Sarah Cypher’s debut novel is as much about storytelling as it is about the characters who inhabit it. A swirling multigenerational family epic, it’s about the power that stories hold over families and whole nations, and the mysterious ways that certain indelible narratives can supplant real memories. Through an unusual structure that bucks narrative convention, Cypher explores the blurry lines between storytelling and history, memory and identity, exile and home.
Born with blue skin into a diasporic Palestinian family, Betty Rummani grows up awash in stories. During the first years of her life, she is passed between family members: her scientist mother, who often buries herself in work; her white father, desperate to remake the three of them into a functioning family unit; and her great aunt Nuha, the true keeper of the family’s stories.
Betty recounts this turbulent childhood many years later as an adult faced with a difficult decision: to stay in the city she knows, or to follow the woman she loves to a new country. Searching for clarity, she hungrily turns to the notebooks left behind by Nuha when she died, and begins to piece together the surprising story of her aunt’s life.
Though Betty narrates the novel in the first person, she often feels like a peripheral character. She slips into Nuha’s voice and life as if she were Nuha herself. The book is full of vivid scenes from before Betty’s birth and memories of Nuha’s life in Palestine. This unusual structure can feel a bit clunky at times, as Betty recounts not only events she never witnessed but also the associated complex emotional realities. But readers who can relax into this kind of magical storytelling will find it both whimsical and powerful.
Cypher’s prose has a softness to it and a melodic cadence. It often feels as if Betty is speaking directly to the reader, though when she breaks the fourth wall, she does so slyly, so quietly you’ll miss it if you blink. The story feels like it’s being untangled as it’s told, and this—along with subtle glimpses of almost-magic—provides the sense of mystery that permeates the book.
The Skin and Its Girl is an intriguing debut, a story within a story within a story, and a lyrical and haunting journey through generations and across oceans.
Sarah Cypher’s first novel is a story within a story within a story, a lyrical and haunting journey through generations and across oceans.
Jennifer Neal’s debut novel is a haunting coming-of-age story, a melodic love letter to the language of music and a fierce, dark, rage-filled upbraiding of patriarchal violence.
Gabrielle has the ability to change the color of her skin, a quality inherited from her mother, Tallulah. As a child, Gabrielle learns how to shift from her natural brown into vivid reds and blues and golds, as well as how to hide her skin tones from the world when needed. Chillingly, Gabrielle and Tallulah most often make their skin white to appease the family patriarch, a violent, abusive man who demands everything in the house, including his wife and daughter, be whitewashed.
When Gabrielle’s controlling father insists that she take a year off after high school to improve her piano playing and bulk up her resume for college applications, she finds an unexpected source of freedom and solace in her piano teacher, a queer woman named Dominique. Dominique and her mother, Niyala, fill their colorful home with love, music and food—so unlike the cold and fearful house where Gabrielle grew up. As Gabrielle spends more time with them, she slowly begins to face—and heal—her deep old wounds.
Notes on Her Color unfolds almost glacially at first, in a series of meandering scenes—some banal and domestic, others startling in their harsh depictions of violence. A series of events toward the end of the novel heightens the book’s emotional impact, and though the pacing may feel a bit dizzying to some readers, it also captures the often tumultuous whims of adolescence.
Neal’s prose is assured and evocative, and the magic of shifting skin tones enables a fascinating commentary on race, power, invisibility and desire. But where this novel truly shines is in its nuanced exploration of relationships between women. There’s a softness in the way Neal writes about Gabrielle and Dominique, and a hard-edged tenderness to how Dominique and Niyala bicker and tease. Gabrielle and Tallulah’s thorny, muddled relationship is described with prickly honesty: They are haunted by many of the same demons, and yet they struggle to see each other clearly. With small but devastating details, Neal paints a vivid picture of their close bond and, just as gracefully, depicts the ways the world frays it nearly to breaking.
Notes on Her Color is about familial violence and the complex legacies of generational trauma. It’s also about queer joy and the hard, slow work of liberation. Musicians and artists will likely find it especially compelling—the women in this novel use music as a form of resistance and power—but anyone craving a fresh, inventive take on the bildungsroman should look out for this debut.
