A Canada Reads finalist for her novel The Bone Cage, Angie Abdou (a frequent Q&Q reviewer) unveils a third novel that deals with the charged subject of live-in nannies from the Philippines. Told from the alternating perspectives of Vero, an overextended mother of two, and Ligaya, the family’s nanny, Between (Arsenal Pulp Press, $18.95 pa., Oct.) is a contemporary satire about marriage, parenthood, and cultural disparity. • Russell Wangersky, author of the Giller-shortlisted story collection Whirl Away, is back this fall with a new novel. Walt (House of Anansi Press, $22.95 pa., Sept.) tells the story of the eponymous cleaner at a grocery store who claims his wife abandoned him. Local police, however, don’t believe his account of the woman’s disappearance. • One of the books up against Whirl Away on the 2012 Giller shortlist was Ru, the first of Montreal writer Kim Thúy’s novels to be translated into English. (The French edition won a Governor General’s Literary Award.) Thúy’s follow-up, about a married chef in Montreal who embarks on an affair with a Parisian, is due in August from Random House Canada. Like its predecessor, Mãn ($25 cl.) is translated by Sheila Fischman.

Joan Thomas’s previous novel, Curiosity, was longlisted for the Giller in 2010. Her new book, The Opening Sky (McClelland & Stewart, $29.95 cl., Aug.), is about a modern family who must confront the long shadow of the past, in particular the spectre of four missing children who disappeared from an artists’ retreat years previously. • Giller winner Johanna Skibsrud returns with an ambitious novel that explores memory and history from the little-known Bonus Army Riots of 1932 through the Second World War and beyond. Hamish Hamilton Canada will publish Quartet for the End of Time ($30 cl.) in September. • Musharraf Ali Farooqi’s 2008 novel, The Story of a Widow, was longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His most recent, Between Clay and Dust ($19.95 pa., Sept.), was nominated for the 2012 Man Asian Literary Prize. The novel, about a wrestler in post-partition India who befriends an elderly courtesan, will be published in Canada by Freehand Books.

David Bezmozgis was named one of The New Yorker’s top 20 under 40 writers, and his debut novel, 2011’s The Free World, was shortlisted for the Giller. Bezmozgis’s sophomore novel, The Betrayers ($29.99 cl.), about an Israeli politician whose enemies attempt to disgrace him by exposing his affair with a much younger woman, is out from HarperCollins Canada in August. • It has been six years since the publication of Lee Henderson’s first novel, The Man Game. His follow-up is about the quixotically named Wendy Ashbubble, an aspiring comics artist who suspects she might be the daughter of Ronald Reagan. High-­quality marijuana, junk bonds, mysterious disappearances, and demonology all factor into The Road Narrows as You Go (Hamish Hamilton Canada, $32 cl.), due out in September. • As a poet, Dionne Brand has won the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, the Trillium Book Award, and the Griffin Poetry Prize, among others. She returns to the novel form with a book about the nature of love and our contemporary urban lives. Love Enough (Knopf Canada, $26.99 cl.) appears in September. • Seven years after her collection of short(er) fiction, Long Story Short, Elyse Friedman returns with a new publisher – HarperCollins Canada imprint Patrick Crean Editions – and a new novel. The Answer to Everything ($26.99 cl., Aug.) follows a misanthropic, unemployed artist who launches a New Age cult with his pot-­smoking, eccentric neighbour.