A new thriller from Amy Stuart and a fascinating posthumous read from David Graeber

A Death at the Party, Amy Stuart (Simon & Schuster): Toronto writer Amy Stuart has created a following with her thrillers “Still Mine,” “Still Water” and “Still Here.” This one is a bit different: a stand-alone thriller set at a garden party that has Virginia Woolf’s novel “Mrs. Dalloway” at its core. As Stuart describes it in a note, she aimed to merge: “a classic structure with a modern thriller’s twists and turns.” Stuart is part of a smart coterie of Canadian women who write highly entertaining books that never talk down to their readers.

Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia, David Graeber (Signal): Cultural anthropologist David Graeber famously wrote “Bulls–t Jobs: why they exist and why you might have one” and “Debt: The first 5,000 Years, and is known as an activist, intellectual and critic of inequality. Toward the end of his life (Graeber died in 2020 at age 59), he returned to research on pirates in Madagascar that he had begun in graduate school, after travelling to the island. He unearthed some tantalizing accounts and, with his own notes and stories and other research, pieced together a fascinating story of an egalitarian group of former pirates who founded a republic called Libertalia in the early 1700s. The result is the entertaining and fascinating posthumously published “Pirate Enlightenment.”

Some Unfinished Business, Antanas Sileika (Cormorant): Toronto writer Antanas Sileika has long mined his Lithuanian roots in his fiction: including books such as his 2017 memoir “The Barefoot Bingo Caller” and his 2019 novel “Provisionally Yours,” a spy thriller set in post-First World War Lithuania. In the notes of the latter he writes that his home country was, for much of its existence, caught between the “hammer of Germany and the anvil of the Soviet Union.” In “Some Unfinished Business,” he returns to the tension of the spy thriller, in which he explores love and betrayal and justice.

Displacement City, edited by Greg Cook and Cathy Crowe (University of Toronto Press): Anyone who visited downtown Toronto during the pandemic knows the devastating and powerful impact it had on the city’s homeless. Outreach worker Greg Cook and street nurse Cathy Crowe have a deep knowledge of the people behind the statistics and the headlines, and here create a better understanding of how policies affect people. In this powerful book, they have collected poetry, photography, essays that tell the stories of front-line workers, advocates, people who are unhoused. These include experiences living in the shelter system, displacement, the legacy of residential schools and the experience of the Indigenous population. A unique and powerful account.

SHARE: