Fiction

Excerpt: THE COMEDIAN’S BOOK OF THE DEAD by Gary Barwin (Book*hug Press)

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Tomorrow, Book*hug Press are due to publish The Comedian’s Book of the Dead by Gary Barwin. An imaginative “underworld quest”, it’s the latest amusing page-turner from the acclaimed Canadian storyteller. To mark the occasion, the publisher has provided an excerpt to share with our readers. First, here’s the synopsis:

Death is a comedian and devoted family man, but everything falls apart when the Fates choose him to guide departed souls to the Beneath. Having to perform this new role erodes his humanity and causes him to do some perhaps unforgivable things, and when his only son dies by suicide, Death realizes he’s likely the one to blame.

Attempting the impossible, Death goes into the Beneath to beg the Fates to allow him to bring back his son. Naturally, things are not what they seem, and Death is forced to reevaluate everything he knows― everything except the deep love he has for his child. Blending Barwin’s celebrated wit with deeply moving scenes of empathy and compassion, The Comedian’s Book of the Dead is a heartbreaking and humorous journey into the joy and pain of parenthood, and a thoughtful exploration of choice and agency, sacrifice and love.

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Excerpt: THE GREAT CATSBY BY HILTON by Rod Carley & Juliette Miron (Smart House Books)

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The Great Catsby by Hilton, the latest book by award-winning and acclaimed author Rod Carley will be published shortly by Smart House Books. Illustrated by Juliette Miron, it is a “catification” of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel, “a playful parody poking fun at love foiled and ambitions foisted” within an uncertain 1920s world of cats. Here’s the synopsis:

Jay Catsby, the feral son of impoverished barn cats, has built his kibble fortune selling illegal catnip. When Nick Cattaway moves in next cat-door, Catsby’s only a whisker away from winning back his beloved Daisy, the beautiful Persian he lost to the arrogant Tom Cat Burmese two lives earlier.

Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby as an indictment of the reckless wealth of post-World War I America. The selfish and careless fat cats of The Great Catsby by Hilton similarly ring true.

Part of the charm of the book is that Hilton, a seven-year-old rescue tabby adopted by Rod, “writes” it. He is the voice of Nick Cattaway, the first-person narrator. Reimagining the story through the eyes of a domestic housecat has allowed Hilton to be frisky with the text. Hilton also writes the Preface.

The Great Catsby by Hilton also features twenty full-page colour illustrations in addition to an assortment of black and white drawings.

The Great Catsby by Hilton adds some much-needed whimsy to the world. In these uncertain times, we could all use a few more cats and a little more catnip in our nine lives.

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Upcoming: & SONS (Icon Film)

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Over the weekend, I spotted the trailer for the upcoming film & Sons (probably on Instagram). The name jumped out at me, because back in 2014 I read (and very much enjoyed) a novel of the same name by David Gilbert. And, it turns out, it is indeed an adaptation of that book. I was a little thrown, initially, because the novel is set in Manhattan, but the movie is set in the UK — an interesting choice, and I’m very much looking forward to seeing how this changes the story.

The trailer is above, and here’s the movie synopsis:

A world-renowned but reclusive novelist, convinced he is about to die, summons his estranged sons to his home. But instead of seeking forgiveness for his countless mistakes, he instead reveals a truly unbelievable secret that brings his beloved ex-wife back into his orbit. With decades of resentment, jealousy and rage on the verge of spilling over, this splintered family is forced to face an inevitable reckoning, for better or for worse.

The movie, directed by Pablo Trapero and distributed by Icon, has a stellar cast, too: Bill Nighy, Imelda Staunton, Johnny Flynn, Noah Jupe, George MacKay, and Dominic West.

The movie will open in cinemas on August 21st. (I think it is also going to be on at TIFF, so I’ll do my best to see it then.)

David Gilbert’s & Sons is out now, published by Random House in North America and Fourth Estate in the UK.

Movie: Website, IMDb
Follow the Author: Goodreads

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Upcoming: LIFE OF M by Rachel Cusk (FSG / Faber)

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Yesterday, I spotted Life of M on NetGalley. It’s the next novel by Rachel Cusk, the acclaimed, best-selling author of the Outline Trilogy and many others. I haven’t actually read anything by Cusk (not actually sure why), but the synopsis for this next book caught my attention. I’ve popped it on my anticipated list, and I’m really looking forward to reading it. Here’s the synopsis:

M is a famous actor. She has been famous since she was a child. With such fame, her life has the appearance of freedom: people are instantly obliging, spaces are altered to accommodate her, time can be rearranged. Over time she has grown so accustomed to being recognized that not to be recognized comes as a rare surprise.

