Slideshow: spring preview highlights 2012

In the January/February issue, Q&Q looks ahead at some of the spring season’s new books. Covering Canadian fiction, non-fiction, children’s books, and international titles, the highlights below are a sample of 2012 titles from rising stars, critical darlings, reader favourites, and familiar faces, not to mention plenty of authors who seem poised to break out.

Check out Q&Q’s spring previews in each category for more information.

The fine print: Q&Q’s spring preview covers books published between Jan. 1 and June 30, 2012. All information (titles, prices, publication dates, etc.) was supplied by publishers and may have been tentative at Q&Q’s press time.

Spring preview 2012: international books

In the January/February issue, Q&Q looks ahead at the spring season’s new books.

FICTION

Two prolific American literary novelists are set to publish new titles this spring. Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize winner Toni Morrison is back with her 10th novel, Home (Knopf Canada, $25.95 cl., May). Exploring themes of masculinity and belonging, the short novel follows a self-loathing Korean War veteran as he surmounts defeat and finds a place to call home. • Also in May, part-time Toronto resident John Irving returns with his 13th novel, In One Person (Knopf Canada, $34.95 cl.), a tragicomedy narrated by a bisexual protagonist who reflects on life as a boy, a young man, and an adult.

Jack Kerouac’s first novel, The Sea Is My Brother (Da Capo Press/Raincoast, $26.50 cl., March), was written in the 1940s but never published. One of several Kerouac manuscripts that has recently resurfaced, the story follows the divergent fortunes of two sailors and explores an important theme in Kerouac’s later work: rebellion. • A book of little-known stories written by Anton Chekhov at the end of his career is forthcoming from Biblioasis. About Love ($12.95 pa., May), the Russian writer’s only linked collection, is translated by David Helwig and contains illustrations by Seth.

One of the most buzzed about debut novels of the season is Karen Thompson Walker’s The Age of Miracles (Bond Street Books/Random House, $29.95 cl., June), a unique coming-of-age story about a young girl who wakes up one morning to discover that the rotation of the earth has begun to slow, upending life as she knows it.

Jodi Picoult’s new novel, Lone Wolf (Atria/Simon & Schuster, $32 cl., Feb.), tells the story of two siblings who disagree over the treatment of their comatose father. • Best known for his 2003 novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, British author Mark Haddon returns with The Red House (Doubleday Canada, $29.95 cl., June). The book is narrated by eight characters, all related, who spend a week together in a countryside vacation home.

From the best-selling (co-)author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies comes another new take on an old story. Seth Grahame-Smith’s Unholy Night (Grand Central Publishing/Hachette, $27.99 cl., April) reimagines the personalities of the three kings of the nativity, injecting the well-known Bible tale with thievery, escape, and intrigue. • The author of 12 previous novels, Christopher Moore continues in the surreal, satirical style of Lamb and Fool in his latest book, Sacré Bleu: A Comedy d’Art (William Morrow/HarperCollins, $34.99 cl., March), which follows friends of Vincent van Gogh as they vow to uncover the truth behind the painter’s death. • Neurosurgeon and medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta, whose non-fiction books Chasing Life and Cheating Death were New York Times bestsellers, makes his first foray into fiction with Monday Mornings (Grand Central/Hachette, $27.99 cl., March). In the vein of TV medical dramas, the novel follows the daily lives of five surgeons.

From Argentinean writer Liliana Heker comes The End of the Story (Biblioasis, $19.95 pa., April), a novel about Argentina’s Dirty War translated by Andrea Labinger. Set in 1976, the book follows a group of women living against a backdrop of state-sponsored violence. • Waiting for the Monsoon (House of Anansi Press, $24.95 pa., Feb.), by Threes Anna and translated from the Dutch by Barbara Fasting, is about a British woman’s relationship with the Indian tailor to whom she rents a room in her crumbling mansion.

Australian author Elliot Perlman’s third novel, The Street Sweeper (Bond Street Books/Random House, $32.95 cl., Jan.), explores the unlikely intersection of two characters’ lives: a history professor whose career and relationship are unravelling, and a black man from the Bronx who struggles to reintegrate after serving a prison term for a crime he didn’t commit.

MYSTERY, CRIME, AND FANTASY

Stephen King’s latest novel, The Wind Through the Keyhole (Scribner/S&S, $29.99 cl.), is set to publish in April. The eighth book in the Dark Tower series – chronologically set between volumes four and five – tells the story of gunslinger Roland Deschain’s first quest. • Camilla Läckberg is a household name in her native Sweden. In The Drowning (HarperCollins, $19.99 pa., April), translated by Tiina Nunnally, a man is found murdered and frozen beneath the ice. After discovering a similar incident, police realize the killings are connected and look into each victim’s past for clues. • Best-selling psychological suspense writer Brian Freeman returns with Spilled Blood (Sterling/Canadian Manda Group, $29.95 cl., May), the story of two Minnesota towns locked in a violent feud over the carcinogenic waste one town’s research corporation is releasing into the other community.

U.K. writer Benjamin Wood, who completed a master’s degree in creative writing at the University of British Columbia, is set to publish his debut mystery novel. In The Bellwether Revivals (McClelland & Stewart, $29.99 cl., March), bodies turn up near an elegant Cambridge house, and the young narrator and his lover become entangled in the search for the villain. • The 500 (Little, Brown/Hachette, $28.99 cl., June), a first novel from Matthew Quirk that is in development as a feature film, follows a young lawyer at a powerful Washington, D.C., consulting firm as he is pursued by two of the world’s most dangerous men. • A New York family is involved in a financial scandal in lawyer Cristina Alger’s debut thriller, The Darlings (Penguin, $28.50 cl., Feb.).

In Sara Paretsky’s latest crime thriller, Breakdown (G.P. Putnam and Sons/Penguin, $28.50 cl., Jan.), girls from some of Chicago’s most powerful families stumble upon a corpse in an abandoned cemetery. Detective V.I. Warshawski investigates childhood secrets to get to the bottom of the killing. • In Cloudland (St. Martin’s/Raincoast, $28.99 cl., March), the latest crime novel from Joseph Olshan, a newspaper reporter gets involved with the search for a serial killer after discovering a murder victim’s body. Meanwhile, a failed love affair surfaces and acquaintances emerge as suspects.

BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR

Sally Bedell Smith’s biography, Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch (Random House, $34 cl., Jan.), chronicles the public persona and private life of the reigning English monarch, offering a close-up view of her routines and relationships. • In Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World (HarperCollins, $24.99 cl., Jan.), biographer Simon Callow explores the Victorian novelist’s status as an early celebrity and his little-known love of the stage.

Iconic American singer-songwriter Carole King is set to publish a memoir, A Natural Woman (Grand Central/Hachette, $29.99 cl., April). Chronicling King’s early years, her musical career, and her present-day activism, the book features behind-the-scenes concert photographs.

Revolution 2.0 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/Thomas Allen & Son, $29.95 cl., Jan.) is former Google executive Wael Ghonim’s first-hand account of his capture and interrogation in Cairo during the Arab Spring protests. The memoir also looks at how social media helped foment revolution. • Norwegian writer Halfdan W. Freihow reflects on his attempts to help his son, who has autism, make sense of the world in Somewhere Over the Sea (Anansi, $14.95 pa., June), translated by Robert Ferguson with a foreword by The Boy in the Moon author Ian Brown.

What Do You Want to Do Before You Die? (Artisan/Thomas Allen, $23.95 cl., April) follows four twentysomethings during their journey to complete a 100-item bucket list. Five years into their quest, Ben Nemtin, Dave Lingwood, Duncan Penn, and Jonnie Penn share what they’ve accomplished.

POETRY

Political activist, writer, and Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo has become a symbol of the struggle for human rights in China. His collection June Fourth Elegies (Graywolf/D&M Publishers, $27.50 cl., April), translated by Jeffrey Yang, honours the memory of fellow protesters in the Tiananmen Square massacre.

GRAPHICA

Following his internationally acclaimed debut, The Wrong Place, Belgian graphic novelist Brecht Evens is back with The Making Of (Drawn & Quarterly, $27.95 pa., May). Using watercolour images and deadpan humour, the book details the misadventures of an honoured guest at a country art festival. • Tom Gauld reimagines a familiar Bible story in Goliath (D&Q, $19.95 cl., Feb.). Focusing on the reluctant fighter, the graphic novel pairs minimalist drawings and witty prose. • In My Friend Dahmer (Abrams/Manda, $27.95 cl., March), cartoonist John “Derf” Backderf creates a haunting, intimate portrait of Jeffrey Dahmer, a high school friend who later became the notorious American serial killer.

POLITICS AND CURRENT AFFAIRS

New York Times Washington correspondent Jodi Kantor invites readers on a tour of the White House in The Obamas (Little, Brown/Hachette, $32.99 cl., Jan.), a detailed look at the family’s attempts to lead a normal life while juggling public roles and responsibilities. • The decade-long search for Osama bin Laden is the subject of CNN national security analyst and Holy War, Inc. author Peter L. Bergen’s new book, Manhunt (Doubleday Canada, $29.95 cl., May). • In Newstainment: Why the News Is Bad for You (Picador/Raincoast, $18.50 pa., June), Chase Whiteside and Erick Stoll argue that brief, up-to-the-moment bulletins are revolutionizing news media but failing political discourse.

Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid confronts crucial questions about U.S. foreign policy in Pakistan on the Brink: The Future of America, Pakistan, and Afghanistan (Viking, $28.50 cl., March). A follow-up to the acclaimed Descent into Chaos, Rashid’s latest explores solutions for achieving stability in the war-torn region. • In Heaven on Earth: A Journey Through Shari’a Law from the Deserts of Ancient Arabia to the Streets of the Modern Muslim World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux/D&M Publishers, $31 cl., April), U.K. human rights lawyer Sadakat Kadri takes an historical approach to explaining the evolution and implications of Islamic law.

An economics historian, British MP, and son of African immigrants, Kwasi Kwarteng explores the global reverberations of colonial history in Ghosts of Empire: Britain’s Legacies in the Modern World (Public Affairs/Raincoast, $34.50 cl., Feb.).

HISTORY

Long before the earthquake that ravaged Haiti in 2010, the country had a history of poverty and corruption. In Haiti: The Aftershocks of History (Henry Holt and Company/Raincoast, $29 cl., Jan.), Laurent Dubois traces the Caribbean nation’s troubles back to the 1804 slave revolt and sheds light on the country’s overlooked successes. • Jenny Balfour-Paul probes the roots of the world’s oldest dye in Indigo: Egyptian Mummies to Blue Jeans (Firefly Books, $39.95 pa., Jan.). Covering the history, science, and cultural significance of indigo dye, the full-colour book also explores its use in sustainable development initiatives.

LIFESTYLE, SCIENCE, AND SELF-HELP

Following his quests to read the Encyclopedia Britannica from cover to cover (The Know-It-All) and live according to a literal interpretation of the Bible (The Year of Living Biblically), A.J. Jacobs is back with another experiment. Drop Dead Healthy: One Man’s Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection (S&S, $29.99 cl., April) follows his efforts to become the healthiest man in the world. • Tae kwon do master Jim Langlas discusses seven principles of the martial art that also build character in Heart of a Warrior: 7 Ancient Secrets to a Great Life (Free Spirit/Georgetown, $17.50 pa., April). • For fans of Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret comes another guide to living a fulfilling life. The Tools (Random House Canada, $29.95 cl., June), by Phil Stutz and Barry Michels, identifies and offers solutions to four common barriers that hold people back.

FOOD AND DRINK

First Lady Michelle Obama argues for the need to improve access to healthy, affordable food in her first book, American Grown: How the White House Kitchen Garden Inspires Families, Schools, and Communities (Crown/Random House, $34 cl., April.). • Food writer (and son of Baskin-Robbins founder) John Robbins goes undercover in No Happy Cows: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the Food Revolution (Conari Press/Georgetown, $18.95 pa., March) to investigate the feedlots and slaughterhouses that satisfy modern appetites. • In The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Food from My Frontier (Morrow/HarperCollins, $38.99 cl., March), best-selling author, blogger, and ranch wife Ree Drummond shares easy country cooking recipes.

The fine print: Q&Q’s spring preview covers books published between Jan. 1 and June 30, 2012. All information (titles, prices, publication dates, etc.) was supplied by publishers and may have been tentative at Q&Q’s press time. • Titles that have been listed in previous previews do not appear here.

Spring preview 2012: books for young people

In the January/February issue, Q&Q looks ahead at the spring season’s new books.

FICTION

Spring sees the Canadian launch of Penguin Canada’s Razorbill imprint for young readers, and the publishing house is banking on a couple of high-profile releases to set the ball in motion. The follow-up to Hiromi Goto’s Sunburst Award–winning Half World is Darkest Light ($21 cl., Feb.), in which 16-year-old orphan Gee embarks on a dark journey of discovery. Jillian Tamaki again lends her considerable talent to the illustrations. • Vancouver paramedic turned scribe Carrie Mac explores what happens when the messy life of 15-year-old Junie is further complicated by her mother’s compulsive hoarding in The Opposite of Tidy ($16 pa., April).

In Toronto author Helaine Becker’s How to Survive Absolutely Anything (Fitzhenry & Whiteside, $9.95 pa., April), Bonnie and her best friend, Jen, start an advice blog for the middle-school set. But can Bonnie’s wise ways prevail when it comes to her troublesome new stepbrother, Carter? • Alice Kuipers’ debut, Life on the Refrigerator Door, was published in 29 countries. In her third novel, 40 Things I Want to Tell You (HarperCollins Canada, $14.99 pa., Feb.), Amy (a.k.a. Bird) is another advice-doling teen who has trouble practicing what she preaches when a new “bad boy” shows up at school and threatens her relationship with her long-time steady. • Pajama Press has Nova Scotian Sylvia Gunnery’s new novel, Emily for Real ($14.95 pa., March), which revolves around a 17-year-old girl who, after a bad breakup and the revelation of some scandalous family secrets, finds solace in an unlikely friendship with a troubled classmate. • Eileen Cook has a reputation for writing funny, realistic junior chick-lit with a twist. Her latest, Unraveling Isobel (Simon & Schuster, $18.99 cl., Jan.) follows a similar path, with the titular character facing the challenges of her dippy mother’s hasty marriage to an Internet beau, her relocation to a remote small town, her dreamy stepbrother, and the possibility that she just might be losing her mind.

Teresa Toten, of the witty Blonde series, has teamed up with the unstoppable Eric Walters for The Taming (Doubleday Canada, $14.95 pa., Jan.), which bills itself as a cross between Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist and The Taming of the Shrew. • Debut novelist Leah Bobet creates a safe haven for outsiders and shape-shifters under the streets of Toronto in her dystopian romance Above (Scholastic Canada, $19.99 cl., March). • Degrassi Junior High scriptwriter Kathryn Ellis makes her YA debut with Home in Time for Dinner (Red Deer Press, $12.95 pa., May), in which a boy discovers he was the victim of parental abduction when he spots a digitally aged picture of himself on the news.

There is no denying the immense popularity of Kelley Armstrong’s sexy, dark teen fantasy novels. The Calling (Doubleday Canada, $19.99 cl., April) is the second instalment in her Darkness Rising trilogy. In it, Maya’s small Vancouver Island town is threatened by an arsonist’s forest fire. Her affinity with wild animals in the surrounding woods may be her only hope for survival. • From Great Plains Teen Fiction comes Jocelyn Shipley’s How to Tend a Grave ($14.95 pa., April), a story about a chance meeting in a cemetery between a teenaged boy who has lost his mother and a girl who has lost her baby.

Best known for her Stella and Sam series of picture books, Marie-Louise Gay once again teams up with husband David Homel for a sequel to their two previous travelogues. This time Charlie and his family explore their own metropolis of Montreal in Summer in the City (Groundwood Books, $15.95 cl., April). • Fourteen-year-old Johanna longs to see what life is like outside of the Jewish quarter in Anne Dublin’s 18th-century historical novel The Baby Experiment (Dundurn Press, $9.99 pa., May). When she discovers that babies in the Hamburg orphanage where she works are being used for experiments, she is forced to grow up quickly. • A Jewish girl and a Christian boy find friendship and hope together in pre-revolutionary Russia in Rachel’s Secret (Second Story Press, $12.95 pa., April) by first-time novelist Shelly Sanders.