Musicians and artists will likely find Jennifer Neal’s novel especially compelling—the female characters use music as a form of resistance and power—but anyone craving a fresh, inventive take on the bildungsroman should read this debut.
Claudia Cravens’ debut novel is a funny, sharp, subversive marvel: a queer Western that feels both fresh and timeless. With gunfights, gambling, mysterious strangers riding into town, criminal gangs and highway robbery, it has all the trappings of a classic Western. The plot takes off about two-thirds of the way through, and it delivers plenty of heart-pumping action and adventure. There’s more than one scene during which you might find yourself holding your breath. But what makes all of this action so compelling is the quiet buildup.
Alone and broke after her father dies from a snakebite, 16-year-old Bridget arrives in Dodge City, Kansas, exhausted, hungry and desperate for work. She finds it at the Buffalo Queen Saloon, a brothel run by two fierce but protective women. The Queen provides a kind of safety that Bridget has never known—steady money and a roof over her head—but it also makes her vulnerable to more than one kind of danger. When she falls in love with Spartan Lee, a legendary female gunfighter, Bridget realizes just how big the world truly is—and how much it will change her, if she lets it.
Though grounded in rich historical detail, Lucky Red reads at times like a modern coming-of-age story. Bridget’s new life as a “sporting woman” provides her with a fast education—in friendship and first love, in loss and betrayal, in what it means to stand up for herself and those she cares about. Cravens relates all of these internal revelations and outward discoveries in Bridget’s brash, no-nonsense, take-things-as-they-come narrative voice.
Through Bridget, Cravens captures the daily rhythms of a Kansas brothel in the 1870s with incredible care and nuance. There’s nothing sensational or dramatic about it. There’s only the honest depiction of the textures of ordinary life: the endless string of tricks that blur into each other; the petty squabbles between the women; the acts of loyalty and friendship that keep them alive; the bawdy jokes and moments of private amusement; the drudgery of chores; the ache of a hangover after a night of drinking and the pleasure of a hot cup of coffee.
Lucky Red is a complicated and moving portrait of a young queer woman determined to take up space in a world trying to render her invisible. Bridget often finds herself in situations without any good choices, and she sometimes pursues a course of action that causes harm, or makes messes—and isn’t that what it means to grow up? At its heart, this novel is a thrilling but contemplative meditation on the courage it takes to choose—yourself, your freedom, your pleasure, your home—and own the consequences.
There’s more than one scene of Claudia Craven’s queer Western during which you might find yourself holding your breath. But what makes all of this action so compelling is the quiet buildup.
Nicola Dinan’s debut novel is the best kind of queer love story: not a dramatic tragedy but an expansive exploration of intimacy, desire and queer family-making. Dinan refuses to adhere to the expected beats of mainstream narratives about straight relationships, but she also also brashly and bravely rejects the standards of moral perfection that queer and transgender characters in fiction are too often required to live up to. Instead, she honors what is uncomfortable and hard about trans life right alongside what is sacred.
Tom and Ming meet in their early 20s at a drag show put on by their university and immediately hit it off. Tom is a white Brit whose good-natured cheerfulness masks his insecurity. Ming is an aspiring playwright who has come to England from Malaysia; her mother died when she was a teenager, and she’s still looking for a place or a group of people that feel like home. Tom and Ming fall in love easily, but their relationship is thrown into turmoil when Ming decides to transition. The narrative switches between their two perspectives as they navigate their changing relationships to each other and to themselves.
Ming finds freedom, relief and joy in finally being herself, but being a nonwhite trans woman in the U.K. also brings new challenges. Tom struggles to accept that while his love for Ming hasn’t changed, his desire for her has. They are both grieving imagined versions of themselves and their futures. This kind of heartbreak, which is as much a part of queer and trans life as anything else, is not something that queer fiction often makes space for.
Bellies is fraught with all the messes of growing up and into identity. Dinan’s prose is fresh and immediate and full of tension. There’s drunken revelry, heart-pounding fights, tender moments between lovers, strained long-distance phone calls with family and awkward support group meetings. Every page of this novel feels alive and thrumming; even the introspective sections have a momentum that pulls the reader along. Ming, Tom and their group of friends have quirks and flaws that make them immediately recognizable. They are selfish and petty, confused and clueless, loving and impatient. Sometimes they love one another generously, but sometimes they fail to love one another at all.
