The Globe and Mail

A GOOD MAN

By Guy Vanderhaeghe
(McClelland & Stewart)

This deeply satisfying novel, dealing with ethics, politics and nationhood, is more entertaining than political historical novels have any business being. It is the kind of impeccably crafted, Dickensian charmer we expect from Vanderhaeghe's now completed “literary western” trilogy, a collection of thematically connected fictions about the death of the wild in the Wild West.

– Andrew Pyper

ALONE IN THE CLASSROOM

By Elizabeth Hay
(McClelland & Stewart)

Through the figure of a beloved schoolteacher aunt, Hay’s narrator in this splendid novel sets out to discover the experiences that shaped her parents, and herself. In 1929, Connie Flood encounters, while teaching in Saskatchewan, a grim principal, self-important and determined to castigate. Antagonist to this sadist is a dyslexic boy whom Connie tutors.

– Aritha van Herk

AND ALSO SHARKS

By Jessica Westhead
(Cormorant)

In this story collection, Westhead returns to the office, employing the wit and offbeat characters that recall her novel, Pulpy & Midge. The stories unfold seamlessly, strikingly realistic and almost plain. However, there’s always something that catches you off guard. Westhead is a talented storyteller with a sharp sense of humour.

– Brooke Ford

A WORLD ELSEWHERE

By Wayne Johnston
(Knopf Canada)

In late-19th-century St. John’s, Landish Druken lives in exile in a two-room attic. Both Druken and his creator use anagrams, puns and neologisms as keys to unlock secret lives, longings, betrayals and revenges. Revel in one of the funniest books that will move you to a deeper sense of the poignancy of human experience.

– T.F. Rigelhof

BETTER LIVING THROUGH PLASTIC EXPLOSIVES

By Zsuzsi Gartner
(Hamish Hamilton Canada)

Gartner’s West Coast is wild and weird, uncanny and unnerving, volatile and violent, exploring the increasingly blurry line between science fiction and science fact. These stories are mutants, the glowing fruit of irradiated breeding experiments involving the DNA of a meticulous journalist, a snarky critic of hippie/hipster/yuppie mores, an inventive stylist and an old-school fabulist.

– Laura Penny

BRIDE OF NEW FRANCE

By Suzanne Desrochers
(Penguin Canada)

A wholly original example of social history at its best. Desrochers, a trained historian, has boldly appropriated fiction to expand a vision gleaned from study of often overlooked evidence about the filles du roi, women exported by royal decree into the faltering, almost wholly male colony in the late 17th century to serve as breeding stock.

– John Barber

BY LOVE POSSESSED

By Lorna Goodison
(McClelland & Stewart)

The subject matter is unique: Jamaicans of various classes and castes, passionately in and out of love. The style is also unique: a cool, faintly decorous prose, incorporating a witty, idiosyncratic Jamaican patois. As a rule, this, broadly deployed, amusingly distances us. But Goodison’s alchemy of standard and Jamaican English places us deep within the consciousness of her people.

– Donna Bailey Nurse

DOGS AT THE PERIMETER

By Madeleine Thien
(McClelland & Stewart)

Dogs at the Perimeter aims to render intimate the Cambodian genocide, and to inhabit the psyches of three of its victims over several decades. These bracing, shattering stories that link past and present, Canada and Cambodia, are characterized by Thien’s insight and compassion.

– Charles Foran

DON'T BE AFRAID

By Steven Hayward
(Knopf Canada)

Don’t Be Afraid focuses on the death of 18-year-old Mike Morrison in a mysterious explosion, and his younger brother, Jim, and his family are shattered. But Hayward never lingers over the grief under which his characters are labouring. Rarely has loss and grieving been handled with such deft tenderness, sly humour and almost inexplicable beauty.

– Robert J. Wiersema

EVERY TIME WE SAY GOODBYE

By Jamie Zeppa
(Knopf Canada)

Zeppa’s first novel explores three generations of a Canadian family in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., spreading out the full spectrum of the human experience in an unpretentious and thoroughly convincing way. She takes us from the Depression to the late 1970s as smoothly as if we were on a guided tour in a time machine.

– William Kowalski

EXIT

By Nelly Arcan
Translated by David Scott Hamilton
(Anvil Press)

Exit was finalized just days before Arcan’s suicide at 36. Set in Montreal “in the not too distant future,” the novel opens two years after a guillotine “malfunction” left narrator Antoinette paraplegic, rather than granting her the death by decapitation she then desired. Dark, beautiful, poignant and clever, Exit is a powerful read.

– Lisa Foad

HALF-BLOOD BLUES

By Esi Edugyan
(Thomas Allen)

Set in Baltimore, Berlin and Paris, Scotiabank Giller Prize-winner Half-Blood Blues spans from just after the First World War to the 1990s, but centres on the months leading up to the Nazi occupation of Paris. It chronicles the increasingly deadly trials of an interracial jazz band in which the trumpeter, a German of African descent, is arrested.

– Donna Bailey Nurse

INFRARED

By Nancy Huston
(McArthur & Company)

Rena, a 45-year-old photographer in Paris, visits Florence with her elderly father and her stepmother, even though she can’t bear to be away from her lover and resents her stepmother. We come to see that her relationship with her father is problematic too. Huston shows her mastery of complicated structure, wide cultural knowledge and brilliant, assured portraiture.

– Michel Basilières

INTO THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY

By Pauline Holdstock
(HarperCollins)

Holdstock takes on the relationship between English fur traders in Churchill, Man., and the native women on whom they relied. The novel follows the real-life, 18th-century exploits of Richard Norton, his son, Moses, and explorer Samuel Hearne, interspersing the goings-on at the Prince of Wales Fort with the dream sequences of Molly Norton, Hearne’s fictional love interest.

– Suzanne Desrochers

MISS NEW INDIA

By Bharati Mukherjee
(HarperCollins)

This is a compelling novel of young people washing up in the call centres, coffee shops and bars of today's Bangalore. It is set in India, but American culture and values loom large. The novel makes sense of India’s digital age, and brings the worlds of tradition and change together in ways that illuminate both.

– Linda Leith

MONOCEROS

By Suzette Mayr
(Coach House)

In this imaginative, quirky and devastating novel, the first chapter is narrated by the Dead Boy, harassed for being gay. By the end of the chapter, he has hanged himself; the rest of the novel is written by the students, parents and staff affected. Mayr nails the voices of her stable of wildly divergent narrators with aplomb.

– Zoe Whittall

OUR DAILY BREAD

By Lauren B. Davis
(Wordcraft of Oregon)

Trouble’s brewing in the Church of Christ as religion and sin collide in a novel full of remarkable moments. Davis takes her character Dorothy on the road to the mountain of hell and offers to walk us back down. in simple, brave, powerful scenes that sit with the soul long after the book is closed.

– Alan Cumyn

QUIVER

By Holly Luhning
(HarperCollins)

Like a perfectly executed murder with a feminine touch, Quiver has everything: style, substance, terror, a treacherous murderess – and lip gloss. Danica, a Canadian forensic psychologist, finds her enthrallment with violence fed by Hungarian Countess Elizabeth Báthory, who tortured and killed 650 women; her celebrity patient, murderer Martin Foster; and “frenemy” Maria Janos.

– Ibi Kaslik

THE ANTAGONIST

By Lynn Coady
(Anansi)

Rank, the protagonist of Coady’s angry, funny, tender work, comes across himself in a novel by a former university pal. Outraged, he fires off a string of e-mails about what it was like to grow up as a huge boy continually mistaken for a tough guy, and who always gets the enforcer role on a hockey team.

– Giles Blunt

THE CAT'S TABLE

By Michael Ondaatje
(McClelland & Stewart)

Mynah, 11 is on board a luxury liner in the early 1950s, headed from Ceylon to London. At mealtimes, he is seated at the cat’s table, “the least privileged place” in the ship’s grand dining hall, but the best spot for an unsupervised boy to overhear the crisscrossing lines of adult intrigue and gossip he will pursue toward life-changing adventure.

