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Seven (mainly poetry) books released in 2024 that I recommend are:  

Fady Joudah, [...]: Poems  

Refaat Alareer, If I Must Die: Poetry and Prose 

Max Porter, All of This Unreal Time 

CAConrad, Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return 

Danez Smith, Bluff 

Zehra Naqvi, The Knot of My Tongue 

Emily Austin, Gay Girl Prayers 

If I Must Die is still en route as it isn’t released for two more weeks here; like many, I’ve read sections from this collection and believe absolutely everyone should read the words of Refaat Alareer. The other books on my list were recommended or given to me by writer friends I love and admire. So, as we end the year, it’s not just these books that stand out as exceptional, I am also reminded of my love and gratitude for these relations who made sure the books made their way to me. 

Poetry:  
Teeth by Dallas Hunt 

Layered and insightful, from finding “little pockets of livability,” Hunt uses poetry to highlight “symptoms of colonization” and the power imbalances that persist and the systems that maintain inequities. 

2023: 

Fiction 

Beautiful, Beautiful by Brandon Reid 

Heiltsuk writer Brandon Reid gifts readers with new eyes. His debut novel invites dreams, archetypes, memories — and more stories.

At the moment I am moving back and forth between three books, each differently seductive. I want to be entirely inhabited by each, but lack the discipline to set any one of them aside: 

Maud Martha by Gwendolyn Brooks 

A rare novel of plainness, poetry, and immediacy that enters quietly and weaves itself into your thinking. 

Men in the Sun and other Palestinian Stories by Ghassan Kanafani 

These stories invite you to lie down and press your ear to the earth, wherever you are, and listen, then sit up, look around you, and wait for someone to speak. 

No Jews Live Here by John Lorinc 

Whether a border is being redrawn, or a building torn down and replaced by another, or a new racial law imposed, the telling is meticulous, driven by a hunger to know what exactly happened, and this desire to get to the bottom — to the impossible bottom of turmoil — becomes infectious. 

I also am wanting to read:  

Ce Que Je Sais de Toi / What I Know About You by Éric Chacour 

Tremor by Teju Cole, whose mind is so nimble and prose so fine and seemingly effortless.  

and to re-read Maria Reva’s collection of stories, Good Citizens Need Not Fear, which will always be for me essential reading. 

Dandelion Daughter by Gabrielle Boulianne-Tremblay

A moving coming-of-age novel where questions of relationships with others, family and transidentity intertwine. A favorite piece of Quebec literature, now translated into English by Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch.

I thought I’d share one collection, one novel, and one novella: 

Coexistence by Billy-Ray Belcourt 

Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera 

Green Fuse Burning by Tiffany Morris 

Most of the reading I did in 2024 was not anywhere near the casual, fun variety — fun and casual didn’t seem like 2024 at all. My first pick is intense, as well as poetic. Supplication, by Nour Abi-Nakhoul, is unlike anything I’d ever read before. It is true literary horror. And sometimes, in bleak times, the catharsis horror provides is exactly what I need.  

2024 also offered up a few short fiction collections that I think provided some much needed perspective on how we’re functioning as a society. Carleigh Baker’s Last Woman has three satirically biting “Billionaires” stories interwoven throughout, asking us what would happen if billionaires actually made it to space. And many stories in Sara Power’s The Art of Camouflage dealt head on with both a loss of self and mother guilt in a way I think is so necessary to talk out loud about, for mental health’s sake.  

I found the thing I needed most in 2024 was hope. And The Future, by Catherine Leroux, translated by Susan Ouriou, provided it. Sure, this 2024 Canada Reads winner features the bleakness of a crumbling Detroit. But there are also gardens, and a wild pack of abandoned children who are somehow making it in the woods. There are even fairies. This is a book that doesn’t shy away from the sadness of where our society is headed, but also offers hope in the relationships we build, and the gardens we tend together. 

This year I’ve been grateful to receive generous support from the writing community across Turtle Island. The following books (and their authors) have inspired me, taught me, and pushed me in my own writing practice. I hope these titles enrich your creative life in the new year as much as they have mine. Nitsiniiyi'taki (thank you). 

The All + Flesh by Brandi Bird 

Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century by Kim Fu 

Prairie Edge by Conor Kerr 

Adonis: Selected Poems by Ali Ahmad Said Esber, trans. Khaled Mattawa. 

