Over the course of three instalments, Q&Q presents the titles we’re most excited about this fall. This week’s instalment features novels. Short fiction, graphic novels, and poetry will be featured next week, with nonfiction to be featured on Aug. 7. 

Q&Q’s fall preview covers books published between July 1 and Dec. 31, 2024. All information (titles, publication dates) was supplied by publishers. Books that have appeared in previous editions of the preview but whose publication was postponed are not included. 

Farida 
Monia Mazigh, Phyllis Aronoff and Howard Scott, trans.
Mawenzi House, Aug.

Academic, writer, and activist Monia Mazigh’s latest novel traces the life of a woman living in Tunis, from her youth using the beautiful literature of the colonizing French as her secret refuge from a brutal husband, to her later independence alongside the gradual independence of Tunisia itself. –Andrew Woodrow-Butcher

Blackheart Man
Nalo Hopkinson
Saga Press/Simon & Schuster, Aug.

Nalo Hopkinson’s first novel in six years is a dark fantasy reimagining Caribbean culture that follows a griot-in-training whose scholarly ambitions are interrupted – and whose heroics go wrong – when his island is invaded by an army led by the demon Blackheart Man. –Attila Berki

In Winter I Get Up at Night
Jane Urquhart
McClelland & Stewart, Aug.

In her first novel in nearly a decade, CanLit legend Jane Urquhart tells the story of Emer McConnell, who teaches children music in the schools of rural Saskatchewan. The practical facts of this work mean she wakes in the dark in the winter months, and as she moves through physical space she undergoes an introspective journey that explores the story of her life – and of our times. –Cassandra Drudi

Oil People
David Huebert
McClelland & Stewart, Aug.

A first novel by the award-winning short fiction writer (Chemical Valley) examines the heritage of Canada’s first commercial oil exploitation – its impact on people and the environment – in the story of Clyde Armbruster, who strikes oil in Lambton County, Ontario, in 1862, and his descendants, whose lives more than a century later are still shaped by that legacy. –AB

Peggy
Rebecca Godfrey with Leslie Jamison
Knopf Canada, Aug.

Rebecca Godfrey’s final novel tells the story of art collector, bohemian, and socialite Peggy Guggenheim. Godfrey takes a different approach to Guggenheim, taking her seriously as a whole person instead of writing her off as an heiress with no taste splashing her money around. Godfrey died before she was able to complete the book, but her friend, writer Leslie Jamison, took up the pen posthumously, based on drafts, notes, and conversations. –CD

The Capital of Dreams
Heather O’Neill
HarperCollins, Sept.

This dark fairy tale is filled with myths, and the magic of a master storyteller. Set, unusually for Heather O’Neill, in a forgotten European country, a young girl is tasked with smuggling to safety her famous mother’s latest manuscript, as war brings destruction to her world. –AB

Chandelier
David O’Meara
Nightwood Editions, Sept.

Award-winning poet David O’Meara turns to prose in this debut novel that examines the dysfunction of a modern family by taking a three-part look at a young adult and her divorced parents as they navigate life’s challenging offerings. –CD

Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim
Jacob Wren
Book*hug, Sept.

A writer travels to see a friend in a war-torn country despite the practical and ethical dubiousness of his motives and actions. An intriguing examination of building a utopia, the support of political causes not our own, and how personal social values can be complicit in global conflicts. –AB

Hi, It’s Me
Fawn Parker
McClelland & Stewart, Sept.

A woman goes to a farmhouse, where she will stay in her recently deceased mother’s room while cataloguing her last possessions and deciding what to keep and what to offload. In Hi, It’s Me, Fawn Parker portrays the realities of fresh grief and the relationship between the living and the dead. –CD

I Never Said That I Was Brave
Tasneem Jamal
House of Anansi Press, Sept.

By the author of Where the Air Is Sweet, a novel about shifting dynamics and betrayal in the lives of two women, both childhood immigrants to Canada from Uganda, as they assimilate into Canadian society and chafe against the expectations of their South Asian community. –AB

Juiceboxers
Benjamin Hertwig
Freehand Books, Sept.

This debut novel by a former soldier examines masculinity, war, friendship, white supremacy, trauma, and loss in a story about four young military recruits whose lives are forever changed by their service in Afghanistan. –AB

May Our Joy Endure
Kevin Lambert; Donald Winkler, trans.
Biblioasis, Sept.

Like his previous works, including Querelle of Roberval, Kevin Lambert’s new novel has garnered acclaim and won multiple awards in the original French. A philosophical critique of the ultra-privileged, it tells of a famous architect who returns to her hometown and creates a furor with a widely condemned Montreal megaproject. –AB

real ones
katherena vermette
Hamish Hamilton, Sept.

In this fourth novel from award-winning author katherena vermette, two Michif sisters are plunged back into traumatic moments from their past when their estranged – and very white – mother is publicly called out as a “pretendian” after succeeding for her Indigenous-style artwork. –CD

Subterrane
Valérie Bah
Véhicule Press, Oct.

