This Place Called Absence by Lydia Kwa (Turnstone) is another debut novel. It traces the lives of two ah ku (prostitutes) living in turn-of-the-century Singapore and intertwines their stories with that of Wu Lan, a Vancouver psychologist struggling to come to terms with her father’s suicide, and Wu Lan’s mother, who still lives in Singapore.

A Student of Weather (McClelland & Stewart), Elizabeth Hay’s first novel, follows a family from their Depression-era Saskatchewan farm to New York City to a comfortable neighbourhood in Ottawa. The story centres on the alienation between the two sisters of the Hardy family, who fall in love with the same man.

Patrick Lane’s new book is Mortal Remains (Exile Editions) and should be owned by everyone who loves poetry. This is nearly a perfect book of mostly new poems, many of which concern the poet’s older brother, who died an early death, and his father, who was murdered forty years ago.

The storyteller’s verve in Can You Wave Bye Bye Baby? (McClelland & Stewart), by the Montreal writer Elyse Gasco, speaks volumes in which time and place hardly matter. Gasco writes in the second person in four of the seven short stories; in one of these—the tide story, which won the prestigious Journey Prize in 1996—a woman leaves the hospital with her newborn and says, “You feel conspicuous with your package wrapped and bound like a crazy person being subdued.

Mr. Ryder, the storyteller in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled (Knopf), speaks so sincerely, humbly and clearly in the first person that we hear his voice inside ourselves; this inspires trust.

The photographs in Saqiyuq: Stories from the Lives of Three Inuit Women (McGill-Queens), are plentiful but wretchedly printed, which is a sadness because this book of stories is so good that you want to return to the photographs again and again to see what the people telling the stories look like and what the place looks like and what their relatives look like. Most “oral history” suffers from bad or nonexistent editing and the result is often an unreadable transcription of people talking out loud; this book, on the other hand, is truly a living text, the result of careful editorial work by Nancy Wachowich, who is a southerner, in collaboration with Apphia Agalakti of Melville Peninsula and Baffin Island, her daughter Rhoda Kaukjak Katsak and her granddaughter Sandra Pikujak Katsak.

Everyday Stalinism—certainly a tide to conjure with—by Sheila Fitz-Patrick (Oxford) is subtitled Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s, and is proof that under certain circumstances the everyday is never normal. This is a harrowing account (taken from personal diaries and correspondence, and official reports) of Stalinism, which Fitzpatrick defines as a complex of institutions and rituals that made up the habitat of Homo Sovieticus in the era of Stalin: party rule, Marxist-Leninist ideology, rampant bureaucracy, leader cults, social engineering, stigmatization of class enemies, surveillance, terror and arbitrary execution, and the endless struggle to survive.

If you haven’t read a book with a horse sex scene before, Theresa Kishkan’s Sisters of Grass (Goose Lane) is one place to start. The story reconstructs the life of Margaret Stuart, a young woman living in the Nicola Valley of B.C. at the turn of the nineteenth century, who is an expert ranch hand and who falls in love with a visiting American anthropology student.

The new Karl Marx biography by Francis Wheen (4th Estate) fails to illuminate a man who was loved by his family and revered by his followers; instead we are given a hazy sketch of a petulant, perhaps incompetent man of few skills and little discipline, who nevertheless by some undescribed process managed to achieve eponymity during his lifetime (“At least I will never be a Marxist,” says Marx in one of the better but still misunderstood moments in this book). Like many biographers, Wheen is disappointed and perhaps insulted to learn that even larger-than-life human beings have feet of clay, and his book is a long slide into self-satisfied sly digs and innuendo, which begin as his subject in his teenage years engages in student pranks and other devilments.