A searing examination of male friendship and the broader social implications of masculinity in an age of toxic loneliness

Two teenagers leave their small town on a vaguely charted road trip through the northern wilderness, with little more than canned food, second-hand camping gear, and the rifle they buy for reasons neither can articulate. The more they handle the gun, and the farther they get from their parents and peers, girlfriends and online gaming, the less their actions--and the games, literal and metaphorical, they play--are bound by the usual constraints. When one decides to harass a young couple they meet on the highway, the encounter leads them down a road from which there's no coming back.

A searing examination of male friendship and masculinity in an age of toxic loneliness, The Passenger Seat introduces Vijay Khurana as an extraordinary new voice.

Stefánsson shares the elemental grandeur of Cormac McCarthy.--Eileen Battersby, TLS

In a remote fishing village, a boy and his best friend spend the lonely hours on shore reading and talking about poetry. When the friend, absorbed in a borrowed copy of Paradise Lost, forgets his oilskin one morning and the crew is unexpectedly caught at sea in a savage winter storm, tragedy strikes. Overwhelmed by grief--and his crewmates' indifference to what has happened--the boy leaves the village, determined to return the book to its owner. The hardship and danger of the journey is of little consequence: he's already resolved to join his friend in death. But when he reaches the town where he intends to end his days, he couldn't have imagined the stories and lives he finds.

Navigating the depths of despair to celebrate the redemptive power of friendship, Heaven and Hell is an incandescent story of community, resilience, and love from one of Iceland's most celebrated novelists.

From the Booker-nominated author of Case Study and His Bloody Project comes the next adventure of Inspector Gorski.

In the unremarkable French town of Saint-Louis, a mysterious stranger stalks the streets; an elderly woman believes her son is planning to kill her; a prominent businessman drops dead. Between visits to the town's drinking establishments, Chief Inspector Georges Gorski ponders what connections, if any, exist between these events, all while grappling with his own domestic and existential demons.

With his signature virtuosity, in which literary sleight-of-hand meets piercing insight into human nature, Graeme Macrae Burnet punctures the respectable bourgeois façade of small-town life and unspools a spellbinding riddle that blurs the boundaries between suspect, investigator, writer, and reader.

Longlisted for the 2024 Republic of Consciousness US and Canada Prize - A World Literature Today Notable Translation of 2024 - A Shelf Awareness Best Book of 2024

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.

A Walrus Best Book of Fall 2024 - A Globe 100 Best Book of 2024 - A CBC Best Fiction Book of the Year - Winner of the 2023 Prix Médicis, Prix Décembre, and Prix Ringuet

Céline Wachowski, internationally renowned architect and accidental digital-culture icon, unveils her plans for the Webuy Complex, her first megaproject in Montreal, her hometown. But instead of the triumph she anticipates in finally bringing her reputation to bear in her own city, the project is excoriated by critics, who accuse her of callously destroying the social fabric of neighborhoods, ushering in a new era of gentrification, and many even deadlier sins. When she is deposed as CEO of her firm, Céline must make sense of the charges against herself and the people in her elite circle. For the first time in danger of losing their footing, what fictions must they tell themselves to justify their privilege and maintain their position in the world that they themselves have built?

Moving fluidly between Céline's perspective and the perspectives of her critics, and revealing both the ruthlessness of her methods and the brilliance of her aesthetic vision, May Our Joy Endure is a shrewd examination of the microcosm of the ultra-privileged and a dazzling social novel that depicts with razor-sharp acuity the terrible beauty of wealth, influence, and art.

Finalist for the 2024 Firecracker Award in Creative Nonfiction - Shortlisted for the 2024 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction - Finalist for the 2024 Leslie Feinberg Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature - One of CBC Books' Canadian Nonfiction to Read in the Fall - A Tyee Best Book of 2023 - A CBC Books Best Nonfiction Book of 2023 - A Hamilton Review of Books Best Book of 2023 - An Autostraddle Best Queer Book of 2023

We need community to live. But what does it look like? Why does it often feel like it's slipping away?

We are all hinged to some definition of a community, be it as simple as where we live, complex as the beliefs we share, or as intentional as those we call family. In an episodic personal essay, Casey Plett draws on a range of firsthand experiences to start a conversation about the larger implications of community as a word, an idea, and a symbol. With each thread a cumulative definition of community, and what it has come to mean to Plett, emerges.

