Rebecca and Laura have been reading and writing about books on the Carol Shields Fiction Prize too: Rebecca (Loot, The Future and Chrysalis, Cocktail and Land of Milk and Honey and Laura (Between Two Moons and Summary) If you’re also reading from the longlist (shortlist with winner announced), please feel free to contribute to the conversation and leave a link to your posts/reviews below. And, of course, to chime in with the discussions generally (so many well-known books and writers here, even if the prize for women’s writing is still new).

A couple of weeks ago, I added to my own posts here, writing about Kim Coleman Foote’s Coleman Hill—a real favourite so far—and still have five books yet to read from the list (although, if you follow the prize, you’ll notice that the winner’s discussed here).

The first of the fifteen stories in Anuja Varghese’s Chrysalis is “Bhupati” and the last is the title story: both highlight Varghese’s focus on relationships, an appreciation of almost-mystical experiences, and the inclusion of unusual details tied to small epiphanies (even though life isn’t so neat and tidy and a knowingness in the author’s tone broadcasts that she knows this). One ends with an element of surprise that made me smile—several of the other stories in this 2023 collection do too.

She writes in bold strokes and concisely establishes setting so that readers can focus on story and character. Quickly I invested in the relationships she highlights, as in “Arvind” (one of my favourite stories): “They played old Bollywood movies, played truth or dare, played with their imagined future together like a Rubik’s cube, spinning the colours recklessly, all passion and no plan.” And I admire her willingness to engage with complexity, and multiple perspectives, as in “Cherry Blossom Fever” (which tickled as I was reading in season and have seen those High Park blooms): “Whatever he and Sunil had, whatever Talia had with the woman on the phone, whatever Sunil and Talia had together—all these things existed in a delicate balance.”

Some of the language really works for me, as in “Milk”: “It was hot, the way the end of May can be sometimes, spring curdled into summer overnight.” And other figurative language did too: “Chitra was startled out of her fantasy by a voice like cream cheese on an everything bagel—rich and smooth and soft and even.” (Later I thought that the detail of “everything” only appealed because it’s my favourite, but it doesn’t serve the prose: it’d be rich and all that on Raisin or even Whole Wheat too.)

I also appreciated the ambitious take on socio-political themes, like “Remembrance” (domestic violence), “Stories in the Language of the Fist” (othering), and “Midnight at the Oasis” (gender fluidity). Sometimes the language is overly earnest, on-the-nose: “Somewhere in the city, the family into whose hands I was born mourns the boy I never was, fails to see who I am, who I’ve always been.” But these stories demonstrate a kind of compassion that makes me curious to see what she might produce in a booklength work, with more targeted and extensive characterisation.

With Mona Susan Power’s The Council of Dolls (2023), imagine the main characters all sitting in a circle: Sissy and Lillian and Cora, each of them with their doll in their arms. The narrative reflects this circle, each segment moving backward in time by a generation until the narrative line reconnects with the present in the final section, Jesse’s.

Jesse is Sissy, grown and middle-aged. From the novel’s opening pages, readers understand that naming is complex. As girls, they each have a Christian name but also a tribal name and, further, other people in their lives also bestow names and identities on them. In turn, each of these women names their doll. Sissy’s grandmother explains how Sissy got her name: “But the first time I saw you the name just came out of my mouth, so it was yours. Wanáĥča Waŝté Wiŋ. Woman Whose Good Works Bring Flowers.’ It’s a beautiful name but can be heavy on one’s back. I hope I didn’t give you too great a burden.”

This is how readers learn that we’re being introduced to Sissy and that she’s not Sissy to anyone else in this story who matters. Sissy and Lillian and Cora are how readers experience this story, how we learn about and experience the inherited trauma in this Indigenous family. The domestic violence, the alcoholism, the residential schools, the Outing program, the massacres: readers experience through the lens of the girls’ Christian identities and they, too, are kept at a distance from their authentic selves, from the resources they require to defend themselves against these attacks.

In this sense, too, Power’s something of a translator. She’s experienced and witnessed this story, and now she transforms it into a narrative for others to consume. (Language is key: Power explains that she once believed she was solely Iháŋktĥuŋwaŋna Dakhóta, then learned she was also Húŋkpapĥa Lakĥóta, so her mother’s vocabulary here reflects both Dakhóta and Lakĥóta terms. Identity shifts once more.) This does not create the kind of narrative arc that readers experience in any of the other books on this longlist, but it does invite readers to uniquely understand these characters’ layered and fragmented identity.

V.V. Ganeshananthan’s Brotherless Night pulled me into the story straightaway with its opening discussion of terrorism, the idea that “that word, terrorist, is too simple for the history we have lived” as Sashi says. I’ve had many conversations about the line between freedom-fighter and terrorist in recent months, about how or whether or when one should respond to an ambiguous but pervasive threat to one’s own existence. And I’ve been reading about Sri Lanka for as long as I’ve been reading literary fiction, beginning with Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family (1982) and Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy (1994).

But even as I bolted into Ganeshananthan’s novel, I saw that the prose is thick with exposition. She lays out the scenes in such thoughtful detail, then embroiders them with small flourishes of looking-back-ness, so that readers move slowly and deliberately through the story. This perfectly suited my reading mood and inclinations but, as I closed the book that first evening, 50 pages in, I reflected on the title and realised this was likely to be a devastatingly sad story (whether all of Sashi’s losses were literal or only metaphorical).

And that’s true. But there is so much more to this story than loss. All that attention to detail builds credibility, and the extended list of resources and publications in the back underscore this sense (at least one key character is based on an historical figure—I shan’t say which because they also stand for many other individuals who demonstrated resistance and courage in wartime there). The novel is rich and complex, the characters nuanced and the history gripping.

“Dayalan’s pencil made us look somehow warm and alive—Appa, heavy-browed and stern; Niranjan with his steady, quietly content gaze; Seelan smiling a slightly angry smile; Aran clutching a newspaper; Amma happy and worried; Dayalan himself at one edge, with a too-serious expression. He had put me in the center, a stethoscope around my nceck, I laughed at the vote of confidence. In the small, formal photographs I had brought with me, my family looked like some other blank, emotionless set of people. I preferred the honesty of the sketch.”

What I most enjoyed about C. Pam Zhang’s 2020 debut novel was her use of language: sleek and deliberate. And Land of Milk and Honey (2023) displays that even more effectively. In both novels, the main characters inhabit stark and unwelcoming landscapes, so the prose style suits. “My life was dredge, fry, plate. My life was wait, wait, wait.”

Here, a dust cloud across the planet has impacted the global food supply so that the chef at the heart of the narrative must accept an unusual position with such limited opportunities to work:

“Chef had lost its meaning, like lucky, like fresh, like soon. No saffron, no buffalo, no polished short-grain rice. Dishes winked out from menus like extinguished stars as a conservative, nativist attitude seized the few restaurants that remained open thanks to government subsidies.” The strain of her current situation adds tension to the story right from the start, when she’s cooking for her potential employer under these conditions of scarcity.

There are also lots of recognisable strains from the real world: “It has always been easy to disappear as an Asian woman. You people. The number of times I’ve been mistaken for Japanese or Korean or Lao women decades older or younger, several shades darker or lighter, for my own mother once I hit puberty.” But the bulk of the novel’s conflict is between its characters, and this keeps the pages turning.

Which of these have you read, or which would you add to your Now or Later lists?