This might be why she agrees to let a stranger write her biography, a stranger who knows nothing of M and yet resembles her uncannily. The project they embark upon together sprawls and expands, to the olive groves and holiday beaches where M spends her days, across hotel rooms and bourgeois facades and film sets, through the endless modern cities whose beauty requires great suffering, whose ugliness holds great beauty.

Out of the bewildering torrent of the present, Rachel Cusk has fashioned a new kind of literature. What begins with a collision between two people — M, and the ordinary stranger who begins to tell her story — evolves into a chronicle of modern life, a choral investigation into how we might find what is significant within the wreck of the ordinary. This is a novel stripped of artifice, that takes our emptiness and fills it with grace. It is a shocking achievement.

Rachel Cusk’s Life of M is due to be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in North America (August 25th) and Faber & Faber in the UK (August 28th).

Follow the Author: Goodreads

Quick Review: THE SWISS AGENT by Anna Pitoniak (Simon & Schuster)

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Amanda Cole manages a new case and a potentially-rogue friend and colleague…

CIA officials Amanda Cole and Kath Frost must work together to untangle a global bribery scheme involving murder, wealthy oligarchs, and high-level Swiss bankers — unless Kath’s mysterious past tears them apart first…

Amanda Cole’s posting as the CIA station chief in Rome is normally too quiet for her liking. But when a chef’s body washes ashore on Capri, and Amanda learns he worked for a Russian oligarch with deep Kremlin ties, her alarm bells start ringing. Even more suspicious is the fact that the oligarch had hosted a private dinner with NATO’s deputy secretary general the night the chef died.

To get answers, Amanda calls on her former partner Kath Frost, a semi-retired CIA legend who is as brilliant as she is unpredictable. As they dig deeper, they discover a web of corruption that stretches from Moscow to Geneva to Washington, eventually uncovering a Kremlin-backed scheme to bribe NATO officials and tip the global balance of power.

But when a suave Swiss banker named Julian Schmidt emerges at the center of the scheme, it becomes clear that Kath shares an intimate history with him and that she may know more than she’s letting on. It turns out that Kath’s past is full of shadows, and the choices she made decades ago, in the gray borderlands of the Soviet collapse, are resurfacing now with devastating consequences. Amanda must uncover the truth about Kath — and whether she can really be trusted at all — before it’s too late.

This is the sequel to The Helsinki Affair, which was Pitoniak’s first spy novel. I’ve been a long-time fan of the author’s work — I started with a very early ARC of her excellent debut, The Futures — and I’ve enjoyed each of her new novels. I have been particularly enjoying this pivot to espionage. While The Swiss Agent isn’t the author’s best, it is nevertheless an engaging read, and I enjoyed it. Continue reading →

Upcoming: THE BREAKUP by Kurt Andersen (Random House)

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This August, Random House are due to publish the new novel from Kurt Andersen: The Breakup. It’s been quite a while since Andersen’s previous novel, True Believers (2013), but readers may also be familiar with his non-fiction — which includes the excellent Fantasyland and Evil Geniuses. In addition to his excellent non-fiction, the author on occasion turns to fiction to explore contemporary life and issues — he did this in the aforementioned True Believers, and also in Turn of the Century (2000). This latest book is about a marriage that is cracking apart during a near-future United States that is undergoing dramatic changes following a second civil war and its own break-up.

Here’s the synopsis:

Natalie and Asher’s marriage has long been marked by fault lines, quiet rifts in how they view their fellow Americans and navigate AI-suffused life in 2045. After twenty-three years together, and after surviving the two years of civil war in the 2030s, Natalie in rural Tennessee (part of the new Free American Republic) and Asher in San Francisco (in the now smaller United States).Natalie and Asher’s relationship mirrors America’s own unraveling — confused, messy, painful, ambivalent, and impossibly intimate.

When Natalie and Asher are brought back into proximity while touring far-flung colleges with their seventeen-year-old, they find themselves on a road trip through a strange, uncertain new American landscape, transformed by both the terrorist uprising and technology, all while dealing with the flux — and resilience — within their own family. They face the questions the nation has reckoned with for a generation: what differences are irreconcilable, and when is something broken worth saving?

Razor-sharp, ambitious, ranging from tragic to comic and brimming with imagination, The Breakup is a sweeping story where the personal and sociopolitical intersect in ways bracingly plausible, keenly insightful, and surprisingly hopeful.

I’m really looking forward to this. (And have also been reminded that I need to catch up on Andersen’s other novels…)

Kurt Andersen’s The Breakup is due to be published by Random House in North America, on August 18th.

