Home Base: Gainesville, Florida

Author’s Take: “I don’t want to write about cellphones! I don’t want to write about Twitter. I would hate to write about Donald Trump in any form. Just thinking about him makes me sad. But I do want to talk about the urgencies of the now, and I think you can do that through historical fiction because history loops, and spirals. There are ways to, slantwise, talk about the great sources of heat and disaster happening now, through a historical lens.” 

Favourite line: “In the tall black wall of the palisade, through a slit too seeming thin for human passage, the girl climbed into the great and terrible wilderness.”

Review: Lauren Groff is one of the best writers at work today. Full stop, and I’ll brook no disagreement. 

From her sublime short stories, often published in The New Yorker to her four previous novels, including Arcadia, Matrix, and Fates and Furies (one of President Obama’s favourite books of 2015), Groff regularly displays both a fiery imagination and a fervent devotion to her craft. Her new book, The Vaster Wilds, doesn’t just continue Groff’s ascendency into the literary heights, but serves as an example of just how high she soars. That might seem a tad over-the-top, but I assure you, Groff really is THAT good.

The Vaster Wilds begins with a young girl escaping from a walled settlement and venturing, alone, into the wilderness. It’s the winter of 1609, and the settlement is in the Virginia colony of Jamestown. Historians have called that winter “the starving time” — the community’s water was brackish and undrinkable, crops had failed, disease was rampant, trade with Indigenous tribes was at a hostile stand-still, and the supply ships from England, which they heavily relied on, were long delayed. Of the 500 residents of Jamestown that fall, there were fewer than 100 survivors the following spring.

The Vaster Wilds is, on the surface, a survival story, as the girl (she is known by many names, and sometimes none) attempts to survive in the wilderness after fleeing the colony. Why she had to escape is a subtle mystery, which plays out, in the background, throughout the novel as she reckons with her past and the slim odds of her future. As a historical novel, it takes a unique look at the American experience in tightly focused miniature, while also being an examination of colonialism and an exploration of faith, both religious and secular. 

It is also the second book in a planned trilogy of connected novels, which Groff describes as “seeing from the outside about a thousand years of how we got to where we are now.” The first book, Matrix, was released in 2021, and was the fictionalized account of a 12th-century Catholic nun and visionary; the planned third book will take place roughly in our time. Of her plans, she says, “What I really want to do is talk about ideas of God, and the changeable ideas of God and how those ideas have sent us careening through the Anthropocene to the cusp of absolute catastrophic climate times at the moment, which is where we are right now.” 

While Groff works on that third volume, this is your opportunity to catch up on the first two books. And while you’re at it, you’ll probably want to explore the rest of her books, too. Time with Groff is time well-spent. — Robert Wiersema

Home Base: Philadelphia, Pa.

Author’s Take: “Who was this man, this omnipresent and impactful but shadowy Village figure? How are we to understand the paradox of an artist whose life was almost completely outside the public’s view, who was always on the edge of calamity — if not death — and yet was so influential in so many ways?”

Favourite Line: “As Harry Everett Smith told it, he was born into a family of theosophists and Freemasons.” 

Review: We all have blind spots. Especially in this age of sophisticated algorithms and on-line echo chambers, where we’re often completely unaware of information and people outside of our chosen spheres. So I understand people’s confusion at my excitement about the publication of a biography about Harry Smith. “Harry who?” you might ask. Exactly.

Harry Smith is a combination of cypher and legend. As author John Szwed comments in the introduction to Cosmic Scholar: “As I’ve searched for Harry Smith among those who knew him, each has described a different person, depending on where and when they first met him, the interests they shared, or what they expected from him.” Before reading Szwed’s book, I knew Smith as the compiler of The Anthology of American Folk Music, a six-record set taken from his own collection of 78s, which were recorded between 1926 and 1933. The anthology — accompanied by collage-style liner notes, written and decorated by Smith — was released in 1952 to very little notice. Over time, though, it became one of the key inspirations for the folk movement of the ’50s and ’60s, influencing artists like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez and, later, Nick Cave, Lou Reed, Patti Smith and numerous others.

I didn’t know, though, that Smith was also a well-regarded anthropologist, a painter and filmmaker, and an expert in the occult. I also didn’t know he was basically homeless for much of his life, moving from borrowed apartment to flophouse to the street and back, time and again, often losing his work in the process. I also didn’t know he was almost always intoxicated, he was friends with Allen Ginsberg, and a teacher to Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe.

In the absence of almost any verifiable biographical data, writer and anthropologist John Szwed has crafted a powerful and compelling biography of the gifted polymath, exploring his powerful creativity and ability to learn, while never shying from the darker aspects of his life. It’s a momentous achievement; a biography which reads like a novel, in places proving the aphorism that “truth is stranger than fiction.” 

