I read this one a month ago, and it's stayed on my mind. With The Immortal Woman, which is out on March 4, Chinese-Canadian debut novelist Su Chang is defying limits with triumph and aplomb, first by fitting 70 years of contemporary Chinese history into 300-some pages through the story of one family. The novel begins with Lemai, born in Shanghai in 1954 and growing up against the devastating tumult of China under Mao, surviving by her wits, working as a journalist and churning out state-sanctioned propaganda. Chang's lyrical, spinning and dizzying prose creates a vivid sense of the ever-shifting ground beneath her characters' feet. A catastrophic personal loss amidst the horror of the Tiananmen Square Protests underlines Lemai's determination that her own daughter, Lin, will have a very different kind of life abroad in America. When that dream finally comes true, however, Lin's experience proves that China is not the only place where reality can fall short of its ideals, Chang resisting simple either/or comparisons between mother and daughter, two imperfect people; and China and the USA, two imperfect nations. Truth, as always, is a muddle and complicated, Chang determined to plot a way through that pushes back against the binary thinking which, as her characters and history show, it's all too easy to fall under.

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I picked up See You Later Maybe Never, by Lenore Rowntree, after it was recommended by Andrew Boden (author of When We Were Ashes) on his "Fiction to Savour This Winter" recommended reading list because I'd really enjoyed Rowntree's 2016 novel Cluck (which you'll find on our very esteemed "Chicken... or the Egg?" book list). So many Canadian writers—Carrie Snyder, Mavis Gallant, Isabel Huggan—have shone with coming-of-age journeys told through linked short stories, and with this book we can add Rowntree to the mix. Although Rowntree's protagonist, Vanessa, comes of age twice in this book, as she emerges from a tumultuous adolescence into adulthood and a steady marriage, and then again once she is forced out of a career that defines her and casts off her marriage after decades, forced to learn how to begin again (and again and again!). Sharp, funny, and engaging, See You Later Maybe Never shows that the shape of a life is never a straight line, and that's actually how it's supposed to be.

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I love swimming, and I also know that the Black history of swimming is particular one rife with racism and segregation, so I was fascinated to learn more about the story Ruby Smith Diaz tells in Searching for Serafim: The Life and Legacy of Serafim "Joe" Fortes, a re-consideration of Vancouver's first lifeguard, a Trinidad native who arrived in Canada in 1885 and would be locally heralded for saving dozens of people from drowning, his funeral drawing the largest crowd ever recorded in the city's history. But this is no cozy tale of inclusion and community, Smith Diaz interrogating the conventional narrative told about Fortes, for example was it really so heartwarming that Vancouverites sang a song called "Old Black Joe" during his funeral procession? (Um, no.) What do clues from photographs tell us about how Fortes was actually a part of the community? How does Fortes' story of exceptionalism square with discrimination against Asian and Indigenous communities at the time? Smith Diaz views his biography through her lens of her own experience "as a fellow Afro Latine in Vancouver, separated only by time."

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And it was a pleasure to finally get to Fanny Britt's novel Sugaring Off, winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for French-Language Fiction, which is now available in English translation by Susan Ouriou. I was a big fan of Britt's Hunting Houses and knew I'd find a sharp and jarring depiction of contemporary life and relationships and just what might constitute the good life. In Sugaring Off, the comfortable arrangement of Adam and Marion's life together comes apart piece by piece after an accident on the beach at Martha's Vineyard during a summer vacation. When they return home to Quebec, nothing seems to fit anymore—Adam impulsively buys a sugar bush thinking something so sweet and wholesome might fill the gap, but it only drives deeper the wedge between him and Marion who, for the first time in the decade they've been together, starts considering acting on her attraction to other people. There are also snarly stepchildren, a caustic sister, demanding parents, and friends with their own lives, everything swept up inside their own personal vortices that seem impossible to see beyond.