New Books in Literature

Brandon Taylor is the author of the novels Minor Black Figures (Riverhead, 2025), The Late Americans and Real Life, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a Science + Literature Selected Title by the National Book Foundation. His collection Filthy Animals, a national bestseller, was awarded The Story Prize and shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. He is the 2022-2023 Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. Recommended Books: Jordan Castro, Muscle Man Grace Byron, Herculine Edith Warton, Ethan Frome Emile Zola, Germinal The History of Sound (Film) Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is published with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Caskey Russell’s novel The Door on the Sea (Solaris, 2025) follows Elan, the youngest member of once revered Flicker Clan, on a journey to find a weapon that can defend his people from the shapeshifting Koosh invaders threatening their existence. To reach his goal, Elan must captain a canoe crewed by an unlikely team and force the cooperation of a raven who is the only one who knows the weapon’s location. Throughout their journey, the crew must navigate an increasingly hostile political landscape, as the Koosh invasion throws old laws and alliances into disarray. In this interview, Russell describes the process of developing the novel over several years and the ways that he built a world inspired by nineteenth century Tlingit culture. We discuss survivalist elements in fantasy, shifting relationships with violence, and the role of journeys and quest in fantasy. The Door on the Sea is an engaging, thoughtful story and it was so much fun discussing it with the author. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Lady Anne is in the Cotswolds with her 8-month-old son, there to restore a famous walled garden. The magnificent home has been hosting a television cooking special over the summer, and Anne’s husband, Lord Terrence Reid, is there to enjoy a “Summer of Chefs” week with his wife and baby son. Reid’s parents have also been invited to spend the week and are looking forward to delicious food, although Reid’s father is recovering from a recent heart attack. Each week, a new chef prepares magnificent meals, and the mystery chef that week turns out to be the former lover of Reid’s mother. Theirs is not the only family Gareth Talbot has affected with his sly machinations. He’s there to settle old scores and cash in on decades-old grudges. Although the setting is serene and the food fantastic, Lord Terrence Reid is called upon to uncover a murderer in their midst, and his family members are among the suspects. The menu is the last thing on their minds. Mary Birk is a former trial lawyer and avid gardener who lives and writes in Colorado. After graduating from law school, she moved from North Dakota with her late husband to Colorado where they raised their children and dogs and together worked to turn two and a half acres into a high-country garden retreat. Ms. Birk has been named a Library Journal SELF-E Select author. Her Terrence Reid/Anne Michaels mystery series combines her love for gardening and passion for all things Scottish. The first book in the series, Mermaids of Bodega Bay, was a finalist for the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers’ Colorado Gold award in the mystery/suspense category and was named by Library Journal as a SELF-e Top Book of the Year. The First Cut, the second book in the series, won the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Colorado Gold Award in the mystery/suspense category. A founding member of the Colorado chapter of Sisters in Crime, Ms. Birk served as treasurer from 2016-2023 and is currently Vice President. She also serves as social media director for the Rockky Mountain Chapter of Mystery Writers of America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

A TRAGIC DOUBLE HOMICIDE, OR A HIDDEN SERIAL KILLER? SERGEANT ALICE MORROW IS DETERMINED TO SOLVE A MYSTERY SPANNING SIXTY YEARS. When Evelyn Massey is found dead in her home, it seems like an open-and-shut case: Evelyn was one hundred years old — natural causes. But Sergeant Alice Morrow learns that traces of poison were found in Mrs. Massey’s blood. Then the remains of a body some sixty years deceased are discovered in the dead woman’s basement. Two murders, decades apart. Are they connected? In the second book in Shane Peacock’s award-winning Northern Gothic Mystery series, Morrow and former nypd homicide detective Hugh Mercer unearth stunning truths about Evelyn Massey’s life and learn of other disappearances over the past sixty years. Was a serial killer quietly at work in this Ontario town? Could the murderer still be among its citizens, hidden in plain sight? About Shane Peacock: SHANE PEACOCK has been published in twenty languages in eighteen countries. The first book in the Northern Gothic Mystery series, As We Forgive Others, was published in 2024 to