Missed the Canada Reads contenders on The Next Chapter? Catch up here

CBC

13-03-2025

With Canada Reads coming up soon, our champions are in full swing preparing for the great Canadian book debate.
The great Canadian book debate will be broadcast on YouTube, CBC Gem, CBC Radio One, CBC TV, CBC Listen and on CBC Books. Canada Reads airs at 10:05 a.m. ET (11 a.m. AT, 1:30 p.m. NT) on CBC Radio One and 1 p.m. ET (2 p.m. AT, 2:30 p.m. NT) on CBC TV. You can tune in live or catch a replay on the platform of your choice.
To help them get ready, they've chatted with the author of the book they're bringing to the table — and those conversations aired on The Next Chapter.
Featuring powerful moments of connection, discussion and excitement, these segments dive deep into the five books and the reasons they resonated with the panellists.
You can listen to these interviews below.
Maggie Mac Neil & Samantha M. Bailey
Watch Out for Her is about a young mother named Sarah who thinks her problems are solved when she hires a young babysitter, Holly, for her six-year-old son. Her son adores Holly and Holly adores Sarah, who is like the mother she never had. But when Sarah sees something that she can't unsee, she uproots her family to start over. Her past follows her to this new life, raising paranoid questions of who is watching her now? And what do they want?
"For the Canada Reads audience, first to see genre fiction like last year with Carley Fortune's Meet Me at the Lake and this year with Watch Out For Her, to give genre fiction a seat at the table, to give mysteries and thrillers a seat at the table, I'm incredibly honoured," said Bailey on The Next Chapter.
"One of the big things that my mom always told me as I was going through my career and making big decisions is that you can't make a decision until you have all the information first," said Mac Neil."I think that's what I like the most about thrillers, is that you have to make the assumptions and you can imagine the ending with all the information that you have at the time."
Shayla Stonechild & Ma-Nee Chacaby
In A Two-Spirit Journey, Ma-Nee Chacaby, an Ojibwa-Cree lesbian who grew up in a remote northern Ontario community, tells the story of how she overcame experiences with abuse and alcohol addiction to become a counsellor and lead Thunder Bay's first gay pride parade.
The Next Chapter.
"The perseverance that Ma-Nee has and the way she embodies the teachings of her grandmother and also the way she just gives back was something that I was inspired by," said Stonechild.
Michelle Morgan & Emma Hooper
In the novel Etta and Otto and Russell and James, 82-year-old Etta decides to walk 3,232 kilometres to Halifax from her farm in Saskatchewan with little more than a rusty rifle and a talking coyote named James for company. Her early life with her husband Otto and their friend Russell are revealed in flashbacks to the Great Depression and the Second World War.
The Next Chapter.
"I feel like that's one of the reasons I love this book is that you do that often," said Morgan. "Rather than describing or trying to tell the reader what we're seeing or what we should feel, we're just sort of in it. A lot of this book is letters written by Etta and Otto to each other and notes and things like that, a lot of it is their own writing."
Linwood Barclay & Wayne Johnston
Jennie's Boy is a memoir that recounts a six-month period in Wayne Johnston's chaotic childhood, much of which was spent as a frail and sickly boy with a fiercely protective mother. While too sick to attend school, he spent his time with his funny and eccentric grandmother Lucy and picked up some important life lessons along the way.
"Back then I had never known anything else and I read a lot early on and I tended to compare myself to characters in books," Johnston said on The Next Chapter. "One thing I found out really early about books is that unless something goes wrong, there's no book so I was used to characters encountering problems. I kind of thought of myself as a fictional character and it never occurred to me to wonder, 'Am I going to survive at the end of this story?'"
"I wonder if that's why this book connected with me so much," said Barclay. "To your point about when you're going through this, you don't really appreciate how desperate or how bad it is."
"When I wrote my memoir years ago, it was a difficult time I went through in my teens and lost my father and so forth. But it wasn't until many years later when it even occurred to me that it would be interesting to anyone."
Saïd M'Dahoma & Jamie Chai Yun Liew
Dandelion is a novel about family secrets, migration, isolation, motherhood and mental illness. When Lily was a child, her mother, Swee Hua, walked away from the family and was never heard from again. After becoming a new mother herself, Lily is obsessed with discovering what happened to Swee Hua.
She recalls growing up in a British Columbia mining town where there were only a handful of Asian families and how Swee Hua longed to return to Brunei. Eventually, a clue leads Lily to southeast Asia to find out the truth about her mother.
"A lot of the research and the work I was doing was listening to clients, listening to people who have experienced migration, experienced statelessness and the hardships that they've had to endure," said Liew on The Next Chapter. "I wanted to write from an emotional place."
"I really like Dandelion because it resonated with me a lot, especially because I'm an immigrant," said M'Dahoma. "I'm the son of immigrants and that book created so many emotions for me. I could see that, even though I'm not from the same country as the characters from the book, I really look like them. My parents really look like them."