Getting some boys to read can be a perennial challenge, so it’s a good thing Redcoats and Renegades (Thistledown Press, $15.95 pa., March) by B.C. journalist Barry McDivitt is aimed squarely at reluctant readers. McDivitt’s tale centres on a young malcontent from New York who gains the dubious distinction of being the first person arrested by the new North-West Mounted Police and is forced to endure the long, difficult trek to Fort Whoop-Up. • Jean Rae Baxter’s The Way Lies North told the story of Charlotte, a young Loyalist, and her family as they travelled north to Canada during the American Revolution; it was followed by a sequel, Broken Trail. Baxter wraps up the trilogy in Freedom Bound (Ronsdale Press, $11.95 pa., Feb.), in which Charlotte, now 18, ventures to Charleston, South Carolina, to find her new husband, Nick, and help a couple of runaway slaves as they try to survive the waning days of the revolution.

Governor General’s Literary Award winner Michael Bedard showcases his love of poetry in his latest novel for young readers, The Green Man (Tundra Books, $21.99 cl., April). The tragically monikered Ophelia (known only by her first initial) agrees to spend the summer helping her Aunt Emily recover from a heart attack, managing both the elder woman’s home and her chaotic antiquarian bookshop. But O gets more than she bargained for when she unearths a long-buried mystery. • After an auspicious start to his career writing adult fiction, Alberta’s Thomas Wharton has found success in the YA market as well. The Fathomless Fire (Doubleday Canada, $19.95 cl., Jan.), the second instalment of his Perilous Realm trilogy, continues the story of young Will, who returns to the land of Fable and learns that his beloved Rowen is missing. • Red Deer Press is set to publish a debut novel by Alberta’s Amy Bright. Before We Go ($12.95 pa., May) describes a New Year’s Eve like no other when teens Emily and Alex meet at the hospital where Emily is visiting her dying grandmother.

Actor, stable owner, and wife of former Ontario Premier David Peterson, Shelley Peterson showcases her love of horses in the Saddle Creek series for young readers. The sixth novel, Dark Days at Saddle Creek (Dancing Cat Books, $12.95 pa., March) once again features Bird, a girl who is able to communicate with animals. • Vancouver journalist John Lekich is set to publish his third YA novel, The Prisoner of Snowflake Falls (Orca Book Publishers, $12.95 pa., March), in which a 15-year-old burglar is sent to live with a strange family in a small town. When his uncle is sprung from the big house and comes up with a scheme to rob the town’s residents, he must choose between family loyalty and doing the right thing.

Lorimer has tapped sports fanatic Lorna Schultz Nicholson for its new six-book Podium Sports Academy series, the first of which, Rookie ($9.95 pa., March), tells the story of newbie hockey player Aaron Wong, whose team captain seems to have it in for him. • Métis writer Jacqueline Guest is known for her sports-themed and historical YA novels featuring native Canadian protagonists. Her latest, Outcasts of River Falls (Coteau Books, $8.95 pa., April), is a sequel to 2004’s Belle of Batoche. Belle is all grown up, and this time it’s her niece, a young Victorian lady named Kathryn from Toronto, who is in for a bit of culture shock when she arrives in Buffalo Hills, Alberta, and has to come to terms with a heritage she didn’t know about.

Apparently, Q&Q is a fan of Montreal illustrator and graphic novelist Matthew Forsythe. He illustrated My Name Is Elizabeth by Annika Dunklee, which was a 2011 Book of the Year. His debut graphic novel, Ojingogo, was a pick in 2008. The sequel, Jinchalo (Drawn & Quarterly, $19.95 pa., Feb.), follows the pint-sized heroine of Ojingogo on another adventure through Forsythe’s Miyazaki-esque world.

PICTURE BOOKS

Laurel and Hardy, Holmes and Watson, peanut butter and jam – some things just go better together. Robert Munsch and Michael Martchenko figured that out a number of years ago, and have been teaming up to produce silly, insanely popular books ever since. Their latest effort is It’s My Room! (Scholastic Canada, $7.99 pa., $19.99 cl., Feb.), in which Matthew has to battle his relatives and friends for space in the family trailer. • Vicky Metcalf Award winner Sheree Fitch’s latest picture book, Night Sky Wheel Ride (Tradewind Books, $16.95 cl., May) follows the same path as her previous works, with tongue-twisting lines and nonsense words describing a brother and sister as they explore a nighttime fair and embark on a Ferris wheel adventure. Boldly hued illustrations by Quebec artist and author Yayo accompany Fitch’s text.

Following her adorable and clever picture-book debut, Giraffe and Bird, author, illustrator, and designer Rebecca Bender returns with Don’t Laugh at Giraffe (Pajama, $19.95 cl., May), in which Giraffe’s awkward attempt at graceful rehydration is met with laughter from other animals on the savannah. • Canadian Jeremy Tankard (of Boo Hoo Bird and Grumpy Bird fame) illustrates New Yorker Rachel Vail’s story about Liam the pig, who just wants to rock a bunny suit and learn how to hop in Piggy Bunny (Feiwel & Friends/Raincoast Books, $16.99 cl., Feb.). • Nominated in its original French for a 2011 Prix TD de littérature canadienne pour l’enfance et la jeunesse, Martine Audet’s Martin on the Moon ($16.95 cl., April), translated by Sarah Quinn, is set to be published in English by Owlkids. Luc Melanson illustrates the story, about a boy whose imagination first gets him into trouble, then endears him to his classmates.

Simply Read Books is offering Wild Berries ($18.95 cl., April) by Métis and Cree multimedia artist and illustrator Julie Flett. The book, in which a young boy learns to pick wild blueberries with his grandmother on a sunny summer day, includes some words in Cree. • Find Scruncheon and Touton 2: All Around Newfoundland (Creative Book Publishing, $10.95 pa., May) is the sequel to the Where’s Waldo-esque 2011 effort about two dogs on the loose by mother-daughter illustrators Nancy and Laurel Keating.

Known for her adult fiction, Donna Morrissey makes her kidlit debut with Cross Katie Kross (Puffin Canada, $18 cl., Feb.), about a persnickety old woman who goes in search of a personal nirvana free of chores, animals, and bothersome people. Artist Bridgette Morrissey helps out her mom with illustrations. • It’s not all ogres and underwater monsters in the Arctic; there are dwarves too! CBC Radio personality Alan Neal and author Neil Christopher team up to tell the story of Ava and the Little Folk (Inhabit Media, $13.95 cl., March), in which an orphan left on her own by village elders stumbles upon a group of magical munchkins. Iqaluit resident Jonathan Wright’s illustrations offer instant visual appeal.

NON-FICTION

Deborah Ellis continues to do what she does best, chronicling the lives of children in war-torn and Third World countries in stories that resonate with First World readers. In Kids of Kabul: Living Bravely Through a Neverending War (Groundwood, $15.95 cl., April), she revisits the kids who inspired the Breadwinner trilogy 11 years ago to find out what their lives are like now. • Former Chickadee magazine editor Catherine Ripley teams up with illustrator Scot Ritchie on another fact book in the same format as their classic Why? series. How? The Most Awesome Question and Answer Book about Nature, Animals, People, Places – and You! (Owlkids, $19.95 cl.) appears in May. • Combining narrative, photos, comics, maps, and even fake tweets, Hey Canada! (Tundra Books, $21.99 cl., May) by former Vancouver educator Vivien Bowers (with illustrations by Milan Pavlovic) uses a fictional grandma and two grandkids to explore the country from coast to coast, relaying tidbits of history and geography along the way.

A science book with an environmental bent, The Big Green Book of the Big Blue Sea (Kids Can Press, $10.95 pa., $16.95 cl., April) by Helaine Becker, with illustrations by Willow Dawson, uses experiments with everyday objects to teach kids about oceanic ecosystems and the effects of pollution. • Junior CSI fans might enjoy Seeing Red: The True Story of Blood (Annick Press, $14.95 pa., $22.95 cl., Feb.) by Vancouver author Tanya Lloyd Kyi, who informs readers about all things sanguineous, from sacrifices to forensics. One hopes accompanying illustrations by graphic novelist Steve Rolston only required a bit of sweat and tears.

It’s a favourite kindergarten class project, and now there’s a handy guide from Carol Pasternak. How to Raise Monarch Butterflies: A Step-by-Step Guide for Kids (Firefly Books, $8.95 pa., $19.95 cl.) appears in April. • Literature for LGBT teens can be hard to come by, so Ivan E. Coyote’s collection of stories about her own experiences growing up queer, and of others who have inspired her, One in Every Crowd (Arsenal Pulp Press, $17.95 pa., March), is a welcome arrival.

INTERNATIONAL

In The Rumour (Tundra, $19.99 cl., May), Indian nonsense poet Anushka Ravishankar crafts a story about the village of Baddpaddpur, where telling tales is an art form. Kanyika Kini provides vivid illustrations. • It’s been 65 years since the Moomins first appeared in a Finnish-Swedish newspaper, but people just can’t get enough of those hippo-esque creatures. Drawn & Quarterly releases Moomin Book 7: The Complete Lars Jansson Comic Strip ($19.95 cl.) in March.

Was Precious precocious? Alexander McCall Smith answers that question when he takes readers back to his beloved character’s childhood in The Great Cake Mystery: Precious Ramotswe’s Very First Case (Anchor Canada, $7.99 pa., April), a YA addition to his Number 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series. • In Adrian Fogelin’s Summer on the Moon (Peachtree/Fitz & Whits, $15.95 cl., April), Socko’s mom just wants to get him out of their crummy neighbourhood and away from the threat of the local gang. When they move to a new community, he realizes he isn’t the only one with problems.

William Joyce may win the prize for lengthiest title for his E. Aster Bunnymund and the Battle of the Warrior Eggs at the Earth’s Core! (S&S, $16.99 cl., Feb.), a picture book in which the Easter bunny is much more than just a fuzzy, cotton-tailed source of chocolate eggs. • Katherine Applegate gives us Ivan the gorilla, who thinks he has it pretty good living in a glass cage at the Exit 8 Big Top Mall and Video Arcade. At least until Ruby the baby elephant arrives and enlightens him. The One and Only Ivan (HarperCollins, $10.99 pa.) appears in January. • A deadly plague, alien invaders, androids, and even a prince feature in Marissa Meyer’s debut sci-fi novel, Cinder (Feiwel & Friends/Raincoast, $19.99 cl., Jan.), in which the titular character is a girl on a mission to save the world. (Did we mention she’s a cyborg?)

The fine print: Q&Q’s spring preview covers books published between Jan. 1 and June 30, 2012. All information (titles, prices, publication dates, etc.) was supplied by publishers and may have been tentative at Q&Q’s press time. • Titles that have been listed in previous previews do not appear here.

Spring preview 2012: Canadian non-fiction

In the January/February issue, Q&Q looks ahead at the spring season’s new books.

MEMOIR AND BIOGRAPHY

Revolutionary activity in the Middle East and North Africa has created an appetite for stories about life in these regions. Among them is the story of CBC News foreign correspondent Nahlah Ayed. In A Thousand Farewells: A Reporter’s Journey from Refugee Camp to the Arab Spring (Penguin Canada, $32 cl., April), the Winnipeg-born journalist traces her passion for reporting on the Middle East to her Palestinian roots and the time she spent in a Jordanian refugee camp as a child. • When Nazanin Afshin-Jam, a Vancouver-raised beauty queen, first heard of Nazanin Fatehi, a teen on death row in Tehran for the murder of her would-be rapist, the two young women had only a name and their Iranian heritage in common. The Tale of Two Nazanins (HarperCollins Canada, $31.99 cl., May), co-written with Susan McClelland, is the story of how the women found common ground in the struggle for Fatehi’s freedom.

While on a tour of duty in Afghanistan in 2006, reservist Trevor Greene had an axe plunged into his skull and lived to tell the tale. Read it for yourself in March Forth: The Inspiring True Story of a Canadian Soldier’s Journey of Love, Hope and Survival (HarperCollins Canada, $29.99 cl., Feb.), co-written with his wife, Debbie Greene.

A pair of memoirs out this spring feature sons coming to terms with their late fathers’ true identities. Deni Béchard follows his fictitious family saga, Vandal Love, with a personal story. Cures for Hunger (Goose Lane Editions, $29.95 cl., May) finds the novelist dealing with the fallout from discovering his dad’s criminal past. • In Cold Comfort: Growing Up Cold War (Talonbooks, $18.95 pa., May), poet Gil McElroy writes about discovering his father’s hidden past working on the controversial Distant Early Warning Line.

In The Many Voyages of Arthur Wellington Clah: A Tsimshian Man on the Pacific Northwest Coast (UBC Press, $29.95 pa., Jan.), historian Peggy Brock creates a portrait of Arthur Wellington Clah, a Hudson’s Bay Company employee who left one of the few first-hand accounts of colonization in Western Canada written from an aboriginal perspective. • In 2008, the Community Arts Council of Greater Victoria commissioned a chronicle of the globetrotting life and unconventional work of artist and printmaker Pat Martin Bates. The result is Balancing on a Thread (Frontenac House Media, $49.95 cl., April), a biography and critical analysis by Pat Bovey, former director of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria.

Internationally renowned composer and music educator R. Murray Schafer recounts personal and artistic growth in My Life on Earth and Elsewhere (The Porcupine’s Quill, $27.95 pa., May), which follows his journey from aspiring painter to sailor to vagabond before deciding to dedicate his life to music. • As an octogenarian, Naomi Beth Wakan considers herself somewhere between old and “old-old,” and thus amply qualified to comment on retirement homes, elder abuse, death, and the disconnect between self-image and society’s perception of seniors. Liquorice and Lavender: Some Thoughts on Roller-coasting into Old Age (Wolsak & Wynn, $19 pa.) appears in April.

William Stevenson may be best known for his book A Man Called Intrepid, about the similarly named British spy William Stephenson, often considered the real-life model for James Bond. Stevenson tells his own life story, touching on his career as a war reporter, in Past to Present: A Reporter’s Story of War, Spies, People, and Politics (Lyons Press/Canadian Manda Group, $28.95 cl., June). • B.C. cowboy and rodeo regular Bruce Watt spins a few yarns about the good, the bad, and the ugly of ranching in Chilcotin Yarns (Heritage House, $16.95 pa., May).

POLITICS AND CURRENT AFFAIRS

As the Canadian government works toward repatriating child soldier Omar Khadr, McGill-Queen’s University Press is set to publish a timely anthology exploring the Canadian-born man’s background, his incarceration at Guantanamo Bay, his treatment at the hands of Canadian authorities, and the implications raised by his legal case. Omar Khadr, Oh Canada ($24.95 pa., May), edited by Janice Williamson, includes contributions from Sherene Razack, Roméo Dallaire, Charles Foran, Judith Thompson, George Elliott Clarke, and Maher Arar.

Nora Young, host of CBC Radio’s Spark, explores issues such as the real-world impact of online communities and why it’s essential to ensure digital privacy in The Virtual Self: How Our Digital Lives Are Altering the World Around Us (McClelland & Stewart, $29.99 cl., April). • Some form of monarchy has ruled Canada since the start of the nation’s recorded history. The Secret of the Crown: Canada’s Long Affair with Royalty (House of Anansi Press, $29.95 cl., March) by John Fraser is a witty look at our country’s enduring appetite for all things regal.

HISTORY

A number of titles this season take an unflinching look at Canada’s history of racism. In Orienting Canada: Race, Empire, and the Transpacific (UBC Press, $34.95 pa., Jan.), John Price, associate professor of history at the University of Victoria, exposes anti-Asian racism at home and in foreign policy through examples such as the 1907 Vancouver race riots and Canada’s early intervention in the Vietnam War. • Canada’s Forgotten Slaves: Two Centuries of Bondage (Véhicule Press, $27.95 pa., May), George Tombs’ English-language translation of the late Marcel Trudel’s groundbreaking work on the history of slavery in colonial Canada, identifies Canadian slave owners and reveals the extent to which national leaders tried to cover up this unsavoury past. • Bryan Prince looks at slavery in One More River to Cross (Dundurn Press, $24.99 pa., Jan.), which tells the real-life story of Isaac Brown, a slave who was falsely accused of murder and made a daring escape from New Orleans before coming to Canada.

Educator Paul Keery and illustrator Michael Wyatt borrow from the graphic novel tradition to make Canada’s military history accessible in Canada at War: An Illustrated History of Canada in the Second World War (Douglas & McIntyre, $24.95 pa., May). • Originally published in Italian in 2003, Pietro Corsi’s Halifax: The Other Door to America (Guernica Editions, $15 pa., March), translated by Antonio D’Alfonso, explores the city’s role in the immigrant experience through a first-hand account.

