Gen Z protagonist’s insecurities tackled with unexpected levity

This timely and witty Canadian novel wades into the North American culture wars, while dipping its toes into the waters of philosophy and urban development.

In What Gentleman Do, veteran Alberta-born author Todd Babiak imagines a gen-Z protagonist whose personal insecurities have pushed him into the clutches of a white supremacist podcaster.

The protagonist, Waylon Gans, narrates in the close first-person. At 20 and essentially an incel (involuntary celibate), he thinks of himself as “some loser from a town nobody has ever heard of.”

Walleye, “current population 97,461 and falling,” occupies an unspecified part of the North American prairie.

Wryly funny essays chronicle rocky road to motherhood, postpartum anxiety

‘Motherhood is often oppressively touted as one of the most important things a woman can do, and yet that same oppressive force demands she never speak on the inherent realities of mothering.”

So begins Toronto sportswriter Stacey May Fowles in her touching memoir on becoming a mother after four years of infertility.

Fowles is best-known for her baseball reporting, including 2017’s Baseball Life Advice, a collection of essays celebrating baseball while challenging sexist attitudes towards female sports reporters.

She’s also published two novels, a children’s book and contributed to several literary anthologies, demonstrating gifts for reporting, research and prose.

Gruelling world of competitive chess and its top players profiled in riveting new account

For many avid Free Press readers, a favourite morsel is the biweekly chess segment authored by Cecil Rosner. While many, including this reviewer, might not be terribly skilled at chess and more inclined to fiddle with the puzzles on the same page, there’s something about the explanation of the history, depth of thinking and grace under pressure that envelopes the mystery of this ancient game.

For Toronto Star journalist and editor Jordan Himelfarb, the mystery and beauty of chess not only stems from the evolution of the game itself — from India to Persia and to Spain — but also in its prime characters that have shaped the modern game over the last 150 years and who vie for global chess supremacy.

In Interregnum: Inside the Gruelling and Glamorous Battle to Become the Next King of Chess, Himelfarb tells the tale of the lead-up to the 2024 world championships, chronicling famed chess royalty, such as Magnus Carlsen, as well as his challengers — an assortment of millennial and gen-Z geniuses who possess what Himelfarb sees as the keys to chess mastery: “a powerful memory, keen analytics, a gift for abstraction, a tireless work ethic, competitive drive, physical endurance.”

Moreso, the elite chess players of the world have something deep inside them that compels them to leave school, family and what we might deem a normal life. It’s certainly not for great riches or fame — although perhaps the top 10 players might achieve some success in this area. Rather, as Himelfarb, a former professional Scrabble player, details, these chess grandmasters “are transfixed by its beauty, lured by its depth, compelled by the contest. Family, friends, hobbies — all life beyond the board begins to recede.”

New slate of Kanata Classics titles incoming

The Kanata Classics series of book titles is slated to double in size when the six newest volumes land at better booksellers on Tuesday.

The series features previously published titles repackaged and with new introductions, and aims to “bring a balance of Indigenous and non-Indigenous voices into provocative and nuanced dialogue with one another.” The first half-dozen titles launched in July 15, 2025, and included work by Jordan Abel, Kim Thúy, Marian Engel and others.

The forthcoming titles in the second run include Billy-Ray Belcourt’s This Wound is a World, Gabrielle Roy’s The Tin Flute, Richard Wagamese’s Starlight (featuring an introduction by Winnipeg’s Shelagh Rogers), André Alexis’ Childhood, Maria Campbell’s Little Badger and the Fire Spirit and Omar El Akkad’s American War.

For more on the series, see wfp.to/kanataclassics.

Mysterious payment made to missing mom leads to tense father-daughter reunion

The twisted and troubled relationship between the charming but irresponsible father John Dixon (Dix) and his adult daughter Lila lies at the heart of Justin Halpern’s comedic novel.

Halpern, author of the New York Times bestselling memoir Sh*t My Dad Says, is executive producer and co-showrunner of the Emmy award-winning TV series Abbott Elementary. His literary flair for snappy dialogue and sharp humour is evident in his debut novel, Get Lost.

Dix is one of those men who, despite having a messy personal life, including a jail stint, manages to remain charismatic and overwhelmingly positive. Once a promising semi-professional baseball player, Dix’s bad decisions have left him destitute and stuck back in his dusty hometown of Los Armarios, Calif. He’s been estranged from Lila for years, but the two reunite when Lila returns to town to look for her missing mother, Mattie.

After reaching Los Armarios, Lila’s first stop is the town’s jail, where her father is being held on suspicion of killing Mattie. Lila finds the suspect at the centre of a group of laughing police officers as Dix regales them with jokes and stories.

Dave Eggers’ stunning new novel ruminates on friendship, art and the tension between conception and creation

It’s a funny thing to review a book. There’s an obligation to tell readers what it’s about, to summarize the plot without giving too much away and to evaluate whether it deserves their time. Yet sometimes a book is so wonderful you just want to scream at everyone, “Read this thing now,” and consider it a service rendered. Such is the case with Dave Eggers’ latest novel Contrapposto.