This is a vulnerable, moving, riotously funny and deeply honest book about trans life, first love, art-making, friendship, grief and the hard, slow process of building a home—in a new country, with another person and inside yourself. Bellies celebrates a hundred different kinds of transformation and, like the very best novels, has the power to transform its readers in unexpected ways.
Nicola Dinan’s debut novel is a vulnerable, moving, riotously funny and deeply honest story about trans life, first love, art-making, friendship, grief and the hard, slow process of building a home—in a new country, with another person and inside yourself.
Kim Coleman Foote’s debut, Coleman Hill, is a sweeping family epic—an accomplished and assured intergenerational story that feels fresh but remains deeply steeped in Black American literary traditions and history. Foote describes the project as a biomythography, a word coined by writer and scholar Audre Lorde to describe her memoir, Zami. And like Lorde, Foote invokes literal ancestors alongside literary ones; the novel is a fictionalized account of her own family history. As this vivid novel navigates the rich texture of everyday Black life throughout the 20th century, Foote’s emotional investment in telling complicated stories truthfully and openly is apparent in every scene.
The novel begins in 1916 with an exodus. Like so many other Black people during the Great Migration, Celia Coleman and Lucy Grimes leave their homes in the South, intent on escaping racism and poverty. Both women settle in the small community of Vauxhall, New Jersey, but soon find that life in the North, though different, is not always better. Over the following decades, the Colemans and the Grimeses experience shattering losses, form surprising friendships, get into heated arguments, hold grudges and keep secrets from each other—all while trying to stay alive in a world that often treats them like they don’t matter.
Three generations come alive in poignant, beautifully rendered scenes. The narrative moves quickly through time, jumping from the 1920s to the ’40s to the ’70s. Each section begins with a photograph, which lends the book a powerful immediacy and makes it feel even more like a living history. The point of view also shifts quickly from person to person, as mothers and then sons, daughters, aunts and cousins add their memories to the tapestry of the two families’ lives. The result is a polyvocal symphony that highlights the complex and often contradictory experiences of characters who—even if unintentionally—perpetuate cycles of abuse. Foote zooms in and out with breathtaking skill, which allows her to illuminate her characters’ deeply personal choices as well as the long aftereffects of slavery and the insidious ways that trauma moves through generations.
Coleman Hill is not an easy read, rife as it is with violence, racism and abuse, but it never becomes maudlin. Foote’s prose is effortlessly poetic, yet it feels conversational and direct. Even the characters who only take center stage for a few pages are wonderfully drawn. This remarkable debut is a reminder that sometimes the best stories don’t have an answer at the end but, instead, unflinchingly tell the truths of human lives—even, and maybe especially, when the telling hurts.
Kim Coleman Foote’s remarkable debut is a reminder that sometimes the best stories don’t have an answer at the end but, instead, unflinchingly tell the truths of human lives—even, and maybe especially, when the telling hurts.
C Pam Zhang’s sophomore novel has the same striking prose that made her debut, How Much of These Hills Is Gold (2020), so remarkable, but the similarities end there. Land of Milk and Honey is much stranger and perhaps even more beautiful. It’s a dystopian novel about food, pleasure, power, monstrosity and womanhood. It’s about the threads that keep us rooted to ourselves and each other, and about what happens when those threads fray and dissolve. The sheer range of Zhang’s imagination is striking.
A gray smog has spread across the world, causing catastrophic food shortages and global famine. A struggling chef, adrift, alone and stranded in Europe when the U.S. borders close, takes a job for a billionaire, preparing meals for his elite research community on a mountaintop in Italy. There, she cooks extravagant meals with ingredients that have disappeared from the rest of the world—aged cheeses, fresh meat, delicate greens, strawberries. Slowly, she cooks her way back to herself, finding pleasures she thought she’d lost forever. But she’s also forced to confront the reality of what her mysterious employer and his genius daughter are doing in this strange paradise—and the narrator’s own complicity in it.
