My 2025 reading kicked off with a timely pick, the biography Chrystia: From Peace River to Parliament Hill, by Catherine Tsalikis, which was supposed to be published in February but whose release was moved up after Chrystia Freeland's abrupt departure from the federal cabinet in December. (How exactly this transpired is a story in itself!)

Chrystia was a terrific read, and what I loved most about it—apart from learning the details of Freeland’s extraordinary life and also the finer grains of politics and diplomacy that I may not have understood as well during the years I was watching history unfold via a Twitter timeline—is Chrystia Freeland as an example of somebody who stands up tall before authoritarian forces (which is no small thing when you’re five foot two), how her courage and steadfastness have made her a force to be reckoned with, never to be underestimated. Chrystia Freeland is so far from an ordinary person but there is a lot we can learn from her example about how to respond to our current moment, of how to be clear-eyed and fearless in the face of authoritarianism, and how we might live the values that we know to be true.

*

In cozier fare, I had a wonderful time reading Victor & Me in Paris, Janice MacDonald's return to crime fiction in a brand new series featuring Imogene Durant, who is just post-menopausal, post-divorce, and post-retirement from her job as a comparative literature professor teaching in Edmonton. The novel begins with her arrival in Paris where she is planning to spend a month living like a local while doing research for the second book in a nonfiction series about reading in place—her first book was the celebrated Fyodor & Me in Russia. But Imogene's Parisian experiences will include more than just a tour of settings from Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, as she makes friends, indulges in excellent cheese, puts on a pair of ballet shoes, and even finds a paramour, all the while she's offering her police inspector neighbour advice on solving a particularly grisly murder.

Victor and Me in Paris is really more about reading books than solving crimes, although Imogene would suggest that the skills are just the same, but for bookish readers like me, this is actually a selling point.

(Janice MacDonald wrote a fantastic piece for 49th Shelf about the authors who pretty much invented CanLit crime fiction, and have inspired so many others since! Check it out here.)

*

I really liked Terry Watada's Hiroshima Bomb Money, which was on 49th Shelf's 2024 Books of the Year list and was certainly a highlight of my literary year, having stayed on my mind since I read it in November. It's also an altogether timely 2025 read, as this August marks 80 years since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It's the story of three siblings from a Japanese family and their experiences beginning in the 1930s, at which point Japan was at war with China. One sister immigrates to Canada to marry a Japanese-Canadian man, the brother enlists in the Japanese army to fight what he views as a noble war, and the other sister remains close with her parents in their hometown of Hiroshima, each of them impacted in singular ways by some of the most brutal events of the 20th century.

The novel is timely also in our current moment of heightened nationalism and global tension, and warns the ways in which war turns men into monsters, creating trauma that ricochets down the decades.

*

And as a huge fan of Mikka Jacobsen's first book, the essay collection Modern Fables (it's so good; read an excerpt here!), I've been very excited for her fiction debut, the story collection Good Victory, which comes out on February 1. I'm only three stories in, but they've all sparkled just like the book's fantastic cover. Taut, edgy and agonizingly full of tension (that's a good thing!), they're everything I've hoped for, and I'll be savouring the rest, while recommending the collection for its great examples of the short story form.