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The Bibliophile: On the Road

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Road trip narratives are often associated with freedom, independence, a desire to find something, or perhaps change something. They are filled with people hitting the open road, carefree, escaping their everyday lives in search of something greater.

One of my favourite aspects of Vijay Khurana’s The Passenger Seat is how it turns the cliched road trip story on its head. The novel follows two teenagers who want to get away from their small town for the summer. They are free from responsibilities and obligations, but soon realize they are trapped with each other in an enclosed space for miles. We feel their claustrophobia and the tension it brings. The games they play with each other as the road stretches endlessly in front of them become much darker as all that freedom and open space allows for their dissatisfaction with the world to grow.

Photo: The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana. Cover designed by Zoe Norvell.

The Passenger Seat is a road novel for the atomized generation, the ones who’ve grown up in a world where, since everything can be a game, nothing needs to matter, including other’s lives.

John Warner, in his review for the Chicago Tribune last week, I think put it best when he said the novel feels “not so much written as conjured, as though the author has absorbed something from the larger ambient culture and distilled it into the characters and narrative. The result is like being put under a spell, an invitation to join some other mind in a shared dream.”

Vijay himself speaks about the paradoxes of the road trip and the novel much better than I ever could, and you can hear him do so in a recent radio interview with WPR’s BETA and on the podcasts Across the Pond and Beyond the Zero. Or if you’re like me and prefer print interviews, you can read this one from the Berliner.

But now as we head into the May long weekend, the unofficial kick-off to the summer, the time of year most of us start to think of getting back on the road, we thought we’d share with you an excerpt from The Passenger Seat.

Ahmed Abdalla,
Publicist

An Excerpt from The Passenger Seat

The road though! Endless becoming, a colour palette always and somehow never changing, grey to green to brown to blue to other, occasionally red, very occasionally yellow, whoosh, repeat, repeat, something comes the other way with headlights on, the beauty of headlights in daylight, fence, field, these lane markings like perforations maybe, as if the road or the whole world could unzip any moment now, if there were such a thing as a moment when you’re driving, which Teddy realizes there isn’t. It’s just one long stretch. The road and its contradictions: boredom and excitement, you sit still but you’re moving, there’s a good kind of silence even with the engine noise and the German metal Adam has them listening to. Teddy’s mom used to call this sitting and thinking time. But all Teddy wants to think about is how the world keeps rushing toward them then dropping harmlessly into their wake. Adam is a good driver. He speeds often, especially to pass the empty logging trucks that must be on their way back to tree farms farther north. Adam tells Teddy the German metal is political, but it’s in fucking German so how can Adam know? The singer’s definitely angry, though. Teddy can’t decide if Adam’s tastes are more adult or more childish than his own. Is what Teddy likes, let’s say Arkells, more grown-up or just more boring? Funny that people call things middle of the road. That’s where they are now, as Adam passes another rig and swings back in before the line of oncoming traffic can snag them. Somebody beeps, and Teddy lets out a hum to match. Wasn’t that a bit close, he thinks but doesn’t say. He thinks about rhythm and speed, about the fact that they don’t know where they’re going.

At a gas station they buy energy drinks and for an hour they talk eagerly over the music, looking for ways to express how free they feel. Then comes the crash, spiralling silences in which the music speaks for them and Teddy nearly falls asleep. Towns go by, billboards, fruit trees, fences. The images don’t stop when he closes his eyes, and when he opens them again he sees something amazing. Two horses are standing nose to nose in a field, perfectly still, like somebody glued them together. They look like statues or oversized toys. One of them is wearing a halter around its head, the other isn’t. Somehow this makes Teddy think of the French they had done at school, how pointless it was because no one could remember anything by the time the next class came around. The recap would take more than half the time, the teacher getting more and more frustrated. But what did she expect? To Adam he says, over the music, Do you remember when you asked that French teacher if the word for cat also meant pussy? Adam laughs, then says, Wait, are you sure that was me? I don’t remember that. It was absolutely you, Teddy says. They hadn’t been proper friends back then, but he remembers it, his green pencil case, how the boys all laughed and the girls groaned and the teacher just went on as though Adam hadn’t said anything. She was telling them about two words that sounded almost the same, and you had to be careful or you’d end up telling somebody about your horses. She was showing off, trying to make the class laugh, but Adam stole her thunder with the pussy comment. Thinking about it now, years later, Teddy decides that Adam’s comment was actually pretty smart. It was really about how pointless the whole situation was, how they were all wasting their time, the teacher included.

They’re going too fast to have the windows open and the truck’s AC is broken. You only need it two weeks of the year anyway, Adam jokes. But surely these will be those weeks. It’s late afternoon and the sun is still well above the trees. On a long, mild hill the truck seems to struggle until Adam drops a gear. Teddy feels sweat on his neck and in his little pocket of chest hair. Away to the right are miles of quiet forest, places where nobody ever goes, probably full of bugs and bears. He hates himself for not being able to drive.

Stopping is glorious, a chance to move and to fart and to breathe. They both balance on shin-high posts beside a trash can, performing a laughing parody of martial art, for no reason other than the joy of controlling their bodies, of coordinating, synchronizing. Slowly the game becomes a competition, who can jump one-legged from post to post without falling. Knowing their phones will eventually fail them, they buy a map and unfurl it on the truck’s hood, captain and first mate. They can go anywhere they want. Teddy plants a finger at the tiny pink words HOT SPRINGS, feeling the engine’s heat through the waxy paper. Adam steers them north and east, away from the coast where they spent their boyhoods. Inward, toward what comes next. As the sun finally hits the treetops, Teddy tears open a softened chocolate block and passes it to Adam by the row. It leaves sweet muck on their hands, and later, as he stares out the window into the dusk, Teddy realizes he is sucking his thumb. The more the light goes, the more it is his own face he sees in the glass, lit by the blue stereo glow, already a ghost.

Each town they pass through is smaller than the last, recognizable brands slowing to a trickle. They stop for the night on the outskirts of one place, at a bend in the river that looks deserted enough. Adam says they’re far enough from the town that no one will bother them but close enough that they can walk back to that bar they passed. They’d probably get served in a town that small. He parks beside a low track that runs into a sea of pebbles and what looks like a ford through the black water. Teddy can imagine it flooding. Even with the driving done he remains a passenger, watching as Adam unfolds the tarpaulin and ties its ends to the truck’s raised trunk. There’s only one good tree, so Adam squats by the river and lets the water fill one of his new canisters. Then he lugs it back to use as an anchor. Teddy is impressed, and determined to make his own contributions. He doesn’t want to end up with the domestic jobs while Adam does the fun stuff, but with no other options he gets the camp stove out of its mesh sack and tries to remember how the pieces slot together. The burner hisses when he finally lights it, a memory of childhood, of hunger and the happiness of being somewhere other than home. This, he thinks, will be the summer his mother finally leaves his father and goes off with Ron; maybe he will arrive back to find everything dealt with, like how he avoids the kitchen until he knows the dishes are done. He hears the click of a bourbon bottle opening for the first time. Adam has scored three from his cousin, Teddy doesn’t know on what terms. Fuck, Teddy says. We don’t have a can opener. Yeah we do, Adam says, handing him his utility knife. Teddy repeatedly pushes its hook through the metal lid, making notch after notch until he has torn a jagged mouth. Probably he did it wrong, but Adam doesn’t say anything.

They sit with scalding cans between their knees, two mouths making plenty of noise. In brief moments of quiet Teddy hears other things, birds crying in the dark and the persistent river. They pass the bourbon back and forth, and Teddy is happy. He is part of a team. You think we can make it to the Arctic? asks Adam. You mean the ocean? Yeah, Adam says. Jesus, Teddy says, how far is that? Adam’s voice is defensive. It doesn’t take that long, maybe a week. A week there and a week back, Teddy says doubtfully. He doesn’t mention how much it would cost in gas because then Adam would try to buy half the rifle off him again, which would defeat the purpose of having it. Plus he wonders what happens if they get bored, have a fight, or just get sick of each other. He leans back and looks at the stars beyond the tarp, telling himself to relax and enjoy the ride. It’s a lot of driving to do on your own, he says eventually. Maybe, Adam says, not taking the bait. Adam suggests again that they walk to the bar, but this time it sounds more hypothetical. Both of them have taken root in their camping chairs, staring like old men at the darkness that must be the river. By the time the bourbon is a quarter gone, they’re both half-asleep. They lay their mats and sleeping bags side by side in what Adam calls the camper, a rigid bubble bolted to the rear part of the truck. When Teddy closes his eyes he sees the blue flame from the camp stove, then the blue light from the car stereo, then the horses. How weird they looked, how fake, but they were definitely real.

In good publicity news:

  • Don Gillmor, author of On Oil, was interviewed in The Tyee. On Oil was also reviewed in the Miramichi Reader: “Well-researched . . . [and] warns us that should we keep worshipping at the Oil & Gas altar, our story won’t have a happy ending.”
  • Catherine Khordoc, translator of Mélikah Abdelmoumen’s Baldwin, Styron, and Me, was featured in an article on translation on the Carleton website.
  • A Way to Be Happy by Caroline Adderson was listed as one of CBC Books’ “14 Canadian short story collections to read for Short Story Month.”
  • Near Distance by Hanna Stoltenberg (trans. Wendy H. Gabrielsen) was reviewed in On the Seawall: “Stoltenberg’s dual control of and surrender to the psyche of her novel most impressed me.”
  • A Case of Matricide by Graeme Macrae Burnet was reviewed in the Winnipeg Free Press: “It’s depressing, intriguing and quite engrossing.”

The Bibliophile: Two Nice People

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It’s Short Story Month, and we’re celebrating with one of the excellent stories from the recent linked collection Old Romantics by Maggie Armstrong. For those who missed it, our managing editor Vanessa wrote an unbeatable introduction to the book in an earlier post, which accompanies an interview between Maggie and publicist Ahmed well worth checking out, so I shall simply say we hope you enjoy this slice of Old Romantics’ arresting charm.

