Christie Vuong/The Globe and Mail
Martha Sharpe, Flying Books (Toronto)
TOP SELLERS “The top-selling book so far this year is The Creative Act by Rick Rubin. Many customers mentioned having listened to it on the Broken Record podcast. But if we add in numbers at launch events, then it’s Margaret Atwood’s Old Babes in the Wood. We are located in downtown Toronto, and this is the Atwoodian era. Also, she’s very good at getting the human experience onto the page and making it seem effortless.”
RECOMMENDING City in Flames by Tomas Hachard: “It’s a dystopian love story, and the more the real world develops dystopian features, the more eerily relevant and strangely helpful this novel becomes.”
The Globe 100: The best books of 2023
Heather Doran, Bookmark (Charlottetown)
TOP SELLERS Island-born musician Tara MacLean’s memoir Song of the Sparrow and Some Hellish by Nicholas Herring, featuring a lobster fisherman grappling with the meaning of existence.
RECOMMENDING “Michael Crummey has been a store favourite, and he was just here on tour. Message in a Bottle, by wildlife biologist Holly Hogan, was another favourite this year, and we were lucky enough to have her on tour, as well.”
Mary-Ann Yazedjian, Black Bond Books (Vancouver)
TOP SELLERS Black Bond Books has six locations across Vancouver’s Lower Mainland, and Yazedjian says their top-selling books are as individual as the neighbourhoods in which they’re located: Daniel Kalla’s Fit to Die (Main Street store); Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead (Broadway store); Prince Harry’s Spare (Maple Ride store); Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi (Central City store); The Perfect Sushi by Emily Satoko Seo and Mique Moriuchi (Ladner store); and Terry & Me by Bill Vigars (Semiahmoo store).
RECOMMENDING As a team, they decided on Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin; Still Life by Sarah Winman; Empress of the Nile by Lynne Olson; and Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt.
Peter Garden, Turning the Tide (Saskatoon)
TOP SELLER Stay Up: Racism, Resistance, and Reclaiming Black Freedom by Khodi Dill, who teaches high school in Saskatoon. “It’s a well-woven combination of memoir and anti-racism theory. Dill has quickly become a trusted author of books for children and youth after the release of his Little Black Lives Matter earlier this year and Welcome to the Cypher in 2021, which were also popular titles for us. His latest book is great for adults, too.”
RECOMMENDING Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger, which “combines her usual brilliant and incisive analysis mixed with a refreshing dose of personal reflection.”
AUTHORS’ BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR, PLUS THE ONES THEY’RE GIFTING
Janie Chang, The Porcelain Moon
BOOK OF THE YEAR “I’m a sucker for feminist retellings of myths. House Of Odysseus by Claire North is the second in a trilogy, and I’m waiting impatiently for the final instalment. This is the story of Penelope, who is running the kingdom of Ithaca as she waits for Odysseus to come home from the Trojan War. The men are off on adventures, and the women are working hard to keep Ithaca and its economy solvent. It’s smart, snarky and engrossing.”
WHAT I’M GIFTING “I love cookbooks, and I love The Buddhist Chef by Jean-Philippe Cyr. I often read them at bedtime to calm down from the stresses of the day. Sometimes I buy beautiful cookbooks and read them, but never actually cook from them.”
Esi Edugyan, Garden of Lost Socks
BOOK OF THE YEAR “I really enjoyed Walter Isaacson’s biography Elon Musk. I began reading it on the first day of a two-week trip across several cities and found myself finishing just as I flew home. It was a fascinating view on a world I knew little about, and I was awed, admiring and appalled in equal measure. A totally engrossing read.”
WHAT I’M GIFTING “I finally sat down with Hernan Diaz’s Trust. What a lovely puzzle of a novel, so elegant in its restraint. I might also give Natasha Trethewey’s Memorial Drive, a memoir of her mother’s murder and her reckoning with life’s meaning beyond it. I haven’t been so moved by a work in years. Her words are devastating and beautiful.”
Ken Dryden, The Class
BOOK OF THE YEAR “In The Maniac, Benjamin Labatut captures the human instinct to discover and understand why things are as they are, the all-consuming excitement, frustration, and need of scientists and mathematicians to do so, their quest always elusive, the implications for the future unknowable. And he does all this, powerfully, rivetingly, in his second language.”
Adriana Chartrand, An Ordinary Violence
BOOK OF THE YEAR “I am still thinking about Last Winter by Carrie Mac after reading it in February. Its depiction of mental illness, family ties and small-town mountain life were absolutely riveting – incredibly poignant without being mawkish, real and unforgettable.”
WHAT I’M GIFTING “Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe’s When McKinsey Comes to Town sheds a lot of light on the machinations of capitalism. I would gift it this year because it reveals much about how some of the most powerful forces of our contemporary world, including governments and massive corporations, function, while revealing the often devastating influence of a seemingly ‘liberal’ firm with tentacles everywhere.”
Sarah Blakley-Cartwright, Alice Sadie Celine
BOOK OF THE YEAR “I expected to not like Big Swiss by Jen Beagin, but I picked it up anyway because it seemed so much of the moment, with its zeitgeisty spirit of expression and offhand feminist ethos. It blew me out of the water. With its refreshingly wry humanism and its zippy pacing, this novel is an exhilarating ride.”
WHAT I’M GIFTING “We All Want Impossible Things by Catherine Newman confounds. As it breaks your heart for the hundredth time, you’ll wonder, Why am I laughing? For such powerful emotions to coincide in the span of a sentence is a testament to this writer’s prodigious gifts and would seem an impossible thing were it not right there in black and white.”