Archives de catégorie : Literary

ADRIFT de Lisa Brideau

What if you lost everything about yourself—and it would kill you to find it? A galvanizing riddle that is just as unmooring as it seems, this sharp character-driven odyssey explores a future challenged by our quickly changing world and the choices we must make to save what matters most.

ADRIFT
by Lisa Brideau
Sourcebooks Landmark, May 2023

The truth doesn’t always set you free…
Ess wakes up alone on a sailboat in the remote Pacific Northwest with no memory of who she is or how she got there. She finds a note, but it’s more warning than comfort: Start over. Don’t make yourself known. Don’t look back.
Ess must have answers. She sails over a turbulent ocean to a town hundreds of miles away that, she hopes, might offer insight. The chilling clues she uncovers point to a desperate attempt at erasing her former life. But why? And someone is watching her…someone who knows she must never learn her truth.
In Ess’s world, the earth is precariously balanced at a climate tipping point, and she is perched at the edge of a choice: which life does she want? The one taken from her―and the dangerous secret that was buried―or the new one she can make for herself?

« It’s rare for a book to be a taut page-turning thriller and also be the kind of story that makes you think about the nature of self, but Lisa Brideau has managed to do just that. Full of apocalyptic tension, tempered by warm human connection, this is a book that will stay in my memory for life. » ― Marissa Levien, author of The World Gives Way

A former aerospace engineer, Lisa Brideau has a master’s in urban planning from the University of British Columbia and works at the intersection of municipal climate change policy and equity as a sustainability specialist. Recipient of a Canada Council for the Arts grant, Brideau lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

THE GHOST OF SAM WEBSTER de Craig Higginson

Written in Craig Higginson’s masterful prose, THE GHOST OF SAM WEBSTER is at once a war novel, a murder mystery, a multi-layered love story and a robust reassertion of what it is to remain human during the most challenging times.

THE GHOST OF SAM WEBSTER
by Craig Higginson
Pan Macmillan (South Africa), September 2023
(via The Lennon-Ritchie Agency)

• Winner of the HSS Award for Best Fiction Novel (2024)
• Longlisted for the Sunday Times Fiction Prize (2024)
• Longlisted for the SALA Award for Best Novel (2024)

Writer Daniel Hawthorne is packing up his mother’s house in Johannesburg when he hears about the disappearance of Sam Webster, the beautiful daughter of his friend, the famous historian Bruce Webster. When the body of Sam appears briefly on the banks of the flooded Buffalo River, Daniel decides to visit the Websters’ luxury lodge in the heart of Zululand. Under the guise of researching a new novel about his disgraced ancestor, the lepidopterist Lieutenant Charles Hawthorne who fought in the Battle of iSandlwana, Daniel starts to investigate the reasons for Sam’s disappearance. The lines between loyalty and betrayal, love and hate, cowardice and courage, redemption and shame, soon become blurred as Daniel gets closer to the truth.

Craig Higginson is an acclaimed playwright and award-winning novelist whose plays have been performed and produced in theatres and festivals around the world. His novels include Last Summer (Picador Africa, 2010; Mercure de France, 2017), The Landscape Painter (Picador Africa, 2011), The Dream House (Picador Africa, 2015; Mercure de France, 2016) and The White Room (Picador Africa and St Martin’s Press, 2018). The Dream House was a matric setwork for South African schools from 2019 to 2021.

THE ALPHABETICAL DIARIES de Sheila Heti

A habitual diarist radically compresses and reorders ten years of life, asking not how a person should be, but how a person is.

