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Bookville 2023 – Fiction
Explore a wide range of Bookville fiction picks: from humorous, beach-ready reads to serious dramas to award-winners, there’s something for every type of reader in this collection of fiction books.
All Books in this Collection
Showing 21–33 of 33 results
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Such a Lovely Afternoon
$22.95Such a Lovely Afternoon is a poignant, unflinching debut collection. Characters confront urgent questions about gender, identity, family, community, what reconciliation in Canada might look like and where it falls painfully short.
A refugee single dad caring for a man with fetal alcohol effects becomes a scapegoat. A useless toilet, a derelict landlord and wacky neighbours turn an unemployed woman’s cabin life upside down. In the linked section, we first meet Tracy, a feisty tomboy grappling with gender roles. As a cub reporter, she finds herself caught in a typhoon in China, then covering an inquest for a Yukon teen who froze to death. With her boyfriend Rick, she struggles to care for both their baby and Rick’s mother who lives with dementia and residential school trauma. In the final and title story, Tracy attends the preliminary hearing into her father’s murder by a mentally ill former patient, and she, her brothers and grandmother each try in their own ways to make sense of the unfathomable and move on with their lives.
Brimming with compassion, humour and wisps of hope, the stories are set against vivid landscapes from Canada’s West Coast to Hong Kong to the Yukon.
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The Annual Migration of Clouds
$19.95AURORA AWARD WINNER“This packs a punch.” — Publishers Weekly“One of the most unique and engaging voices in genre fiction.” — Booklist“In this rich and nuanced universe, Mohamed offers an emotionally fierce and human story that takes the time and space to personalize apocalypse.” — STARRED review, Quill & QuireA novella set in post–climate disaster Alberta; a woman infected with a mysterious parasite must choose whether to pursue a rare opportunity far from home or stay and help rebuild her communityThe world is nothing like it once was: climate disasters have wracked the continent, causing food shortages, ending industry, and leaving little behind. Then came Cad, mysterious mind-altering fungi that invade the bodies of the now scattered citizenry. Reid, a young woman who carries this parasite, has been given a chance to get away — to move to one of the last remnants of pre-disaster society — but she can’t bring herself to abandon her mother and the community that relies on her. When she’s offered a coveted place on a dangerous and profitable mission, she jumps at the opportunity to set her family up for life, but how can Reid ask people to put their trust in her when she can’t even trust her own mind?With keen insight and biting prose, Premee Mohamed delivers a deeply personal tale in this post-apocalyptic hopepunk novella that reflects on the meaning of community and asks what we owe to those who have lifted us up.
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The Broken Heart of Winter
$24.95Lise, Appoline and Anne are related, though they live on opposite coasts at different moments of time, with the vast geography of Canada and decades of change in between. The three women are linked by generations of hardship, displacement, and an eighteenth-century French musket that has been passed down through the LeBlanc family since the time of the Acadian expulsion. In contemporary Victoria, BC, Lise’s estranged son, Daniel, reappears in Nova Scotia just when she’s making significant changes in her life, including a nasty divorce from Daniel’s father. Upon learning that her son is living with a distant relative Lise barely knows and causing enough trouble to draw the attention of the authorities, Lise goes to him and begins to unravel a family history that brings about unintended consequences. In 1832, on Isle Madame, Nova Scotia, eighteen-year-old Appoline is left by her older brother to overwinter in an isolated cove, where she’s in charge of five members of her family ranging in age from ten to ninety-nine. Grand-mère, the family matriarch, refuses to leave despite the wishes of her family. Tension grows between Appoline and her younger sister, coming to a head when the sister brings home a young ‘Jersey man.’ Finally, Grand-mère tells her own story of the Acadian expulsion of 1755. Her memories follow a group of Acadian fugitives on their flight into what is now northern New Brunswick, seeking refuge at the infamous Camp D’Espérance. In each successive generation, the imprint of the expulsion perpetuates further suffering, severs a connection to the past and contributes to the gradual erosion of cultural identity. Nevertheless, these three women are resilient in the face of great obstacles. The Broken Heart of Winter speaks to the capacity of the human spirit to love, to adapt, and to carry on.
