Carol Shields 2026

Sorcha is over the hook-ups and gay haunts of her twenties. At thirty-one, what she wants, more than anything, is to have a baby. Then she meets Chris — with her buttoned-up plaid, 90s heartthrob hair, and grand romantic gestures — and things get serious. Fast. Though Sorcha's friends find her new partner problematic, Sorcha has an explanation for everything.As Chris's moods turn volatile and Sorcha becomes increasingly isolated, Chris paints an idyllic picture of domestic bliss in Cape Breton. Sorcha is all in: if her conservative religious upbringing taught her anything, it's how to save. Plus, Chris promises Sorcha the thing she wants most — a baby.But when Sorcha becomes pregnant and Chris's abuse escalates, Sorcha realizes she must escape the life they've built together, just as she escaped her own stifling family years before.When Sorcha's estranged Aunt Agnes, a retired midwife, messages Sorcha out of the blue, her bothy in the Scottish Highlands seems the perfect place to hide. As the bundle of cells in Sorcha's belly diligently divides, she daydreams that Agnes will deliver the baby and they'll stay in Scotland, where Chris can't find them. And where, just maybe, Sorcha could build the sort of family she's always ached for.Exploring the clandestinity of queer abuse, the fierceness of friendship, and the magic of found family, milktooth is a bold, inventive, lyrical and darkly funny story about finding the strength to cut away what's harmed you and create something entirely new.

Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an elegant and accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, and young—young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In Audition, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day—partner, parent, creator, muse—and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us best.One woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. A mesmerizing Mobius strip of a novel that asks who we are to the people we love.

In a near-future Kolkata beset by flooding and famine, Ma, her two-year-old daughter, and her elderly father are just days from leaving the collapsing city behind to join Ma’s husband in Ann Arbor, Michigan. After procuring long-awaited visas from the consulate, they pack their bags for the flight to America. But in the morning they awaken to discover that Ma’s purse, containing their treasured immigration documents, has been stolen.Set over the course of one week, A Guardian and a Thief tells two stories: the story of Ma’s frantic search for the thief while keeping hunger at bay during a worsening food shortage; and the story of Boomba, the thief, whose desperation to care for his family drives him to commit a series of escalating crimes whose consequences he cannot fathom. With stunning control and command, Megha Majumdar paints a kaleidoscopic portrait of two families, each operating from a place of ferocious love and undefeated hope, each discovering how far they will go to secure their children’s future as they stave off encroaching catastrophe.Megha Majumdar’s electrifying novel. A piercing and propulsive tour de force. A masterful new work from one of the most exciting voices of her generation.

With crisp and penetrating prose that recalls the work of Mavis Gallant and Alice Munro, the stories in Suddenly Light are bracing, buoyant, and test the delicate threads that tie us together.A stunning new work of intimate, nuanced, and quietly profound realism.EndorsementsThe stories in this collection twice won the Toronto Star Short Story Contest.The collection was long-listed for the CBC Short Story Prize four times.It was nominated for The Journey Prize.

Set in thirteenth-century Bruges, this debut novel follows a young woman’s explorations of faith, agency, and love among a community of fiercely independent women.Aleys is sixteen years old and serious, stubborn, prone to religious visions. She and her only friend, a young scholar, have been learning Latin together in secret—but just as she thinks their connection might become something more, he abandons her for the monastery. When her family falls on hard financial times, her father promises her in marriage to the unctuous head of the weavers’ guild, and in desperation she runs away from home, eventually finding shelter within a community of religious women who do not answer to the church.Among the hardworking and strong-willed Beguines, Aleys glimpses for the first time the joys of a life of song, friendship, and time spent in the markets and along the canals of Bruges. But forces both mystical and political are afoot. Illegal translations of scripture, the women’s independence, and a sudden rash of miracles all draw the attention of an ambitious bishop—and bring Aleys and those around her into ever-increasing danger, a danger that will push Aleys to a new understanding of love and sacrifice.Introducing a spirited, indelible heroine and a major new talent, Canticle is a luminous work of historical fiction, vividly evoking a world on the verge of transformation.

