Carol Shields 2025

A young woman reorients her relationship to the world in the wake of sudden deafness in this mesmerizing debut novel for readers of Rachel Cusk, Clarice Lispector, and Fleur Jaeggy.When the narrator of The Hearing Test, an artist in her late twenties, awakens one morning to a deep drone in her right ear, she is diagnosed with sudden deafness but is offered no explanation for its cause. As the specter of total deafness looms, she keeps a record of her year—a score of estrangement and enchantment, of luck and loneliness, of the chance occurrences to which she becomes attuned—while living alone in a New York City studio apartment with her dog.Through a series of fleeting and often humorous encounters—with neighbors, an ex-lover, doctors, strangers, family members, faraway friends, and with the lives and works of artists, filmmakers, musicians, and philosophers—making meaning becomes a form of consolation and curiosity, a form of survival.At once a rumination on silence and a novel about seeing, The Hearing Test is a work of vitalizing intellect and playfulness that marks the arrival of a major new literary writer with a rare command of form, compression, and intent.

Kin is a story and a celebration of Black womanhood, of resistance, and of perseverance—while simultaneously an indictment of American history. Kin is a tree—alive in places, broken in others—that offers shelter for women seeking respite in the midst of family-making. This tree depicts family grafted together by blood, law, or choice; its stories are voiced through blues-infused poetry, one-act plays, oral history, and reportage that are combined to form an orchestra of Black history and re-memory. Centered on the labor of women, the movement of women through lives and time, and the work of building associations that make up the home, this book takes up the rhythms and multifarious forms of its inspiration, Cane, the 1923 novel by Jean Toomer. The roots from which it all grows are the ancestors who ensure from the spirit realm that the family remains grounded and verdant, despite the manifold threats to its health and well-being. Kin is a tribute to forebearers, a beacon to those calling homes into being, and a strata of stories for children not yet born.A dynamic kaleidoscope of story that honors the work of women.

When she died, Emily Dickinson left behind hundreds of texts scribbled on scraps of paper. She also left behind three formidable women: her steadfast sister, Lavinia; her brother’s ambitious mistress, Mabel Loomis Todd; and his grief-stricken wife, Susan Gilbert Dickinson. With no clear instructions from Emily, these three women would, through mourning and strife, make from those scraps of paper a book that would change American literature.This is the improbable, almost miraculous, story of the birth of a book years after the death of its author. In these sensitive and luminous pages, Dominique Fortier explores, through Dickinson’s poetry, the mysterious power that books have over our lives, and the fragile and necessary character of literature.Dickinson After Her — a novel of the trio of women who brought Emily Dickinson’s poems out of the shadows.EndorsementsFeatured on LithubCBC 2024 Spring Fiction Preview

A semi-famous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country from LA to NY. Thirty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey. Miranda July's second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July's wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman's quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a 45-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectations while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly and profoundly alive.

Curiosities opens with a present-day amateur historian, Anne, who describes her unexpected discovery of five seventeenth-century manuscripts that, astonishingly, tell the same strange story from vastly different points of view.The five manuscripts spin the tale: after the Plague descends upon a village in England, two small children, Joan and Thomasina, are the only survivors. They bond tightly with each other and with a woman living in the forest nearby, who discovers and cares for them. When people return, the woman, as the lone adult alive, is accused of witchcraft, and the children are separated. Joan is taken on as a maid in the local manor house, and through her intelligence and skill becomes a companion to the fascinating Lady Margaret Long. Thomasina, sent on a sea voyage to Virginia, adopts boy's clothing and navigates life as a man named Tom.Tom and Joan find each other as adults and fall in love, but are discovered together, naked, by a young clergyman. Shocked and horrified, he believes there is but one explanation for what he has seen: Joan must be a witch. Desperate to save both himself and Joan, Tom runs as far away as he can, to the North Pole. And so it falls upon Anne, the contemporary historian, to piece together these interlocking stories, discover the fate of the lovers, and add her own layer of “truth” to a history and time period when there were no labels for who Tom and Joan might truly be.A thrilling literary-historical novel with a modern twist, in the vein of Fingersmith by Sarah Waters and Fayne by Ann-Marie MacDonald.

In formally adventurous stories rooted in Zambian literary tradition, Obligations to the Wounded explores the expectations and burdens of womanhood in Zambia and for Zambian women living abroad. The collection converses with global social problems through the depiction of games, social media feuds, letters, and folklore to illustrate how girls and women manage religious expectation, migration, loss of language, death, intimate partner violence, and racial discrimination. Although the women and girls inhabiting these pages are separated geographically and by life stage, their shared burdens, culture, and homeland inextricably link them together in struggle and triumph.

