The Reading Challenge

After her husband’s unexpected death twelve months earlier, Kausar Khan never thought she’d receive another phone call as heartbreaking—until her thirty-something daughter, Sana, phones to say she’s been arrested for killing the unpopular landlord of her clothing boutique. Determined to help her child, Kausar heads to Toronto for the first time in nearly twenty years.

Returning to the Golden Crescent suburb where she raised her children and where her daughter still lives, Kausar finds that the thriving neighborhood she remembers has changed. The murder of Sana’s landlord is only the latest in a wave of local crimes that have gone unsolved.

And the facts of the case are troubling: Sana found the man dead in her shop at a suspiciously early hour, with a dagger from her windowfront display plunged into his chest. But Kausar—a woman with a keen sense of observation and deep wisdom honed by life experience—senses there’s more to the story than her daughter is sharing.

With the help of some old friends and her plucky teenage granddaughter, Kausar digs into the investigation to uncover the truth. Because who better to pry answers from unwilling suspects than a meddlesome aunty? But even Kausar could not have predicted the secrets, lies, and betrayals she finds along the way . . .

After years of working as a personal concierge, Mallory McKenzie-Chu is ready for a change. So when her old friend Cora wants to convert a heritage mansion in Victoria, Canada into a housing cooperative for seniors, Mallory’s onboard faster than you can say, “Ticket, please!”. But springtime in the picturesque seaside town isn’t all cherry blossoms and ocean views; not when she runs afoul of marauding peacocks, a skeevy land developer and former best friend, Saffron, who happens to be Cora’s niece. When the developer is found dead as a dodo in the Bellavista Manor chicken coop, and the residents become suspects, Mallory and Saffron must team up to catch the real killer before Cora’s co-op dream permanently flies south.

Síle is a stylish citizen of the new Dublin, a veteran flight attendant who’s traveled the world. Jude is a twenty-five-year-old archivist, stubbornly attached to the tiny town of Ireland, Ontario, in which she was born and raised. On her first plane trip, Jude’s and Síle’s worlds touch and snag at Heathrow Airport. In the course of the next year, their lives, and those of their friends and families, will be drawn into a new, shaky orbit.

This sparkling, lively story explores age-old questions: Does where you live matter more than who you live with? What would you give up for love, and would you be a fool to do so?

Desperate to escape a messy romance, Florian Mulberry flees London: tipsy, panicked, and without a plan. It’s while hiding in a rural garden shed that he meets Kells, a potion witch, who agrees to shelter him in exchange for manual labor until he gets his life together. Leaving his pampered London existence to work on a secluded cottage farm is a shock, but Florian throws himself into it with passionate determination.

And it’s not just gardening he’s passionate about. In no time, Florian falls head over heels for his skillful, hardworking mentor.

There’s just one problem. Florian is only disguised as a boy, and the enchantment hiding his real body is going to wear off. Florian’s main concern is how to explain himself when it happens. He’s definitely not a girl, but he’s not entirely a boy, either. With all the magic in Kells’ garden, there must be a way to achieve his ideal androgyny.

However he looks, Florian will have to face his past if he wants a future with Kells. Even if he avoids London forever, eventually his past is going to come looking for the girl he used to be.

The law of three is unbroken: three vampires form a coterie, three demons make a pack, and three wizards are a coven. That is how it has always been, and how it was always to be. But Luc, Anders, and Curtis-vampire, demon, and wizard-have cheated tradition. Their bond is not coterie, pack, or coven, but something else. Thrust into the supernatural politics ruling Ottawa from behind the shadows, they face Renard, a powerful vampire who harbors deadly secrets of his own and wishes to end their threat. The enemy they know conjures fire and death at every turn. The enemies they don’t know are worse. Blood, soul, and magic gave them freedom. Now they need to survive it.

One chance meeting. Two curious college boys. Three weeks to follow their hearts.

Clark
Meeting Leo was a happy accident. Now I can’t get him off my mind. Having feelings for a guy is new, and I’m in way over my head. My future’s been decided since I was in diapers, and falling for a boy in college wasn’t in my family’s master plan.

But from our first curious kiss, everything about Leo feels right. Before I know it, I’m dying for our friendship to become something more before the semester ends.

Screw the plan. I’m not going the rest of my life without him.

Leo
So much for not crushing on a straight boy. Only Clark’s not so straight, and it’s way more than a crush.

It’s easy to lose myself in his kiss and hard to forget the way he makes me feel. To the rest of Honeywood, Clark is the untouchable campus king of Royal U. To me, he’s the boy who comes apart when we touch, the boy who wants me to put him back together, and the boy who stole my heart when I wasn’t looking.

Clark is the muse who pulls poetry out of me.

Can he also be the boy who teaches me what it’s like to fall in love?

He was the boy I couldn’t stand in sorcery school. And now he’s the only man who can help me stop a dark threat.

I take pride in being one of the lead agents tasked in protecting the magical world. It’s not an easy job to put our lives on the line keeping mortals and mages safe. Slaying extradimensional monsters is a regular day for us.
But new threats are emerging, and my new partner is the one dude I thought I’d never see again. My old schooltime rival used to get under my skin, and clearly, that hasn’t changed.

Still, he’s just as proficient as he was all those years ago. While we work together, secrets emerge, and when we aren’t bickering, we learn to protect each other. As dark threats rise to power, I need Taz to back me up in the art of breaking hexes and saving lives.

It’s entirely possible he and I have had a sizzling chemistry that burned deeper than teen rivalry. We’re men now, and we need to protect the magical community―that is, if we can stop being at each other’s throats for five minutes.

The only thing scarier than hating my foe, is falling for him. Being an agent of SPELL just got more complicated.

Caden Flanagan
32, Bouncer, member of the Shadow Vipers biker gang.

