using a multitude of literary genres, including gothic horror and isekai, and referencing works from greats like Jane Austen, Jonathan Swift, Yasunari Kawabata, Witold Gombrowicz, and Tomasso Landolfi.Masterfully crafted, blending poignant philosophical inquiry and wry humour tinged with the absurd, here are worlds refracted and reflected back to us with pristine clarity and stunning emotional resonance as only André Alexis can.
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General fiction, Serious and literary fiction
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#1 New York Times bestselling author Fredrik Backman, who &“captures the messy essence of being human&” (The Washington Post), returns…
with an unforgettably funny, deeply moving tale of four teenagers whose friendship creates a bond so powerful that it changes a stranger&’s life twenty-five years later.Most people don&’t even notice them—three tiny figures sitting at the end of a long pier in the corner of one of the most famous paintings in the world. Most people think it&’s just a depiction of the sea. But Louisa, an artist herself, knows otherwise and she is determined to find out the story of these three enigmatic figures. Twenty-five years earlier, in a distant town, a group of teenagers find refuge from their difficult home lives by spending their days laughing and telling stories out on a pier. There&’s Joar, who never backs down from a fight; quiet and bookish Ted who is mourning his father; Ali, the daughter of a man who never stays in one place for long; and finally, there&’s the artist, a boy who hoards sleeping pills and shuns attention, but who possesses an extraordinary gift that might be his ticket to a better life. These four lost souls find in each other a reason to get up each morning, a reason to dream. Out of that summer emerges a transcendent work of art, a painting that will unexpectedly be put into eighteen-year-old Louisa&’s care. As she struggles to decide what to do with this bequest, she embarks on a surprise-filled cross-country journey to learn the story of how the painting came to be. The closer she gets to the painting&’s birthplace, the more she feels compelled to unleash her own artistic spirit, but happy endings don&’t always take the form we expect in this fresh testament to the transformative power of friendship and art.