Zhang’s sentences are visceral and heated. She writes about food and bodies with frenzied truthfulness. There is nothing pretty in this novel, but there is outrageous beauty. There is nothing nice in the way she describes the act of cooking, elaborate meals, butter or honey dissolving on the tongue, sex, bodily pleasure. Instead, Zhang’s prose is sensual, lavish, violent, incredibly close, without restraint. The narrator describes events from a distance of many years, but this only makes the heady details she recalls even more remarkable. For the narrator, and thus, for the readers, that old cliche “it feels like it happened yesterday” is undeniably true.
Land of Milk and Honey casts the kind of spell that readers can spend a lifetime hungering for. To read this book is to know yourself as a being made of skin and touch, a being made of other bodies. The impact is powerful and immediate. This is an astonishingly accomplished work, a deceptively simple dystopian vision that lays bare the heartbreaking complexities of seeking and giving pleasure, of wanting and loving in a world that is fundamentally shattered and forever shattering anew. It is the kind of uncomfortably honest art that disturbs and unsettles. It is also a generous and wildly celebratory ode to what keeps humans striving for something beyond mere survival: art, connection, taste, the sublime and fleeting pleasures of the body.
C Pam Zhang’s sentences are visceral and heated. She writes about food and bodies with frenzied truthfulness. There is nothing pretty in Zhang’s second novel, but there is outrageous beauty.
In her kaleidoscopic debut novel, Oindrila Mukherjee brings the fictional Indian city of Hrishipur to vivid life. Located in northern India, Hrishipur is a young city, home to migrants looking for work, elite professionals dazzled by the glittering nightlife and ultrawealthy business owners searching for the next big deal. With luxury malls, exclusive apartment complexes and crowded streets, it is a place of dizzying extremes.
The Dream Builders unfolds over the course of one hot, dry summer. Maneka Roy, a university professor who’s been living in the U.S. since college, returns home to visit her father after her mother’s sudden death. Her parents moved to Hrishipur from their native Kolkata, investing in one of many new construction projects that never materialized. Now her retired father is struggling to make ends meet, and Maneka is confronted with a city that’s as foreign to her as the American Midwest once was.
But Maneka and her father are just two of the 10 characters whose lives and stories intersect in The Dream Builders. There’s also Ramona, Maneka’s wealthy childhood friend, who has just bought a flat in the biggest new construction in Hrishipur: Trump Towers. There’s Jessica, a single mother with an adopted daughter, and Gopal, an electrician fueled by gritty determination. In other chapters, a husband longs to reconnect with his wife, a spa worker worries about her family’s financial situation, and a photographer dreams of his big break. Mukherjee moves easily from one point of view to the next, highlighting the cultural, class and gender diversity of the city.
All of these characters are hiding from themselves, each other, their pasts and futures. They may be neighbors, friends, lovers, employers and employees, but their dreams, desires and wounds are not immediately apparent to one another. They only ever see other people in bits and pieces, which often leads to misguided assumptions about the relative ease or hardship of another person’s life. This dissonance gives the novel its richness and propulsive motion. Although Mukherjee lingers in each perspective for only a chapter, her characters are so specific, so immediately human, that they remain resolutely present long after the narrative has moved on.
The Dream Builders is an elegant, intimate story about people adrift in a chaotic city, an unpredictable economy and a rapidly changing world. They long for home, belonging, stability and comfort, struggling to root themselves even as the ground shifts beneath them. In the spaces between their stories, Mukherjee invites readers to unknot the deeper echoes and connections that make this beautifully structured novel such a strong debut.
The Dream Builders is an elegant, intimate story about people adrift in a chaotic city, an unpredictable economy and a rapidly changing world.
Kevin Chen’s dark and eerie novel opens with a question: “Where are you from?” This seemingly simple question reverberates throughout Ghost Town, and though its many characters are all desperate for an answer, satisfaction eludes them. Watching them try—as they tumble through their lives and wrestle with their complicated relationships to both home and family—makes for a rich and layered reading experience.
Ghost Town centers on the Chen family. Patriarch Cliff makes a living as a small-time merchant in a rural Taiwanese town. Cliff and his wife, Cicada, are disappointed by the births of their five daughters before finally having two sons. Keith, the youngest, becomes a writer and eventually leaves Taiwan for Germany, hungry to get out from under the weight of familial expectations. He falls in love with a German man, whom he eventually murders.
