Familiar fodder in dystopian coming-of-age novel

“I was sixteen years old when the King pulped our books.”

In 2025, we’ve seen mass book-bannings in Alberta and a leader south of the border who has called himself a “king.” If the best dystopian fiction reflects the world we live in, Vancouver-based author PP Wong’s second novel does this with one chilling introductory line.

Thankfully, the author’s coming-of-age story lives up to its opening, with strong world-building — despite a relatively slim 264 pages — and characters you can actually care about.

Fred, the story’s narrator, lives in a fishing village in a small island country called Mahana. His land is ruled by a King with expectations and demands designed to set citizens up for failure.

Harris recalls whirlwind presidential run in frank, gutsy memoir

“The fight for our freedom will take hard work. But like I always say, we like hard work. Hard work is good work.”

During the last four months of the 2024 American presidential election campaign, Kamala Harris’ mantra dominated political rallies, stump speeches and nightly TV news sound bites. The “hard work is good work’”catch phrase became as much her trademark as the pant suits and pearls during an edgy election contest in which Harris, who served as vice-president from 2021-2025, and Republican candidate Donald Trump, the 45th U.S. president, duked it out for the keys to the White House.

The ending is now history. Harris, the first Black and South Asian-American woman to run on a major political party’s presidential ticket, lost that election battle almost a year ago. The 61-year-old took a few months to lick her war wounds, and then put pen to paper in 107 Days, which follows 2009’s Smart on Crime and 2019’s The Truths We Hold: An American Journey. Selling 350,000 copies in its first week following a late September launch, Harris’ book has already become one of 2025’s bestselling memoirs.

107 Days is her recap of the shortest presidential campaign in modern election history, a fact she partly blames for her loss at the polls. It was also the closest election in the 21st century, she recently told Good Morning America. “As history writes about (it), I wanted to make sure my voice was present in how that election is discussed and covered,” she explains of her rationale for the memoir.

Rick Westhead exposes rot in Canadian hockey culture in book “We Breed Lions”

"Hockey people don't like outsiders knowing their business."

Former Western Hockey League player Ryan Phillips said the above to investigative journalist Rick Westhead in his book "We Breed Lions; Confronting Canada's Troubled Hockey Culture" to be released Tuesday by Penguin Random House Canada.

Westhead catalogues hockey's commercialism and tribalist creed, as well as other cultural factors that led to the sexual assault trial of five players on a Canadian junior team who went on to play in the NHL. They were acquitted in July.

From 16-year-olds moving away from home to learn societal norms from teammates only a few years their senior, to minor hockey becoming the bastion of the financially privileged, to those in power who either abused it or turned away from those who did, Westhead backs up his research with a surprising number of players, agents and coaches speaking on record given Phillips' assertion of hockey's omertà.

Williams explores changing notions of racial identity, sexuality and more in new novel

Like his debut novel Reproduction, which won the Giller Prize in 2019, Ian Williams’ eighth book, You’ve Changed, plays with form and reader expectations.

You’ve Changed opens as if mid-sentence, with a list of mundane tasks such as “tapping screens, setting appointments, trimming fingernails…” written in lighter text as if highlighted by an editor for possible changes. Throughout the book, potentially controversial words such as “gay,” “porn,” “hell” and “dick” are partially blacked out. Despite this self-censorship, William tackles many taboo topics in detail, such as urination and sexual incompatibility, which he approaches with irreverent humour.

William’s latest was also named to the long list for this year’s Giller Prize. He has won the Hilary Weston Prize for Nonfiction, and was chosen to deliver the 2024 CBC Massey Lectures. He teaches English and Creative Writing at the University of Toronto.

On the surface, You’ve Changed is a simple domestic drama about an ordinary married couple, Beckett and Princess, who have no children. Beckett works in construction, and near the beginning of the novel is fired for trying to help a fellow employee, who is being bullied by the boss. Princess is a fitness instructor at a gym. When Princess’ childhood friend Keza and her husband arrive for a visit shortly before Keza is due to give birth to their third child, the cracks in Beckett and Princess’ marriage begin to show.

Orlean’s life experiences and journey as a writer recalled in joyful memoir

American author Susan Orlean, who turned 70 on October 31, has done no other job but writing since she graduated in 1978 from the University of Michigan. In her new book, she cleverly interweaves her autobiographical details with the highlights of the books and articles she has worked on. The title reflects her belief that her life has been a joyride.

While enjoying being a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine since 1992, Orlean has written several books that have become popular for both their choice of topic and the writer’s lively style. She says, “I’m surprised over and over again by how solitary the experience of writing is — how the big conversation the writer conducts with the public… comes down, finally, to quiet moments alone.”

What makes her memoir a joy to read is Orlean’s ability to show how she determined the kind of writing she wanted to do, how she uncovered aspects of topics that were not obvious but were excitingly three-dimensional. Tirelessly, she’d pursue the kinds of details she wanted, often travelling. Somehow, she balanced all this with her personal life, which could be discouraging at some times and happily fulfilling at others.

In an appendix, Orlean offers five articles that appeared in five different periodicals early in her career. These are presented not as her best works, but rather as examples of the wide variety of her work.

On the night table: Souvankham Thammavongsa

Souvankham Thammavongsa

Author, Pick a Colour

I got an advanced reading copy of Salman Rushdie’s The 11th Hour: A Quintet of Stories, which comes out Tuesday (Nov. 4), but I haven’t finished it — in fact I just started it. So I wouldn’t be able to describe what it’s about, but I can only describe my excitement about it. I can’t wait to see how these five stories are put together, how they exist together.