This might sound like an overreaction, but if your goal is to be moved beyond measure and to spend a few hundred wonderfully written pages wrestling with sharply observed questions about art, talent, friendship, ambition, happiness and the meaning of success, then you’ve found your next read.

Eggers is the prolific San Francisco-based author behind numerous works including A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, You Shall Know Our Velocity and A Hologram for the King. He’s also published short fiction collections, children’s books, co-founded the literary journal/ publishing house/website McSweeney’s and established himself as a respected visual artist. Contrapposto represents the meeting point of his literary and artistic passions.

The title of the novel offers the perfect entry point. Contrapposto is the relaxed pose common in classical sculpture in which the body’s weight shifts onto one leg, creating a natural asymmetry. (Think Venus de Milo or Michelangelo’s David.) That balance through imbalance becomes the defining shape of the novel’s central, lifetime-spanning relationship between Robert “Cricket” Dibb and Olympia Argyros.

Spirit of live theatre captured in haunted festival venue

When is a book like a play, or a play like a book — or both? This is the underlying question posed by David Jón Fuller in his debut novel, Venue 13. Considering Fuller’s background as an editor and reviewer for this newspaper, and a longtime part of our city’s theatre community, who better to write a novel that takes place during the Summer Theatre Festival, known locally as Skeeter Fest? (This may sound familiar to any readers who have attended a Winnipeg festival known as the fringe.)

Venue 13 takes the reader behind the scenes of the festival — and not just the actors, directors and sound techs, but the venue owners who mount numerous shows with the hope of attracting large crowds to their BYOV (bring your own venue) location (to use the fringe parlance).

Robert Laliberte has bought an old building that he hopes to resurrect into an arts hub, complete with a fancy fusion restaurant run by his friend, the exotically named Ihor. Winnipeg, and the Exchange District in particular, are well-drawn in the novel, and you can have fun trying to guess which buildings Fuller is referencing.

The novel is a rogue’s gallery of theatre types: the controlling directors, the perfectionist producers, the sensitive actors and even the guy called in to fix the rotting foundation of the theatre.

Smith’s sisters haunted by ghosts, childhood memories

The 15th novel by Scottish author Ali Smith details the remembered traumas or ghost stories of sisters Petra and Patch, who heard of ghost horses and people that were “pancaked” by an army tank (presumably while under military occupation during the First World War).

One also recalls feigning phone conversations with the neighbourhood kids’ dead dogs, while the other just remembers hearing of these stories in the form of fragmented memories. Some of these experiences — either directly witnessed or merely remembered by the two in piecemeal will haunt them deep into their adult years.

Despite having not seen each other in years, through the sisters’ telephone conversations they piece together memories and discuss present-day political goings-on without explicit reference to a particular country. There is an irony to the elder sister Petra’s occupation, as she is (now) an assistant audiologist — Petra also acts as an aid to what is remembered in the past or what was heard by Patch some years ago in childhood.

A homophone to Gliff, Smith’s 2024 novel, Glyph can be read without the former — the two are considered distant relatives or companion pieces. There are no characters or plotlines which tie the two together, and Glyph differs in its temporality in that it situates the sisters in between past and present day, as opposed to Gliff’s focus on the future.

Canadian ‘Little House on the Prairie’ actors talk Indigenous representation in Netflix retelling

Actors in Netflix's upcoming "Little House on the Prairie" series say the latest adaptation of Laura Ingalls Wilder's book series was intentional about portraying its Indigenous characters with depth and avoiding the racial stereotypes that the original text has been criticized for utilizing.

Ojibwe actor Meegwun Fairbrother says the producers wanted an inclusive retelling of the novels that depict a white family settling in the American West on Osage land in the 19th century, and that they wanted to avoid any continuation of "the history of erasure of Indigenous peoples in North America."

The semi-autobiographical books and previous screen adaptations have been criticized by scholars and Indigenous communities for their depiction of Native American characters and the way the colonial narrative is centred. Wilder's name was removed from a children's literature award in 2018, with the organizer, the Association for Library Service to Children, saying the "author's legacy is complex and Wilder’s work is not universally embraced."

The eight-episode first season, which was filmed in Winnipeg and premieres Thursday, follows the Ingalls family in the 1870s as they head west across America with the promise of "free land." However, after settling on Osage Nation territory, they find out the U.S. government is still negotiating a land treaty and they have essentially become squatters.

Deft dual timeline offers plenty to excavate in archaeological thriller

We learn astoundingly early in this otherwise welcoming book that one of our several narrators — the paramount one — will die.

This is the first of several intriguing things about this at-first-blush straightforward, dual-timeline murder mystery. One timeline toils hands-on in the archaeological sands of 1903 British Imperial Egypt, while the other studies away in the comfy armchairs of an archaeological museum of 2019 Toronto. Guess what? The two meet at the end.