The novel opens with Keith’s return home after years in jail. His homecoming coincides with the Ghost Festival, a time when spirits visit the world of the living, who in turn make offerings to honor the ghosts and ease their suffering. Several chapters are narrated by ghosts, but they’re not just characters. Their presence permeates the book as a constant humming backdrop—the ghosts of the dead and the might-have-been, the ghosts of inherited trauma and domestic violence, the ghosts of memory.
It’s a dramatic setup, but the first two-thirds of Ghost Town are deliciously slow, lingering in the details and inviting readers into the characters’ internal lives. Keith muses for pages about the changes to the swimming pool where he learned to swim. Betty, his sister who now lives in Taipei, remembers a bookshop she frequented as a child. Middle sister Belinda describes her rich husband’s domestic abuse with chilling detachment. This attention to the ongoing drama and minuate of the family’s life causes the larger mystery—why Keith murdered his boyfriend—to recede into the background.
The final third contains the kind of grand revelations that can sometimes feel overwrought, especially after such a slow, meandering journey through memory and loss. But Chen sets it up masterfully enough that, instead, the ending feels inevitable.
Winner of both the Taiwan Literature Award and the Golden Tripod Award (one of the highest honors in Taiwanese publishing), Ghost Town is full of gauzy prose and dark imagery. Darryl Sterk’s translation has a dreamlike quality, and it’s clear how much care he took to render the nuances of the original Taiwanese into English. This isn’t an easy read, but like a ghost, it lingers.
This dark and eerie novel isn’t an easy read, but like a ghost, it lingers.
Comics artist Kate Beaton, creator of the award-winning satirical webcomic “Hark! A Vagrant,” demonstrates her remarkable range and storytelling prowess with her debut graphic memoir, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands. With strong prose and striking art, she captures the complexities of a place often defined by stark binaries: the Alberta oil sands, one of the world’s largest deposits of crude oil.
In 2005, 21-year-old Beaton’s goal is to pay off the student loans for her arts degree, so she leaves her beloved home on Cape Breton, a small island off the coast of Nova Scotia, for a job in oil mining. Over the next several years, she works as a warehouse attendant in the town of Fort McMurray, as well as at various temporary work camps owned by several oil companies.
Beaton recounts her experiences—often harrowing, sometimes poignant—with dazzling clarity. She’s one of only a few women in an industry dominated by men, and misogyny, sexual harassment and sexual violence occur nearly every day. In scene after scene, she depicts men laughing over sexist jokes and demeaning the women they work with, and bosses dismissing her concerns.
And yet, without once making excuses for any of this behavior, Beaton honors the humanity of the oil workers. She illuminates the larger contexts of work camps, including labor exploitation and corporate greed, toxic masculinity and a lack of mental health resources. She puts everything, good and bad, into the book: moments of connection with men from the eastern provinces, bleak humor, environmental destruction, stark natural beauty, her own feelings of complicity and homesickness, and the oil companies’ blatant disregard for the Indigenous communities in which they operate.
Beaton’s art conveys the inherent strangeness of living and working in such isolated places, giving Ducks a sense of loneliness that words alone can’t express. Her talent for drawing people, and especially facial expressions, adds layers of emotional depth to every scene. She depicts her own face, and the faces of her many co-workers, in moments of fear, pain, anger, exhaustion, despair, pride and laughter. Meanwhile, her illustrations of massive mining machinery make these people seem small and insignificant.
It is no small task to convey the messy truth of a place in words and drawings, to tell a story that is at once intimate and sweeping, and to resist simplification. “You can’t just paint one picture,” Beaton tells a female co-worker during a moving conversation about the impossibility of summing up the oil sands for an online article. In Ducks, she paints a thousand pictures. It’s a powerful account of the ongoing harm of patriarchal violence, and an equally powerful testament to what is possible when we pay attention, seek out each other’s humanity and honor the hard truths alongside the beautiful.
Kate Beaton's graphic memoir is a powerful account of the ongoing harm of patriarchal violence, and an equally powerful testament to what is possible when we pay attention, seek out each other's humanity and honor the hard truths alongside the beautiful.