POP CULTURE

In The Weakerthans: Watermark ($12.95 pa., April), the second instalment in Invisible Publishing’s Bibliophonic music series, author Dave Jaffer makes the case that the Winnipeg indie rockers are among the country’s best musical acts.

SPORTS

Hockey-shmockey. This season’s ice sport of choice is Arctic aviation. Based on the Canadian TV series of the same name, The Ice Pilots: Flying with the Mavericks of the Great White North (Douglas & McIntyre, $21.95 pa., Jan.), by Survivorman series co-author Michael Vlessides, follows pilots at Buffalo Airways in Yellowknife as they haul supplies and passengers in their Second World War–era propeller planes to remote Arctic outposts. • Frontenac House Media is set to publish Yukon Wings ($59.95 cl., May), an illustrated history of the territory’s aviation sector by industry veteran Bob Cameron.

Much has been written about Leanne Shapton’s quirky style and seemingly charmed career. Swimming Studies (Penguin Canada, $26.50 cl., June) dives into new territory: the illustrator’s lifelong passion for swimming, and her former dream of making it to the Olympics. • Speaking of the Olympics, a former athlete and coach have authored a pair of books on leadership. In The Power of More: Achieving Your Goals in Sport and Life (Greystone Books, $22.95 pa., May), three-time Olympic gold-medal rower Marnie McBean explains how to break down big tasks, set goals, strive for more, and recognize success. • In Leave No Doubt: A Credo for Changing Your Dreams (McGill-Queen’s University Press, $19.95 cl., March), NHL coach Mike Babstock (with co-writer Rick Larsen) expands on a pep talk originally intended for Team Canada, whom he coached at the 2010 Winter Games. • Start your own journey from novice to Olympian with Paddle Your Own Kayak (Boston Mills Press/Firefly Books, $29.95 pa., March), a fully illustrated guide by longtime paddlers Gary and Joanie McGuffin.

Vancouver writer Kevin Chong recounts how he unexpectedly found a new life direction as part-owner of a horse in My Year of the Racehorse: Falling in Love With the Sport of Kings (Greystone, $22.95 pa., April), a look into the tradition and faded elegance of the horse-racing scene.

GARDENING

When friends Rachel Fisher, Heather Stretch, and Robin Tunnicliffe ventured into business together they came up with Saanich Organics, a co-operative of small organic farms around greater Victoria. They’ve teamed up again for All the Dirt: Reflections on Organic Farming (TouchWood Editions, $29.95 pa., Feb.), in part a personal reflection on food entrepreneurship, in part a how-to for small-scale organic farming. • Get growing with Canadian Gardener’s Guide (Dorling Kindersley/Tourmaline Editions, $30 cl., March), an illustrated handbook by prolific food writer and urban gardening guru Lorraine Johnson.

FOOD AND DRINK

In 2009, Lynn Crawford resigned as executive chef at Four Seasons New York to launch a restaurant in Toronto and kick off a new travel series for Canada’s Food Network. The spin-off book, Lynn Crawford’s Pitchin’ In: 100 Great Recipes from Simple Ingredients (Penguin Canada, $37 cl., Jan.), includes recipes the chef acquired in her travels across North America. • While Crawford peddles local foods, University of Toronto geography professor Pierre Desrochers and economist Hiroko Shimizu suggest a different approach in The Locavore’s Dilemma: In Praise of the 10,000-mile Diet (Public Affairs/Perseus Books Group, $30 cl., June). The duo argues the locavore ethos is little more than a well-meaning marketing strategy that distracts from global food problems.

A perfect counterpoint to last season’s roster of meat-heavy cookbooks, Eleanor Boyle’s High Steaks: Why and How to Eat Less Meat (New Society Publishers, $17.95 pa., June) investigates the ecological, health, and social problems caused by conventional meat production, and offers guidance on supporting sustainable livestock practices. • University of Toronto Press’s Edible Histories, Cultural Politics: Towards a Canadian Food History ($34.95 pa., May), edited by Franca Iacovetta, Valerie J. Korinek, and Marlene Epp, is a rare scholarly examination of food culture and traditions from a Canadian point of view. • For nearly three decades, Toronto’s FoodShare has fought to make healthy eating possible for everyone. Share: Delicious Dishes from FoodShare and Friends (Between the Lines, $24.95 pa., May), by Adrienne De Francesco with Marion Kane, brings together favourite recipes from the FoodShare community that emphasize healthy, affordable, culturally diverse, and seasonal meals.

BUSINESS, FINANCE, AND ECONOMICS

Economist Jeff Rubin follows up his bestselling Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller with The End of Growth (Random House Canada, $29.95 cl., May). This time, Rubin posits that the tendency for governments to tie economic well-being to population growth will ultimately lead to disaster. • Michael Lewis and Pat Conaty tread similar territory but offer a solutions-based approach in The Resilience Imperative: Cooperative Transitions to a Steady-state Economy (New Society, $26.95 pa., June), about shifting from growth to a sustainable, low-carbon economy.

Rob Carrick, a columnist at The Globe and Mail, has written a personal finance guide for the Boomerang Generation. How Not to Move Back in with Your Parents: The Young Person’s Guide to Financial Empowerment (Doubleday Canada, $22.95 pa.) comes out in March, just in time for the end of the academic year. • Toronto ad man Rick Padulo – the brains behind the slogans “Leon’s Don’t Pay a Cent Event” and “Black’s Is Photography” – shares the story of his climb up the agency ladder, and spills a few trade secrets, in I Can Get It for You Retail: Down and Dirty Tales from a Canadian Ad Man (Dundurn, $29.99 cl., March).

HEALTH AND WELL-BEING

It seems a new health and fitness fad springs up every week. Timothy Caulfield, director at the Health Law and Science Policy Group at the University of Alberta, has tried some of them so the rest of us don’t have to. Through first-hand research and analysis, Caulfield’s The Cure for Everything! Untangling the Twisted Messages About Health, Fitness, and Happiness (Penguin, $32 cl., Jan.) exposes the special interests behind many scientific claims in the health industries, and suggests getting healthy is not as complicated as it seems. • In Thinking Women and Health Care Reform in Canada (Canadian Scholars’ Press, $39.95 pa., Feb.), the Women and Health Care Reform working group sets out its argument for why changes to Canada’s health care sector are women’s issues. Researchers raise the issue of gender in such areas as privatization, home care, medical insurance, access to treatment, and maternity care. • When a group of women in Parry Sound, Ontario, decided to raise money for a new mammogram machine at their local hospital, they opted for a fundraising project that was fun, creative, and cheeky. Compiled by the West Parry Sound Health Foundation, Support the Girls: Bra Art for Breast Health (Second Story Press, $21.95 pa., April) features the personal stories and bra-based artwork of breast cancer sufferers and survivors, their loved ones, and health-care workers. A portion of proceeds will go to breast cancer research.

Clinical psychologist and psychotherapist Nancy Reeves has travelled throughout North America facilitating workshops on grief, trauma, spirituality, and art therapy. A Path Through Loss: A Guide to Writing Your Healing and Growth (Woodlake Books, $19.95 pa., Feb.) contains self-guided journalling exercises Reeves has employed and honed over the years.

ENVIRONMENT

David Suzuki is back with another collection of thoughts on the environment. The aptly titled Everything Under the Sun: Toward a Brighter Future on a Small Blue Planet (Greystone, $24.95 pa., June), co-written with Ian Hannington, broaches topics such as solar-energy dependence, the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, and the difference between human hunters and other predators. • Documentarian Amy Miller investigates the effects of carbon-emissions trading and carbon credit–funded projects in Carbon Rush (Red Deer Press, $24.95 pa., June), a scathing exposé of a system that bankrolls large-scale industrial operations and endangers all manner of life.

Cameron Dueck’s The New Northwest Passage: A Voyage to the Front Lines of Climate Change (Great Plains Publications, $24.95 pa., April) recalls the journalist’s trip through one of the least accessible places on the planet to encounter the effects of climate change on Arctic life. • In Save the Humans (Random House Canada, $29.95 cl., April), Rob Stewart, the filmmaker behind Sharkwater, turns his attention from marine life to the human cost of environmental carelessness. • Couched in tales of hard-living fishermen and the history of the West Coast fishing industry, Bluebacks and Silver Brights: A Lifetime in the B.C. Fisheries from Bounty to Plunder (ECW Press, $22.95 pa., May), by Norman and Allan Safarik, presents a dire ecological outlook for the Pacific Coast thanks to government mismanagement and overfishing. • In Nevermore: A Book of Hours ($20 pa., April), the third title published by Quattro Books’ non-fiction imprint, Fourfront Editions, David Day elegizes species that are long extinct, with illustrations by Maurice Wilson.

SCIENCE

Carolyn Abraham travels around the world, DNA kits at the ready, to probe the genetic background of her spotty family tree. Along the way, she struggles with the ethics behind using genetic tests to trace bloodlines. The Juggler’s Children: Family, Myth and a Tale of Two Chromosomes (Random House Canada, $32 cl.) lands on bookshelves in April. • In developing neurological exercises to overcome her own severe learning disabilities, Barbara Arrowsmith Young pioneered a cognitive training program that demonstrated the possibility for neuroplasticity – the notion that behaviour and training can alter brain function. The Woman Who Changed Her Brain: Stories of Transformation from the Frontier of Brain Science (Free Press/Simon & Schuster, $29.99 cl., May) recounts Arrowsmith’s story and sets out her methodology.

ESSAYS

Author and writing teacher Douglas Glover shares the finer points of the writing life, as well as a few exercises to get scribbling, in The Attack of the Copula Spiders and Other Essays on Writing (Biblioasis, $21.95 pa., April). • Thirty-three writers with ties to Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, including Michael Turner, Madeleine Thien, and Wayde Compton, recast the maligned neighbourhood as a hub of creativity and humanity in V6A: Writing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (Arsenal Pulp Press, $19.95 pa., April), edited by Elee Kraljii Gardiner and John Mikhail Asfour. • Edited by Kathy Page and Lynne Van Luven, In the Flesh: Twenty Writers Explore the Body (Brindle & Glass, $24.95 pa., April) contains essays by André Alexis, Trevor Cole, Lorna Crozier, Candace Fertile, Kate Pullinger, and Brian Brett that explore aging, illness, and insecurity through a specific body part.

FINE ART AND GRAPHICA

Canadian cities provide a rich source of inspiration for a number of fine art and non-fiction graphica titles this season. Dave Lapp combines new and previously published comics about encounters and conversations on the streets of Toronto in People Around Here (Conundrum Press, $17 pa., April), a follow-up to 2008’s Drop-in. • Toronto streets are brought to the fore in Full Frontal T.O. (Coach House Books, $24.95 pa., May), a chronicle of the Big Smoke’s ever-changing streetscapes by photographer Patrick Cummins and Stroll author Shawn Micallef. • Meanwhile, illustrator Michael Cho wanders Toronto’s backstreets for Back Alleys and Urban Landscapes (Drawn & Quarterly, $19.95 pa., May), a collection of vibrant illustrations of the city’s hidden streetscapes.

Heading West, Michael Kluckner’s Vanishing Vancouver: The Last 20 Years (Whitecap Books, $35 pa., April) updates the artist’s classic book of the same name two decades after its initial release. The new edition documents the city’s rapid development and features more than 200 images, including the author’s own watercolours and brush-and-ink drawings. • Rocky Mountain Books celebrates 100 years of the Calgary Stampede with Cowboy Wild ($39.95 cl., May), a photo book by David Campion chronicling a decade of the greatest show on earth, with text by Samantha Shields.

The latest from D&Q’s Petit Livre art book imprint is Idyll: Dream-filled Landscapes, Portraits, and Abstracts in Beautiful Detail ($19.95 cl., March) by Amber Albrecht. Inspired by the dreaminess of childhood, Albrecht’s paintings, screen prints, and drawings employ folklore and female iconography to address loneliness and loss.

HUMOUR

Just in time for summer break, Thomas Allen Publishers will release Almost There: The Family Vacation Then and Now ($24.95 pa., May), Curtis Gillespie’s take on family travel. • A “good mommy” is as real as a unicorn or Bigfoot, argues Willow Yamauchi in Bad Mommy (Insomniac Press, $19.95 pa., April), which celebrates the kind of parenting that falls somewhere between Joan Crawford and June Cleaver.

RELIGION

Conservative commentator and Sun News Network host Michael Coren’s latest book, Heresy: Ten Lies They Spread About Christianity (Signal/M&S, $29.99 cl., April) picks up where 2011’s Why Catholics Are Right left off, challenging popular assumptions about Christianity regarding issues such as homophobia, sexism, and racism. • To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council, in which the Roman Catholic Church updated its practices for an increasingly secular world, Novalis will publish Vatican II: Fifty Years of Evolution and Revolution in the Catholic Church ($18.95 pa., May) by Margaret Lavin, associate professor at the University of Toronto’s Regis College.

The fine print: Q&Q’s spring preview covers books published between Jan. 1 and June 30, 2012. All information (titles, prices, publication dates, etc.) was supplied by publishers and may have been tentative at Q&Q’s press time. • Titles that have been listed in previous previews do not appear here.

Spring preview 2012: Canadian fiction, poetry, and graphica

In the January/February issue, Q&Q looks ahead at the spring season’s new books.

NOVELS

Vincent Lam won the 2006 Scotiabank Giller Prize for his debut, the short-story collection Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures. His follow-up is a novel set during the Vietnam War. The Headmaster’s Wager (Doubleday Canada, $32.95 cl., April) is about the gambling, womanizing head of an English school in Saigon, whose son runs afoul of the country’s authorities and is forced into exile. • Another Giller winner, CBC broadcaster Linden MacIntyre, has a new novel out this season. Why Men Lie (Random House Canada, $32 cl., March), the third volume in the author’s Cape Breton trilogy – which also includes The Long Stretch and 2009 Giller champ The Bishop’s Man – is the first to be told from the perspective of a woman.

Four-time winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award, winner of the Prix Médicis, the W.O. Mitchell Prize, and the Matt Cohen Award, and member of the Order of Canada, Marie-Claire Blais is one of this country’s most lauded authors. Her new novel is set in the Saloon, a phantasmagorical place where boys are transformed into dream creatures who engage in carnivalesque performances of song and dance. Mai at the Predator’s Ball (House of Anansi Press, $19.95 pa., May) is translated from the French by Nigel Spencer. • Following 2007’s The Letter Opener (and the successful children’s picture book Spork), Kyo Maclear’s sophomore novel draws on memories of her father, a foreign correspondent. Stray Love (HarperCollins Canada, $29.99 cl., March), which includes illustrations by Toronto artist Heather Frise, is about Marcel, a man approaching 50 who reflects on his childhood in London, his globetrotting father, and his mysterious, bohemian mother.

Nina Dolgoy lives in a bad neighbourhood. If only the boarded-up local pool reopened, she thinks, it might provide her daughters with something to do. The problem is Nina doesn’t have any money. What else to do but rob a bank? Nina, the Bandit Queen (Dundurn Press, $21.99 pa., March) is a darkly comic novel from former Toronto Star columnist Joey Slinger. • In her first novel since 2000’s A Message for Mr. Lazarus, B.C. writer Barbara Lambert tells the story of a woman who, after inheriting property in Tuscany from an estranged uncle, tries to find out why she is heir to this mysterious legacy. The Whirling Girl ($22 pa.) appears from Cormorant Books in February.

We’ve all been annoyed – or worse – by spam e-mail allegedly from exiled Nigerian royalty. In his latest novel, Will Ferguson imagines the shadowy criminals behind such scams and the potentially devastating effects they might have on the lives of their anonymous victims. 419 (Viking Canada, $32 cl.) is due out in April. • Culture journalist and Globe and Mail columnist Katrina Onstad returns with her sophomore novel, about a contented urban couple whose lives are turned upside down when they become legal guardians of a two-and-a-half-year-old boy. Everybody Has Everything (McClelland & Stewart, $22 pa., May) focuses on the collision between “urban affluenza” and parental responsibility.

