Bala’s brilliant new satire skewers philanthropy’s pitfalls, offering a rich cast of characters

Sharon Bala’s much anticipated new novel Good Guys signals irony from the start. It follows the success of her 2018 debut, The Boat People, and is every bit worth the wait.

A CBC Canada Reads finalist, The Boat People was based on the real-life events of the MV Sun Sea ship told from the fictionalized perspectives of a Tamil passenger, his lawyer and the adjudicator of the case. It was translated into four languages and won the Newfoundland and Labrador Book Award and the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction.

In that book, Bala made riveting the frustrations of the bureaucratic process and shone a light on the harsh realities for refugees in Canada. In Good Guys, the author turns a sharp eye to the complexities of philanthropy, interrogating the terrain of non-profits, charity and the politics of celebrity and international aid.

Born in Dubai, Bala immigrated to Canada with her Sri Lankan parents when she was seven. Raised in Pickering, Ont., she went on to earn university degrees in psychology and history before moving, at age 30, to St. John’s, N.L., where she joined the Port Authority writers’ group and embarked on her authorial career.

Ken Follett’s next epic heads to Victorian Britain, where strict morals meet secret passions

NEW YORK (AP) — Ken Follett's next historical epic is a story of forbidden romance set during a time of official propriety, the Victorian age.

Follett's “The Deep and Secret Things” will be published Sept. 21, 2027, Hachette Book Group and Hachette UK announced Wednesday. His novel follows the life of a noblewoman from South Wales, Helena Bowen, and her attraction to a charming, but disreputable acquaintance, Johnnie.

“I love stories set in the Victorian era because of the shocking contrasts,” Follett said in a statement. “Britain was richer than any country had ever been, but the London slums were places of grim poverty. Moral rules were strict, but rich men had mistresses and destitute women turned, in desperation, to prostitution. Dresses were gorgeous and parties were lavish, but the children of the poor started work at the age of seven.”

The 76-year-old Follett is one of the world's most popular authors, with sales nearing 200 million copies, according to his publishers. His novels, which have spanned from the Dark Ages to modern times, include “The Pillars of the Earth,” “Eye of the Needle” and “World Without End.”

On the Night Table: Davin de Kergommeaux

Davin de Kergommeaux

Author, Canadian Whisky: The Essential Portable Expert

I’m reading a book called Bottom Shelf: How a Forgotten Brand of Bourbon Saved One Man’s Life. It’s the memoirs of Fred Minnick, a guy who honestly had many horrible experiences in Iraq — he came home and tried to kill himself before eventually becoming a whiskey writer. He’s a friend of mine, and relates some experiences we’ve shared in the book.

I’ve also got Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry on the go, and I’m trying desperately to read T.M. Devine’s The Scottish Clearances: A History of the Dispossessed, 1600-1900. He’s a historian, and man, he writes like a PhD — it’s almost impenetrable.

Nicole Kidman and Jamie Lee Curtis adapt ‘Scarpetta’ book series for TV

NEW YORK (AP) — When Jamie Lee Curtis' blockbuster film “True Lies” premiered worldwide, it would've been improbable to think that 30 years later she would be giddy about a TV show — about as improbable as performing her iconic helicopter stunt without special effects.

“I guarantee you when I was … literally hanging under a helicopter above the Florida Keys over the Seven Mile Bridge in Florida, I did not imagine I’d be sitting in New York City that many years later with Nicole Kidman,” Curtis said. “Not only being co-bosses on a show, but then also playing her slutty sister. I was not imagining that as my future.”

The Oscar winners co-executive produced and star in “Scarpetta,” a new mystery crime series from Prime Video, out March 11, based on Patricia Cornwell's popular books. Curtis credits Kidman as one of the major Hollywood players who helped shrink the gulf between perceptions of film and TV roles with prestige series like “Big Little Lies” and “Nine Perfect Strangers.”

Kidman, 58, plays the titular character Dr. Kay Scarpetta, a forensic pathologist who solves complex murders. Upon returning to Virginia, she comes across cases eerily reminiscent of one three decades prior that catapulted her career forward. To prepare for the role, Kidman spent time with a medical examiner in Tennessee, where she learned how to hold a scalpel, and how to identify and dissect organs.

After 5 years, Sarah J. Maas returns to ‘A Court of Thorns and Roses’ with 2 untitled books

NEW YORK (AP) — Romantasy favorite Sarah J. Maas has given her millions of fans a plot twist they had long been waiting for — two more books over the next 11 months in her blockbuster “A Court of Thorns and Roses” series.

Bloomsbury announced this week that Book 6 will come out Oct. 27, and Book 7 on Jan. 12, 2027. Neither novel is currently titled. Maas' last installment in the saga of protagonist Feyre Archeron, “A Court of Silver Flames,” came out more than five years ago, in February 2021.

The author herself, who turned 40 this week, first revealed the news on the podcast “Call Her Daddy.”

“It took me a while to find the right story and find the right head space,” she said. “And then what poured out of me was this, and it poured out very quickly.”

Christina Applegate unleashes a raw, probing memoir: ‘You with the Sad Eyes’

NEW YORK (AP) — Christina Applegate's memoir is not a safe, prim thing. It's raw and angry, lyrical and funny, and more than a bit dangerous — a lot like Christina Applegate.