Don’t let your blind spot stop you from reading one of the best books of the year, about one of the most fascinating characters of the 20th century. — RW

Home Base: New York, N.Y.

Author’s Take: “As an artist, he was a ‘transformer,’ and everybody has their own version of who he was. What they want him to be, what aspect of his character they wanted to take in. I tried to show them all. I don’t know if they all morph into a single, intelligible human being. But maybe that is part of what was endlessly fascinating about him. He was all of these things simultaneously and they didn’t all necessarily add up.” 

Favourite Line: “Reed and Anderson stayed up all night that Saturday, talking and doing breathwork. When daybreak came, he asked to be helped to the porch. “Take me into the light,” Reed said — his final words, spoken on a Sunday morning.”

Review: When Lou Reed died in 2013, he left behind a staggering body of work, a long-held reputation for decadence and impatience, a succession of battered friendships and, perhaps most strangely, a touching and seemingly pure relationship with musician and artist Laurie Anderson. It was difficult to reconcile the seemingly disparate aspects of Reed as musician, writer, husband, and human being.

That difficulty seems to have fuelled long-time music writer Will Hermes, who, in his new book Lou Reed: King of New York, seeks to capture those contradictions without attempting to reconcile them. In the process, he has created an at-times breathtaking biography, which begins with an in-depth exploration of Reed’s troubled childhood. A smart kid who struggled to read, Reed also struggled with growing up queer (though he never called it that). He suffered a nervous breakdown in college and underwent Electroconvulsive Therapy (which has been referenced multiple times in his work), and then moved into the city, where he became part of the early ’60s downtown art scene and, eventually, a rock star. Hermes explores Reed’s difficult relationships with fellow travellers like David Bowie and Andy Warhol, as well as his bandmates in the Velvet Underground and his solo bands, but Reed’s most difficult relationship was likely that with himself. 

Hermes, whose previous work includes Love Goes to Buildings on Fire, a sprawling account of the music scene in New York in the 1970s (which includes classical and jazz, punk and hip-hop, and their cross-pollinations), weaves Reed into the New York tapestry, centering him as a seminal figure for more than three decades.

With Lou Reed: King of New York, Hermes has crafted neither a hagiography (Reed doesn’t need one; as he famously told two rock critics attending one of his shows, “F–k you. I don’t need you to tell me I’m good”) nor a hatchet job (Reed was often his own worst enemy and adeptat shooting himself in the foot). Instead, Hermes has created a powerful, multifaceted and utterly empathic exploration of an artist often at war with himself, who finally finds a sense of peace.  — RW

Home Base: Suffolk, England and Donegal, Ireland

Author’s Take: “It’s very different from my previous books, but shares many of their deepest themes: love, loss, hope, nationhood, and the ways we recruit the past for our own ends.” 

Favourite Line: “See, the main problem with the way Sasha’s life shook out is that she hadn’t really planned for this to happen. Truthfully, speaking from the heart and all that crap, she hadn’t really planned for a lot of stuff, but this took the cake.”

Review: English writer Helen Macdonald burst into public awareness, and onto the bestseller lists, with their 2014 memoir, H Is for Hawk, an elegiac account of training a goshawk in the wake of their father’s death. Beautiful and heartbreaking by turns, the book earned Macdonald the Costa Book of the Year Prize, among other awards, and positioned Macdonald as one of a new generation of nature writers.

For Macdonald fans, her new book, Prophet — co-written with American-transplant-to-Ireland, Sin Blache — may come as something of a shock. 

Rather than being rooted in the natural world, Prophet is a high-concept, almost madcap spree across genres, including science fiction, action thriller, espionage, queer romance, mystery and even westerns. It’s an odd book, and I mean that as the highest of compliments.

It revolves around the spread of a chemical called Prophet, which induces a state of nostalgic euphoria in people exposed to it, but eventually leads to catatonia. The chemical is uncontrollable, and soon begins to mutate, giving people the ability conjure items from their most loved memories (the scene where an American diner from the 1950s manifests near an English air force base is a tour de force of imagination).

Enter the odd couple assigned to figure it all out and, well, save the world: Adam, an American soldier with special skills, and Rao, a former British Intelligence officer who is also an addict with a gift for being able to detect truth and falsehood (except when it comes to Adam). 

Prophet is an intellectually challenging novel that indulges in the sort of high-stakes action usually found in B-movies. It’s a thrill-ride of a novel: to say you never know quite what to expect is a significant understatement. You have to read it to believe it.  — RW

Home Base: Southern California

Author’s take: “I get asked, ‘Why write it now?’ Which seems ridiculous. I’m certainly not going to write it at the start of my career, or halfway through it. I’m 73 years old so it seems like the most sensible time to put down in words … that sounds like a song! 