Looking at phenomena from transgender literature, to Mennonite history, to hacker houses of Silicon Valley, and the rise of nationalism in North America, Plett delves into the thorny intractability of community's boons and faults. Deeply personal, authoritative in its illuminations, On Community is an essential contribution to the larger cultural discourse that asks how, and to what socio-political ends, we form bonds with one another.

An Post Irish Book Awards Nonfiction Book of the Year - A Guardian Best Book of 2020 - Shortlisted for the 2021 Rathbones Folio Prize - Longlisted for the 2021 Republic of Consciousness Prize - Winner of the James Tait Black Biography Prize - A New York Times New & Noteworthy Title - Longlisted for the 2021 Gordon Burn Prize - A Buzzfeed Recommended Summer Read - A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2021 - A Book Riot Best Book of 2022 - An NPR Best Book of 2021 - A Chicago Public Library Best Book of 2021 - A Globe and Mail Book of the Year - A Winnipeg Free Press Top Read of 2021 - An Entropy Magazine Best of the Year - A LitHub Best Book of 2021 - A New York Times Critics' Top Book of 2021 - A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist

When we first met, I was a child, and she had been dead for centuries.

On discovering her murdered husband's body, an eighteenth-century Irish noblewoman drinks handfuls of his blood and composes an extraordinary lament. Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill's poem travels through the centuries, finding its way to a new mother who has narrowly avoided her own fatal tragedy. When she realizes that the literature dedicated to the poem reduces Eibhlín Dubh's life to flimsy sketches, she wants more: the details of the poet's girlhood and old age; her unique rages, joys, sorrows, and desires; the shape of her days and site of her final place of rest. What follows is an adventure in which Doireann Ní Ghríofa sets out to discover Eibhlín Dubh's erased life--and in doing so, discovers her own.

Moving fluidly between past and present, quest and elegy, poetry and those who make it, A Ghost in the Throat is a shapeshifting book: a record of literary obsession; a narrative about the erasure of a people, of a language, of women; a meditation on motherhood and on translation; and an unforgettable story about finding your voice by freeing another's.

Stoltenberg's elegant prose makes each scene . . . so engaging that it gives plot a bad name.--John Self, Guardian

For her entire life, Karin has fled anything and anyone that tries to possess her. Her job demands little, she mostly socializes with men she meets online, and she's rarely in touch with Helene, her adult daughter. But when Helene's marriage is threatened, she turns, uncharacteristically, to her mother for commiseration, and a long weekend away in London. As the two women embark on their uneasy companionship, Karin's past, and the origins of her studied detachments, are cast in a new light, and she can no longer ignore their effects--on not only herself and her own relationships, but on her daughter's as well.

An unnerving, closely observed study of character--and the choices we do and do not make--Near Distance introduces Hanna Stoltenberg as a writer of piercing insight and startling lucidity.

Shortlisted for the 2017 International Man Booker Prize - Shortlisted for the 2018 International Dublin Literary Award​ - Even by his high standards, his magnificent new novel The Unseen is Jacobsen's finest to date, as blunt as it is subtle and is easily among the best books I have ever read.―Eileen Battersby, Irish Times

Born on the Norwegian island that bears her name, Ingrid Barr y's world is circumscribed by storm-scoured rocks and the moods of the sea by which her family lives and dies. But her father dreams of building a quay that will end their isolation, and her mother longs for the island of her youth, and the country faces its own sea change: the advent of a modern world, and all its unpredictability and violence. Brilliantly translated into English by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw, The Unseen is the first book in the Barr y Chronicles and a moving exploration of family, resilience, and fate.

Shortlisted for the Kate O'Brien Award - Shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards Sunday Independent Newcomer of the Year

Like Dubliners, if Dubliners were Cat Person as a feminist mock-epic about a writer's coming of age--and every Dubliner was named Margaret.

A woman pursues the man who cut ahead of her in line. Two nice people report that a child has been left unsupervised at a local beach. Romances, old and new, shift and sour. Following Maggie Armstrong's intrepid hero, Margaret, through first love, first bad date, first job, first extremely bad date, and on into midlife and its attendant disillusionment and revelations, Old Romantics is an acutely observed and hideously entertaining collection of linked short stories from an astonishing new talent. Endearingly flawed and perilously honest, Armstrong's characters navigate a world of awkward expectation and latent hostility with piercing insight and indelible wit.

Longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize - Shortlisted for the 2023 An Post Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year - One of the Globe and Mail's Sixty-Two Books to Read This Fall - One of the Globe 100's Best Books of 2023 - A New Yorker Best Book of 2023 - A NYPL Book of the Day

Jamie O'Neill loves the colour red. He also loves tall trees, patterns, rain that comes with wind, the curvature of certain objects, books with dust jackets, rivers, cats, and Edgar Allan Poe. At age thirteen, there are two things he wants most in life: to build a Perpetual Motion Machine, and to connect with his mother, Noelle, who died when he was born. In his mind, these things are intimately linked, and at his new school, despite the daily barrage of bullies and cathedral bells, he meets two teachers who might be able to help him, though each struggles against inertias of their own.

How to Build a Boat is the story of how one boy's irrepressible dream finds expression through a community propelled by love out of grief. Lyrical and compassionate, it's a novel about the courage of conviction and the power of the imagination to transform--and how sometimes the best way to break free of old walls is to build something beautiful within them.

A Financial Times Best Book of 2024: Fiction in Translation

International Booker-nominated satirist GauZ' returns with a panoramic journey into the colonization of the African interior.

Mourning the recent deaths of his parents, a young white man in nineteenth-century France joins a colonial expedition attempting to establish trading routes on the Ivory Coast and finds himself caught between factions who disagree on everything--except their shared loathing of the British.

A century later, a young Black boy born in Amsterdam gives his account, complete with youthful malapropisms, of his own voyage to the Ivory Coast, and his upbringing by his father, Comrade Papa, who teaches him to always fight the yolk of capitalism.

In exuberant, ingenious prose, GauZ' superimposes their intertwined stories, looking across centuries and continents to reveal the long arc of African colonization.

A Globe 100 Best Book of 2024 - A Guardian Best Fiction Book of 2024 - A CBC Best Fiction Book of the Year

On a Caribbean island in the mid-1960s, a young girl copes with the heavy cost of migration.

When her mother emigrates to England to find work, Wheeler and her older sisters are left to live with their aunts and cousins. She spends most days with her cousin Donelle, knocking about their island community. They know they must address their elders properly and change their shoes after church. And during the long, quiet weeks of Lent, when the absent sound of the radio seems to follow them down the road, they look forward to kite season. But Donelle is just a child, too, and though her sisters look after her with varying levels of patience, Wheeler couldn't feel more alone. Everyone tells her that soon her mother will send for her, but how much longer will it be? And as she does her best to navigate the tensions between her aunts, why does it feel like there's no one looking out for her at all?

A story of sisterhood, secrets, and the sacrifices of love, The Pages of the Sea is a tenderly lyrical portrait of innocence and an intensely moving evocation of what it's like to be a child left behind.

Longlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize - A Globe 100 Best Book of 2024 - A CBC Best Fiction Book of the Year

Short stories about disparate characters consider what it means to find happiness.

On New Year's Eve, a pair of addicts robs a string of high-end parties in order to fund their own recovery. A recently separated woman relocates to a small northern town, where she receives a life-changing visitation, and a Russian hitman, suffering from a mysterious lung ailment, retrieves long-buried memories of his past. In the nineteenth century, a disparate group of women coalesce in the attempt to aid a young girl in her escape from a hospital for the insane. These are but some of the remarkable characters who populate these stories, all of them grappling with conflicts ranging from mundane to extraordinary. Caroline Adderson's A Way to Be Happy considers what it means to find happiness--and how often it comes through the grace of others.

WINNER OF THE 2019 GOLDSMITHS PRIZE - SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2019 BOOKER PRIZE - A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2019 - A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2019 - A TIME MUST-READ BOOK OF 2019

This book has its face pressed up against the pane of the present; its form mimics the way our minds move now toggling between tabs, between the needs of small children and aging parents, between news of ecological collapse and school shootings while somehow remembering to pay taxes and fold the laundry.--Parul Sehgal, New York Times

Baking a multitude of tartes tatins for local restaurants, an Ohio housewife contemplates her four kids, husband, cats and chickens. Also, America's ignoble past, and her own regrets. She is surrounded by dead lakes, fake facts, Open Carry maniacs, and oodles of online advice about survivalism, veil toss duties, and how to be more like Jane Fonda. But what do you do when you keep stepping on your son's toy tractors, your life depends on stolen land and broken treaties, and nobody helps you when you get a flat tire on the interstate, not even the Abominable Snowman? When are you allowed to start swearing?

