Loan Stars is the readers’ advisory tool that allows library staff across Canada to collaboratively select their favourite forthcoming titles. Using CataList, the online catalogue service and order management tool available for free to libraries, library staff can endorse the Fiction, Non-Fiction, Juvenile, and Young Adult titles they want to recommend to their patrons. The titles with the most recommendations become Loan Stars picks!

Join us as we go back in time and recap what happened in the Loan Stars world in the Summer and Fall seasons of 2021 (click here to see the full lists by month).

Library circulation

Thanks to LibraryData, BookNet’s national library collection and circulation analysis tool, we were able to determine which of the 50 books on the five lists — August, September, October, November, and December Loan Stars adult lists — were the most popular among library patrons from their publication date up until Jan. 2, 2022.

These are the results:

Collage of covers of The Madness of Crowds by Louise Penny, Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr, and The Apollo Murders by Chris Hadfield.

The Madness of Crowds by Louise Penny 🍁 (August 2021 list)
Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr (September 2021 list)
The Apollo Murders by Chris Hadfield 🍁 (October 2021 list)
The Strangers by Katherena Vermette 🍁 (September 2021 list)
The Perfect Family by Robyn Harding 🍁 (August 2021 list)
The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman (September 2021 list)
Velvet Was the Night by Silvia Moreno-Garcia 🍁 (August 2021 list)
The Mystery of Right and Wrong by Wayne Johnston 🍁 (September 2021 list)
Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone by Diana Gabaldon (November 2021 list)
Matrix by Lauren Groff (September 2021 list)

Subject popularity

Similar to what we’ve seen in previous Loan Stars Adult roundups, Fiction is the most popular subject among the lists with 39 out of the 50 titles featured in the five lists. Next, we have Cooking with five titles, Biography and Autobiography with three, and Poetry, Humor, and Business & Economics with one title each.

Bar graph showing the distribution of all the 50 titles by subject.

We can see that Fiction is the dominant subject, but what categories are getting library patrons more interested in borrowing books? Of the 39 Fiction titles present in the five lists, 11 are Thrillers. The Romance, Mystery & Detective, and Literary categories have five titles each. Historical has four. Women and Action & Adventure have two each. All the remaining categories, Visionary & Metaphysical, Science Fiction, Sagas, Horror, and Fantasy, have one title present across all five lists.

Bar graph breaking down the Fiction titles by categories.

Repeat authors

Of the authors whose titles were Loan Stars picks during these seasons, seven had been featured on a previous Loan Stars list!

The authors previously included (and the titles that got them on the list):

Louise Penny’s A Better Man was on the August 2019 list, Kingdom of the Blind on the November 2018 list, and Glass Houses on the August 2017 list
Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic was present on the June-September 2020 list and also on the Best of the Brightest 2020
Robyn Harding’s The Swap was on the June-September 2020 list, Her Pretty Face was on the July 2018 list, and The Party on the June 2017 list
Elly Griffiths' Now You See Them was on the Dec. 2019 list and The Stranger Diaries on the March 2019 list
Rick Mercer’s Rick Mercer Final Report was on the November 2018 list
Katherena Vermette’s The Break was on the September 2016 list
Wayne Johnston’s First Snow, Last Light was on the September 2017 list

Canadian 🍁 contributors

We also looked at the number of Canadian contributors present in the five lists. (For reference, a Canadian contributor is an author, illustrator, translator, or editor who is a Canadian citizen or a permanent resident of Canada.) Of all 50 titles on the August, September, October, November, and December Adult lists, 28% were by Canadian contributors.

Pie chart showing the distribution between Canadian and non-Canadian authors present on the lists, 28% are Canadian, 72% are not.

ICYMI, these are the titles that made it to the lists

August Loan Stars Adult List

The Madness of Crowds by Louise Penny 🍁 (Minotaur Books)
The Hit List by Holly Seddon (Trapeze)
Wait For It by Jenn McKinlay (Berkley)
Velvet Was the Night by Silvia Moreno-Garcia 🍁 (Del Rey)
The Royals Next Door by Karina Halle 🍁 (Berkley)
Missed Connections by Brian Francis 🍁 (McClelland & Stewart)
Mrs. March by Virginia Feito (Liveright)
The Family Plot by Megan Collins (Atria Books)
The Guide by Peter Heller (Knopf)
The Perfect Family by Robyn Harding 🍁 (Simon & Schuster)

Find all these titles in this CataList Catalogue

September Loan Stars Adult List

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr (Scribner)
The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman (Pamela Dorman Books)
The Strangers by Katherena Vermette 🍁 (Hamish Hamilton)
Matrix by Lauren Groff (Riverhead Books)
What Are Friends For? by Lizzie O'Hagan (Headline)
All Day Baking by Pippa James (Hardie Grant)
The Mystery of Right and Wrong by Wayne Johnston 🍁 (Knopf Canada)
The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik (Del Rey)
Celebrate with Kim-Joy by Kim-Joy (Quadrille Publishing)
Dark Things I Adore by Katie Lattari (Sourcebooks)

Find all these titles in this CataList Catalogue

October Loan Stars Adult List

The Last Guest by Tess Little (Ballantine Books)
The Apollo Murders by Chris Hadfield 🍁 (Random House Canada)
The Holiday Swap by Maggie Knox 🍁 (Viking)
The Death of Jane Lawrence by Caitlin Starling (St. Martin's Press)
Mooncakes and Milk Bread by Kristina Cho (Harper Horizon)
The Corpse Flower by Anne Mette Hancock (Crooked Lane Books)
Truth or Dare by M. J. Arlidge (Orion)
Beat Bobby Flay by Bobby Flay, Stephanie Banyas, and Sally Jackson (Clarkson Potter)
Island Eats by Dawn Postnikoff and Joanne Sasvari 🍁 (Figure 1 Publishing)
The Final Chapter by Jerome Loubry (Hodder)