Kris: In the not-too-distant future, American refugees stream into Canada, populating shelters and dilapidated warehouses. Racial tension, skittish police, a powerful elevator operators’ union and flying teens are all factors in the skewed reality of Your Secrets Sleep With Me by Darren O’Donnell (Coach House Books).

Patty: What I liked about Alan Cumyn’s The Sojourn (McClelland and Stewart) is the way he thrusts us into a muddy trench in the middle of World War I, where the narrator is carrying a load of something called iron pig’s tails on his shoulders and his buddy behind him is wrestling with two sheets of corrugated iron. A few pages on, we figure out that these soldiers’ job is to repair trenches while shells explode around them and all they have is each other.