Margaret Atwood Recommends

“If you’ve never read this 1970 classic, time to do so. Quote from the era: ‘Mr. Davies, you published three earlier novels, but then there was a long pause. Why have you come out with this book, so much later?’ Davies: ‘People…. died.’ So then he put these dead people into his book, and a strange and entertaining lot they are. Another quote from Davies: ‘I know the dark folkways of my people.’”

“This one grabbed folks by the short hairs, as it were. A woman who finds her affair with a human man conducted on a library table less than satisfactory falls in love with a bear instead. Does the bear love her back? How much fantasizing is going on? Deft, plangent, touching, and, as you might imagine, fairly grotesque.”

“This author made her debut with Good Citizens Need Not Fear, a dark, funny story collection set in Ukraine in the last days of the Soviet Union, in an apartment building that’s crumbling as fast as the USSR. Endling is set in the new Ukraine, as an obsessive researcher devoted to an almost-extinct species of snail poses as a bride for sale to earn money for her project. (I can identify, being fond of snails.) So far so zany, but then, bam! The war hits, and …” 

“Speaking of which—USSR, police states and so forth—this is one we all need to have on hand, for when They come knocking, flame-throwers in fist—whether they be from left or right, or something else. There are always people who think they know what you shouldn’t read. There’s a long and fascinating history. Delve in, before this book gets banned.”

“A unique writer tackles a unique real-life story: a group of Mennonite women who discover that their men have been drugging them and raping them while they slept. What to do? Tear the community apart, shame and blame, continue to put up with it? They work it out, not without conflict. Sarah Polley made this book into a haunting—and hauntingly beautiful—film.” 

“This is the sequel to the hilarious and darkly gothic novel, Bunny, in which a clutch of girlie, Pinkberry-nibbling cuties who call each other ‘bunny’ get up to some really creative stuff behind the scenes: they create men out of rabbits, tailoring them to their own desires. Though incompletely: the guys lack a few essentials, and explode under stress. Now the Pinkberry cuties are on the warpath, bent on chastising the odd sister out, who favours black rather than pink. As does Awad.” 

“Alexis is best known for his tragi-comic and very odd novel, Fifteen Dogs, in which the heartless gods decide to give some dogs human consciousness just to see what happens; and what happens tells us quite a bit about ourselves. Other Worlds shows an equal inventiveness—Alexis keeps you reading because you never know what weird-shit tour-de-force he’s going to pull off next. A sixty-year-old obeah man finds himself recreated in the body of a seven-year-old boy in Palgrave, Ontario. So tempting to continue to practice his Garifuna magic on his bullying schoolmates, one of whom he ‘chickenifies.’ Effortlessly intelligent, plangent, and uproarious by turns—a wild ride.”

“Having just dressed up as a peacock at a garden party to help raise funds for the Pelee Island Bird Observatory, I found this book singularly engaging. Canadians have been dressing up for fun for a long time, usually for charity and not always in the best of taste—lots of history and pictures in this book—and it was this tradition I was drawing on for the ‘Xanadu’ chapter of my novel, The Blind Assassin. The charity ball in that chapter has a ‘Kubla Khan’ theme—after the Coleridge poem—but there are wackier themes in this book. Anyone who’s considered the symbolism and the peculiarity of clothes will enjoy it.” 

“This is a book of poems, and therefore not thick, as it is not a Selected or a Collected. It’s not the kind of book you write when you’re in your twenties—that would be Rat Jelly or The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. But those of us who’ve reached a soberer age will recognize the feelings. Things slip away, and are mourned, elegantly, intensely. I’m happy to see I’m not the only person who went a little mad with grief when their cat died.” 

“I met singer-songwriter band-creator (Junkhouse)Tom Wilson backstage at a theatre where we were each doing something or other. I looked up at him—he’s tall, I’m not. He gave me his book. Reading it, I felt, I remember this time. The story of his deeply buried past—of the woman he did not know was his mother, knocked about as a young girl and hidden away for the crime of getting pregnant; of the damaged, blind, enraged WW2 vet he thought was his father; of the people who thought being Indigenous was so shameful they had to conceal it—yes, it’s all familiar: the dark side of Canada, then. Not knowing where he belonged, feeling he wasn’t who he was told he was, Wilson made it through one gritty ordeal after another and considers himself lucky to be alive. This is slice-of-life at its most intense. You won’t forget it.”