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A Traveler’s Talebegins in a small village in Turkey where the protagonist, Jefferson Cooper, finds himself (despite himself). He has no idea why he is there, nor who he is. An apparent victim of some sort of selective amnesia, with a suitcase full of money and demonstrably a shady past, he sets out on a voyage of self-discovery. He travels to Istanbul, Mumbai, and Kerala, meeting all manner of people who seem to know him so much better than he knows himself. Along the way, he falls in love with a slender, ethereal person who keeps reappearing just when he seems on the brink of total desperation. It is Miryam who leads him to a realization of who he is and to his long-sought redemption.

Longlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize • A Globe 100 Best Book of 2024

Short stories about disparate characters consider what it means to find happiness.

On New Year’s Eve, a pair of addicts robs a string of high-end parties in order to fund their own recovery. A recently separated woman relocates to a small northern town, where she receives a life-changing visitation, and a Russian hitman, suffering from a mysterious lung ailment, retrieves long-buried memories of his past. In the nineteenth century, a disparate group of women coalesce in the attempt to aid a young girl in her escape from a hospital for the insane. These are but some of the remarkable characters who populate these stories, all of them grappling with conflicts ranging from mundane to extraordinary. Caroline Adderson’s A Way to Be Happy considers what it means to find happiness—and how often it comes through the grace of others.

A brilliant, darkly comic, and startlingly honest novel, A Week of This follows the lives of an extended family over one increasingly desperate week. At the centre of the novel is 38-year-old Manda, a tough, sarcastic woman who has yet to make peace with the town she was brought to as a teenager after her parents’ messy divorce. Her estranged mother is crazy, her father is ill and in retreat, her damaged older brother is growing restless and distant, her stepbrother is a grown-up teenager without any real friends, and her husband is a tight-lipped, depressed store-owner who has been pressing Manda to have a baby.

Full of barbed dialogue and hilariously deadpan descriptions of family dynamics and the kind of awkward social dances that get performed every day, A Week of This is a book for people who always feel a little out of place, right where they are. People who are smart enough to know something has gone wrong, but can’t figure out how to fix it. People who know they aren’t kids anymore, but are not quite ready to grow up.

“A Week of This is bleak, funny, sad, smart, and unlike any novel I have ever read. The lives of these characters are so richly imagined I could taste the furnace dust, smell the backed-up sewer, feel the thump of every hangover. It’s an authentic, unsentimental literary experiment that doesn’t read like an experiment. Nathan Whitlock has exposed the timeless heart of lower-middle-class everywhere.” — Todd Babiak, author of The Book of Stanley and The Garneau Block.