With a torrent of consciousness and an intoxicating coziness, Ducks, Newburyport lays out a whole world for you to tramp around in, by turns frightening and funny. A heart-rending indictment of America's barbarity, and a lament for the way we are blundering into environmental disaster, this book is both heresy―and a revolution in the novel.

An Independent Best Book to Look Out For in 2025

At an elite secondary school in the English countryside, students and teachers cope with a sudden loss.

In the aftermath of a shocking death, students and teachers at an elite English school grapple with their disorientation and grief. Yet the bell continues to ring, and amidst grief, normal life--lessons, arguments, flirtations--goes on. At the seeming center of the clock's sweeping hands is Tin, feared and adored in equal measure, and newly betrayed by Robin, her best friend. As the heat of the late spring day intensifies, allegiances strain and rivalries escalate, and old secrets start to surface.

Set against a backdrop of strikes and economic unrest, and across the stratified milieus of a small town in the late 1980s, Dark Like Under is at the same time languorous with sun-soaked, rural beauty. Thrumming with the richly detailed inner lives of its varied cast of characters, this luminous debut captures the promise and risk of late adolescence and is a profound exploration of resilience and connection, frustration and grief, renewal and the legacies we leave.

Winner of Canada Reads 2024 - Longlisted for the 2025 Dublin Literary Award - Longlisted for the 2024 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction - One of Tor.com's Can't Miss Speculative Fiction for Fall 2023 - Listed in CBC Books Fiction to Read in Fall 2023 - One of Kirkus Reviews' Fall 2023 Big Books By Small Presses - A Kirkus Review Work of Translated Fiction To Read Now - One of CBC Books Best Books of 2023 - A CBC Books Bestselling Canadian Book of the Week

In an alternate history in which the French never surrendered Detroit, children protect their own kingdom in the trees.

In an alternate history of Detroit, the Motor City was never surrendered to the US. Its residents deal with pollution, poverty, and the legacy of racism--and strange and magical things are happening: children rule over their own kingdom in the trees and burned houses regenerate themselves. When Gloria arrives looking for answers and her missing granddaughters, at first she finds only a hungry mouse in the derelict home where her daughter was murdered. But the neighbours take pity on her and she turns to their resilience and impressive gardens for sustenance.

When a strange intuition sends Gloria into the woods of Parc Rouge, where the city's orphaned and abandoned children are rumored to have created their own society, she can't imagine the strength she will find. A richly imagined story of community and a plea for persistence in the face of our uncertain future, The Future is a lyrical testament to the power we hold to protect the people and places we love--together.

Writing is, and always will be, an act defined by failure. The best plan is to just get used to it.

Failure is a topic discussed in every creative writing department in the world, but this is the book every beginning writer should have on their shelf to prepare them. Less a guide to writing and more a guide to what you need to continue existing as a writer, On Writing and Failure: Or, On the Peculiar Perseverance Required to Endure the Life of a Writer describes the defining role played by rejection in literary endeavors and contemplates failure as the essence of the writer's life. Along with his own history of rejection, Marche offers stories from the history of writerly failure, from Ovid's exile and Dostoevsky's mock execution to James Baldwin's advice just to endure, where living with the struggle and the pointlessness of writing is the point.

Shortlisted for the 2022 Gordon Burn Prize - Shortlisted for the 2022 Ned Kelly Awards - Longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize - Longlisted for the 2022 HWA Gold Crown Award - Longlisted for the 2023 Dublin Literary Award

SELECTED BY NEW YORK TIMES AS ONE OF 100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2022

The Booker-shortlisted author of His Bloody Project blurs the lines between patient and therapist, fiction and documentation, and reality and dark imagination.

London, 1965. 'I have decided to write down everything that happens, because I feel, I suppose, I may be putting myself in danger, ' writes an anonymous patient, a young woman investigating her sister's suicide. In the guise of a dynamic and troubled alter-ego named Rebecca Smyth, she makes an appointment with the notorious and roughly charismatic psychotherapist Collins Braithwaite, whom she believes is responsible for her sister's death. But in this world of beguilement and bamboozlement, neither she nor we can be certain of anything.

Case Study is a novel as slippery as it is riveting, as playful as it is sinister, a meditation on truth, sanity, and the instability of identity by one of the most inventive novelists of our time.

When a group of tourists visits the deserted island of Podolo, one wants to rescue a feral cat they find there, and the others reluctantly agree. Unfortunately, the rescue proves more difficult than they expect--and they soon discover they're not alone on Podolo.