Bikers have the best life. Being a member of the Shadow Vipers comes with certain perks and privileges. First, everyone fears you. Nobody wants to mess with a member of a local biker gang, especially one with a certain reputation. Secondly, everyone finds you sexy as… Well, let’s just say we have no problem finding company. I’ll admit, I’ve had my fair share of the ladies. But all that changed the moment I bumped into him. I don’t know what it is, but something about him has got me thinking all sorts of dirty thoughts. It’s new and exciting, but the more I get to know him, the more I realize he’s hiding something. I’m not sure what, but it’s clear that something has him… scared.

Lucas Braden
24, Busboy, major weakness for big beefy biker dudes who have a bit of a possessive side.

Working at a biker bar is torture. The customers are loud, rude, and out of control. So are the workers. But that’s not the worst part. The worst part is being hardcore attracted to the smoking hot bouncer, who is covered in tattoos and has muscles the size of my head. How can I be so attracted to someone yet totally afraid of them at the same time? Oh, did I mention that the guy is straight? Yup. Leave it to me to fall for a guy who is totally unattainable. Well, it’s a good thing that I’m not looking for love. Right now, I am just trying to stay two steps ahead of my past.

When she was three years old, Rachel Phan met her replacement. Instead of a new sibling, her mother and father’s time and attention were suddenly devoted entirely to their new family restaurant. For her parents—whose own families fled China during Japanese occupation and then survived bombs and starvation during the war in Vietnam—it was a dream come true. For Phan, it was something quite different. Overnight, she became a restaurant kid, living on the periphery of her own family and trying her best to stay out of the way.

As Phan grew up, the restaurant was the most stalwart and suffocating member of her family. For decades, it’s been both their crowning achievement and the origin of so much of their pain and suffering: screaming matches complete with smashed dishes; bodies worn down by long hours and repetitive strain; and tenuous relationships where the family loved one another deeply without ever really knowing each other.

In Restaurant Kid, Phan seeks to examine the way her life has been shaped by the rigid boxes placed around her. She had to be a “good daughter,” never asking questions, always being grateful. She had to be a “real Canadian,” watching hockey and speaking English so flawlessly that her tongue has since forgotten how to contort around Cantonese tones. As the only Chinese girl at school, she had to alternate between being the sidekick, geek, or Asian fetish, depending on whose gaze was on her.

Now, three decades after their restaurant first opened, Phan’s parents are cautiously talking about retirement. As an adult, Phan’s “good daughter” role demands something new of her—and a chance to get to know her parents away from the restaurant.

In Restaurant Kid, Phan deftly combines candour, wit and insight to craft a vibrant and important narrative on the strength and foibles of family, and how we come to understand ourselves.

Food has long played an important role in queer culture. Lesbian- and queer women-run feminist restaurants, cafes, and coffeehouses have been safe spaces for queer and trans folk where gender norms can be challenged and where female authority is legitimized. During the AIDS epidemic, gay men and their allies centred food as an expression of collective care for those who needed it most. And queer and trans folk have asserted themselves in a restaurant culture largely controlled by white cisgender men.

Queers at the Table celebrates the various intersections between queers and food. In its essays, comics, and recipes, the book shows how this shared culture fosters connections, defies norms, honours legacies, and creates community. Taylor Hartson and Tristian Lee write about a queer farming community in which queerness is part of a broad network of living things to be enjoyed and shared; Danielle Kydd writes about food security issues as faced by LGBTQ2S+ folk; and Blue Delliquanti’s comic on urban foraging in Minneapolis demonstrates the role of a queer friend group in a local ecosystem.

In full colour throughout, Queers at the Table is a diverse and enriching anthology that reveals the myriad nurturing ways that queerness informs food production and restaurant culture and how food empowers, transforms, and unites queer and trans folk.

In this singular firsthand account, a former migrant worker reveals a disturbing system of exploitation at the heart of Canada’s farm labour system.

When Gabriel Allahdua applied to the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program in Canada, he thought he would be leaving his home in St. Lucia to work in a country with a sterling human rights reputation and commitment to multiculturalism. Instead, breakneck quotas and a culture of fear dominated his four years in a mega-greenhouse in Ontario. This deeply personal memoir takes readers behind the scenes to see what life is really like for the people who produce Canada’s food.

Now, as a leading activist in the migrant justice movement in Canada, Allahdua is fighting back against the Canadian government to demand rights and respect for temporary foreign labourers. Harvesting Freedom shows Canada’s place in the long history of slavery, colonialism, and inequality that has linked the Caribbean to the wider world for half a millennium—but also the tireless determination of Caribbean people to fight for their freedom.

The Indigenous Peoples of North America have a long history of using native plants as medicine and for food. These traditions have used herbs, trees, and other plants as sources of healing and nourishment. These knowledges also create deeper connections to the land by learning stories and traditions about how these plants have been and continue to be used.

This beautifully illustrated guide introduces readers to how to identify and harvest native plants in their area, how to use them to treat common ailments, and how to add them to your diet and beauty regime. Readers of Held by the Land will develop a deeper appreciation for the native plants and land around us.

A Fate Worse Than Death is a stunning poetic investigation of the worthiness of disabled life as told through the author’s evaluation of her own medical records over the course of a decade. Living with treatment-resistant diabetes, bipolar disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, and complex chronic pain, Nisha Patel reveals how her multiple disabilities intertwine with her day-to-day life, even when care and treatments are not available. As she works through bouts of illness, neglect, and care, Patel reveals how poetry provides her a way to resist the sway of medical hegemony and instead offer complex accounts of pain, sickness, and anger, but also love.Navigating the menial and capitalist systems of health care and paperwork, documentation, and forms, Patel uses clinical texts in visual poems that show how words like patient and client underscore medical access and denial of coverage more than words like person and care. Patel asks us to consider if her life is worth living – and saving. The future of her disabled body and her desire for it is a building meditation as the collection progresses, ending not so much with a finite ending of cured illness and disease than with a look at how we can embody hope and joy in a disabled body, as it is the body that, like time, goes on.