Best-selling novelist Lilian Nattel returns with Web of Angels (Knopf Canada, $22 pa., Feb.), the story of Sharon Lewis, an apparently unflappable wife and mother whose battle with dissociative identity disorder is thrust into the open after a family friend commits suicide. • Set in postwar Montreal, Nancy Richler’s third novel, The Imposter Bride (HarperCollins Canada, $29.99 cl., March), is about the disappearance of an enigmatic woman and her daughter’s attempt to understand who her mother really was. • The dark inheritance of mental illness forms the spine of the debut novel from Grace O’Connell, one of this year’s “new faces of fiction.” Magnified World (Random House Canada, $22.95 pa., May) tells the story of Maggie, whose mother kills herself by walking into Toronto’s Don River. When Maggie begins to experience blackouts, she fears she may be suffering from the same condition that plagued her disturbed mother.

Eccentric and reclusive author D.O. Dodd follows up his/her controversial 2010 novel, Jew, with The Immigrant’s Handbook (Exile Editions, $19.95 pa., April), about a woman who relocates to a new country in order to leave behind her old life. • Judy Garland died of a drug overdose in 1969. Unless, like Elvis, her death was a ruse and she was secretly kept alive. In novelist and playwright Sky Gilbert’s Come Back (ECW Press, $18.95 pa., May), the year is 2060 and Garland, age 138, is working on her Ph.D. thesis at the University of Toronto.

Quebec’s Patrick Senécal is a literary sensation in his home province, despite being virtually unknown in English Canada. All of that may change with Against God (Quattro Books, $14.95 pa., April), about a man’s mental breakdown ­following the deaths of his wife and children. The novella is translated from the French by Susan Ouriou and Christelle Morelli. • Q&Q reviewer Alex Good has referred to the short fiction of David Nickle as “a perverted version of Alice Munro country.” In his new novel, Rasputin’s Bastards (ChiZine Publications, $19.95 pa., June), Nickle imagines a version of postwar Russia in which a group of “telekinetics” who were bred as secret agents begin to wield their powers for reasons contrary to the greater good.

“Sexy” is not a word commonly associated with CanLit, but it certainly applies to Maidenhead (Coach House Books, $18.95 pa., April) by Tamara Faith Berger, whose debut, a work of unabashed smut called Lie with Me, was made into a frankly explicit movie by Clément Virgo. The new novel focuses on a 16-year-old girl’s sexual awakening at the hands of a Tanzanian musician. The author has said it will be her last literary exploration of explicit sexuality, bringing to a close a “pornographic trilogy” that also includes The Way of the Whore. • Montreal-based novelist Daniel Allen Cox is back with his third book from Arsenal Pulp Press. Basement of Wolves ($15.95 pa., April) tells the story of paranoid actor Michael-David, who barricades himself inside an L.A. hotel after a film shoot involving a pack of wolves somehow goes awry.

Biblioasis is comparing Irish-Canadian writer Anakana Schofield’s debut novel, Malarky ($19.95 pa., April), to Brecht’s Mother Courage and Beckett’s Endgame. When Philomena discovers her son canoodling with another man and is informed of her husband’s (possibly invented) indiscretions, she embarks on a journey of discovery that involves grief, resilience, and something like madness. • Toronto-based poet and music journalist Tanis Rideout’s debut is part adventure story, part Mrs. Dalloway. Above All Things (M&S, $22 pa., March) alternates between the story of George Mallory’s ill-fated attempt to conquer Mount Everest and a day in the life of Mallory’s wife, Ruth, who anxiously awaits his return to England.

The new year marks the 100th anniversary of the Titanic disaster. In Titanic Ashes (Flanker Press, $17.95 pa., Feb.), St. John’s novelist Paul Butler uses the tragedy as a backdrop for the story of J. Bruce Ismay and Miranda Grimsden, two passengers on the ill-fated voyage, who are reunited 13 years later. • This Ramshackle Tabernacle, the debut from Newfoundland and Labrador writer Samuel Thomas Martin, was shortlisted for the 2010 Winterset Award and the ReLit Award for short fiction. Martin returns with A Blessed Snarl (Breakwater Books, $19.95 pa., Feb.), a novel about a man whose marriage ends when his wife takes up with someone she met on Facebook.

What would a Canadian publishing season be without a new book by Tim Bowling? This time the prolific author appears not with a collection of poetry, but a novel. The Tinsmith (Brindle & Glass, $21.95 pa., March) focuses on a surgeon during the American Civil War who moves to B.C., where he battles the unscrupulous practices of the province’s salmon canners. (It being Bowling, you had to know there would be fish in there somewhere.) • Set in Paris, Leper Tango (Guernica Editions, $20 pa., May) tells the story of a lawyer who becomes obsessed with a hooker named Sheba. David MacKinnon’s novel is the first in a projected trilogy.

Turnstone Press seems to be staking out territory in the area of male Boomer humour. Following last year’s novel Dadolescence by Bob Armstrong, the Manitoba publisher is bringing out Dave Williamson’s Dating ($19 pa., April), about a widower who finds himself thrust back onto the singles market in his senior years. • Canadian expat Emily Mandel has completed her third novel in as many years. The Lola Quartet (McArthur & Company, $24.95 pa., May) tells the story of Gavin, a disgraced journalist who moves home to Florida and embarks on a search for his high-school girlfriend, who has stolen a large sum of money from a drug dealer and is on the run with a girl who might be Gavin’s daughter.

The fourth novel from Quebec writer Martine Desjardins is a literary hybrid combining gothic elements with history and fantasy. In Maleficium (Talonbooks, $16.95 pa., March), translated by Fred A. Reed and David Homel, a 19th-century priest relates the confessions of seven men who have experienced bizarre or disturbing fates while in pursuit of material possessions.

SHORT FICTION

Acclaimed poet, novelist, and essayist Steven Heighton is set to publish his first collection of short stories in more than 15 years. The Dead Are More Visible (Knopf Canada, $22.95 pa.) appears in May. • Prolific St. John’s author and journalist Russell Wangersky returns with the collection Whirl Away (Thomas Allen Publishers, $22.95 pa., March), about what happens when people’s coping mechanisms begin to fail. • Self-confessed “literary voyeur” Julie Wilson has a debut collection with Freehand Books. Seen Reading ($21.95 pa., April), based on Wilson’s website of the same name, contains descriptions of people reading in public paired with short pieces of imaginative writing.

Victoria native Buffy Cram is the latest contributor to the 2010 anthology Darwin’s Bastards to appear with a collection of her own, following last year’s offerings from Matthew J. Trafford and David Whitton. In the surreal world of Radio Belly (Douglas & McIntyre, $22.95 pa., April), a mob of “intellectual vagrants” overruns a complacent neighbourhood, a father and daughter negotiate life on a post-apocalyptic island, and a woman who has recently undergone an appendectomy begins to receive Russian radio signals emanating from her belly. • Novelist and children’s author Cary Fagan’s first collection in a decade is due out from Cormorant in May. My Life Among the Apes ($22 pa.) includes a story about a bank manager who uses his obsession with Jane Goodall to solve his problems. • Poet and author Lynn Crosbie returns with her first full-length work since the poem-à-clef Liar. Life Is About Losing Everything (Anansi, $24.95 pa., May), chronicling the past seven years of the author’s life, is a literary hybrid combining fiction and memoir.

Gay dwarves don’t appear in Anne Fleming’s Gay Dwarves of America (Pedlar Press, $21 pa., April), but there is a story about a hockey mom who imagines she’s Swiss, a story told in the form of a musical, and a story structured as one family’s “puke diary.” • Heather Birrell returns with her first collection since winning the 2007 Journey Prize for the story “BriannaSusanna­Alana.” Mad Hope (Coach House, $18.95 pa., April) uses unconventional characters to explore universal subjects such as parenting, pregnancy, and marriage. • Stories that bring out the humour of the human condition appear in Saskatoon author Donald Ward’s The Weeping Chair (Thistledown Press, $18.95 pa., March).

Novelist, story writer, and biographer of Tommy Douglas, Dave Margoshes is back with a collection of linked stories loosely based on the life of his father. Set mostly in New York City’s Jewish community during the interwar years, A Book of Great Worth (Coteau Books, $18.95 pa., April) contains stories the author has been working on for 30 years.

CRIME FICTION

Wayne Arthurson follows up his well-received debut, Fall from Grace, with a second mystery featuring half-Cree, half-French protagonist Leo Desroches. In A Killing Winter (Forge/Raincoast, $27.50 cl., April), Desroches goes undercover as a homeless man and befriends a native street kid. When his young friend is found murdered, Desroches embarks on a highly personal investigation into local gang culture. • Mob enforcer Wilson is back for a fourth wallow in gritty urban noir in Hamilton author Mike Knowles’s Never Play Another Man’s Game (ECW, $24.95 cl., April). This time, Wilson is broke and takes a job with an old partner, despite reservations about involving his son.

Lake on the Mountain (Dundurn, $11.99 pa., Jan.), the latest mystery from Jeffrey Round, features missing-persons investigator Dan Sharp, who attends a wedding on a yacht and gets caught up in both a case of mistaken identity and a 20-year-old disappearance. • A veteran forest ranger and firefighter, Dave Hugelschaffer draws on his own life experience in a mystery series featuring Porter Cassel, an Alberta forest-fire forensics investigator. The latest book, Whiskey Creek (Cormorant, $19.95 pa., April), has Cassel looking into arson and murder in the isolated Alberta community of Fort Chip­ewyan. • The second adventure of Casey Holland, transit cop, is due out this season from TouchWood Editions. Debra Purdy Kong’s Deadly Accusations ($14.95 pa., March) finds Holland caught up in a gang war being waged on local buses.

POETRY

Dennis Lee (who is, not incidentally, co-founder of his current publisher, Anansi) returns with the culmination of his late-period trilogy that includes Un (2003) and Yesno (2007). Testament ($19.95 pa., March) reconstitutes poems from the previous books and incorporates new work to create a provocative statement about living in the modern age. • Also from Anansi is the new collection from Griffin Poetry Prize winner A.F. Moritz. The New Measures ($19.95 pa., March) is a suite of tonally varied poems that share a thematic strain of hope for improving the contemporary world.

M&S’s spring poetry features new collections from three of Canada’s so-called “eco-poets.” In Paradoxides ($18.99 pa., March), Griffin winner Don McKay combines his well-known affinity for the natural world with the mysteries of geology and the landscape of Newfoundland. • Rain; road; and open boat ($18.99 pa., March), Roo Borson’s first collection since 2004’s Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida (which won both the Griffin and the Governor General’s Literary Award), ranges from New Zealand to Beijing to Toronto, exploring a variety of tones, themes, approaches, and subjects. • And finally, Tim Lilburn returns with Assiniboia ($18.99 pa., March), which interrogates notions of colonialism and modernity by addressing subjects such as Louis Riel, Western mysticism, and geography.

It’s not just the novelists who are marking the centenary of the Titanic’s sinking. Acclaimed Vancouver poet Billeh Nickerson’s Impact (Arsenal Pulp, $14.95 pa., April) uses historical research to recreate the ship’s construction and imagine what it must have been like to be onboard when the tragedy occurred. • The culmination of a decade of work, Whiteout (ECW, $18.95 pa., April), the sixth collection from erstwhile Bookninja George Murray, juxtaposes form and formlessness, anger and serenity. • The Smooth Yarrow (Véhicule Press, $18 pa., April), Susan Glickman’s sixth collection, explores life in all its manifestations, from an elegy to the poet’s late father to a sequence of poems on gardening. • Sumptuary Laws (Véhicule, $18 pa., March) is the first full-length collection from Nyla Matuk. The title is a reference to feudal regulations that enforced social divisions by stipulating what a person was allowed to eat and wear. • Chris Hutchinson returns with his third collection, A Brief History of the Short-Lived (Nightwood Editions, $18.95 pa., April).

In Geographies of a Lover (NeWest Press, $14.95 pa., April), B.C. poet Sarah de Leeuw finds inspiration from The Story of O and Marian Engle’s Bear. Her frankly sexual poems, written in the first person, explore the trajectory of a love affair, from infatuation through obsession, using the Canadian landscape as a metaphor for erotic passion. • Toronto-based poet and heavy metal journo Natalie Zina Walschots has a debut collection called DOOM: Love Poems for Supervillains (Insomniac Press, $16.95 pa., April), which employs dense, technical language to explore the pathology of comic book villains and other bad boys. • Gerald Lampert Award–winning poet and novelist Steven Price brings together Greek mythology and a North American childhood in Omens in the Year of the Ox (Brick Books, $19 pa., Feb.), which contains free-verse and more structured poems.

Mansfield Press is tapping both ends of the career spectrum with a pair of poetry collections by a newcomer and a veteran. Jaime Forsythe’s debut collection, Sympathy Loophole ($16.95 pa., April), includes poems that feature ventriloquism, contortion, and pickled sharks, among other (somewhat less colourful) subjects. • Now entering his sixth decade of publishing poetry, David W. McFadden’s new book, What’s the Score? ($16.95 pa., April), collects 65 poems by the revered author. • The Least Important Man (Biblioasis, $17.95 pa., April), Alex Boyd’s sophomore collection, contains poems that explore the dignity found in everyday life.

GRAPHICA

David Collier’s previous book, Chimo, told of the author’s experiences with the Canadian military. His new work, Collier’s Popular Press (Conundrum Press, $20 pa., Jan.), is a collection of the artist’s published work from the last three decades. • The Porcupine’s Quill has worked closely with iconic engraver George A. Walker to produce a series of beautifully designed books featuring the artist’s instantly recognizable woodcuts. Walker’s new “wordless novel,” The Mysterious Death of Tom Thomson ($22.95 pa., April), features 109 engravings that tell the story of the painter’s life.

The fine print: Q&Q’s spring preview covers books published between Jan. 1 and June 30, 2012. All information (titles, prices, publication dates, etc.) was supplied by publishers and may have been tentative at Q&Q’s press time. • Titles that have been listed in previous previews do not appear here.

Fall preview 2011: Canadian crime fiction, graphica, and poetry

In the July/August issue, Q&Q looks ahead at the fall season’s biggest books.

CRIME FICTION
Perennial bestseller Linwood Barclay returns with another spine-tingler, this one about a Connecticut contractor who gets caught up in a world of corruption and illegal activity when his wife is killed in a car crash the police accuse her of causing. The Accident (Doubleday Canada, $29.95 cl.) appears in August. • October sees the return of Father Brennan Burke and Monty Collins, the heroes of Anne Emery’s popular mystery series. In Death at Christy Burke’s (ECW Press, $26.95 cl.), Father Burke is forced to investigate a murder at his grandfather’s pub in Dublin, a crime that has far-reaching implications involving the historical clashes between Northern and Southern Ireland.

Peter Robinson, best-selling author of the Inspector Banks series, returns this season with a one-off mystery. Before the Poison (M&S, $29.99 cl., Aug.) is about a Hollywood film composer who returns to the Yorkshire Dales after the death of his wife, only to discover that the house he’s moved into was the scene of a murder in the 1950s. • Veteran indie author Stan Rogal returns with a genre mystery, Bloodline (Insomniac Press, $19.95 pa., Oct.), about a series of murders involving female hitchhikers.

Gordon Cope taps into modern paranoia, computer viruses, and cyberwarfare in his debut, Secret Combinations (TouchWood Editions, $26.95 pa., Sept.). FBI agent Jack Kenyon is investigating a plot to steal a secret code that could wreak havoc on national security, but the case is derailed when his aunt dies in London, England. Until, that is, Kenyon discovers that his aunt’s death may be related to a deadly cyberwarfare conspiracy.

Series hero Detective Lane faces trouble on many fronts in the latest novel from Garry Ryan. He’s under investigation by the Calgary Police Department, his partner has contracted cancer, and an Eastern European war criminal has been murdered. Find out how all these problems work themselves out when Malabarista (NeWest Press, $18.95 pa.) hits bookstores in September.

GRAPHICA
It’s taken Nova Scotia native Kate Beaton a scant four years to make an indelible mark on the world of comics, in part because of her warped sensibility and irreverent wit, in part through appearances in magazines such as Harper’s and The New Yorker. Beaton’s new book, Hark! A Vagrant (Drawn & Quarterly, $19.95 cl., Oct.), features the artist’s unique take on historical and literary figures as diverse as Napoleon and Nancy Drew.