We arrive at wreckage—a restaurant smashed to rubble, with tables and chairs upended riotously. Under the swampy nighttime cover of a Montreal heat wave, this is where we meet our protagonist, Cannon, dripping with little beads of regret-sweat. She was supposed to be closing the restaurant for the night, but instead, well, she destroyed it. The mess feels a bit like a horror-scape—not unlike the horror films Cannon and her best friend, Trish, watch together. Cooking dinner and digging into deep cuts of Australian horror films on their scheduled weekly hangs has become the glue in their rote relationship. In high school, they were each other's lifeline—two queer second-generation Chinese nerds trapped in the suburbs. Now, on the uncool side of their twenties, the essentialness of one another feels harder to pin down.Yet, when our stoic and unbendingly well-behaved Cannon finds herself—very uncharacteristically—surrounded by smashed plates, it is Trish who shows up to pull her the hell outta there.

In a plague-stricken medieval convent, a nun works on a forbidden mystic manuscript, pining for Christ’s love. During a long, muggy July in rural South Carolina, an adolescent girl finds unexpected power as her family obsesses over the horror film The Exorcist. On the outskirts of a Southern college town, a young woman resists the tyranny of a shape-shifting older professor as she develops her own sorceress skills. And at a feminist art colony in the North Carolina mountains, a group of mothers contends with the supernatural talents their children have picked up from a pair of mysterious orphans who live in the woods. With exuberance, ferocity, and astounding imagination, Julia Elliott’s Hellions jumps from the occult to the comic, from the horrific to the wondrous, presenting earthbound characters who long for the otherworldly.

From the author of Book of the Little Axe, nominated for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, a riveting literary novel with the sharp edges of a thriller about the abuses of history and the costs of revenge, set between Washington, DC, and Johannesburg, South AfricaPrudence Wright seems to haveit a loving husband, Davis; a spacious home in Washington, DC; and thepast glories of a successful career at McKinsey, which now enables her todedicate her days to her autistic son Roland. When she and Davis head out fordinner with one of Davis’s new colleagues on a stormy summer evening filledwith startling and unwelcome interruptions, Prudence has little reason to thinkthat certain details of her history might arise sometime between cocktails andthe appetizer course.Yet when Davis’s colleague turns out to be Matshediso, a man from Prudence’s past, she is transported back to the formative months she spent as a law student in South Africa in 1996. As an intern at a Johannesburg law firm, Prudence attended sessions of the Truth and Reconciliation hearings, which uncovered the many horrors and human rights abuses of the Apartheid state, and which fundamentally shaped her sense of righteousness and justice. But Prudence experienced personal horrors in South Africa as well, ones she long resolved to keep carefully hidden and ones which Matshediso threatens now to expose. When Matshediso finally reveals the real reason behind his sudden reappearance, he will force Prudence to examine her most deeply held beliefs and to excavate inner reserves of resilience and strength.Lauren Francis-Sharma’s previous two novels have established her as a deft chronicler of history and its intersections with flawed humans struggling to find peace in unjust circumstances. With keen insight and gripping tension, Casualties of Truth explosively mines questions of whether we are ever truly able to remove the stains of our past and how we may attempt to reconcile with unquestionable wrongs.