The Way Disabled People Love Each Other is a fierce crip reckoning with all the ways disabled people love each other, in all our complexity. A book that will speak to any kind of griever, but particularly disabled QTBIPOC ones sitting with the endless mass grief and possibility of this time, and those with violent family from whom we still yearn to claw out beauty from the trauma rubble. It’s a road map for survivors looking for something that’s neither a happy Hollywood ending nor a transformative justice fairy tale – not the healing we wished for, but the healing we find anyway.

This collection is a rigorous, rueful documentation of a specific time of pandemic fascist grief and possibility. Brimming with odes, elegies, and mourning songs, these poems sparkle like switchblades and offer new possibilities for love, grief, and memory.

Notes from the Ward is Steffi Tad-y’s new collection of poetry exploring bipolar disorder and psychotic break through lived experience and a poet’s eye. It is breathtakingly truthful and disarmingly direct, a powerful intervention into a diagnosis that remains more medicalized and sensationalized than understood.

Created entirely out of words found on trash collected at local swimming holes, Anna Swanson’s garbage poems reclaim hyperbolic corporate marketing-speak for the expression of physical pleasure, queerness, and vulnerability. Written in the years following a head injury, this book traces the connections experienced in the fiercely embodied act of swimming with a chronically ill body. Paired with tender watercolour illustrations of the source garbage by award-winning artist April White, these poems refuse to conform to an illness-and-cure narrative and instead become a vibrant archive of the process of piecing together a voice back together from fragments, an urgent study of the deeply political nature of joy.

From the outside, David A. Robertson looks as if he has it all together—a loving family, a successful career as an author, and a platform to promote Indigenous perspectives, cultures and concerns. But what we see on the outside rarely reveals what is happening inside. Robertson lives with “little monsters”: chronic, debilitating health anxiety and panic attacks accompanied, at times, by depression. During the worst periods, he finds getting out of bed to walk down the hall an insurmountable task. During the better times, he wrestles with the compulsion to scan his body for that sure sign of a dire health crisis.

In All the Little Monsters, Robertson reveals what it’s like to live inside his mind and his body and describes the toll his mental health challenges have taken on him and his family, and how he has learned to put one foot in front of the other as well as to get back up when he stumbles. He also writes about the tools that have helped him carry on, including community, therapy, medication and the simple question he asks himself on repeat: what if everything will be okay?

In candidly sharing his personal story and showing that he can be well even if he can’t be “cured,” Robertson hopes to help others on their own mental health journeys.

Through reflections on childbirth, parenting, creative practice, and expansive responsibility, Anishinaabe visual artist Quill Christie-Peters explores how reconnecting with the body can be an act of resistance and healing. She shows that wholeness—despite pain and displacement—is not just possible but essential for liberation, not only for Indigenous people but for all of us.

In poetic and raw storytelling, Quill shares her own experiences of gendered violence and her father’s survival of residential school, revealing how colonialism disconnects us from ourselves. Yet, through an Anishinaabe lens, the body is more than just flesh—it extends to ancestors, homelands, spirit relations, and animal kin.

This fierce and enlightening book reimagines the way we understand settler colonialism—through the body itself. On Wholeness takes us on a journey that begins before birth, in a realm where ancestors and spirits swirl like smoke in the great beyond.

An Anthology of Monsters by Cherie Dimaline, award-winning author of The Marrow Thieves, is the tale of an intricate dance with life-long anxiety. It is about how the stories we tell ourselves can help reshape the ways in which we think, cope, and ultimately survive. Using examples from her books, from her mère, and from her own late night worry sessions, Dimaline choreographs a deeply personal narrative about all the ways in which we tell stories. She reveals how to collect and curate our stories, how they elicit difficult and beautiful conversations, and how family and community is a place of refuge and strength.

Part self-interrogation, part confession, part hospital diary, the intense, heartbreakingly frank poems in Brandi Bird’s second collection detail the author’s ongoing struggles with eating disorders and depression, conditions that disproportionately afflict Indigenous girls, women, and two-spirited persons. These challenging poems investigate the relationship between sexuality and eating disorders as well as how the voyeurism of religion (the idea of being eternally watched) intersects with both of those spheres. They also raise questions about body shaming and body sovereignty—a failed sovereignty in this case, as “sovereignty” itself is a communal concept. In the tradition of poets like Amy Berkowitz (Tender Points) and Hannah Green (Xanax Cowboy), the poems in Pitiful also lay bare the way patriarchy, medical sexism, and bigotry have not only sabotaged the treatment of such conditions but often make them worse.

Darcy’s life turned out better than she could have ever imagined. She is a librarian at the local branch, while her wife Joy runs a book binding service. Between the two of them, there is no more room on their shelves with their ample book collections, various knickknacks and bobbles, and dried bouquets. Rounding out their ideal life is two cats and a sun-soaked house by the lake.

But when Darcy receives the news that her ex-boyfriend, Ben, has passed away, she spirals into a pit of guilt and regret, resulting in a mental breakdown and medical leave from the library. When she returns to work, she is met by unrest in her community and protests surrounding intellectual freedom, resulting in a call for book bans and a second look at the branch’s upcoming DEI programs.

Through the support of her community, colleagues, and the personal growth that results from examining her previous relationships, Darcy comes into her own agency and the truest version of herself. Is This a Cry for Help? not only offers a moving portrait of queer life after coming of age but also powerfully explores questions about sexuality, community, and the importance of libraries.

Love finds a way-through dating apps, shared playlists, inherited recipes, and sweat-soaked dance floors.In this interconnected collection of modern sapphic stories, six singles navigate the beautiful chaos of finding romance across cosmopolitan cities from Los Angeles to Montreal. Noura swipes right on Luna with a little help from her friends. Maryam and Nilou fall hard after a meet-cute in the copyshop. Paz and Ale rediscover each other, and rehash a decades-old heartbreak. Each story stands alone as a perfect escape, but together they weave a gorgeous tapestry of connection. Hot, hopeful, and unapologetically glamorous, You x Me celebrates love between queer women and nonbinary people of color, in all its sparkling, complex, and irresistible forms.

