“T he Best Books of Fall” is a project that inspires both glee and gravitas in The Walrus staff. First come the catalogues of titles, the arrival of galleys, the silent tucking into pages and chapters. And then there is the deliberation, the choosing of our favoured ten. “What is a ‘best book’?” we ask ourselves each time we sit down to compile our list. This year, it is a book we found ourselves waiting to return to, a world we wanted to stay immersed in, a voice we longed to keep listening to, an idea we needed to keep turning over. These are the ten books we thought about between the moment we put them down and the moment we picked them up again.

In A Year on the Abyss of Genocide, writer and poet Mahmoud Al-Shaer, documents a life of survival. His collection of letters, “a sign of life inside the Gaza Strip,” comes from a place where everything has been lost and “only our souls remain.” He writes about his three-year-old twins—a daughter who can hold her parents’ hands but has to grow up around bombings, and a son who is away from the devastation, separated from his family for medical care in Turkey. He yearns for normalcy, for a sky clear of warplanes and drones. Words like future, home, light, and school no longer carry the same meaning they once did. Friends and neighbours are killed “with every passing hour.” Al-Shaer writes about wanting to stay alive, again and again. You can feel the exhaustion as his words repeat, mirroring a reality with no end in sight. But just as the horror of his days does not abate, neither does his hope: “If you are reading this, please don’t let these words fade. Keep sharing. Keep this signal of life alive.” And months later, he and his family are still there. Still alive. Still writing. Still pleading.
—Hailey Choi, Chawkers fellow

I’m generally not fond of sequels, but Mona Awad’s outrageous We Love You, Bunny is a worthy exception. The original novel Bunny follows outcast MFA student Samantha Mackey in her interactions with the “Bunnies”—a cult-like clique of wealthy and beautiful girls in her program. Now that Samantha has graduated and published her debut, we get to hear the story from the Bunnies’ perspectives. They insist that they were misrepresented in Bunny and attempt to set the record straight. But these aren’t the perfectly in-sync Bunnies of the previous novel; they are hilariously unreliable narrators, interrupting each other with accusations of exaggeration, digression, and outright lying. They are also excessively referential, mentioning Sylvia Plath, Charlotte Brontë, Lana Del Rey, and Kate Bush. I loved these various cultural allusions, which highlight the performative intellectualism of the group while also creating dialogues between texts. The novel pays homage to Frankenstein in particular, with its focus on mad science (or perhaps mad creative writing). We Love You, Bunny contains as much social satire and dark comedy as its predecessor, and with multiple distinctive narrators, it emerges as even bolder and stranger.
—Amarah Hasham-Steele, Power Corporation of Canada fellow for emerging BIPOC journalists

“The way I spoke to myself in early motherhood was diabolical,” Carla Ciccone writes, “but I’d been perfecting the art of motivational meanness for decades.” Is she........

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