Rouge
By Mona Awad
Hamish Hamilton / Penguin, 2023
$34
A darkly delicious fairytale set against the California coast, Mona Awad’s Rouge is a feverish romp of beauty detectives, femme-facials, and the dark side of that coveted youthful “glow.” At turns playful and introspective, Awad layers petals of memory and forgetting to create an all-consuming nightmare of beauty, motherhood, and sharp, thorny envy. Not to be dismissed as capitalizing on social media’s current skincare craze, Awad uses the phenomenon to beg the questions why, for whom, and to what end? – CC/Forest Hill
The Details
By Ia Genberg
HarperCollins Canada, 2023
$28.50
Lying in bed with a high fever, a woman reads the inscription written inside a novel that she has long owned. The words in this message surface parts of her past and feelings about the people she won’t ever be able to forget. Through four intimate reflections, Genberg draws readers into a sentimental and contemplative journey. While reading The Details, at times, I found myself stopping mid-sentence to reflect — sometimes with tears in my eyes — as I recalled my own long gone connections. If you’re looking for a meditation on loss and nostalgia, Genberg’s English language debut is a must read. – NR/Forest Hill
Birnam Wood
By Eleanor Catton
McClelland & Stewart / Penguin Random House, 2023
$36.95
In Eleanor Catton’s follow-up to The Luminaries, guerilla gardeners squatting on an abandoned farm on New Zealand’s South Island stumble onto an American tech billionaire’s end-of-times bunker. An uneasy alliance forms and the vacuum of suspicion rapidly fills as surveillance scuffles with trust. While conservation is the core of every character’s motivation, who decides what is conserved becomes a race to the last page. The title, Birnam Wood, may lead crafty readers to think that this book is a retelling of Macbeth. It’s not a retelling of Macbeth but it’s also not not one. – PD/Queen Street
My Work
By Olga Ravn, translated by Jennifer Russell and Sophia Hersi Smith
Book*hug Press, 2023
$25
Olga Ravn structurally reinvents each genre she writes in. My Work, a novel exploring a new mother’s journey into unknown territory, is merciless, debilitatingly beautiful, and as harsh as it needs to be to convey the reality of postpartum depression. I love when a highly anticipated book for me exceeds its expectations. – OP/Junction
Tremor
By Teju Cole
Penguin Random House, 2023
$37.99
What would your doppelganger, the one who had never left your ancestral home, be like? And if you got to meet them, with the same skin colour as you but with a different accent and different wounds, what would that be like? In this W.G.Sebald-like novel, Tunde, a Nigerian-born photography professor teaching at Harvard, grapples with these questions and more. – MA/Junction
Nipponia Nippon
By Kazushige Abe, translated by Kerim Yasar
Pushkin Press, 2023
$19.95
Haruo is a wayward 17-year-old who has endured many humiliations. He has no friends, speaks petulantly to his parents, and lives alone in a small Tokyo apartment. After discovering an interest in preserving an endangered species of birds, Haruo slowly begins to come into his own, bit by bit. Alas, Haruo’s situation takes a dark turn when he decides his destiny will be realized only when he is able to rip into pieces the “script written by human beings”’ Kazushige Abe’s sharp and careful writing reminds us that not all struggles are a triumph of the human spirit. Sometimes, the human spirit takes a loss, albeit a captivatingly interesting one. – KB/Queen Street
This article appeared in the 2023 Nov/Dec issue.