Ashley Van Elswyk
Editorial Assistant

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Two Nice People

I was burying my little boy in sand when the policeman came right up to us. He cut out the sea and sky and I thought, what have I done now?

‘Hello there,’ he said, bending to our level. He was a shiny, compact kind of man, got up in hi-vis, shell tracksuit bottoms, sporty trainers; his summer uniform, I guessed. He didn’t wear the hat, but I knew from the badges on his arms and chest.

‘How are things here now don’t worry—because these days with everything people might see a policeman and think, Oh, I’m in trouble or something.’

‘Heh—no.’ I sat up straight and folded up my legs in such a way that he would not see any pubic hair. My swimming togs were very old and didn’t fit me properly. How many of them were here this time? I looked around but it was just this one policeman. ‘I’m Sergeant Pat Hourican,’ he was saying. Or Houlihan? O’Halloran? I didn’t really want to know his name.

‘I’m on duty up at the station on the main drag. And—hello there? This is your little fella?’

We both looked at the boy, buried to the waist. He was patting, imperiously, the sand around his body. Sand had got in everywhere, into his hair, his ears, eyebrows, nostrils. Once he noticed we were watching him he broke away and walked up to the dune to pick up stones and things. His only piece of clothing was a UV tank top with clouds and rainbows on it, and his little ass was coated in wet sand.

‘We’re obviously contented anyway, ha,’ the policeman said. He looked at me again. ‘Now, it’s a hot day, and very crowded out here.’ His eyes were bright like candle flames; his nose and cheeks were sunburned, as if all he did was patrol beaches.

‘Are ye visitors to the area, or . . . ?’

‘Yes. I come here all the time, I grew up here. We’re not just on holidays.’ I wanted to convey my separateness out here, and the policeman nodded; he understood.

‘I hear you, not exactly blow-ins.’ He edged closer on a taut calf muscle. ‘So. I just had a call there at the station, and I came to check if you were alright.’

‘Oh!’ Somebody came, I thought.

‘A call from a gentleman you may have met on the beach today.’

A gentleman. I couldn’t think of any gentleman.

‘A man who was a little bit concerned.’

‘Oh dear.’

The policeman nodded regretfully. ‘About the two of ye here, yes.’

‘Oh.’

The policeman looked inside me now, and I felt very peculiar, very bad, like I was being poisoned by my own friends. The boy was busy, collecting shells, seaweed, bits of rope and other debris. I saw the sleepy crowds, the tide, white horses, shimmering sea. Our patch of things. Mangled towels, opened suncream, sand-coated flask. Lunchbox, no lid; chocolate-smeared Wagon Wheel wrappers, one filled with a sand pie. In the game, you had to eat the sand pie and be sick. But I hadn’t played the game this time. Why had I not played the game this time? My book, a classic love story I was keen to finish and have read, was discarded, face down on its pages.

‘I’m sorry to have disturbed you, but I’m just responding to the call,’ the policeman went on. ‘So I hope it’s OK if I have a word with you here, ask a few questions. Just to find out what the story is.’

He took a pad of paper from a pocket in his jacket and he gave me a gallant little nod.

It was a half-truth, that I grew up here. We used to come here on our holidays, to a farm along an avenue where sheepdogs leapt, blackberries clustered in the briars, and bright-green cow-dotted fields, hiding flat white mushrooms, led right down to the rocky shore, and to the sea; and on hazy afternoons straw bales were tossed by the farmer onto trailers and the air was thick with pollen and wild perfumes.

The previous winter, I’d ended up very suddenly alone with my small son. Now it was time for freedom, time to be seen—maybe to be given some reward for tough endurance. Always I felt owed some happy time, some crock of gold, had no doubt but that it awaited us. The Airbnb, a bedroom and kitchenette, was clean and tasteful, and the farm just up the road looked much the same as I’d remembered it. They let us pick eggs and give a carrot to the horse. The weather was incredible, in fact it was a dangerous heatwave, with red warnings on the news. Every day we dragged ourselves into the car, and to the beach to cool off in the sea.

Today was the hottest day. In France, that week, four people died, and two in Spain. Here, people went around in a daze.

Up on the cliffs, the cars were sprawling from the car park onto the road and grass and golf links. The bins were overflowing, and long drooping queues of colourfully dressed families trailed from the Mr Whippy and chip vans. CAUTION, BEWARE OF BEING CUT OFF BY INCOMING TIDES, the sign read. We parked in a ditch and, holding hands, climbed the steep path down the cliffside to the beach. A sign said: DANGER, SUDDEN DROP BELOW.

On trips alone with my small son, to a beach or park, on planes or train journeys, I used to go up close to other families or friendly looking people. I had a beady eye for friendship on these traipses, for that gleam of openness and understanding that just might lead to company. At this beach, I pulled the boy around, checking faces under hats until we found a spot. It was a whole extended family. Mums, dads, aunts, uncles and kids, passing around crisp packets and soft drinks. The women stretched out on towels, the dads having conversations looking straight ahead of them, out to sea, the boys throwing a ball or digging a moat. They had castle moulds, pirate ships, sticky rackets, balls, snorkels—and we hadn’t thought of bringing any beach toys. I placed our bags in their periphery.

DANGER, COLLAPSING SAND DUNES. CAUTION, INCOMING TIDES. I unrolled our towels, shook the sand away. I set out the boy’s lunchbox: a peanut-butter sandwich sliced in triangles; four apple quarters turning brown; two Wagon Wheels, both already melted in their packets. And his turquoise water flask, decorated with pink octopi. The flask was stainless steel and the lunchbox bamboo, so—doing everything the right way here.

We had absolutely everything we needed. I looked around for something missing, something to stoke my anxiety, nothing came to mind. I got hold of him, coated him with Factor 50, put his cap on, stretched his limbs into his swimming trunks and rainbow top. He took his swimming trunks back off again, and sat down to play. He took his cap off, threw it away. Sun lit up his golden hair, and the shadows of his long eyelashes swept his face in lavish streaks.

I took out my paperback and looked for my page. I had forgotten water. His flask was full, but none for me. I looked up at the cliff, and the distance made my mouth feel dry. I lay back under the burning sun. You can’t have everything. I reached for his flask, but he got to it first.

Carefully, the boy unscrewed the flask, looked inside it, then tipped it upside down into the sand. He shook it hard to empty out the last few drops, then buried all the water, squatting right into his ankles. I unstuck my tongue from the roof of my mouth and pulled myself to standing.

‘Come on.’ I took his hand. The tide was so far out it took forever, pebbles pushing at our heels, before we reached the water. We waded out and farther out. The sea was shallow, murky, strewn with seaweed and dead crabs. We went a little deeper, then with his arms around my neck and his legs around my body we plunged in. The waves surged and tossed him up and down and he broke away, gasping, flapping his arms and kicking his legs until he was completely separate from me, gulping and spitting seawater, laughing, showing every tooth inside his gums. I’ve never had the strength to test it, but it seems there is no limit to the fun this boy is capable of having. He snips up cables, opens teddies with a joyfulness he shouldn’t be deprived of. Sometimes he bursts out laughing in his sleep.

There is not much to report about the day now that I’ve sat down to try. The sun shone, birds called; I worried about the sun, about sunburn, I worried that I didn’t worry half as much as someone should. I worried about all the wrong things. The group beside us, they knew how to live—their bored and diligently playing children, a woman drinking Diet Coke, reading from her phone, on her back a tattoo of a bat with its wings spread.

He was running up and down, playing in the water of a little stream that trickled from the cliffs into the sea. It occurred to me that I should put his cap back on, and his swimming trunks. The sun shone down, and I turned from right to left to let it cook me on both sides. I felt its hot rays cutting through the parting on my scalp. Fizzy drink, I thought. Iced lemonade. Cold beer. Ice cubes. Cold glass of water.

The men, arms draped around knees, had their conversations. Talked of these extremes in temperature. Of boats at sea—or county councils. Planning applications, objections to the plans. They talked about the schools, they talked about the coaching—the hoops you had to go through. Most likely all of that. One had dark hair. I moved along the towel to get a closer look. He had a beard. He had a beard and yet—the face. Easy-going—small, hooked nose, cheeks stretched now, dark impressive beard—eyes that seemed sad, or just afraid. He was heavier now, but distinguished, by the beard, kind of—time had passed, but he’d remember me as well. I’d already pulled myself to sitting and was clambering forwards on the sand.

‘Excuse me? Hi?’

They turned to look at me.

‘Hi. Did you study Arts in UCD? Ten years ago—no, fifteen.’

The bearded man leaned back. His friend or brother glanced from me to him, the bearded man pointed at himself but I knew already. His face, up close, distorted into someone else’s.

‘Sorry,’ he said, looking at his friend or brother. ‘We’re from—!’ The name of a town. I hadn’t heard of it. His friendly Northern accent forgave everything. They laughed it away. I laughed back, and they turned back to face the sea. The boy at his marsh of sand, pouring in the seawater, mixing up his elements. Running to and fro in an ecstatic hurry.

I held up the book to block the sun, checking on him with one eye. My novel was insufferably long and heavy in my hand. I’d been reading this one for about four years, even though it was a classic and a bestseller. The book jacket, its technicolour drawing of a frightened woman running from a burning house, had come apart from being

carried around. I’d seen the Netflix adaptation, so the story held no mystery anymore, I knew who murdered who and why they did it, knew there was a shipwreck coming, two shipwrecks, that in the end a human skeleton would be fished out of the bottom of the sea.

I read a paragraph from start to finish, and the effort could have killed me. Half the words were cast in shadow, and the tiny print felt harmful to my eyes. The boy was lining up some rocks along the stream now, rushing, in great hurry.

