Last year I read 11 of the longlisted titles for The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction and with the recent announcement of the 2024 longlist I was prompted to reflect on 2023’s selections.

Three of the short story collections I’ve already written about—Talia Laksmni Kolluri’s What We Fed to the Manticore (shortlisted), Andrea Barrett’s Natural History (longlisted), and Francine Cunningham’s God Isn’t Here Today (longlisted)—in the Autumn quarterly.

Two standout reads for me consider themes of belonging. First, Daphne Palasi Andreades’ Brown Girls (shortlisted) which hooked me straight away with voice and style. “Brown girls singing, jumping, spinning. Brown girls screeching Mariah at the top of their lungs, cackling in the school courtyard, playing handball, talking smack. You can see that, at the sentence level, there are echoes and exclamations that pull readers by a thread into the story. It held my attention throughout.

Tsering Yangzom Lama’s We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies (longlisted) was every bit as compelling. I’d read it the previous fall when it landed on the Giller Prize longlist. It’s longer, so I had time to grow more attached to the characters (four voices) and to feel connected to the settings (partly 1950s Tibet after China’s invasion, partly Toronto, decades later). “A smile spreads across my face as the sky rearranges its clouds. It occurs to me that the sky does this, day and night, whether we notice or not. The earth, too, rearranges itself, and all of us on it. Why don’t we let it?” The structure requires some attention; patient readers are rewarded.

Questions about belonging are also key to Alexis Schaitkin’s Elsewhere (shortlisted) but that’s not immediately clear. At first, there’s just a general sense of unease and, then, questions arise. “It felt less like we were building something stone upon stone, than like we were uncovering it, a structure hidden in the forest, pulling away the moss and ferns to find what had been waiting there.” For others who seek out stories about mothers and daughters, there’s a lot to like here. But the characters’ shared sense of seeking is so pervasive that readers remain at a distance: observers, apart, alone.

Suzette Mayr’s The Sleeping Car Porter (shortlisted) is set in 1929, on a train where Baxter’s working as a porter. His work is a grind and an affront, but Mayr’s so skilled that his daily chores reflect historical inequities—class and race—and even as the hours in his shifts drag, the pages turn quickly. “Baxter clicks on a smile. Helps passengers board, then settles their bags, wraps, and hats. Answers questions about the speed of the train. Yes, he says for the seven hundred and thirty-three thousand and fifty-eighth time, the fastest train across the continent.” There were a couple of laugh-out-loud moments for me here, too, and I gobbled the book so quickly that I barely had time to flag a few pages.

Emma Hooper’s We Should Not Be Afraid of the Sky (longlisted) is set at the height of the Roman Empire and told through a chorus of voices. I enjoyed her debut novel, Our Homesick Songs, for its lyricism and accessibility, with sentences like this to charm me: “Without clocks or people to pace it out, the darkness spread out and out like the sea, like she could sink into it, away.” But although those qualities are evident here, too, I found the sense of present-day thinking pulled me out of this ancient story of persistence and resistance, power and desire. It reminded me of Rivka Galchen’s Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch, another whose description seemed a perfect match but left me unmoored, careening between historical and contemporary elements.

With Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s work, I quite liked her debut Sabrina & Corina but I felt as though she was more at home with Woman of Light (longlisted), her characters free to stretch and grow. “The first time Avel had kissed Luz, a rainbow trout leapt from the water and smacked against a boulder before flopping into the foam line. Luz gasped and Avel figured the breathlessness was for him, or at least that’s what she let him believe.” Although the cover illustration hints at the importance of the setting and the characters’ relationship to home, place, and the land, it doesn’t depict the sense of connection and the importance of relationships in the story.

The past plays an important role in Namwali Serpell’s The Furrows (longlisted) as the story revolves around grief and loss, a sense of being stuck. “Me, every time: ‘I felt him die. I know he’s dead.’ My mother, every time: ‘Where is he? What really happened that day?’ My father, one time, when he’d finally had enough: “Why does it matter? Either way, the boy’s gone.’” It’s an uncomfortable but tender story, as she spirals around her brother’s absence; and, then, the narrative hinges, as she finds another way of coping. Tone and style shift, reflecting her new reality, reminding us how vulnerable we are when we are mourning, but also how that openness contains new possibilities.

There are some similarities with Fatima Asghar’s When We Were Sisters, which ultimately won the 2023 prize. But in Asghar’s novel, even the structure represents the fractures caused by reality shifting too rapidly. It’s a disjointed reading experience, which reflects the sense that nothing is trustworthy, everything is eroding a sense of stability and a sense of trust. “Their wails scatter throughout the entire house, frothing like windows, filling the stove, painting the walls. Their wails everywhere, turning our house into a House of Sadness.” Readers are supposed to feel as though the story is folding in on itself, which is such an interesting experiment that I lost touch with some of the moving aspects of the story, but I remain curious about her next books.

Because I haven’t read the entire longlist, I can’t say which of the books I would have chosen as my personal and inaugural winner of the prize, but there were certainly plenty of strong contenders, so I hope to find some new favourites on the longlist for this year too.

In a couple days, I’ll write about the books I’d previously read on the 2024 longlist and, in a couple more, I’ll write about the books I’m reading now.