Leisure Reading: CanLit

Canadian Writers in Person Lecture Series (2025)
https://www.yorku.ca/laps/huma/canadian-writers/

A mind-bending, razor-sharp look at motherhood and mental health that follows a young Indigenous woman who discovers the picture-perfect life she always hoped for may have horrifying consequences
On the surface, Alice is exactly where she thinks she should be: She's just given birth to a beautiful baby girl, Dawn; her charming husband, Steve--a white academic whose area of study is conveniently her own Mohawk culture--is nothing but supportive; and they've moved into a new home in a posh Toronto neighborhood. But Alice could not feel like more of an imposter. She isn't connecting with her daughter, a struggle made even more difficult by the recent loss of her own mother, and every waking moment is spent hiding her despair from Steve and their ever-watchful neighbors, among whom she's the sole Indigenous resident. Even when she does have a minute to herself, her perpetual self-doubt hinders the one vestige of her old life she has left: her goal of writing a modern retelling of the Haudenosaunee creation story.
Then, as if all that wasn't enough, strange things start to happen. She finds herself losing bits of time and hearing voices she can't explain, all while her neighbors' passive-aggressive behavior begins to morph into something far more threatening. Though Steve assures her this is all in her head, Alice cannot fight the feeling that something is very, very wrong, and that in her creation story lies the key to her and Dawn's survival. . . . She just has to finish it before it's too late.
Told in Alice's raw and darkly funny voice, And Then She Fell is an urgent and unflinching exploration of inherited trauma, womanhood, denial, and false allyship, which speeds to an unpredictable—and surreal—climax. (Book Jacket, Inside Flap)

2024 CBC Canada Reads Finalist

In this gripping, horror-laced debut, a Cree woman's dreams lead her on a perilous journey that forces her to confront the toll of a legacy of violence on her family, her community and the land they call home.
When Mackenzie wakes up with a crow's head in her hands, she panics. Only moments earlier she had been fending off masses of birds in a snow-covered forest. In bed, when she blinks, the head disappears.
Night after night, Mackenzie's dreams return her to a memory from before her sister Sabrina's untimely death: a weekend at the family's lakefront campsite, long obscured by a fog of guilt. But when the waking world starts closing in, too--a murder of crows stalks her around the city; she emerges, retching water, from a nightmare of drowning; and she gets threatening text messages from someone claiming to be Sabrina--Mackenzie knows this is more than she can handle alone.
Traveling north to her rural hometown in Alberta, she finds her family still grappling with the same grief she ran away to Vancouver to escape. They welcome her back, but their shaky reunion only seems to intensify her dreams and make them more dangerous. What really happened that night at the lake, and what did it have to do with Sabrina's death? Only a bad Cree would put their family at risk, but what if whatever has been calling Mackenzie home was within her all along? John's visceral writing takes us from dreams to waking nightmare and asks us to find the universal in the personal, uncovering shame, doubt, and denial as she tracks a family's attempts to come to grips with loss. (Book Jacket, Inside Flap)

Catherine Hernandez's most gripping and affecting novel yet, Behind You is inspired by a horrifying chapter in Canadian history and follows fictional characters terrorized by a fictional perpetrator.
Alma is a film editor working on a True Crime series about the twentieth century's most notorious killers. It's not until the series' last episode, which features the Scarborough Stalker, that Alma remembers coming of age while the serial rapist and killer was attacking women and girls in Scarborough in the late 80s and early 90s.
Two storylines unfold. In the past, young Alma watches as an entire city hunts for an elusive, terrifying suspect, while she herself faces jeopardy from closer corners. In the present, adult Alma must come to terms with her own ideas of consent in order to stop her teenage son Mateo's dangerous behaviour toward his girlfriend.
Weaving back and forth in time, Behind You is a moving story of one girl’s resilience as she enters adulthood and a chilling portrayal of the insidiousness if rape culture. It daringly turns the whodunit genre on its head by asking "Who hasn't done it?" As in, who hasn't been complicit in sexual harm? (Inside Book Flap)