A lesbian mother feels out of place taking her daughter to a princess party; a gay couple turns to unconventional means to create their baby; a grieving man winds up on a date with a centaur; an agoraphobic must make an impossible choice before time runs out. This is the unnerving world of Runs in the Blood, Matthew J. Trafford’s sophomore story collection, and it pulses with humour, anxiety, and profound disquiet.

Darkly satirical and unflinchingly human, the stories of Runs in the Blood unsettle our notions of family, whether biological or chosen. Careening through the space beyond nature versus nurture, its characters – betrayed, wounded, unequipped – wrangle with their own worst instincts and the grotesqueries of the modern world, attempting to create families worth holding on to and to protect the children they love.

Delightful and disarming, odd and audacious, Runs in the Blood announces the return of a bold and fearless writer.

Taara, the pious newly crowned Queen of Abhaya, a resource-rich city-state, must marry whether she wishes to or not. Her betrothed is Garjan, Prince of Nandapore, a neighbouring city-state full of secrets and spellcasters. His forbidden love is Bhediya, a courtesan with magic in her blood. And then there is Roland, a thief by trade, attached to nothing and no one, who stumbles into a power-hungry king’s plot to unearth a weapon that has only lived in myth…until now.

Linked by desire, destiny, and a dangerous foe, these four must summon the power of an ancient goddess and chart a course through the empire’s brothels, temples, taverns, and palaces, forcing them to confront the darkest kinds of magic and the truest parts of themselves—before it’s too late.

Locked in a battle that will reshape the empire, they each must decide: What will they risk for a weapon worth dying for, and a love worth life itself?

What You Won’t Do for Love is an inspiring conversation about love and the environment. When artist Miriam Fernandes approaches the legendary eco-pioneer David Suzuki to create a theatre piece about climate change, she expects to write about David’s perspective as a scientist. Instead, she discovers the boundless vision and efforts of Tara Cullis, a literature scholar, climate organizer, and David’s life partner. Miriam realizes that David and Tara’s decades-long love for each other, and for family and friends, has only clarified and strengthened their resolve to fight for the planet.

What You Won’t Do for Love transforms real-life conversations between David, Tara, Miriam, and her husband Sturla into a charmingly novel and poetic work. Over one idyllic day in British Columbia, Miriam and Sturla take in a lifetime of David and Tara’s adventures, inspiration, and love, and in turn reflect on their own relationships to each other and the planet. Revealing David Suzuki and Tara Cullis in an affable, conversational, and often comedic light, What You Won’t Do For Love asks if we can love our planet the same way we love one another.

For many years, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson has found refuge in skiing—in all kinds of weather across different forms of terrain, often following the trail beside a beloved creek near her home. Recently, as she skimmed along this path and meditated on our world’s uncertainty—including environmental devastation, the rise of authoritarianism, and the effects of ongoing social injustice—her mind turned to the ice beside her, and the snow beneath her feet. And she asked herself: What might it mean to truly listen to water? To know not only the land on which we live, but the water that surrounds and inhabits us? To coexist with and alongside water?

So begins this renowned writer’s quest to discover, understand, and trace the historical and cultural interactions of Indigenous peoples with water in all its forms. On her journey, she reflects on the teachings, traditions, stories, and creative work of others in her community—particularly those of her longtime friend Doug Williams, an Elder whose presence suffuses these pages; reads deeply the words of thinkers from other communities whose writing expands her own; and begins to shape a “Theory of Water” that reimagines relationships among all beings and life-forces.

In this essential and inventive work, Simpson artfully weaves Nishnaabeg stories with her own thought and lived experience—and offers a vision of water as a catalyst for transformation, today and into our shared future.

The world is nothing like it once was: climate disasters have wracked the continent, causing food shortages, ending industry, and leaving little behind. Then came Cad, mysterious mind-altering fungi that invade the bodies of the now scattered citizenry. Reid, a young woman who carries this parasite, has been given a chance to get away — to move to one of the last remnants of pre-disaster society — but she can’t bring herself to abandon her mother and the community that relies on her. When she’s offered a coveted place on a dangerous and profitable mission, she jumps at the opportunity to set her family up for life, but how can Reid ask people to put their trust in her when she can’t even trust her own mind?

With keen insight and biting prose, Premee Mohamed delivers a deeply personal tale in this post-apocalyptic hopepunk novella that reflects on the meaning of community and asks what we owe to those who have lifted us up.

The deepening climate crisis is making all kinds of work harder, more dangerous and more unpredictable, or if it hasn’t yet, it will soon enough. And all kinds of workers have something to say about it. I’ll Get Right On It is a poetry anthology about making a living and carrying on despite smoky air, fires, climate grief, species loss and increased precarity. Contributors include Indigenous, migrant, racialized, low-income, queer, disabled and unpaid labourers who do all kinds of work, including climate-related work, extractive work, migrant work, gig work, care and service work and traditional work.

This anthology builds on the rich traditions of working-class literature, work poetry and social poetics. These poems are both a way to pay attention to the politics of everyday life and a workshop for building solidarity among working people already surviving and adapting to a climate emergency. They surface the commonplace, powerful feelings of cynicism, helplessness, empathy, responsibility, resilience and hope that are needed in the struggle for a liveable future. Connecting the dots between labour and environment, this anthology invites us to think and feel through the many ways climate change transforms our working lives.

Before the oracular gadèt-zafè came to warn his mother she would die, 6-year-old Fidel knew only the everyday mystery of the Guadeloupe around him. The lush greenery, the dusty roads, the sugar cane growing and the neighbors arguing, the push and pull of love and resentment between people who rely on each other—his world is small but full. Until a few moments of violence change his life forever.

