R

e

c

o

m

m

e

n

d

e

d

 

R

e

a

d

i

n

g

 

L

i

s

t

s

In his debut short story collection, Vincent Anioke explores themes of masculinity and repressed desires through the lens of (un)conditional love. Set largely in Nigeria, Perfect Little Angels shows us imperfect characters looking for connection and salvation — an addict seeking a fresh start in pottery class, the unravelling of a mother’s world after a confession from her son. What happens when our personal desires conflict with the duties we are bound to? Anioke’s characters confront this dilemma and more through his brilliantly imagined tales. 

◢ Learn more about the author

In 1960s Cairo, Tarek’s entire life is already written. He’ll be a doctor like his father, marry, and have children. He does just that until a patient’s son, Ali, enters his life and spins it upside down. The turn of the millennium finds Tarek living as a doctor in Montreal, where someone is writing about him and to him, piecing together a past he wants only to forget. From Cairo’s grand boulevards and hidden alleys during the reign of Nasser to Montreal’s grim winter in the early 2000s, What I Know About You tells the heartbreaking story of a family torn apart by an epic love.  

◢ Learn more about the author

Ezzy and Grey are Métis cousins passing their days in an old trailer playing games and cracking cans of cheap beer. Grey, once a passionate advocate for change, has been hardened by an activist culture she thinks has become performative. One night she decides on a bold act of protest — capture a herd of bison from a national park and set them free in downtown Edmonton. She enlists Ezzy, who is hopelessly devoted to her but eager to avoid the authorities. As Grey becomes increasingly single-minded in her calling, their actions result in devastating consequences. 

◢ Learn more about the author

Canisia Lubrin’s debut fiction work departs from the infamous “Code Noir,” a set of historical decrees originally passed in 1685 by King Louis XIV of France defining the conditions of slavery in the French colonial empire. The original Code had 59 articles; Code Noir has 59 linked fictions ranging in style from contemporary realism to dystopia, from futuristic fantasy to historical fiction, and are filled with characters who desire to live beyond the ruins of the past. The stories are accompanied by black-and-white drawings by acclaimed visual artist Torkwase Dyson. 

◢ Learn more about the author

Glue doesn’t care about much. He returns to Hong Kong, the city he grew up in, and teaches ESL to placate his parents. But he shows up hungover to class, barely stays awake, and prefers to spend his time smoking weed until dawn breaks. As he watches the city he loves fall — the protests, the brutal arrests — life continues around him, so he drinks more and picks more fights. The very little he does care about are his sister, who deals with Hong Kong’s demise by getting engaged to a rich immigration consultant; his on-and-off-again relationship with a woman who steals things from him; and memories of someone he once met in Canada. When the government tightens its grip, language starts to lose all meaning, and Glue finds himself pulled into an unsettling venture. 

◢ Learn more about the author

M.G. Vassanji draws deeply on his own transnational upbringing to explore the unique challenges and perspectives born from leaving one’s home to resettle in a new land. The question of identity, of how to configure and see oneself, is one such challenge faced. But Vassanji suggests that a more fundamental and slippery endeavor than establishing one’s identity is how, if ever, we can establish a sense of belonging. Can we ever truly belong in a new home? Did we ever truly belong in the home we left? Where exactly do we belong? Nowhere, Exactly examines the space between identity and belonging, the immigrant experience of both loss and gain, and the weight of memory and nostalgia, guilt and hope, felt by so many.

◢ Learn more about the author

A retiree is convinced that his silence is the only thing that will prevent a deadly sinkhole. An emerging academic wakes up and chooses institutional violence. An enigmatic empath is on a cleanse. Last Woman is a collection of thirteen short stories that delve into fear for the future, intergenerational misunderstandings, and the complexities of belonging. Carleigh Baker’s characters are both wildly misguided and a product of the times in which we live. They show a world askew, leaving us to decide whether we can begin to see it anew. 

