Coming Home From the Candy Factory 

“Work holds little mystery for most. We think we know all about it, the drudgery, the accomplishment, or lack thereof, the wearing down or selling one’s soul,” argues Jane Byers in Coming Home From the Candy Factory (Caitlin Press). But what do we actually know about work? Her genre-bending book, featuring poems and essays, educates readers about the under-exposed world of ergonomics, as Byers assesses safety in different blue-collar work environments. 

While at times heavy on technical jargon to the point of almost losing the reader, Byers cuts through a commonly perceived distance from manual work and confronts the reality that many have not considered labour carefully. She points out the problematic work environments of what she calls “below the neck” occupations and the diseases to which workers like firefighters and factory workers are exposed. Throughout the book, Byers recounts anecdotes she has witnessed in the occupational sphere. She speaks of life with her hardworking father, colleagues helping each other, a firefighter vulnerably sharing his goal of becoming a priest. She uses her observations to take the reader on a journey where she gently encourages us to consider and appreciate the hidden beauty of this world. —Houda Kerkadi

Seven Heavens Away

“Bang! Bang! Bang!” That’s the sonic backdrop to a traumatic experience witnessed by fifteen-year-old Aziz: the murder of his best friend, Hassan. This chilling scene finishes the first chapter of Seven Heavens Away (Anansi), quickly establishing the realities faced by the novel’s Palestinian protagonist, Aziz, and his peers growing up in Jerusalem. In his gripping debut novel, Ashraf Zaghal spins a trying coming of age story that is unwavering and blunt in its depictions of life within an increasingly hostile climate. 

Hassan’s death thrusts Aziz into deeper negotiation with other uncertainties in his life, from his understanding of faith and spirituality; to his relationship with his family, namely his protective mother and volatile father; to his longing for stable community. Jerusalem stands as a powerful and political setting. Aziz’s intimate knowledge of the city’s environments brings the Holy City to life, with vivid descriptions of its mosques and marketplaces, hills and valleys. Zaghal’s portrayal of the political climate, one in which armed soldiers regularly patrol squares and arrest boys Aziz’s age, adds a palpable tension that further invests the reader in the characters’ wellbeing. Ultimately, Seven Heavens Away is a harrowing but deeply human story of loss, survival, community and imperfect love.—Joel Sawmadal 

Property 

A doomed construction project—the basement of a Toronto home unable to hold back the impending onslaught of the buried creek it sits atop of—frames Kate Cayley’s Property (Coach House). The novel is set over a single day, and examines the inner thoughts of the various characters that live along a residential street in Toronto, culminating at a dinner party attended by a few of the characters. Cayley’s intense exploration of her characters is reminiscent of the works of Virginia Woolf, where time and the narrative structure of the novel seem to be dictated by the characters’ inner lives. The reader is isolated and stuck in the characters’ deeply examined thoughts, similarly to how the characters are isolated from each other, their assumptions further widening that disconnect. The detailed care Cayley takes in considering these characters’ every passing thought makes the otherwise mundane problems they face feel insurmountable. A tragedy unfolding on their street comes as a relief, because the narrative finally moves outside the minds of these characters, as they scale the walls of their own assumptions to help one another. —Alice Boyle 

All the Cameras in My Room 

Two ultrafans of a boy band gush about their favourite star before kidnapping and robbing him (“his vulnerability is so sexy”); a cult-classic Christmas special may reveal the arcane truth of death; an exhibitionist environmentalist named Larry Seedyseed sprouts forests from his sperm. Renowned Toronto comic artist Michael DeForge’s All the Cameras in My Room (Drawn & Quarterly) is a collection of stories, vignettes and fables that warble between the absurd and the profound. The arresting illustration style is surrealist-folk, the palette ranging from minimalist black and white to wilder, more opulent yellows, reds and beyond. Characters are depicted variously as stick figures, single-expression masks and angular insectoids. Across stories, the tone swerves from disquieting tension to playful whimsy, but DeForge’s eclectic breadth somehow never jars.

Sexuality and nostalgia recur intermittently—mature, gloopy lust and the beguiling, impenetrable mystery of the past. The final (and longest) story, “The Organizer,” is a sober, quietly harrowing political parable. An informant reports to a mysterious agency on a masked revolutionary group she has infiltrated. Her compromised status symbolizes a deeper alienation: nobody seems capable of truly knowing the other. Fresh, sharp, irreducible, All the Cameras in My Room leaves a seedy residue floating in the brain long after the final page. —Josh Milton-Bell