Heather Birrell’s debut novel finds a high school English teacher going into labour during a lockdown
Birrell employs a variation on Faulkner's structure in As I Lay Dying.
Extremely online: Two new novels explore the brutal nihilism of digital addiction and its effects
rekt tells much the same story as Feeders, but from a dude's perspective.
Choice cuts: In The Butcher’s Daughter, Canadian writers David Demchuk and Corrine Leigh Clarke reimagine one of Broadway’s nastiest bakers
The Butcher's Daughter may best be enjoyed by those unfamiliar with The String of Pearls or the musical Sweeney Todd.
Future (un)certain: An unconventional POV undercuts the emotional force in Jean-Phillippe Baril Guérard’s You Crushed It
Guérard's novel gives the impression that the author is impatient with traditional narrative forms.
“Anyhow, he gives large parties”: On the centenary of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
In Gatsby, we find the apotheosis of Fitzgerald's novelistic voice.
“I authentically admire his legacy”: Sash Bischoff on how F. Scott Fitzgerald influenced her debut novel, Sweet Fury
"I sort of lucked into the idea that Fitzgerald should be a part of this book."
Casualties of war: Poet Otoniya J. Okot Bitek’s debut novel focuses on the girls kidnapped by the Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army
Okot Bitek uses local folklore as a metaphorical way of bringing the girls' experience into relief.
In Clay McLeod Chapman’s savage new novel, digital wellness gurus and a far-right news channel serve as linchpins for the apocalypse
Chapman's book is about as far from subtle as it's possible to get.
Hildur Knútsdóttir’s psychological horror story The Night Guest uses spare language and elision to heighten the feeling of creeping dread
Knútsdóttir places the reader in close proximity to Iðunn's psyche via an unreliable first-person narration.
Working blue: In her sophomore novel, Brittany Newell probes the limits of desire and loneliness
Newell unfolds a tale that is, in places, almost unbearably sad in its portrayal of contemporary anomie.