2027 Evergreen Award™ Nominees
Adult, English, Fiction / Non-Fiction
Discussion Themes/Content for all 10 titles
Booktalking Video for all 10 books
At Sea in a Sieve
Written by Cordelia Strube
Published by ECW Press
A sharp and moving portrait of Ray — judge, single parent, and tightly leashed woman whose survival strategies seem suddenly to be coming apart
Ray, a single mother and superior court judge, pounds a punching bag in her basement to manage her anger. She has concluded that life must be lived tightly leashed or chaos will move in. Her prime directive is to protect her daughter, Armada, from life’s unruly forces. Ray deftly handles other people’s problems, managing her courtroom and the politics of the judges’ chambers, and defusing her neighbors’ battles, all the while staying above the fray. But when her feckless, sweet brother re-enters Ray’s life, bringing unpredictability and wayward emotion with him, and her sexy, but enervating Guatemalan ex crashes into her world, she realizes that her carefully piloted ship is not watertight after all — it’s no better than a sieve. Cascading events reveal to Ray that suffering cannot be held at bay and that life must be lived in all its messy glory.
Peopled with a cast of characters for the ages, from the eccentrics that surround Ray’s courtroom and her street to a flock of recalcitrant hens, and laden with her trademark sly wit, this is Strube’s best novel yet — sharp, intensely humane, moving, and funny.
The Brink of Something Beautiful
Written by Bobbi French
Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
An immersive and poignant new novel from the award-winning author of The Good Women of Safe Harbour about the unique kinship of women and found family, and the hope and healing it can bring.
Ruby Nolan is a new widow. Hidden in the grief and guilt for her husband, Joe, is a sense that she is free from a marriage she never wanted. But how can she possibly begin again? An encounter with Maxine, a pregnant teen who reminds Ruby of her own sorry past, and a shocking revelation from her mother, Vera, sends Ruby on a collision course with old truths and regrets. They also send her on a mission to help Maxine whether she wants it or not. While a friend warns Ruby that you can’t help anyone until you help yourself, it’s a lesson Ruby has to learn the hard way if she’s going to find any real peace.
Set over the course of one winter in 1990s St Johns, infused with the rich culture and characters of the Rock, The Brink of Something Beautiful is the life-affirming, ultimately hopeful story of how women lift each other up and figure themselves out.
Cleo Dang Would Rather Be Dead
Written by Mai Nguyen
Published by Simon & Schuster Canada
A darkly humorous yet uplifting novel about a grieving mother who starts working at a funeral home and discovers that the best way to honor the dead is to live—by the author Taylor Jenkins Reid calls “a real standout.”
All Cleo Dang has ever wanted was to be a mother. The day she discovers she’s pregnant is the happiest of her life, especially when she learns that her best friend, Paloma, is also expecting. It’s a wonderful surprise and together, they enjoy their pregnancies. But when they both go to the hospital in labor, something goes very, very wrong. Paloma comes home with a baby. Cleo does not.
Now a grieving Cleo must navigate life after losing her baby. She alienates herself from the world, especially her best friend who is living the life she so desperately wanted. Forced to quit her demanding job as an actuary, Cleo manages to find a job at a funeral home where she meets a revolving door of bereaved locals and discovers the power of confronting grief.
Colin Gets Promoted and Dooms the World
Written by Mark Waddell
Published by Viking Canada
A USA Today Bestseller!
Finalist for the Leacock Medal for Humour!
Colin Harris is your typical twenty-something stuck in a dead-end job. He joined Dark Enterprises, humanity’s oldest and most dangerous corporation, for the usual reasons: immeasurable power, staggering wealth, maybe the chance to rule the world someday. After spending two years as a lowly data analyst in Human Resources, however, Colin now faces early retirement. He has one week to turn things around or he’s going to be terminated. Like, terminated.
Desperate, he makes a deal with a mysterious entity and secures the promotion he’s always wanted. The catch? He’s loosed a ravenous supernatural monster on an unsuspecting world, which probably isn’t great. Worse, he’s met an incredibly hot guy who just might be the love of his life, and that makes looming global annihilation pretty inconvenient.
With the clock ticking down to the end of everything, Colin sets out to save the world. It’s the ultimate power move. Along the way he’ll have to impress his new boss, outwit a few homicidal coworkers, keep his job a secret from his best friend, and survive a pair of lurking assassins. It won’t be easy, but such is life in Dark Enterprises—if the deadlines don’t kill you, something else probably will.
Days of Feasting and Rejoicing
Written by David Bergen
Published by Goose Lane Editions
In this brilliant existential portrayal of identity, David Bergen introduces Esther Maile, an expat American living in Thailand in a house rented by the richer, more popular Christine. While on holiday in Bali, Christine is caught by an ocean wave and drowns. Esther rushes to save her, but in the chaos that ensues, the police arrive and confuse Esther for Christine.
For someone who would prefer to be anyone but herself, this is the perfect solution — no matter the consequences. When a local Thai police captain, Net Wantok, begins to investigate Christine’s death and seeks out Esther, he is caught between his curiosity — she is charming, evasive, and flirtatious — and the awareness that people around Esther are disappearing. Sensing danger, Esther acts out of fear and pulls the one person who loves her into her perilous world.
Bergen’s mesmerizing psychological drama hums with expatriate gossip, sexual tension, unexpected violence, a passion for food, and a woman who, seemingly unhindered by questions of truth or morality, hints at the darkness in all of us.
Five Seasons of Charlie Frances
Written by Danica Roache
Published by Vagrant Press/Nimbus Publishing
A bold, refreshing, and darkly funny debut novel about a mixed-ancestry Mi’kmaw woman balancing academia, grief, love, and new motherhood, for fans of Fleabag and Amanda Peters.
