Kobo's picks for the best books of 2022

The Sleeping Car Porter by Suzette Mayr

Baxter answers to the name George because that’s what everyone calls him, and he puts up with it just to keep the peace and hold onto his job as a porter on the sleeping car of a train that travels across Canada—if only to save enough to quit someday and enroll in dentistry school. But this trip out west, with passengers growing restless as the train sits stalled for days, pushes him in ways that threaten his safety in every way. Suzette Mayr won Canada’s prestigious Scotiabank Giller Prize for this work of historical fiction that sheds light on Black labourers who played an important and often invisible role in transportation infrastructure in the early 20^th century.

All My Rage by Sabaa Tahir

A heart-wrenching novel steeped in teenage longing to escape a stifling small town—and a young man’s struggle to be free of his family’s baggage.

Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution by R. F Kuang

A wickedly intelligent work of speculative fiction that plays with the form of the academic novel while weaving in elements of fantasy and carving out an alternate history—in which Oxford University’s Babel program attracts the world’s top scholars who come together to learn the art of translation yes, but also magic.

Every Summer After by Carley Fortune

A story about childhood friends who once spent every summer together—and once thought they’d be together forever. For readers who enjoy a romance—but aren’t quite into romance novels (yet).

A Flicker in the Dark by Stacy Willingham

Since she was twelve, Chloe Davis’ dad has been serving a life sentence for the murders of six teenage girls carried out over a single summer. Now in her 30s, working as a psychologist counselling troubled teenagers, a new string of disappearances give her the feeling that she’s re-living her horrifying past.

Mistakes Were Made by Meryl Wilsner

College student Cassie Klein had a wonderful one-night stand with an older woman, who she learns the next morning—at the breakfast table—is her friend’s mother. The pair keeps their fling on the down-low during Family Weekend, but there’s something between them that neither of them can deny, and they’re going to need to decide what to do about it.

Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley

Kiara and Marcus are a pair of siblings in East Oakland trying to get by as rents skyrocket and threaten to kill any future they might imagine for themselves beyond mere survival. A chance encounter tips Kiara off to a line of work she never imagined doing but has an immediate flair for: sex work. But this new job threatens to consume her whole life when she’s named as a witness in a police corruption investigation.

When We Lost Our Heads by Heather O'Neill

Marie and Sadie are the unlikely pair at the heart of this drole historical novel set in late 1800s Montreal. As they reach adulthood, Marie inherits an empire while Sadie sinks into the underworld—where she stokes a revolution of the working class.

We spoke with Heather O’Neill about how she finds the stories she ends up writing about.

The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human by Siddhartha Mukherjee

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies and The Gene rounds out his masterful and literary trilogy on human biology with this study of the fundamental operating unit of your body: the cell. Readers can expect at once to recalibrate their recollection of high school biology while leaping into the current science of what we know, what we don’t, and what hopes researchers hold today.

The Last Housewife by Ashley Winstead

A dark thriller with a fresh and contemporary premise... Shay long ago escaped the cult that swallowed her and her friends years ago. Then one day while listening to a true crime podcast she learns that one of those friends who stayed behind has died. She decides to infiltrate the shadowy group to get answers, and just maybe—revenge.

A Minor Chorus by Billy-Ray Belcourt

In his first novel, poet Billy-Ray Belcourt takes us inside the mind of an unnamed narrator who flees from academia to his hometown in northern Alberta. In prose textured by the voices of the narrator’s relatives, neighbours, and hookups, we learn of their ambition to capture the story of his home on the page. A poetic, challenging, and exhilarating book.

The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan

Frida has let down just about everyone, from her cheating husband to her parents. But with her daughter Harriet, Frida finds that one thing she’s extremely good at is motherhood. Then one day, during the briefest lapse in judgement, she’s brought under the most merciless scrutiny and forced to prove to state officials that Harriet shouldn’t be taken from her.

Motherthing by Ainslie Hogarth

Ainslie Hogarth’s domestic horror story is funnier than it should be, given that it’s about depression, suicide, and a cruel mother-in-law whose death only amplifies her power over her son and daughter-in-law.

Zachary Ying and the Dragon Emperor by Xiran Jay Zhao

For middle-schoolers who’ve blown through all the Percy Jackson adventures and want more mythology-infused, funny, action-packed stories—Zack Ying and pals deliver in the first installment of this new series.