If you’re looking for a novel to keep people faithful to your book club, pick up Michael Crummey’s Galore (Doubleday). Crummey is great at capturing the ethos of place in stories that blend historical research with collective memory. Galore is set in Paradise Deep, an isolated fishing town in Newfoundland, between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and follows a couple of generations of townsfolk after a biblical-like event befalls them. Their intertwining stories are full of wit, love and minor political intrigue. Galore can be likened to a fabled recounting of history. It’s more family history than the capital-H kind of history, and you might also consider it the history of a place you didn’t know you needed to know about—a place somewhat like Macondo, from One Hundred Years of Solitude. Through Crummey’s writing, Newfoundland suddenly becomes Canada’s most interesting setting for fiction, infinitely more interesting than Toronto, and punching above its weight when compared to stories set in the Canadian West. With its ironies, its struggles and its rooted logic, Paradise Deep seems as fascinating a place as New York City or America's Deep South, and as exciting as Nigeria, or India.

— Anson Ching