great acclaim and won the Crime Writers of Canada Award of Excellence for Best Crime Novel Set in Canada. He has won the Junior Library Guild of America Selection seven times, the Arthur Ellis Award / cwc Award of Excellence three times, and has been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award and the td Canadian Children’s Literature Award. His young adult novels include the Boy Sherlock Holmes series, the Dylan Maples Adventures, The Dark Missions of Edgar Brim trilogy, The Book of Us, and Show. He lives in Cobourg, Ontario, with his wife, journalist Sophie Kneisel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery interviews award-winning author Bruce Hunter about his CanLit masterpiece, In the Bear's House (Frontenac House Press, 2025). So many different worlds emerge and converge in this lyrical, expansive novel from Bruce Hunter that we need two narrators: Trout, the deaf boy from Ogden, whose vivid imagination and wise pragmatism enhance and stimulate his unhearing world, and his young, artistic mother, Clare, a Scottish-Canadian lass from a rambunctious and sometimes unlucky but loving family of resilient pioneers at the cusp of old and new worlds in the Alberta of the early 1960s. Calgary and its recent subdivision Ogden are glorious places for a childhood. Trout and his one friend, the tragic hero Kenny Dawes, roam the prairies with temerity, and revel in a young city poised for explosive growth. When one of their early adolescent adventures turns sour, Trout faces a looming downfall that could echo the past trajectory of his father, a good but flawed man who loves him deeply. This is a new edition of the book previously published by Oolichan Books in 2009. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In this double interview I talked to Michael Kinnamon, author of A Rooftop in Jerusalem and Philip Graubart author of Here There Is No Why. A Rooftop In Jerusalem: When Daniel Jacobs decides to spend his junior year abroad in Israel, he never dreams he'll fall in love with both Jerusalem's Old City and an Israeli woman, Shoshana. It's the year religion becomes a part of his identity, from the heights of a simple rooftop. A year he encounters the tragic complexity of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. A year that begins a four-decade-long love affair, as complicated and heartbreaking as the political conflict with which it's intertwined. As Daniel moves through life-through marriage and divorce, career and travel-he returns periodically to Jerusalem, where his heart faithfully remains. A Rooftop in Jerusalem brings the Old City's walls, holy sites, and inhabitants to life, while putting a human face on headlines from the Middle East. Here There Is No Why: Did Chaim Lerner, acclaimed Israeli author and Holocaust survivor, kill himself in 1983, thirty-eight years after surviving Auschwitz? If so, was it traumatic memories finally catching up to him? Or despair over Holocaust denialism? Or ordinary, difficult health issues-an aching hip, a damaged knee? Or simply a deadly episode of depression? Or was it murder? In 2005, Judah Loeb, Lerner's former student and now a struggling American journalist and single father, travels to Jerusalem to investigate Lerner's death. He drags along his fifteen-year-old daughter, Hannah, and they team up with Charlie, Judah's former Hebrew University roommate, now a Jerusalem homicide detective. Their investigation takes them through the darker corners of the Israeli psyche, where they uncover secrets that threaten to destroy Lerner's reputation and alter Jewish history. While probing the mysteries of Israel's past, they encounter personal betrayal, heartbreak, and the fragile possibilities of forgiveness and redemption. Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Blusky and IG: @robbyref Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with author Kasia Jaronczyk about her novel, Voices in the Air (Palimpsest Press, 2025).  What would drive women to risk the lives of their children and innocent people to leave their mother country forever? On April 30, 1982, two women and their families hijack a Polish passenger plane flying from Breslau to Warsaw in a bold attempt to escape Martial Law in Communist Poland and find safety in West Berlin. Among the hijackers are a cotton spinner whose husband wants to avoid a long prison sentence, a schoolteacher with a sick daughter, a pregnant fourteen-year-old who has visions of the Virgin Mary, and an ambitious young filmmaker. Inspired by real events, Voices in the Air is told from the point of view of these four women and a stewardess in love with the married pilot. Will they find happiness beyond the Iron Curtain or was the hijacking not worth the risk? Told using traditional narrative and documentary film-style interviews, Voices in the Air follows the main characters' lives before and after the hijacking, and through real-life events as the fall of the Berlin Wall, the fight for women's