EZ Fiction Picks: 7 Must-Reads

What books are on your nightstand? Here, our top picks to add to the stack.

THE HIGH MOUNTAINS OF PORTUGAL (Knopf Canada) by Yann Martel

From Canada’s best-selling author of Life of Pi, The High Mountains of Portugal is a novel of three intersecting stories and a multi-generational quest for meaning.

THE PIANO MAKER (Penguin Random House) by Kurt Palka

When the Great War and her mother’s death force her to abandon her life and start over, an enigmatic French woman moves to the northern Canadian town of St. Homais where she finds sanctuary in the simple life – until past and present suddenly converge and she must confront a dark episode from her past.

THE MOTORCYCLIST(Harper Collins Canada) by George Elliot Clarke

From the winner of the Governor General’s Literary Ward for Poetry comes this story of a young man seeking the bohemian life in 1959 Nova Scotia. Based loosely on the life of Clarke’s father, the novel depicts one year in the life of a black working class man who broke free from his dull – and often humiliating -work as a railway porter to embrace his romantic yearnings for the open road.

THE WIDOW (New American Library) by Fiona Barton

Widely compared with Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train, the story is about the dark spaces and dangerous secrets even within a seemingly perfect marriage.

PILLARS OF LIGHT (Doubleday Canada) by Jane Johnson

This 12^th century tale of love and war takes us from the ancient Syrian city of Akka and the war wrought by Saladin’s army in Jerusalem to the Gothic Cathedrals of England and Richard the Lionheart’s drive to regain the Latin Kingdom from the infidel.

NOAH’S WIFE (Putnam) by Lindsay Starck

Based upon motifs of the biblical flood story, this whimsical novel is about a small community battered by an unrelenting downpour from the heavens. When the rivers rise and flood the streets and wild animals are driven from the zoo, the townspeople are forced to overcome their differences to confront forces of nature before their world is washed away.