This autobiographical coming-of-age novel by Canadian author-activist-diplomat Mairuth Sarsfield is set in the historically Black Montreal neighbourhood of Little Burgundy during the Second World War, and returns to print 25 years after its initial publication, with a foreword by Black Canadian historian Dr. Dorothy Williams. Through the story of a Ghanaian-Canadian widow who works several jobs to raise and educate her daughters, it explores themes of passing and Canada’s history of racism.

Keane’s darkly camp 1981 tragicomedy of manners is about an Anglo-Irish household in decline after the First World War, and double Booker winner Hilary Mantel (Wolf Hall) has championed it so often in roundups over the years that it’s finally had a reprint. “It is a concise, witty and perfectly constructed masterpiece – the product of a lifetime’s experience of people and the writer’s craft,” Mantel enthuses. Francine Prose is also a devotee. 

This year marked the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre, when a mob of white residents  – aided by the National Guard – attacked the residents, homes and businesses of Greenwood, a prosperous Black district. An intimate story of events leading up to their heroic but doomed resistance, this historical novel first published in 1997 was one of the first works of fiction to explore one of the bloodiest and most shameful racial atrocities in American history, and paints a dark portrait about injustice and vigilantism. It comes with a new afterword by the author.

Written in 1923, this dystopian Russian classic set in the 26th Century A.D. that influenced Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, is out in a new translation. It features an introduction by Margaret Atwood, Orwell’s review of the novel from 1946 (three years before he published 1984), and Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay, “The Stalin in the Soul,” on Zamyatin’s enduring influence.

A regular contributor to the New Yorker and Gourmet magazines before her untimely death in 1992, all 10 of Colwin’s titles got handsome repackaging this year, including this nonfiction essay collection introduced by former Gourmet editor Ruth Reichl. Colwin delighted in entertaining and the domestic life, and the author is beloved because both her food writing and her comforting fiction (like the novel, Happy All the Time) explored courtship, modern romance and devoted friendships.

“Generally, booksellers and readers probably thought of this as a NASCAR book more than an American history book around social and racial justice,” publisher Chip Fleischer told Publishers Weekly about this compelling 2008 biography of Wendell Scott. The book, about a Black stock-car racer who broke NASCAR’s colour barrier in the 1950s, is written by Donovan, the late, Pulitzer-winning newspaper reporter. It’s republished in Steerforth Press’s new Truth to Power non-fiction imprint to highlight Scott’s overlooked broader cultural significance.

This literary rediscovery about the existential malaise and urban ennui of a narrator rattling around Rome is appearing in English for the first time since its original Italian publication in 1973, with a foreword of biographical and cultural context by Call Me By Your Name writer André Aciman.

Véhicule Press’s Ricochet imprint continues its welcome resurrection of bygone Canadian pulp fiction with journalist Arthur Mayse’s West Coast crime story, which first appeared in 1949 as a serial in the Saturday Evening Post (it’s been out of print in English since 1952). The book about teenage runaways dodging drug smugglers and rumrunners features an introduction by his daughter, and award-winning crime writer, Susan Mayse.

“The man on his holidays becomes the man he might have been, the man he could have been, had things worked out a little differently,” the author, a First World War veteran famous for his play Journey’s End, writes in this 1931 novel. This unassuming masterpiece takes us on the much-anticipated annual seaside holiday with a working-class English family. Nothing much happens, but it beautifully captures each stage of a precious vacation as it brings us into the family’s cares and pleasures, and has an elegiac quality that works a strong spell.

Booker (1888-1955) was a pioneering Canadian abstract painter who was also a Governor General’s Award-winning novelist whose book, Think of the Earth, was the first-ever fiction winner in 1936. That same year, under the name Huxley Herne, he also wrote this top-notch thriller about detective Mortimer Hood, the latest from Invisible Publishing’s splendid Throwback Books editions.

The godfather of urban and street lit, Goines regularly gets name-checked by Jay-Z, Nas, and 50 Cent. As Tupac Shakur put it: “Machiavelli was my tutor, Donald Goines my father figure.” Accordingly, the 50th anniversary of what’s considered his best work – an unflinching novel about Detroit’s underground drug world – gets reissued this year, along with three more books from his backlist (White Man’s Justice, Black Man’s Grief, Crime Partners, and Whoreson), all with 70s-inspired art covers.

As part of their 50th anniversary, Overlook Press is repackaging the books of Charles Portis, the U.S. writer Esquire calls, “perhaps the most original, indescribable sui generis talent overlooked by literary culture in America.” Look beyond his modern classic True Grit to this entertaining road trip novel first published in 1966.

For decades, even secondhand copies of the obscure mystery writer’s 1938 novel have been extremely scarce. This nail-biter stands out as a well-plotted story about an amateur detective living in a boarding house, but the other re-issues – like The Chuckling Fingers, her Depression-era thriller about the dark and deadly secrets at a wealthy family’s remote estate on Lake Superior – are also worthwhile.

Forty years ago Naylor’s novel won the National Book Award’s debut category and became a contemporary classic (and a 1989 mini-series starring Oprah Winfrey, Jackee Harry and Cicely Tyson). The gripping story about the friendships and challenges facing a group of strong-willed women in an inner-city housing development was a watershed in Black storytelling and is newly re-issued with an appreciation by writer Tayari Jones as part of the Penguin Vitae series, which highlights seminal past works by diverse storytellers.

Putting a second New York Review Books Classic on this list feels a bit like cheating, but this Booker-shortlisted, 1971 novel about a recent, aging widow in the 1960s – who moves into to a geriatric London hotel in her sunset years and has a fall, and then a sort-of romance – just got a nice reissue. Legendary stage actress Joan Plowright starred in the 2005 adaptation, but it pales compared to this “exquisitely drawn character study of eccentricity in old age” that the Guardian newspaper named to its Best 100 Novels in English list.

Pulitzer-winning Lonesome Dove writer Larry McMurtry was an ardent admirer of this hard-to-find feminist literary memoir about life in small-town Abilene, Texas, that was suppressed in 1925. Banned as obscene for discussing domestic rape, birth control and social welfare, it was deemed “the first genuinely realistic picture of the Southern poor white trash” before its author was committed to an institution for the rest of her life.

Granted, I have a thing for elderly amateur sleuths (as this recent Big Read for Zed Books can attest). Hitchens’s better-known thriller Fool’s Gold  formed the basis of Jean-Luc Godard’s French new wave classic film Bande à part, but, under the pen name D.B. Olsen, she also wrote more than a dozen “cat” cozies. Introduced by Joyce Carol Oates, Otto Penzler’s mystery imprint republishes the first in the series, about a great aunt who goes to California with her cat Samantha in tow.

Australian Clift’s celebrated but long out-of-print 1959 memoir of life on Hydra helped inspire Polly Samson’s stunning historical novel A Theatre for Dreamers about Leonard Cohen’s bohemian circle there in the early 1960s, which was a highlight of the summer.  (Read our feature interview with Samson here.) Here she writes an appreciative introduction to this beautiful new edition.