◢ Learn more about the author

Manahil Bandukwala’s second collection of poems is a meditation on love during times of social and political upheaval. As a sunflower’s growth reaches toward the sun, so too is a lover’s growth compelled by the gravitational pull and soul-light of their beloved. Many of Bandukwala’s poems are in conversation with other poets and artists, creating a lineage of call and response. Against a backdrop of terrestrial crisis, readers are invited to spend precious time in love’s Heliotropia. 

◢ Learn more about the author

Excerpts from a Burned Letter makes queerness explicit. Written from the perspective of a single, modern speaker, each poem in Joelle Barron’s collection is haunted by a fictional or historical queer couple, connecting ancestors to their descendants and underlining the ancientness of being queer. Barron’s poems explore themes of religion, disability, and motherhood and highlights the circular nature of time, demonstrating how even in a world with marriage equality, queer experiences and queer histories still face erasure. The poems provide explicit acknowledgement of queer people where it didn’t exist before: You were here. You live on. 

◢ Learn more about the author

A writer discovers that her ex has published a novel about their breakup. A Reddit post about a man’s habit of grabbing his girlfriend’s breasts prompts a shocking confession. And when a woman begins to lose her hair, she embarks on an increasingly nightmarish search for answers. The stories in Death by a Thousand Cuts boldly wrestle with rage, longing, illness, bodily autonomy, and ultimately, their inescapable impacts on a woman’s relationships with others and with herself.  

◢ Learn more about the author

Married to a man of her own choosing and progressing in her career as a professor at Dhaka University, Rumana seemed an unlikely victim of domestic abuse. But in 2011, on return from graduate studies at the University of British Columbia, her husband attacked and blinded her in front of their young daughter. As Rumana's horrifying story garnered international headlines, and connections brought her to Vancouver in an attempt to restore her sight, her plight underscored the fact that there are no typical victims of intimate-partner violence. Denise Chong goes behind the headlines to reveal the devolution of a love story into a tale of tyranny behind closed doors, and the pursuit of justice in a globe-spanning narrative about a woman’s determination to face the future and rebuild a life with meaning.  

◢ Learn more about the author

For a long time, the Kwantlen people and the bears have lived side by side in a symbiotic relationship. The Kwantlen leave fish for the bears and in turn the bears keep away other animals that might try and steal the Kwantlen fish. One day, a master carver falls into the river. Saved by the bears, he thanks them by carving special masks, but the bears don’t know the magic the masks hold. The Bears and the Magic Masks is Joseph Dandurand’s fourth book in the Kwantlen Stories for children which captures the delightful relationship between the Kwantlen people and the bears. 

◢ Learn more about the author

It’s September 1984 at Thornton College private school. After Zahabiya’s father remarries, she convinces him to send her away to boarding school. Seventeen-year-old Leesa has been at Thornton since middle school after her parents’ messy divorce. She climbs the social ladder with meanness and manipulation but is guarding a big secret. Fresh out of university, Nahla is drowning at her first real teaching job. She has her distractions though, including a cryptic notebook left behind by her deceased predecessor, Mademoiselle Leblanc. Zahabiya and her friends — all racialized girls and victims of Leesa’s bullying — uncover Leesa’s secret. Nahla, too, is embroiled in her own mystery, assisted by Mademoiselle Leblanc’s ghost. The Beauty of Us is a gripping novel about surviving hardship, the power of friendship, and growing up. 

◢ Learn more about the author

Little Tony is full of love for his grandmother, his home in Trinidad, and delicious pholourie. But he's also full of other big feelings, including anger. His grandmother tries to teach him to be patient — patience is a star in his crown, she says — but it's hard. When he and his brother move away from their beloved Trinidad, there's even more for him to be upset about. His new home is cold, full of new people, and there's no pholourie anywhere! But then he remembers his grandmother's lessons, and a surprising thing happens. Based on the author's own childhood, Stars in My Crown is an ode to big feelings and even bigger triumphs. 