Celebrated playwright, choreographer, and filmmaker Robert Lepage makes the transition to graphic novels with The Blue Dragon (Anansi, $25 cl., Nov.), an adaptation of the play Lepage co-wrote with Marie Michaud. The story follows a love triangle that unfolds in the context of modern China’s political and cultural paradoxes. Fred Jourdain illustrates. • Marc Bell brings his unique artistic sensibility, last seen in 2009’s Hot Potatoe, to Pure Pajamas (D&Q, $22.95 cl., Nov.), a collection of comics from his syndicated strip in Montreal’s Mirror and Halifax’s The Coast.

Red Power (Fitzhenry & Whiteside, $19.95 pa., Oct.), by author and illustrator Brian Wright-McLeod, tells the story of Shelley and Billy, two activists who join a group fighting for native land rights.

POETRY
Chris Banks delves into the realm of Asian folklore in his third collection, Winter Cranes (ECW, $18.95 pa., Sept.), which extends the Asian idea of cranes as symbols of longevity, immortality, and good fortune to examine the modern chasms that exist between the physical and emotional realms.

Following last year’s Witness: Selected Poems 1962–2010, Harbour Publishing is releasing a comprehensive career retrospective of Patrick Lane’s poetry. The Collected Poems of Patrick Lane ($44.95 cl., Sept.), co-edited by Russell Brown and Donna Bennett, contains more than 400 poems by one of Canada’s pre-eminent poets, and an afterword by the University of British Columbia’s Nick Bradley. • In the last few years, Louis Riel has been the subject of a graphic novel by Chester Brown and a biography by Joseph Boyden. The leader of the Northwest Rebellion of 1885 is now the focus of a collection by Métis poet Gregory Scofield. Louis: The Heretic Poems (Nightwood Editions, $18.95 pa., Oct.) attempts to overturn traditional ideas of Riel as either a folk hero or a traitor.

Stephanie Bolster’s debut, White Stone: The Alice Poems (1998), won both the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Gerald Lampert Award. Her latest, A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth (Brick Books, $19 pa., Sept.), focuses on zoos and gardens, nature, and interspecies relations (get your mind out of the gutter). • An 18-year-old girl spends a summer working in a canned-corn factory and dealing with her alcoholic mother, her boyfriend, and her terminally ill grandfather in Kathryn Mockler’s book of linked poems. The Onion Man (Tightrope, $15.95 pa.) starts peeling in November.

Toronto-born poet Barry Dempster follows up his 2010 collection Blue Wherever with a new book from Wolsak and Wynn. Dying a Little ($17 pa., Sept.) is a sombre meditation on cancer, death, and the ghosts of the departed. • Frequent Q&Q reviewer Alexis Kienlen has a new book out with Frontenac House this fall. 13 ($16 pa.), which takes up subjects as diverse as beehives, board games, and childhood depression, appears in September.

The last time we heard from B.C. poet and author Brian Brett, he had won the 2009 Writer’s Trust Non-fiction Prize for Trauma Farm. He’s back this season with a collection of poems about our relationship with nature and the land. Wind River Variations (Oolichan Books, $22.95 pa.), which also contains photography by Fritz Mueller, appears in August. • Poet and literary prankster David McGimpsey is back with a collection of “chubby sonnets” – 16-line poems organized into eight sequences. Dropping in September, L’il Bastard (Coach House, $17.95 pa.) is Shakespeare on steroids.

Sachiko Murakami follows up her acclaimed first collection, The Invisibility Exhibit, with Rebuild (Talonbooks, $16.95 pa., Sept.), about the urban aesthetic and fanaticism for real estate that drives contemporary Vancouver. • Franzlations (New Star Books, $19 pa., Oct.), the new collaboration from Gary Barwin, Hugh Thomas, and Craig Conley, has nothing to do with Jonathan Franzen. Instead, it’s a reinterpretation and reinvention of the parables and aphorisms of Franz Kafka. • Author of more than a dozen books of poetry and essays, Vancouver Island-based writer Patrick Friesen is set to release Jumping in the Asylum (Quattro Books, $16.95 pa., Oct.), a collection that is equally inspired by the cadences of jazz and the Bible.

Joel Thomas Hynes is a novelist, actor, playwright, and screenwriter. Now, he adds poet to that list. Straight Razor Days (Pedlar Press, $20 pa., Aug.) finds the author in a gentler mood, but remains focused on his two favourite subjects: masculinity and the mores of contemporary Newfoundland. • Lover Through Departure (Mansfield Press, $19.95 pa., Nov.) presents new and selected poems from Rishma Dunlop, about landscape and the sensual territory of lovers. • Poet, publisher, and book designer Carleton Wilson’s The Material Sublime (Nightwood, $18.95 pa., Oct.) examines the confluence between the material and spiritual worlds.

The fine print: Q&Q’s fall preview covers books published between July 1 and Dec. 31, 2011. All information (titles, prices, publication dates, etc.) was supplied by publishers and may have been tentative at Q&Q’s press time. • Titles that have appeared in previous previews do not appear here.

Fall preview 2011: books for young people

In the July/August issue, Q&Q looks ahead at the fall season’s biggest books.

FICTION
Kenneth Oppel has become a kidlit star while mostly steering clear of the genre end of YA fiction. His early 1990s sci-fi thriller novels, Dead Water Zone and The Live Forever Machine, now seem slightly anomalous in his list of published works. With This Dark Endeavour (HarperCollins Canada, $19.99 cl., Aug.), however, Oppel appears to make a slight return to that earlier mode. The novel tells the tale of a young Victor Frankenstein who dares to try creating the Elixir of Life to help save his ailing twin brother Konrad. Revisioning the mad doctor’s backstory has been done many times before, but Oppel will almost certainly pull off his own entry into the Frankenstein canon with aplomb.

It is generally understood that not even global apocalypse will prevent Eric Walters from publishing books. How appropriate, then, that one of his new novels is End of Days (Doubleday Canada, $14.95 pa., Sept.), in which the world appears to be doomed, and renowned scientists appear to be dying by the dozen. Things are not what they appear, however – one word: aliens. • Walters will also release Cat Boy (Orca Book Publishers, $9.95 pa., Aug.), about a boy trying to save a family of junkyard cats, and Just Deserts (Puffin Canada, $12.99 pa., Aug.), co-written with ultra-marathoner Ray Zahab, about a boy who must cross the Sahara on foot.

Deborah Ellis has mastered the trick of creating fiction that aims at inspiring social awareness and fomenting justice, without being dry or overly pedantic. Her new novel, No Ordinary Day (Groundwood Books, $16.95 cl., Sept.), tells the story of a young Indian girl who escapes a life of drudgery to wander the country, only to discover she has leprosy. It seems hardly a premise to get young readers excited, but Ellis’s hundreds of thousands of fans know the book will be just as engaging as it is eye-opening. • Ellis’s other novel of the season is a slight departure for her: True Blue ($19.95 cl., Sept.) is a mystery in which two teen friends are implicated in the murder of a young camper. The novel is one of the first releases from well-known kidlit editor Gail Winskill’s new company, Pajama Press.

Novelist and journalist Don Gillmor makes his first foray into YA fiction with The Time Time Stopped (Scholastic Canada, $7.99 pa., Oct.), a comic tale about a boy who hates time so much, he tries to stop it. • Comics artist (and Coach House Books publicist) Evan Munday makes his YA debut with The Dead Kid Detective Agency (ECW Press, $11.95 pa., Oct.), in which a 13-year-old girl must solve grisly mysteries with the help of five dead teenagers who live in the cemetery near her home.

Montreal’s P.J. Bracegirdle wraps up his Joy of Spooking trilogy with Sinister Scenes (Simon & Schuster, $18.99 cl., Aug.), in which old grudges are settled, and secrets revealed. • Tower of Treasure, the first instalment in Scott Chantler’s Three Thieves series, was a graphic novel packed with action, intrigue, and daring escapes. In the second book, The Sign of the Black Rock (Kids Can Press, $19.95 cl., Sept.), the three fugitives wait out a massive storm in a small inn and tavern. All goes well until the queen’s soldiers pursuing them decide to take shelter there, too. • Sir Seth and Sir Ollie set out on a new, waterlogged quest in Sir Seth Thistlethwaite and the Kingdom of Caves (Owlkids Books, $15.95 cl., Sept.) by Richard Thake and illustrator Vince Chui.

In the fourth volume of Nova Scotia author Philip Roy’s Submarine Outlaw series, Alfred sets out on a slightly morbid tour of the Pacific Ocean, visiting sites associated with historical horrors. Doing so, he encounters modern environmental horrors like shrimp trawlers and giant, floating plastic islands, transforming him into an eco-warrior. Ghost of the Pacific (Ronsdale Press, $11.95 pa.) publishes in September. • The massively successful 39 Clues series gets restarted with an all-new adventure in Cahills vs. Vespers: The Medusa Plot (Scholastic, $14.99 cl., Aug.) by Gordon Korman. In the new book, the kids do global battle with the Vespers. • The Boy Sherlock Holmes’s fifth case, as it unfolds in Shane Peacock’s The Dragon Turn (Tundra Books, $21.99 cl., Oct.), involves murder and magicians.

Look out: Long John Silver has a ’tween-age grandaughter. In Adira Rotstein’s Little Jane Silver (Dundurn Press, $12.99 pa., July), the plucky 12-year-old must prove she is worthy of her heritage when her pirate parents’ ship is sabotaged. • Mike Deas, the illustrator of Orca’s Graphic Guide Adventure series, returns with an odd-sounding mash-up of a graphic novel in which two pop-eyed aliens from the planet Budap end up fighting to save a struggling fishing community in B.C. All the space/fish action can be found in Dalen and Gole: Scandal in Port Angus (Orca, $9.95 pa., Oct.). • In Kit Pearson’s The Whole Truth (HarperCollins Canada, $19.99 cl., Aug.), two sisters are sent to live with their grandmother on an island near Victoria, taking with them a secret that threatens to be exposed just as they are building their new lives.

In C.K. Kelly Martin’s new novel, My Beating Teenage Heart (Doubleday Canada, $21 cl., Sept.), the narrative is split between two characters: a desperately unhappy teenage boy and a woman, stuck in some nether dimension between life and death, who must constantly observe the boy. Question is: who’s got it worse? • In the wake of Darren Aronofsky’s film Black Swan, tales of battling ballerinas are big. Love You, Hate You (Dundurn, $ 12.99 pa., Nov.), the first novel by Vancouver’s Charis Marsh (herself a dancer), tells of the struggle of four Vancouver International Ballet Academy students as they prepare for their first performance of The Nutcracker. • Paul Yee’s Money Boy (Groundwood, $16.95 cl., Sept.) is the story of a young Chinese immigrant turfed out of his comfortable suburban life when his family finds out he is gay.

Iain Lawrence’s The Winter Pony (Delacorte/Random House, $22.99 cl., Nov.) is reminiscent of one of Jack London’s tales, with horses instead of dogs, and the Antarctic replacing the Arctic. It’s the story of a wild white pony captured and taken on Robert Falcon Scott’s quest to reach the South Pole. • Q&Q feature reviewer Sarah Ellis has penned a new volume in the decade-old Dear Canada series. That Fatal Night (Scholastic, $14.99 cl., Sept.) explores the aftermath of the sinking of the Titanic. • The new book in Dear Canada’s sister series (brother series?), I Am Canada, also spins a suspenseful and educational tale set amid the Titanic tragedy. Hugh Brewster’s Deadly Voyage (Scholastic, $14.99 cl.) publishes in September. • In Timber Wolf (Red Deer Press, $12.95 pa., Oct.), Greener Grass author Caroline Pignat’s new novel about Jack Byrne, logging camp cook Jack finds himself stranded in the woods with only a wolf as company. • A more contemporary boy finds himself similarly stranded in Helaine Becker’s Trouble in the Hills (Fitzhenry & Whiteside, $9.95 pa., Oct.), in which the youngster must dodge kidnappers, drug runners, and a former friend as he tries to make it back to town.

Lobster Press has partnered with Toronto’s Cookie Jar Entertainment for a series of books based on the kids’ show Johnny Test. The first four titles – Get in Shape, Johnny!, Johnny X vs. Bling-Bling Boy, Ready, Set, Go!, and Mission Bora Bora (all $4.95 pa.) – drop in October.

PICTURE BOOKS
Kids love the dainty, dancing Mole Sisters. In September, author-illustrator Roslyn Schwartz brings us their male counterparts in The Vole Brothers (Owlkids, $16.95 cl.), in which the eponymous heroes seek out a feast that will satisfy their enormous appetites. • Author-illustrator Marie-Louise Gay has a knack for creating picture books centred on believable and strong-willed young characters who inhabit a slightly absurd world. Caramba, the only cat in the world who can’t fly (and the star of his own picture book), must contend with an annoying little brother who nearly can in Caramba and Henry (Groundwood, $17.95 cl., Aug.).

Binky the cat has a new foe to contend with when he gets a new spaceship-mate: a cute foster kitten. In Ashley Spires’ Binky Under Pressure (Kids Can, $16.95 cl., $8.95 pa., Sept.), the intrepid space cat knows the kitty isn’t what she seems – and so he must take action! • Pierre Le Poof is in Paris for a dog show, but can’t resist getting out in the city to have a high-flying, mess-making, fur-dirtying adventure. Will he look his best for the show? Find out in Pierre in the Air! (Orca, $19.95 cl., Oct.) by Elliot Moose creator Andrea Beck. • A pet goat helps a young girl defeat a cousin who won’t share her chocolate bar in the allegedly autobiographical My Goat Gertrude (Nimbus Publishing, $18.95 cl., Oct.) by Starr Dobson and illustrator Dayle Dodwell.

A magic meat-grinder – you read that right – grants its new owners three wishes, and ends up teaching them a lesson, in Kishka for Koppel (Orca, $19.95 cl., Oct.) by Aubrey Davis and illustrator Sheldon Cohen. • Little ones often get a lot of their knowledge about the world from older siblings. Some of it is very useful; some of it … well.… Both kinds of information are passed on in Sarah Tsiang and illustrator Qin Leng’s Dogs Don’t Eat Jam, and Other Things Big Kids Know (Annick, $19.95 cl., $8.95 pa., Sept.), in which a young girl schools her little brother on the way things are. • With Dog Breath (Fitz & Whits, $18.95 cl., Nov.), Carolyn Beck and illustrator Brooke Kerrigan have created a touching, humorous portrait of a child’s best four-legged friend.

Barbara Reid’s plasticine artwork is a lively and engaging riposte to digital, standardized picture-book illustration. In her newest book, Picture a Tree (Scholastic, $19.99 cl., Oct.), Reid employs her signature art to celebrate all things arborial. • When You Were Small and Where You Came From, the almost unbearably charming picture books by Montreal’s Sara O’Leary and Vancouver illustrator Julie Morstad, are now  joined by a third, When I Was Small (Simply Read Books, $18.95 cl., Aug.), in which little Henry grows tired of hearing about his own past, and wants his mother to tell him about hers. • Books that encourage young ones to close their eyes are perennial favourites, with Goodnight Moon as the standard-bearer. Calgary illustrator Carolyn Fisher and Rhode Island author Willa Perlman go one better with Good Night, World (Simon & Schuster, $19.99 cl., July), in which everything on the planet, from east to west, is bid so long, farewell, auf weidersehen, goodbye. • Bird Child author Nan Forler explores rural Mennonite culture through poems and recipes in Winterberries and Apple Blossoms: Reflections and Flavors of a Mennonite Year (Tundra, $24.99 cl., Oct.). Peter Etril Snyder illustrates. • “Only connect” is the dictum behind best-selling author and illustrator Peter H. Reynold’s I’m Here (Simon & Schuster, $17.99 cl., Aug.), which is all about how children sometimes struggle to be part of the world around them.

The trend of using beloved songs as the basis for picture books (see, for example, Groundwood’s Canadian Railroad Trilogy by Gordon Lightfoot) continues with The Circle Game (Dancing Cat Books, $20 cl., Sept.). In the book, Joni Mitchell’s lyrics about the stages of a boy’s life are illustrated by Toronto’s Brian Deines • The Jelly Bean Row (Creative Book Publishing; $12.95 pa., Oct.) by author Susan Pynn and illustrator Lizz Pratt tells the “true,” sticky story behind St. John’s, Newfoundland’s famous row of multicoloured houses. • A picked-on cat and a seagull who’s afraid of heights team up in The Adventures of Gus and Isaac (Breakwater Books, $12.95 pa., Oct.), by Debbie Hanlon and illustrated by Grant Boland. • After being saved from certain death by a young prince, a mouse goes on to do exactly what the title of the book suggests in The Mouse Who Saved Egypt (Tradewind Books, $16.95 cl., July) by Vancouver’s Karim Alrawi and illustrator Bee Willey of Suffolk, England. •  Living near the world’s biggest bubblegum factory puts a lot of pressure on young Olivia Bezzlebee to blow a proper bubble in A Very Small Something (Biblioasis, $19.95 cl., Oct.) by P.E.I. poet David Hickey and illustrator Alexander Grigg-Burr.