DANGER, GOLF BALLS FLYING. I thought to take a little break from looking, so that I could be right here, just sink into this time. One eye was still open; now it drooped and rested closed and everything was calm. This way I could employ my hearing at its most acute. I could appreciate the heat, and air, the sound of waves, for what they were. DANGER, OR CAUTION, BEWARE OF BEING CUT OFF BY INCOMING TIDES. You can really open all your senses, absorb the moment, take time, when you’re allowed to close your eyes. I stretched an arm, found the book, and placed the pages on my face.

‘DO YOU HAVE A SMALL BOY, THREE, BLOND??? A SMALL BOY, THREE, BLOND???’

Loud like torchlight or a speeding car. I sat up.

He was on his hunkers, talking in a phone.

‘SHE’S HERE, I’VE FOUND HER.’

Pink man, yellow thinning hair. Short, doughy build. He had a job at hand. He didn’t have a whistle round his neck but it seemed that in some other situation he would have had a whistle, and a first-aid pack, and ID.

‘HE’S WITH US, HE’S OVER BY THE WATER!’

The beach had emptied. I reached around for things, then threw myself to standing. My legs were stilts. My legs weren’t working properly. Half-words fell out—not what I’d have said if I’d had time to collect all my thoughts. But I understood the urgency, and I would not begrudge these people their distress. One foot found the sand, and then another, and I ran, with difficulty, on stilts.

My little boy was standing, seeming very little and confused, at the shore, beside a woman in a sarong. She was talking in a high-pitched voice about the water, eyes wide in mine, with her hair neatly brushed and her hand on the shoulder of my little boy. I pulled him in and picked him up.

*

The policeman wasn’t particularly enjoying any of this either, I was to understand.

‘And do ye mind me asking, are ye alone together on your holidays?’

‘Oh yes. But lots of help around. Lots of family.’

‘Oh yes surely, good to hear, it takes a village doesn’t it.’ He made some scribbles in his notepad.

‘A village.’

‘Well to rear a child, doesn’t it.’

‘Oh, sorry, yes. You’re telling me!’

‘And how did ye get down here, was it in the car today?’

‘We parked illegally, Garda.’

‘Well I think now you wouldn’t be the first, heh heh.’

‘No, heh.’

‘The car park is choc-a-bloc, alright.’ He seemed to look inside me, with a tilt, and the most inveigling compassion.

‘Are you alright?’ He looked in my pupils and gave a quick high-pitched laugh.

‘Garda,’ I said. ‘What do you want?’

‘Right. Well, this afternoon I received a phone call. What happened was you, ehm, your child, came to the attention of a gentleman on the beach here, and a lady, two nice people. They said to me that you were there with a book, that you had your face inside the book. Physically, inside the book. Not just looking at the book, but unconscious, underneath the book.’

‘I was reading, Garda.’

‘OK, listen, when you got up off the ground, you seemed disoriented. They said you weren’t making any sense, they said—look. OK—I’ll tell you. They said you looked a bit dishevelled.’

‘Dishevelled.’ We both looked down at my appearance, which was of course dishevelled, a worry almost. All our stuff. Scattered everywhere. I shut my knees together and hugged them to my chest.

‘But look sure, you seem very well. And he’s a great lad.’

‘I am very well. I’m—I’ve just been burying my kid in sand here.’

I reached out for my beach bag, and opened it, and found my sunglasses. Tears burst out behind the frames while he told me about his kids.

‘They are a handful, boys. I’ve two myself at home, I have your sympathy, I’m sure.’

‘They’d send you to an early grave,’ I wept, laughing. Tears burst from my face. He wasn’t to know.

‘Oh, you’re preaching to the converted you are.’ He shut his notepad.

Before he left, I asked him where the two nice people were. I would like to thank them one more time for coming to our rescue. He pointed at the cliffs, where the rocks were clustered in a jagged ring, where the man and woman had been watching. I shook out our towels.

On the way home, we stopped and bought the last remaining can of 7up and two Cornettos from the petrol station. The moment we arrived back in the Airbnb, it filled with sand. I stood at the shower, rinsing down the boy, who twirled and laughed under the warm spray. I scrubbed him clean, washed the sand into the plughole, dried him off, then unwrapped his ice cream while he hopped from foot to foot with his arms outstretched.

That night he watched YouTube Kids while I finished all the bottle in the fridge. Then I uncorked something special, organic and spumante I’d saved specially for the holiday. The evening darkened, the boy fell asleep. I picked up the phone.

‘No, this time I’m going to ask you some questions!’ I was on the grainy bedspread, in déshabillé, dishevelled if you like, white flesh exposed to nobody, hair tangled in saltwater, a cone of melted ice cream tipped over on the bedside table. ‘I’m going to want phone numbers,’ I said. ‘Names and phone numbers!’ The boy slept on like a little angel. I drank the wine down to its last few vinegary droplets and flopped back, laughing, and waves crashed on my skull.

In good publicity news:

  • UNMET by stephanie roberts was reviewed in the Adroit Journal: “One emerges from the agile linguistic theatrics of this book [UNMET] feeling requited, met, seen, and inspired—a sensation that moves from writer to reader.”
  • On Oil by Don Gillmor was excerpted in The Walrus.

The Bibliophile: Along for the ride

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Want to get new excerpts, musings, and more from The Bibliophile right away? Sign up for our weekly online newsletter here!

***

Next week, Vanessa will be attending the London Book Fair for the first time in my absence. I’m torn between relief and remorse, and excitement for Vanessa. I wish I could have been there for her first trip. Though the event itself happens in an inhuman environment, some kind of cross between an airport hanger and a processing plant, it’s nevertheless one of the most human-oriented of occasions. It’s both exhausting and invigorating. I will miss being there, jostling for floor space with my fellow indie publishers, raising a glass at the end of a long day with more of the same. Many of the people I’ve met through these fairs have become close friends and confidantes. I care about them deeply, and having missed Frankfurt in October I mourn that it’ll have been more than a year before I see any in person.

But I will also miss the raison d’etre for the fair: the books. The hunt for them, wandering the aisles and looking at what’s on display, flipping through the catalogues, listening intently to the enthusiastic pitches of those who care about what they publish as much as we care about what we do. The quickening that happens when you happen upon something unexpected, that might be a natural fit for our list. It’s a kind of magic. Many of the most important international books we’ve discovered have resulted from these fairs and from the relationships that they’ve helped cement: Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport, Roy Jacobsen’s Barrøy series, Elaine Feeney’s novels, the works of Jón Kalman Stefánsson. I learned about Roland Allen’s The Notebook spending a couple of hours strolling around Hampstead Heath as Mark Ellingham’s wolfhound loped pleasurably ahead of us through the grasses. It’s one of my favourite London memories.

Photo: The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana. Designed by Zoe Norvell.

The discovery of Vijay Khurana’s The Passenger Seat didn’t occur in such an idyll: I first read it in a narrow bed in my discount Frankfurt hotel room in mid-October, 2023, shivering under the too-thin sheets. Or at least that’s when I read the first sixty or so pages: I hadn’t realized that the manuscript Vijay’s agent, Philip Gwyn Jones, had sent was incomplete, and was not at all pleased to have to turn out the light without knowing what happened next. I accosted Philip first thing the next morning when I got to the fairgrounds, begging him for the rest, so intent was I on what happened to (though their names were different in that iteration) Teddy and Adam.

Teddy and Adam have been with me ever since. “There are books,” George Orwell wrote, “that one reads over and over again, books that become part of the furniture of one’s mind,” and The Passenger Seat is one of these for me. It goes to deeply uncomfortable places in its examination of male friendship and identity and our relationship with violence. From its opening apocryphal Mailer epigraph (“When two men say hello on the street, one of them loses.”) to its final despondent sentence, it never looks away from the ugly vulnerability that propels us too often to do our worst. Using the frame of real-world events—the 2019 Bryer-Schmegelsky spree killings—it risks imagining what can never be known, and in doing so gets at truths that might not otherwise be possible. And it asks the reader what can be learned from two broken boys/men: up to now, too often, the answer has been not enough.

The Passenger Seat has been adopted enthusiastically by American booksellers, who have made it both an Indies Introduce and an Indie Next pick. Douglas Riggs of Bank Square Books called it “a plunge into a pitch-black abyss . . . (that) feels so real it may as well be a cursed memoir.” It launched this week with a New York Times review which called it “unsettling and powerful.” It is both of these things, and like the best books, will leave no one who risks its pages indifferent.

Please read on for an excellent interview with the author, conducted by Ahmed Abdalla.

Dan Wells,
Publisher

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A Biblioasis Interview with Vijay Khurana

Could you tell me a little about yourself and how this novel came about?

I’m a fiction writer and translator from Germany. I was born in Australia but I’ve lived in quite a few different places. I’ve lived in the US, the UK, and Cambodia for about a year. But I’ve lived on and off for the last decade in Berlin.

This book’s genesis really came about when I was doing an MFA at the University of East Anglia. I noticed I was writing a lot of short stories about male friendships, and about the ways in which sexuality influences and shapes friendships among heterosexual young men and some of those stories included an aspect of violence, of young men dehumanizing those around them in various ways. I went from those short stories to looking at a larger piece of writing.

Photo: Vijay Khurana in the wilderness. Credit: Madeleine Watts.

I know it was partly influenced by true events. Could you speak about the relationship between fact and fiction and what made you want to write about this?

There was an incident I read about in North America where two young men did a similar thing to what I was thinking about. I was influenced by that, but also by those short stories that I had been writing. The book takes a few cues and images from real events. There’s a road trip aspect that is similar to some of the things I was reading about. There’s an image in the novel of Teddy and Adam using a digital camera and being obsessed with this idea of filming and experiencing the world through that medium of recorded video. That’s another thing that came from real events. Then the second part of the book is wholly fictional.

Why did you decide to call it The Passenger Seat?