The story of a runaway mother’s ten days of freedom—and the pain, desire, longing, and wonder we find on the messy road to enlightenment—from Pulitzer Prize winner Quiara Alegría Hudes.April is a young mother raising her daughter in an intergenerational house of unspoken secrets and loud arguments. Her only refuge is to hide away in a locked bathroom, her ears plugged into an ambient soundscape, and a mantra on her lips: dead inside. That is, until one day, as she finds herself spiraling toward the volcanic rage she calls the white hot, a voice inside her tells her to just . . . walk away. She wanders to a bus station and asks for a ticket to the furthest destination; she tells the clerk to make it one-way. That ticket takes her from her Philly home to the threshold of a wilderness and the beginning of a nameless quest—an accidental journey that shakes her awake, almost kills her, and brings her to the brink of an impossible choice.The White Hot takes the form of a letter from mother to daughter about a moment of abandonment that would stretch from ten days to ten years—an explanation, but not an apology. Hudes narrates April’s story—spiritual and sexy, fierce and funny—with delicate lyricism and tough love. Just as April finds in her painful and absurd sojourn the key to freeing herself and her family from a cage of generational trauma, so Hudes turns April’s stumbling pursuit of herself into an unforgettable short epic of self-discovery.

Debut author Molly Olguín brings us The Sea Gives Up the Dead, a collection of stories sprinkled into the soil of fairy tales, left to take root and grow wild there.A lovesick nanny slays a dragon. The devil tries to save her mother. A girl drowns and becomes a saint. Three kids plot to blow up their dad, a grieving mother sails the sea to find her son’s grave, a scientist brings a voice to life, and a mermaid falls into the power of a witch. Here, historical fiction, horror, and fantasy tangle together in a queer garden of love, grief, and longing.Endorsements“A wunderkammer of beauty and sorrow.” — Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House“Witty, witchy, darkly brilliant.” — Andrea Barrett, author of Natural History and Ship Fever“Fantastical, queer, wildly inventive stories.” — Austin Carter, Pocket Books Shop

In the early days of China's Cultural Revolution, Qing Yuan, the morgue keeper of a Beijing hospital, does his thankless duties without complaint, cleaning corpses night after night and counting the daily number of the dead. But when a nameless woman appears on his slab, brutalized beyond recognition, Qing Yuan becomes obsessed with what happened to the victim who becomes known to him simply as #19.Soon Qing Yuan and other medical workers are accused and detained as counter-revolutionaries by Mao's Red Guards. Locked in a coal room with the accused, Qing Yuan witnesses and experiences unspeakable horrors in a fight to survive. When he's released on a whim, Qing Yuan must summon the inner strength to rebuild his life as a dunce-capped pariah and solve the mystery of what happened on the night #19 was murdered.Written by Ruyan Meng, a Chinese political dissident residing in the United States, The Morgue Keeper is based on real-life events. Meng's debut novel is both a Kafkaesque mystery and a survivor's testimony. Qing Yuan is a narrator readers will never forget, an ordinary man whose heroism is to simply insist on human kindness and dignity even in the most chaotic and catastrophic circumstances.

An engrossing work of autobiographical fiction about the relationship between an actress daughter and her larger-than-life father—the astonishingly assured debut novel of Sonya Walger, actress on Lost, For All Mankind, and more.Lion, as his friends call him, is an unlikely parent, more legend than presence in his daughter’s life. He is a charismatic, dashing bon-vivant, a polo player, race car driver, cocaine addict, ex-con, pilot, and skydiver. Born in the aftershocks of Argentina’s greatest earthquake, Lion is like a minor god who comes down to earth in a grand manner, falling in all the ways there are to fall.“It is hard to compete with adrenaline when you are a child,” his daughter writes, now a mother herself to young children whose settled upbringing prompts her to consider her unconventional youth and the source of its chaos, her, by turns, loving, maddening, and magnetic father.Lion is a double portrait told in a perpetual present tense that moves back and forth between present-day Los Angeles, where the narrator lives with her family and works as an actress, and the past of her peripatetic childhood, spent shuttling between her mother in England, boarding school, and her father and his successive wives in Buenos Aires and Lima.Sonya Walger’s stunning autobiographical debut is an emotionally acute palimpsest of a novel about a father and daughter, in which the drama and incident, love and tragedy that make up his life make up hers as well. The legend of his life and her distinctive and imaginatively charged telling of it make for an engrossing and unforgettable family saga.

