SUMMER READING FOR ADULTS

Is there any better way to spend a summer day than reading? Not in our books! Here are some titles on our TBR lists right now. Pick up or order these books from your local independent bookstore today.

This list features books for adult readers. Click here to see our list for young adults and visit this page for our picks for kids!

To the Forest
By Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette, translated by Rhonda Mullins
Coach House Books (June 2023)

When a family is forced to return to the mother’s childhood home, she seeks meaning in her ancestral roots and the violent beauty of the natural world. To the Forest is a field guide to a quieter life, a call to return to the places where we can reweave the threads of memory, where existence waltzes with death, where we can recapture what it means to be alive.

Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette is a Montreal-based author and director. She was named 2012 Artist for Peace by the social justice organization Les Artistes Pour la Paix. In 2016, her novel La femme qui fuit (Suzanne) won the Prix des libraires du Québec.

Rhonda Mullins is a Montreal-based translator who has translated many books from French into English. She is a seven-time finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation, winning in 2015 for her translation of Jocelyne Saucier’s Twenty-One Cardinals.

The Handyman Method
By Nick Cutter and Andrew F. Sullivan
Simon & Schuster Canada (August 2023)

When a young family moves into an unfinished development community, cracks begin to emerge in both their new residence and their lives. The trials of home improvement, destructive insecurities, and haunted house horror all collide in this thrilling story perfect for fans of Black Mirror and The Amityville Horror.

Nick Cutter is the author of the critically acclaimed national bestseller The Troop, as well as The Deep and Little Heaven. Nick Cutter is the pseudonym for Craig Davidson, whose much-lauded literary fiction includes Rust and Bone, The Saturday Night Ghost Club, and, most recently, the short story collection Cascade. He lives in Toronto.

Andrew F. Sullivan is the author of the novel The Marigold. His short story collection All We Want is Everything and his debut novel Waste were both named Best Books of the Year by The Globe and Mail. He lives in Hamilton, ON.

And the Walls Came Down
By Denise Da Costa
Dundurn Press (June 2023)

Just before the demolition of her childhood home, Delia Ellis returns to retrieve her beloved diary. Using it as a compass, she rediscovers life as a precocious teen growing up in the nineties. Through the lens of adulthood, Delia’s entries take a wrecking ball to the perception of her parents’ love story she’d long built up in her mind, uncovering a child’s internalization of a failed marriage, poverty, and a mother come undone.

Denise Da Costa is a Canadian poet, novelist, and essayist whose work is featured in Subdivided: City Building in an Age of Hyper Diversity. She lives in St. Catharines, ON.

Between Good and Evil: The Stolen Girls of Boko Haram
By Mellissa Fung
HarperCollins Canada (April 2023)

In April 2014, the world awoke to news that the terrorist group Boko Haram had kidnapped nearly 300 school-aged girls and taken them into the forests of Nigeria. When Mellissa Fung travelled to Nigeria, she discovered that the scope of the kidnappings had been vastly under-reported. During several visits to Nigeria, she sat down with the girls and their families and conducted hundreds of hours of interviews. This book tells the stories of the girls and of the women fighting against the terrorist group in their own powerful ways.

Mellissa Fung is an award-winning journalist, author, and filmmaker. In 2008, as a field correspondent covering Afghanistan for the CBC, she was taken hostage, an experience that led to her bestselling book Under an Afghan Sky. Her work as a human rights reporter has been featured in The Globe and Mail, the Huffington Post, the Toronto Star, and on Al Jazeera, CNN, and other media.

Let It All Fall: Underground Music and the Culture of Rebellion in Newfoundland, 1977–95
By Mike Heffernan, ed.
Breakwater Books (June 2023) 

Beginning in the late 1970s, a new raw sound began to emerge from the basements and garages of St. John’s which, by the mid-90s, had grown into a vibrant community. With few resources, dozens of bands produced a staggering amount of music. Let It All Fall traces how underground youth culture challenged social and economic inequity, as well as cultural norms, during one of the most turbulent times in Newfoundland history.  

Mike Heffernan was born and raised in St. John's. He is the author of the national bestseller Rig: An Oral History of the Ocean Ranger Disaster and The Other Side of Midnight: Taxicab Stories. His work has appeared in Riddle Fence, This Magazine, Our Times and been performed on CBC Radio. 

Tauhou
By Kōtuku Titihuia Nuttall
House of Anansi Press (April 2023)

Tauhou is an inventive exploration of Indigenous families, womanhood, and alternate post-colonial realities. This innovative hybrid novel envisions a shared past between two Indigenous cultures, set on reimagined versions of Vancouver Island and Aotearoa New Zealand that sit side by side in the ocean. In a testament to the resilience of Indigenous women, the two sides of this family, Coast Salish and Māori, must work together in understanding and forgiveness to heal that which has been forced upon them by colonialism.

Kōtuku Titihuia Nuttall (Te Ātiawa, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, W̱SÁNEĆ) holds an MA from the International Institute of Modern Letters. She won the 2020 Adam Foundation Prize and was runner-up in the 2021 Surrey Hotel-Newsroom writer’s residency award. She lives on the Kāpiti Coast of Aotearoa New Zealand.

Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast  
By John Vaillant
Penguin Random House Canada (May 2023)

In May 2016, Fort McMurray was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster melted vehicles, turned entire neighborhoods into firebombs, and drove 88,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the lens of this apocalyptic conflagration—the wildfire equivalent of Hurricane Katrina—John Vaillant warns that this was not a unique event but a shocking preview of what we must prepare for in a hotter, more flammable world.

John Vaillant’s acclaimed, award-winning nonfiction books, The Golden Spruce and The Tiger, were national bestsellers. He has received the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, among others. He lives in Vancouver.