It felt very much from early on that The Passenger Seat was the perfect title for this book. If you’re in the passenger seat, you’re not in control, and you’re also potentially not responsible for what happens in that vehicle. There’s this whole idea of passivity and abdication of responsibility that runs through the novel. There’s this question between Teddy and Adam of which one of them is actually in control and which one of them is responsible for the things they end up doing. One of the things I’m really interested in is to get at the idea that the male friendship itself is part of some of the problems with violence and dehumanizing among young men. But I think by the end of the novel, I’d like the reader to ask this question about why it’s called The Passenger Seat and what questions are there then about who was active and who was along for the ride. Who was culpable? And in what ways was everyone basically culpable?

There is a sharp shift in the narrative from the Teddy and Adam story to the Ron and Freeman one, where the former story ends unexpectedly. Both sections seem to be about men who don’t stop their friend from committing violence because of that idea of passivity and control. But one section is definitely much more violent than the other. How do you see these two sections as related and what are you trying to say by having them together in the novel?

In some ways I’m interested in asking what is the difference between the men that society tends to look at as being “essentially good” despite their faults and other men that society might deem to be so beyond understanding and so monstrous that they really have nothing to teach us. That we, the rest of society, are so unlike them that there is no redeeming them and there’s no sense that they might be able to teach us something about ourselves. The second part of the novel is exactly that, and it does have an element of Ron reflecting on a specific moment where his friend was committing domestic violence. He is pretty sure it’s happening, but he has sort of enough plausible deniability about the situation that he decided to not do anything about it. He asks himself about that and yet doesn’t really come to any conclusions about his own responsibility. I’m definitely comparing those two friendships and the ways in which the performance of masculinity itself can lead men, through the guise of friendship, to do things that are not productive, helpful or good.

Photo: Interior image from The Passenger Seat.

What do you think it means to perform masculinity and what does it reveal about the men in the novel? I’m thinking about all the references to audience and being watched. They seem to think a lot about how they will be perceived and what kind of man they want to be thought of.

In terms of trying to figure out what kind of man you are expected to be and what kind of man you might want to be when you are very young, it makes friendships you have with other young men really important. I think especially young men can only see themselves mediated through someone else. They can see themselves mediated through a friend, an enemy, through someone who’s envious of them, disgusted at them, through someone who, in a public space, perceives them as being disrespectful or threatening or going against some sort of social etiquette. This is something that happens a lot in various ways that may not be as stark as the ways in which I depict these characters, but performing in order to get a reflected sense of oneself is really common.

It’s also not just about performing masculinity as a way of understanding what kind of man you are, but it’s also about performing masculinity in terms of playing a role that you could see as absolving you from the consequences of your actions. If you’re just playing a role or playing a game or seeing yourself as a story, then it becomes easier to go through life without a sense that your actions have real consequences for other people. Hence there’s a lot of focus not just on that video camera, but also there’s a specific video game that these two young men play, which I’m not using to say that video games make young men violent, but it’s more that idea of mediation, of playing a role, of going through life as an avatar rather than as yourself.

And then also, the windshield itself, which I think has an interesting parallel with cinema. If you’re on a road trip, you’re looking through that windshield and everything you experience is mediated by the glass. You’re in the world, but you’re not really in the world, and that’s something else I was getting at.

That also makes me think of Adam’s refrain of “fun and games” whenever they’re together. It’s like all their actions are supposed to be taken as playful. So it further blurs reality and gameplay. They’re both in the world and not seriously in it.

And I think it’s also for him almost a defense mechanism at times. The way he feels he can get through life is to treat things as if they don’t really matter, especially at the beginning. It seems like something that he says to himself in order to help him cope with things not necessarily being in his control or to pretend that he’s okay with something that he finds challenging. But yes, game playing is absolutely a huge part of it. There’s even a line when they first start using the rifle, a comparison to how really young children will share their toys with pride and reluctance. That idea of playing games, using toys, is a big part of going through life when you are scrambling to work out what life is and who you are in it.

While Teddy and Adam are friends, a lot of their thoughts about each other seem to be comparing what the other has or lacks. Could you talk about the competitive aspect in male friendships and how this plays out in the novel?

There’s always this very fine line between play and competition. When something is played, it does not actually have an aim or a goal or an ambition. But once it becomes a game, then it might have rules, a goal, a winner, a loser. I think that competition is obviously a big part of how many young men have a sense of themselves, as a winner or a loser or someone who is good at something or not. It’s probably to some extent just human nature to contend with others, to want to best somebody at something, even something completely pointless. In the novel there’s a moment where they are perched on these fence posts beside a car park and they mess around for a while but then suddenly they are actually playing a game with a winner and a loser. They’re trying to hop from one to the other as many times as they can without falling. Or later they end up playing a game where they’re kicking an orange peel and trying to kick it as far as they can and further than the other one. Games for them are something they take refuge in as a language almost, as a way of communicating with each other, because they maybe lack more sophisticated ways of doing that. And of course they also take refuge in the idea of games once they have done something that is life-changingly tragic.

Learn more about Vijay Khurana and The Passenger Seat in another new interview with Open Book!

Violence seems to be a threshold that Teddy and Adam are building up to pass. We see them in different situations getting a bit more violent either with their words or their actions, trying to one up each other. But once Teddy does shoot those two people, a scene that is very drawn out in the novel, their relationship changes and also the rest of the violence happens off the page. How does that level of violence change them and their friendship?

One thing I was really conscious of with this novel is that I didn’t want to just “get inside the head” of someone who would do something like that because that would be to some extent a fool’s errand. But I think that I was trying to work out not just what these two characters would do after doing something extremely violent like that, but also what their relationship and the change in their relationship might say about other men or all men in general and how they would attempt to keep moving through space having done something like that.

They react in different ways. Teddy becomes increasingly passive and submissive almost as a way of dealing with what he’s done. Adam, for different reasons, tries to become much more dominant, while also at various times trying to treat what they did as a game, as something that didn’t really matter, and he has his own background and ideas that help him towards that position. After it happens, their relationship changes in a few ways. But for me, they’re both just hurtling towards the end of that section, which, if the reader doesn’t know it at the time, is essentially their deaths.

And why did you decide not to show the rest of their violent acts?

There are a couple of reasons. I was a journalist for a while and I worked in radio and have always been quite interested in the way that the media turns tragedy like this into its own kind of consumable narrative. So one reason is that I wanted to write some part of the novel from the point of view of a voracious media cycle, which is in the book as we get towards the end of the first section.

Another thing is that it was very difficult to write all these things and to write these characters who are in many ways just really terrible people doing really terrible things. I didn’t want to make the violence seem like page-turning excitement. In order to avoid that, and in order to concentrate on the ideas behind what was happening rather than the violence itself, having had a scene which I think had to be there, I didn’t want to then give more space on the page to violence that might just feel like it was for the sake of a narrative or anything like that.

What were you looking to say about how the media talks about male violence?

One of my main thoughts when I first started writing this is just how often this kind of thing happens. It just happens over and over and over again, and what I mean by “it” is young men, not always together, but often together with other young men, doing violent things. There is this idea that the media is fundamentally interested in certain things. The main one being trying to appeal to a lot of consumers of that medium, so it’s definitely going to create a narrative that suits its own aims and that combined with the fact that young men so often commit violent acts, I think that leads to quite an unnuanced depiction of some of these events. It’s often kind of lazy and emotionally manipulative in a way that is maybe unproductive for asking the really important questions, which is why does this keep happening? Why do we not seem to be learning anything from these repeated things happening?

I really enjoyed the rhythm of the book and how each sentence kind of flows nicely into the next as well as how the characters speak to each other and the language within their friendship. Could you speak about your style and how you decided to shape the novel?

Some of it is the sort of slightly taciturn rhythms of communications between male teenagers. Some of it is the rhythm of the road trip. There are rhythms to being in a car and driving down a highway or a road. So some of that I wanted to get into the prose. I like books where each sentence has its own kind of drama or tension. Or it might have a pleasing aspect if there’s some kind of alliteration in there or it might have a disharmonious or dissonant kind of quality as well. And the pace of a sentence also matters. The sounds of that sentence can reflect somebody’s state of mind or an action or the passing of time and how people’s experience of the passing of time is happening. There’s a whole lot of stuff that I really enjoy doing with a sentence.

Road trips in stories are usually associated with a desire to find something or change yourself, often a coming-of-age story. And this novel is kind of a coming-of-age story, just in a much darker sense. Do you have any thoughts about that?

I’m really interested in the paradoxes of the road trip. It tends to be about coming of age and becoming an adult to some extent. But at the same time, the road trip is so much about not actually engaging seriously and responsibly with the world around you, which we could understand to be a big part of adulthood. The very fact of just passing through different towns without properly stopping or engaging with them is like an abdication of adulthood.

I knew early on that I didn’t want their road trip to have a serious or specific goal. It sort of has these different goals but neither Teddy nor Adam properly commits to any of them. Adam has this idea that he might just leave home and never go back. He has this idea of maybe going and getting a job in a mine and completely leaving his old life behind. But you can tell that it’s still a childhood fantasy rather than actual ambition. There’s also that idea of running to something versus running from something and a lot of road trip narratives are a combination of both.

A road trip is about being completely free and wide open spaces, but it’s also about the utter claustrophobia of being stuck in a really small space often with someone else. It’s also about forcing a relationship to change under conditions of tiredness, or boredom, or whatever else. I also thought back to the road trips I took when I was around Teddy and Adam’s age. I thought a lot about the ways in which my friendships and relationships were impacted by those trips and some of the feelings of just what it was like to be in a vehicle. And I knew that the road trip was definitely what I wanted to use to explore those ideas about masculinity and violence.

We usually learn to be adults by watching our parents, but, for different reasons, both Teddy and Adam reject their fathers as figures to aspire to. Where do you think they get their ideas of masculinity and how does this affect them?