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The Crash Palace
$22.95SHORTLISTED FOR THE RELIT 2022 NOVEL AWARD
A joy ride set on a crash course with the past.
Audrey Cole has always loved to drive. Anytime, anywhere, any car: a questionable rustbucket, a family sedan, the SUV she was paid to drive around the oil fields. From the second she learned to drive, she’s always found a way to hit the road.
Years ago, when she abandoned her oil field job, she found herself chauffeuring around the Lever Men, a B-list band relegated to playing empty dive bars in far-flung towns. That’s how she found herself at the Crash Palace, an isolated lodge outside the big city where people pay to party in the wilderness.
And now, one night, while her young daughter is asleep at home, Audrey is struck by that old urge and finds herself testing the doors of parked cars in her neighbourhood. Before she knows it, she’s headed north in the dead of winter to the now abandoned Crash Palace in a stolen car, unable to stop herself from confronting her past
The Crash Palace is a funny, moving, and surprising novel by the author of the Amazon First Novel Award–nominated The Milk Chicken Bomb. Audrey is unlike any character you’ve met before, and you’ll love being along for the ride.
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The Donkey Cutter
$25.00Years after the death of her mother, Mareika Doerksen moves through her adolescence with feelings of loss, confusion, and isolation as she seems somewhere between not being a child and not being a complete woman. Her father, a Mennonite only ethnically and socially, and a long-time atheist, has always been distant but pragmatic as he prepared her for the day he expects her to abandon their homestead on the Canadian Prairies for an education once impossible for women of their time. They move day to day avoiding the tragedies, traumas, and social expectations they rebel against in their Mennonite community during the infancy of Canada. But with the looming arrival of the 1910 Halley’s Comet, so too comes a handsome, charismatic Doomsday preacher. He captivates Mareika as he offers her solace and his ear. Meanwhile the local Bishop with a troubling and violent past sewn to the Doerksens, too, becomes obsessed with the maturing Mareika and sets out with the goal of saving her from the chiliast stranger and her atheist father.
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The Loyal Daughter
$24.95The Loyal Daughter is a novel in stories, told from the perspective of mother, daughter, and granddaughter and spans the 1940s to modern day. A young woman in a village in Communist China finds herself scrapping her way through the crowded streets of Hong Kong. She immigrates to an isolated Northern Ontario city and finally settling in Toronto. When she finds herself stuck in a small apartment above a clothing store, with four kids, her mother, two siblings, and a husband who is never home, the promise of a new beginning fades. Filled with heart-breaking sacrifices, struggles, and secrets that shape her identity, The Loyal Daughter stands testament to a woman’s true resilience.
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The Raw Light of Morning
$22.95***2022 BMO WINTERSET AWARD – WINNER***
The Raw Light of Morning is a powerful debut novel about women and children finding humour and love in the aftermath of domestic violence.
Fourteen-year-old Laurel Long does something unimaginable. In a house at the back end of Woods Road, she commits an act of violence that alters the course of her life. Laurel finds herself living in Stephenville, a small town on Newfoundland’s west coast, trapped in a system of poverty and generational neglect, haunted by trauma. Laurel needs a fresh start, and education is her ticket out, but when her past starts to catch up with her, she must decide how far she will go to protect herself and the ones she loves.