Favourite lines: On inhaling the wildly potent weed smoked by Bob Marley after a Wailers gig in L.A. in the 1970s: “I’ve been pretty stoned at several points in my life. In fact, I once ingested half a block of opium on a night flight from New York to Barbados and spent two days in the airport because I had no idea where I was. This wasn’t like that. This was like when you hear about those people who are pronounced dead but they’re really still alive and inside they’re screaming and praying for a tear to appear in order to save them from a premature burial.”

Review: Bernie Taupin may be the ultimate fantasy dinner party guest. He’d come armed with enough hilariously hair-raising, true-life stories to keep jaws on the floor from canapés to cognac. Over the course of a highly successful, globe-spanning, 50-year career, Elton John’s longtime lyricist met everybody — everybody — who was anybody from the freewheeling 1970s to the present day, and was largely lucid enough to remember what happened. In his memoir Scattershot, Taupin’s recollections include, but are not limited to: enjoying a lunch date with Cher in Beverly Hills; meeting Frank Sinatra backstage after an L.A. gig with his best mate Alice Cooper in tow; dining with Salvador Dalí in New York and receiving and then losing an original sketch; helping Kris Kristofferson keep a drunken John Prine upright during a UK TV appearance; splitting his trousers while bowing to Princess Margaret at a royal event; thrice introducing an acid-addled Brian Wilson to John Lennon at an L.A. house party; and openly mocking Serge Gainsbourg at famous Paris nightclub Régine’s. (“That a stunning woman like Jane Birkin could crawl into bed at night with a man who looked like he’d been dipped in Crisco and rolled in pubic hair still makes me shudder to this day.”)

Taupin’s prose may be a smidge overwrought and he’s prone to clichés, but that’s a fair trade for such dazzling stories. Interestingly, he spends scant time describing his songwriting process, though readers do glean some choice insights: Marilyn Monroe was not the inspiration for Candle in the Wind (it was Montgomery Clift, who co-starred with Monroe in John Huston’s The Misfits from 1961), and Don’t Go Breaking My Heart was essentially a drunken lark. He also charts his and John’s steady rise to the very pinnacle of the rock and roll world, as well as the latter’s crushing struggles with drugs and his sexual identity. For the most part though, Scattershot is a freewheeling ride through a kaleidoscopic life many aspire to, but few actually enjoy. Taupin certainly had a ball. — Kim Hughes 

Home Base: Berkeley, Calif.

Author’s take: “It’s been marvellous to me to watch people who know a fraction of what I know, who are willing to be much more certain than I am about what happened. I’ve earned my doubt. You haven’t yet earned your certainty.”

Favourite lines: “The whole thing was odd: these people joined together by their fear of trust erected a parallel financial system that required more trust from its users than did the traditional financial system. Outside the law, and often hostile to it, they discovered many ways to run afoul of it. Crypto exchanges routinely misplaced or lost their customers’ money. Crypto exchanges routinely faked trading data to make it seem as though far more trading had occurred on them than actually had. Crypto exchanges fell prey to hackers, or to random rogue traders who gamed the exchanges’ risk management.” 

Review: Michael Lewis is a terrific storyteller, as his many bestsellers (2003’s Moneyball, 2009’s The Blind Side and 2011’s The Big Short) illustrate. So one approaches Going Infinite with high expectations, especially since its subject, the disgraced crypto king Sam Bankman-Fried, is currently under a microscope (his trial for fraud began in New York on Oct. 3, the same day the book was released). 

Surely, Lewis’ in-depth profile of this oddball raised by two Stanford University law professors will contain insights into how he allegedly bilked billions from investors through FTX (one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges), as well as Alameda Research, a crypto hedge fund that he built with a team of like-minded eggheads, several of whom have already pleaded guilty to fraud and are testifying against their former boss? 

Alas, Lewis’ triumph here, if we can call it that, is documenting how the apparently insufferable Bankman-Fried convinced anyone to do anything, including the author, who shadowed him in multiple locations while interviewing those in his orbit. Throughout the book, I wondered if Bankman-Fried was a savant or just a jerk, given passages detailing his broken promises, colossal managerial and relationship missteps. Bankman-Fried claimed he wanted to raise billions trading crypto “for effective altruistic causes,” but Lewis does not – maybe cannot – reconcile that high-mindedness (which he seems to believe is true) with the man described by prosecutors as perpetuating the largest financial fraud in recent history. (Bankman-Fried was found guilty on seven charges Nov. 3) . On the plus side, reading the book made it easier to follow the action as the white-knuckle trial proceeded, and the mind-bending FTX org chart reprinted on the dust jacket was a huge help. Once again, truth really is stranger than fiction. — KH

Home Base: Cape Town, South Africa

Favourite lines: “Intensity matters. A Category 5 hurricane is a completely different thing from a Category 2 storm, ecologically speaking. Because oceans are warming and creating more water vapor, and warmer air can hold more water vapor than cooler air, we can now expect Category 5 hurricanes to rage across the Earth more often than before.”