NON-FICTION
Science has always borrowed from the natural world for its innovations. Biomimicry: Inventions Inspired by Nature (Kids Can, $19.95 cl., Aug.), by Vancouver’s Dora Lee and illustrator Margot Thompson, tells the history of these borrowings, and takes a look at possible future innovations drawn straight from Earth’s R&D lab.

Somali-Canadian performer K’naan, with help from illustrator Rudy Gutierrez, gives the skinny on his ubiquitous hit song/earworm When I Get Older: The Story Behind “Waving Flag” (Tundra, $19.99 cl., Nov.). • Fatty Legs told the story of Margaret Pokiak-Fenton’s experiences in a residential school. In the sequel, A Stranger at Home (Annick, $21.95 cl., $12.95 pa., Sept.), Pokiak-Fenton must try to reintegrate into her own community after returning home. Pokiak-Fenton co-wrote the book with her daughter-in-law, Christy Jordan-Fenton. San Francisco’s
Liz Amini-Holmes illustrates. • Ray Zahab recounts his transformation from disaffected teen to ultra-athelete in Running to Extremes: Ray Zahab’s Amazing Ultramarathon Journey (Puffin Canada, $12.99 cl., Aug.), co-written by Steve Pitt. • Righting Canada’s Wrongs: Japanese Canadian Internment in the Second World War (Formac Lorimer Books, $24.95 cl., Oct.) by Pamela Hickman and Masako Fukawa examines a dark time in Canadian history.

INTERNATIONAL
Martin Scorsese’s film version of The Invention of Hugo Cabret hits theatres in November. How lucky, then, that Cabret author Brian Selznick’s new book should appear just two months earlier. Wonderstruck (Scholastic, $29.99 cl., Sept.) tells two stories – one through words, one through pictures – that run parallel, though they take place 50 years apart. • Beloved illustrator Eric Carle’s new picture book, The Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse (Philomel/Penguin, $21 cl., Oct.), which is filled with images of animals coloured “wrong,” might as well come pre-chewed and stained with juice, for all the enthusiastic handling it will get from little ones. • Inheritance (Knopf Books for Young Readers, $27.99 cl., Nov.) is the fourth and final book in Christopher Paolini’s mega-selling series about dragons and the kids who ride them. • Providing stories to accompany the intriguing-yet-inexplicable images and characters found in Chris Van Allsburg’s famous and notoriously story-free 1984 picture book, The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, seems almost sacrilegious. However, the fact that The Chronicles of Harris Burdick (Houghton Mifflin/Thomas Allen & Son, $29.95 cl., Oct.) has such talents aboard as Sherman Alexie, Cory Doctorow, Stephen King, and Jules Feiffer makes it both unnecessary and an absolute must-have. • The Man in the Moon (Simon & Schuster, $19.99 cl., Sept.) is the first book in William Joyce’s Guardians of Childhood series, which offers origin stories for icons like Santa, the Tooth Fairy, and the eponymous moon man.

The fine print: Q&Q’s fall preview covers books published between July 1 and Dec. 31, 2011. All information (titles, prices, publication dates, etc.) was supplied by publishers and may have been tentative at Q&Q’s press time. • Titles that have appeared in previous previews do not appear here.

Fall preview 2011: international books

In the July/August issue, Q&Q looks ahead at the fall season’s biggest books.

FICTION
Originally excerpted in The Paris Review in 2002, Denis Johnson’s novella Train Dreams (Farrar, Straus and Giroux/D&M Publishers, $19.95 cl.) rolls into stores this September. Known for his stories in Jesus’ Son and the National Book Award–winning novel Tree of Smoke, his latest work tells the story of Robert Grainer, a forlorn labourer in the 20th-century American West, struggling to cope with the loss of his family. • Fans of The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex have been waiting with bated breath for the arrival of Pulitzer Prize winner Jeffrey Eugenides’ new novel, The Marriage Plot (Knopf Canada, $32 cl., Oct.). In it, a naive English major endures a paradigm shift when she enrolls in a semiotics class and meets a charismatic loner. • The White Tiger author Aravind Adiga returns to the theme of a rapidly modernizing India in his third novel, Last Man in Tower (Bond Street Books, $32 cl., Sept.). The new novel is about a real estate developer who meets resistance when he tries to buy out the inhabitants of a Mumbai apartment he wants to turn into a luxury residence.

The late Portuguese author and Nobel laureate José Saramago’s posthumous novel is Cain (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/Thomas Allen & Son, $28.95 cl., Oct.), a retelling of the story of humanity’s original bad brother • Appearing for the first time in English, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Apricot Jam and Other Stories (Counterpoint/Publishers Group Canada, $30.95 cl., Sept.), first published in Russia in the 1990s, is a collection of eight paired stories that exemplify the Nobel laureate’s “binary” approach to literature, in which interconnected stories are juxtaposed. • From Umberto Eco, the thinking person’s Dan Brown, comes another enigmatic tale of 19th-century Europe rife with intrigue. The Prague Cemetery (HMH/Thomas Allen, $33.95 cl., Nov.) imagines that a single evil genius is behind the era’s most infamous conspiracies and world-shattering events, from the Paris Commune to the Dreyfus Affair to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

This season will see new novels from two of the U.K.’s finest literary authors. The Stranger’s Child (Knopf Canada, $32 pa., Oct.), Alan Hollinghurst’s follow-up to the Man Booker Prize winner The Line of Beauty, is all about love, passion, and art in the face of destruction, telling the story of a 16-year-old girl transformed by a love poem written by a soldier before he is killed in the First World War. • In the vein of Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad, A.S. Byatt’s Ragnarok: The End of the Gods (Knopf Canada, $25 cl., Sept.) examines how a book of Norse mythology changes the course of a young girl’s life as she seeks refuge in the British countryside during the Second World War.

Following the success of his debut novel, Submarine, which was recently adapted for film, Joe Dunthorne returns with another whimsical coming of age novel. Wild Abandon (Hamish Hamilton Canada, $30 cl., Aug.) is the story of two teens who escape a crumbling Welsh commune while preparing for the apocalypse. • Shock-author Chuck Palahniuk continues to churn out the bizarre with Damned (Doubleday Canada, $29.95 cl., Oct.). Try to envisage Dante’s Inferno, The Breakfast Club, and the world’s first death by marijuana overdose. Well, what else would you expect?

Harry Whitehead is a British writer whose first novel has a very Canadian setting. The Cannibal Spirit (Hamish Hamilton Canada, $32 cl., Oct.), inspired by Whitehead’s time at a writing workshop at the University of British Columbia, is based on the life story of the historical figure George Hunt, a mixed-race shaman who is driven to confront his dual heritage when his son dies of tuberculosis.

Stephen King indulges in one of the ultimate “what if” scenarios in his latest novel, 11/22/63 (Scribner/Simon & Schuster, $40 cl., Nov.), about a man who travels back in time to prevent the JFK assassination. • Lev Grossman may be best known as the book critic for Time magazine, but he is also the author of the best-selling novels Codex and The Magicians, both of which offered literary twists on the fantasy genre. Grossman returns with The Magician King (Viking, $31 cl., Sept.), a sequel to The Magicians, billed as an epic fantasy for fans of J.K. Rowling and C.S. Lewis. • Questions about individuality and privacy in a society obsessed with surveillance are addressed in British novelist, critic, and journalist Philip Hensher’s King of the Badgers (Faber & Faber/D&M, $28.95 cl., Sept.), in which the disappearance of a young girl places a small English town under the microscope.

Ghost World’s Daniel Clowes returns with a new graphic novel, The Death-Ray (Drawn & Quarterly, $19.95 cl., Oct.), about a nicotine-fuelled teenage vigilante.

MYSTERY AND CRIME
Best-selling author Ian Rankin returns with the second instalment of the Malcolm Fox detective series. In The Impossible Dead (Orion/Hachette, $34.99 cl., Oct.), Fox encounters police corruption, terrorism, and a murder with a weapon that shouldn’t exist.

Readers can’t seem to get enough of Nordic crime fiction. Following in the footsteps of Stieg Larsson, Henning Mankell, and Jo Nesbo, Denmark’s top crime writer, Jussi Adler-Olsen, makes his North American debut with The Keeper of Lost Causes (Dutton/Penguin, $30 cl., Sept.). The first instalment of the Department Q series introduces readers to Carl Morck, a homicide detective on a downward spiral who uncovers a cold case that could revive his career.

The Great Leader (House of Anansi Press, $22.95 pa., Oct.) by Jim Harrison follows a Michigan police detective who, before he retires, is determined to close an investigation involving a nefarious cult leader. • In Bad Signs (Orion/Hachette, $34.99 cl., Nov.) by R.J. Ellory, the lives of two orphaned half-brothers become even worse when they are taken hostage by a convicted killer on death row. • James Lee Burke tells of violence along the Texas-Mexico border in his latest, Feast Day of Fools (Simon & Schuster, $29.99 cl., Sept.).

BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR
Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, about the death of the author’s husband, was hailed for its honest portrayal of mourning. Didion’s new memoir, Blue Nights (Knopf Canada, $28.95 cl., Nov.), is a meditation on the death of her daughter just before the publication of Magical Thinking. • Paulo Coelho’s Aleph (Knopf Canada, $27.95 cl., Sept.) is a personal story about the author’s mystical journey toward self-discovery after experiencing a crisis of faith – and his encounter with a lover from a past life. • In 1985, at the age of 24, Jeanette Winterson rocketed to literary celebrity with the publication of her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. Her memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (Knopf Canada, $29.95 cl., Oct.), is about the author’s rift with her Pentecostal parents, and her search for her biological mother.

Fifty years after the death of Ernest Hemingway, the author’s granddaughter, actress Mariel Hemingway, has delved into the family photo album to compile a pictorial biography of the literary giant. Hemingway: A Life in Pictures (Firefly Books, $40 cl., Sept.) is accompanied by a biographical essay by scholar Boris Vejdovsky. • Compiled from thousands of pages of journal entries, letters, story sketches, and other ephemera, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (HMH/Thomas Allen, $49.95 cl., Nov.), edited by Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem, is being billed as the definitive edition of the science-fiction author’s unfinished final work. • Cambridge University Press is publishing The Letters of Samuel Beckett Volume 2: 1941–1956 ($50.95 cl., Oct.), edited by George Craig et al., which will inevitably peel back the layers of the man responsible for some of the most enduring literary output of the 20th century.

D&Q is set to publish a graphic (as in, illustrated) biography of Tintin creator Georges Prosper Remi, better known by his pen name, Hergé. The Adventures of Hergé ($19.95 cl., Sept.), which addresses (among other things) accusations that the author was a Nazi collaborator, is a collaboration between French authors José-Louis Bocquet, Jean-Luc Fromental, and Stanislas Barthélémy.

If you enjoy films (and using your thumbs to signify quality), then Roger Ebert’s memoir Life Itself (Grand Central Publishing/Hachette, $29.99 cl., Sept.) is for you. • In Diane Keaton’s memoir Then Again (Random House, $30 cl., Nov.), the famed actress explains how the bond she shared with her mother gave her the strength to catapult from ordinary girl to movie star.

HarperCollins Canada is set to release an intimate look at the life of former Israeli Prime Minister and army commander Ariel Sharon, who has been in a coma since suffering a stroke five years ago. Sharon ($38.99 cl., Oct.) was compiled by the controversial leader’s youngest son, Gilad Sharon, from his father’s meticulously detailed journals and personal archive.

Professional wrestler Chris Kanyon recounts his tumultuous life story in Wrestling Reality: The Life and Mind of Chris Kanyon, Wrestling’s Gay Superstar (ECW Press, $21.95 pa., Nov.). The as-told-to memoir, by journalist Ryan Clark, details Kanyon’s life in and out of the ring, including his decision to come out in 2004 and the events leading up to his recent suicide.

POLITICS AND CURRENT AFFAIRS
Do you think we’re living in the most tumultuous time in human history? Well, Steven Pinker politely disagrees in his latest book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (Viking, $46 cl., Oct.). The Harvard University professor of psychology mixes insights into history and human nature to dispel the myths of mankind’s violent nature as we move toward a more peaceful society.

After tackling seemingly intractable problems in the developing world in books such as The End of Poverty, U.S. economist Jeffrey Sachs turns his attention to his home country, offering ways of reforming American-style capitalism. The Price of Civilzation: Economics and Ethics After the Fall (Random House Canada, $29.95 cl., Oct.) looks at the role government ought to play in the lives of its citizens. • Three-time Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas L. Friedman teams up with Michael Mandelbaum, director of the American foreign policy program at Johns Hopkins University, to diagnose America’s ills, and offer a way out of the trap the country has fallen into, in That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World We Invented – And How We Can Come Back (FSG/D&M, $31 cl., Sept.). • Polemical columnist Christopher Hitchens is sure to ruffle feathers in Arguably: Selected Essays ($34.99 cl., Sept.), published by McClelland & Stewart’s new non-fiction imprint, Signal.

Philanthropist and U.N. special envoy Ray Chambers has done everything in his power to eradicate the spread of malaria. Time magazine’s Africa bureau chief, Alex Perry, looks at Chambers’ campaign and investigates the scope of this often overlooked issue in Lifeblood: How to Change the World One Dead Mosquito at a Time (PublicAffairs/Perseus Books Group, $30 cl., Sept.).

Washington Post investigative reporters Dana Priest and William Arkin delve into the expansion of the U.S. national security apparatus since 9/11 in Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State (Little, Brown/Hachette $32.99 cl., Sept.), which exposes how a new, secret “fourth branch” of government is becoming ever more powerful.

HISTORY
Civilization: The West and the Rest (Allen Lane, $32 cl., Nov.) is Harvard historian Niall Ferguson’s study of how Western culture has risen to world dominance over the past 500 years. • James Palmer documents a single tumultuous year in China’s history (1976), when the deadliest earthquake in modern history helped end the Cultural Revolution. Heaven Cracks, Earth Shakes: The Tangshan Earthquake and the Death of Mao’s China (Basic Books/Perseus, $32.50 cl.) ships in December.

Thomas Keneally, author of the Booker Prize–winning Schindler’s Ark – later adapted into the film Schindler’s List – explores how, historically, famine is not caused by food shortages, but rather by social injustice and government neglect. Three Famines: Starvation and Politics (PublicAffairs/Perseus, $32.50 cl., Aug.) documents past tragedies in Ireland, Bengal, and Ethiopia. • Journalist and economist Sylvia Nasar, who won the National Book Critics Circle Award for her biography A Beautiful Mind (about Princeton mathematician John Nash), returns with a look at the men and women who invented modern economics in Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius (Simon & Schuster, $39.99 cl., Sept.).

Stephen Clarke, author of the best-selling novel A Year in the Merde, is set to release a companion volume of sorts. 1,000 Years of Annoying the French (McArthur & Company, $24.95 pa., Aug.) explicates (with humour) the ongoing British effort to pester the French, from the Norman Conquests up to the present.

BUSINESS AND TECHNOLOGY
Journalist Warren H. Phillips offers a behind-the-scenes account of a dying profession in Newspaperman: Inside the News Business at The Wall Street Journal (McGraw-Hill, $34.95 cl., Oct.). Phillips began his career as a copyboy, eventually working his way up the ranks to become publisher of the WSJ. • In The Mountain Within: Leadership Lessons and Inspiration for Your Climb to the Top (McGraw-Hill, $28.95 cl., Sept.), Herta von Stiegel, founder and CEO of Ariya Capital Group – a private equity firm that focuses on sustainable investments in Africa – shares how she led a group of people with disabilities to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro, and how readers can apply the same leadership skills to the business world.

The Conficker worm baffled cyber-security experts when it infected millions of computers across the globe. Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down and Guests of the Ayatollah, investigates the impact of the computer virus in Worm: The Story of the First Digital War (Atlantic/PGC, $26.50 cl., Oct.). • U.K. journalist Misha Glenny follows up 2008’s McMafia with DarkMarket: CyberThieves, CyberCobs and You (Anansi, $29.95 cl., Sept.), an exposé of the online underworld.

