Books
Night in the World
- A 49th Shelf Book of the Year, 2022
- The Ultimate Cli-Fi Bookclub selection, 2023
- A Literature of Restoration selection
What's Night in the World about? Ecological catastrophe and mid-life crisis; Toronto Island, Rice Lake and the Humber River; moths and masters’ thesis studies; drugs and marriage; fracking, activism, and falling in love; coming home to oneself, one’s family and the beauty and soulfulness of Earth in an age of unravelling.
"Offers us everything we need from fiction right now.” - Catherine Bush
Reviews
“Night in the World is a splendid and searing novel, pressed up against the tremours of our times. I read it compulsively, astonished by the way Sharon English turns Toronto inside out, making the city a wild and watery landscape, bringing the beyond-the-human close. With dextrous language and expansive love, English creates complex characters struggling to find their truths in a fraught world ultimately hopeful and vital. The novel offers us everything we need from fiction right now.”
— Catherine Bush, author of Blaze Island and The Rules of Engagement
“Once started I couldn’t stop reading, and the intensity and engagement increased as each page turned. Sharon English has written the compelling, the irresistible text, in which the natural world is what compels. This is a wildly important book, brilliant, necessary.”
— Deena Metzger, author of A Rain of Night Birds, La Negra y Blanca, and Ruin and Beauty: New and Selected Poems
"Sharon English's novel solicits readers to step into another realm so they more fully inhabit their own." - The/tεmz/Review
Graceful in its execution and powerful in throwing up a lens on our current climate dilemma and our colonial relationships with the land.
– Miramichi Reader
In Sharon English’s astounding new novel Night in the World, we come to understand that our world teeters on the edge of losses so radical no one can fathom the consequences. Complex, deeply imagined characters: two brothers, a budding but conflicted moth biologist and the wild landscape of Toronto (every bit as powerful a character as the humans) navigate new paths, as each of us inevitably must.
Read this novel: Sharon English is a deeply reliable guide to place and possibility.
- Susan Cerulean, author of I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird: A Daughter’s Memoir
Justin and Oliver are estranged brothers who are both nearing a breaking point in their lives; Gabe is a biologist in love with moths. With astonishing skill and insight, English immerses us completely in each of these characters’ psyches and their worlds: the world of night clubs and coke addiction, of anti-fracking activism, of academic research and perhaps most unforgettably, of moths. Shadowing all three lives is the fact of climate dissolution, and a relentlessly extractive and dissociated human world.
As in Powers’ The Overstory, human and nonhuman life are densely entangled. Chapter titles alternate between “River” “Island” and “Lake” and water is what ultimately draws the three main characters together; the city of Toronto, where these bodies of water are located, is shown to be home to a vast urban wilderness. Night in the World is a novel about loss and endings but it also pulses with revelation: moonrise in a Toronto ravine, the nighttime miracle of moths, bonds between humans that reassert themselves in unexpected, defiant, beautiful ways.
- Lise Weil, author of In Search of Pure Lust and editor of Dark Matter: Women Witnessing
An intelligent and compelling novel that hits at the heart of what is happening to society and to the earth in our dire times.
– Maya Spector, author of The Persephone Cycle
Zero Gravity
- Long-listed for the 2007 Giller Prize
- Short-listed for a 2007 ReLit Award
- A Globe &Mail Best 100 title of the year
- Released in Serbian, December 2020, by Partizanska Knija
“Stories rooted in Vancouver, BC, with side trips to the Kootenay mountains, Montreal and Delphi, Greece. Zero Gravity portrays characters who lead accelerated lives, only to be seized by spiritual emptiness. Their attempts to escape — by joining, by quitting, by falling in and out of love — make for funny, insightful and intense reading. The author presents a fly’s-eye view of urban experience, coming at city life from multiple angles that unite, as the book progresses, into a vivid experience of isolation and adaptation. The book’s unusual imagery and controlled prose deliver an edgy and anxious commentary on a new century.” [Publisher’s Description]
Reviews
“[O]ne of our sharpest new talents, wedding precision of language to a remarkable moral and imaginative range.”
—Alex Good and Steven W. Beattie, “Flying under the Radar: 10 Underrated Canadian Authors,” National Post
“Charged, potent, luminous: these words come to mind when describing Zero Gravity, Sharon English’s collection of nine short stories.” —Patricia Young, Canadian Notes and Queries
“[E]xploring the concerns of a whole new generation of Canadians.” —Kim Jernigan, Editor, The New Quarterly
“Throughout the book, English exploits language to its fullest and explores the limits of genre with creativity and confidence.” —Michelle Ariss, Canadian Review of Books
Uncomfortably Numb
A city suburb, 1980. The front of propriety, the freakish stillness–and the bush parties. This is the home of Germaine Stevens, a social misfit who thinks she’s struck ultimate cool when she’s accepted into her preppie high school’s only counter-culture group, the Rockers. Yet has she really just traded one kind of conformity for another? And is she still a loser?
Her friends are desperate characters: Regina’s on the road to ruin, Bono’s more boy than girl, and Jackie’s postering her bedroom into a rock‘n’roll tomb. Yet beneath the party-hardy attitude, no one is as disaffected as they seem, or want to be.
In a voice that ranges from tough to achingly vulnerable, the linked short stories in Uncomfortably Numb powerfully convey the anger, lust and absurdity that spiral into one girl’s growing fight against the tuned-out numbness of her world.
Reviews
“[A] Lives of Girls and Women for today’s 30-somethings … highly readable, peppered with spicy bad-girlishness and teenage suburban wretchedness that rings true on nearly every page.”
—Sue McCluskey, THIS Magazine
“[A] skin-crawling ability to regress one instantly to mean corridors, clique-blighted lunch rooms and excruciating eruptions of lust … ghastly and fascinating.”
—Jim Bartley, The Globe and Mail
“As with potato chips, you can’t consume just one of these stories at a sitting. English’s writing is powerful and addictive—so much so that at the end of the last story I wanted to turn back to the first page and start over.”
—Linda Bayley, Canadian Book Review Annual