Atlantic Books Today AFTERWORD
This is a Stickup Amber MacMillan Wolsak & Wynn
“Look, I want you to know / That everything is different, / but it’s the cold and quiet end / of another year, just as cold / and quiet as all the ends to all / the years, and I’m still here.” This passage, in tribute to RM Vaughan, is typical of MacMillan’s emotional wallop.
The End is in the Middle Daniel Scott Tysdal Goose Lane Editions
Mad Magazine inspired, Tysdal’s poems go beyond the page— literally—inviting us to fold the page and find the closing statement. In content he probes his psyche and varied environments, from airports to baseball games, that hold those deemed mad.
The Remembering Susan Sinnott Vagrant Press
Retired widow Liz’s world is crumbling from grief and early-onset dementia when her daughter reveals she has been sexually assaulted. From the awardwinning author of crossover novel Catching the Light, this is a highly anticipated work, filled with empathy, exploring multigenerational trauma.
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Young Readers
My Fade is Fresh
Knight of the Rails
Shauntay Grant Penguin
Billy Knight is our young guide through an era of desperation, dangers, difficulties and the comradery they built among the down and out. They found courage and strength in their numbers and their commitment to helping each other survive. The Canadian answer to the great dust bowl balladeer, Woody Guthrie.
It’s hard to overstate the importance of confidence to a young person, or how hard it is to find it when everyone tells you there’s a certain way you’re supposed to look. Grant’s rhyming story and Thomas’ vibrant illustrations deliver an important message of self-assurance—and pride in their hair!—to young Black girls.
Christine Welldon Red Deer Press
Face the Music
Lesley Choyce Orca Book Publishers
Troubled youth on a road adventure in a stolen car that breaks down. Choyce delivers quick action and an engaging story featuring a compelling protagonist pulled into uncomfortable situations. He has a talent for drawing in-depth characters with few words. The issues are engrossingly embedded in a well-constructed story.
Anna Maria and Maestro Vivaldi Jan Coates Red Deer Press
Music, like story, is a powerful means of conveying feeling. Coates, who has already shown a gift for rhetorical music appreciation, taps into a universal loneliness and longing to convey the story of how a young girl connects through music to another soul from another time and place.
Fiction Because of Nothing at All Paul Sunga
Goose Lane Editions
It begins like a thriller, but quickly shows itself as a profound story of impossible choices, identity, disparity and injustice. This is a vividly compelling novel that shows the world as a place of justifiable madness amidst blurred and crumbling lines.
Apastoral: A Mistopia Lee D Thompson Corona/Samizdat
Novelist and critic Jeff Bursey calls this work “hilarious, sad, sarcastic, imaginative.” It is also Canlit Atypical, brilliantly satirical and weird, with a story centred around Constock, a penal system where criminals’ brains are transplanted into farm animals; the guards are wolves with the brains of, well, prison guards.