THE ALPHABETICAL DIARIES
by Sheila Heti
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Spring 2024
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

“A little more than 10 years ago, I began looking back at the diaries I had kept over the previous decade. I wondered if I’d changed. So I loaded all 500,000 words of my journals into Excel to order the sentences alphabetically. Perhaps this would help me identify patterns and repetitions. How many times had I written, I hate him, for example? With the sentences untethered from narrative, I started to see the self in a new way: as something quite solid, anchored by shockingly few characteristic preoccupations. As I returned to the project over the years, it grew into something more novelistic. I blurred the characters and cut thousands of sentences, to introduce some rhythm and beauty. When I was asked about a work of fiction that could be serialized, I thought of these diaries: The self’s report on itself is surely a great fiction, and what is a more fundamental mode of serialization than the alphabet? After some editing, here is the result.” —Sheila Heti

Sheila Heti is the author of several books of fiction and nonfiction, including How Should a Person Be?, which New York Magazine deemed one of the “New Classics of the 21st century.” She was named one of “The New Vanguard” by The New York Times book critics, who, along with a dozen other magazines and newspapers, chose Motherhood as a top book of 2018. Her books have been translated into twenty-one languages.

THE IDLE STANCE OF THE TIPPLER PIGEON de Safinah Danish Elahi

A beautifully rendered portrait of love, healing, and long-buried pain, digging deep into the nature of trauma and class division. Perfect for readers of Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman, The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, and The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak.

THE IDLE STANCE OF THE TIPPLER PIGEON
by Safinah Danish Elahi
Neem Tree Press, May 2023
(via Randle Editorial & Literary)

Zohaib, Misha and Nadia believed they would be in each other’s lives forever. As children they played, argued, teased and loved one another. Yet nothing could have prepared them for the tragic turn of events one fateful afternoon in Karachi, Pakistan, when the divisions and differences between them are revealed.
Years later and they are still trying to piece their lives back together, still trying to make sense of what happened. Zohaib is living in London, haunted by the ghosts of the past. Nadia has escaped the household where she first met Misha and Zohaib but finds fate delivering her back to their door…

Safinah Danish Elahi is a lawyer, writer and poet. She is the author of two books, The Unbridled Romance of Love and Pain and Eye on the Prize, a novel which is being adapted for tv. Safinah is also the founder of Reverie Publishers, an independent press based in Pakistan. Recently, she was selected for the Iowa Writing Program Fall Residency 2022.

THE CURATION OF EAMON O’REILLY de Hugh Blackthorne

A remarkable literary debut about a young genderfluid man who escapes his difficult life in Cork to chase his dreams of fashion and modelling in London, for fans of Garth Greenwell and Swimming in the Dark.

THE CURATION OF EAMON O’REILLY
by Hugh Blackthorne
Publication: TBD
(via Northbank Talent Management)

Genderfluid Eamon Kastellakis wants to be beautiful. More than anything, he dreams of wearing couture dresses by the designers he worships, Alexander McQueen and Gucci, well away from the roar and threat of his alcoholic Greek da in their decaying house in Cork, Ireland.
At a turning point following his seventeenth birthday, Eamon gives himself the gift he’s always wanted: freedom. But running away to fashion capital London isn’t the end of his troubles – it’s only the beginning. Eamon’s given survival pro tips – where rent’s cheap, where a lad might find some work under the table – by an odd girl who’s on the run herself. He lives in a slum house, a step up from the streets, struggling to make his way. The world of fashion seems an unattainable dream for a runaway.
Eamon slowly starts to build a life for himself in a new country away from his da. But as soon as Eamon’s modelling dreams are in sight, with runways ahead, his da falls ill. Eamon faces a painful choice between returning home to care for him or staying in London to pursue his fashion dreams – and he stands to lose everything he’s fought for.

Hugh Blackthorne is a queer trans writer of LGBTQ fiction and poetry. His writing has been published by several journals, and in 2020, THE CURATION OF EAMON O’REILLY was Runner Up in the BPA First Novel Award. In 2019, his writing was longlisted for both the Bath Novel Award and the Canadian Broadcast Corporation (CBC) Nonfiction Prize. His writing has received funding support from the Canada Council for the Arts and BC Arts Council. His work in museums and archaeology provide plenty of inspiration for his writing, along with his experiences living and working in Canada and the UK, and his travels. He often writes on themes of queer identity, belonging, and found family. Hugh currently lives in Victoria, BC, Canada.