Featuring: Madhur Anand * Sharon Bala * Gary Barwin * Billy-Ray Belcourt * Xaiver Michael Campbell * Corinna Chong * Beth Downey * Allison Graves * Joel Thomas Hynes * Elise Levine * Sourayan Mookerjea * Lue Palmer * Michelle Porter * Sara Power * Ryan Turner * Ian Williams (Back Cover)

Canadian Writers in Person Lecture Series (2024)
https://www.yorku.ca/laps/huma/canadian-writers/
Winner, 2023 Governor General's Literary Award

Genre-blending stories of transformation and belonging that centre women of colour and explore queerness, family, and community.
A couple in a crumbling marriage faces divine intervention. A woman dies in her dreams again and again until she finds salvation in an unexpected source. A teenage misfit discovers a darkness lurking just beyond the borders of her suburban home.
The stories in Chrysalis, Anuja Varghese’s debut collection, are by turns poignant and chilling, blurring the lines between the real world and worlds beyond. Varghese delves fearlessly into complex intersections of family, community, sexuality, and cultural expectation, taking aim at the ways in which racialized women are robbed of power and revelling in the strange and dangerous journeys they undertake to reclaim it. (Publisher)

Companion novel to: The Break & The Strangers

The concept was simple. You sit a bunch of people in a circle—everyone who hurt, everyone who got hurt, all affected—and let them share. Some people, it helped them heal, for sure. Others went in angry and left a different kind of angry. Learned how the blame belonged on the system, the history, the colonizer, the big things that were harder to change than one bad person.
The day that Cedar Sage Stranger has been both dreading and longing for has finally come: her sister Phoenix is getting out of prison.
The effect of Phoenix’s release cascades through the community. M, the young girl whom she assaulted, is triggered by the news. Her mother, Paulina, is worried and her cousin is angry—all feel the threat of Phoenix’s release. When Phoenix is seen lingering outside the school to catch a glimpse of her son, Sparrow, the police get a call to file a report—but the next thing they know, she has disappeared.
Amid accusations and plots for revenge, past grievances become a poor guide in a moment of danger, and the clumsy armature of law enforcement is no match for the community. Cedar and her and Phoenix’s mother, Elsie, continue down different paths of healing, while everyone in their lives form a circle around the chaos, the calm within the storm, and the beauty in the darkness.(Publisher)

Canadian Writers in Person Lecture Series (2024)
https://www.yorku.ca/laps/huma/canadian-writers/

A collection of intersecting stories about Indigenous love and loneliness from one of contemporary literature’s most boundless minds.
Across the prairies and Canada’s west coast, on reserves and university campuses, at literary festivals and existential crossroads, the characters in Coexistence are searching for connection. They’re learning to live with and understand one another, to see beauty and terror side by side, and to accept that the past, present, and future can inhabit a single moment.
An aging mother confides in her son about an intimate friendship from her distant girlhood. A middling poet is haunted by the cliché his life has become. A chorus of anonymous gay men dispense unvarnished truths about their sex lives. A man freshly released from prison finds that life on the outside has sinister strictures of its own. A PhD student dog-sits for his parents at what was once a lodging for nuns operating a residential school—a house where the spectre of Catholicism comes to feel eerily literal.
Bearing the compression, crystalline sentences, and emotional potency that have characterized his earlier books, Coexistence is a testament to Belcourt’s mastery of and playfulness in any literary form. A vital addition to an already rich catalogue, this is a must-read collection and the work of an author at the height of his powers. (Publisher)