In their English-language debut, Québécois novelist Valérie Bah offers a dystopic comedy that catalogues the lives of queer and Black artists, activists, and outsiders living in and around the “prosperous” city of New Stockholm. –AWB

This Bright Dust
Nina Berkhout
Goose Lane Editions, Sept.

As two families struggle to keep their debt-ridden farms going on the Prairies in 1939 – in the shadow of looming war – the forthcoming royal tour by the King and Queen to rally troops offers both hope and disillusionment in this new work by the author of The Gallery of Lost Species. –AB

White World
Saad T. Farooqi
Cormorant Books, Sept.

In the midst of a civil war, and having raised the ire of both the army and some local gangsters, Avaan doesn’t seem to have much to live for, or much chance of surviving. Saad T. Farooqi’s debut novel offers a dystopian vision of love and resistance in late-21st-century Pakistan. –AWB

The Wedding
Gurjinder Basran
Douglas & McIntyre, Sept.

However Far Away
Rajinderpal S. Pal
House of Anansi Press, Aug.

This fall’s offerings include two novels set against Sikh weddings in Vancouver that unravel family secrets and the lives of the wedding parties, guests, and event staff – one a debut by Rajinderpal S. Pal and the other by Gurjinder Basran, author of Everything Was Goodbye. –AB

All You Can Kill
Pasha Malla
Coach House Books, Oct.

In Pasha Malla’s fourth novel, a narrator and his accidental companion find themselves impersonating a purportedly dead couple at an island wellness retreat. But the holidaying turns dark when a guillotine and a haunted chapel are revealed on an excursion to a nearby deserted village – followed by the murder of a guest and the arrival of the impersonated couple. –CD 

The Coming Bad Days
Sarah Bernstein
Knopf Canada, Oct.

This debut novel from Montreal-born and Scotland-based author Sarah Bernstein was first published in the U.K. in 2021, and arrives on Canadian shelves a year after her second novel, Study for Obedience, won the Giller Prize. A woman moves to a university town, joins an academic department to study poet Paul Celan, and lives in self-imposed exile that is interrupted when she meets Clara, her opposite. The women’s friendship grows until an act of violence interrupts it. –CD

The Diapause
Andrew Forbes
Invisible Publishing, Oct.

In one of two novels out this fall from Andrew Forbes, 10-year-old Gabriel and his parents retreat to his late grandfather’s cabin to wait out a pandemic. But the idyllic childhood summer begins to reveal tensions in the family unit, and over the novel’s near half-century time span, Forbes explores themes of family and isolation, and all the ways in which we don’t know the people we think we know best. –CD

Keep
Jenny Haysom
House of Anansi Press, Oct.

If our minds are aptly metaphorized as houses, what does it mean to pack up and move? To downsize? Or to hire stagers – strangers paid to depersonalize? Jenny Haysom’s debut novel asks these questions through her protagonists Harriet, a dementia-stricken poet who is being moved from her home to a home, and Eleanor and Jacob, the home-stagers charged with sifting through and dealing with Harriet’s lifetime of furniture and knick-knackery, both real and psychic. –AWB

The Reeds
Arjun Basu
ECW Press, Oct.

The optimistic tale of a slightly dysfunctional, loving, middle-class, west-end Montreal family as they navigate the modern world of work, internet fame, and gender by the author of the Giller-longlisted Waiting for the Man. –AB

I Might Be in Trouble
Daniel Aleman
Grand Central Publishing, Dec.

When once-successful novelist David Alvarez went to bed with a handsome stranger the night before, it seemed at least his love life might be looking up, if not his career. But when he awakens the next day to find the fellow lying next to him dead, the first person he thinks to call is his literary agent, Stacey. Can the two of them figure out what happened, possibly dispose of a body … and also use this as the basis of his next book? –AWB

MYSTERY/THRILLER

Glass Houses
Madeline Ashby
Tor Books/Raincoast Books, Aug.

Employees of an AI company who survive a crash on a seemingly deserted island find refuge in a mysterious luxury home decked out with the latest technology. The crash is but the first test for the group in this thriller by the author of the Canada Reads shortlisted Company Town. –AB

The Grey Wolf
Louise Penny
Minotaur Books/Raincoast Books, Oct.

The 19th outing of the sympathetic Chief Inspector Gamache. What more needs to be said of this ever-popular series set in the Eastern Townships village of Three Pines? –AB

Murder on Painted Place
Emily Hepditch
Flanker Press, Oct.

In this third thriller from Newfoundland writer Emily Hepditch, six strangers are invited to the remote island mansion of a legendary portrait artist after his death to explore the home and inherit his art collection, when a storm strands them in the North Atlantic. The next morning, a guest is dead, and murder looks likely. –CD

Satellite Image
Michelle Berry
Buckrider Books/Wolsak & Wynn, Oct.

Michelle Berry’s literary thrillers deserve a much wider readership. Following on the terrific Everything Turns Away, Berry’s new tale is of a couple discovering that the move to an affordable small town is not what they expected. –AB