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Tulpa Mea Culpa
$24.95When Gellhorn, a notable poet, begins a university residency in a “dynamic metropolis” and stays at the illustrious Máximo College, he finds himself scandalized, and for little known reason. Scrutiny by his new academic neighbours is the least of his worries, as he learns of the existence of Aaron Schnell, his physical pseudo-twin, and an actor and film “double.”The Chair shares fragments from the oeuvre of Thomas Claque, a recently deceased author who contrived the tale of the pseudo-twins. The Chair’s scholarship leads him to the real Máximo College, where he revives those characters and scenarios, before travelling to a smaller prairie town where he reimagines one of Claque’s risqué getaways. There he meets a young woman doing her creative thesis on the double in literature.Petra, a police clerk in an entirely different prairie city, receives a photograph of a missing person and recognizes a passenger from her weekday commute. Non-routine surveillance draws her deeper into his world until a global pandemic abruptly stalls her progress. Her romantic prospect soon leads to a greater mystery punctuated by the words, TULPA MEA CULPA, although its uncanny truth will be ultimately less provocative than serial coverage in the Prairie Pulse.Tulpa Mea Culpa is a literary tour-de-force and solidifies Morse as one of Canada’s most exciting writers today and proves why he is a two-time Governor General Award nominee.
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We, Jane
$23.00Shortlisted for the 2022 Amazon Canada First Novel Award
Longlisted for the 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize
Shortlisted for the 2021 BMO Winterset Award
Shortlisted for the 2021 Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction
Shortlisted for the 2021 Concordia University First Book Prize
Shortlisted for the 2022 ReLit Award for FictionA remarkable debut about intergenerational female relationships and resistance found in the unlikeliest of places, We, Jane explores the precarity of rural existence and the essential nature of abortion.
Searching for meaning in her Montreal life, Marthe begins an intense friendship with an older woman, also from Newfoundland, who tells her a story about purpose, about a duty to fulfill. It’s back home, and it goes by the name of Jane.
Marthe travels back to a small community on the island with the older woman to continue the work of an underground movement in 60s Chicago: abortion services performed by women, always referred to as Jane. She commits to learning how to continue this legacy and protect such essential knowledge. But the nobility of her task and the reality of small-town life compete, and personal fractures within their group begin to grow.
We, Jane probes the importance of care work by women for women, underscores the complexity of relationships in close circles, and beautifully captures the inevitable heartache of understanding home.
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What Is Written on the Tongue
$24.95For readers of Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, a transportive historical novel about finding morality in the throes of war and colonizationReleased from Nazi forced labor as World War II ends, 20-year-old Sam is quickly drafted and sent to the island of Java to help regain control of the colony. But the Indonesian independence movement is far ahead of the Dutch, and Sam is thrown into a guerilla war, his loyalties challenged when his squad commits atrocities reminiscent of those he suffered at the hands of the Nazis. Sam falls in love with both Sari and the beautiful island she calls home, but as he loses friends to sniper fire and jungle malady, he also loses sight of what he wants most — to be a good man.
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Who Has Seen the Wind
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Wonder World
$21.95WINNER, Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award
Wonder World is a look at a part of the country not often written about (Casey Plett’s work and Miriam Toews’ come to mind – these places do exist in literature, just not widely) and a wonderful contribution to the queer literary landscape. I’ll be on the lookout for what Byggdin writes next.” – Tara-Michelle Ziniuk, ROOM MagazineTwenty-seven-year-old Isaac Funk is broke, drifting, and questioning his lonely existence on the East Coast. Having left his conservative hometown of Newfield, Manitoba full of piss and vinegar, Isaac’s dreams of studying music and embracing queer culture in Halifax have gradually fizzled out. When his grandfather dies and leaves him a substantial inheritance, Isaac is pulled back to the Prairies for the first time in ten years.
Finding his father Abe just as enigmatic and unreachable as always and his extended family more fragmented than ever, Isaac begins to wonder if there will ever be a place for him in Newfield.
Is the prodigal son home for good, or is it time to cut and run once more?
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Your Body Was Made for This
$21.95Eating too much, eating not enough, having sex, not having sex, aging parents, grief, drugs, childhood trauma, and the last call of ovaries – a woman’s body at mid-life can get messy.
Debbie Bateman’s stories take a clear-eyed look at the largely unexplored private world of a pivotal stage in virtually every woman’s life. These stories are linked not only by the characters, but also by the visceral themes of food, sex, exercise, beauty, and aging. The secret clenching of a fist, the unwinding of a silk scarf, the proud refusal to have breast reconstruction, the women in these stories want full authority over their bodies and their lives.