When the tides in the Cobequid Bay went out and left stretches of mudflats, I could walk halfway to the other shore. Sometimes the mud engulfed my feet, right up to my ankles, and made it hard to move. The longer you stayed stuck, the harder it was to keep going.
Charlie Francis’s five-year plan has gone to shit. She was supposed to greet the new millennium by diving head-first into a master’s degree, but her thesis has ground to a halt, Y2K was a bust, her rambunctious family and claustrophobic hometown are driving her around the bend?and the maybe-love-of-her-life, Adam, keeps joking about her moving home to marry him and have his babies.
When Charlie’s beloved uncle?the same person who told her to get out of town and never look back?dies suddenly, Charlie leans into her independence, breaking Adam’s heart and rushing headlong into an academic career despite the baked-in racism of the predominantly white institution. When she unexpectedly becomes pregnant, she has to navigate being a (mostly) single mother on top of everything else.
Charlie finds herself at a crossroads?and only so much stress-baking can keep reality at bay. How can she reconcile being a student of history within the colonial system that exploited her ancestors? How can she be a good mother when she can barely afford groceries? And how can she be a proud Mi’kmaw woman when the world seems determined to keep her down?
Maybe it’s time for a new five-year plan.
With grit, humour, a lovable cast, and the nostalgia of the early aughts, this bold and refreshing novel from a powerful new voice in Indigenous fiction explores grief, the complex bonds of family, and cultural identity.
Good People
Written by Patmeena Sabit
Published by Crown
Zorah Sharaf could do no wrong. Zorah Sharaf brought shame upon her family. What’s the truth? Depends on who you ask.
After fleeing a war-torn Afghanistan, the Sharaf family resettles as refugees in Northern Virginia. After many years of hard work, the father has become a successful businessman. Now they live in the most exclusive neighborhood, their growing family attending the most prestigious schools. Zorah, the eldest daughter, is the apple of her father’s eye.
When an unthinkable tragedy strikes, everyone is left reeling and the family is thrust into the court of public opinion. There is talk that behind closed doors the Sharafs’ happy household was anything but. Did the Sharaf family achieve the American Dream? Or was the image of the model immigrant family just a façade?
A kaleidoscopic, urgent narrative, told through the perspectives of those who know the family best, and those who only think they do, Good People is a riveting, provocative, and unforgettable story of community, family, and identity in our increasingly divided times.
Layaway Child
Written by Chanel Sutherland
Published by House of Anansi Press
Magnificent stories about Caribbean immigrants navigating the emotional terrain of girlhood, displacement, longing, and identity across continents.
Layaway Child is a luminous debut short story collection by award-winning writer Chanel Sutherland that explores the emotional landscapes of Caribbean families fractured by migration, especially the harrowing yet resilient journeys of Black girls and women. In lyrical, linked stories, Sutherland traces the lives of mothers working abroad as housekeepers and nannies, and the children they left behind.
From lush island childhoods marked by absence and community, to the cold, alienating spaces of Canadian cities, Layaway Child captures the complexity of growing up between worlds. A mother, newly arrived in Montreal, is kept from speaking to her daughters by her own mother’s misguided attempt to help her let go of home. A schoolgirl becomes a spectacle under the gaze of white classmates. A young girl’s curiosity about the cosmos collides with the confusion of puberty. Sutherland brings deep compassion and sharp insight to each moment, revealing both the beauty of island life and the harshness of immigration’s toll.
Rufous and Calliope
Written by Sarah Louise Butler
Published by Douglas & McIntyre
In Rufous and Calliope, Sarah Louise Butler takes readers deep into the rugged British Columbia Interior, where the mysteries of nature collide with the fragile threads of memory.
Rufous Flanagan, a modern-day cartographer, embarks on a solo trek through an ancient mountain pass in search of the summer hideaway he once shared with his siblings as child runaways. With every step, the vast, untamed wilderness presents both physical and emotional challenges, forcing Rufous to confront not only the treacherous terrain but also the unravelling of his own mind.
His memories—sometimes vivid, sometimes slipping away—become a map guiding him through towering forests, dry creek beds and smoke-filled skies. In this landscape, not everything is as it seems: echoes of the past lead Rufous on a journey that blurs the line between dream and reality. As the elements close in, this novel offers a suspenseful tale of survival, memory and family bonds.
Wild People Quiet
Written by Tara Gereaux
Published by Simon & Schuster Canada
National bestseller and featured in a list of best new historical fiction in The New York Times.
Torduvalle, Saskatchewan, 1946.
Florence has created a beautiful life for herself. Her home is immaculate; she is a model employee at Pratt’s Insurance, where she works as a secretary. Her hair is the perfect shade of movie-star blonde—never once does she allow her brown roots to show. She dyes them every other Saturday night, without fail.
But one morning, everything changes.
Florence notices a new group of men at the local diner, Métis workers from out of town, hired on for the season at a nearby farm. And one of them has a connection to the past that Florence has spent her entire life outrunning. He has one simple request for her.
Suddenly, Florence is thrown back into memories of her life before. Suddenly, the line between who she once was and who she has chosen to be feels very thin.
And when Florence learns of the government’s plans for the Métis community on the fringes of town, she will be faced with a choice—one that will shatter her carefully constructed life forever.
This extraordinary novel asks us what we will do for our community, for our families, for our friends, even at our own expense. It examines the harrowing effects of choosing to live as someone else—and the radiant peace that comes from finally living one’s truth. Gripping, wrenching, and utterly immersive, Wild People Quiet is a stunning achievement by a remarkable literary talent.