Sam Shelstad's award-winning Citizens of Light is a July summer books pick—you can enter for your chance to win a copy until the end of July.

And be sure to check out all the other books up for grabs right now!

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I have always wanted to read a book while paddling down the River Tweed in the morning light with but a whisper of rain falling. It would have to be the perfect book, though. What follows is a list of Canadian fiction books, all published within the past five years, that I enjoyed reading and would love to read again while paddling down the River Tweed in the morning light with but a whisper of rain falling. It will likely prove difficult to paddle and read at the same time, so an audiobook might work best here. When I picture paddling down the River Tweed in the morning light with but a whisper of rain falling, however, I imagine that I’m listening to the nice morning river sounds as I paddle along and read. Perhaps an assistant could join me in my watercraft and hold the book up to my face, turn the pages when they receive a cue, and even provide navigational tips. Just the two of us, paddling along the Tweed in the morning light, but a whisper of rain, and one of these eight excellent books hovering with perfect steadiness fifteen inches from my face.

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Life Is Like Canadian Football and Other Authentic Folk Songs, by Henry Adam Svec

The first time I became aware of Henry Adam Svec, he was performing music under the name The CFL Sessions, and spent much of the set talking to the audience about how he uncovered recordings of 70s Canadian football players performing original folk songs, which ended up buried in Library and Archives Canada. Svec, of course, had invented the entire thing and wrote the songs himself, but at the time I believed him—I wanted to believe. Years later, Svec somehow turned this whole experiment into a hilarious and compelling narrative, which tracks the fictionalized Svec and his quest to capture and harness authenticity in the world of Canadian folk music. This would be the perfect book to read while paddling down the River Tweed in the morning light with but a whisper of rain falling.

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A Hero of Our Time, by Naben Ruthnum

This dark literary comedy made me laugh out loud throughout. Osman Shah’s self-loathing is visceral and earnest, and this was perhaps the primary source for what made this book so funny to me, but the protagonist also focuses his scathing, clever judgments on the people surrounding him with hilarious results. He navigates the dull, competitive world of “edu-tech,” where his colleagues scheme and jostle to push their own careers ahead and their insincerity and thinly veiled opportunism leads to even more comedic gold. Naben has written several great Tweed-worthy books, covering different genres and narrative approaches, but for me, A Hero of Our Time is peak Ruthnum and a must-have on the Tweed.

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What We Both Know, by Fawn Parker

Hilary Greene’s father, Baby, is a Canadian literary icon who’s beginning to lose his memory, along with the ability to write. Hilary’s tasked with ghost-writing his final work—a memoir—which forces her to sort through the wreckage of his life and career. The subject matter is often dark and disturbing, but Parker is a sharp and funny writer whose clever prose gives the novel range and depth. The narrative voice, which seems cool, calm, and measured on the surface comes with a sense of explosiveness lurking beneath, as if an emotional dam is ready to burst at any second. The heartbreaking abuse and violence at the heart of this book is pieced together both through things explicitly stated and things unsaid, and as you read between the lines and watch Hilary navigate her new role as caregiver and literary executor, a very real and deeply felt portrait emerges of a family torn apart. I cannot wait for Fawn’s next book, which I will definitely want to read while paddling down the River Tweed in the morning light with but a whisper of rain falling.

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The Creep, by Michael Lapointe

This is a novel I’d recommend to anyone: the story of Whitney, a journalist who digs into the world of an ambitious doctor’s groundbreaking synthetic blood substitute is well-plotted and incredibly thrilling. The increasingly disturbing details Whitney uncovers as she investigates the people and places involved in the medical trials build toward a real feeling of horror that will linger long after you finish. It’s also a book about the media’s tenuous connection to the truth, post 9/11—the title references Whitney’s habit of letting little falsehoods and white lies slip into her reporting in order to tell compelling stories. And while LaPointe is masterful in his ability to cover large-scale, complex issues like American culture during the Bush years, ethics in journalism, the disposibality of society’s most vulnerable people in the name of progress, and the 2002 NBA playoffs, he captures it all through Whitney and the people she encounters up-close and on the ground, living through this chaotic era. A Tweed-paddler for sure.

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The Marigold, by Andrew F. Sullivan

Sullivan’s aptitude for capturing the dark, funny, and strange through a large ensemble of fully-realized, compelling characters is no easy feat, but he makes it look easy. As we switch perspectives between The Marigold’s numerous chapters to inhabit a new person struggling to survive in his near-apocalyptic, near-future version of Toronto, we zoom in on a high-stakes, emotionally taut scene that feels lived-in from the punch—these people have rich histories, and we’re just catching up. A strange oozing fungal substance called The Wet is creeping into the city’s buildings, streets, sewers, and luxury condo towers like The Marigold of the title, and is responsible for the physical horror that pulsates throughout the novel. The other source of terror here—the moneymakers and political figures behind the scenes, whose neglect and heartless decisions have caused the collapse of the city—are less fantastical, which is even scarier. Definitely a Tweed-paddler.