◢ Learn more about the author

South Side of a Kinless River wrestles with concepts of Métis identity in a nation and territory that would rather erase it. Métis identity, land loss, sexual relationships between Indigenous women and European men, and midwifery by Indigenous women figure into the poems in this collection. They add up to a Métis woman’s Prairie history, one that helps us feel the violence in how those contributions and wisdoms have been suppressed and denied.  

◢ Learn more about the author

The Dialogues: The Song of Francis Pegahmagabow brings to life both the story of the famed WWI Indigenous sniper and the complexities of telling Indigenous stories. From Wasauksing (Parry Island) to the trenches of WWI, the poems in this collection take the reader on a journey through Pegahmagabow’s story and onto the stage of Sounding Thunder, the opera based on his life. Author Armand Garnet Ruffo uses the Ojibwe concept of two-eyed seeing, which combines the strengths of Western and Indigenous ways of knowing, and invites the reader to do the same, particularly through the inclusion of the Anishinaabemowin language.  

◢ Learn more about the author

With lyrical text and vibrant illustrations by Jenin Mohammed, Shauntay Grant’s When I Wrap My Hair is both an act of joyful recognition and a demonstration of how knowledge is passed through generations. This picture book celebrates how hair wrapping ties together past and present. 

◢ Learn more about the author

In a Mughlai restaurant in Toronto, a late-night visit from a mysterious stranger rattles the cage and shatters the peace. Now Ayub, the restaurant's employee, must face reality, the family he’s left behind, and the dreams he’s abandoned, all while keeping the restaurant shiningly clean. Anosh Irani’s play Behind the Moon is a story of love and loss, freedom and faith, the meaning of brotherhood, and how we begin a new life. 

◢ Learn more about the author

A box of family documents reveals Chase Joynt’s previously unknown connection to Canadian media maverick Marshall McLuhan and inspires a reckoning with the impact of media and masculinity on the stories we tell about ourselves and our families. Vantage Points uses McLuhan’s Understanding Media as an inciting framework to connect difficult pasts to contemporary politics and ways of being.  

◢ Learn more about the author

Roland Keener is an aging hairstylist in Winnipeg who is content with the quiet and predictable days he shares with his partner of twenty-five years, Tony. That is, until he hears that Birdy O'Day — washed-up music icon and Roland's childhood best friend and first love — is playing his first concert in Winnipeg since fleeing decades earlier. During their childhood the two were inseparable, with Roland an eager sidekick to Birdy and his dreams of stardom. But when Birdy got his big break, Roland was left behind. Birdy's imminent return to town is a chance for both to finally come to terms with their glorious yet troubled past. An Evening with Birdy O'Day is a novel about hero worship, heartbreak, and queer survival.  

◢ Learn more about the author

Amy Lin’s husband is a gifted young architect who pulls her towards joy, adventure, and greater self-acceptance. But one August morning, a few months shy of the newlyweds’ move to Vancouver, the thirty-two-year-old leaves home to run a half-marathon. It is the last time Lin sees her husband alive. Ten days after this seismic loss, she finds herself in the hospital navigating her own shocking medical crisis. Here After is a love story and meditation on the ways in which her husband’s death shatters any set ideas Lin ever held about grief, strength, and memory.  

◢ Learn more about the author

When the deliverymen set off in the morning, the children wait for the flicker of pedal and wheel. It’s the demae, Tokyo’s bicycle food deliverers, setting off to deliver steaming trays of noodles to hungry customers all over the city. They are acrobats: whizzing past other bicycles, soaring around curves, avoiding the black smoke of motorcycles. When the children see them, they want to be them. And so, they practice with bowls of wobbling water stacked on trays. The day passes and finally exhausted, the demae return home to their families and to steaming bowls of noodles.  

◢ Learn more about the author

Shani Mootoo’s great-great-grandparents were brought to Trinidad as indentured labourers by the British. There is no record of where they were from in India or whether it was kidnapping, trickery, or false promises of wealth that took them to the Caribbean. In Oh Witness Dey! Mootoo expands the question of origins, from ancestry percentages and journey narratives, through memory, story, and lyric fragments. These poems transcend the tropes of colonial violence through saints and spices, rebellion and joy, to reimagine tensions and solidarities among various diasporas.  