One of things I really wanted to avoid doing was telling a kind of trauma narrative where somebody does something terrible to somebody else and then you learn that they had had something terrible done to them. I didn’t want to tell a story where two young men don’t have father figures and therefore their manhood becomes twisted in such a way that it becomes polluted. But at the same time, they do both essentially turn away from their fathers. I wanted to get beyond the father figure, which is maybe the most obvious masculine example. I was more interested in getting at the many other examples that men see and emulate, including the male friend. I didn’t want to weigh things too heavily towards the idea of the father-son dynamic because that would have weighted the book in a very specific way. In fact, the idea of fatherhood is most present in the second section, when we find out that Ron has this fantasy that he could have been a stepfather if things had turned out differently, whereas in fact Ron never actually had the courage to commit to that role when he had the chance. It was kind of a game for him, too.

What are you hoping people take away from reading this novel?

I think I want them to read it again. I want them to feel like there might be undercurrents and links and things that a reader might not necessarily pick up on first read. Little ties between different characters, recurring images and things like that. And also that the experience of reading the prose will be a pleasurable one. I’m of two minds about saying “pleasurable” because the book is really not necessarily a pleasurable book. It’s about some quite disturbing stuff. But having said that, the idea of reading sentences and finding them to be in some way aesthetically interesting, is always part of reading, at least for me.

Also, I hope I am asking some interesting and difficult questions that the reader will be left saddled with after they’ve finished this book. I didn’t want to write a book where the problems that the book raises get resolved by the end. I wanted to write a book where people have to walk away holding all of that stuff in their head, holding those questions, juxtapositions and paradoxes. I hope readers might walk away asking some questions about the connections between friendship and violence and how men perform their masculinity in ways that often see them avoiding responsibility.

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In good publicity news:

The Bibliophile: Like a lock fitting into place

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An interview with Hanna Stoltenberg, author of Near Distance

This week marked our first release of 2025—the exquisite, aching Near Distance by Hanna Stoltenberg, translated from the Norwegian by Wendy H. Gabrielsen. I first read this novel about eight months ago (before I even started working at Biblioasis) and have been eagerly awaiting its publication. Because of all their flawed humanity, the characters in Near Distance—particularly Karin, the cool, often self-absorbed mother—have continued to linger in my life: sitting at the bar across the street from my home, or smoking outside a jewellery shop. Karin’s realness makes her one of the best literary characters I’ve encountered in a while.

I had the chance to ask Stoltenberg a handful of questions, and her responses show a deep level of care to the development of her characters and craft.

Dominique Béchard
Publicist

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Presenting our first book of 2025: Near Distance by Hanna Stoltenberg, translated by Wendy H. Gabrielsen. Cover designed by Natalie Olsen.

Near Distance begins with a kind of prologue, a brief chapter on the changed relationship between mother and daughter, as portrayed through their smoking rituals; Karin and Helene used to smoke together, but Helene has quit and now Karin smokes alone. I’m always interested in how beginnings become beginnings. At what point in the writing process did this scene appear, or was it the first thing you wrote? What else can you say about the shape of the book and how it came together?

The “prologue” was actually the last thing I wrote. For me the novel began with the image of Karin waking up next to a one-night-stand and walking home alone in the wet snow. The night before I had been out to a bar with some friends and became captivated by a woman who was on a date with a garrulous man she clearly didn’t know well. Every time he left the table to buy drinks or use the bathroom, her expression shifted, becoming softer yet less compliant. Those glimpses of “private faces” in public interest me. The woman walking home developed into Karin, and I began writing scenes from different points in her life: as a young mother, on a family vacation in Germany, during a brief affair, on a “girls’ trip” with her grown daughter. Eventually the relationship between Karin and Helene became the focus point, and my editor wisely suggested I add a scene with Helene in the beginning. After a few unsuccessful attempts I wrote the smoking scene and it was like a lock fitting into place, I knew the novel was finished.

You’ve previously said that Karin is based on fathers you knew growing up—that her character eschews conventional ideals of motherhood and care. Can you say more about how you envision Near Distance as upending or playing with conceptions of gender and emotional labour?

When I started writing about Karin, I was getting to know her and at the same time I felt like I had a deep understanding of who she was. As I moved her through different situations with different people, my main concern was rendering her thoughts and emotions as truthfully and precisely as I could. Which is to say, I didn’t necessarily have those fathers in mind then. Later, however, I thought a lot about how Karin’s and Helene’s relationship is shaped by societal expectations, one of them being that a mother’s love is expressed through tireless devotion and selfless care. Would a different, less fraught relationship have been possible simply by changing Karin’s gender?

It can be difficult to reconcile the idea of care as a natural, authentic expression of love and a moral obligation with the fact that the majority of care work is done by women, whether paid or unpaid. Today, at least in Norway, most couples co-parent 50/50 after a split, but when I grew up “the weekend dad” was the norm. My siblings and I spent every other weekend at my dad’s—the rest of the time, while my mom took care of us, he was free to do as he pleased—and it never made me, or anyone else—question his love or character. Whereas if a mother didn’t have main custody of her children, people would assume she did something horrible. Although parenthood is more equal today, a selfish mother is still considered unacceptable in a way a selfish father isn’t. Rachel Cusk has previously said that in the Outline trilogy she tried to write a female consciousness that is not shaped by oppression. I think it’s similarly interesting to explore female love that is not structured around nurture and care.

Hanna Stoltenberg. Credit: Julie Pike.

How would you like a North American reader to approach your work? What—if anything—should they know about life in Norway and how it might differ from life in Canada or the US?

I believe the themes and subjects in the novel are recognizable and relevant to readers from both Canada and the US, but the wealth and comfort of Scandinavian societies, for me, is significant. The community represented by the welfare state paradoxically relieves us of some of the duty to take care of each other. It also removes a lot of the struggle. Instead, we are free to seek out the meaning of life through individual self-realization, whether that be wellness retreats or erotic desire, which can feel both meaningful and unbearably hollow.

John Self, in The Guardian, writes that your “elegant prose . . . gives plot a bad name.” Near Distance isn’t without plot, of course, but characterization and language seem to be at the forefront. In this way, it could be said to participate in the tradition of writers like Rachel Cusk and Gwendoline Riley. What excites you the most about literature? What are your priorities when writing?

The writer Kathryn Scanlan has stated that she tries “to write a sentence as unbudging and fully itself as some object sitting on a shelf in my office.” That is an ambition I share. I can admire a writer’s intelligence, imagination and sense of composition, but never more so than when it’s on display within a sentence.

I think it’s similarly interesting to explore female love that is not structured around nurture and care.

Atmosphere is important in Near Distance. Critics have described the book as stark, anxious, tense. But atmosphere is difficult to pin down and depends largely on what the reader brings to the work. It’s also interesting how this tense atmosphere counters the novel’s wellness subplot: Helene and Endre’s involvement in the world of self-care. Did you set out to create a particular atmosphere (if so, how?), or did it manifest on its own?

I wanted to observe the contrast between the groping, failing intimacy between mother and daughter and the smooth, commercialized care of strangers, be it on the plane, in the shops or in the world of self-care. In London, Karin and Helene visit a large clothing store and pay for the services of a personal shopper, a young woman named Rosie. With a mixture of standard phrases and feminine efficiency, Rosie establishes a relaxed intimacy with Helene that Karin is completely shut out of. As you point out, how you experience the novel’s atmosphere largely depends on whether you are inclined to read that scene as simply two women shopping—as some readers have—or something more sinister. For me, there is something bleak about how the self-care-industry capitalizes on your most private feelings (shame, self-loathing, loneliness) while also being obsessed with personal boundaries. Like the question posed by a wellness guru in the novel: “If you don’t look after yourself, who will?”

Writing a book is often viewed as an essentially solitary activity. What does having a translator feel like? You speak English, so I imagine that it must feel particularly strange to experience your work through another. Did it ever feel like an imposition? Or was it liberating?

As I said above, when I write I work and rework the language in order to achieve “unbudging” sentences, held in place by rhythm and sound. Sometimes I know the shape and feel of a sentence before I know what I want to say. Like Don DeLillo “I’m completely willing to let language press meaning upon me.” Therefore, being translated can feel like a massive loss of control. When it doesn’t, that is because of Wendy’s attentive and precise work, which I feel very lucky to benefit from. She has managed to transfer the novel’s tone and atmosphere perfectly, and also to create something subtly different and exciting.

Finally, what are you reading these days?

I recently had my second child, and at the moment a novel’s actual weight has become an important factor when filtering through my reading options: I need to be able to hold it in one hand while feeding or lulling a baby to sleep with the other. Luckily, I have much to choose from, as I tend to favour compact narratives. Three slim, but substantial novels I’ve recently read are The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş, Sitt Marie Rose by Etel Adnan, and Famous Questions by Fanny Howe.

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In good publicity news:

The Bibliophile: 2025 Staff Picks

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In which! The crew of the good ship Biblio sails into the new year with a preview of some of their most anticipated 2025 titles. (Yes, we made them choose. No, they didn’t like it.)

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Vanessa’s Picks

 

Cover design by Kate Sinclair.

Dark Like Under by Alice Chadwick

My new year’s resolution was to not complain about having to choose from among our books, and so I guess that’s all I’m allowed to say about that. Instead I’ll say how excited I am that we’ll be sharing Alice Chadwick’s debut with you. It’s a circadian novel, set over the course of a single day in the 1980s, and it follows a large cast of characters at an elite secondary school in a rural English town as they grapple with the surprising death of a beloved member of the faculty. It’s a book about resilience and connection, systems and resistance, renewal and what we leave behind, and a work of great poetic insight, keenly sensitive to paradox: that the old ways oppress while the ancient can illuminate, that the pastoral can be claustrophobic as well as restorative, that time is both a line and a circle. The form itself works into and against the conventions of Western narrative, the Western mind: in following the hours of the clock, around which human action revolves, we are reminded that although the earth turns circles inside of circles, somehow we still believe we travel a straight line, even in spite of having watched the hands sweep around and around. It’s the kind of fiction, and vision, that is for me the antidote to the disaffected irony and fashionable despair of a great deal of contemporary fiction, a book that risks all those old-fashioned ideas: generosity, forgiveness, love—even hope.