rights in modern Poland, the Covid pandemic and the refugee crisis on the Polish-Belarus border. A must-read novel exploring ambiguous moral choice, censorship, emigration, fate and regret. Kasia Jaronczyk is a Polish-Canadian writer, artist and microbiologist. She immigrated to Canada at the age of 14. Her debut short story collection Lemons was published in 2017 by Mansfield Press. She is a co-editor of the only anthology of Polish-Canadian short stories Polish(ed): Poland Rooted in Canadian Fiction (Guernica Editions, 2017). Her stories were short-listed for the Bristol Prize 2016 and long-listed for CBC Short Story Prize 2010. She has published in Canadian literary magazines such as TNQ, Room, Prairie Journal, Carousel, The Nashwaak Review, Postscripts to Darkness, and in anthologies Wherever I Find Myself. Essays by Canadian Immigrant Women (Miriam Matejova, Ed. Caitlin Press, April 2017) and The Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology (2016. Vol 9.). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Aisha Sasha John about her poetry collection, total: poems (McClelland & Stewart, 2025).  "John is brilliant at communicating. She's also really funny. Poems don't get more direct and precise and unforgettable than this." —National Post The highly anticipated new collection from Griffin Poetry Prize finalist Aisha Sasha John. IS THERE A SYNONYM CLOSER TO COMPASSION THAN PATIENCE? A PERSON WHO LOVES BEAUTY MORE THAN THEY FEAR IT THE CLOSEST TO NOTHING YOU CAN DO FOR MONEY TO TOUCH TIME TO ITSELF About Aisha Sasha John: AISHA SASHA JOHN is the author of i have to live (2017), a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize; THOU (2014), a finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and the ReLit Poetry Award; and The Shining Material (2011). She choreographs and performs in the feminist collective WIVES as well as solo performances (The Aisha of Oz, VOLUNTEER). Aisha's video work and text art have been exhibited in galleries (Doris McCarthy, Oakville Galleries) and installed at Union Station in Toronto (Art Metropole). She was born in Montreal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Genevieve Yang, the protagonist of Jemimah Wei’s debut novel The Original Daughter (Doubleday/Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2025) works a dead-end job in Singapore, living in the shadow of her adopted younger sister, Arin, a rising movie star. Genevieve’s dying mother asks her to call Arin; Genevieve refuses. Jemimah’s novel then teases out the history of Gen and Arin’s sibling relationship, from their first meeting in the late 90s, through their shared experience in school, to the final grievance that splits them apart. Naomi Xu Elegant, journalist and author of Gingko Season, also joins the show today. Jemimah Wei is a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 Honouree, William Van Dyke Short Story Prize winner, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and Felipe P. De Alba Fellow at Columbia University. A recipient of awards and fellowships from Singapore’s National Arts Council, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Writers in Paradise, Jemimah’s writing has appeared in Joyland, Guernica, and Narrative, amongst others. She can be found on social media at @jemmawei on socials, or at jemmawei.com. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Original Daughter. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The author of the award-winning national bestseller I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times returns with a poetry collection that transforms the Black female speaker from object, artistic muse, and victim to subject, critic, and master of her story.Resting Bitch Face (Soft Skull Press, 2025) is a book for women, for Black women, for lovers of art and film criticism, and for writers interested in work that finds a middle ground between poetry and prose. Taylor Byas uses some of our most common ways of “watching” throughout history (painting, films, sculpture, and photographs) to explore how these mediums shape Black female subjectivity.From the examination of artwork by Picasso, Gauguin, Sally Mann, and Nan Goldin, Byas displays her mastery of the poetic form by engaging in intimate and inventive writing. Fluctuating between watcher and watched, the speaker of these poems uses mirrors and reflections to flip the script and talk back to histories of art, text, photography, relationships, and men. From Polaroids to gesso primer to sculpture, Byas creates a world in which the artist calls out and the muse responds. For not only does she enter the world of the long-revered classic artist, but she also infuses her poems with such iconic pop culture works as The Joker, WandaVision, and Last Tango in Paris. You can find Taylor on Instagram and Bluesky. Find host Sullivan Summer online, on Instagram, and over on Substack, where she and Taylor went to continue their conversation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In 