Each week, Globe and Mail staffers and readers share what they’re reading now, whether it’s a hot new release or an old book they’re discovering for the first time. Tell me about a book you loved and we might publish your recommendation. Fill out this form, or send your book recommendation to Lara Pingue at [email protected]
12 thrillers to read now
Although Barbara Kingsolver’s novel The Lacuna is nearly 16 years old, it feels newly relevant in 2025.Set in the United States and Mexico and spanning the 1920s to postwar 1950s, it tells the story of a boy born in the U.S. to an American father and a Mexican mother, who was mainly raised in Mexico. His return to the U.S. during the Second World War offers a unique perspective on how propaganda fuels both a sense of national unity and, later, a postwar fear. Reading about the rise of the Cold War that brought a new wave of deportations targeting alleged Communists and political dissidents while foreign workers were being deported in California amid riots was an eerie reminder that history repeats itself. This is an entertaining novel, but it also offers a timely lesson. To quote the book itself: “You force people to stop asking questions, and before you know it they have auctioned off the question mark, or sold it for scrap. No boldness. No good ideas for fixing what’s broken in the land. Because if you happen to mention it’s broken, you are automatically disqualified.”
-Globe reader Lana Durst, Scarborough, Ont.
D. M. Buehler’s debut novel Tiaris: When the Oceans Kissed is a deeply compelling time-slip adventure. It follows the story of Canadian teen Tiaris, who moves to Panama for her mother’s sabbatical, only to be transported back in time to when the Panama Canal was being built. To find her way home, she must navigate racism, gender expectations and the dangers of a world very different from her own. With her relatable frustrations, sensitive observations and evolving perspective, Tiaris offers readers – both young and adult – the gift of hope. I couldn’t put the book down, eager to learn more about the era, the setting and whether Tiaris would make it back home. This gripping book reminded me of Where the Crawdads Sing. It has real cinematic potential: lush, immersive landscapes, a deeply personal drama set against a visually striking world and the fascinating historical backdrop of the Panama Canal’s construction.
-Globe reader Alicia Laumann, Collingwood, Ont.
Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song follows the story of Eilish, a Dublin mother of four who finds herself in the unfolding horror of a fascist government takeover in Ireland, which threatens to shred her life. The novel evokes the current reality of our time, where norms are being smashed, truths are being turned upside down and there is little steady going to be found. One cannot help but relate to Eilish as she tries to keep up with the mundane tasks of mothering and tending to her failing father while her world crumbles around her. This was a harrowing and beautiful book. I loved it.
-Globe reader Sandra Swail, West Vancouver, B.C.
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence, commonly known as ‘Lawrence of Arabia,’ is a classic book that serves both as an in-depth telling of the Arab desert campaign against the Turks and as a history of the march to Damascus. I read the book before deploying to the Golan Heights in Israeli-occupied territory in 2000 for a year as the deputy commanding officer of the UN Logistics Battalion. The book gaveme a good understanding of Arab tribal culture, and how to interact with them in a manner in which they were comfortable. With the current conflict in the Middle East, this book provides an interesting viewpoint on a volatile region.
-Globe reader Ross Fetterly, Victoria
A book of short stories is the perfect summer reading when you want to dip into a book in small bursts. Out of the Woods: Voices from the Forest City fits the bill for me. The short stories and poems in this small anthology, all written by members of the London Writers Society, were selected by Canadian author Emma Donoghue, who happens to live in that city. I grew up in a town south of London and attended Western University there, so I have a relationship with “the forest city.” I particularly liked that all the selections had to relate literally or metaphorically to the “out of the woods” theme. As Terry Fallis writes in the foreward: “London writers, like most other Canadian writers, live lives not unlike your own. Except, late at night, while others sleep, they are wrestling with words, polishing phrases, and crafting sentences, to create stories.”
-Globe reader Patricia Fry, Port Credit, Ont.
I’ve long known about The Curve of Time and finally got around to reading it. It’s the beautifully written memoir of M. Wylie Blanchet, a widow who explored the wild coasts of Vancouver Island and the Inside Passage with her five children in the late 1920s and 1930s. Adventurous doesn’t begin to describe their travels. Frankly, it’s a wonder they survived. This book joins two others on my shelf – Totem Poles and Tea by Hughina Harold, which follows her years as a nurse and teacher to the Indigenous population on a remote island off the central coast in the 1930s, and Jedediah Days by Mary Palmer, chronicling her summers on a northern Gulf Island without any kind of amenities. All three books feature women whose bravery is almost madness.
-Globe reader Vicki Metcalfe, Victoria
After a 50-year gap, I’m re-reading What Maisie Knew, Henry James’s novel about the misbehaviours of parents and step-parents from the view of a precocious child. Maisie explores her agency by making moral claims on adults and learns hard lessons when their weakness and selfishness fail her. Complex and, yes, sometimes pretentious, this book often requires that passages be re-read to determine what happened or who said or thought what. Still, at 248 pages it’s a manageable introduction to the author. Not exactly a summer beach read, but it may provide a patient reader a unique, absorbing pleasure on a rainy cottage weekend.
-Globe reader Chester Fedoruk, Toronto
What is it about Newfoundland that manages to produce some of the finest and most inventive contemporary writers around? Is it the island’s isolation from the mainland, perhaps, or its rich tradition of storytelling? Is it the weather? I count Susie Taylor’s collection of linked stories, Vigil, among the region’s standouts. Set in the fictional small town of Bay Mal Verde, Vigil brings to life a landscape brought to its knees by addiction and economic despair. Still, the community survives, its members struggling to find their place and to avoid despair. Taylor creates a story that’s at turns tragic and brutally funny. I especially loved Taylor’s description of the town, which “loves all her children,” but knows she has let them down.
-Globe reader Wendy Bonus, Toronto
In Gorilla Tactics: How to Save a Species, Canadian author Greg Cummings chronicles his fight for gorilla conservation in turbulent times. Cummings, who lived in Africa during his childhood, began working with a U.K. conservation group and realized his dream of returning to the beauty of the dark continent, where he navigated the Rwandan guerilla war, the genocide of 800,000 people and armed anarchy. With the help of world-famous celebrities including Arthur C. Clarke, Douglas Adams, Darryl Hannah and Sigourney Weaver, Cummings helped raise awareness of the mountain gorillas’ peril and put a spotlight on the possibility of extinction. This book is also a personal story for Cummings, and he shares his own flaws and failings as he takes on the monumental task of saving a species.
-Globe reader Barbara Golder,Victoria
Anne Michaels’s modern classic Fugitive Pieces is a mastery of minimal, first-rate prose that accords well with poetry from its first sentence of “Time is a blind guide” to sentences such as, “The branches look painted onto the onion-white sky.” The story takes place over several decades and includes two narrators: one is a child orphaned by the Nazi invasion of Poland; the other, a Canadian professor who admires the writing of the former child, now an acclaimed adult poet. Both lives have been torn apart by the Holocaust. Fugitive Pieces covers familiar territory, such as grappling with the past, suffering and exploring connections. However, it never falls into cliché because of Michaels’s imagination and superb writing.
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