“T he Best Books of Fall” is a project that inspires both glee and gravitas in The Walrus staff. First come the catalogues of titles, the arrival of galleys, the silent tucking into pages and chapters. And then there is the deliberation, the choosing of our favoured ten. “What is a ‘best book’?” we ask ourselves each time we sit down to compile our list. This year, it is a book we found ourselves waiting to return to, a world we wanted to stay immersed in, a voice we longed to keep listening to, an idea we needed to keep turning over. These are the ten books we thought about between the moment we put them down and the moment we picked them up again.
A Year on the Abyss of Genocide by Mahmoud Al-Shaer
ARP Books (Arbeiter Ring Publishing)
September 1
In A Year on the Abyss of Genocide, writer and poet Mahmoud Al-Shaer, documents a life of survival. His collection of letters, “a sign of life inside the Gaza Strip,” comes from a place where everything has been lost and “only our souls remain.” He writes about his three-year-old twins—a daughter who can hold her parents’ hands but has to grow up around bombings, and a son who is away from the devastation, separated from his family for medical care in Turkey. He yearns for normalcy, for a sky clear of warplanes and drones. Words like future, home, light, and school no longer carry the same meaning they once did. Friends and neighbours are killed “with every passing hour.” Al-Shaer writes about wanting to stay alive, again and again. You can feel the exhaustion as his words repeat, mirroring a reality with no end in sight. But just as the horror of his days does not abate, neither does his hope: “If you are reading this, please don’t let these words fade. Keep sharing. Keep this signal of life alive.” And months later, he and his family are still there. Still alive. Still writing. Still pleading. —Hailey Choi, Chawkers fellow
We Love You, Bunny by Mona Awad
Scribner Canada
September 23
I’m generally not fond of sequels, but Mona Awad’s outrageous We Love You, Bunny is a worthy exception. The original novel Bunny follows outcast MFA student Samantha Mackey in her interactions with the “Bunnies”—a cult-like clique of wealthy and beautiful girls in her program. Now that Samantha has graduated and published her debut, we get to hear the story from the Bunnies’ perspectives. They insist that they were misrepresented in Bunny and attempt to set the record straight. But these aren’t the perfectly in-sync Bunnies of the previous novel; they are hilariously unreliable narrators, interrupting each other with accusations of exaggeration, digression, and outright lying. They are also excessively referential, mentioning Sylvia Plath, Charlotte Brontë, Lana Del Rey, and Kate Bush. I loved these various cultural allusions, which highlight the performative intellectualism of the group while also creating dialogues between texts. The novel pays homage to Frankenstein in particular, with its focus on mad science (or perhaps mad creative writing). We Love You, Bunny contains as much social satire and dark comedy as its predecessor, and with multiple distinctive narrators, it emerges as even bolder and stranger. —Amarah Hasham-Steele, Power Corporation of Canada fellow for emerging BIPOC journalists
Nowhere Girl: Life as a Member of ADHD’s Lost Generation by Carla Ciccone
Random House Canada
September 9
“The way I spoke to myself in early motherhood was diabolical,” Carla Ciccone writes, “but I’d been perfecting the art of motivational meanness for decades.” Is she in my head? I wondered as I read the introductory lines of Nowhere Girl, Ciccone’s reported memoir about the experience of living with untreated attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, and the cost of a late diagnosis. According to Ciccone, girls raised in the ’80s and ’90s were rarely assessed for the condition. As their male peers disrupted class, little “nowhere girls” like Ciccone chewed their nails and lost battles with their brains while trying to pay attention. They learned to “mask” these behaviours and the emotions that came with them. For many women, motherhood was the final straw of this personal effacement. “I persuaded myself to go for daily walks, cut up sweet potatoes in baby-graspable sticks, and make sure the diaper bag had diapers in it by being an asshole to myself—because it worked.” I can confirm that it does, though I wouldn’t recommend it. With plenty of charm and humour, Ciccone delves into the science, the stats, and the softness she decided to bring into her life. I suspect her words will be vindicating for many women, neurodivergent people, or anyone else who has perfected the art of motivational meanness. —Carine Abouseif, senior editor