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Moon of the Crusted Snow, by Waubgeshig Rice

Rice’s second novel (his THIRD is due this fall!) concerns a northern Anishinaabe community that loses power. As the residents scramble to prepare for the long winter, tensions rise and with communications down, the mysterious cause of this situation creates a palpable sense of fear: how long will this go on for? What actually happened down south? When outsiders begin to arrive, on the run from their own communities, the situation grows even more tense and the community leaders scramble to patch together a plan to survive. Moon of the Crusted Snow is an incredibly thrilling and intense story, but it’s Evan Whitesky and the novel’s other complex, carefully drawn characters who hold everything together and make this an electric, immersive reading experience. A sequel, Moon of the Turning Leaves, comes out this fall and I can’t wait to see where the story goes. I also can’t wait to read this book while paddling down the River Tweed in the morning light with but a whisper of rain falling.

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Fake It So Real, by Susan Sanford Blades

Set in Victoria, BC’s punk scene, starting in the 80s and moving on up toward the present, Fake It So Real follows Gwen and her daughters navigating through gritty, real, and often hilarious situations. Each chapter could stand alone as a contained, complete short story—many of these chapters were first published as short stories in literary magazines—but appearing side-by-side together in novel form, they comprise a rich and cohesive family narrative, with the different set-pieces speaking to each other and building upon the material of the other chapters. Susan’s writing is blunt, playful, and wonderfully surprising. This is an emotionally rewarding novel filled with complicated, beautifully drawn characters, but also features lines like “When her bare thighs hit the fine porcelain of Victoria’s hippest cocktail bar, out sprays diarrhea like a blow from an orca.” Another great Tweed-paddler.

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Disintegration in Four Parts, by Jean Marc Ah-Sen, Emily Anglin, Devon Code, and Lee Henderson

Jean Marc Ah-Sen is one of the most interesting and exciting writers working in Canada today. His contribution to this collection of four long stories/novellas, “Parametrics of Purity,” throws you into his uncompromising, inventive style where he draws from an extensive, esoteric vocabulary and a rich meta-fictional world of avant-garde schools of writing to tell an unconventional and surprising love story. He also spear-headed this project and has another collaborative collection of novellas, Dead Writers, forthcoming next year. The novella is a perhaps underappreciated form that I really love, and the idea to bring together these longer short stories by different writers in themed collections is something I hope catches on. The theme with Disintegration is stories about purity, and the four narratives featured all take a different approach, and are all worth reading. Lee Henderson’s “Merz in the Arctic Circle,” for example, follows the Dada artist Kurt Schwitters’ time in an internment camp in Nazi-occupied Norway and is one of the funniest, sweetest, and darkest stories I’ve read in a long time. I’ll go ahead and call this one a Tweed-paddler, because I can only imagine the joy of reading it while paddling down the River Tweed in the morning light with but a whisper of rain falling.

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Learn more about Citizens of Light:

Winner of the 2023 Crime Writers of Canada Award for Best Crime First Novel

This debut novel set in southern Ontario captures call-centre life, faded tourist attractions, and suburbia with oddball wit and sharp realism.

Colleen Weagle works in a call centre and lives in a bungalow with her mother in a quiet Toronto suburb. In her spare time she writes spec scripts for a CBC riding-school drama (her mother’s favourite) and plays an online game set in a resort populated by reindeer. It’s a typical life. Except three months ago Colleen’s husband Leonard—who led a similarly monotonous life—was found in a bog in the middle of the night, a two hours’ drive from home. Dead.

With a flatly optimistic belief in the power of routine, Colleen has been soldiering on, trying not to think too hard about all the unknowns surrounding the death. But when a local news photo twigs Colleen’s memory of a mystery attendee at Leonard’s funeral she snaps into action.

In the maddening company of her ornery co-worker Patti, she heads to Niagara Falls on a quest to find the truth behind the death. Amid the slot machines and grubby hotels, the pair stumble into the darker underworld of a faded tourist trap. What they find will lead straight to an episode from Colleen’s adolescence she thought she’d put firmly behind her.

Bleakly madcap, with deadpan dialogue, Shelstad’s debut novel is a noir anti-thriller reminiscent of Twin Peaks and the work of Ottessa Moshfegh and early Kate Atkinson. He captures call-centre life, ramshackle tourist attractions, and suburbia with wit and sharp realism, and reveals the undercurrents of melancholy and the truly bizarre that can run beneath even the most seemingly mild-mannered lives.