Books

An extraordinary and deeply satisfying story about love, betrayal, mercy, and second chances—for readers of Elizabeth Strout and Ann Napolitano

When Stafford Hopkins loses his high-profile job in network television, his American colleagues rejoice. Canadian-born, his disdain for the industry has outrun his success, and few mourn his departure. His mercurial American wife in tow, he retreats to their luxury estate on Maui where he does what he has always done best―he rewrites the past. But a year into their exile, Stafford’s defenses are crumbling, and when a letter arrives with a request from the dead to do something for the living, he is summoned home to a farm, a lake, a prison, and a dance hall where the spirit of a boy named Bobby Shepherd is waiting for him.

“Patricia Finn has constructed something miraculous—an immersive, profoundly moving story about friendship, marriage, betrayal, and redemption that spans across generations and oceans. She writes with a philosopher’s deep wisdom, and a screenwriter’s talent for satisfyingly messy characters and wholly gripping plots. Combine all of that with the fact that The Golden Boy is also very, very funny, and what you’ve got is a novel that’s about as perfect as they come.” —Grant Ginder, author of The People We Hate at the Wedding

What would drive women to risk the lives of their children and innocent people to leave their mother country forever?

On April 30, 1982, two women and their families hijack a Polish passenger plane flying from Breslau to Warsaw in a bold attempt to escape Martial Law in Communist Poland and find safety in West Berlin. Among the hijackers are a cotton spinner whose husband wants to avoid a long prison sentence, a schoolteacher with a sick daughter, a pregnant fourteen-year-old who has visions of the Virgin Mary, and an ambitious young filmmaker. Inspired by real events, Voices in the Air is told from the point of view of these four women and a stewardess in love with the married pilot.  Will they find happiness beyond the Iron Curtain or was the hijacking not worth the risk?

Told using traditional narrative and documentary film-style interviews, Voices in the Air follows the main characters’ lives before and after the hijacking, and through real-life events as the fall of the Berlin Wall, the fight for women’s rights in modern Poland, the Covid pandemic and the refugee crisis on the Polish-Belarus border. A must-read novel exploring ambiguous moral choice, censorship, emigration, fate and regret.

Praise for Voices in the Air

Kasia Jaronczyk’s Voices in the Air is a remarkable achievement – the novel depicts multiple characters as if they lived on two flaps with a hinge between them – a before and an after – with a dramatic event in the middle that changes everything for them all. The depiction of Marshal Law Poland is gritty and compelling, and the variety of post-emigration stories is psychologically subtle and profound.—Antanas Sileika The Death of Tony

Samara and J., a struggling young couple, are off to J.’s birthplace, Upton Bay, a small town turned upscale theatre and winery destination. Sam has been hired by an editor friend to write a promotional piece about the place while she and J. stay with his grandfather Otto, a prominent businessman in his day.

But their visit does not go as planned. Sam’s explorations of Upton’s tourist attractions lead her to ugly truths behind the quaint little town’s façade—discoveries that are counterpointed with vignettes of the town’s wealthy, elderly ruling class, painting a different picture than the one Sam’s friend expects her to provide. Tensions between Sam and J. worsen as J.’s true nature emerges and Sam begins to question both his values and his family’s past—especially after Otto tells them stories about his time as a German soldier during WW2.

Back in the city, Sam’s opinions and judgments about what is right and wrong are tested when a shocking truth surfaces about her grandmother’s flight from Norway after the war, profoundly changing Sam’s understanding of who she is and who she wants to become.

In A Town with No Noise, fact and fiction combine to ask difficult questions about the communities we build, questions that are as relevant today as ever: Who stays? Who is chased away? And who decides?

