Staff picks: volume 4
Summer is in full swing at the cottage, which means lake breezes, long afternoons, and books that make it easy to lose track of time. For Volume 4, our shelves stretch from mischievous robots and rogue SecUnits to wartime Ontario, enchanted bookshops, and the astonishing intelligence of the living world.
Every title here was chosen by one of our booksellers. As always, look for the pink heart online and at the cottage—our removable stickers keep the covers pristine—to spot a guaranteed good read.
Here’s what Chris, Maddie, Taylor, and Caleigh are recommending this summer.
Chris’s picks
Dead but Dreaming of Electric Sheep by Paul Tremblay
Paul Tremblay turns the anxiety humming beneath everyday AI into a wickedly funny near-future nightmare. Julia Flang, a former professional gamer juggling two dead-end jobs, accepts a suspiciously lucrative assignment from her estranged tech-executive mother: escort a man in a vegetative state across the country. The catch is that his body houses an artificial mind. Running beside her story is an amnesiac man trapped in a grotesque, shifting hellscape, driven only by a rabbit tattoo and the sense that he must find someone. Brainy, unsettling, and darkly comic, this genre-bender keeps asking where the “I” ends and the AI begins.
Platform Decay by Martha Wells
Murderbot volunteers for a rescue mission and immediately discovers the worst part: it will have to spend a lot of time with unfamiliar humans. Some of them are children. The eighth Murderbot Diaries instalment delivers the series’ signature mix of tense action, corporate menace, bone-dry humour, and reluctant tenderness. This is best read after System Collapse, but longtime fans will find Murderbot’s snark fully charged—and its stubborn instinct to protect people as moving as ever.
Valet by J.P. Lacrampe
Cy is a VALET—a helper robot whose future depends on staying useful. Unfortunately, his latest assignment is Grayson, the aimless thirty-five-year-old son of Cy’s late inventor, who would rather make pottery and eat synthesized mozzarella sticks than save the family robotics company. When Grayson’s formidable sister plans to sell the business and its technology, robot and ward go on the lam with a stolen flash drive and a twice-cloned golden retriever. A near-future riff on Jeeves and Wooster, Valet is clever, big-hearted, and very funny about work, obsolescence, family, and what usefulness really means.
Maddie’s picks
The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang
Rin is a war orphan from an impoverished province who shocks everyone by acing the Keju, the empire-wide exam that wins her a place at Sinegard’s elite military academy. Surrounded by privileged classmates and brutal instructors, she discovers a rare aptitude for shamanism—and a power that may be as dangerous as the enemy gathering at the empire’s borders. Drawing on twentieth-century Chinese history, R.F. Kuang’s debut begins as a fierce school story and transforms into uncompromising military fantasy. It is propulsive, furious, and devastating, with a heroine whose ambition keeps colliding with the terrible cost of power.
The Cure for Drowning by Loghan Paylor
Kit McNair has never fit the life southern Ontario expects of a farm girl. After falling through river ice as a child and being brought back by their mother’s Celtic magic, Kit grows into a daring young adult who understands themself beyond the categories their family can name. Then Rebekah Kromer arrives in 1939, and a love triangle with Kit’s brother Landon sends all three toward the upheaval of war. Winner of Canada Reads 2026, Loghan Paylor’s debut braids queer and trans history, wartime Canada, family secrets, and a shimmer of magic into something intimate and sweeping. Tender, transporting, and deeply humane.
The Lost Bookshop by Evie Woods
On a quiet Dublin street, a bookshop appears only to those who need it. Opaline, Martha, and Henry have each been pushed to the margins of their own lives, but the search for the vanishing shop draws their stories together across time. Evie Woods blends literary mystery, historical fiction, romance, and a touch of magic into a love letter to books—and to the way stories can help people imagine a life beyond the one handed to them. Cozy on the surface but grounded in real hurt, this is a hopeful tale of second chances, hidden histories, and becoming the author of your own future.
Taylor’s picks
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer writes from two ways of knowing: the tools of Western science and the teachings of her Citizen Potawatomi heritage. Through essays on sweetgrass, strawberries, maple trees, salamanders, and more, she shows the natural world not as a collection of resources but as a community of teachers and gift-givers. The result is lyrical, rigorous, and quietly transformative—a book about gratitude, reciprocity, and learning to listen. Braiding Sweetgrass does more than change how you see plants; it asks what it would mean to live as though our relationship with the earth were mutual.
Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake
Fungi are everywhere: beneath forests, inside plants and animals, in the food we eat, and in the medicines and materials we make. Biologist Merlin Sheldrake leads us into this hidden kingdom, from vast mycelial networks to yeasts, truffles, lichens, and mind-altering mushrooms, showing how fungi make ecosystems possible and scramble our tidy ideas about individuality and intelligence. Entangled Life is serious science written with infectious wonder. You will finish it looking differently at a forest floor—and perhaps at what it means for any living thing to be separate at all.
The Light Eaters by Zoë Schlanger
What if plants are not passive scenery, but active participants in the world around them? Science journalist Zoë Schlanger follows researchers investigating how plants sense touch, light, sound, injury, and one another, while carefully examining the contentious questions of memory, agency, and intelligence. The Light Eaters does not settle the debate with easy answers; its thrill is watching the evidence complicate every assumption. Curious, lucid, and full of astonishing fieldwork, this is the kind of science writing that sends you back outside with more humility than you had before.
Caleigh’s picks
Crazy Genie by Inès Cagnati, translated by Liesl Schillinger
Marie lives with her mother, Genie, in a crumbling house beside a river in rural France. Genie once belonged to the valley’s most respected family; now she works on neighbouring farms, speaks to almost no one, and is known by the villagers only as “Crazy Genie.” Marie watches her with the fierce attention of a child desperate for even a moment of tenderness. Translated from the French by Liesl Schillinger, Inès Cagnati’s brief, devastating novel has the clarity of a fairy tale and the ache of a memory you cannot escape. It is a beautiful portrait of unconditional love—and of the cruelty a community can inflict on those it refuses to understand.
Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett
Cambridge professor Emily Wilde would rather catalogue faerie lore than make small talk. She travels to the remote northern village of Hrafnsvik to complete the world’s first encyclopaedia of faeries, only for her charming academic rival, Wendell Bambleby, to arrive and disrupt both her research and her carefully ordered life. Told through Emily’s field journal, Heather Fawcett’s series opener pairs meticulous folklore with wintry danger, dry humour, and the gentlest spark of romance. The fae here are beautiful but never harmless, and Emily’s prickly brilliance makes her an irresistible guide.
The Exquisite Torment of Loving Your Enemy by Brigitte Knightley
Osric and Aurienne are back, and the line between assassin and healer has never felt more perilously thin. He belongs to the Fyren Order, which kills for coin; she is a Haelan sworn to harm none. Their illicit full-moon healing sessions are already blurring duty into desire when new evidence about the deadly Pox points toward an Order more dangerous than either of theirs. Brigitte Knightley’s conclusion to the Dearly Beloathed duology doubles down on the first book’s wicked banter, forbidden attraction, and agonizingly slow burn while raising the stakes from personal ruin to war. Read The Irresistible Urge to Fall for Your Enemy first—then prepare to suffer beautifully.