Review: The word “grim” hangs over every page of The End of Eden, South African author and environmental journalist Adam Welz’s chilling exploration of the impacts of climate change on wild animals and global habitats. As the author tallies how our use of fossil fuels and myriad other bad behaviours have triggered apocalyptic fires, hurricanes, droughts and floods, he proves unequivocally that humans have caused these disasters. And, that flora and fauna — from koala bears to Joshua trees to the above-mentioned shorebirds — are paying a grave price for our recklessness. 

That may not be news, but Welz breaks our insidiousness down to a molecular level, illustrating the domino effect of rapidly changing weather patterns on animals and the environments that sustain them, and us. Yet, while humans are the cause of this mess, Welz focuses on non-human lifeforms struggling to cope in the wild, where outcomes are measured in extinctions, scrambled migratory patterns, ruined waterways and dead trees. After a major February 2020 wildfire in Australia, for instance, the author was fundamentally changed by what he saw.

“A dense mass of thousands, millions, of dead trees filled the landscape from horizon to horizon. The forest was the brown of dead wood and the black of charcoal. I had never seen a place so thoroughly and extensively burned.” I’ll spare you the awful fate of the “huge number of animals including deer and Eastern Gray Kangaroos” that perished in another brutal Australian wildfire chronicled elsewhere in the book. 

The End of Eden is more than urgent. It’s a devastating and yes, grim, battle cry for sweeping change on a global level. It is supported by facts gathered through eyewitness reporting from Africa to the United States and beyond, though notably, Welz doesn’t take on meat production, perhaps because the devastating scale of its environmental impacts and ethics demand its own book. Still, readers of The End of Eden will be shattered and humbled, but hopefully galvanized into action. — KH

Home Base: Athenry, Ireland

Author’s Take: “I often think of this book like a glass lake with currents underneath it; you can enter this novel at a very simplistic level, which is what I wanted, you can go along with the story, but then there’s layers of undercurrents. But also the idea of building the currach, it became, in retrospect, as much about making something beautiful in a really oppressive dark space. It’s like the opposite of the Trojan horse. They’re making it on the inside, and they need to get it out, and free it. They are building something beautiful inside the institution.”

Favourite Line: “The organ — an instrument tasked with getting souls into heaven by forcing air through the fipple — started up like a whale echolocation, and startled Tess, who sat up straight in the varnished pew. Churches made her feel inadequate, but this one also made her feel unwelcome.”

Review: Poet and novelist Elaine Feeney says she isn’t a fan of linear fiction narratives where everyone’s issues are neatly resolved by book’s end, and that is certainly true of How to Build a Boat. Set in the fictional town of Emory, Ireland, the story revolves around Jamie O’Neill, a neurodiverse 13-year-old entering his first year at Christ’s College, an all-boys Catholic secondary school. Jamie loves Edgar Allan Poe, rivers, the curvature of objects and the late Maryam Mirzakhani, an Iranian mathematician and the first woman to win the Fields Medal (the Oscars of mathematics). He lives with his father Eoin, but the only thing he knows of his mother Noelle — who died giving birth to him — is a two-minute video clip of her at a swimming competition. Jamie’s plan is to build a perpetual motion machine that — according to his own unique calculations — will finally allow him to be closer to her. 

At school he forms a deep connection with Tess Mahon, a special needs teacher who veers between quiet rage at her husband and saint-like patience with Jamie, as well as Tadhg Foley, the woodworking teacher who first proposes building the boat that will eventually absorb the lives of the book’s main characters. Both reject the school’s blind conformism and, with Tess, the misogyny that runs deep into the school’s teachings and in Irish society at large. “The College was everything Tess Mahon despised about education; closest to the church, farthest from god,” writes Feeney.

All three bump up against the institutional oppression governing their lives, and constantly question the natural order of things, but seem powerless to do anything about it.

Feeney, who counts Edna O’Brien, John Prine, Lucia Berlin and James Joyce among her influences, says she started writing as a way to control a world that she couldn’t control, and it seems the characters in How to Build a Boat grapple with the same. At its core, she says the book is about loneliness and isolation and asks whether we can ever really know one another. As a reader, I felt a deep simpatico with their struggles, but I had a special fondness for Jamie. Feeney — who spent five years writing the novel — says it took her a long time to find Jamie’s voice, but the time spent inside his head was the most enjoyable. His unfiltered and brutally honest naivete was a treat, even when he was angry and confused, and eschewing the kind of sentimentality adults around him kept trying to foist on him. 

The author’s skill at laying bare her characters’ anxieties gave this book an intimacy I wasn’t expecting, while at the same time taking a sharp look at issues of class and the restrictive roles placed on men and women. I can’t wait to read Feeney’s next novel, but in the meantime, I will busy myself with reading As You Were, her first. — Kisha Ferguson