LIFESTYLE & SELF-HELP
Neuroscientist, professor, and former drug addict Dr. Marc Lewis explains the propensities behind addiction in Memoirs of an Addicted Brain: A Neuroscientist Examines His Former Life on Drugs (Doubleday Canada, $32.95 cl., Oct.). The narrative bounces between Lewis’s experiences as an addict and his study of how our brains cyclically crave what we don’t have.

Alexis Stewart (daughter of Martha Stewart) and Jennifer Koppelman Hutt – co-hosts of the Sirius Radio program Whatever with Alexis and Jennifer, as well as a growing empire of TV shows – share their insights on, well, just about whatever they feel like in Whateverland: Learning to Live Here (John Wiley & Sons, $29.95 cl., Oct.). • Actress, author, and fitness enthusiast Jane Fonda looks at her own life to offer a blueprint for living well in Prime Time: Love; Health; Fitness; Sex; Spirit; Friendship; Making the Most of All Your Life (Random House, $30 cl., Sept.). • In Breast Cancer: 50 Essential Things You Can Do (Conari Press, $18.95 pa., Sept.), cancer survivor and author Greg Anderson offers vital information regarding the issues patients encounter, from diagnosis to recovery.

FOOD AND DRINK
World-famous French chef Jacques Pépin unveils a compendium of his favourite recipes – from haute cuisine to Pépin’s twist on fast food – in Essential Pépin: More Than 700 All-Time Favorites from My Life in Food (HMH/Thomas Allen, $49.95 cl., Oct.). • The Oxford Companion to Beer (Oxford University Press, $65 cl., Oct.), edited by Garrett Oliver, is an all-encompassing guide to everything you wanted to know about the world’s third most popular beverage (after water and tea).

Known for the lofty Veganomicon, Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero’s Vegan Pie in the Sky: 75 Out-of-this-World Recipes for Pies, Tarts, Cobblers and More (Da Capo Lifelong Books/Perseus, $19.95 pa., Oct.) will be fattening up vegans with these dessert recipes. • The Healthy Voyager’s Global Kitchen: 150 Plant-Based Recipes from Around the World (Fair Winds/Canadian Manda Group, $21.99 pa., Dec.) is Carolyn Scott-Hamilton’s guide to plant-based ethnic eating.

Firefly has two cookbooks slated for September: Ken Hom’s Complete Chinese Cookbook ($35 cl.) is an introduction to Chinese cuisine and cooking techniques. • Superfoods for Pregnancy: The Healthiest Foods for the Expectant Mother and Her Baby ($19.95 pa.) by Susannah Marriott is a comprehensive guide to nutrition for expectant mothers.

The fine print: Q&Q’s fall preview covers books published between July 1 and Dec. 31, 2011. All information (titles, prices, publication dates, etc.) was supplied by publishers and may have been tentative at Q&Q’s press time. • Titles that have appeared in previous previews do not appear here.

Fall preview 2011: Canadian non-fiction

In the July/August issue, Q&Q looks ahead at the fall season’s biggest books.

POLITICS AND CURRENT AFFAIRS

With Canada’s combat role in Afghanistan coming to an end this summer, a number of fall titles take stock of the country’s most significant military intervention since Korea. Journalist Terry Glavin, a recent recipient of the B.C. Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence, offers a candid portrait of Afghanistan in Come From the Shadows: The Long and Lonely Struggle for Peace in Afghanistan (Douglas & McIntyre, $29.95 cl., Oct.), in which Glavin meets Afghanis from many walks of life who offer hope for a sustainable peace. • In The Long Way Back: Afghanistan’s Quest for Peace (HarperCollins Canada, $32.99 cl., Sept.), former Canadian ambassador and U.N. special representative in Afghanistan (and newly minted Conservative MP) Chris Alexander lays out a roadmap for peace, and offers his take on the last 10 years of the country’s tumultuous history. • Seasoned correspondent Murray Brewster’s The Savage War: The Untold Battles of Afghanistan (John Wiley & Sons Canada, $34.95 cl., Sept.) offers a candid look at Canada’s war effort in some of Afghanistan’s most dangerous regions. • Drawing on her own experiences growing up in Afghanistan, as well as the stories of others, Sharifa Sharif offers a candid portrait of the lives of Afghani women and children in On the Edge of Being ($16.95 pa., Oct.), published by newcomer Three O’Clock Press.

As the Toronto Star’s national security reporter and author of 2008’s Guantanamo’s Child: The Untold Story of Omar Khadr, Michelle Shephard has made a name for herself as a critic of the security state run amok. Decade of Fear: Reporting from Terrorism’s Grey Zone (D&M, $32.95 cl., Sept.) reflects on her experience covering some of the most important stories from the war on terror. • Haunted by the 1993 murder of a Somali teenager by Canadian soldiers, B.C. writer Gary Geddes travelled from the Hague to Africa to look at whether international aid is helping or harming ordinary Africans. Geddes, author of the travel memoir Kingdom of Ten Thousand Things, shares his discoveries in Drink the Bitter Root: A Writer’s Search for Justice and Redemption in Africa (D&M, $32.95 cl., Aug.). • Samantha Nutt, founder of War Child North America, offers an account of her work in some of the world’s most devastated corners, and shares her vision for changing course from our growing militarization, in Damned Nations: Greed, Guns, Armies, and Aid ($29.99 cl., Oct.), published by McClelland & Stewart’s new non-fiction imprint, Signal.

Joel Bakan’s previous book, The Corporation, was adapted into a documentary film that hit a nerve with the counterculture. His follow-up, Childhood Under Siege: How Big Business Ruthlessly Targets Children (Allen Lane Canada, $32 cl., Aug.) is another scathing indictment of corporate greed, examining how, in the words of the publisher, big business plans to turn kids into “obsessive and narcissistic mini-consumers, media addicts, cheap and pliable workers, and chemical industry guinea pigs.” • Sociologist Lyndsay Green follows up her surprise bestseller You Could Live a Long Time: Are You Ready? with Teens Gone Wired: Are You Ready? (Thomas Allen Publishers, $19.95 pa., Aug.), a guide for parents who may not know what “sexting” means, but know they don’t like it.

In Room for All of Us (Allen Lane Canada, $35 cl., Sept.), Canada’s 26th Governor General, Adrienne Clarkson, draws on her own experiences, and those of other immigrants, to offer a revealing portrait of a changing country and its people.

In Dependent America? How Canada and Mexico Construct U.S. Power (University of Toronto Press, $34.95 cl., Nov.), one of Canada’s most important political scientists and observers, Stephen Clarkson, offers his thoughts on the simultaneous importance and powerlessness of the U.S.’s two most significant trading partners and allies. The book is co-authored by Matto Mildenberger. • Flanker Press had a surprise hit on its hands with Danny Williams: The War with Ottawa, released just a few months before the former Newfoundland premier stepped down. Well-known broadcaster and ex-politician Bill Rowe returns with the plea Danny Williams, Please Come Back ($19.95 pa., Sept.), a collection of political columns.

ENVIRONMENT
Andrew Nikiforuk, author most recently of Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent, reports on another environmental scourge in Empire of the Beetle: How Human Folly and a Tiny Bug Are Killing North America’s Great Forests (Greystone Books, $19.95 pa., Sept.). The book, co-published with the David Suzuki Foundation, looks at how misguided science, out-of-control logging, and climate change contributed to the destruction of more than 30 billion pine and spruce trees in North America. • Los Angeles–based biologist and journalist Reese Halter looks at the same problem in The Insatiable Bark Beetle ($16.95 cl., Oct.), published as part of Rocky Mountain Books’ Manifesto series of short, opinionated non-fiction.

The Geography of Hope author Chris Turner continues to take an optimistic view of mankind’s ability to adapt to environmental challenges in The Great Leap Sideways: How to Survive and Thrive in the Sustainable Twenty-first Century Economy (Random House Canada, $29.95 cl., Sept.), a field guide to recent breakthroughs in renewable energy, urban design, and nascent “green-collar” economies. • In Atlantic Canada’s Sustainability Innovators (Nimbus, $22.95 pa., Oct.), Chris Benjamin profiles forward-thinking entrepreneurs, educators, and activists who are making a difference, from organic farmers to the founder of Frenchy’s, the prevalent East Coast chain of used-clothing stores.

MEMOIR AND BIOGRAPHY
Vancouver author Charlotte Gill is known in literary circles for her story collection Ladykiller, which won the B.C. Book Prize for fiction, but she has also spent nearly 20 years planting trees in clear-cuts across Canada. Her memoir, Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe (Greystone, $29.95 cl., Sept.), is at once an account of Gill’s “million-tree career,” a snapshot of a unique, particularly Canadian subculture, and a meditation on the wonder of trees. • One of Canada’s most beloved novelists, David Adams Richards, shares his love of the outdoors and offers an impassioned defence of a way of life he believes is under attack in Facing the Hunter (Doubleday Canada, $32.95 cl., Oct.), a companion to Richards’ Governor General’s Literary Award–winning ode to angling, Lines on Water.

In what promises to be a searingly honest account of mental illness, Ray Robertson describes how he battled suicidal depression after completing his sixth novel. Why Not? Fifteen Reasons to Live (Biblioasis, $19.95 pa., Sept.) is described as “self-help for the socially hostile.” • Shannon Moroney’s life as a newlywed was shattered when, just one month into her marriage, her husband was arrested and charged in the brutal assault and kidnapping of two women. Moroney describes her journey to overcome the stigma of guilt by association, and understand her husband’s violent actions, in Through the Glass (Doubleday Canada, $32.95 cl., Oct.).

Commemorating the 60th anniversary of the National Ballet of Canada, Carol Bishop-Gwyn‘s The Pursuit of Perfection: A Life of Celia Franca (Cormorant Books, $36 cl., Oct.) is the first major biography of the woman who made the troupe a cultural force in Canada.

Historian Michael Bliss is known for his biographies of Canadian politicians and early medical practitioners. In Writing History: A Professor’s Life (Dundurn Press, $40 cl., Sept.), the University of Toronto professor emeritus turns to the raw materials of his own life in a memoir that touches on family, Canadian politics, and the craft of researching and writing history. • Joseph B. Martin traces his climb from a Mennonite farm to dean of Harvard Medical School in Alfalfa to Ivy (University of Alberta Press, $34.95 pa., Aug.), offering insight into academic politics and health care in Canada and the U.S.

Kurdish poet and journalist Jalal Barzanji endured imprisonment and torture at the hands of Saddam Hussein because of his outspoken writings. After emigrating to Canada in the 1990s, Barzanji, who was named Edmonton’s first writer-in-exile in 2007, finally tells his story. The Man in Blue Pajamas: Prison Memoir in the Form of a Novel (U of A Press, $24.95 pa., July), translated from the Kurdish by Sabah Salih, includes a foreword from John Ralston Saul.

LITERARY CRITICISM
As part of the inaugural season for M&S’s new non-fiction imprint, Signal, Margaret Atwood shares her lifelong love of science-fiction in the essay collection In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination ($26.99 cl., Oct.).

A companion to 2002’s Odysseys Home, poet George Elliott Clarke’s Directions Home: Approaches to African-Canadian Literature (University of Toronto Press, $39.95 pa., Dec.) is billed as the most comprehensive analysis of African-Canadian texts and writers to date, and includes studies of contemporary writers such as George Boyd and Dionne Brand. • In a new collection of essays, poet and scholar Roy Miki investigates the shifting currents of citizenship, globalization, and cultural practices of Asian-Canadians. In Flux: Transnational Signs of Asian Canadian Writing (NeWest Press, $24.95 pa., Oct.) is edited by University of Guelph professor Smaro Kamboureli.

Discovered in the author’s archive after her death in 2007, Jane Rule’s Taking My Life (Talonbooks, $19.95 pa., Aug.) offers a portrait of the writer as a young woman, tracing her maturation as an artist in the first 21 years of her life. • How I Wrote Certain of My Books (Mansfield Press, $19.95 pa., Oct.) is prolific poet, fiction writer, and critic George Bowering’s memoir about building his literary oeuvre. • Poet, novelist, and journalist George Jonas takes readers on a romp through literary history in The Jonas Variations: A Literary Séance (Cormorant Books, $24 pa., Sept.), in which the author pays homage to foreign-language poets who have inspired him.

CANADIAN HISTORY
Richard Gwyn won the 2008 Charles Taylor Prize for John A: The Man Who Made Us, the first volume of his biography of Canada’s founding Prime Minister. The follow-up, Nation Maker: Sir John A. Macdonald – His Life, Our Times (Random House Canada, $37 cl., Sept.), picks up the story on Confederation Day in 1867. • It’s been 30 years since the last major biography of William Lyon Mackenzie King appeared. Winnipeg historian and novelist Allan Levine updates the record with William Lyon Mackenzie King: A Life Guided by the Hand of Destiny (D&M, $36.95 cl., Sept.), a portrait of one of Canada’s greatest – and easily, quirkiest – PMs. • University of Toronto historian and Celtic Studies professor David A. Wilson is set to publish the second volume in his biography of Thomas D’Arcy McGee, one of the fathers of confederation and Canada’s only federal politician to be the victim of an assassination. Thomas D’Arcy McGee, Volume 2: The Extreme Moderate, 1857–1868 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, $39.95 cl.) publishes in October.

When a U.S. Air Force bomber caught fire over Canada’s northwest coast in 1950, it was carrying some very important cargo – a nuclear bomb. Aviation historian Dirk Septer investigates questions that still remain about the incident in Lost Nuke: The Last Flight of Bomber 075 (Heritage House Publishing, $19.95 pa., Oct.). • In Maple Leaf Empire: Canada, Britain, and Two World Wars (Oxford University Press, $29.95 cl., Oct.), historian Jonathan F. Vance looks at Canada’s unique brand of Britishness through the two nations’ shared military endeavours.

When he died last fall, folk historian Chuck Davis was known as the custodian of Vancouver’s collective memory. His magnum opus, Chuck Davis’s History of Metropolitan Vancouver ($49.95 cl.), will be published by Harbour Publishing in October.

HISTORY
Anthropologist, ethnobotanist, and National Geographic Society explorer-in-residence Wade Davis climbs to new heights with Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest (Knopf Canada, $35 cl., Sept.), an account of British adventurers’ early ascents of Mount Everest, and what they meant for a nation still reeling from the devastation of the First World War.

In Long Night of the Tankers (McArthur & Company, $34.95 cl., Nov.), University of Calgary scholars David J. Bercuson and Holger H. Herwig examine an often overlooked theatre of the Second World War: the Caribbean, whose oil refining facilities were targeted by German U-boats.

POP CULTURE
Dave Bidini may be one of the founding members of the seminal Canadian indie band the Rheostatics, but his prolificacy as an author (nine books in just over a decade) is equally impressive. Bidini marries his passions for music and literature in Writing Gordon Lightfoot: The Man, the Music, and the World in 1972 (M&S, $29.99 cl., Oct.), which looks at the folk-rock legend in the week leading up to the 1972 Mariposa Folk Festival. • Frequent Q&Q contributor Robert J. Wiersema (author of Bedtime Story) salutes his own rock ’n’ roll idol in Walk Like a Man: Coming of Age with the Music of Bruce Springsteen (Greystone, $21.95 pa., Sept.), which functions as liner notes for the soundtrack of the author’s life.

Shania Twain and Anne Murray have scored bestsellers with their recent as-told-to memoirs. Michael Bublé follows in their footsteps with Off Stage On Stage (Doubleday Canada, $34.95 cl., Nov.), which promises to offer fans an intimate portrait (with pictures!) of the easy-on-the-eyes crooner. • Singer-songwriter Jann Arden promises not to be insensitive in recounting her Prairies upbringing and maturation as an artist in Falling Backwards (Knopf Canada, $32 cl., Nov.). • With his popular CBC Radio show, Randy Bachman, best known for his work in the Guess Who and Bachman-Turner Overdrive, has proven himself to be the Stuart McLean of the rock ’n’ roll set. He shares some of the best-loved chestnuts from his ample repertoire in Randy Bachman’s Vinyl Tap Stories (Viking Canada, $32 cl., Oct.).

