Becky Blake’s debut novel Proof I Was Here is a new take on the expat abroad story that focuses on Niki, a 20-something Torontonian who has just moved to Barcelona with her fiancé Peter. The story is divided into three parts. In the first, Peter ends the relationship soon after they arrive, and she walks out of her apartment and leaves her wallet and keys behind. She is struggling to deal with the loss of her old life by living penniless, listless and aimless, a stranger in a foreign land: “I rode the trains back and forth for hours, noticing the unloved people. They were suddenly everywhere. A thin woman…

One Brother Shy follows Alex MacAskill, a shy computer programmer who works for a tech company that produces facial recognition software. After the death of his mother, he discovers that she has been receiving monthly payments of $5,000. He also finds out he has a twin brother, and sets out to find both him and his father in a wild ride from Canada, to the UK, to Russia, and back.

“You’re not a monster,” Mother used to say. “Just a little beast.” In the original French, the title for Little Beast was Barbe: Roman. “Barbe” means “beard” in French. Both of these titles ring true when looking at the story as a whole.

“The dark cup of the cat’s ear moved, the long guard hairs at the tip shivering toward the crack in the window beside her. Art finished his drink, put his glass down by the whiskey bottle, and waited to see if the cat’s ear would come back to rest, but it didn’t. Instead, she lifted her head and looked out the window, both ears pointed at whatever was outside.”

Cold Skies by Thomas King is the third in the Thumps DreadfulWater series, featuring a retired Cherokee LAPD detective with a keen interest in photography who is unwillingly pulled back into the force to replace Sheriff Duke Hockney in his hometown of Chinook, Montana. Hockney hands the reigns to DreadfulWater when he is ordered to go to Costa Rica, a questionable choice that casts a shadow over the whole book given that it is the FBI’s responsibility to investigate murders that occur on U.S. reservations

Cobra Clutch features Jed, a retired wrestler, who returns to his previous life, a raw and gritty world relieved by comedy from his ex-military cousin, Decalin. Decalin not only has the “ability to pour the perfect pint of Guinness. But he is damn near legendary for his tendency to pick a fight after downing one too many of his masterful creations.”

“Wood is time captured. A map. A cellular memory. A record.” Spanning 138 years, Greenwood is structured like the cross-section of a tree, the rings of which physically record time passing, and is reflected visually in the novel’s Table of Contents. The oldest events occur in 1908, nestled in the middle rings, and the near future events of 2038 hover on the outer rings.

Daniel Zomparelli’s Everything is Awful and You’re a Terrible Person is a collection of short stories forefronting human connection: from obsession with strangers’ passing comments to online dating, to conversations with the dead. Most stories are focused on the romance – or the lack thereof – that arises from digital communication within the gay community. As readers, we are transported from mind to mind, body to body, with a group of men. Each perspective is different, but they are fundamentally connected in that that they appear in each other’s lives as they do in small and intertwined gay communities.

University can be a strange and confusing time—and there’s no stranger time than the final semester, when real life begins to come into view. Just when you think you’ve finally cracked the code of the university student dynamic, it’s time to move on and turn that four year degree (time mostly spent drinking campus coffee, lounging around the newspaper office, etcetera), into a stable income.

The phrase ‘dead reckoning’ invokes a sense of doom while one awaits a horrible fate. In fact, the phrase refers to a navigational technique used by explorers while voyaging. Dead reckoning allows us to remember where we have been, and then to decide where to go. It’s how European explorers first charted their way through the treacherous waters of Northern Canada in search of a safe trade route between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans: the infamous Northwest Passage.