Miss the Canada Reads contenders on The Next Chapter? Catch up here
Each author and contender duo discussed their book on The Next Chapter with Ali Hassan
With Canada Reads less than two weeks away, our champions are in full swing preparing for the great Canadian book debate.
To help them get ready, they've chatted with the author of the book they're bringing to the table — and those conversations aired on The Next Chapter.
Featuring powerful moments of connection, discussion and excitement, these segments dive deep into the five books and the reasons they resonated with the panellists.
You can listen to these interviews below.
Dallas Soonias & Jessica Johns
Bad Cree is a horror-infused novel that centres around a young woman named Mackenzie, who is haunted by terrifying nightmares and wracked with guilt about her sister Sabrina's untimely death. The lines between her dreams and reality start to blur when she begins seeing a murder of crows following her around the city — and starts getting threatening text messages from someone claiming to be her dead sister.
Looking to escape, Mackenzie heads back to her hometown in rural Alberta where she finds her family still entrenched in their grief. With her dreams intensifying and getting more dangerous, Mackenzie must confront a violent family legacy and reconcile with the land and her community.
"I knew that in centring family and love and dreams as well, that it had to come from a place of compassion and true joy of storytelling," said Johns on The Next Chapter.
"There's so much of this book that everybody can just chew into and then learn about this other way of life, this other way of living," said Soonias.
Naheed Nenshi & Christina Wong
Set in Toronto's Chinatown and Kensington Market, Denison Avenue is a moving portrait of a city undergoing mass gentrification and a Chinese Canadian elder experiencing the existential challenges of getting old and being Asian in North America. Recently widowed, Wong Cho Sum takes long walks through the city, collecting bottles and cans and meeting people on her journeys in a bid to ease her grief.
"[Chinatown/Kensington Market is] a neighborhood that I've pretty much grown up with," said Wong in an interview on The Next Chapter. "My parents and my grandparents, our family, we would just go there on Sundays and go for dim sum and go grocery shopping. So it's a place that's like home for me."
"[Denison Avenue is] an extraordinary work. It is a gorgeous and beautiful book," said Nenshi. "It is written with incredible skill and I think it tells a story that's going to cause people to think differently about the cities they live in."
Mirian Njoh & Carley Fortune
Meet Me at the Lake finds 32-year-old Fern Brookbanks stuck — she can't quite stop thinking about one perfect day she spent in her 20s. By chance, she met a man named Will Baxter and the two spent a romantic 24 hours in Toronto, after which they promised to meet up one year later. But Will never showed up.
Now, instead of living in the city like she thought she would, Fern manages her mother's Muskoka resort by the lake, a role she promised herself she'd never take on.
Disillusioned with her life, Fern is shocked when Will shows up at her door, suitcase in hand, asking to help. Why is he here after all this time and more importantly, can she trust him to stay? It's clear Will has a secret but Fern isn't sure if she's ready to hear it all these years later.
"Romance is about people," said Fortune on The Next Chapter. It's about relationships. It's about learning to love ourselves and love others. It's about the challenges we have with our emotions and with our friendships and I think a good romance is about how we live and how we empathize with others."
"This book is a beautiful way to show us who we are, who we want to be, where we come from, how we can join and meld all those things together so that when we do go forward into the future, we can confidently do that with certainty," said Njoh.
Kudakwashe Rutendo & Téa Mutonji
Shut Up You're Pretty is a short fiction collection that tells stories of a young woman named Loli coming of age in the 21st century in Scarborough, Ont. The disarming, punchy and observant stories follow her as she watches someone decide to shave her head in an abortion clinic waiting room, bonds with her mother over fish and contemplates her Congolese traditions at a wedding.
"The concept of a short story gives me the possibility of individualism," said Mutonji on The Next Chapter. "And my goal was sort of to create this illusion that Loli is a different Black person, Black woman in every story. I wanted to create something that felt contained, but also individualized."
"What really connected with me is that they're just different aspects of Loli that I either see reflected in myself or reflected in the people around me," said Rutendo. "For me, a lot of it was how people reacted to Loli's Blackness, especially in her Black womanhood. So that was something that I connected with so intimately."
Heather O'Neill & Catherine Leroux
The Future is set in an alternate history of Detroit where the French never surrendered the city to the U.S. Its residents deal with poverty, pollution and a legacy of racism. When Gloria, a woman looking for answers about her missing granddaughters, arrives in the city, she finds a kingdom of orphaned and abandoned children who have created their own society.
"For the most part, when something terrible happens, cooperation is the main thing that is witnessed," said Leroux on The Next Chapter. "So I think it's important to show that because I think that there's an element of self-fulfilling prophecy in terms of the stories that we tell."
"What I loved about [the setting] was that it identified this isolated group and what happens to a language when it's on its own," said O'Neill. "It also really reflected the French Canadian traditions in Quebec and how the language there has become its own dialect. And it's so unusual in its own way and it's included anglophone influences and just different sayings. So I love that parallel: what she's doing in Detroit and how it becomes this colloquial invention of language."
