Six books to read this winter – Maclean’s

Engaging new reads for the holiday season

12 Bytes by Jeanette Winterson

The author of Frankissstein (2020) has an abiding interest in the relationship between humans and their technology. In the dozen provocative and often funny essays found here, Winterson discusses everything from the future of love and sex (Hot for a Bot) to her enthusiasm for transhumanism. We need to control our evolution via such enhancements as neural implants, she writes, or AI will rule us instead.

The Sentence by Louise Erdrich

The Pulitzer Prize-winning Indigenous author and bookstore owner has a lot to say about a momentous year in her Minneapolis hometown, from the pandemic lockdown to the aftermath of George Floyds murder. She delivers it powerfully in a quirky, beguiling novel about bookstores, racial reckoning and ghosts of all sorts, under a title as resonant of prison time as of literary building blocks.

The Singing Forest.

Toronto refugee lawyer Leah Jarvis is, for once, working on the feds side as Ottawa attempts to deport a nonagenarian war criminal. The novels twin storylinesJarvis explores pre-war Stalinist atrocities and her own family secretsare beautifully written, and reach a profound and unsettling moral clarity as McCormack weighs what happens when, in her protagonists words, fragments of leftover history spill into the present.

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

Readers can dispute whether the newest work from the brilliant Irish short story writer is trulyat 114 pagesa novel. But there is no arguing the beauty of Keegans story of a crisis in the life of coal merchant Billy Furlong. Every small thing in Small Thingsa nuns gesture, a husbands look, a wifes veiled referenceis a polished gem.

On Consolation: Finding Solace in Dark Times by Michael Ignatieff

While his political career may have ended in disaster, Ignatieff has always been a remarkably accomplished and versatile writer of fiction and non-fiction. In his compelling new work, he explores how major figures in the Western tradition, from St. Paul to Primo Levi, sought solace in times of tragedy, and how that primarily religious tradition fares in our modern winter of disbelief and discontent.

These Precious Days: Essays by Ann Patchett

The acclaimed American novelist is also a superb essayist. Her new collection23 fluid, intricate and utterly absorbing piecesruns a gamut from Three Fathers, rooted in a rare joint appearance of her father, her stepfather and her mothers third husband, to the title essay, the luminous story of an unexpected friendship.

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Six books to read this winter - Maclean's