What does it mean to write a novel in a world defined by the violence of colonization and white supremacy—a world that can’t be saved with mere words? What does it mean to want to write a novel at all, especially as you doubt yourself and recognize the contradictions in your desires and intentions? And what does it mean to be a queer Indigenous man living through these questions and their consequences?
These are the quandaries at the heart of Cree poet Billy-Ray Belcourt’s extraordinary debut novel. A Minor Chorus is a slim, sparse book with a breathtaking structure, a genre-defying blend of fiction, critical theory and oral history that holds seemingly endless layers of stories in its mere 176 pages.
Belcourt’s unnamed narrator is a 20-something queer Cree man fed up with the overt and insidious racism of the academic realm. He abandons his dissertation, leaves his Ph.D. program and returns to his hometown in northern Alberta, Canada, to write a novel. While there, he speaks with various people from his past: an old classmate, a closeted gay elder and his great-aunt. Between these conversations, he recounts childhood memories of his cousin, another Cree man who’s just been arrested on a drug charge.
It’s hard to describe just how moving and unusual this novel is. It is intensely interior, sometimes dizzyingly so. The narrator is a scholar who constantly analyzes his own experiences, philosophizing and interrogating, but he’s painfully aware of the limits of academic thought. This tension sizzles and spits at the center of the book, and while the narrator never resolves that tension, he begins to dissect the rigid binaries between living in the world and thinking about it, creating experience and feeling it.
Belcourt crafts sentences like only a poet can, each one precise and shimmering. He writes with ferocious intensity and beauty about Grindr hookups, queer Indigenous friendship, police violence, the open wounds of Canada’s residential schools, loneliness and longing. The narrator frequently invokes the work of other poets and writers—Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, Carl Phillips—and in doing so, firmly places himself in a lineage of struggle and resistance, artistic rigor and poetic thought.
A Minor Chorus is a feat of technical brilliance, a novel that questions the worth of writing even as it asserts its own value. It is a slippery, scholarly work, rooted in the layered complexity of Indigenous life. Belcourt has established himself as one of Canada’s leading contemporary poets. Now, with his first work of fiction, he cements his place as both writer and world builder, his words creating portals from the past and present into the queer Indigenous future.
A Minor Chorus is a feat of technical brilliance, a novel that questions the worth of writing even as it asserts its own value.
In 2005, in order to pay off her student loans, Kate Beaton left her home in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, to work on the Alberta oil sands, a vast region in Canada that contains one of the largest deposits of crude oil in the world. During this time, Beaton began writing “Hark! A Vagrant,” a witty, irreverent webcomic about history, literary figures and her own life. The beloved series has been collected into two bestselling books, Hark! A Vagrant and Step Aside, Pops.
Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, Beaton’s first full-length graphic memoir, is a beautiful and nuanced account of her time working in the town of Fort McMurray, as well as at various temporary work camps owned by several oil companies. It directly addresses the sexual harassment and violence that she and others experienced in the oil sands, as well as the toxic masculinity that permeates the work camps.
We talked with Beaton about the difficulties of capturing the sometimes contradictory realities of such a complicated place.
You started posting “Hark! A Vagrant” 15 years ago. How have you changed as a writer and artist since then? I’ve changed a lot. I was only 23 when I started making things that would be “Hark! A Vagrant.” I had gone through a lot in some ways, but I was very young and inexperienced, and I look at some of my old work and cringe at it, but this is the same for almost anyone making things in the public eye. Everyone is a young fool for a while, and the world changes around you, and you get older and hopefully not more foolish but the other way around.
Right now I’m 38, and it has been a long time since I was a fresh face on the comics scene. I’m more like the wallpaper or a worn-out chair, but I like being that. No one is surprised I’m here.
How did writing those comics affect your life in the work camps? Did you have any sense of how your career would unfold? After I had comics in my life, working in the camps got easier, because I had this thing that was just for me. Before I had that, I lost myself. It was just work and people chipping away at you in a certain way. Then I had comics and I’d go home to my little camp room after work and draw them and put them online, and here I was in a work camp in the oil sands, very alone in many ways, and I was connecting to people who saw me for who I was through my work. I felt like myself. And I didn’t want to give that up or lose that.