Set between Nigeria and New Orleans, The Edge of Water tells the story of a young woman who dreams of life in America, as the collision of traditional prophecy and individual longing tests the bonds of a family during a devastating storm. In Ibadan, Nigeria, a mother receives a divination that foretells danger for her daughter in America. In spite of this warning, she allows her to forge her own path, and Amina arrives in New Orleans filled with hope. But just as Amina begins to find her way, a hurricane threatens to destroy the city, upending everything she’d dreamed of and the lives of all she holds dear. Years later, her daughter is left with questions about the mother she barely knew, and the family she has yet to discover in Nigeria.Exploring the love of a determined mother and dreaming daughter who do not say enough to each other until it is too late, the detangling of Yoruba Christianity, traditional religion, and folklore, and the tellings of three generations of daring women—through times of longing, promise, and romance, as well as heartbreak—Olufunke Grace Bankole’s The Edge of Water is a luminous debut novel about a young woman brave enough to leave all she knows behind, and the way her fate transforms a family destined to stay together.

Cumin Baleen is a forty-one-year-old writer living in Philadelphia—a city of hospitals—who works at the upscale market Sea & Poison and is navigating the onset of an autoimmune condition. To start a course of medicine that might help, an eye exam is required, which leads to a nightmarish laser eye surgery. The laser shoots into her brain, making her language spare and her sentences clause-less—a vexing constraint that stalls her book on gynecology; she wants others in the for-profit medical industry to see poison.Meanwhile, Cumin is kicked out of her boyfriend Mari’s studio after he falls for Janine, their landlord, and starts renting a closet in Maron’s bedroom—polyamorous Maron, who is hooking up with Alix, whom Cumin lusts after. Disheveled from medicines and medical scams and unmoored from the reality she once knew, she begins to crack—in more ways than she can imagine…A darkly funny, electrifying tale of polyamory, medical malfeasance and Carrie Bradshaw, written with utterly singular flair and style.Endorsements“Exhilarating… this rewarding and uncompromising novel is distinguished by its deliriously wild writing. It’s impossible not to be swept up in Beilin’s wake.” — Publisher’s Weekly (starred)“Caren Beilin is one of the most bizarre and fearless writers of her generation.” — Catherine Lacey“I was instantly won over by Beilin’s writing — so funny and serious and playful. Her books have the natural authority of those artworks that are strictly, rigorously themselves.” — Sheila Heti“An absurdist masterpiece. Nothing, just nothing, is as wild, outrageous and free as Sea, Poison.” — Amina Cain

In 19th-century Scotland, young Josiah is banished by his father for seeing the divine in the animals around him and sent to Siberia with a small Christian mission to purge such nonsense from his soul. Miserably scrubbing the chapel floor one night, Josiah is visited by what he thinks is God in animal form. When his saviours, a hyena and her mate, rescue him from a natural disaster that kills the other missionaries and then bring him safely home, he founds a religion based on his belief that God granted speech to the hyenas as part of a divine plan to heal and exalt the human race.The hyena pair, Barbara and Kendrith, aren't so sure that Josiah has it right. But with their beautiful strangeness, they utterly transform the people they encounter over succeeding generations. As Josiah's church gathers adherents, more and more animals start to speak to humans—from signing baby gorillas to seductive alligators. At first one or two rebellious pets make a break for freedom, but then comes a mass exodus of all animals held captive, forcing people to contend with a wildness in themselves they have spent millennia denying. The end of this remarkable fairytale is both joyful and devastating, completely dissolving the boundary between what's human and what's animal.Amanda Leduc’s dazzling new novel follows two walking, talking hyenas as they interact with humans over decades. Blurring the line between human and animal, these strange messengers reveal what is possible when the cages that contain us are broken.EndorsementsLonglisted for the 2025 Giller Prize.