When I was a child, my grandfather was embroiled in a quiet, and possibly entirely one-sided, feud with his next-door neighbor. Every summer I would visit my grandparents for a week, and follow Grandpa on his morning walks through the woodlot, along a path that skirted the neighbor’s field.
Each day, on reaching the fence, Grandpa would pause, squint across the field at this man’s distant house, and then mutter rude things about “that damn pig farmer” under his breath for an extended period before turning back toward home, to all appearances satisfied and ready to face the day.
I couldn’t say what the pig farmer in question had done to provoke this ritual grumbling; I have the vague sense it was something to do with an offensively-placed mailbox? It doesn’t really matter, except that Grandpa cherished that grudge like an old friend, and always had one eye up that hill. Such is often the way with neighbors, especially in small, rural villages: everyone always seems to know everyone else’s business, and if by some miracle they don’t, they’re absolutely itching to find out.
Over the years, I forgot about my grandfather’s feud with the pig farmer. Still, it all came rushing back to me at the moment in A Sweet Sting of Salt where Jean, a Nova Scotian midwife, begins making daily trips across the stream and up through the woodlot behind her house to spy on the fisherman who lives next door.
Despite having made a point of distancing herself from the prying eyes and flapping tongues of the nearby village, Jean is desperate to figure out why his enigmatic, beautiful wife ventured out alone in the middle of a stormy night, in labor, turning up in the salt marsh in Jean’s backyard—and why the woman seemed so reluctant to return home after the birth of her child. Though Jean learned long ago that she should stay out of other people’s business, her growing concern—and growing feelings—for Muirin mean that she can’t simply set her worries aside. The more Jean uncovers, the more her questions multiply.
In the time honored tradition of nosy neighbors everywhere (and in memory of my notorious curmudgeon of a grandfather), I present this list of queer Canadian historical novels—handpicked especially for Americans with a burning curiosity to find out what’s going on next door.
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Alissa York, Far Cry
Set in a remote and hardscrabble cannery town along the British Columbia coast, this beautiful, heartbreaking book has prose so vivid you can practically smell and taste the air, and feel every dislocated shoulder and cold water plunge, as seen through the eyes and experiences of Anders Viker, a Norwegian immigrant with hidden depths and carefully guarded secrets, as he relates his life story for his young, recently orphaned, and fiercely independent niece, Kit.
Loghan Paylor, The Cure For Drowning
This recent debut follows another fiercely independent character named Kit—a troublesome changeling who insists on adopting a boy’s clothing following a near fatal plunge through thin ice. After finding themself embroiled in a bitter love triangle with a local girl and their own older brother, Kit leaves home to enlist in the air force as Christopher, but when all three return home again after the war, peace is the last thing they’re likely to find there.
Suzette Mayr, The Sleeping Car Porter
A fascinating glimpse into an important part of Black history, this fabulous book, set in 1929, takes us on a long-haul journey with Baxter, a Black, gay, painfully sleep-deprived railway porter desperate not to lose his job (over any number of ridiculous infractions, never mind being caught with the pornographic postcard he’s found in the loo) before he can earn enough tips to enroll in dental school, and the eccentric, often infuriating guests and co-workers he is forced to endure along the way.
Illuminating the ways in which race, class, and queerness intersect, this book will feel deeply relatable to anyone who has ever had to suffer the indignities of working front-line customer service.
Gail Andersen Dargatz, The Cure For Death By Lightning
The second novel on this list to feature a miraculous-sounding cure is this harsh but beautiful tale of a young woman living on a dirt-poor farm in the British Columbia interior during the second world war. Beth’s life falls apart during a summer of strange, unexpected, sometimes traumatic and oft-uncanny events after she is struck in the arm by a bolt of lightning.
A bestseller in Canada and the UK following its release in 1996, this magical book, with its rich and unusual cast of complex characters, is one of my personal favorites: If you missed it then, now is a great time to pick it up.
Cherie Dimaline, Into The Bright Open: A Secret Garden Remix
The only young adult title on this list is part of the delightful Classics Remixed series, in which authors from marginalized backgrounds reimagine classic works though their own lens, to subvert expectations of the white, cishet, and frequently male canon.
In this riff on The Secret Garden, young Mary Lennox is sent from Toronto to live in her uncle’s home on the shore of Georgian Bay following the death of her parents, introducing her to a vibrant Metis community, and drawing her into a fight to protect the family she finds there.
Heather O’Neill, When We Lost Our Heads
Revolving around the messy, intersecting lives of Marie, the charismatic daughter of a wealthy sugar baron, and her dangerously precocious best friend Sadie (who are also somehow Marie Antoinette and the Marquis de Sade, in a sprawling 19th-century Montréal peopled with walking allusions to the French revolution in female form) this novel is one of the wilder rides I’ve been on this year, and among the most entertaining.
Darkly funny, fiercely feminist, and gleefully anachronistic, it is also packed with O’Neill’s signature brand of inventively specific metaphorical turns, which I adore.
Anne Fleming, Curiosities
In this forthcoming novel, a modern historian attempts to piece together the story of Joan and Thomasina, two children who are the sole survivors of a 17th-century plague outbreak. Separated when their guardian is accused of witchcraft, the two reunite as adults, with one living as a man named Tom, and enter into a relationship.
When they are discovered together, the explanation assigned to Tom’s unexpected physical appearance is that Joan must be a witch, which sets off a series of tangled events and disparate accounts that the historian must unravel to determine the two lovers’ eventual fate.
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A Sweet Sting of Salt by Rose Sutherland is available via Dell.
