Books from Canada — The Book Roads

Iain Reid

Missy Djalo has spent years chasing her dream of becoming an actress, enduring failed auditions and struggling to escape the shadow of her fractured relationship with her Cameroonian mother. Broke and desperate, she receives an unexpected opportunity to audition for a mysterious company called Air Free. Welcomed into a beautiful house by a charismatic couple, Missy soon realises that the audition is unlike anything she has experienced before. As reality and fantasy begin to blur, she faces an unsettling question: how much of herself must she sacrifice to become the person she longs to be? A surreal, unsettling tale of ambition, memory, and identity, this philosophical horror explores the frightening possibility that achieving your dreams might mean losing yourself.

2027

Strange Harm

Ainslie Hogarth

When teenager Janie Yearling vanishes from the small town of Gold River, her grieving parents become the centre of a media frenzy. Her mother, Annette, turns her pain into a carefully maintained public image, while her father, Calvin, becomes a figure of suspicion. Fifteen years later, a podcaster with a troubled past offers to reopen the case, stirring up old rumours about a mysterious spirit said to haunt the nearby woods. As the investigation unfolds, the boundaries between truth, superstition, and spectacle begin to blur. A chilling, darkly comic novel about grief, obsession, and the stories we tell to make sense of tragedy.

2027