Orphaned, Fidel returns to his mother’s native Dominica and whirls from one relative and reality to another, learning pieces of his own story. His heritage is one of layered secrets and sharp divisions—between the grandmothers who love him and the aunt who wants him dead, the Catholic orthodoxy of his school and the Obeah knowledge of his grandfather, and the indigenous and the colonial. The violence he’s witnessed inhabits not only strangers but himself. The spirits of the dead visit him with advice, threats, and explanations. And when he sees a path toward happiness in Canada, he must reconcile his intense, bittersweet love of his home with the possibility of leaving it.

There is that photograph, of course. My mother: standing in front of a soldier, closer than anyone else would dare . . .

In late-1980s South Africa, teenager Kelelo is forced to leave her mountain school for a newly desegregated school in town, where her identity as the daughter of celebrated freedom fighter Kewame “Dolly” Malaka makes her an instant curiosity. While her classmates see her as a symbol of progress, at home she struggles with a mother who is emotionally unreachable, still haunted by the violence and deprivation she endured as a political prisoner under apartheid.

Kewame, now living in material comfort, hides a growing inner collapse as memories of prison life and the women who sustained her resurface, stirred by her grandmother’s illness and the pressure of maintaining a façade of perfection. As mother and daughter navigate a shifting political landscape, We Inherit the Fire interlaces their voices to reveal the unspoken wounds, buried histories, and complex inheritance of resilience, pain, and responsibility that bind and divide generations of Black South African women.

Best friends of over twenty years, Tania and Margot are preparing to host their monthly Sunday Loaf dinner party, when Tania tells Margot this isn’t working for her anymore—they’ve been entangled for too long and she wants to “unknow” her. But how do you extricate yourself from someone whose family owns the apartment you live in, who has taken you in as their own, even claims you as their “person”?

As Tania attempts to live her life loudly on the outskirts of Margot’s bubble, Margot’s past betrayals become increasingly clear. But she means well, doesn’t she? They’d felt like sisters from the start. Or had Tania just been blind to Margot’s antics?

Set in the framework of a tense will-they-won’t-they break-up, Tania and Margot get entangled in a rigorous revision of history, their once delicate dance intensifying toward a frantic finale and forcing them to reckon with where it all went wrong . . . or whether they were simply wrong for each other to begin with.

A taut, piercing exploration of race and privilege, codependency and the ways in which world-defining friendships can be both beautifully and excruciatingly life-altering, My Person is an addicting, astutely observed novel from a major talent.

In 1940s Port-au-Prince, Gertie and Sisi become fast childhood friends, despite being on opposite ends of the social and economic ladder. As young girls, they build their unlikely friendship—until a deathbed revelation ripples through their families and tears them apart. After François Duvalier’s rule turns deadly in the 1950s, Sisi moves to Paris, while Gertie marries into a wealthy Dominican family. Across decades and continents, through personal success and failures, they are parted and reunited, slowly learning the truth of their singular relationship. Finally, six decades later, with both women in the United States, a sudden phone call brings them back together once more to reckon with and—perhaps—forgive the past.

Told with power and frankness, Village Weavers confronts the silences around class, race, and nationality, charts the moments when lives are irrevocably forced apart, and envisions two girls—connected their entire lives—who try to break inherited cycles of mistrust and find ways back into each other’s hearts.

Bringing together ink artwork and fiction, Denison Avenue by Daniel Innes (illustrations) and Christina Wong (text) follows the elderly Wong Cho Sum, who, living in Toronto’s gentrifying Chinatown–Kensington Market, begins to collect bottles and cans after the sudden loss of her husband as a way to fill her days and keep grief and loneliness at bay. In her long walks around the city, Cho Sum meets new friends, confronts classism and racism, and learns how to build a life as a widow in a neighborhood that is being destroyed and rebuilt, leaving elders like her behind.

A poignant meditation on loss, aging, gentrification, and the barriers that Chinese Canadian seniors experience in big cities, Denison Avenue beautifully combines visual art, fiction, and the endangered Toisan dialect to create a book that is truly unforgettable.

Imbued with cyberpunk attitude and in the rebellious tradition of afrofuturism, GLEEM is drawn with a fierce momentum hurtling towards a future world. Carrasco’s distinct cinematic style layers detailed panels and spreads, creating a multiplicity of perspectives, at once dizzying and hypnotic. Vignettes unspool in proximity to our own social realities and expand into the outer layers of possibility. Whether in the club or a robot repair workshop, the characters in these three interconnected stories burst across frames until they practically step off the page.

A boy becomes bored at church with his grandmother until he tries a psychedelic drug. A group of friends are told that they need a rare battery if they want any chance of reviving their friend. Street style and cybernetics meet and burst into riotous dancing. Kindness and violence might not be as distant from each other as we think. GLEEM unsettles with a confidence that could make you believe in anything.

In April 2020, cartoonist Sarah Leavitt’s partner of twenty-two years, Donimo, died with medical assistance after years of severe chronic pain and a rapid decline at the end of her life. About a month after Donimo’s death, Sarah began making comics again as a way to deal with her profound sense of grief and loss. The comics started as small sketches but quickly transformed into something totally unfamiliar to her. Abstract images, textures, poetic text, layers of watercolour, ink, and coloured pencil – for Sarah, the journey through grief was impossible to convey without bold formal experimentation. She spent two years creating these comics.

The result is Something, Not Nothing, an extraordinary book that delicately articulates the vagaries of grief and the sweet remembrances of enduring love. Moving and impressionistic, Something, Not Nothing shows that alongside grief, there is room for peace, joy, and new beginnings.

Dhaliwal creates a land ruled by magic and fire, where the sky is thick with witches

A witch’s work is never done when she works for the people. With the success of her town relying on her magic, demands are high. But what happens when a witch can’t keep up with the magical requests? She is burnt, of course—in a cruel ritual that extinguishes her magic and erases all her memories, making her just like everybody else. But when a burning ceremony is interrupted by rain in Chamomile Valley, a witch is left writhing at the stake. It’s up to a witch doctor and her toad friend to save the singed witch and nurse her back to health. Can they help her before her magic is lost forever?