As the book begins, you write about the tension between loving your home in Cape Breton and needing to leave it to find work. During your time in the oil sands, some of the most poignant, powerful moments—both good and bad—are the interactions you have with people from Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and Cape Breton. Talk to me about how you feel about these places. Do you see this memoir as being about Cape Breton as well as about Alberta? It makes sense that it is. Cape Breton has always exported workers. They leave for where the work is, and they leave together. To Boston, Sudbury, Windsor, Alberta—not always, but often you see it. And when they do, there is a shared history and a connection that is always happening.
My grandfather went out on harvest trains in the 1930s, from Nova Scotia to the prairies. There were 1,200 people on the train, he said, and there was one car for schoolteachers. Women. Along the way, the men smashed up the train and looted. “They were full of the devil,” he said. How do you think that car of women felt with those 1,200 men? I know how they felt.
You think your story is new, you think you have something new to say, but really it is all something you are born into. My mother’s family all went to work in the car factories of Windsor, and they would come visit in the summer. And I would watch my aunts go crying into the car to go back and Grandma go silently back into the house with her private sorrow, and I would know that’s going to be me someday—or rather, that this is the choice I will have to make, to stay or to go wherever the work is.
When it really was time for me to go, Alberta was where the work was, and I went. I thought nothing of it at all. And I had no idea, none at all, what I was doing. Then you come home and talk to your relatives about what happened when they left, and they all say the same thing: “We had no idea what we were doing.” “I’ve never been so cold.” “I’ve never been so lonely.” “Thank god I knew this other person from home.”
“Everyone is a young fool for a while, and the world changes around you, and you get older and hopefully not more foolish but the other way around.”
One of the many remarkable things about your memoir is its nuance: You write so honestly about a complicated place. As many readers will likely not have given oil mining much thought beyond “necessary jobs” or “climate destruction,” what do you hope they take away from reading Ducks? Nuance is not a bad thing to take away. I think it is a book about empathy—however you want to take that, and whomever or whatever you think that comment is about. Then that is what it is about.
You convey so much emotion through your characters” facial expressions, images of massive equipment and views of the surrounding landscape, both natural and human. What’s your drawing process like when bringing scenes from your memory to the page? Oh, I had a lot of visual references. I can’t just draw an excavator from memory! But I knew what I was looking for in references—that was memory. You see those images again, and you can really smell it and feel it, being out there. I just wanted people to feel like they were there.
There are so many people in the book—by my count, over 40 named characters! What are the challenges or joys of drawing so many different people? The challenge was that I drew a lot of people the same! And my editors made me go back and change some of them because people were getting confused—haha! But when you have a bunch of guys in hard hats, safety glasses and safety vests, they do start looking alike. So that was challenging for sure. I was mostly concerned that I didn’t mess up on any of them and make people confused.
Since your time in Alberta, you’ve lived all over Canada, as well as in New York. Now that you’re back in Cape Breton, how does it feel to be home? It feels natural. I liked being away in those places. I think it was a healthy thing. I learned a lot from being in cities like Toronto and New York. But I always felt like a peg on a board there too, like a thing that didn’t fit in the picture. Here, I feel like part of the painting.
If you could go back in time, what advice would you give your 21-year-old self who has just arrived in Alberta? What would you say to other young women thinking about working in the oil sands? My advice would be that you can actually ask for better money or apply for a better job. Someone told me that I wasn’t allowed to do either in the first year that I was there, and I believed them. And even the second year that I was there, I didn’t challenge the money that I was being paid, and I was in one of the lowest-paid tiers of people on site. I just didn’t know any better. And we are not really raised to know better or to ask for more when other people have no problem doing that.
Photo of Kate Beaton by Stephen Rankin Photography.
The award-winning comics artist solidifies her reputation for storytelling prowess and remarkable range.
In his third novel, Brooklyn-based Cuban translator and author Ernesto Mestre-Reed delves into Fidel Castro-era Cuba in a beguiling, meandering story that unfolds in dense and dizzying prose. Though challenging at times, Sacrificio is an invitation to slow down and pay attention. The rewards are plentiful for readers willing to give themselves over to a narrative that twists through Havana’s streets, churches, hotels, backyard restaurants and many secrets.