– Sonnet L’Abbé

THE FREE WORLD

By David Bezmozgis
(HarperCollins)

Bezmozgis tells the story of three generations of Russian Jews in Italy in 1978, emigrating from the Soviet Union to the “free world.” The novel unspools in a voice as whimsical and wry and trippingly light as a sidewalk musician’s, and Bezmozgis draws us in the way a consummate busker attracts his audience: with deceptive ease and unavoidable power.

– Leah Hager Cohen

THE GUARDIANS

By Andrew Pyper
(Doubleday Canada)

Trevor, Randy, Ben and Carl were friends and schoolmates. One day, a teacher disappeared; seeking to solve the mystery, they entered Thurman House, where the unspeakable happened. Twenty-four years later, Trevor is awakened with the news that Ben has hanged himself. They return for Ben’s funeral, but the past begins to repeat itself when a young woman goes missing.

– Christy Ann Conlin

THE LITTLE SHADOWS

By Marina Endicott
(Doubleday Canada)

Featuring three fatherless sisters and their widowed mother, The Little Shadows is set on vaudeville stages all over the U.S. and Canadian West around the First World War. The novel features Endicott’s trademark wry sensibility and pithy lyricism, and her skill at pulling the rug out from under the reader’s feet.

– Katherine Ashenburg

THE MEAGRE TARMAC

By Clark Blaise
(Biblioasis)

A short-story stalwart, Blaise gives us whole personalities and the lived experience of his characters in a handful of pages. He has always explored the interconnections (and disconnections) of cultural and geographical spaces (and people). In The Meagre Tarmac, Blaise addresses himself to India and the stories of Indian immigrants in North America.

– Steven Hayward

THE PERFECT ORDER OF THINGS

By David Gilmour
(Thomas Allen)

Gilmour’s delicious, subversive, self-mocking novel features a narrator who is a composite from all his other books. He revisits the places he has suffered, hoping to balance old scores and relearn early lessons. In the process, he is transformed from a man who likes to watch his own reflection into a man who reflects on his failings and losses.

– Aritha van Herk

THE SISTERS BROTHERS

By Patrick deWitt
(Anansi)

The Sisters Brothers, winner of two major prizes, is poignant and powerful. This bold and compelling novel follows Eli and Charlie Sisters as they travel to San Francisco during the gold rush to kill a man. Their pursuit is a fantastic, fatalistic journey into the heart of their own natures, and the consequences of their past.

– Robert J. Wiersema

THE THIRTEEN

By Susie Moloney
(Random House Canada)

Haven Woods is a suburban idyll: quiet streets, good schools, friendly neighbours and a bit of blood sacrifice and demon worship, the price of keeping life blessed for a coven of 13 women. Moloney has constructed a compellingly uncanny narrative, binding the tropes of small-town paranoia and cliquishness with the chokehold of family obligations and religious fervour.

– Sandra Kasturi

THE TIME WE ALL WENT MARCHING

By Arley McNeney
(Goose Lane)

This small, beautiful book is filled with large themes. Edie and her four-year-old son, Belly, have boarded a train to B.C., leaving Belly’s father passed out in their freezing apartment. On the train, Edie tells Slim’s stories of Depression-era marches to Belly. McNeney layers these stories on Edie’s story with great care. A stunning achievement.

– Michelle Berry

UNDERGROUND

By Antanas Sileika
(Thomas Allen)

This is a rare and compelling chronicle of Lithuanian partisans and their violent struggle against Soviet occupation after the Second World War. The central characters are Lukas, in love with Elena, and his brother, Vincentas. Sileika gives us a brilliant, highly accessible military history, one that remains largely repressed – underground.

– Donna Bailey Nurse

VITAL SIGNS

By Tessa McWatt
(Random House Canada)

McWatt's bracing slap of a novel makes long-term couplehood more puzzling, murky and indefinable than ever. After 30 years of marriage, Michael and Anna must contend with Anna’s brain aneurysm and the prospect of a life-threatening operation. Over this book’s eerie traverse, Michael comes to question everything he has ever thought about “normal” life.

– Cynthia Macdonald