Entertainment / Books

From MaddAddam to The Orenda to Luminaries: Just some of the books in store for you this fall

Reviewer Alex Good picks some of the best reads of the season

Scotiabank Giller prize winner Joseph Boyden's latest novel, The Orenda, comes out in September.

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Scotiabank Giller prize winner Joseph Boyden's latest novel, The Orenda, comes out in September.

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  • Toronto Star reporter and columnist, Susan Delacourt's Shopping for Votes, comes out in September. zoom

If summer is the season for lighter literary fare and beach reads, fall is when publishers really get serious and call up their heavy hitters.

It’s in late August, September and October when you can expect the most anticipated titles of the year to be released, both to get their names in the running for prestigious literary prizes — the winners of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, Governor-General’s Literary Awards and Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize will all be announced in November, with the short lists coming out a month earlier — and to prime the pumps buzz-wise for the Christmas book-buying rush.

This year will be no exception, so here’s a quick preview of some of the more noteworthy titles soon to appear on a bookshelf near you.

First up is Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam (McClelland & Stewart, $32.95, Aug. 27), the final instalment in a science fiction trilogy that began with Oryx and Crake (2003) and its companion piece The Year of the Flood (2009). Beginning where those two books left off, MaddAddam takes Toby and Zeb further into a post-human future populated by mixed-up creatures like the Crakers, Pigoons and Painballers.

As with any sequel, interest in MaddAddam will be mainly limited to readers who are already up to speed with the series. But the first two books were very well received and if the last few years have taught us anything about today’s publishing environment, it’s that nothing succeeds like franchise fiction.

One thing we can say for sure is that Atwood won’t be winning the Giller this year, as she is on the jury.

There are plenty of other big-name literary authors coming your way in the fall whom you likely will see on the October short lists. Many of these feature authors returning to familiar ground. So, for example, both Wayne Johnston ( The Son of a Certain Woman , Knopf, $30) and Michael Winter ( Minister Without Portfolio , Hamish Hamilton, $30) will have new novels out in September set in Newfoundland, while previous Giller winner Joseph Boyden is back with The Orenda (Hamish Hamilton, $32), about fraught relations among Huron, Iroquois and Jesuits in the 17th century. Mary Lawson returns to the Northern Ontario setting of her previous bestsellers Crow Lake and The Other Side of the Bridge with Road Ends (Knopf, $29.95, November), a story of the fallout from a drunk-driving accident set in the 1960s.

If you’re looking for names that might be considered outliers during prize season but who are worth flagging, here’s a short list:

  • Douglas Glover is one of those great writers who has managed to stay under the radar throughout most of his career by specializing in books of short stories published by small presses. Savage Love (Goose Lane, $29.95, September) continues that trend, but it’s an exciting, unpredictable collection by a true virtuoso.
  • Eleanor Catton, who was born in London, Ont., but now lives in New Zealand, may be thought of as a rising CanLit star after winning the Amazon.ca First Novel Award in 2012 for The Rehearsal . In The Luminaries (McClelland & Stewart, $35, September), which has already appeared on the long list for this year’s Man Booker Prize, she offers up a thick (over 800-page) supernatural-historical novel set in a New Zealand goldfield.
  • Douglas Coupland and literary prizes don’t really go together, which is a bit odd given how prominent he has been for a long time now. In Worst. Person. Ever. (Random House, $30, October) he tells the story of Raymond Gunt, the eponymous anti-hero who might not be as bad as all that, but probably is.
  • Louis Hamelin’s literary thriller October 1970 (Anansi, $24.95) first came out in 2010 in French as La Constellation du Lynx , but it’s being released in September in a new English translation by Wayne Grady. Thirty years after the FLQ crisis, journalist Samuel Nihilo is drawn into an investigation of those events and before you can say “conspiracy theory,” he begins to uncover some secrets behind the official story.
  • Finally, Tony Burgess is an author you don’t expect to see ascending the podium at a black-tie literary prize gala anytime soon, but the author of the intellectual zombie-stomp classic Pontypool Changes Everything is one of this country’s most distinctive indie-alternative voices. With The n-Body Problem (ChiZine, $18.95, October) the lurid master of mega- and meta-gore considers the ramifications of getting rid of the living dead by sending their animate corpses into space. You can imagine the ensuing horror.
  • If fiction isn’t your thing you don’t have to feel left out this fall. Canadian political junkies, in particular, will be well served, with some great-looking titles. Michael Ignatieff looks back on his time in office in his memoir Fire and Ice: Success and Failure in Politics (Random House, $29.95, September). One suspects he will have more to say about the latter. For a blast from the past, former prime minister Joe Clark addresses Canada’s international role in How We Lead: Canada in a Century of Change (Random House, $32, November). And to round off the party picture, Brad Lavigne, former campaign manager to Jack Layton, provides an account of his boss’s rise in Building the Orange Wave (Douglas & McIntyre, $34.95, November).

    If it’s political commentary you’re looking for, there are two must-reads on the way. Toronto Star writer Susan Delacourt analyzes our current political system in Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them (Douglas & MacIntyre, $32.95, September), and Paul Wells of Maclean’s dissects the reign of Stephen Harper in The Longer I’m Prime Minister (Random House, $32, October).

    But the non-fiction reading list isn’t all about politics and current affairs. Historian Margaret MacMillan first rose to fame with her book on the winding up of the First World War: Paris 1919 . Now, with The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (Allen Lane, $38, October), she provides the other bookend, looking at how it all got started. It’s a story that’s been told many times before but, given this country’s special fascination with the subject, I suspect she’s going to have another hit.

    On the home front, another popular Canadian historian, Charlotte Gray, also takes us back to the WWI era (1915, to be exact) with The Massey Murder: A Maid, Her Master, and the Trial That Shocked a Country (HarperCollins, $33.99, September). In this upstairs-downstairs true-crime drama set against the backdrop of the First World War an 18-year-old domestic servant goes to trial for the killing of the scion of one of Canada’s wealthiest families. It sounds made for TV, and probably will be, but you’ll want to read the book first.

    Correction - September 3, 2013: This article was edited from a previous version that misstated the price and release date of Building the Orange Wave.

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