Many Canadians were shocked and saddened to learn of the death earlier this year of Roger Abbott, one of the founding members of the Royal Canadian Air Farce. In the posthumously published Air Farce: 40 Years of Flying by the Seat of Our Pants (Wiley Canada, $34.95 cl., Oct.), Abbott, along with fellow Farcer Don Ferguson, offers a behind-the-scenes account of how the CBC show got off the ground and continued to fly for four decades.

William Shatner seems to be experiencing a new vogue of late – though in some ways he never really went away. The Star Trek and Boston Legal star gives fans a glimpse of his quirky genius in Shatner Rules: Your Key to Understanding the Shatnerverse and the World at Large (Viking Canada, $25.50 cl., Oct.). • Vancouver broadcaster and actor Terry David Mulligan recently caused a stir for an act of civil disobedience involving an illicit substance (Google it, if you haven’t heard), reminding Canadians he has never been far from the media spotlight. In Terry David Mulligan (Heritage House, $19.95 pa., Oct.), written with Glen Schaefer, the former MuchMusic VJ relates his career highs and lows. • William B. Davis is known as one of the most famous TV villains of the 1990s for his role in The X-Files. He tells of his upbringing in the Canadian theatre world in Where There’s Smoke… : Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man (ECW Press, $22.95 pa., Oct.).

Street artist Roadsworth gained notoriety when he was arrested for his stencils and street markings that subverted Montreal’s urban facade. Some of his best-known pieces are included in Roadsworth (Goose Lane, $29.95 pa., Sept.), which features more than 200 reproductions of his work. • Visual Orgasm: Highlights of Canadian Graffiti (Frontenac House, $40 cl., Sept.) is a visual history of Canadian tags, bombs, and burners by Adam Melnyk, who has maintained the online archive visualorgasm.org for more than a decade.

SCIENCE AND IDEAS
Jessa Gamble explores the intersection of circadian rhythms and modern culture in The Siesta and the Midnight Sun: How We Measure and Experience Time (Viking Canada, $34 cl., Oct.), which argues, among other things, that people who lived before the invention of mechanical timepieces endured less stress than their modern counterparts.

McGill-Queen’s University Press is set to publish an ambitious art book that brings an early explorer’s account of Canada to modern readers. The Codex Cadensis and the Writings of Louis Nicolas ($65 cl., Nov.) is an encyclopedic record of Canada’s natural history by a Jesuit priest who travelled extensively in Canada in the mid-17th century. The work is edited and introduced by scholar François-Marc Gagnon, with translations by Nancy Senior and Réal Ouellet.

Ian Dowbiggin diagnoses the modern obsession with mental well-being in The Quest for Mental Health: A Tale of Science, Medicine, Scandal, Sorrow and Mass Society (Cambridge University Press, $25.95 pa., Sept.), in which the University of Prince Edward Island historian of science argues that the trend for “therapism” will persist as long as consumerism holds sway. • In Strong Helpers’ Teachings (Canadian Scholars’ Press, $39.95 pa., Sept.), Ryerson University prof Cyndy Baskin shows how professionals in the field of “human services” can learn a lot from native teachings.

FOOD
Montreal is rightly celebrated as a mecca for gluttonous gourmands. One of the city’s most distinctive restaurants, Joe Beef, gets its due in The Art of Living According to Joe Beef (Ten Speed Press/Random House, $40 cl., Oct.), by co-owners/chefs David McMillan and Frédéric Morin, with journalist Meredith Erickson. • Canadian celebrity chef Michael Smith is set to publish his first book with Penguin Canada. Chef Michael Smith’s Kitchen ($32 cl., Sept.) is a collection of the Prince Edward Island chef’s favourite home-cooking recipes.

As the title suggests, Food and Trembling (Invisible Publishing, $16.95 pa., Oct.) isn’t your typical highbrow culinary memoir. The collection of humorous essays by Montreal blogger Jonah Campbell is more gourmand than gourmet, approaching eating with fierce appetite, but not always good manners. • One of the more surprising trends arising from the locavore movement is celebrated in We Sure Can! How Jams and Pickles Are Reviving the Lure and Lore of Local Food (Arsenal Pulp Press, $24.95 pa., Aug.) by Sarah B. Hood, which includes more than 100 recipes.

In Cravings: Comfort Eats and Favourite Treats (TouchWood Editions, $19.95 pa., Sept.), Debbie Harding shares recipes for those sinful foods – cinnamon buns, poutine, sugar donuts – most of us just can’t resist. • For those suffering dietary restrictions who still want to indulge comes The Gluten-Free Baking Book: 250 Small-Batch Recipes for Everything from Brownies to Cheesecake (Robert Rose/Firefly, $27.95 pa., Sept.) by Donna Washburn and Heather Butt.

Fresh & Healthy Cooking for Two: Easy Meals for Everyday Life (Formac, $24.95 pa., Oct.), by Ellie Topp and Marilyn Booth, is billed as an alternative to prepared foods, offering quick, healthful dishes for smaller households. • Also from Formac, Scrumptious & Sustainable Fishcakes: A Collection of the Best Sustainable Fishcake Recipes from Canadian Wharves, Coast to Coast ($24.95 pa., Oct.) brings together ethical seafood recipes from the likes of Elizabeth Feltham, Elaine Elliot, and Craig Flinn.

SPORT
The First Stampede of Flores LaDue (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, $29.99 cl., Oct.) by Wendy Bryden is the true love story of Guy Weadick and Flores LaDue, two Wild West vaudevillians who founded the Calgary Stampede. • Soccer legend Bob Lenarduzzi, president and CEO of the Vancouver Whitecaps, tells co-author Jim Taylor how he became the face of soccer in B.C. in The Bobby Lenarduzzi Story (Harbour, $28.95 cl., Sept.).

The fine print: Q&Q’s fall preview covers books published between July 1 and Dec. 31, 2011. All information (titles, prices, publication dates, etc.) was supplied by publishers and may have been tentative at Q&Q’s press time. • Titles that have appeared in previous previews do not appear here.

Fall preview 2011: Canadian fiction

In the July/August issue, Q&Q looks ahead at the fall season’s biggest books.

NOVELS

One of the most anticipated releases of the fall season is surely the new novel from internationally acclaimed author Michael Ondaatje, his first since 2007 Governor General’s Literary Award winner Divisadero. Set in the early 1950s, The Cat’s Table (McClelland & Stewart, $32 cl., Sept.) tells the story of an 11-year-old boy crossing the Indian Ocean on a liner bound for England, and the mysterious prisoner shackled on board. • Also from M&S is Guy Vanderhaeghe’s first novel in eight years. Set in the late 19th-century Canadian and American West, A Good Man ($32.99 cl., Sept.) is the third book in a loose trilogy that also includes The Last Crossing (2003) and The Englishman’s Boy, which won the 1996 Governor General’s Literary Award. • A third GG winner has a new novel out this season: David Gilmour, who won in 2005 for his previous novel, A Perfect Night to Go to China. Gilmour returns with The Perfect Order of Things (Thomas Allen Publishers, $26.95 cl., Sept.), the story of a man who revisits traumatic and life-changing incidents from his past.

Marina Endicott follows up her Scotiabank Giller Prize–shortlisted 2008 novel Good to a Fault with The Little Shadows (Doubleday Canada, $32.95 cl., Sept.), about three sisters who become vaudeville singers following the death of their father. • Acclaimed novelist Helen Humphreys returns with an historical novel set in France during the Napoleonic period. The Reinvention of Love (HarperCollins Canada, $29.99 cl., Sept.) is about a French journalist whose affair with Victor Hugo’s wife causes a scandal (as it might be expected to do).

Brian Francis’s debut novel, Fruit, was a runner-up in the 2009 edition of CBC’s battle of the books, Canada Reads. His second novel, Natural Order (Doubleday Canada, $29.95 cl., Aug.), tells the story of a mother who is forced to confront the secrets she has kept about her son when her carefully constructed life is overturned by a startling revelation. • Kevin Chong returns to fiction with his first novel in a decade. Beauty Plus Pity (Arsenal Pulp Press, $17.95 pa., Sept.) follows an Asian-Canadian slacker in Vancouver whose incipient modelling career is derailed by the death of his father and the sudden departure of his fiancée.

Requiem (HarperCollins Canada, $32.95 cl., Sept.), the third novel from Frances Itani, is about a Japanese-Canadian who embarks upon a cross-country journey of discovery following the death of his wife. • Anita Rau Badami follows her best-selling novels Tamarind Mem and The Hero’s Walk with Tell It to the Trees (Knopf Canada, $32 cl., Sept.), about the Dharma family – the authoritarian Vikram, the gourmand Suman, and the old storyteller Akka. When the Dharmas’ tenant, Anu, turns up dead on their doorstep, the family’s long-buried secrets begin to boil over. • Gayla Reid returns with her first novel since 2002’s Closer Apart. Set during the Spanish Civil War, Come from Afar (Cormorant Books, $32 cl., Aug.) tells the story of an Australian nurse who falls into a relationship with a Canadian soldier from the International Brigade.

Haitian expat Dany Laferrière is back with his third novel in translation in three years. The Return (Douglas & McIntyre, $22.95 pa., Aug.) tells the story of a 23-year-old Haitian named Dany who flees Baby Doc Duvalier’s repressive regime and relocates to Montreal. Thirty-three years later, Dany learns of his father’s death in New York City, and plots a return to his native country. David Homel translates. • Another Montreal resident, poet Sina Queyras, has a novel out this fall, the author’s first. Autobiography of Childhood (Coach House Books, $20.95 pa., Oct.) is about one day in the lives of five siblings haunted by the death of a brother years before. • Infrared (McArthur & Company, $29.95 cl., Sept.), the new novel by Nancy Huston, is about a photographer who travels to Tuscany with her father and stepmother. Employing internal dialogues with the photographer’s mental doppelgänger, Huston opens up her hero for exposure and provides an intimate picture of her interior life.

CanLit mainstay David Helwig returns with a novella, his first since 2007’s Smuggling Donkeys. Killing McGee (Oberon, $38.95 cl., $18.95 pa., Oct.) tells the story of a professor’s dual obsessions with the assassination of D’Arcy McGee and the disappearance of one of his students. • Toronto-based poet Dani Couture returns with her first novel, a surreal and iconoclastic take on that perennial CanLit staple: the family drama. Algoma (Invisible Publishing, $19.95 pa., Oct.) tells the story of a family attempting to cope with the aftermath of a young child falling through the ice and drowning. • Shari Lapeña also has a novel about a perennial CanLit concern: raising money to allow one time to write poetry. Happiness Economics (Brindle & Glass, $19.95 pa., Sept.) tells the story of a stalled poet who takes a job writing advertising copy to start a poetry foundation.

Jamaican-born novelist, poet, and non-fiction author Olive Senior returns to long-form fiction with Dancing Lessons (Cormorant, $22 pa., Aug.), about a woman looking back on her life after a hurricane destroys her home. • Memoirist Frances Greenslade (A Pilgrim in Ireland, By the Secret Ladder) has a debut novel out this August. Shelter (Random House Canada, $29.95 cl.) is a coming of age story about two sisters searching for their mother, who abandoned them after their father was killed in a logging accident.

Not one, but two novels this season extend the burgeoning CanLit focus on towns that have been/are about to be flooded (after Johanna Skibsrud’s The Sentimentalists, Anne Michaels’ The Winter Vault, and Michael V. Smith’s Progress). Tristan Hughes’s Eye Lake (Coach House, $19.95 pa., Oct.) is about the town of Crooked River, Ontario. Named for a river that was diverted to make way for a mine, the town harbours secrets that surface when the river reclaims its original course. • And in September, Goose Lane Editions will publish Riel Nason’s The Town that Drowned ($19.95 pa.), about the suspicions, secrets, and emotions that flare up when the township of Haverton is scheduled to be flooded to allow for the construction of a massive dam.

Edward Riche follows up his Thomas Head Raddall Award winner The Nine Planets with Easy to Like (House of Anansi Press, $29.95 cl., Sept.), a satire about a screenwriter and oenophile who dreams of travelling to Paris, but is trapped in Canada by an expired passport and a growing Hollywood scandal. Relocating to Toronto, he bluffs his way into the upper echelons of the CBC. • Former president and CEO of Penguin Canada, David Davidar was forced out of his position under a cloud of scandal after accusations of sexual harassment. Davidar’s new novel, Ithaca (M&S, $29.99 cl., Oct.), is, perhaps not coincidentally, about the rise and fall of a publishing star.

Canadian literary icon Michel Tremblay returns with a new novel, the first in a trilogy. Set in 1913, Crossing the Continent (Talonbooks, $18.95 pa., Oct.) takes the author’s characters out of Quebec for the first time, to tell the backstory of the people who populate his Chroniques du Plateau-Mont-Royal series. Long-time Tremblay collaborator Sheila Fischman translates.

A resident of St. John’s, Newfoundland, lately one of the most fertile spots for Canadian writing, Michelle Butler Hallett crafts genre-busting stories and novels that frequently experiment with gender and perspective. Her new novel, Deluded Your Sailors (Creative Book Publishing, $21.95 pa., Sept.), focuses on the culture industry from the perspective of Nichole Wright, who makes a discovery that puts a government-funded tourism project in jeopardy, and a shape-shifting minister named Elias Winslow. • Another Newfoundland native, Kate Story, has a novel out with Creative this season. The follow-up to 2008’s Blasted, Wrecked Upon This Shore ($21.95 pa., Sept.) tells the story of Pearl Lewis, an emotionally damaged, charismatic woman who is seen at different stages in her life.

In 1972, Christina Parr returns to her hometown of Parr’s Landing, a place she fled years earlier. The dirty secret of Parr’s Landing? A 300-year-old vampire resides in the caves of the remote mining town. Christina learns why she should have stayed away in Michael Rowe’s Enter, Night (ChiZine Publications, $17.95 pa., Oct.). • English literature professor Janey Erlickson struggles to make headway in her academic career while caring for a tyrannical toddler in Sue Sorensen’s comic novel A Large Harmonium (Coteau Books, $21 pa., Sept.). • Paul Brenner, a Vancouver lawyer, dines with his son, Daniel, one Friday evening. The next day, Brenner receives word that his son has been murdered. Hold Me Now (Freehand Books, $21.95 pa., Oct.), the first novel from Stephen Gauer, examines a father’s grief and a lawyer’s faith in the legal system.

SHORT FICTION

Anyone who has ever wondered what might transpire if the author of Bigfoot’s autobiography were to illustrate a story collection by Canada’s reigning postmodern ironist can stop wondering. October sees the publication of Highly Inappropriate Tales for Young People (Random House Canada, $24 cl.), the first collaboration between author Douglas Coupland and well-known illustrator Graham Roumieu.

D.W. Wilson currently lives in London, England, but is a native of B.C.’s Kootenay Valley. The winner of the inaugural Man Booker Prize Scholarship from the University of East Anglia, Wilson’s debut collection, Once You Break a Knuckle (Hamish Hamilton Canada, $32 cl., Sept.), is a suite of stories about good people doing bad things.

Novelist Anne DeGrace has her first collection of short stories on tap for September. Flying with Amelia (McArthur & Company, $29.95 cl.) spans the 20th century and crosses vast swathes of territory. Wireless telegraphy, German POWs in Manitoba, the Great Depression, and the FLQ crisis all crop up in her stories. • David Whitton’s story “Twilight of the Gods” was included in the 2010 sci-fi anthology Darwin’s Bastards. The story also appears in Whitton’s first solo collection, The Reverse Cowgirl (Freehand, $21.95 pa., Oct.), which sports the most sexually suggestive title for a collection of CanLit stories since Pasha Malla’s The Withdrawal Method.

Toronto writer Rebecca Rosenblum follows up her Metcalf-Rooke Award–winning debut collection Once (a Q&Q book of the year for 2009) with The Big Dream (Biblioasis, $19.95 pa., Sept.), a collection of linked stories about the lives of workers at Dream, Inc., a lifestyle-magazine publisher. • The Maladjusted (Thistledown Press, $18.95 pa., Sept.), Toronto writer Derek Hayes’ debut collection, focuses on people who run afoul of the dictates of polite society. • Also from Thistledown, Britt Holmström’s Leaving Berlin ($18.95 pa., Sept.) examines contemporary women in both Canadian and European settings.

The fine print: Q&Q’s fall preview covers books published between July 1 and Dec. 31, 2011. All information (titles, prices, publication dates, etc.) was supplied by publishers and may have been tentative at Q&Q’s press time. • Titles that have appeared in previous previews do not appear here.