Hybrid memoir haunted by history

Stylistically excessive writing that impairs ready comprehension can torpedo a thought-provoking book.

Red Pockets is a case in point.

Author Alice Mah is a Chinese-Canadian professor of urban and environmental studies at the University of Glasgow who grew up in Cranbook, B.C. Red Pockets is her first book.

She’s of mixed race, her father being of Chinese descent, her mother Caucasian. Growing up in southeastern B.C., she and her siblings were often mistaken for local Wet’suwet’en Indigenous people by townspeople.

Unflinching essays meld coming-of-age story, travelogue

Fans of Tara Westover’s bestselling memoir Educated and Lydia Yuknavitch’s Chronology of Water will find much to love in this debut collection of essays from an exciting new Canadian voice. Danica Klewchuk’s memoir-in-essays, Standing in the Footprints of Beasts, explores similar themes of growing up in the shadow of abusive religious leaders, sexual violence and misogyny.

The northern Alberta writer weaves in what it means to be a girl among men and boys in a rustic oil patch town. Poverty, isolation and exposure to a fierce kind of sexism are examined through the lens of someone who came of age on the outskirts of industrial expansion, labour camps and rampant exploitation of women and girls.

“The town, with its transient crush of oilfield workers, grew ever more menacing,” Klewchuk writes, describing how men would often drop by their teenage parties to look for underage girls. “We never went off to pee by ourselves and even had a name for things that happened to you when you were passed out. We called it being ghost ridden.”

Klewchuk develops an eating disorder and body dysmorphia that coincides with the onset of puberty. She navigates a complicated relationship with her own bodily autonomy against a memory as a nine-year-old girl when she finds her father’s Penthouse magazine in the glove box of his truck and wonders, “Would I look like this one day?”

Zadie Smith muses on art, politics, culture and late authors in new essay collection

Bursting onto the literary scene in 2000 with White Teeth, Zadie Smith has gone on to write five more novels, including 2023’s The Fraud. The London-based writer is also an untiring essayist, having released several agile, insightful and far-ranging collections.

This latest batch, Smith’s fourth, includes reviews, articles, columns and talks. Some pieces feel like brief and breezy conversations with the reader; others are deep dives into fraught cultural and political intersections. As suggested by the title, there’s a particular focus on the way the past frames and forms our present moment.

Grouped under the headings Eyeballing, Considering, Reconsidering, Mourning and Confessing, the essays cover visual art, film, performance and, of course, books. Smith eulogizes Toni Morrison, Joan Didion, Philip Roth, Martin Amis and Hilary Mantel, all writers who have died in the last few years, and brings up many more.

Smith includes forewords she has written for the reissue of two crucial historical works, Gretchen Gerzina’s Black England and James Weldon Johnson’s Black Manhattan. She considers the labour and craft of writing, the serendipitous pleasures of urban walks — in New York City and her beloved northwest London — and the lures and risks of being Extremely Online.

Lyndal Roper wins Cundill History Prize for book on 16th century uprising

MONTREAL - Oxford professor Lyndal Roper has won this year's Cundill History Prize for "Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants' War," which challenges the prevailing narrative about the doomed 16th century rebellion.

Roper, who is originally from Australia, received the US$75,000 award at a gala dinner in Montreal on Thursday night.

Cundill jurors praise her work for her deep research, which tells the story of the war of 1524 and 1525 from the perspective of the peasants.

The judges say the book shows the rebels expressed "early ideas of justice, communal decision-making, and resistance to arbitrary power," and were not the disorganized radicals the victors claimed them to be.

A selection of horror, dread and other terrifically creepy tales

The spooky season is in full swing, with every streaming service worth its salt suggesting films that go bump in the night. A scary movie is a great date night, but we suggest burning the midnight oil with one of these gripping, ghoulish reads.

From classic chillers to frightful new fiction, these terrific terror tomes will have you sleeping with the light on.

Mongrels: A NovelBy Stephen Graham Jones

A new ‘Blue Food’ cookbook champions fish and other seafood for any meal

NEW YORK (AP) — Andrew Zimmern and Barton Seaver are what you'd call seafood fanatics. Or blue food evangelists. They want us to eat more things from the water, even first thing in the morning.

“Seafood for breakfast is delicious,” says Zimmern, a chef, writer and TV host. Seaver, a chef and National Geographic Explorer, agrees — he argues that some lean protein with omega-3 fatty acids is a great way to start the day.

“Seafood belongs in all places at all meals at all times,” Seaver says.

The two — in collaboration with the ocean food advocacy nonprofit Fed by Blue — have combined for “The Blue Food Cookbook: Delicious Recipes for a Sustainable Future," part cookbook and part educational resource to help make food from oceans, lakes and rivers less confusing for many people.

Nigeria’s Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka says US visa was revoked after Trump criticism

DAKAR, Senegal (AP) — Nobel Prize-winning author Wole Soyinka said on Tuesday that his non-resident visa to enter the United States had been rejected, adding that he believes it may be because he recently criticized U.S. President Donald Trump.

The Nigerian author, 91, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986, becoming the first African to do so.

Speaking to the press on Tuesday, Soyinka said he believed it had little to do with him and was instead a product of the United States' immigration policies. He said he was told to reapply if he wished to enter again.

“It’s not about me, I’m not really interested in going back to the United States,” he said. “But a principle is involved. Human beings deserve to be treated decently wherever they are.”