Amana and Skelele — evolved sea beings with Taíno and African ancestry — and their naniki animal avatars begin an archipelagic journey to see the future. Distracted by love, they must search for mythological, historical, and ontological purpose when faced with a disastrous monstrosity.

Creation Lake is a novel about a secret agent, a thirty-four-year-old American woman of ruthless tactics, bold opinions, and clean beauty, who is sent to do dirty work in France. “Sadie Smith” is how the narrator introduces herself to her lover, to the rural commune of French subversives on whom she is keeping tabs, and to the reader. Sadie has met her love, Lucien, a young and well-born Parisian, by “cold bump”—making him believe the encounter was accidental. Like everyone Sadie targets, Lucien is useful to her and used by her. Sadie operates by strategy and dissimulation, based on what her “contacts”—shadowy figures in business and government—instruct. First, these contacts want her to incite provocation. Then they want more. In this region of centuries-old farms and ancient caves, Sadie becomes entranced by a mysterious figure named Bruno Lacombe, a mentor to the young activists who communicates only by email. Bruno believes that the path to emancipation from what ails modern life is not revolt, but a return to the ancient past. Just as Sadie is certain she’s the seductress and puppet master of those she surveils, Bruno Lacombe is seducing her with his ingenious counter-histories, his artful laments, his own tragic story. Written in short, vaulting sections, Rachel Kushner’s rendition of “noir” is taut and dazzling. Creation Lake is Kushner’s finest achievement yet as a novelist, a work of high art, high comedy, and unforgettable pleasure.A propulsive page-turner of glittering insights and dark humor.EndorsementsFrom Rachel Kushner, a Booker Prize finalist and two-time National Book Award finalist."One of the most gifted authors of her generation" — The New York Times Book Review

A woman, her grandfather, and her lover quarantine in the remote lakeside wilderness—where their world splits apart at the seams.In the summer of 2020, with a heat wave bearing down and a brood of periodical cicadas climbing into the trees, Husha mourns the recent death of her mother while quarantining with her ailing grandfather, Arthur, at his lakeside cabin in remote Ontario. They’re soon joined by Husha’s ex-lover, Nellie, who arrives without explanation to complete their trio.Also among them is a strange book, discovered by Husha while cleaning out her mother’s house. When she, Arthur, and Nellie begin to read it together, they learn that her mother’s last missive was a short story collection crawling with unsettling imagery and terrifying transformations. As the stories bleed into their cloistered life in the cabin, they must each reckon with loss, longing, and what it means to truly know another person.Incantatory and atmospheric, Cicada Summer is a dazzlingly original novel about how we grieve and care for one another.

Set against the backdrop of developing modern China, this mesmerizing literary debut is part coming-of-age tale, part family and social drama, as it follows two generations searching for belonging and opportunity in a rapidly changing world.Shanghai, 2007: Fourteen-year-old Alva has always longed for more. Raised by her American expat mother, she’s never known her Chinese father, and she is certain a better life awaits them in America. But when her mother announces her engagement to their wealthy Chinese landlord, Lu Fang, Alva’s hopes are dashed. She plots for the next best thing: the American School in Shanghai. Upon admission, though, Alva is surprised to discover an institution run by an exclusive community of expats and the ever-wilder thrills of a city where foreigners can ostensibly act as they please.1985: In the seaside city of Qingdao, Lu Fang is a young married man and a lowly clerk in a shipping yard. Although he once dreamed of a bright future, he is now one of many casualties in his country’s harsh political reforms. So when China opens its doors to the first wave of foreigners in decades, Lu Fang’s world is split wide open after he meets an American woman who makes him confront difficult questions about his current status in life and how much will ever be enough.In a stunning reversal of the east-to-west immigrant narrative and set against China’s political history and economic rise, River East, River West is an intimate family drama and a sharp social novel. Alternating between Alva and Lu Fang’s points of view, this is a profoundly moving exploration of race and class, cultural identity and belonging, and the often-false promise of the American Dream.