1907, eight years before she published her first novel, a twenty-five-year-old Virginia Woolf drafted three interconnected comic stories chronicling the adventures of a giantess named Violet—a teasing tribute to Woolf’s friend Mary Violet Dickinson. But it was only in 2022 that Woolf scholar Urmila Seshagiri discovered a final, revised typescript of the stories. The typescript revealed that Woolf had finished this mock-biography, making it her first fully realized literary experiment and a work that anticipates her later masterpieces. Published here for the first time in its final form, The Life of Violet blends fantasy, fairy tale, and satire as it transports readers into a magical world where the heroine triumphs over sea-monsters as well as stifling social traditions.In these irresistible and riotously plotted stories, Violet, who has powers “as marvelous as her height,” gleefully flouts aristocratic proprieties, finds joy in building “a cottage of one’s own,” and travels to Japan to help create a radical new social order. Amid flights of fancy such as a snowfall of sugared almonds and bathtubs made of painted ostrich eggs, The Life of Violet upends the marriage plot, rejects the Victorian belief that women must choose between virtue and ambition, and celebrates women’s friendships and laughter.A major literary discovery that heralds Woolf’s ambitions to revolutionize fiction and sheds new light on her great themes, The Life of Violet: Three Early Stories (Princeton UP, 2025) is first and foremost a delight to read. This volume features a preface, afterword, notes, and photographs that provide rich historical, literary, and biographical context. Urmila Seshagiri is Distinguished Professor of Humanities and Professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is the author of Race and the Modernist Imagination, the editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, and a contributor to the Los Angeles Review of Books. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In early-seventeenth-century Portugal, Spain, France, and Germany, dangers are plentiful—especially for those of Jewish heritage. Non-Catholics have been expelled from Spain, and the Inquisition has come to Portugal to impose its prohibitions. In Isabela's Way: A Novel (She Writes Press, 2025), fourteen-year-old Isabela, an obedient “New Christian” with a talent for needlework, believes she has nothing to fear from the Inquisition. But when a mysterious woman arrives with a message from Isabela’s traveling father, the girl must leave her home and embroider her way along the clandestine network of sanctuaries created to conduct Conversos, or secret Jews, to safety.A host of supporters and spirit guides, as well as one special young man, assist Isabela as she escapes the Inquisitors and makes her way across countries and cultures. As she travels, she learns of the danger and importance of her work, with its coded symbols, and is shocked to discover her family’s true origins.In this enthralling coming-of-age tale of resistance, love, and danger, Isabela employs her talent and fierce determination to find her way despite the powerful forces that buffet her at every turn. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Olivia Wolfgang-Smith is the author of the novels Mutual Interest (2025) and Glassworks, which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, Apple, and Good Housekeeping. She is a 2024 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Fiction and lives in Brooklyn with her partner. Recommended Books: Hugh Ryan, When Brooklyn Was Queer Michael Koresky, Sick and Dirty Damon Runyon, Guys and Dolls and Other Writings Anna North, Bog Queen Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is published with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Zilla Jones about her debut novel, The World So Wide (Cormorant Books, 2025). Felicity Alexander should be charming audiences at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, not under house arrest in Grenada in October 1983, as rumours swirl that United States troops are preparing to invade.Born and raised in Winnipeg, the daughter of a Grenadian woman and an absent white father, Felicity is blessed with enviable beauty and an extraordinary singing voice. Arriving in London to study opera in 1965, she finds early success and joy on stage, as well as a sense of belonging in the arms of the charming Claude Buckingham. Members of the West Indian Students Association, Claude and his friends are law students and activists. They plan to return to Grenada to overthrow the corrupt dictator, “Uncle” Percy Tibbs. Felicity and Claude’s intense affair cannot survive their diverging destinies. Claude brings revolution to Grenada and becomes a minister in the new Black Pearls of Freedom government; Felicity devotes herself to music, conquering the racism and sexism of the opera world to rise to international stardom. The brighter she shines, the