◢ Learn more about the author

Anthony Oliveira’s Dayspring is a bold retelling of biblical tales and a contemporary coming-of-age story connected in collapsing time across millennia. Oliveira weaves together stories of passion, grief, destruction, and survival into a narrative unmoored in space and time, one that reexamines and reframes great and doomed figures from scripture and history, even as it casts its keen eye on the trials of modern life.   

◢ Learn more about the author

A young man returns from residential school only to realize he can no longer communicate with his own parents. A young woman finds purpose and healing on the front lines as a water protector. An old man remembers his life as he patiently waits for death. And a young girl nervously dances in her first Mawi'omi. At times sad, sometimes disturbing, but always redemptive, the stories in Amanda Peters’ collection remind us that where there is grief there is also joy, where there is trauma there is resilience and, most importantly, there is power.   

◢ Learn more about the author

For generations, Indigenous people have known that their family members disappeared, many of them after being sent to residential schools, “Indian hospitals,” and asylums through a coordinated system designed to destroy who the First Nations, Métis, and Inuit people are. Anishinaabe author Tanya Talaga retells history through an Indigenous lens, beginning with the life of her great-great grandmother Annie Carpenter and her family as they experienced decades of government and Church-sanctioned genocide. The Knowing unravels the centuries-long oppression of Indigenous people that continues to reverberate in these communities today.  

◢ Learn more about the author

Ebele wishes more than anything to have a memorable, gift-filled Christmas with his widowed mother, but with her barely able to afford food and the harsh ridicule of his friends, Ebele is disheartened. When a strange man comes to town, the boy opens his heart and home reluctantly. In return, the stranger teaches him there is more to Christmas than just gifts, and that kindness is a virtue rewarded by great fortune. 

◢ Learn more about the author

Wild Failure is Zoe Whittall’s collection of powerful feminist and queer short fiction. The title story is a doomed love story between an agoraphobic and a wilderness hiker. A group of idealistic roommates find themselves the subject of a true crime podcast in “Murder at the Elm Street Collective House.” In “The Sex Castle Lunch Buffet,” a woman reflects on her brief stint at 90s strip club after she learns of the death of a former client. The characters in Whittall’s stories encounter feelings of shame, desire, attachment, and disconnection as they find themselves navigating their way through bad decisions, unusual situations, and fraught relationships. 

◢ Learn more about the author

A memoir written in prose poetry, No Credit River probes a period of six years marked by abandoned love, the pain of a lost pregnancy, and pandemic isolation. Zoe Whittall’s book is a reckoning with the creative instinct itself and a unique examination of anxiety in complex times. 

◢ Learn more about the author

Much of our communication now exists in the dimension of the online space and it’s changing how we regard each other and how we converse. In the digital realm, anonymity can result in false and hurtful comments without consequence in a hurried scroll of clicks and swipes. But a good conversation takes time, patience, and courage. What I Mean to Say seeks to ignite a conversation about conversation, to confront the deterioration of civic and civil discourse, and to reconsider the act of conversing as the sincere, open exchange of thoughts and feelings.  

◢ Learn more about the author

As a transnational and transracial adoptee, Jenny Heijun Wills has spent her life navigating the fraught spaces of ethnicity and belonging. As a pan-polyam individual, she lives between types of family and community, heteronormativity and queerness, commitment and constellations of love. As a parent with an eating disorder, her love language is to feed but daily she wishes her body would disappear. Everything and Nothing At All weaves together a lifetime of literary criticism, cultural study, and personal history into a fearless vision of kinship.  

◢ Learn more about the author

Faced with a tyrannical emperor determined to wage war, three sisters sublimely gifted in music manage to fend for themselves and their parents with the power and magic they create with their instruments. Can the beauty of their music change the emperor’s heart and bring peace? 

◢ Learn more about the author