Starry Starry Night by Shani Mootoo
Book*hug Press
September 23
At the opening of Shani Mootoo’s Starry Starry Night, Anju Ghoshal is six years old. The novel follows her growth over several years—before, during, and after Trinidad gained independence from Britain in 1962—and documents her tumultuous childhood, relationship with gender, and budding artist’s sensibility. This is not a book of tight narratives and linear plotlines; it paces, wanders, and frequently pauses to look up at the stars. And yet, there is a certain propulsive quality to the novel, created by constant tiny shifts in the Trinidadian political landscape and in the relationships in Anju’s family. Perhaps the novel’s greatest strength is its first-person child narrator, whose innocent observations about the adults around her double as biting social commentary. Reflecting on her parents’ relationship, she muses, “when I grow up, I don’t ever want to be as weak as she is with him, or as strong as he is with her.” Here and elsewhere, her remarks reflect and critique social systems entirely beyond her character’s comprehension. Starry Starry Night reminds us what childhood feels like, but it also reminds us how clearly children see and how frequently we underestimate them. —Amarah Hasham-Steele, Power Corporation of Canada fellow for emerging BIPOC journalists
As the Earth Dreams: Black Canadian Speculative Stories, edited by Terese Mason Pierre
House of Anansi
October 14
In As the Earth Dreams: Black Canadian Speculative Stories, memories are traded for money, magic carpets take flight, and mothers return from the dead—not once, not twice, but four times. Edited by Terese Mason Pierre, this collection of short fiction gathers writers such as francesca ekwuyasi, Whitney French, and Zalika Reid-Benta to create a kaleidoscope of not-so-distant futures. Against the backdrop of disaster, characters navigate joy and loss, desire and duty, their stories infused with the warmth of family, friendship, and other intimacies. Taking us across time, place, and possibility, As the Earth Dreams offers a distinctly Canadian vision of Black life that is as lush and expansive as it is tender and rooted. More readers are seeking out speculative fiction from traditionally underrepresented voices, a genre in which contributions of Black Canadians have been rarely spotlighted. Here, their presence is affirmed by the words of the protagonist in contributor Chimedum Ohaegbu’s story “Ravenous, Called Iffy”: “I’ve been right here. I’ve always been right here.” —Makda Mulatu, digital production manager
All Kidding Asideby Jean-Christophe Réhel, translated by Neil Smith
QC Fiction
September 1
On the surface, Jean-Christophe Réhel’s novel sounds miserable. Louis, the narrator, lives in Montreal with his dying father and a brother who has schizophrenia. He texts his ex-boyfriend too much. He’s thirty-two and stuck working at Tim Hortons. He obsessively watches clips of comedians online, dreaming of becoming a comic himself. His landlord is up to something, measuring the family’s apartment. His circumstances feel impossible and go from bad to worse. And yet Louis’s voice—wry, witty, and observant—carries the book, making it readable and funny in spite of the harsh reality of loneliness, precarity, burnout, and the messiness of caring for family. I tore through it, anxious to know what would happen. The pressure doesn’t let up, but Réhel weaves in moments of absurdity and connection: the ill father gamely flirting on Tinder or a hand-knit toque adorned with a skull that’s so tight the skull’s eyes jiggle whenever the wearer moves. It’s an impressive balancing act between tension and humour, one that underlines the magic of what happens when you tell a joke to someone listening and it really lands. —Monika Warzecha, digital editor
We’re Somewhere Else Now by Robyn Sarah
Biblioasis
September 2
Close attention to time and its effects mark Robyn Sarah’s taut, wary, elegiac, rueful new collection. But, for Sarah, the problem isn’t so much growing older (charting the seasons into motherhood and beyond has been one of her great themes). It’s, too suddenly, being old: finding yourself inescapably septuagenarian and living inside an augmented reality where discontinuous memories map over your surroundings (of street hockey: “You close your eyes and see them again / the players, forty years ago on this block, / nameless boys”). The title’s inside joke is that very little happens. Cut sunflowers, a medical lobby, four sparrows at a feeder: scenes, when we get them, are minimal. Sarah mostly lives in her head, a place of clutter and contradictions. She comes as close as any recent poet to capturing the twitchy frustration of life not quite matching up to expectations. Nothing adding together was part of the pandemic mood, and a number of poems trace that period. But Sarah makes the disorientations of lockdown days feel inescapable, as if one of COVID’s aftershocks was to expose what was already helpless and undirected about contemporary life. We’re Somewhere Else Now is a gravely beautiful collection, chronicling days “spent and drying.” No poet has published anything close to it this year, and it confirms Sarah as one of our best. —Carmine Starnino, editor-in-chief