Cover design by Ingrid Paulson.

On Oil (Field Notes #10) by Don Gillmor

If you’d told me a year ago that I would spend a late afternoon inhaling a nonfiction book about the history and culture of oil in North America, stopping only because it was time for dinner and picking it back up to finish as soon as the dishes were done, I’d have been, admittedly, surprised. But if you’d told me Don Gillmor was the author, I wouldn’t have argued. Gillmor, a novelist, memoirist, historian, children’s author, journalist, and, it turns out, former roughneck, can do just about anything. In On Oil, Gillmor draws on the latter two professions to chart the rise and imminent fall of the oil industry, beginning with firsthand experience on oil rigs during the seventies oil boom in Alberta and traveling across the continent and then the globe to show the complex and maddening means by which oil has captured government interests and profoundly impacted—for better, and more often for worse—life on Planet Earth. The picture, I found out, is both more and less grim than one might think, but I’ve always been with Francis Bacon on difficult truths: knowledge is power.

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Ahmed’s Picks

 

Cover design by Zoe Norvell.

The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana

This was the first book I read as an official Biblioasis employee and I was floored. It was the prose that first did it, beautifully tense, controlled, electric. And then the questions this novel raises—about masculinity, violence, personal responsibility—all lingered in my mind for weeks after. We follow two young men who hit the road with no real plan other than to get away from their lives and their town. But, moment by moment, we see how they become more and more violent, until they cross a line from which they can never return. It’s all a game to them and it makes you wonder if we could ever learn anything from those who commit such violent acts. There are no neat and tidy answers, but I think that’s what’ll keep me coming back to this book. It’s a tragic story that stays with you because it insists we don’t look away anymore.

Cover design by Ingrid Paulson.

On Book Banning (Field Notes #9) by Ira Wells

The increase in book bans across the country is startling and alarming. Some people want to ban books with LGBTQ+ characters because they think those books are indoctrinating their children. And some people want to ban classics and important contemporary works because they contain language deemed offensive today. I wonder what books will be left on the shelf. Probably bland ones. With the forces of censorship seemingly getting stronger, I’m really grateful for what Wells does in this short book. It’s both a history lesson and passionate defense for the right to read. From ancient to recent cases, Wells walks us through the history of censorship and shows how and why book bans are making a comeback. On Book Banning is an excellent distillation of how we treat books today and how book bans are connected to the need to control others. It’s a useful reminder of why the freedom to read is crucial and what we lose when it is taken away. A very important read today and, I think, for the years to come.

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Dominique’s Picks

 

Cover design by Ingrid Paulson.

Baldwin, Styron, and Me by Mélikah Abdelmoumen, translated from the French by Catherine Khordoc

I read Baldwin, Styron, and Me in two sittings; the book’s hybrid form is addictive—it’s at once a memoir of Québecois identity, a literary history of the friendship between James Baldwin and William Styron, and a thoughtful critique of race, cultural appropriation, and the possibility for meaningful disagreement and debate. Abdelmoumen is a champion of resisting certainty, and her commitment to this is refreshing and inspiring (and important as we enter the increasingly politically-fraught new year).

Cover design by Ingrid Paulson.

UNMET by stephanie roberts

I’ve already read this collection a few times, and it’s impressive. roberts’ poems lean against surrealism without losing their humanity, their creatureness, their affinity for the real. And these sentences are just so pleasurable to read: they sinew and worm into a world-expanding illogic. I’ll be reading her first collection, rushes from the river of disappointment, soon. I’m thrilled UNMET is making its way into the world next year; I think roberts is one of Canada’s best, most original voices.

Cover design by Ingrid Paulson.

Dust: More Lives of the Poets (with Guitars) by Ray Robertson

I love reading about music almost as much as listening to it. And Robertson writes from a loving, considerate space that avoids the hyper-analytical, that instead creates a kind of music to live alongside the music. I can tell from this book’s setlist (Alex Chilton, Captain Beefheart, Muddy Waters, etc.) and from his previous Lives of the Poets (which includes some truly beautiful pieces on Gram Parsons and Townes Van Zandt), that this book will be a fount of joy and discovery for me in the new year.

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Ashley’s Picks

 

Cover design by Natalie Olsen.

Heaven and Hell by Jón Kalman Stefánsson, translated from the Icelandic by Philip Roughton

Your Absence Is Darkness was one of my favourite reads of last year, so I was quite pleased to find out that we’re not only publishing more of Stefánsson’s work, but a full trilogy is on the way. Heaven and Hell is a brilliant start to The Trilogy About the Boy, with everything I loved from Your Absence returning here, in perhaps what some might find a more accessible introduction to his writing (translated in excellent form by Philip Roughton). Stefánsson has this way of describing the world—from the way two distant lovers look up at the same moon, to the chill of a stormy ocean soaking a man to the bone, to the slow loss of sight—that really strikes a reader, and makes me consider things in a different way. It’s poetic and straightforward, and complements the emotions woven through the story, of the boy’s struggle with life or death, and the ways in which he connects with the people around him and remembers those who have passed. I look forward to reading more of this journey.

Cover design by Ingrid Paulson.

Sacred Rage: Selected Stories by Steven Heighton

I first learned of this forthcoming collection of the late Steven Heighton’s stories in the form of a handwritten table-of-contents, passed along from editor John Metcalf, to our publisher Dan, and then along to me—for compilation. Consequently, I’ve gotten to know this collection quite well already, having spent the last few months gradually acquiring, scanning, and cleaning up the converted text of a majority of these stories from older editions without available digital files. Heighton takes his readers across the world, from the back kitchen of a chicken restaurant to an onsen in Japan. Reading a collection in bits and pieces, before it’s been neatly woven together in order and packaged in its usual final book form, is a strange but exciting experience; I can say I’ve read Sacred Rage already in one sense, but what I’m looking forward to most is the day we receive our printed copies in-office, so I can finally sit down and enjoy these brilliantly written short stories—without the need to hunt for missing characters and lost italicizations—and be properly reintroduced to Heighton’s best works.

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Emily’s Picks

 

Cover design by Natalie Olsen.

Near Distance by Hanna Stoltenberg, translated from the Norwegian by Wendy Harrison Gabrielson

I’m not a reader who is typically drawn to a domestic drama or narrative centered around motherhood. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve read plenty of amazing literary books about just these things—but they’re rarely a narrative I find myself naturally delighting in. I was surprised and delighted as soon as I opened Near Distance by Hanna Stoltenberg (trans. Wendy Harrison Gabrielson). Taut and sparse, it’s the story of a mother (Karin) who has largely opted out of her daughter’s (Helene) life. When Helene asks Karin to travel with her to London, the result is an emotionally tense and very uneasy road trip story. It’s cold, sparse, and elegant, and made me chuckle darkly several times. What luck to start 2025 with such a beautiful and understated bang—Near Distance would have been a one sitting read for me had life not interrupted.

Cover design by Fiachra McCarthy.

Old Romantics by Maggie Armstrong

If you read our holiday Bibliophile, you may remember I’m a short story superfan. I won’t wax poetic about the form again, but you need to know that Old Romantics is a remarkably good story collection made even more remarkable by the fact that it’s debut. From the very first story, Maggie Armstrong made me laugh out loud in recognition (I mean we’ve all either been someone or known someone whose terrible boyfriend wouldn’t even chip in for a slice of pizza, right?) Witty and wry, the stories offer a distinctly literary and nuanced take on the popular “sad girl” genre. As I read through, I recognized shades of Fleabag and Halle Butler in the character variations. And impressively, while the stories stand alone taken together they are “a novel in stories” about an artist’s growth and maturity. Every character’s name is an alternative form of “Maggie,” and the reader gets the sense they’re watching the author grapple with Irish patriarchy and history in real time. When you pick up Old Romantics you’re not only picking up a very good book—you get to enjoy the next great voice in Irish literature.

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Dan’s Picks

 

Cover design by Ingrid Paulson.

I’m no more able to tell you what my favourite books for 2025 will be than I was able to declare my favourites from the past year. This is complicated further by the fact that the 2025 list is still taking shape. We’re still reading in the hopes of locating an international title or two for fall, and there are a handful of Canadian titles that may or may not be ready in time for the latter part of the 2025 season. And we have at least one title that we’re not in a position to announce anything about quite yet, though I promise it will stir things up something fierce.

What I can promise is a list that rivals all others before it, brimming with exceptional works of short fiction and novels and poetry and translations and history and cultural and social criticism, our yearly Best Canadian anthologies, and seasonal ghost stories (with a special addition in that department, to be revealed at a later date). It’s a heady mix of the new and familiar. As difficult as it is for me, I won’t repeat anything about the titles that others have highlighted above (except to say that there isn’t a person reading this who shouldn’t have Jón Kalman Stéfansson’s Heaven and Hell high on their to-be-read list: this series, of which this is only the introductory volume, is one of the great modern classics by my estimation, finally available here for the first time). But there are a few forthcoming titles from this fall that most staff haven’t had the opportunity to read quite yet. These include Russell Smith’s long-awaited and quite savagely propulsive new novel Self Care, about a young woman who gets involved, against her better judgement, with an incel; there’s a meditation on the spirit of sport in a new Field Note, On Sports, by David Macfarlane, that captures well my own ambivalence about what has long been one of my very favourite things; there’s a new work of memoir/cultural investigation by Elaine Dewar, tentatively titled Growing Up Oblivious in Mississippi North, about which I should say little else for now; and an important, timely, and moving investigation into the lives of migrant workers in Canada in Marcello Di Cintio’s Precarious. With, as I said, more to come.