Aminder Dhaliwal’s A Witch’s Guide to Burning is a whimsical and humorous allegory for burnout in a society in desperate need of self-care. With a lavish blend of prose, illustration, and comics, Dhaliwal crafts an enthralling hybrid adventure story like you’ve never seen before. Follow Singe and her companions Yew-Veda and Bufo Wonder as they journey across dangerous landscapes, battling demons along the way in an extraordinary tale about sacrifice and healing.

The boys of Huaxia dream of pairing up with girls to pilot Chrysalises, giant transforming robots that can battle the aliens that lurk beyond the Great Wall of China. It doesn’t matter that the girls die from the mental strain.

When 18-year-old Zetian offers herself up as a concubine-pilot, it’s to assassinate the ace male pilot responsible for her sister’s death. But when she gets her vengeance, it becomes clear that she is an Iron Widow, a rare kind of female pilot who can sacrifice males to power up Chrysalises instead.

To tame her frightening yet valuable mental strength, she is paired up with Li Shimin, the strongest male pilot in Huaxia, yet feared and ostracized for killing his father and brothers. But now that Zetian has had a taste of power, she will not cower so easily. She will take over instead, then leverage their combined strength to force her society to stop failing its women and girls. Or die trying.

In Nalo Hopkinson’s first collection of stories since 2015, a woman and her cyborg pig eke out a living in a future waterworld; two scientists contemplate the cavernous remains of an alien life-form; a trans woman at a funeral might be haunted by more than just bad memories; and an artist creates nanotechnology that asserts Blackness where it is least welcome and most needed.

Hailed by the Los Angeles Times as having “an imagination that most of us would kill for,” Hopkinson and her Afro-Caribbean, Canadian, and American influences shine in truly unique stories that are gorgeously strange, inventively subversive, and vividly beautiful.

“Oh what is stronger than a death? Two sisters singing with one breath.”

In the small town of Thistleford, on the edge of Faerie, dwells the mysterious Hawthorn family.

There, they tend and harvest the enchanted willows and honour an ancient compact to sing to them in thanks for their magic. None more devotedly than the family’s latest daughters, Esther and Ysabel, who cherish each other as much as they cherish the ancient trees.

But when Esther rejects a forceful suitor in favor of a lover from the land of Faerie, not only the sisters’ bond but also their lives will be at risk…

My body is made of scars,
some were done to me,
but most I did to myself.

Keera is a killer. As the King’s Blade, she is the most talented spy in the kingdom. And the king’s favored assassin. When a mysterious figure moves against the Crown, Keera is called upon to hunt down the so-called Shadow. She tracks her target into the magical lands of the Fae, but Faeland is not what it seems . . . and neither is the Shadow. Keera is shocked by what she learns, and can’t help but wonder who her enemy truly is: the King that destroyed her people or the Shadow that threatens the peace?

As she searches for answers, Keera is haunted by a promise she made long ago, one that will test her in every way. To keep her word, Keera must not only save herself, but an entire kingdom.

Delving behind Canada’s veneer of multiculturalism and tolerance, award-winning scholar and activist Robyn Maynard traces the afterlives of slavery across multiple institutions. Maynard sheds light on the state’s role in perpetuating colonial dispossession, racial profiling, police killings, incarceration, immigration detention, deportation, exploitative migrant labour practices, disproportionate child removal and the school-to-prison pipeline, as well as the ubiquity of Black resistance.

The first new chapter meticulously documents how half a century of police reforms have served to undermine Black freedom struggles while expanding the scope and scale of policing in Canadian society. In the second, Maynard advances a compelling vision for making policing obsolete and building new forms of safety.

In Salvage: Readings from the Wreck, Dionne Brand’s first major book of non-fiction since her classic A Map to the Door of No Return, the acclaimed poet and novelist offers a bracing look at the intersections of reading and life, and of what remains in the wreck of empire. Blending literary crticism and autobiography-as artifact, Brand reads Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, among other still-widely studied works, to explore encounters with colonial, imperialist and racist tropes from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century—tropes that continue in new forms today. Brand vividly shows how contemporary practices of reading and writing are shaped by the narrative structures of these and related works; and explores how, in the face of this, one writes a narrative of Black life that attends to its own consciousness and expression.

With the power and eloquence of a great poet coupled with the rigour of a deep and subtle thinker, Brand reveals how she learned to read the literature of two empires, British and American, in an anti-colonial light—in order to survive, and in order to live.

This is the library, the wreck, and the potential for salvage she offers us now, in a brilliant, groundbreaking and essential work.

A poetic exploration of the cyclical philosophy of dismantling and remaking, Unravel is a moving and inventive rove through what could happen in the deconstructed aftermath of person and world.

A collaborative, multi-faceted book by two extraordinary Black artists about finding beauty in the chaos

Roger Mooking is a Trinidadian-born, Canadian-raised talent who creates immersive experiences in the arts, and francesca ekwuyasi is a writer whose debut novel, Butter Honey Pig Bread, has received wide acclaim. These two artists come together in Curious Sounds, a book of art, stories, and conversations illuminating their search for solace and perspective.

A dialogue between two artists across various mediums, Curious Sounds uses Mooking’s most recent album, SoundBites, as scaffolding for the artists’ conversations on creativity, Blackness, family, grief, and more. Composed of ekwuyasi’s essays reflecting on artmaking, storytelling, and creative expression and Mooking’s multimedia visual art, micro stories, music, and lyrics, this book is a collage of ideas about making meaning through life’s rhythms.

Arranged in three parts, which mirror the arc of a life – the Learning, the Living, and the Leaving – Curious Sounds is an interactive collection of fleeting moments and visuals that explore the beauty in chaos.