Last Woman by Carleigh Baker 

The Houseguest by Amparo Davila 

Letters in a Bruised Cosmos by Liz Howard 

Essential reads for me in 2024: 

Daddy’s Gone A Hunting by Penelope Mortimer  

Relentless, lonely, and a clarion call for choice, Mortimer’s work here is astounding. Ferocious and taut this novel gives humanity without being maudlin, does not apologize for the stultifying facts of motherhood, and hopes for freedom.  

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman  

In this austere and brilliant novel, there is the insistence that tenderness must continue to act in the face of all evidence to the contrary, a staggeringly clear ideal amid a novel that questions everything, wondering what is a life worth living? What is a human when everything is taken away? Is anyone else out there? 

The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş   

Silken, thoughtful, and elegant, this novel marvels in the glory of the ordinary, of the “slow and leisurely rot of a day.” In awe of and perfectly attuned to the stumbling, developmental years of finding your place, there is so much pleasure in this book, in entering its world and finding here, there is still enough time to choose. 

Running In The Family by Michael Ondaatje   

When I think of books that are passed from reader to reader like secrets, I think of Running In The Family. Ondaatje’s account of returning to the family and country that he left behind in Sri Lanka when he moved as a young child to Canada is a memoir that is not based in trauma, but rather a grief borne from a longing to trace the roots of a family tree Ondaatje was cut away from by his family’s relocation. Mythological, poetic, fragmented, it’s a marvel. 

It’s been a busy year immersing myself in books about memoir writing technique and memoirs themselves, so to that end, I have a couple of favourite and essential books.  

A favourite Canadian book from this year is Widow’s Guide to Dead Bastards by Jessica Waite. I am fascinated by secret-keeping, and this book is full of secrets unfolding. I felt as though I was investigating along with the author and as we found things out about her husband’s other life I felt every moment along with her. Waite’s vulnerability and strength are astonishing. I loved the humour in this book as well. She shared so much of herself, even at her worst, which helps us trust her as a storyteller. Added bonus: lots of sarcasm and anger.    

Easy Beauty by Chloe Cooper Jones gave me goosebumps as I came to realize what she was writing about. I don’t want to spoil the read for others, but she has a way of writing her story that slowly reveals her reality; and once you realize what it is, it is not what you expect. I was with her every moment of the book and felt like she was right next to me.  

I was comforted and inspired by Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative by Jane Alison. It was great to read and remind myself that rules exist to be broken sometimes and that writers are allowed to play with form.   

And for fun? Well, that would be How To Tell If Your Cat Is Plotting to Kill You by Matthew Inman which I picked up from a little free library on my street. If you know, you know. 

Years ago, as a books columnist I had to do seemingly endless year-end best book lists and so I’m going to keep this brief. I’ve chosen a historical novel and a beautiful picture book to recommend. 

Anne Fleming’s Curiosities engages in both gender and genre-bending. It comes with a preface by a self-described amateur historian named Anne who may or may not be the same Anne whose name is on the cover. I don’t always subscribe to this sort of meta fiction, but it works beautifully here — the narratorial voice both lends context and instills enthusiasm for this 17th story told in discrete sections through shifting perspectives. Joan Palmer and Tom Willes’ two children who are their village’s lone survivors of the plague are taken in by an elderly woman subsequently accused of witchcraft. Joan later becomes companion and amanuensis to Lady Margaret Long and in time is reunited with the other child, Tom, with unforeseen tragic consequences. Like Sarah Water’s Fingersmith or Anne-Marie Macdonald’s Fayne, the novel excels at placing queer and gender non-conforming individuals in a context where their identities would have been concealed or coded in their own time. Having re-opened it for the purpose of writing this brief song of praise, I now plan to spend the evening reading it over again. It’s simply a beautifully original piece of writing. 

And because, I value writing for children as much as writing for adults, I’m sharing one of my favourite picture books of 2024, Tove and the Island with No Address by Lauren Soloy. As a writer/illustrator, Soloy is very good at creating stories about child versions of people we know for their adult accomplishments, such as Emily Carr, Maud Lewis, and now Tove Jansson.  