Cover design by Kate Sinclair.

The best way to ensure that you don’t miss any of these publications is to either pre-order them from your favourite independent (it’s so easy to do, especially with those shops that use the Bookmanager interface), or to take out a subscription directly from the press: we have several options available, that cover all aspects of our list. There’s no better way to ensure that independent publishers can continue to do the work that we do in this increasingly precarious time.

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In good publicity news:

THE FUTURE and COCKTAIL longlisted for the CAROL SHIELDS PRIZE FOR FICTION!

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This morning at 8 AM ET, The Future by Catherine Leroux (translated by Susan Ouriou) and Cocktail by Lisa Alward were longlisted for the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, which is worth $150,000 USD! Both titles were published in September 2023 by Biblioasis. The shortlist will be announced on Tuesday, April 9, 2024. Check out the full longlist here.

Jen Sookfong Lee, on behalf of the Jury for the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, shared:

“The Jury for this year’s Carol Shields Prize is so very pleased to share this exceptional and diverse longlist. All the authors have written remarkable works of fiction that illuminate who we are—our histories, flaws, ambitions, and loves—and who we could be. Congratulations to all the longlisted writers and their publisher.”

These are Biblioasis’ first two books to be nominated for the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. Biblioasis is a literary press based in Windsor, Ontario. Since 2004 we have published the best in contemporary fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and literature in translation.

This is the second year of The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, which aims to address continued inequality in the literary world, especially among women and non-binary authors. Novels, short story collections, and graphic novels written by women and non-binary authors and published in the United States and Canada are eligible for the Prize. Should a translated work win the Prize, $100,000 will be awarded to the author and $50,000 to the translator.

Get your copy of The Future here!

Get your copy of Cocktail here!

Credit: Maria Cardosa-Grant

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Lisa Alward‘s stories have won The Fiddlehead Prize and the Peter Hinchcliffe Short Fiction Award and have appeared in Best Canadian Stories as well as The Journey Prize Stories. She grew up in Halifax and worked for several years in literary publishing in Toronto before moving with her family to Vancouver and ultimately to Fredericton, where she lives with her husband, John.

Photo Credit: Justine Latour

Catherine Leroux is a Québec novelist, translator and editor born in 1979. Her novel Le mur mitoyen won the France-Quebec Prize and its English version, The Party Wall, was nominated for the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize. The Future is the CBC Canada Reads 2024 winner. It has also received the Jacques-Brossard award for speculative fiction and was nominated for the Quebec Booksellers Prize. Catherine also won the 2019 Governor General’s Literary Award for her translation of Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien. Two of her novels are currently being adapted for the screen. She lives in Montreal with her two children.

Photo Credit: Jaz Hart Studio Inc

Susan Ouriou is an award-winning fiction writer and literary translator with over sixty translations and co-translations of fiction, non-fiction, children’s and young-adult literature to her credit. She has won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation for which she has also been shortlisted on five other occasions. Many of her young adult translations have made the IBBY Honor List. She has also published two novels, Damselfish and Nathan, edited the anthologies Beyond Words – Translating the World and Languages of Our Land – Indigenous Poems and Stories from Quebec and contributed a one-act play to the upcoming anthology Many Mothers – Seven Skies. Susan lives in Calgary, Alberta.

THE FUTURE wins CANADA READS 2024!

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We are overjoyed to announce that this morning at 11 AM ET, The Future by Catherine Leroux (translated by Susan Ouriou) was declared the winner of CBC’s Canada Reads competition 2024! One of the most important literary prizes in Canada, the competition is a four day broadcast event featuring five celebrity panelists championing Canadian books and debating their merits, in this battle of the books a title is eliminated each day until the last remaining book is named the one book all Canadians should read. The post-dystopian novel which was published by Biblioasis on September 5, 2023, was championed by the brilliant writer, and fantastic debater, Heather O’Neill. The theme of this year’s competition was “one book to carry us forward.” Set in an alternate history in which the city of Detroit was never ceded by French Canadian settlers and citizens still speak French, The Future is the story of one woman’s search for her missing granddaughters across a post-industrial landscape reeling from ecological collapse. It shows how it is in building community that we can find hope.

In her impassioned defense of the novel, Heather O’Neill said,

“This is a book about how the future belongs to children and how wrong it is that they are being given a broken world.”

The other Canada Reads champions appreciated the novel’s beautiful prose, colorful characters, and bittersweet ending. 

Both Catherine Leroux and Heather O’Neill are natives of Montréal, Québec and translator Susan Ouriou hails from Calgary, Alberta. The Future is the first translation to win Canada Reads since Kim Thúy’s Ru in 2015, and only the third translation to win in the prize’s more than twenty year history. 

Biblioasis publisher Dan Wells says,

“Before I was even a publisher, I remember listening avidly to Canada Reads. I can remember exactly where I was at certain moments—in the Tim Hortons drive-through in Emeryville, Ontario, when Lisa Moore defended Mavis Gallant’s short fiction against the suggestion that they were somehow lesser than a novel, for example—and today’s episode, for entirely different reasons, will remain as emblazoned. Heather O’Neill was the champion that a book like Catherine Leroux’s The Future needed, that literature in this country needs: kind, generous, gentle; off-centre and sparking insight in unexpected places and ways. We’re grateful for her efforts, thrilled for Catherine, one of our favourite writers and people; and ecstatic that Canada Reads has brought The Future to a nation-wide audience in a way that would have been impossible otherwise. Our heartfelt thanks, also, to moderator Ali Hassan, as well as Erin Balser, Lucy Mann, Charlene Chow and the rest of the Canada Reads team, whose professionalism, enthusiasm and care helped the anxiety go down.”

This is Biblioasis’ first book to win Canada Reads and its second translation to be nominated for CBC’s Canada Reads. The Dishwasher by Stéphane Larue (translated by Pablo Strauss) was nominated in 2020. Biblioasis is a literary press based in Windsor, Ontario. Since 2004 we have published the best in contemporary fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and literature in translation. 

CBC’s Canada Reads premiered in 2002. The great Canadian book debate has been airing annually for more than twenty years and selects a winning book that all Canadians should read. Ali Hassan hosted the 23rd competition, in which a panel of five celebrity advocates will champion Canadian books. More information on the program is available at cbcbooks.ca.

Grab your copy of The Future here!

ABOUT THE FUTURE

Winner of Canada Reads 2024 • One of Tor.com’s Can’t Miss Speculative Fiction for Fall 2023 • Listed in CBC Books Fiction to Read in Fall 2023 • One of 20 Books You Heard about on CBC Last Week • One of Kirkus Reviews’ Fall 2023 Big Books By Small Presses • A Kirkus Review Work of Translated Fiction To Read Now • One of CBC Books Best Books of 2023 • A CBC Books Bestselling Canadian Book of the Week

In an alternate history in which the French never surrendered Detroit, children protect their own kingdom in the trees.

In an alternate history of Detroit, the Motor City was never surrendered to the US. Its residents deal with pollution, poverty, and the legacy of racism—and strange and magical things are happening: children rule over their own kingdom in the trees and burned houses regenerate themselves. When Gloria arrives looking for answers and her missing granddaughters, at first she finds only a hungry mouse in the derelict home where her daughter was murdered. But the neighbours take pity on her and she turns to their resilience and impressive gardens for sustenance.

Photo Credit: Justine Latour

When a strange intuition sends Gloria into the woods of Parc Rouge, where the city’s orphaned and abandoned children are rumored to have created their own society, she can’t imagine the strength she will find. A richly imagined story of community and a plea for persistence in the face of our uncertain future, The Future is a lyrical testament to the power we hold to protect the people and places we love—together.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR & TRANSLATOR

Catherine Leroux is a Quebec novelist, translator and editor born in 1979. Her novel Le mur mitoyen won the France-Quebec Prize and its English version, The Party Wall, was nominated for the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize. The Future won CBC’s Canada Reads 2024, received the Jacques-Brossard award for speculative fiction and was nominated for the Quebec Booksellers Prize. Catherine also won the 2019 Governor General’s Literary Award for her translation of Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien. Two of her novels are currently being adapted for the screen. She lives in Montreal with her two children.

Photo Credit: Jaz Hart Studio Inc

Susan Ouriou is an award-winning fiction writer and literary translator with over sixty translations and co-translations of fiction, non-fiction, children’s and young-adult literature to her credit. She has won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation for which she has also been shortlisted on five other occasions. Many of her young adult translations have made the IBBY Honor List. She has also published two novels, Damselfish and Nathan, edited the anthologies Beyond Words – Translating the World and Languages of Our Land – Indigenous Poems and Stories from Quebec and contributed a one-act play to the upcoming anthology Many Mothers – Seven Skies. Susan lives in Calgary, Alberta.

THE FUTURE shortlisted for CANADA READS 2024!

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We’re thrilled to share that this morning, CBC announced the shortlist for Canada Reads 2024. The Future by Catherine Leroux (translated by Susan Ouriou) which was published by Biblioasis on September 5, 2023, will be championed by writer Heather O’Neill. The live debates will take place from March 4th to 7th, 2024. The theme of this year’s competition is hope. We are living in challenging times, and CBC Books has curated a list of books about, “finding the resilience and the hope needed to carry on and keep moving forward.”

Champion Heather O’Neill says The Future is an accomplished novel portraying,

“A dystopian world of feral children and corruption. Leroux describes it in an eerily beautiful and absolutely unique voice.”