more she struggles to find her place and purpose in life.Her career in ascendance, Felicity accepts an invitation to perform in Grenada. The red sky of revolution calls to her almost as much as the hope of Claude’s embrace. But their reunion is interrupted by a coup. Surrounded by soldiers and guns, Felicity’s voice is born anew. Zilla Jones is an African-Canadian anti-racist educator, lawyer, mother, and singer of Caribbean, Chinese, and European heritage, writing on Treaty 1 territory (Winnipeg). She was born in the UK and now lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She is a winner of the Journey Prize, a finalist for The Writers’ Trust Bronwen Wallace Emerging Writers Award, and a finalist for the CBC Short Story Prize. Her writing has appeared in many literary journals including Event Magazine, The Fiddlehead, Prairie Fire, The Malahat Review, and Bayou Magazine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In this NBN episode, NBN host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu about her phenomenal novel, The Creation of Half-Broken People. (House of Anansi Press, 2025). Stupendous African Gothic, by the winner of Yale University’s Windham–Campbell Prize Showcasing African Gothic at its finest, The Creation of Half-Broken People is the extraordinary tale of a nameless woman plagued by visions. She works for the Good Foundation and its museum filled with artifacts from the family’s exploits in Africa, the Good family members all being descendants of Captain John Good, of King Solomon’s Mines fame.Our heroine is happy with her association with the Good family, until one day she comes across a group of protestors outside the museum. Instigating the group is an ancient woman, who our heroine knows is not real. She knows too that the secrets of her past have returned. After this encounter, the nameless woman finds herself living first in an attic and then in a haunted castle, her life anything but normal as her own intangible inheritance unfolds through the women who inhabit her visions. With a knowing nod to classics of the Gothic genre, Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu weaves the threads of a complex colonial history into the present through people “half-broken” by the stigmas of race and mental illness, all the while balancing the humanity of her characters against the cruelty of empire in a hypnotic, haunting account of love and magic. SIPHIWE GLORIA NDLOVU is a Zimbabwean writer, scholar, and filmmaker. She is a 2022 recipient of the Windham–Campbell Prize for Fiction. Her debut novel, The Theory of Flight, won the Sunday Times Barry Ronge Fiction Prize in 2019. Her second and third novels, The History of Man and The Quality of Mercy, were shortlisted for the Sunday Times Fiction Prize. After almost two decades of living in North America, Ndlovu has returned home to Bulawayo, the City of Kings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery interviews historical fiction legend Lucy E.M Black about her phenomenal new novel, A Quilting of Scars (Now or Never Publishing, 2025).   Filled with the pleasure of recognizable yet distinctively original characters and a deftly drawn sense of time and place, A Quilting of Scars brings to life a story of forbidden love, abuse and murder. Pulsing with repressed sexuality and guilt, Larkin Beattie reveals the many secrets he has kept hidden throughout his lonely life. The character-driven narrative is a meditation on aging and remorse, offering a rich account of the strictures and rhythms of farming in the not-so-distant past, highlighting the confines of a community where strict moral codes are imposed upon its members and fear of exposure terrifies queer youth. As Larkin reflects upon key events, his recollections include his anger at the hypocrisy of the church, and the deep grief and loneliness that have marked his path. There is a timelessness to this story which transcends the period and resonates with heart-breaking relevance. About Lucy E.M. Black: Author of The Marzipan Fruit Basket, Eleanor Courtown, Stella's Carpet, The Brickworks, and Class Lessons: Stories of Vulnerable Youth, Lucy E.M. Black's short stories have been published in Britain, Ireland, USA and Canada in a variety of literary journals and magazines. She lives in Port Perry, Ontario, the traditional territory of the Mississaugas of Scugog Island, First Nations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Guelph, Ontario author Karen Smythe about Karen's novel, A Town With No Noise (Palimpsest Press, 2025). Samara and J., a struggling young couple, are off to J.’s birthplace, Upton Bay, a small town turned upscale theatre and winery destination. Sam has been hired by an editor friend to write a promotional piece about the place while she and J. stay with his grandfather Otto, a prominent businessman in his day. But their visit does not go as planned. Sam’s explorations of Upton’s tourist attractions lead her to ugly truths behind the quaint