Jansson is best known as the creator of the Moomins but anyone who hasn’t read her novel, The Summer Book has a treat in store for them. Her child Tove is a very small figure in the landscape with a head of brilliant dandelion-yellow hair. She arrives on the island that her family visits every year and there is something so familiar in that childhood ritual of returning to places that stay the same even as we change from one visit to the next. Little Tove goes to visit a strange little creature who lives in a cave and ends up creature-sitting his five daughters for the day.  

Soloy writes so beautifully about the particularities of childhood: 

Tove climbed into her red kitchen chair. She kicked her legs so her feet swung just so. The wind boomed against the wall of the cabin. The rain drummed on the roof. Tove snuggled in her mom’s sweater and took a bite of pancake. Imagine never getting soaked to the bone and then getting dry again, she thought. How dreadful! 

Soloy’s books are always guaranteed day-brighteners and this one is no exception. The art is beautiful — one spread features a sky straight out of Blake—and the colour palette somehow allows you to feel the cold wind little Tove endures along with the reassuring warmth of the home fire she returns to. Love this book and would recommend to readers young or old. 

Joelle Barron’s Excerpts from a Burned Letter pokes at the fire of queer history and sets flecks and cinders flying — forgotten furtive teen memories, razed archives of great love affairs, sparking and whirling. I loved it. 

Madeline Ashby’s Glass Houses turns the tech boom and the human implosion this way and that and wonders what we are without peripherals and supporting infrastructure. A kind of Agatha Christie in plexiglass. 

Sofia Ajram’s Coup de Grâce considers the horror of that quintessential Canadian experience of the unreal underground city — the spaces burrowing under Toronto and Montreal in mismatched glass and vast concrete. A study in blown-out body horror and prose in bloated bruise-purples. 

The Book of Eels: Our Enduring Fascination with the Most Mysterious Creature in the Natural World by Patrik Svensson 

The Lost Supper: Searching for the Future of Food in the Flavours of the Past by Taras Grescoe (we're labelmates at Greystone) 

The Road by Cormac McCarthy (I discovered this late!) 

Water Always Wins: Thriving in an Age of Drought and Deluge by Erica Gies 

Beneath the Surface of Things: New and Selected Essays by Wade Davis 

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris 

On Writing and Failure by Stephen Marche (much more inspiring than the title suggests — this tiny book helped me navigate a particularly dark phase of writing Pitfall) 

Not to brag but I read 60 books this year. So, I'm only including the absolute hardest hitters on this list. Go buy them!! 

Brandi Bird’s All + Flesh—poetry that is tender, ferocious, and so beautifully rooted in reclamation. The closing poem felt like it contained the answers to (imperfectly) healing all my family relationships, and I keep rereading and sending it out widely. 

Hannah Green’s Xanax Cowboy is a book I didn’t know I needed until I had it in my hands (on the recommendation of Brandi, actually!) It’s a raw and honest collection that dives headfirst into mental health, addiction, and healing. But what I loved most about the book was the unwavering intensity and risk of the speaker. As an emerging poet, reading this debut encouraged me to lean into weirdness with rigor, and I am so grateful! 

As for nonfiction, there was social visionary Kai Cheng Thom’s prose-poetry hybrid Falling Back in Love with Being Human. This collection felt like a compassionate conversation with a dear friend, exploring survival, joy, and community with an honesty that felt like a lifeline. In a political landscape where the left has been pretty fragmented, there’s urgency in how important and beautiful Thom’s work is. This book is such a gift! 

Indigena Awry by Marie Annharte Baker — I read this book of poems on the recommendation of my prof Cecily Nicholson, and it was so playful and humourous in all the most deeply affecting ways. This one also felt like a gentle, generous invitation to lean into humour and weirdness, even (or especially) for work that’s politicized and expected to perform a certain way on the page. 

Lastly, Something, Not Nothing by Sarah Leavitt. Having lost some dear ones the last couple of years, this graphic memoir saw me into the darker, weirder, and even funnier parts of grief. Truly cathartic and incredibly generous.  

Too many good ones, so here are some more bonus beauties: Lunch Poems by Frank O'Hara, [...]: Poems by Fady Joudah, Mothman Apologia by Robert Wood Lynn, Path of Totality: Poems by Niina Pollari, I Love Information: Poems by Courtney Bush, and Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe. 