Our author, Toronto-based Kate Hilton, is a busy person, crafting an increasingly successful fiction-writing career, especially working in tandem with Elizabeth Renzetti on the emerging “Quill & Packet” mystery series, while somehow keeping a private psychotherapist practice afloat. Now, with City of the Muse, she has her fourth solo effort as a novelist.

There can be no question this effort resides at a nexus of her passions, classics and archaeology, but also the ways museums, trailblazing women, poetry and true crime seem so often to lurk in these venues.

All grown up, teen murderer sets sights on ex-shrink and family

Profilic Newfoundland-raised, Toronto-based crime fiction author Nicole Lundrigan (A Man Downstairs, An Unthinkable Thing) clearly doesn’t want to leave her readers wanting for a fresh summer release. Thrillers are the quintessential beach read, are they not? Breezy and gripping, a new paperback with murder and intrigue is just the thing for this time of year.

Lundrigan’s latest The Case Study follows the intertwined destinies of two women: Lainey, a former adolescent murderer responsible for the wanton and brutal killing of her uncle; and Mia, the rudderless wife of the psychiatrist whose case study on Lainey made him famous.

In the two decades since, Lainey’s story has become a classic in the annals of psychiatric history, but not for the murder itself. Lainey was trapped alone with her uncle’s body for days at an isolated lakeside property and came to believe that she, too, was dead. The delusion took years of intensive therapy, electroshock treatments and powerful drugs to finally shatter.

So when her former psychiatrist, Dr. Ian Morrison, reaches out wanting to do a follow-up on her case, she is torn between the desire to face her demons and the worry that she will again lose her grip on reality.

Stymied student makes alpha males pay in dark-academia debut

In her debut novel Honey, British writer Imani Thompson takes on the ivory tower of academia, and the mediocre white men and alpha males of the manosphere, with a dose of “good for her” rage.

Yrsa, a Caribbean-descended Briton, is working on a PhD at Cambridge University. She is critiquing the critical framework of Afropessimism, which argues that anti-Blackness is so ingrained in the modern world that there is essentially no way to move past it — and that the only means for liberation for people of colour is violence.

Clearly a brilliant academic, Yrsa nevertheless finds herself stuck, unable to advance her thesis methodology while also receiving a complaint from a white student that she is too harsh.

At the same time, Yrsa learns her best friend Nina has not only been having an affair with her supervisor, Dr. Richardson, but that he has broken it off and stolen Nina’s research, claiming that publishing her name alongside his will open him up to unacceptable risk. Nina is devastated and unsure what to do, while Yrsa seethes with rage.

Reading series welcomes Wong, Fuller, Joudrey

The 12th edition of the Wild and Wonderful Words reading takes place Wednesday, with a stacked lineup of writers slated to share their work.

Travel essays predictably funny, with occasional poignant moments

Award-winning travel writer, novelist and humourist Will Ferguson has collected 48 pieces, mainly magazine articles and essays that haven’t appeared in previous books, for this collection that highlights tales designed to celebrate Canadian identity and idiosyncrasies while introducing readers to people and places across the land.

He does wander farther afield — to mud pools in New Zealand and to Iceland for a short walk across the Arctic Circle, for example — but concentrates more on varied Canadian locales such as prairie towns, Montreal’s varied neighbourhoods, Sable Island’s famous horses, Niagara Falls daredevils and the politics of the Confederation Bridge connecting P.E.I. to the mainland.

Ferguson discovers an unexpected (but practical) use for a Juno Award, and includes the recipe and back story of scorched-flour gravy (his mother originally wrote the recipe in a piece for the Calgary Herald). If a national music award and a practical solution to feeding a pack of kids when money is short aren’t Canadiana, then there is no such category.

First, the Juno. The title story takes Ferguson to Nokomis, Sask., in a paean of sorts to Streetheart singer Kenny Shields, where it seems everyone he meets in the rocker’s hometown knows the family and has a story.

Woman reconnects with long-absent stepfather in Patchett’s profound prose

A winter car accident, childhood abandonment, grave illness and broken hearts are all central to Ann Patchett’s latest novel, but Whistler is far from a sad and depressing work of fiction. It is, rather, a lovely and engaging novel about decent, well-meaning people, the art of forgiveness and the embrace of family.

A resident of Nashville, Tenn., Patchett is the author of nine other novels, including Bel Canto (winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction), the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Dutch House and the COVID-set Tom Lake.

Like that last work of fiction, Whistler is set in the 2020s and is narrated by a strong, independent woman with much to be grateful for. It is not, contrary to its cover design and the fact that it is named for a horse, a novel about a horse.

Middle-aged Daphne Fuller is a happily married private school English teacher living in Bronxville, N.Y. who has managed to keep some confusing and painful childhood memories at bay simply by not thinking about them.