little town’s façade—discoveries that are counterpointed with vignettes of the town’s wealthy, elderly ruling class, painting a different picture than the one Sam’s friend expects her to provide. Tensions between Sam and J. worsen as J.’s true nature emerges and Sam begins to question both his values and his family’s past—especially after Otto tells them stories about his time as a German soldier during WW2. Back in the city, Sam’s opinions and judgments about what is right and wrong are tested when a shocking truth surfaces about her grandmother’s flight from Norway after the war, profoundly changing Sam’s understanding of who she is and who she wants to become. In A Town with No Noise, fact and fiction combine to ask difficult questions about the communities we build, questions that are as relevant today as ever: Who stays? Who is chased away? And who decides? About Karen Smythe: Karen Smythe is the author of the novel This Side of Sad (Goose Lane Editions, 2017), the story collection Stubborn Bones (Polestar/Raincoast, 2001), and the critical study Figuring Grief: Gallant, Munro, and the Poetics of Elegy (McGill-Queen’s U.P., 1992). She lives in Guelph, Ontario. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Yiming Ma holds an MBA from Stanford and an MFA from Warren Wilson College, where he was the Carol Houck Smith Scholar. His stories and essays appear in the New York Times, The Guardian, The Florida Review, and elsewhere. Born in Shanghai, he now lives in Toronto, New York, and Seattle. Recommended Books; Rita Bullwinkle, Headshot Aube Rey Lescure, River East, River West Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go R.O. Kwon, Exhibit Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is published with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery interview debut Toronto author, Nadia Ragbar, about her novel, The Pugilist and the Sailor (Invisible Publishing, 2025).  The Pugilist and the Sailor follows conjoined twins, Bruce and Dougie. Dougie is an ambitious amateur boxer, having dragged his brother into the ring since childhood. Bruce is a bookkeeper who has become smitten with Anka. Unaware of the facts of the twins' physicality an epistolary relationship unfolds between Anka and Bruce, as he wrestles with broaching the topic of separation with Dougie. Dougie's sole focus is the Heavyweight Amateur Boxing title as one half of "The Reuben Beast," though he is trying to ignore his mysterious blackouts and severe headaches. Anka is, specifically, navigating through her grief over her parents' deaths, but also, generally, reconciling her understanding of being a first-generation Canadian without her Guyanese parents as an anchor. A character-driven story with an ensemble cast, told across multiple points of view and time periods, examines the unique relationships between conjoined brothers, parents, crushes, and unexpected mentors. A story about the intertwined nature of longing and belonging, compromise and connection, this is ultimately a consideration of family and finding your unique place in it, and in the world. Nadia Ragbar lives in Toronto with her partner and son. Her short fiction has appeared in Broken Pencil and This Magazine, among other outlets. Her flash fiction appeared in The Unpublished City, an anthology curated by Dionne Brand, which was shortlisted for the 2018 Toronto Book Award. The Pugilist and the Sailor is her first novel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Susan Glimore about her wonderful novel, The Curious Calling of Leonard Bush (Blair, 2025).  Young Leonard Bush buries his lost leg and saves his whole East Tennessee town in this winsome and miracle-making novel. When twelve-year-old Leonard Bush loses his leg in a freak accident, he decides to give his leg a proper burial in the hilltop cemetery of his East Tennessee town. This event somehow sets off a chain of miraculous and catastrophic events--upending the lives of Leonard's rigidly God-fearing mother, June; his deeply conflicted father, Emmett; and his best friend, Azalea, and her mother, Rose, who is also the town prostitute. While the local Baptist minister passes judgment on events and promises dire consequences, the people of this small community on the banks of Big Sugar move together toward awakening. Susan Gilmore's love of storytelling flows naturally from her Tennessee roots. She's the daughter of a revival preacher's son, brought up on the land and streams that populate this novel that is, as Appalachian novelist Lee Smith says, a "homespun Pilgrim's Progress." Susan Gregg Gilmore is the author of the novels The Curious Calling of Leonard Bush, Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen, The Improper Life of Bezellia Grove, and The Funeral Dress. She has written for the Chattanooga Times Free Press, the Los Angeles Times, and the Christian Science Monitor. Born in Nashville, she lives in Tennessee with her husband. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature