We are stoked to share that the Globe & Mail has included forthcoming titles from Katherena Vermette, Sam Shelstad, Paola Ferrante, Tara Sidhoo Fraser, and Martha Baillie in their roundup of 62 books to get ready for the fall cozy season with!
To read the full roundup, click here: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books/article-fall-books-preview-62-books-to-get-ready-for-the-cozy-season/
About the included titles:
THE CIRCLE by Katherena Vermette (Hamish Hamilton)
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.
Katherena is represented by Marilyn Biderman.
THE COBRA AND THE KEY by Sam Shelstad (Brindle & Glass)
To the untrained eye, Sam Shelstad may look a lot like a Value Village cashier who shares an apartment with his Uncle Herman and has just emerged from a failed relationship with a woman forty years his senior whom he met at his mother’s book club. But Sam is a successful novelist—or will be soon, he’s certain. The manuscript of his debut novel, The Emerald, is currently on the desk of a celebrated indie publisher. While he waits to hear back, he’s hard at work on two ambitious writing projects. The first is the Molly novel, a fictional rendering of Sam’s newly defunct relationship. The second is a guide for aspiring fiction writers like yourself. The two have much to teach one another, and much to teach you.
Drawing on examples from the work of greats like George Orwell, Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Alice Munro, Kazuo Ishiguro, Clarise Lispector, and Sam Shelstad, The Cobra and the Key takes the novice through aspects of character, detail, plot, style, point of view, dialogue, and meaning. Before long, you’ll be ready to print off your first draft and embark on revisions. Then it’s time to learn some of the tricks of the publishing biz. Having just been threatened with legal action by his soon-to-be publisher for stalking said publisher’s son via Instagram, Sam knows a thing or two about that too. Are you ready to get serious about your writing?
Sam is represented by Samantha Haywood.
HER BODY AMONG ANIMALS by Paola Ferrante (BookHug)
In this genre-bending debut collection merging horror, fairy tales, pop culture, and sci-fi, women challenge the boundaries placed on their bodies while living in a world “among animals,” where violence is intertwined with bizarre ecological disruptions.
A sentient sex robot goes against her programming; a grad student living with depression is weighed down by an ever-present albatross; an unhappy wife turns into a spider; a boy with a dark secret is haunted by dolls; a couple bound for a colony on Mars take a road trip through Texas; a girl fights to save her sister from growing a mermaid tail like their absent mother.
Magical yet human, haunted and haunting, these stories act as a surreal documentation of the mistakes in systems of the past that remain very much in the present. Ferrante investigates toxic masculinity and the devastation it enacts upon women and our planet, delving into the universal undercurrent of ecological anxiety in the face of such toxicity, and the personal experience of being a new mother concerned about the future her child will face.
Through these confrontations of the complexity of living in a woman’s body, Her Body Among Animals moves us from hopelessness to a future of resilience and possibility.
Paola is represented by Marilyn Biderman and Amanda Orozco.
WHEN MY GHOST SINGS by Tara Sidhoo Fraser (Arsenal Pulp)
A lucid exploration of amnesia, selfhood, and who is left behind when the past is obliterated.
Tara Sidhoo Fraser is thirty-two years old when a rare mutation in her brain causes a stroke. Awakening after surgery with no memory of her previous life, she attempts to piece it all back together through a haze of amnesia. Yet, as memories do begin to surface, they are seen through someone else’s eyes – the person whose body she stole, whom she calls Ghost.
Fighting to stabilize her existence, Tara struggles with the gulf between who she was and who she is now, while constantly battling and paying penance to Ghost. She meets Jude, who is also contending with their identity, the gap between who they are and who they present to the world. As Jude’s transition progresses and they begin testosterone injections, Tara’s conflict with Ghost heightens. Ghost’s voice becomes stronger, and memories, buried in the body they now share, of hospital visits, old desires, and her ex threaten Tara’s new relationship.
She burrows deeper into the mystery of who she once was, recognizing the need to fuse herself and Ghost into one. When My Ghost Sings is a lyrical memoir of healing, a farewell letter, and a reclamation of selfhood.
Tara is represented by Laura Cameron.
THERE IS NO BLUE by Martha Baillie (Coach House)
Martha Baillie’s richly layered response to her mother’s passing, her father’s life, and her sister’s suicide is an exploration of how the body, the rooms we inhabit, and our languages offer the psyche a home, if only for a time.
Three essays, three deaths. The first is the death of the author’s mother, a protracted disappearance, leaving space for thoughtfulness and ritual: the washing of her body, the making of a death mask. The second considers Baillie’s father, his remoteness, his charm, a lacuna at the center of the family even before his death, earlier than her mother’s. And then, third, shockingly, the author’s sister, a visual artist and writer living with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, who writes three reasons to die on her bedroom wall and then takes her life, just before the book the sisters co-authored is due to come out.
In this close observation of a family, few absolutes hold, as experiences of reality diverge. A memoir of cascading grief and survival from the author of The Incident Report.
Martha is represented by Samantha Haywood.