Follow the Author: Website, Goodreads, Instagram, BlueSky

Upcoming: MUDLARK by Mary Helen Specht (Ballantine)

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This summer, Ballantine Books will publish Mudlark by Mary Helen Specht (author of Migratory Animals). I’ll admit that it was the cover that first caught my attention (well done, artist/designer — unfortunately, not sure who it is), but the synopsis further piqued my interest. The book is a “dystopian novel about the fall of a troubled rockstar, her long-lost solo album, and her daughter’s epic search for redemption in the ruins of New York City”. Here’s the full synopsis:

Jenny Sweet’s marriage is ending — and with it her band and maybe even her fragile relationship with her thirteen-year-old daughter, Neko. A reluctant wife and mother, Jenny plans a new journey of self-discovery after one more gig at Burning Man. But when Neko disappears amid the chaos of the festival, Jenny fears that everything that mattered to her has been lost. As she races against the dark, Jenny finds herself thrown into the past, and into the heart of a gathering storm.

Now twenty-five, Neko is a mudlark: a trained recruit who braves the rival factions and feral survivalists in the ruins of a crumbling, flooded Manhattan for resources that grow scarcer by the day. When she stumbles upon the master of her mother’s long-lost solo album and later hears that someone else is searching for it — someone who could be her mother, missing for over a decade—she embarks on a perilous adventure with a ragtag crew that will take her from treetop societies to decadent raves to the underground bunker where she will, finally, confront her mother’s fate — and her own.

I’m very much looking forward to reading this. I think it’ll probably appeal to fans of Emily St. John Mandel and other authors of “literary SFF”.

Mary Helen Specht’s Mudlark is due to be published by Ballantine Books in North America, on July 21st.

Follow the Author: Website, Goodreads, Instagram, BlueSky

Quick Review: LAKE EFFECT by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney (Ecco)

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A story of two families navigating scandal

It’s 1977 and an air of restlessness has settled on the residents of Cambridge Road in Rochester, New York, a place long fueled by the booming fortunes of Kodak and Xerox and, for some, the mores of the Catholic church. When Nina Larkin is given a copy of The Joy of Sex by her newly divorced friend, she can no longer dismiss the nearly nonexistent intimacy of her marriage. Just as her oldest child, Clara, is falling in love for the first time, Nina finds herself longing for the forbidden: a midlife awakening. An intoxicating fling with a prominent neighbor brings Nina a freedom she never thought possible—but also risks the reputations of both families and unravels Clara’s world, just as she stands on the threshold of adulthood.

Years later, Clara, now a successful food stylist in New York City, has never been able to move past the long-ago scandal. Drawn back home by the pull of a family wedding and wrestling with her own demons, she makes a pivotal decision that turns her life upside down. Written with Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney’s signature humor and insight, Lake Effect is a wise and probing look at love and desire, mothers and daughters, loss and grief, and what we owe the people we love most. 

I’ve been a fan of Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney’s novels since her debut, The Nest, and she has been a Must Read author ever since. In the author’s excellent third novel, we get another engaging and moving portrait of a complicated family. Absolutely met my high expectations. I really enjoyed this. Continue reading →

Excerpt: STAN ON GUARD by K. R. Wilson (Guernica Editions)

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In March, Guernica Editions are due to publish Stan on Guard by K. R. Wilson: a “tragical-comical-historical novel” and follow-up to Call Me Stan. To mark the upcoming release, we have an excerpt to share with our readers. First, of course, here’s the synopsis:

Ishtanu (call him Stan) is a Hittite immortal keeping his head down in Toronto and recounting some of his experiences. Tróán is an immortal Trojan princess who thought she’d killed Stan in post-war Berlin but who now knows he survived. Yes, technically Stan can die. He has just managed not to for 3200 years.

As their stories braid together toward a final reckoning they take us through, among other things, a subversive retelling of the Odysseus story, the resistance of pagan Lithuania against Papal crusaders, the decline of Friedrich Nietzsche in a German clinic, the arts scene in belle epoque Paris, and the descent of Europe into the horrors of the Great War.

Strap in.

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Excerpt: THE UNRAVELLING OF OU by Hollay Ghadery (Palimpsest Press)

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The Unravelling of Ou is the latest novel from Canadian author Hollay Ghadery. Due out next month, via Palimpsest Press, the publisher has provided CR with an excerpt to share with our readers. First, here’s the synopsis:

Moving on is hard. Even harder when it’s from a make-believe friend — someone, or in this instance, some thing — who’s been your strongest source of support. On what should be one of the happiest days ever, the day her granddaughter is born, Minoo is faced with a terrible choice: make a clean break from her constant companion, a sock puppet named Ecology Paul, or lose her daughter and granddaughter, and maybe all of the people she loves.

On an emotional drive home from the hospital, Ecology Paul shares the story of how Minoo got to this point, recalling Minoo’s early teenage pregnancy in Iran, her exile to Canada, her questions about her sexuality, and how a ragtag sock puppet came to her when she desperately needed to be seen.

Full of imagination, whimsy and heart, The Unravelling of Ou follows Minoo’s struggles to justify the puppet’s existence and untangle herself from her dependence on it, and reconnect with the people she loves.

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