“My words come out of my face hole the way they come out of my face hole and that’s just the way it goes,” she tells The Associated Press. “I can feel them coming out of my brain and I have stopped editing them.”

“You with the Sad Eyes: A Memoir,” out Tuesday, charts the personal and career ups and downs of a veteran Hollywood comic actor with a rawness rarely found in today's memoirs.

She writes of being abandoned by her father and growing up in an abusive household, of being the victim of domestic violence as an adult, motherhood, of surviving cancer and now living with multiple sclerosis.

What's up: Author Sarah K.L. Wilson, Jordan Miller exhibition, One Gay Choir, International Women’s Day Rave, Sound Like Light concert

Compost — whose shows are known for integrating Joel Penner’s pristine time-lapse recordings of plant life cycles — are promising an “immersive night of music, sound and light” Saturday at the Centennial Concert Hall’s Sound Bites Room.

Millennial pals convene at parties, drift apart in breezy, heartfelt and detail-driven novel

“This is how it works/You’re young until you’re not.”

That lyric comes from singer-songwriter Regina Spektor’s 2006 single On the Radio — a staple of millennial mid-aughts playlists, especially those compiled by skinny jean-clad hipster/indie millennials with Zooey Deschanel bangs or horn-rimmed glasses who lived in New York City (or desperately wished they did).

Back when “millennial” was a synonym for “young person.” Back when the 2008 crash had yet to thwart all our college dreams. Back when we could still be anything, anyone, and our choices didn’t feel locked in.

So it’s fitting, then, that this lyric should open American novelist Grant Ginder’s So Old, So Young, a funny, nostalgic and open-hearted look at multi-decade friendship and millennial middle age. (Yes, that’s right: the eldest millennials are deep into their 40s now.)

Friends’ coming-of-age story tackles love, loss and more in pitch-perfect prose

American author Tayari Jones’ new novel Kin is a love story — but it is far from a typical one.

Moving, tender and beautifully told, it is the shared coming-of-age story of Niecy and Annie, two friends whose adoration for and devotion to one another survive multiple tests of time, distance, misunderstanding and heartbreak.

Jones is an English and creative writing professor at Emory University in Atlanta and the author of An American Marriage, which was awarded the 2018 Women’s Prize for Fiction. Kin is her fifth novel.

Annie and Niecy, the alternating narrators of this novel, are cradle friends growing up together in the small town of Honeysuckle, La. in the 1950s. Niecy is being raised by an aunt, who begrudgingly stepped in to look after her after Niecy’s mother was murdered by Niecy’s father. Annie also is being raised by kin, as her young mother handed her over to her grandmother within weeks of giving birth and subsequently disappeared.

Amanda Leduc, Katie Kitamura among 15 authors longlisted for Carol Shields Prize

TORONTO - Books by Amanda Leduc, Megha Majumdar and Katie Kitamura are among the 15 titles longlisted for the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction.

The US$150,000 award is the world's largest literary purse for English-language books by women and non-binary writers, and it's open to American and Canadian authors.

Hamilton-based Leduc made the list for her novel "Wild Life," while Majumdar is longlisted for "A Guardian and a Thief" and Kitamura's book "Audition" is in the running.

Also on the long list are "The Edge of Water" by Olufunke Grace Bankole, "Sea, Poison" by Caren Beilin and "milktooth" by Jaime Burnet of Halifax.

Groff’s gripping stories pull the reader into their depths before surfacing for air

It makes good emotional sense that so many stories in American literary star Lauren Groff’s latest collection, Brawler, feature water. Soft and ferocious, enlivening and deadly, chemically simple yet behaviorally complex, water exerts a mysterious pull. Our bodies answer back to it, seas themselves, enclosed in flesh.

Groff is often praised for her writerly mastery and versatility. She’s as comfortable writing a contemporary domestic drama like 2015’s Fates and Furies as she is re-imagining the life of the 12th-century poet Marie de France in 2021’s Matrix. Her work radiates energy.

What comes powerfully across in Brawler is how vulnerable our world of social contracts is to our inner seas. According to one character, “in every human there is both an animal and a god wrestling unto death.”

The nine stories in Brawler are set between the 1950s and the present. In The Wind, a man who is supposed to uphold the law violates it in his own home. In Under the Wave, a woman loses her child and takes another in a single day. In To Sunland, a girl abandons her disabled brother at an institution to seek a better future for herself, knowing all the while that she is in agony.

Q&A: Activists, ‘sister-friends’ Gloria Steinem and Leymah Gbowee channel their bond into a new book

Leymah Gbowee, the Liberian peace activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner, says she doesn’t pay much attention to celebrities. With one key exception: that time she first met Gloria Steinem.

“I was just starstruck,” Gbowee confesses to The Associated Press of the moment a mutual friend introduced her to the feminist icon. “Everyone knows of Gloria, regardless of which continent you come from.”

Steinem, for her part, protests that she’s not any more of a star than Gbowee. “She’s a GLOBAL celebrity,” the famed activist, now 91, says of Gbowee, 54, who won the Nobel in 2011 for her work promoting peace and women’s rights in Liberia.

In any case, their introduction two decades ago — via filmmaker and fellow activist Abigail Disney, who'd made a documentary about Gbowee's peace movement — led to a strong friendship, separated by an ocean but fueled by shared commitment to social justice.