Praise for A Town With No Noise

The epigraph of Karen Smythe’s novel A Town with No Noise is a gorgeous poem by Derek Walcott, which alludes to stories hidden in plain sight. Smythe’s narrative wends through deceptively bucolic small-town Ontario, then Toronto, then northern Ontario, to arrive, finally, at the devastating story of a Jewish girl and her family in Nazi-occupied Norway. In this skilful intertextual weave of fiction and true history, the reader is shocked and moved to come upon a past in Europe that Smythe’s characters—in Canada—would prefer to forget. Smythe’s protagonist Samara has taken herself on a journey of revelation and remembrance, a journey that will make of her a writer: a healer and mender. And Karen Smythe has written this story: her novel is a captivating and brave achievement.—Dawn Promislow, author of Wan

Karen Smythe is a brilliant and insightful observer of her character’s inner lives, and A Town With No Noise is no exception. Smythe is a master at articulating tension between Samara and J., between their expectations and the reality that hides behind the facade of Upton Bay, and Samara’s discoveries of certain character’s pasts. Smythe’s descriptions are gorgeous and poetic, her pacing deft and precise. A beautiful novel that I couldn’t put down.—Danila Botha author of Things that Cause Inappropriate Happiness

A compelling novel of family secrets and revelations, Karen Smythe’s A Town With No Noise lays bare WWII histories of cruelty, connection, and the bright flame of repair and healing that persists into our present day. Read this powerful, moving story of a young woman coming to terms with the past, and confronting our contemporary inequalities, for its clarity and urgent call for reckoning.—Elise Levine, author of Say This and This Wicked Tongue

With its inventive layering of a fictional narrative with footnotes, a transcription of a recording, a play, journalism, and historical details, the novel invites us to question how history is written, remembered, and forgotten, and to listen to the stories of others. A Town with No Noise will surprise, move, and push you to see the world differently, as only the best fiction can.—Kasia Jaronczyk, author of Voices in the Air and Lemons

Based on Tea Gerbeza’s experience with scoliosis, How I Bend Into More re-articulates selfhood in the face of ableism and trauma. Meditating on pain, consent, and disability, this long poem builds a body both visually and linguistically, creating a multimodal space that forges Gerbeza’s grammar of embodiment as an act of reclamation. Paper-quilled shapes represent the poet’s body on the page; these shapes weave between lines of verse and with them the reclaimed disabled body is made. How I Bend Into More is a distinctive poetic debut that challenges ableist perceptions of normalcy, and centers “the double architecture / of  ( metamorphosis (.”

Praise for How I Bend Into More

How I Bend Into More is a singular, stunning debut. The brilliance and courage with which Tea Gerbeza remembers, witnesses, experiences, and imagines is matched only by the intensity with which she bends the boundaries of art. Gerbeza expands the possibilities of poetry, renewing the creative potential of everything from punctuation, lines, and images to layout, paper, and the corporeal body itself. Read this book immediately and share in this expansion, this renewal.—Daniel Scott Tysdal, author of The End Is in the Middle: Mad Fold-In Poems

How I Bend Into More is a healing line. Tea Gerbeza’s sculptural pages crack the brackets of shame and unfurl the self—the vertebral I—until poem and body touch. This is the quilled work of a heart. A bouquet of paper roses unfolding in the hand.—Jennifer Still, author of Legs, Comma, and Girlwood 

In What to feel, how to feel, Shane Neilson dazzles in the lyric essay form. Focusing on non-neurotypicality, Neilson investigates his supposed difference of self while also holding to account society’s construction of that difference, moving from his early childhood to adulthood and then back again in terms of a neurodivergent fathering of his own son. Covering subjects that have yet to receive attention in Canadian literature, including how the medical profession discriminates against its own, Neilson’s poetic accounts of stigma and self-discovery interleavened with literary history mark a first in our letters.