In the mid-1990s, Rafa, a Cuban teenager from the countryside, makes his way to Havana, where he finds a job at a tiny restaurant run by middle-aged Cecilia and her two sons. Rafa falls in love with the older son, Nicolás, though his intimate conversations with the younger son, Renato, have a more profound effect on Rafa’s life.
In the aftermath of Nicolás’ death, Renato goes missing from the state-run “AIDS sanitarium” where he’s been sent, and Rafa sets out to find him. He soon becomes entangled in a complicated web of government agents, counterrevolutionaries and the mysterious workings of a secret city-within-the-city. He discovers the brothers’ connection to “los injected ones,” a group of radical counterrevolutionaries determined to overthrow the Castro government via a delusional plan to spread HIV across the island.
That’s a lot of plot, but it’s only the beginning, as Sacrificio is Dickensian in both scope and feel. Observant Rafa narrates in the first person, but he is long-winded and unreliable, often drifting into discursive stories told to him by others. The historical backdrop—including the 1997 hotel bombings throughout Havana and Pope John Paul II’s 1998 visit to Cuba—looms large, and these events have cosmic consequences. Rafa recounts his own involvement with mild detachment, like someone looking back on experiences they’re not yet sure how to interpret. Fear, betrayal, longing, confusion, love, the desire for justice, the need to be seen, despair and determination—these emotions run beneath Rafa’s surface, ready to be excavated by attentive readers.
Contemporary literature often feels like it’s moving as fast as contemporary society, as if our culture of instant gratification has changed not only the way we read but also the way we write. While there’s certainly a place for that kind of literature, Sacrificio is a reminder that other kinds of books are worthwhile as well: slow stories, disorienting yet compelling books that require work, old-school dramas that nevertheless speak to the fraught complexities of our current political reality.
For readers willing to give themselves over to a narrative that twists and turns through Havana's streets, churches, hotels, backyard restaurants and many secrets, the rewards of Sacrificio are plentiful.
Perhaps it’s too soon to say which books we’ll look back on in 50 years as the ones that defined a generation, but Sarah Thankam Mathews’ debut, a close-to-perfect coming-of-age romp, is surely a contender. Bitingly funny and sweetly earnest, it’s one of those rare novels that feels just like life, its characters so specific in their desires and experiences that you’re sure you’ve met them—or maybe you’re about to. Yet Mathews also captures some unnamable, essential thing about being a 20-something struggling through work and love and late-stage capitalism in the United States in the mid-2000s. In the manner of books that stay with you forever, All This Could Be Different is a singular story that extends beyond itself.
At 22, Sneha graduates from college into a tanked economy. She immigrated to the U.S. as a teenager, but her parents have since returned to India, leaving Sneha alone. She lands an entry-level job at a consulting firm in Milwaukee and starts fresh in a new city, where she encounters financial successes and catastrophes, makes friends and falls into a heady romance. She relates these experiences in an unforgettable narrative voice: dryly funny, self-analytical, a little sarcastic and full of heart.
Though Sneha is preoccupied with her girlfriend for much of the book, this is actually a story about friendship. Sneha’s new friend Tig, a slightly older Black genderfluid lesbian, tells her that friendship takes a lot of work, and over the course of the novel, we get to see Sneha and Tig do that work. It’s breathtaking to witness this slow and painful process. Over dinners and phone calls and meltdowns, long drives and impromptu parties, Sneha, whose past traumas have made her unwilling to trust others, who longs for love even as she shies away from it, learns what true intimacy requires: to see and be seen.
Lives are made up of so many ordinary moments, so many conflicting emotions, so many messes—some world-shattering, some mundane. It’s all here in this funny, vibrant, heartbreaking book: the ache of new love and the pleasures of good food, what it’s like having money and what it’s like losing it, microaggressions and casual racism and radical politics. There are drunken mistakes, childhood wounds, good sex, bad sex, the American dream, queer love, an explotitive economy and the bite of Midwestern winters. And of course, the pressures and expectations of being a first-generation Asian American immigrant.
Through it all, there’s the steady pulse of friendship and the quiet work of building a family—all the beautiful details that unfold along one woman’s journey to wholeness and home.
Bitingly funny and sweetly earnest, Sarah Thankam Mathews’ debut is one of those rare novels that feels just like life.
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