At the heart of the stories in Everything Flirts are some of life’s trickiest questions: Why is it so hard to make the first move on a date? How do we find the person we will love? If you finally find a person to love, how do you convince them to love you back?With a mixture of humor and reverence, Sharon Wahl hijacks classic works of philosophy and turns their focus to love. The philosopher Wittgenstein helps us consider the limits of language: Does there exist an argument, a logical deduction, that will cause another person to love us? The philosopher Zeno’s laws of motion stipulate that we can only ever cross half of any distance. This principle is applied to a first date, where making a first move becomes more and more impossible because the movie this couple goes to see is a depressing mood-killer. A woman afraid of love applies Bentham’s utilitarian principles to find her perfect match, testing every man she meets until she finds one who aces every one of her tests. Nonetheless, she wonders: Is he right for her? Is she ready to fall in love forever? The sublime and the ridiculous come together to playfully examine why love just might be a topic too hard for philosophers to explain.

Canisia Lubrin's debut fiction is a rare work of art—a brilliant, startlingly original book that combines immense literary and political force. Its structure is deceptively simple: it departs from the infamous real-life “Code Noir,” a set of historical decrees passed in 1685 by King Louis XIV of France defining the conditions of slavery in the French colonial empire. The original Code had fifty-nine articles; Code Noir has fifty-nine linked fictions—vivid, unforgettable, multi-layer fragments filled with globe-wise characters who desire to live beyond the ruins of the past.Ranging in style from contemporary realism to dystopia, from futuristic fantasy to historical fiction, this inventive, shape-shifting braid of stories exists far beyond the enclosures of official decrees.The stories are accompanied by fifty-nine black-and-white drawings—one at the start of each fiction—by acclaimed visual artist Torkwase Dyson.Groundbreaking, dazzling debut fiction from one of Canada’s most exciting and admired writers, winner of the prestigious Windham-Campbell Prize. This is a timely, daring, virtuosic book by a young literary star.

A nuclear family can destroy a woman artist. I’d always known that. But I’d never suspected how easily I’d fall into one anyway.When Jane, an aspiring writer, meets filmmaker John Bridges, they both want the same: to be in love, to live a successful, creative life, and to be happy. When they marry, Jane believes she has found everything she was looking for, including—a few years later—all the attendant joys and labors of motherhood. But it’s not long until Jane finds herself subsumed by John’s ambitions, whims, and ego; in short, she becomes a wife.As Jane’s career flourishes, their marriage starts to falter. Throughout the upheavals of family life, Jane tries to hold it all together. That is, until John leaves her.A searing novel about being a wife, a mother, and an artist, and how marriage makes liars of us allEndorsements'Painful and brilliant—I loved it.' — Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot and Either/Or

A mesmerising novel of two sisters on a Pacific Northwest island whose lives are upended by an unexpected visitor — a tale of family, obsession, and a mysterious creature in the woods.They were sisters and they would last past the end of time.Sam and her sister, Elena, dream of another life. On the island off the coast of Washington where they were born and raised, they and their mother struggle to survive. Sam works long days on the ferry that delivers wealthy mainlanders to their vacation homes while Elena bartends at the local golf club, but even together they can’t earn enough to get by, stirring their frustration about the limits that shape their existence.Then one night on the boat, Sam spots a bear swimming the dark waters of the channel. Where is it going? What does it want? When the bear turns up by their home, Sam, terrified, is more convinced than ever that it’s time to leave the island. But Elena responds differently to the massive beast. Enchanted by its presence, she throws into doubt the plan to escape and puts their long-held dream in danger.A story about the bonds of sisterhood and the mysteries of the animals that live among us — and within us — Bear is a propulsive, mythical, rich novel.

Òdòdó's hometown of Timbuktu has been conquered by the warrior king of Yorùbáland. Already shunned as social pariahs, living conditions for Òdòdó and the other women in her blacksmith guild grow even worse under Yorùbá rule. Then Òdòdó is abducted. She is whisked across the Sahara to the capital city of Ṣàngótẹ̀, where she is shocked to discover that her kidnapper is none other than the vagrant who had visited her guild just days prior. But now that he is swathed in riches rather than rags, Òdòdó realizes he is not a vagrant at all; he is the warrior king, and he has chosen her to be his wife. In a sudden change of fortune, Òdòdó soars to the very heights of society. But after a lifetime of subjugation, the power that saturates this world of battle and political savvy becomes too enticing to resist. And as tensions with rival states reveal elaborate schemes and enemies hidden in plain sight, she must re-forge the shaky loyalties of the court to her favor, or risk losing everything — including her life.Loosely based on the myth of Persephone, O.O. Sangoyomi’s Masquerade takes you on a journey of epic power struggles and political intrigue that turn an entire region on its head.