Shrapnel's Spring Most Anticipated of 2022
Image by Jo Ramsay
In search of the perfect book to accompany you to the beach or to cozy up with at the cabin? Our editorial director and poetry editor, Jo and Prathna, have listed the titles that they’re most excited to dig into this season.
Rest assured this list has our diverse mix of the experimental, surreal, and humorous. We’ve briefly explained what it is about each book that has us intrigued, and you can learn more and order the books by clicking on the hyperlinked titles.
FICTION
MY VOLCANO
John Elizabeth Stintzi
Arsenal Pulp Press
Through surrealist visions and absurdist happenings, John Elizabeth Stintzi’s poetic prose traverses the Earth with a novel that centres around crumbling civilizations and personified environmental happenings.
A volcano sprouts up in Central Park, a child is transported back in time to the fall of the Aztec Empire, and a Mongolian herder transforms into a flowering creature bent on cleansing the world of pollution. These delightfully bizarre threads weave themselves together with purpose in Stintizi’s calculated and poetic voice.
SEA OF TRANQUILITY
Emily St. John Mandel
Knopf
Who doesn’t love a little time travel? The fabulously talented Emily St. John Mandel’s latest novel sounds a bit like a short story collection, and we’re eager to find out how the cast of characters will interact in this fantastical world.
An intriguing metanarrative in Sea of Tranquility features a character that’s the author of a bestselling novel about a fictional pandemic who then embarks on a galaxy-spanning book tour during the outbreak of an actual pandemic.
Book tours? During a pandemic? We’re invested to see how this goes down in this world not-so-different from our own.
BUFFALO IS THE NEW BUFFALO
Chelsea Vowel
Arsenal Pulp Press
"Instead of accepting that the buffalo, and our ancestral ways, will never come back, what if we simply ensure that they do?" asks Chelsea Vowel.
In Vowel’s short story collection — an exciting fusion of classic and contemporary speculative fiction — she invites readers to consider a return to ancestral ways and explores science fiction tropes through a Metis lens.
UNCERTAIN KIN
Janice Lynn Mather
Doubleday Canada
Witchcraft, girls missing from their beds, and shocking beach discoveries are some of the surreal delights in Janice Lynn Mather’s 18 short stories in Uncertain Kin.
Partially set in the Bahamas, folkoric elements are beautifully realized in stories of women and girls “searching for identity and belonging during moments of profound upheaval.” Head to a hot beach and bury your toes into the sand while disappearing into these gorgeously written yet haunting vignettes.
LESSER KNOWN MONSTERS OF THE 21st CENTURY
Kim Fu
Coach House Books
For readers seeking a fantastical and slightly nightmarish collection of short stories, Kim Fu’s Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century delivers on its title’s promise.
“A girl growing wings on her legs feels like an ordinary rite of passage, while a bug-infested house becomes an impossible, Kafkaesque nightmare.” Throw in a haunted doll, a sea monster, and a seductive Sandman for good measure, and readers are given a feast of frights and contradictions as the worldly is melded with the otherworldly.
POETRY
FUGUE WITH BEDBUG
Anne-Marie Turza
House of Anansi Press
Anne-Marie Turza’s awaited second poetry collection, Fugue With Bedbug, promises to be a spiralling adventure into the weird, the uncanny, and the hilarious. Bringing together musicality, lyricism, and portraiture, Turza’s abundant and mixed uses of genre invite readerly excitations of all kinds.
In the poem, “What is this? The Futureworld?” we are told that “The mind is an interrobang.” Such questioning and exclamation pulses throughout this collection: “What is nothingness? I hope to persist somehow/ in a radiant 4.5-centimetre ordinary idea belonging to a not- / human future animal.” We cannot wait to read more.
CANE | FIRE
Shani Mootoo
Book*hug
From acclaimed writer and multimedia visual artist Shani Mootoo comes Cane | Fire — a poetic memoir that moves lyrically from Ireland to San Fernando to Canada. In this collection, which Madhur Anand describes as an “anti-history,” Mootoo explores the translational poetics of personal history and includes original artwork by the author.
QUIET NIGHT THINK
Gillian Sze
ECW Press
Taking its title from an eighth-century poem by Li Bai, Gillian Sze’s Quiet Night Think explores her own meditations on self, language, and artistry. Moving between essays, as well as short and long poems, Sze’s collection invites readers to witness her own encounters with her pluralizing selves — as mother, writer, poet, thinker.
YOU STILL LOOK THE SAME
Farzana Doctor
Freehand Books
Content warning: following text contains mention of bodily harm.
With both wit and grace, Farzana Doctor explores the tumultuous decades of her forties, tackling issues such as FGM/C , racism, and misogyny, as well as the curiosities of romantic intimacy amidst mid-life dating. We’re looking forward to seeing how Doctor’s collection navigates social and personal crises with oddities and mishaps.
MOTHER MUSE
Lorna Goodison
Véhicule Press
Mother Muse is an exploration of Jamaican tradition through diverse forms — praise songs, autobiography, and personal and collective histories — in order to show “another side of history.” As her first poetry collection to appear in almost a decade, Lorna Goodison returns with a collection that abounds with lyricism and language that is, according to Kaie Kellough, “often spare and exact.”