Elevator in Sài Gòn by Thuận, translated by Nguyễn An Lý, Book*hug Press, 2024

Colonial pasts continue to haunt the present in Thuận’s Elevator in Sài Gòn. Translated to English by Book*hug Press in 2024, the novel follows a Vietnamese woman in Paris who travels back to Sài Gòn to attend her mother’s funeral. Her mother died in the elevator shaft, the first elevator in a private home in the country, after the opening ceremony organized by her brother. Her mother, once a powerful figure in the political scene, has a past our narrator knows little about. Our narrator becomes fascinated. Sometimes curiosity comes after death and develops into an obsession. She imagines a past between her mother and a man named Paul Poloaski, a name that appears in her mother’s notebook. She begins to track this man down in Paris. She follows him. She haunts him just as she and her country’s history and her displacement haunt her. This is a detective novel, a post-colonial ghost story, and a political satire that pokes fun at the institutions of second-language acquisition. Thuận’s prose is dense. It at times feels claustrophobic, but the story continues to expand. Our narrator’s search for her mother’s past spans from Paris to Seoul to Pyongyang and back to Sài Gòn, but many questions remain unanswered.

Other recommendations from my 2024 read:

Everything and Nothing at All, Jenny Heijun Wills

Patterns of the Heart and Other Stories, Myŏng-ik Ch'oe (Translated by Janet Poole)

Greek Lessons, Han Kang (translated by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won)

Denison Avenue, Christina Wong/ with illustrations by Daniel Innis

Shut Up You're Pretty by Téa Mutonji

In an ideal world, translating a book set largely in Egypt would have meant spending time in Cairo; in this one, the best I could manage was seeking out other books to guide me. Especially memorable were If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English by Noor Naga and Traces of Enayat by Iman Mersal, translated by Robin Moger. I also loved Mersal’s knowing and deeply affecting collection of poems, The Threshold, translated by Robyn Cresswell. 

A madcap story of an over-the-hill boxer, Pet, Pet, Slap, by Andrew Battershill, made me laugh out loud, too loud, at a public library and a Burger King and on a streetcar and a train and a plane and my own couch.  
 
Many great titles from Quebec came out in English translation this year, including the five finalists for the Governor General’s Literary Award. Another I recommend is As the Andes Disappeared, by Caroline Dawson, translated by Anita Anand. Dawson won over all of Quebec with her moving account of emigrating from Chile as a child and coming of age in Montreal in a loving family struggling to get by. Dawson died in 2024, far too young, but the work she leaves behind and her impact on Quebec’s writing community will endure. 
 
As this year marked by intolerance and genocide comes to an end, I am reading the 2023 Alchemy Lecture, Five Manifestos for the Beautiful World (edited by Christina Sharpe). Each of these five lectures by Phoebe Boswell, Saidiya Hartman, Janaína Oliveira, Joseph M. Pierce, and Christina Rivera Garza, lays bare the wrongness of the status quo while pointing toward other old and new ways of thinking, relating, and being in our world; vital reading. 

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

Perfect Little Angels by Vincent Anioke

Our Green Heart: The Soul and Science of Forests by Diana Beresford-Kroeger

Coexistence by Billy-Ray Belcourt

Wrong Norma by Anne Carson

The Vegetarian by Han Kang (Winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature)

Self-Mythology by Saba Keramati

Forest of Noise by Mosab Abu Toha

Bird Suit by Sydney Hegele

High Jump as Icarus Story by Gustav Parker Hibbett

No Signal No Noise by A Jamali Rad

Doppelganger by Naomi Klein

Dispersals: On Plants, Borders, and Belonging by Jessica J. Lee

Dressing the Bear by Susan L. Leary

Oh Witness Dey! by Shani Mootoo

Adam by Gboyega Odubanjo

A Year of Last Things by Michael Ondaatje

Scattered Snows, to the North by Carl Phillips

Crooked Teeth by Danny Ramadan

The Architecture of Modern Empire by Arundhati Roy

echolalia echolalia by Jane Shi

Rubble Children by Aaron Kreuter

Egg/Shell by Victoria Kennefick

The Lantern and the Night Moths by Yilin Wang

No Credit River by Zoe Whittall