Looking for a good book? Saskatoon's best writers have got you covered

After you are finished with Thanksgiving dinner, what do you plan to do this weekend? Visit with family? Go for a walk? Read a book?

If it's a book you're interested in, we've got some suggestions.

Through a Summer Reads series, CBC Radio's Saskatoon Morning asked several of the city's award-winning writers what was on their reading lists.

This is what they had to say.

Guy Vanderhaeghe

Recommendations:

• A Great Reckoning by Louise Penny. 
• Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History by Richard J. Evans.
• Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman.

One of Guy Vanderhaeghe's picks is Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate, a book set in Russia during the Second World War. It's a thick book that has often been referred to as the 20th century's War and Peace. 

"I find the characters fascinating," said Vanderhaeghe.

"Grossman was actually a journalist during the Second World War, so he had a lot of experience with his nose right in it.  Also mingled with this is a reckoning of the Stalinist period."

Vanderhaeghe says the book was never published in Russia when Grossman was alive.

"It was deemed unpublishable," he said. "He was told by the Soviet Writers Union 'this book will never be published for 200 years.'"

Vanderhaeghe called the novel  an indictment of Stalinism, but also a great celebration of the spirit of the Russian people.

Dan Macdonald

Recommendations:

• Milkman by Anna Burns.
• Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin.
• Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor.

Playwright Dan Macdonald prefers really big, ambitious reads, such as Booker award winners or non-fiction science-driven books. Recently, Macdonald discovered audio books on a cross-country drive and now it's one of his favourite forms of entertainment. 

Included in his list of picks is Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish. It deals with Shubin's research into a fish with hands.

"One of the comparisons is actually the bone structure in our inner ear," Macdonald said. 

"Early fish had ears. The bone structure of early fish have bone structures almost identical to our inner ear bone structure. And the fins of a fish are very, very similar to our hands if you examine them closely."

Macdonald says the book ultimately is an examination of  the evolution of our bodies.

Arthur Slade

Recommendations:

• A Brightness Long Ago by Guy Gavriel Kay.
• The Absence of Sparrows by Kurt Kirchmeier.
• How Not to be a Boy by Robert Webb.

Young adult author Arthur Slade's picks reflect his eclectic taste in literature.

"I want to be like I was when I was 13," he said. "I would just disappear into a book. That's what I want every time."

Slade says that is why he was so taken with The Absence of Sparrows by Kurt Kirchmeier. He describes the novel as a cross between the Netflix series Stranger Things and Alfred Hitchcock.

"Two brothers are just out playing and suddenly this storm comes across their town. There's something freaky about the storm. They don't know what it is and they know something bad is going to happen. When the storm passes, suddenly some of the adults are turned into glass," he said.

Slade says while The Absence of Sparrows is listed as a middle-grade book, it is suitable for all ages.

Candace Savage

Recommendations: 

• The Wife's Tale by Aida Edemariam.
• House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk.
• H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald.

Candace Savage does not escape into books like fellow author Arthur Slade. She prefers non-fiction, especially books that teach her how to write.

However, her choice of House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk is both fiction and non-fiction. It is a portrait of a particular part of Poland, near the Czech border.

"I had no clue that this was a part of the world that had been settled by Germans in the 1300s and 1400s," Savage said. "After the Second World War, it was transferred to Poland and the Germans had to leave, and so they were displaced."

Savage says the plot of the book is about a character who has a dream where she can see what is going on in everyone's minds.

Katherine Lawrence

Recommendations: 

• Transcription by Kate Atkinson.
• Quarrels by Eve Joseph.
• Clearing the Plains by James Daschuk.

Katherine Lawrence's choices include Clearing the Plains by James Daschuk. The Literary Review named it to its list of the 25 most influential books of the last 25 years.

The book was Daschuk's PhD dissertation. Lawrence says despite that, it is highly engaging.

"It informs what is going on now and that is this deep division between the health of Indigenous Peoples and mainstream Canadians," she said. "This is a book about the politics of famine."

David Carpenter

Recommendations:

• The Overstory by Richard Powers.
• Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson.
• Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders.

David Carpenter turned to trees for one of his picks. The Overstory by Richard Powers is a novel about the sanctity of trees and how they are the lungs of the Earth. 

He says readers discover that trees have much more to their existence than just things that grow leaves.

"Trees actually have ways of communicating with one another. Trees have a kind of green consciousness," Carpenter  said.  

"I don't mean they whisper to each other, but trees live in community. Say if there is some sort of scourge. It might be an attack of ants. One tree can communicate with another tree and the tree in question would secrete something the ants would not like."

Carpenter says he likes Richard Powers's ability to take the reader to the magical world of forests.

Joanne Paulson

Recommendations:

• White Nights by Ann Cleeves.
• Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver.
• The Dule Tree by H.P. Bayne.

As an author of murder mysteries, it is not surprising that Joanne Paulson would be attracted to Ann Cleeves. Paulson says she admires the way Cleeves uses language to create a sense of space and location and time.

"She's a master of simplicity," Paulson said. "I feel like I really know these people. You really feel you are in Scotland.  The characters are so human. They are so sympathetically drawn."

Paulson says Cleeve has sympathy for all human beings, not just the good guys.

"She understands how things can go very wrong when you never intended them to," she said.

White Knights is the second in Cleeves's Shetland series of books. Paulson says if you can't read all the books, watch the television series on Netflix.