Non-Fiction
PEOPLE CHANGE
Vivek Shraya
Penguin Canada
In a small, yet brightly coloured book design reminiscent of her 2018 hit I’m Afraid of Men, Vivek Shraya is back with another deeply personal meditation on the self and the various iterations we inhabit as we grow over time.
People Change encourages us to reflect on our past selves and also works to guide readers through discovering who they want to become next.
HOW TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD
Ryan North
Riverhead Books
From the mind of an award-winning comics writer, Ryan North sure knows a thing or two about the science of comic-book supervillainy and how to plot out the perfect scheme. One can make even the most cartoonish of heists a reality by harnessing the potential of today's emerging technologies.
Sure, this book seems like an absurdly genius way to trick people into learning about cutting-edge science, but hey, it’s a cool concept. Even if you’re a boring normy and want to save the world, you’ll pick up some tips and tricks for combatting cyberterrorism and extending human lifespans.
SON OF ELSEWHERE
Elamin Abdelmahmoud
McClelland & Stewart
“At twelve years old, Elamin Abdelmahmoud emigrates with his family from his native Sudan to Kingston, Ont. At the airport, he's handed his Blackness like a passport, and realizes that he needs to learn what this identity means in a new country.
“Whether reflecting on how The O.C. taught him about falling in love, why watching wrestling allowed him to reinvent himself, or what it was like being a Muslim teen in the aftermath of 9/11, Abdelmahmoud explores how our experiences and our environments help us in the continuing task of defining who we truly are.”
HAVE YOU EATEN YET?
Cheuk Kwan
Douglas & McIntyre
No matter where you are in the world, even the smallest of towns seem to have a family-run Chinese restaurant. Author and documentarian Cheuk Kwan’s travelogue weaves a global narrative by telling the stories of the “chefs, entrepreneurs, labourers and dreamers who populate Chinese kitchens worldwide.”
By examining the historic evolution of Chinese cuisines cultivated in diaspora communities, Kwan charts the political and cultural shifts that are embodied through delicious food.
SO YOUR GIRLS REMEMBER THAT: MEMORIES OF A HAIDA ELDER
Gaadgas Nora Bellis with Jenny Nelson
Harbour Publishing
“So You Girls Remember That is an oral history of a Haida Elder, Naanii Nora, who lived from 1902 to 1997. A collaborative effort, this project was initiated and guided by Charlie Bellis and Maureen McNamara and was years in the making.
“The resulting book, compiled by Jenny Nelson, is a window into Nora's life and her family—from the young girl singing all day in the canoe, bossing her brothers around or crossing Hecate Strait on her dad's schooner, to the young woman making her way in the new white settlers' town up the inlet, with music always a refrain.”
GRAPHIC NOVELS
SQUIRE
Nadia Shammas & Sara Alfageeh
HarperCollins
“Aiza has always dreamt of becoming a Knight. It's the highest military honour in the once-great Bayt-Sajji Empire, and as a member of the subjugated Ornu people, Knighthood is her only path to full citizenship.” With war coming to the empire once again, Aiza finally has the opportunity to train as a squire.
In this gorgeously illustrated and fantastical graphic novel, Nadia Shammas & Sara Alfageeh form a dream team that conjures a vivid, richly realized world that explores imperliams, racism, and oppression.
RAVE
Jessica Campbell
Drawn & Quarterly
Fifteen-year-old Lauren is a bit sheltered by her fanatical evangelical parents who refuse to allow evolution textbooks into their home. Fortunately, Lauren’s friend Mariah has an absentee mom and unfettered access to the internet.
Embracing soft, blocky shapes that emphasize the visual humour of Campbell’s panels, Rave is a darkly charming coming-of-age story about navigating the small-town pressures of slut-shaming, religious zealotry, and finding your own feet when a community fails you.
JULY UNDERWATER
Zoe Maeve
Conundrum Press
The summer after graduation is supposed to be fun, but with Lina’s friend group quickly drifting apart, Toronto is suddenly feeling hot and empty. In her quest to reconcile the many changes in her life, she consults Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse and Patricia Highsmith's The Price of Salt — you know, for a bit of light reading. At a final party on the shores of Lake Ontario, Lina reflects on her friendships and what it means to grow away from the people she’s grown with for so long.
HYBRID FORMS
PLANS FOR SENTENCES
Renee Gladman
Wave Books
Writer and artist Renee Gladman’s latest interdisciplinary collection, Plans for Sentences, continues her work of blurring the distinction between drawing and writing. Gladman opens up the possibility of poetics by reminding us that every form of writing is also a drawing: “These sentences will constellate the territories of the poem and will be the unraveling of the middle interior sky.”
WHITEMUD WALKING
Matthew James Weigel
Coach House Books
In this multi-genre work combining visual and lyric poetry, prose, photography, art, and design, Matthew Weigel explores the tenuous relationship between memory and the archive in Whitemud Walking, navigating land and family with and against the Canadian colonial archive.
We encourage you to buy these books either directly from the publisher or your local indie bookstore.