Book*hug Turns 20: Thirty Books for Twenty Years, Part Two of Three
In case you missed the news, this year marks our twentieth anniversary. We’ve been celebrating this special milestone anniversary in various ways throughout the year. To help keep the celebrations going, our team has assembled a list of thirty of our favourite titles from the last twenty years. Today, we’re pleased to bring you part two of a three-part series that features ten more of our picks.
Take a dive into the past with us to witness the combined efforts of the fantastic writers, editors, translators, and designers who have helped make Book*hug Press what it is today! This is not an exhaustive list, but a starting point for discovering just some of the daring and bold works that we have proudly championed. Here’s to twenty more years of literary excellence!
Chelene Knight’s award-winning novel is a riveting exploration of the complexity within mother-daughter relationships and the dynamic vitality of Vancouver’s former Hogan’s Alley neighbourhood. Told through the fascinating lens of Junie, a bright young woman in an oft-disquieting world, this moving novel is intimate and urgent—not just an unflinching look at the destruction of a vibrant community, but a celebration of the Black lives within.
Aimee Wall’s remarkable debut novel is about intergenerational female relationships and resistance found in the unlikeliest of places that explores the precarity of rural existence and the essential nature of abortion. Nominated for many prizes, We, Jane probes the importance of care work by women for women, underscores the complexity of relationships in close circles, and beautifully captures the inevitable heartache of understanding home.
You Are Eating an Orange. You Are Naked. by Sheung-King
You Are Eating an Orange. You Are Naked. is an intimate novel of memory and longing that challenges Western tropes and Orientalism. Embracing the playful surrealism of Haruki Murakami and the atmospheric narratives of filmmaker Wong Kar-wai, Sheung-King’s acclaimed debut novel is at once lyrical and punctuated, and wholly unique.
The Employees by Olga Ravn, translated from Danish by Martin Aitken
Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and the inaugural Ursula K. LeGuin Prize for Fiction, The Employees reshuffles a sci-fi voyage into a riotously original existential nightmare. Olga Ravn’s prose, masterfully translated by award-winning translator Martin Aitken, is chilling, crackling, exhilarating, and foreboding. The Employees probes into what makes us human, while delivering a hilariously stinging critique of life governed by the logic of productivity.
In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova, translated from Russian by Sasha Dugdale
In dialogue with writers like Roland Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Susan Sontag, and Osip Mandelstam, the much lauded and acclaimed In Memory of Memory is imbued with rare intellectual curiosity and a wonderfully soft-spoken, poetic voice. Dipping into various forms—essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue, and historical documents—Maria Stepanova assembles a vast panorama of ideas and personalities, offering an entirely new and bold exploration of cultural and personal memory.
Are we ever free from our pasts? Can we ever truly know the people we are closest to? Seductive and tension-filled, Polar Vortex is a story of secrets, deceptions, and revenge. In praise of Mootoo’s acclaimed novel, Madeleine Thien writes, “Shani Mootoo’s intimate novel suspends us in the vortex between acts of betrayal and acts of love. It is a powerfully unsettling work from a brilliant artist.”
Rich and Poor is a novel of a man who washes dishes for a living and decides to kill a billionaire as a political act. It is literature as political theory and theory as pure literary pleasure—a spiralling, fast-paced parable of joyous, overly self-aware, mischievous class warfare. In a review for The Globe and Mail, Jade Colbert writes, “As with Wren’s previous work, Rich and Poor is art in resistance, a work that dares to remind us of our capacity for revolutionary love despite the prevailing economic system’s structural violence.”
Joni Murphy’s stunning debut novel, Double Teenage, tells the story of Celine and Julie, two girls coming of age in the 1990s in a desert town close to the US–Mexico border. Starting from their shared love of theatre, the girls move into a wider world that shimmers with intellectual and artistic possibility, but at the same time, is dense with threat. Part bildungsroman, part performance, part passionate essay, part magic spell, Double Teenage ultimately offers a way to see through violence into an emotionally alive place beyond the myriad traps of girlhood.
Letters to Amelia by Lindsay Zier-Vogel
Grace Porter is reeling from grief after her partner of seven years unexpectedly leaves. Amidst her heartache, the thirty-year-old library tech is tasked with reading newly discovered letters that Amelia Earhart wrote to her lover, Gene Vidal. She becomes captivated by the famous pilot who disappeared in 1937. Letter by letter, Grace understands more about Amelia while piecing her own life back together.Underscoring the power of reading and writing letters for self-discovery, Letters to Amelia is, above all, a story of the essential need for connection—and our universal ability to find hope in the face of fear.
With dreamlike stories and dark humour, Kathryn Mockler’s acclaimed debut work of prose, Anecdotes, is a hybrid collection in four parts examining the pressing realities of sexual violence, abuse, and environmental collapse. Nominated for many literary prizes, these varied, immersive works bristle with truth in the face of unprecedented change. They are playful forms for serious times.