After receiving a frantic letter from her newly-wed cousin begging for someone to save her from a mysterious doom, Noemí Taboada heads to High Place, a distant house in the Mexican countryside. She’s not sure what she will find—her cousin’s husband, a handsome Englishman, is a stranger, and Noemí knows little about the region.

Noemí is also an unlikely rescuer: She’s a glamorous debutante, and her chic gowns and perfect red lipstick are more suited for cocktail parties than amateur sleuthing. But she’s also tough and smart, with an indomitable will, and she is not afraid: Not of her cousin’s new husband, who is both menacing and alluring; not of his father, the ancient patriarch who seems to be fascinated by Noemí; and not even of the house itself, which begins to invade Noemi’s dreams with visions of blood and doom.

Her only ally in this inhospitable abode is the family’s youngest son. Shy and gentle, he seems to want to help Noemí, but might also be hiding dark knowledge of his family’s past. For there are many secrets behind the walls of High Place. The family’s once colossal wealth and faded mining empire kept them from prying eyes, but as Noemí digs deeper she unearths stories of violence and madness.

And Noemí, mesmerized by the terrifying yet seductive world of High Place, may soon find it impossible to ever leave this enigmatic house behind.

Single mother Alice Chow is drowning. With a booming online business, a resentful teenage daughter, a screen-obsessed son, and a secret boyfriend, she can never get everything done in a day. So it’s a relief when Alice wakes up one morning to find the counters are clear, the kids’ rooms are tidy, and orders are neatly packed and labelled. But she doesn’t remember staying up late to take care of things. As the strange pattern continues, she realizes someone—or something—has been doing her chores for her.

Alice knows she should feel uneasy, but the extra time lets her connect with her children and with her hard-edged mother, who has started to share shocking stories from their family history—beginning with the horrors that befell her great-grandmother, who was imprisoned as a comfort woman in Hong Kong during the Second World War. But the family’s demons—both real and subconscious, old and new—are about to become impossible to ignore.

Set against the gleaming backdrop of contemporary Vancouver, The Hunger We Pass Down is a devastating, horror-tinged novel about how unspoken legacies of violence can shape a family. It follows the relentless spectre of intergenerational trauma as it is handed down from mother to daughter, and asks what it might take to break the cycle—heroism, depravity, or both.

Mackenzie, a Cree millennial, wakes up in her one-bedroom Vancouver apartment clutching a pine bough she had been holding in her dream just moments earlier. When she blinks, it disappears. But she can still smell the sharp pine scent in the air, the nearest pine tree a thousand kilometres away in the far reaches of Treaty 8.

Mackenzie continues to accidentally bring back items from her dreams, dreams that are eerily similar to real memories of her older sister and Kokum before their untimely deaths. As Mackenzie’s life spirals into a living nightmare—crows are following her around and she’s getting texts from her dead sister on the other side—it becomes clear that these dreams have terrifying, real-life consequences. Desperate for help, Mackenzie returns to her mother, sister, cousin, and aunties in her small Alberta hometown. Together, they try to uncover what is haunting Mackenzie before something irrevocable happens to anyone else around her.

Haunting, fierce, an ode to female relations and the strength found in kinship, Bad Cree is a gripping, arresting debut by an unforgettable voice.

Sunny Behre has four siblings, but only one is a murderer.

With the death of Sunny’s mother, matriarch of the wealthy Behre family, Sunny’s once picture-perfect life is thrown into turmoil. Her mother had groomed her to be the family’s next leader, so Sunny is confused when the only instructions her mother leaves is a mysterious note: “Take care of Dom.”

The problem is, her youngest brother, Dom, has always been a near-stranger to Sunny…and seemingly a dangerous one, if found guilty of his second-degree murder charge. Still, Sunny is determined to fulfill her mother’s dying wish. But when a classmate is gruesomely murdered, and Sunny finds her brother with blood on his hands, her mother’s simple request becomes a lot more complicated. Dom swears he’s innocent, and although Sunny isn’t sure she believes him, she takes it upon herself to look into the murder—made all the more urgent by the discovery of another body. And another.

As Sunny and Dom work together to track down the culprit, Sunny realizes her other siblings have their own dark secrets. Soon she may have to choose: preserve the family she’s always loved or protect the brother she barely knows—and risk losing everything her mother worked so hard to build.

Fairy tales shape how we see the world, so what happens when you identify more with the Beast than Beauty?

If every disabled character is mocked and mistreated, how does the Beast ever imagine a happily-ever-after? Amanda Leduc looks at fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm to Disney, showing us how they influence our expectations and behaviour and linking the quest for disability rights to new kinds of stories that celebrate difference.

From sidewalks to the climate crisis, Living Disability brings together the vibrant perspectives of thirty-five disabled writers. They explore disability justice, analyze urban systems, and propose more equitable approaches to city building. Essays and interviews push the conversation about accessibility beyond policy papers and compliance checklists to show how disabled people are already creating more inclusive spaces in cities of all sizes.
Living Disability is universal in scope but intimate and local in focus, grounded in personal struggles and celebrations.

Decisions about public transit, affordable housing, and park design all disproportionately impact disabled communities; by sharing stories and strategies, contributors consider the ways disabled thinkers and doers are embracing overlooked aspects of urban design and tackling the toughest problems facing cities.

In The Future Is Disabled, Leah Laksmi Piepzna-Samarasinha asks some provocative questions: What if, in the near future, the majority of people will be disabled – and what if that’s not a bad thing? And what if disability justice and disabled wisdom are crucial to creating a future in which it’s possible to survive fascism, climate change, and pandemics and to bring about liberation?

Building on the work of their game-changing book Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Piepzna-Samarasinha writes about disability justice at the end of the world, documenting the many ways disabled people kept and are keeping each other – and the rest of the world – alive during Trump, fascism and the COVID-19 pandemic. Other subjects include crip interdependence, care and mutual aid in real life, disabled community building, and disabled art practice as survival and joy.