Both Catherine Leroux and Heather O’Neill are natives of Montreal. In a Toronto Star feature story published today, Steven Beattie spoke to Leroux about her novel and to O’Neill about selecting The Future:

“As far as that rubric goes, Leroux’s book seems like a natural fit. With its overlapping themes of ecological decay, motherhood, childhood, and societal discord, The Future seemed to offer O’Neill a rich trove of subject matter to address—a significant consideration when she was musing about what book she wanted to champion. ‘You have to find a book that you can dig into and discuss for an entire week,’ O’Neill says. ‘There are just so many elements in The Future to talk about. I thought, this is going to be really fun.'”

Biblioasis publisher Dan Wells says,

“We’re so pleased for Catherine, and grateful to Heather O’Neill for her enthusiasm for The Future! It’s a book for this moment: in a world that too often seems dystopic, it asks what comes after, where we’ll find our communities, pointing to ways we can live better together. We’re thankful as well to the CBC Books team, and that this program will bring so many new readers to Catherine’s wonderful work.”

This is the second of Biblioasis’ books to be nominated for CBC’s Canada Reads. The Dishwasher by Stéphane Larue (translated by Pablo Strauss) was nominated in 2020. Biblioasis is a literary press based in Windsor, Ontario. Since 2004 we have published the best in contemporary fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and literature in translation.

CBC’s Canada Reads premiered in 2002. The great Canadian book debate has been airing annually for more than twenty years and aims to select a winning book that all Canadians should read. Ali Hassan will host the 23rd competition, in which a panel of five celebrity advocates will champion Canadian books. Each day of the competition, one book will be eliminated by the panelists until a winner is declared the must-read book for Canadians in 2024. More information on the program and the selected titles is available at cbcbooks.ca.

Order your copy of The Future here!

ABOUT THE FUTURE

Shortlisted for Canada Reads 2024 • One of Tor.com’s Can’t Miss Speculative Fiction for Fall 2023 • Listed in CBC Books Fiction to Read in Fall 2023 • One of Kirkus Reviews‘ Fall 2023 Big Books By Small Presses • A Kirkus Review Work of Translated Fiction To Read Now • One of CBC Books Best Books of 2023

In an alternate history in which the French never surrendered Detroit, children protect their own kingdom in the trees.

In an alternate history of Detroit, the Motor City was never surrendered to the US. Its residents deal with pollution, poverty, and the legacy of racism—and strange and magical things are happening: children rule over their own kingdom in the trees and burned houses regenerate themselves. When Gloria arrives looking for answers and her missing granddaughters, at first she finds only a hungry mouse in the derelict home where her daughter was murdered. But the neighbours take pity on her and she turns to their resilience and impressive gardens for sustenance.

Photo Credit: Justine Latour

When a strange intuition sends Gloria into the woods of Parc Rouge, where the city’s orphaned and abandoned children are rumored to have created their own society, she can’t imagine the strength she will find. A richly imagined story of community and a plea for persistence in the face of our uncertain future, The Future is a lyrical testament to the power we hold to protect the people and places we love—together.

ABOUT CATHERINE LEROUX

Catherine Leroux is a Quebec novelist, translator and editor born in 1979. Her novel Le mur mitoyen won the France-Quebec Prize and its English version, The Party Wall, was nominated for the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize. The Future received the Jacques-Brossard award for speculative fiction and was nominated for the Quebec Booksellers Prize. Catherine also won the 2019 Governor General’s Literary Award for her translation of Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien. Two of her novels are currently being adapted for the screen. She lives in Montreal with her two children.

Photo Credit: Jaz Hart Studio Inc

ABOUT SUSAN OURIOU

Susan Ouriou is an award-winning fiction writer and literary translator with over sixty translations and co-translations of fiction, non-fiction, children’s and young-adult literature to her credit. She has won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation for which she has also been shortlisted on five other occasions. Many of her young adult translations have made the IBBY Honor List. She has also published two novels, Damselfish and Nathan, edited the anthologies Beyond Words—Translating the World and Languages of Our Land—Indigenous Poems and Stories from Quebec and contributed a one-act play to the upcoming anthology Many Mothers—Seven Skies. Susan lives in Calgary, Alberta.

Spotlight On: THE PARTY WALL by CATHERINE LEROUX

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Summer is ending, and autumn is nearly here! For the month of September, our featured pick for the Biblioasis Spotlight Series highlights award-winning Quebec author Catherine Leroux with her English-language debut, The Party Wall (translated by Lazer Lederhendler). Read on for a deeply insightful note from Catherine, and be sure to keep an eye out later this month for an excerpt in our newsletter!

THE PARTY WALL

Winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation • Shortlisted for the 2016 Giller Prize • Selected for Indies Introduce Summer/Fall 2016 • Winner of the Prestigious France-Quebec Prize • Nominated for the Quebec Bookseller’s Prize

Catherine Leroux’s The Party Wall shifts between and ties together stories about pairs joined in surprising ways. A woman learns that she may not be the biological mother of her own son despite having given birth to him; a brother and sister unite, as their mother dies, to search for their long-lost father; two young sisters take a detour home, unaware of the tragedy that awaits; and a political couple—when the husband accedes to power in a post-apocalyptic future state—is shaken by the revelation of their own shared, if equally unknown, history.

Lyrical, intelligent, and profound, The Party Wall is luminously human, a surreally unforgettable journey through the barriers that can both separate us and bring us together.

“…an intoxicating blend of the familiar and the uncanny, brilliantly executed … The Party Wall has the narrative force of a Hollywood film, while also offering richly executed portraits of the characters’ interior lives.”—Montreal Review of Books

“… superbly crafted … Leroux skillfully reveals the inner worlds of her achingly human characters and the intricate bonds that connect them to each other. Images from this beautiful and moving book will haunt readers.”—Publishers Weekly

Catherine Leroux was born in 1979 in the Northern suburbs of Montreal. Her first novel, Marche en forêt, was published in 2011 by Éditions Alto. The Party Wall, her English-language debut published with Biblioasis in 2016, was selected for Indies Introduce for Summer/Fall, shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and won the Governor General’s Award for Translation. Her subsequent novels, Madame Victoria and L’avenir were shortlisted and won various awards. Catherine lives in Montreal where she devotes her time between writing, translation and editorial work.

Get your copy of The Party Wall here!

Check out Catherine’s third book, Madame Victoria, here!

 

Photo Credit: Audrée Wilhemy

A WORD FROM CATHERINE LEROUX

Canaries in the Coal Mine

I started writing The Party Wall in 2011. At the time, the book felt slightly hyperbolic, especially the chapters situated in the near future: Canada recovering from years of right-wing, divisive, autocratic government; the Prairies’ soil gone sterile due to droughts; the coasts flooded by torrential rains. Political and racist violence permeating every sphere of life.

More than a decade later, it doesn’t quite seem like an exaggeration anymore. Back then, the effects of climate change were akin to the first subtle, almost unreal symptoms of an illness, while today, they are unescapable in their devastating potency. The turbulence of the world in which Ariel and Marie evolved now seems tame compared to the schizophrenic landscape created by social and political leaders, both abroad and at home.

What are we to make of these stories, that could have been read a decade ago as anticipatory literary attempts to define still-hazy outlines on the horizon, now that these shapes have materialized into our new reality? I believe it’s a matter of shifting one’s perspective. Through the crises, the characters still love and fight and dream and fail. They still come to life regardless of the time in which they are read. Because of that, they remain capable of opening spaces in our minds where we can think and feel our present, where we may hold hope.

I’ve always liked the idea of novelists as canaries in the coal mine. I did wonder what they might do once the gas has filled the tunnel. For now, against all odds, they are still singing.

 

Celebrate Mother’s Day with Biblioasis!

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Mother’s Day is fast approaching! We have some great gift ideas for your mom or any mother figures in your life.

For the mom who keeps up with the bestsellers: A Ghost in the Throat

“A powerful, bewitching blend of memoir and literary investigation … Ní Ghríofa is deeply attuned to the gaps, silences and mysteries in women’s lives, and the book reveals, perhaps above all else, how we absorb what we love—a child, a lover, a poem—and how it changes us from the inside out.”—Nina Maclaughlin, New York Times

For the mom who wants a challenge: Ducks, Newburyport

“Lucy Ellmann has written a genre-defying novel, a torrent on modern life, as well as a hymn to loss and grief. Her creativity and sheer obduracy make demands on the reader. But Ellmann’s daring is exhilarating—as are the wit, humanity and survival of her unforgettable narrator.”—2019 Booker Prize Jury Citation

For the mom who attends open mic night: Hail, the Invisible Watchman

“Alexandra Oliver, Canada’s sublime formal poet, grabs centuries-old traditions by the throat and gives them a huge contemporary shaking in Hail, the Invisible Watchman. Terrifyingly clever, dazzlingly skilled, and chillingly accurate in her social observations, she plunges from lyric to narrative and back again in this, her third volume, where a housewife has ‘a waist like a keyhole’ and a ‘good mood’ has a ‘scent’ … With Hail, the Invisible Watchman Oliver again alters the landscape of Canadian poetry.” —Molly Peacock, author of The Analyst

For the mom who loves historical fiction: The Barrøy Chronicles

“A profound interrogation of freedom and fate, as well as a fascinating portrait of a vanished time, written in prose as clear and washed clean as the world after a storm.”—The Guardian

For the mom who is everyone’s best friend: The Last Goldfish

“Lahey is a writer of extraordinary gifts, evoking the world of two raucous schoolgirls growing up in the 1980s in astonishing, at times laugh-out-loud funny, detail … Lou couldn’t have asked for a more stalwart, loyal friend than Anita Lahey; we couldn’t ask for a more acutely observant and empathetic writer.”—Moira Farr, author of After Daniel: A Suicide Survivor’s Tale

For the mom who wants to be surprised: Biblioasis Mystery Box

Each box is unique and carefully curated. Tell us some of your favourite books or genres in the notes box, so we can pick books specially for you, or leave it blank for a complete surprise!

Happy Mother’s Day from all of us at Biblioasis!

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