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Art & Books Books

The books you have to read in 2017

Time to get up close and personal with a good book. Fortunately, there’s gonna be a lot of them in 2017, so plan to crack a few spines and be transported to new worlds by creative stories and ideas. Here’s what we have our eye on.

THE LONELY HEARTS HOTEL

by Heather O’Neill (HarperCollins, February 7)

Warning or bonus (take your pick): explicit sex plays a major role in  O’Neill’s follow-up novel to her Giller shortlisted The Girl Who Was Saturday Night. This is a riotous tale of two gifted children who meet in an orphanage, fall in love, then lose each other in Depression-era Montreal. Picaresque, even Dickensian, the novel is full of unsavoury characters – including a predator nun – who do bad things, but O’Neill’s lovely language redeems them all.

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Men Walking On Water

by Emily Schultz (Knopf, March 21)

Here’s a prohibition-set novel, tracking the ramifications of an accident that sends a rumrunner’s car into the Detroit River, taking a whack of cash down with it. The event has an impact on the driver’s wife and on folks involved in the booze business (including a bootlegging minister) and brothels. In previous fantasy-based novels (The Blondes, for example), Schultz has demonstrated a vivid imagination and powerful sense of irony. The satire’s back, but this novel has a real-world feel.

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SON OF A TRICKSTER

by Eden Robinson (Knopf, February 7)

The latest from one of Canada’s groundbreaking Indigenous writers gets inside the head of Jared, a 16-year-old stoner with serious family problems. His mother is terrifying, often drunk and armed his father can’t meet his commitments and his grandmother keeps insisting Jared’s not human, but the son of a trickster. She might be right – a raven won’t stop talking to him.

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INTO THE WATER

by Paula Hawkins (Doubleday, May 2)

Not being a fan of unreliable narrators, I never could get behind Hawkins’s mega-seller, The Girl On The Train, with its focus on a drunken protagonist. But she does know how to write a page-turner, and there’s no question this psychological thriller about secrets, lies and family will be one of the most talked-about books of the year.

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FREE WOMEN, FREE MEN: SEX, GENDER, FEMINISM

By Camille Paglia (Random House, March 14)

These essays from the infuriating Camille Paglia are in your face, provocative and always challenging to lazy thinkers. To be sure, they drip with her egotism, but get past that and you encounter someone determined to step out the box of conventional thinking, with opinions on everything from football to Gloria Steinem. In the wake of Madonna’s weird trashing of Paglia during her pro-woman Billboard Award acceptance speech, I want to make clear – as demonstrated in one of the early pieces here – that Paglia was the first writer to celebrate Madge as a feminist.

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DIFFICULT WOMEN

by Roxane Gay (Grove, January 13)

For a while there, Gay was looking like the Paglia of the modern era. In the 80s, Paglia used her academic chops to rip into conventional feminist ideas Gay mined her crafty blogs in the new millennium to create the thought-provoking essay collection Bad Feminist. Here she returns to fiction with short stories featuring strong women characters who tend to behave badly – for good reason.

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THE UNFINISHED DOLLHOUSE

by Michelle Alfano (Cormorant, April 13)

Michelle Alfano’s intimate memoir recounts her life-changing experience as the mother of a transgender child. The dollhouse of the title refers to the gorgeous gift she gave her daughter, only to discover that Frankie had zero interest in it. Alfano deals with reactions from family, friends and educators, but it’s her own responses that make this book a winner.

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AUTUMN

by Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton, February 7)

This release launches a quartet of season-themed novels by one of the most inventive authors writing in the English language. The protagonists, a 100-year-old man and a 30-something woman, have a long-standing friendship, and the themes are aging, love and storytelling. Not that Ali Smith’s head is up there in the clouds: the book was written after Brexit, one of the first of its kind to be released in the UK, and it shows.i

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