Written over the course of two years of disabled isolation during the pandemic, this is a book of love letters to other disabled QTBIPOC (and those concerned about disability justice, the care crisis, and surviving the apocalypse); honour songs for kin who are gone; recipes for survival; questions and real talk about care, organizing, disabled families, and kin networks and communities; and wild brown disabled femme joy in the face of death. With passion and power, The Future Is Disabled remembers our dead and insists on our future.

Christa Couture has come to know every corner of grief—its shifting blurry edges, its traps, its pulse of love at the centre and the bittersweet truth that sorrow is a powerful and wise emotion.

From the amputation of her leg as a cure for bone cancer at a young age to her first child’s single day of life, the heart transplant and subsequent death of her second child, the divorce born of grief and then the thyroidectomy that threatened her career as a professional musician, How to Lose Everything delves into the heart of loss. Couture bears witness to the shift in perspective that comes with loss, and how it can deepen compassion for others, expand understanding, inspire a letting go of little things and plant a deeper feeling for what matters. At the same time, Couture’s writing evokes the joy and lightness that both precede and eventually follow grief, as well as the hope and resilience that grow from connections with others.

Evoking Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work, Couture explores the emotional and psychological experiences of motherhood, partnership and change. Deftly connecting the dots of sorrow, reprieve and hard-won hope, How to Lose Everything contains the advice Couture is often asked for, as well as the words she wishes she could have heard many years ago. It is also an offering of kinship and understanding for anyone experiencing a loss.

Motl is middle-aged, poor, nerdy, Jewish and in desperate need of a shave. Since having his balls shot cleanly off as a youth in WWI, he’s lived a quiet life at home in Vilnius with his shrewd and shrewish mom, Gitl, losing himself in the masculine fantasy world of cowboy novels by writers like Karl May–novels equally loved by Hitler, whose troops have just invaded Lithuania and are out to exterminate people like Motl. In his dreams, Motl is a fast-talking, rugged, expert gunslinger capable of dealing with the Nazi threat. But only in his dreams.

As friends and neighbours are killed around them, Motl and Gitl escape from Vilnius, saving their own skins. But they immediately risk everything to try rescue relatives they hope are still alive. With death all around him, Motl decides that a Jew’s best revenge is not only to live, but to procreate. In order to achieve this, though, he must relocate those most crucial pieces of his anatomy lost to him in a glacier in the Swiss Alps in the previous war. It’s an absurd yet life-affirming mission, made even more urgent when he’s separated from his mother, and isn’t sure whether she’s alive or dead. Joining forces, and eventually hearts, with Esther, a Jewish woman whose family has been killed, Motl ventures across Europe, a kaleidoscope of narrow escapes and close encounters with everyone from Himmler, to circus performers, double agents, quislings, fake “Indians” and real ones. Motl at last figures out that he has more connection to the Indigenous characters in western novels than the cowboys.

An imaginative and deeply felt exploration of genocide, persecution, colonialism and masculinity–saturated in Gary Barwin’s sharp wit and perfect pun-play–Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy is a one-of-a-kind novel of sheer genius.

Vietnamese refugees Debbie and Phil Tran have made a good life for themselves in Toronto, but their landlord has just jacked up the rent of their family-run nail salon, Sunshine Nails, and it’s way more than they can afford. When Take Ten, a glamorous chain offering a more luxurious salon experience, moves into the neighborhood, the Tran family is terrified of losing their business—and the community they’ve built around them.

But daughter Jessica comes to their rescue. She’s just moved back home after a messy breakup and an even messier firing. Together with her workaholic brother, Dustin, and recently immigrated cousin, Thuy, they devise some good old-fashioned sabotage. But as the line between right and wrong gets blurred, relationships are put to the test, and Debbie and Phil must choose: Do they keep their family intact or fight for their salon?

Full of memorable manicures and even more memorable characters, Sunshine Nails is a humorous and heartfelt novel about family, resilience, and what it means to start over.

Dee, Misa, and Matt were the “three musketeers” of the psych ward. Matt is a teddy bear musician with no discernable coping mechanisms. Wildly efficient Misa is quick to take care of others while neglecting herself. And Dee is a puddle with a heart of gold, eager to convince everyone that she’s finally turning things around. A year after discharge, Matt and Misa are tying the knot in Turks and Caicos, surrounded by guests who have no idea where they met. But the secrecy isn’t sitting well with Dee, who has been hopelessly in love with Matt since before she got kicked out of the hospital.

When Dee arrives at the swanky resort with her high-voltage sister Tilley, it’s now or never to confess how she feels about Matt. But disrupting her best friends’ nuptials would jeopardize the entire support system that holds them all together. When it comes to happily ever afters, how is a girl supposed to choose between love and recovery? Introducing a sparkling new voice in commercial fiction, Never Been Better revels in the heartache and hilarity of falling in love when you haven’t quite figured out how to live with yourself.

Jameela Green has only one wish. To see her memoir on The New York Times bestseller list. When her dream doesn’t come true, she seeks spiritual guidance at her local mosque. New imam and recent immigrant Ibrahim Sultan is appalled by Jameela’s shallowness, but agrees to assist her on one condition: that she perform a good deed.

Jameela reluctantly accepts his terms, kicking off a chain of absurd and unfortunate events. The homeless man they try to help gets recruited by a terrorist group, causing federal authorities to become suspicious of Ibrahim, and suddenly the imam mysteriously disappears.

Certain that the CIA have captured Ibrahim for interrogation via torture, Jameela decides to set off on a one-woman operation to rescue him. Her quixotic quest soon finds her entangled in an international plan targeting the egomaniacal leader of the terrorist organization—a scheme that puts Jameela, and countless others, including her hapless husband and clever but disapproving daughter, at risk.

A hilarious black comedy about the price of success, and a biting look at what has gone wrong with American foreign policy in the Middle East, Jameela Green Ruins Everything is a compulsively readable, yet unexpectedly touching story of one woman’s search for meaning and connection.