Beheadings, Ojibwa lovers and missing bees
The fall’s buzziest Canadian novels
The rebel yell
8 x 10
Michael Turner
Vancouver literary bad boy Michael Turner’s latest in a string of experimental novels gleefully flips the bird to book clubs everywhere. Broken into dozens of tenuously connected vignettes, it provides a series of snapshots that range from a woman impregnated by a semen-tipped bullet to a near-decapitation caper at a skating rink. The visions are more than a tad nightmarish, but often exhilarating. Sept. 29.
The cautionary tale, pop culture style
Generation A
Douglas Coupland
Slacker god Douglas Coupland revisits the form and fixations that made him famous 18 years ago with Generation X. Set a handful of years into the future, the novel’s globalized world is totally familiar, except bees are extinct. When five young adults are mysteriously stung, menacing scientists and the media descend. In true Couplandian style, this witty mix of first-person narratives and modern fables pretends it’s about the coming apocalypse, but it’s really about how the act of reading is an antidote to the hyper-anxiety of 21st-century life. (It’s complicated.) Sept. 5.
The CanCon love affair
The Last Woman
John Bemrose
Toronto journalist and playwright John Bemrose’s second novel, a solemn sketch of rural Ontario race relations, seems tailored for entry into the CanLit canon. Set on the border of cottage country and a native reserve, the story centres on Ann and Richard, a waify artist and aspiring politician who have fallen into the rhythms of middle-aged marriage, until one steamy day when Ann’s first love, an Ojibwa man, returns. What the book lacks in humour it makes up for in torrid summer sex. Sept. 29.
The BFF tearjerker
Suddenly
Bonnie Burnard
The title of Bonnie Burnard’s follow-up to her 1999 Giller winner A Good House is something of a misnomer: the heroine’s death from breast cancer is neither particularly swift nor unexpected. But to her best friends, the end cleaves their lives in two. Burnard’s book is filled with closely observed western Ontario characters, with their careful kindnesses and unintentional cruelties. It’s a journey into night, but also a glimpse into the bright day that precedes it. Sept. 26.
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