Praise for What to Feel, How to Feel

Poetic, unique, and captivating, Nielson’s stunning disability treatise examines what it means to feel on the outside of societal acceptance, all while challenging perceptions of self. In this powerful read, Nielson expertly plays with structure to immerse the reader inside his brain, which is a beautiful, honest, and brilliant place to be. —Dr. Kelly S. Thompson, national bestselling memoirist of Still, I Cannot Save You

In The Field, Sadiqa de Meijer’s follow up to the Governor General’s Award winning alfabet/alphabet, brings us essays that move searchingly through their central questions. What meaning does a birthplace hold? What drives us to make contact with a work of art? How do we honour the remains of the dead? This writing constitutes a form of fieldwork grounded in intimate observation. In The Field is an extraordinary book, one that invites readers to bring renewed attention to their own lives and to embrace the subjectivity in the experiences of others.

Praise for Sadiqa de Meijer

“De Meijer has now clearly established herself as powerful essayist and memoirist.”—Canadian Journal of Netherlandic Studies

In her first collection of new poems in a decade, Robyn Sarah chronicles the pandemic years with quiet wisdom and her flair for meshing the familiar with the numinous. 

We’re Somewhere Else Now moves with ease from the particular to the abstract. These are poems of grief and unexpected change, of quiet awe at the human experience. Each poem is a window for the reader to look into, “lit room to lit room,” tracking desultory days of isolation and uncertainty, while also highlighting reasons to pay attention: playing with a grandchild, the rarity of a leap year, the calls of birds.

Three poems from the collection, originally published in The New Quarterly, were nominated for a 2025 National Magazine Award in Poetry.

Praise for We’re Somewhere Else Now

“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, The Walrus

“Robyn Sarah’s work is powerful, visceral, but also elegant and pared down when it needs to be, employing both high formalist rhymes and minimalist beauty. Her poetry collections are consistently lauded, and this one I believe will be no different.”
—Chris Banks, The Woodlot

“Sarah’s verse is an antidote to the soul’s virus . . . Her diction seems so direct, but between the words and lines she meditates in musical nuance and wit to cast doubt on simple and complex truths.”
—Michael Greenstein, The Seaboard Review

“This collection grapples with contemporary life in a way that is both stylized and vulnerable . . . Sarah’s ability to tie scenes of everyday life to highly abstract concepts and ideas results in compelling poems.”
—Anna Roberts, The Tribune

“This is a triumphant return from Robyn Sarah, and her first book of new poems in a decade. With her characteristic quiet wisdom, Sarah turns her attention to the pandemic years, capturing both the strangeness of isolation of that period, and the subtle beauty that persists in daily life.”
—Open Book

Praise for Robyn Sarah

“[Her poems] illuminate the reader’s privacy without destroying the poet’s. And elegant play is going on even in the most acutely painful moments of clarity, a play of pure energy.”
—Margaret Avison, Canadian Women Studies

“[Hers] are the sort of metaphors that poets everywhere dream of conjuring. Metaphors that in their clarity of sense, image, and sound create spaces for meaning to reside—meaning that is elusive or otherwise impossible to articulate, but that leaves the reader with a heightened sense of recognition.”
—Anita Lahey, The Walrus

“In our positive-thinking, smiley-face popular culture, Robyn Sarah looks at the shadows cast by light.  Her poems, with their focus on the passage of time, the emptiness around the presence, the unknowing around the known, are infused with the “black baptismal water” of duende, as they choose the braver joy of life thrown into relief by that dark awareness.”
—Sonnet L’Abbé

“The cool delight of her poetry is to turn those subjects of routine forgetfulness into words that quiver in the heart . . . Sarah knows the language: its pressure points, its traditions, its crevices. Trained as a musician, she also understands flow and timing, when to sing and when to keep silent.”
—Mark Abley, Montreal Gazette

“So assured and musical is the hand that shaped them that these poems tend to memorize themselves, as though they had always formed part of our experience.”
—Eric Ormsby, Books in Canada

“Robyn Sarah’s My Shoes Are Killing Me is a lyrical power. A richly inventive, precise, meditative collection . . . This is a transformative work that continuously surprises the reader.”
—Jury citation, Governor General’s Award for Poetry 2015