Mid-career is an exciting part of an author’s body of work. Initial ideas that arise in their first books can be reworked, elaborated or set aside to address other, newer subject matter. What makes these three novels particularly interesting right now is their cosmopolitan treatment of what it means to exist in Canada. Alexis von Konigslow’s second novel, The Exclusion Zone, looks to Europe, Shani Mootoo’s Starry Starry Night bases itself in the Caribbean, and Adnan Khan’s The Hypebeast moves between India and the Indian diaspora in Toronto.
The Hypebeast
By Adnan Khan (Dundurn Press, 2025) $25.99
In The Hypebeast, Adnan Khan’s second novel, real-world crises — the occupation of Afghanistan, incarceration at Guantanamo Bay, race riots in Mumbai — pulse in, shaping plot, lifestyles and psyches.
Hamid, 28, moved to Toronto because of anti-Muslim riots in Bombay when he was still a child. As he describes himself
in a hypothetical personal ad: “FUCK UP AVAIL, SAYS HE’S 5’10”, DARK SKINNED, NO JOB, NO REAL PROSPECTS,” and “A TOTAL WASTE OF HIS PARENTS’ JOURNEY WESTWARD.”
Hamid has a doppelganger, Abdul Mohammed, a social media-savvy imam who first survived the duress of incarceration at Guantanamo Bay.
Abdul is the counter-cultural force in the book, a charismatic counterweight to Hamid’s lifestyle of clubbing, fraud-based income streams, and materialistic aspirations. Abdul dangles the promise of a more ascetic life of service, membership, and meaning. Speaking of Abdul, Hamid notes:
“It’s his coherence that attracts me, how he moved through the world unfettered by his own past, or so I thought.”
Throughout the book, Khan is attuned to smells. Occasionally these are perfumes, but more often they are less exalted — sweat, breath, inferior vodka — which give the book fleshiness and vitality. This intricate and expansive story brims with indulgence and unruliness.
There’s an old adage that says at any one point a novelist needs to draw from two of: experience, imagination and knowledge. Adnan Khan blends these three inputs subtly and, in so doing, produces a novel that dramatizes contemporary life — its allures and pitfalls — while being poised enough to avoid the simplicity of being emblematic.
The Exclusion Zone
By Alexis von Konigslow (Wolsak and Wynn, 2025) $24.00
Like her first novel, von Konigslow’s The Exclusion Zone centres on a graduate student. In this story, we follow Reyna, a young Canadian scientist with Ukrainian ancestry who researches facial expressions. Reyna’s research takes her to the irradiated zone surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. The forest is a dead place, “like a church”; it won’t be habitable for 500 years.
Reyna is in a state of disequilibrium. She has separated from her longtime partner, Nick, a physicist, and she is lured deeper and deeper into the site of nuclear catastrophe. She justifies her willing exposure to doses of radiation in two ways: her interest in understanding the mysterious men she finds in that territory (Ghosts? Rebels? Security? Looters?), and her own informal exposure therapy to fear itself.
Fear here is not an inhibiting force. Rather, it inspires a desire to know, even if this knowing comes with the possibility of cancer or the anguish of infidelity. As Reyna explains it:
“Fear slows down time. It makes you look more closely, physiologically even. Your heart beats faster. You get more oxygen to your brain. You have better ocular efficiency. You can practically see in the dark.”
The Exclusion Zone isn’t really about Chernobyl itself; rather, it’s an engrossing parable of fear that shows what happens when one presses ahead, regardless of the red light warning us to stop.
Starry Starry Night
By Shani Mootoo (Book*hug Press, Sept 2025) $24.95
In Shani Mootoo’s Starry Starry Night, the circumstances of the book map onto Mootoo’s life, but the protagonist isn’t Shani, it is Anjula Ghoshal. Anjula is six when the book opens, and is living with her maternal grandparents in Trinidad while her parents are in Ireland where her dad is completing a medical degree and her mother is pregnant. When her parents do return, she finds herself estranged from them, which intensifies her two key questions: who is she, and how does she fit into her family and the larger world?
In the three years the book spans, Anjula’s world acquires gender norms, backstories, and troubling questions about race. “There are so many things happening. I might miss something,” she notes. Superstitions are inculcated too: there is “the boo boo man” who, she’s told, lives in the mosque down the street. The mosque’s calls to prayer, she believes, are actually the boo boo man’s threatening exhortations for children to behave.
In Mootoo’s sensitive and tender portrait of childhood, Anjula’s acculturation builds to an aching question: “If everything dies, why does it have to go through the whole of living to get to dying?”
This article appeared in the 2025 Summer issue.
