Crazy for CanLit: Making Lists (2016)

All published in the season which would make them eligible for this year’s Giller Prize, the kaleidoscope of covers for 2016 is now available on Pinterest, a text-based collection here.

They had me at list-making, but also there are prizes, for lucky list-makers (rules, here). The images link to the publisher’s page, the titles to my review (6 are yet to come).

My first list is the list of titles included which I can recommend.

Twenty-three = one for each year of the Giller Prize.

Jean Marc Ah-Sen’s Grand Menteur (Book Thug) [Review to come]
“For there is great reserve in a dependable liar – in somebody one can trust to be tenaciously mistrustful.”

Mona Awad’s 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl (Penguin)
“And I hate that when I say this, she nods, nods in this way like she knows exactly what I’m going to do later. Can actually see me listening to Little Earthquakes on continuous loop while I tear my way through the takeout she left behind.”

John Bart’s Middenrammers (Freehand Books)
“Barbara folded her apron, “Albert always told me it was harder to know if Sweport women were more trapped by their men or their religion.”

Deni Ellis Béchard’s Into the Sun (House of Anansi) [Review to come]
“All expats shared more than we liked to admit: a sense of addiction, an uncertainty about what we’d do if we went home, and a feeling of being awakened – our senses jolted into activity each time we went outside, perceiving every detail in the street. We felt close to the world’s brilliant core – not shielded, not squinting at screens.”

Nadia Bozak’s Thirteen Shells (House of Anansi)
“So Shell reads. Sometimes she walks and reads at the same time, or reads in class, a paperback hidden inside her textbook.”

Ian Colford’s Perfect World (Freehand Books)
“…this is his family. He can’t escape them. Even if he got on a bus this afternoon and didn’t get off for a week, or a month, or a year. Each moment he would be reminded, simply by the act of running, of what he was running from.”

Catherine Cooper’s White Elephant (Freehand Books)
“This was the way she was – more like a character in a story about herself than a real person. “

Farzana Doctor’s All Inclusive (Dundurn) [Review to come]
“When I’d firt arrived in Huatulco, I’d wander to Wild Beach most evenings after my shift, dipping my toes, listening to the sea roar furiously as it crashed against the rocky shore. At some point, I stopped going as often, the ocean becoming a backdrop.”

Tricia Dower’s Becoming Lin (Caitlin Press) [Review to come]
“She holds him, amazed by the heat from such a small body and his innocent, clean smell. She wakes in the morning to clammy sheets and the stink of his pee, disoriented and stunned by what she’s done to them.”

Rhoda Rabinowitz Green’s Aspects of Nature (Inanna Publications)
“Well, it isn’t enough, is it, to march chronologically through a story, beginning to end? Every writer knows that; every reader feels that.”

Michelle Butler Hallett’s This Marlowe (Goose Lane)
“Then tell him this: I would scrape out his skull and arrange his sticky brains upon my desk and so feed crows and kites and divine a reason. For he’s got a reason, no? All this hucker-mucker? Libels and Bridewell and blood?”

Amy Jones’ We All in This Together (McClelland & Stewart)
“The whirlpool in her coffee is still spinning, and she has a strange, irrational urge to be inside it, to surrender herself to the void. Maybe she is beginning to understand what drew her mother-in-law to that waterfall.”

Billie Livingston’s The Crooked Heart of Mercy (Random House)
“Twenty-four hours ago, I couldn’t see today coming, couldn’t imagine the fear letting up. Looking back, I feel as though I had to turn out the lights to see his face, crawl into silence to hear his voice.”

Valerie Mills-Milde’s After Drowning (Inanna Publications)
“The drowning has turned over ancient soil, and with it, the bones of Pen’s past. Last night, unable to sleep, she had reimagined the scene over and over. 86”

Karen Molson’s The Company of Crows (Linda Leith Publishing)
“Emma Bovary goes mad with despair. Anna Karenina. Scarlett O’Hara. But the thing with heroines is that none of them are stricken with acne, have to wear braces or endure thick eyeglasses – or, God forbid, all three at once.”

Gianna Patriarca’s All My Fallen Angelas (Inanna Publications)
“I believed I could make it happen. I believed that it would all come true. It would all turn out the way it was meant to be. I could live the enchantment. I would be wife to the husband prince, daughter to the King and Queen, and mother to the noble heirs to come. I would remain the dawn of every possibility.”

Susan Philpott’s Dark Territory (Simon & Schuster)
“It’s remote, with no neighbours. It’s set up as a safe house. It’ll have everything you need. Food, money ,and clean cellphones. I’ll email you the directions. John will be waiting for you.”

Cordelia Strube’s On the Shores of Darkness There is Light (ECW Press)
“Lynne always excuses Gennedy by saying he didn’t ask for any of this, as though anybody asks for the shit that happens. The fact that Gennedy gets to live rent-free doesn’t enter into the equation, or that Irwin was already sick when they shacked up. It’s always what a good man Gennedy is because he sticks around.”

Malcolm Sutton’s Job Shadowing (Book Thug)
“Most goals, she gets to thinking, most don’t just involve other people. Most require paying other people, and some require convincing or manipulating other people. Most involve wedging oneself into new situations that demand a response from others.”

Jess Taylor’s Pauls (Book Thug)
“Fine is a funny word. The weather can be fine. There can be fine stitching on clothes. Fine can mean small, contained, delicate. Fine can mean okay, all right. Comme ci, comme ca. When someone asks, How are you? You can say, Fine, and mean the opposite, or you can mean, I am like a careful line of stitching, how are you? You can mean, I am delicate. Be careful that I don’t get snagged and unravel.”

Stephen Thomas’ The Jokes (Book Thug) [Review to come]
“Kizzy looks up at the network of geodesic trusses in the grocery storie’s extremely high ceiling.
She realizes that the squandering of human potetial is not aberrant at all, but the norm.”

House of Anansi, 2016

Katherena Vermette’s The Break (House of Anansi) [Review to come]
“The dead don’t hang on, the living do. We don’t have anything to hang on to. Our bodies become nothing, and we just float around the people who love us. We go back to nothing. That is all we ever were or should ever be. […]
The living hang on, the dead long to.”

Zoe Whittall’s The Best Kind of People (House of Anansi) [Review to come]
“She didn’t automatically trust anyone anymore. Trust was now something that required an extra beat, a moment of consideration.”

Next time: another list of 23, but this time 23 on my TBR because I’ve enjoyed other books by that author.

Are you Crazy For Canlit? What’s on YOUR list?