Even though I should have known better, I started to read Miriam Toews’ new novel, Fight Night, shortly before bed and then stayed up to finish it. Because Shiv’s voice is irresistible and the story of life with her grandmother and her mother was so hilarious and moving. But I’ve been there, with Toews before, broken on the other side of her books. So I read the final pages of this novel almost straightaway. (This is a trick that I adopted at the end of my climate crisis reading, out of desperation and hope.) Even so, I enjoyed the ride.

Fight Night reminded me of Dede Crane’s Every Happy Family (2013), which I read as part of my backlist exploring, to write a review of her recent novel about Berthe Morisot. Crane divides her story into six parts, each taking the perspective of a different family member, so that readers temporarily inhabit each one’s experience and later follow the developments in their lives through other points-of-view. The last section is called “Chasing the Circle Closed” and she does a beautiful job of weaving the threads together in an ending that prioritizes credibility over comfort, yet still satisfies at a deeper level.

Also unusual structurally, is Carolyn Ferrell’s Dear Miss Metropolitan (2021). A story the narrators are telling “all from the perch of life lived, escaped, and lived all over again.” Having been imprisoned in Queens, their trauma was invisible to all who passed the building; afterwards, these women recount their story, with ample references to Prince lyrics, photographs (mostly the author’s artwork), musings on time and survival, and personal details from their experience. Sometimes lyrical (like an idea “as unripe as a banana still in its bunch” or a face “as sturdy as sandstone”), sometimes grim, sometimes inspiring.

With Leone Ross’ Popisho (2021) I expected a story like Ingrid Persaud’s Love after Love or Alecia McKenzie’s A Million Aunties. Instead, it’s more like Cherie Jones’ How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House (for some darkness, gradual immersion in perspectives), Nalo Hopkinson’s fiction (the one about Jamaica for the island-ness of it all, but more so Midnight Robber, for the headspinny bits), and N.K. Jemisin’s Inheritance Trilogy (for the sensual collision of realism and mythology). What Ross does with language deepens the reading experience but, simultaneously, there are some very clear-eyed statements: “People is a complicated something. So is art.” There is one character here that I don’t think I’ll forget for a very long time. And there is one aspect of the story that shines with that kind of WellINever-ness too. It’s Hayley Wall’s illustration on the cover: it’s perfect.

Casey Plett’s A Safe Girl to Love (2014) contains the kind of stories in which someone gets felt up and it matters whether it’s over or under the sweater. She reflects a certain kind of coming-of-age energy that feels real and familiar—bars and roommates, shopping lists and tarot cards—even though not much of her experience overlaps with mine, which played out in smaller-venues with fewer-friends. But a lot of the characters are readers and the sense of being-in-flux is relatable. (My favourite bookish quote? “Nobody likes hearing you don’t care about a book they love.” I didn’t love Miranda July’s book either.) These are unapologetically awkward and tender, near-bruised and honest, and there’s even a Christmas story.

Lina Meruane Nervous System (2018; Trans. Megan McDowell, 2021) begins with an epigraph from Stephen Hawking on Richard Feynman: “A system has not just one history but every possible history.” This should have been my first clue that much of this book would sink into my eyeballs and stop short of comprehension before it reached the grey goo behind. And, yet, I responded to the overarching idea of this novel, that meaning is both very large, remote, and unknowable and—simultaneously—tangible, concrete, and gritty in our everyday lives. Divided into five parts (black holes, explosion, milky way, stardust, and gravity), Meruane uses these segments to explore different times. Across the narrative, they layer to pose unanswerable questions about systems of disease and decay, rejuvenation and recovery.

When I first heard about The Barbizon by Paulina Bren (2021), it reminded me of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, its young heroine lodging in a 1950s New York City hotel to work on a magazine. Turns out Plath fictionalized her personal experience in the Barbizon Club-Residence, but many other women writers also considered the Barbizon home. Bren’s style is casual, enthusiastic and lively. This “place where women went to reimagine themselves” has drawn the attention of other journalists, but Bren’s doggedness located previous occupants and there’s a hint of tell-all. Along with some lovely photographs. Despite the awareness that the hotel would eventually open to men (beyond the notorious cads who thwarted the front desk policies), then condominium-ed, there is an overarching sense of celebration: “The hotel set them free. It freed up their ambition, tapping into desires deemed off-limits elsewhere, but imaginable, realizable, doable, in the City of Dreams.”

It’s not surprising that Rafia Zakaria cites Kimberlé Crenshaw and Audre Lorde frequently in Against White Feminism (2021). That’s not the vibe I get; I’d look to Tressie McMillan Cottom’s Thick, Kim McLarin’s Womanish, Brittney Cooper’s Eloquent Rage instead. But I learned about Gita Sen, the Kally Bewah case in 1885, and a 1939 protest by Herrero women in Namibia. In about 200 pages, Zakaria illustrates the challenge of working “to relinquish the sense of being wronged” so that we can “work toward coming together.” Here, she defines whiteness as a “set of practices and ideas that have emerged from the bedrock of white supremacy”, from the “legacy of empire and slavery.” But it’s complicated: Zakaria prioritizes a view of feminism as resilience (over a white feminism of rebellion) and I can’t help but think of the podcast “Don’t Call Me Resilient” which challenges white feminism and the over-use of ‘resilience’. What each of us understands feminism to mean is different; reading books like this helps bring that reality into conversation.

Any of these in your stacks, now or ever? Do you have one to add? Or more?