Claire Holden Rothman

Be warned: reading The Ghost Garden may change you. Susan Doherty, a petite woman with shining blue eyes and a ready smile, is doing big, radical things in the field of mental health – the kinds of things that might inspire you to pitch in and help. At the very least, the book risks challenging misconceptions you may hold about schizophrenia.

Arabic for Beginners, a shape-shifting fictional narrative by Ariela Freedman, is a nuanced and penetrating exploration of life in Israel today.

Montreal writer Alice Zorn immortalizes this icon in her beautifully crafted second novel, Five Roses. Like the gigantic blue eyes of T. J. Eckleburg looking down on the Valley of Ashes, Zorn’s sign is a landmark that does service as a literary device.

For a woman who has devoted the last forty years to discussing national politics on air and in print, Hébert seems surprisingly dispassionate. The Morning After, her fascinating new book about the 1995 Quebec referendum, contains not a whisper of her own political views.

Alice Zorn’s debut novel Arrhythmia is an ambitious, deftly handled exploration of human beings in love. Far from stuttering along as its title might seem to suggest, it seldom misses a beat.

One of the delights of reading fiction is that it lets you travel at practically no cost to places you would otherwise never see. Of Water and Rock, Thomas Armstrong’s debut novel, takes readers to modern-day Barbados, but not the Barbados of glossy travel brochures featuring beaches and resort hotels. This is behind-the-scenes Barbados, in the private homes and lives of the locals.