You Will Not Kill Our Imagination: A Memoir of Palestine and Writing in Dark Times by Saeed Teebi
Scribner Canada
September 30
Saeed Teebi’s You Will Not Kill Our Imagination begins in 2022 with a moment that is at first ordinary, then terrifying: he is carrying his baby daughter to her room, and as he walks past the staircase, he imagines she falls out of his arms and plummets down the stairs. These visions of his daughter falling, sometimes “torn and mutilated,” come to him incessantly no matter where he is or the time of day. But he realizes that this irrational anxiety is in fact an inherited fear for his child’s body, triggered by scenes of daughters like his falling from bombed buildings in Gaza. The visions subside, only to return in late 2023. This is one of the many personal stories in Teebi’s memoir that ties his own life as an exiled Palestinian in Canada to the ongoing occupation and genocide in Gaza. And he doesn’t hold back, including about his own complicity. These systems of oppression, he writes, “exiled my grandfather, silenced my father, and forced me into invisibility for much of my life.” This is the story his father never got to write, told by a son who finally “loosen[ed] the chains that once made anything like it feel impossible.” —Hailey Choi, Chawkers fellow
Pick a Colour by Souvankham Thammavongsa
Knopf Canada
September 30
If you’ve ever wondered whether the woman who does your nails at the local salon is talking about you with her co-workers while gently rubbing moisturizer into your hands, here is your answer. Making fun of customers, making up stories about them, is practically a love language for the employees of Susan’s, the nail shop in which Thammavongsa’s debut novel is set. Pick a Colour spans a single day of commerce, during which menace, joy, generosity, and loneliness take turns filling the room. It is narrated by the salon owner, Ning, whose matter-of-fact, staccato voice belies a delicate vulnerability. “If you want to know,” she says, “I’m not married. And I don’t have kids. I am a family of one. You can be that, you know. A family of one.” She is almost as tough and careful a storyteller as she is a boss—refusing to go to lunch with her staff, refusing to offer a kind word to the shop’s new girl, pretending she doesn’t care if people notice her missing finger—but in the end, she cannot hide how much she values them all: her workers, her clients, the pigeons on the street, and the people living there too. “Everyone is ugly” is the very first thing Ning says. It seems she feels the exact opposite to be true. —Dafna Izenberg, features editor
A Truce That Is Not Peace by Miriam Toews
Knopf Canada
August 26
“A student of English Literature, whose class I recently visited, has suggested that now is the time for me to stand back and listen. I’ve had a ‘platform’ long enough,” Miriam Toews writes in her latest. “But what then—if I stop writing? I don’t want a platform. I am listening. What an awful word! Platform. Dear Comité, Why do I write?” Toews toils over this last question, provided to her by the committee running a writers’ conference in Mexico City. They’d like her to write something in response to read at the conference. The prompt quickly becomes existential—and a moment for her to interrogate the grief left by her sister, who took her own life in 2010, and her father, who did the same twelve years prior. Part epistolary, at times diary, and at other moments poetry, the book is also Toews’s first true turn to memoir, as she excavates her life to find out why it is that she gets to keep writing while her sister and father stay silent. This search takes her back to a college cycling trip where she fought with a boyfriend across Europe, to a freezing night in Winnipeg, and to Trinity Bellwoods Park in Toronto with her grandson, though never, as it happens, to Mexico City. We may never learn exactly why it is that Toews writes, but thank God she does. —Ariella Garmaise, associate editor
Julieta Caballero is an illustration student whose work ranges from children’s illustration to branding and editorial design.