2024 Giller Prize Shortlist

This sparkling, genre-bending novel opens with amateur historian Anne, who has a passion for research into the murkier corners of England in the 1600s. In an archive, Anne has stumbled across an obscure memoir, one that hints at an intricate tapestry of secret lives and loves.
The full story eventually weaves together five manuscripts, each a different thread in the same strange tale: The Plague descends upon a village, and two children, Joan and Thomasina, are the only survivors. They bond with each other and with "Old Nut," a woman who lives in the forest nearby. But when relatives return, Old Nut is accused of witchcraft and condemned to death. Joan is hired as a maid to well-educated Lady Margaret Long—and, being lively and curious, soon becomes a beloved companion. Thomasina is sent on a perilous voyage to Virginia, where she adopts boys' clothing and navigates life as a male.
Years later, Tom and Joan find each other and fall in love—but are discovered, naked, by a clergyman. Horrified, he believes there can only be one explanation for Tom's "unmanned" state: Joan is a witch and, like Old Nut years ago, must be tried for sorcery. It falls upon Anne, reading between faded pages and centuries, to uncover the fate of the lovers—and add her own contemporary line of "truth" to this tale from a time when there were no labels for who Tom and Joan might be. (Book Jacket, Inside Flap)

Canadian Writers in Person Lecture Series (2025)
https://www.yorku.ca/laps/huma/canadian-writers/

What would have happened if she’d met him at a different time in her life, when she was older, more confident, less lonely, and less afraid? She wonders not whether they would have stayed together, but whether she would have known to stay away.
A writer discovers that her ex has published a novel about their breakup. An immunocompromised woman falls in love, only to have her body betray her. After her boyfriend makes an insensitive comment, a college student finds an experimental procedure that promises to turn her brown eyes blue. A Reddit post about a man’s habit of grabbing his girlfriend’s breasts prompts a shocking confession. An unsettling second date leads to the testing of boundaries. And when a woman begins to lose her hair, she embarks on an increasingly nightmarish search for answers.
From Governor-General's Award-shortlisted author of The Most Precious Substance on Earth, Shashi Bhat's Death By a Thousand Cuts is a breathtaking and sharply funny collection about the everyday trials and impossible expectations that come with being a woman. With honesty, tenderness, and a skewering wit, these stories boldly wrestle with rage, longing, illness, and bodily autonomy, and their inescapable impacts on a woman’s relationships with others and with herself. (Back Cover)

2024 CBC Canada Reads Finalist

A moving story told in visual art and fiction about gentrification, aging in place, grief, and vulnerable Chinese Canadian elders
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. (Publisher)

Dear Marian, the letter from the Company begins. You are one of the great writers of this century.
At 75, Marian Ffarmer is almost as famous for her signature tricorn hat and cape as for her verse. She has lived for decades in the one-bedroom New York apartment she once shared with her mother, miles away from any other family, dedicating herself to her art. Yet recently her certainty about her choices has started to fray, especially when she thinks about her only son, now approaching middle age with no steady income. Into that breach comes the letter: an invitation to the Silicon Valley headquarters of one of the world's most powerful companies in order to make history by writing a poem.
Marian has never collaborated with anyone, let alone a machine, but the offer is too lucrative to resist, and she boards a plane to San Francisco with dreams of helping her son. In the Company's serene and golden Mind Studio, she encounters Charlotte, their state-of-the-art poetry bot, and is startled to find that it has written 230,442 poems in the last week, though it claims to only like two of them.
Over the conversations to follow, the poet is by turns intrigued, confused, moved and frightened by Charlotte's vision of the world, by what it knows and doesn't know ("Do you remember being born?" it asks her. Of course Marian doesn't, but Charlotte does.) This is a relationship, a friendship, unlike anything Marian has known, and as it evolves—and as Marian meets strangers at swimming pools, tortoises at the zoo, a clutch of younger poets, a late-night TV host and his synthetic foam set—she is forced to confront the secrets of her past and the direction of her future. Who knew that a disembodied mind could help bend Marian's life towards human connection, that friendship and family are not just time-eating obligations but soul-expanding joys. Or that belonging to one’s art means, above all else, belonging to the world. (Publisher)

Canadian Writers in Person Lecture Series (2025)
https://www.yorku.ca/laps/huma/canadian-writers/
2023 Scotiabank Giller Prize Shortlist

In a Chinatown housing project lives twelve-year-old Benny, his ailing grandmother, and his strange neighbor Constantine, a man who believes he’s a reincarnated medieval samurai. When Benny's grandmother is hospitalized, he manages to survive on his own until a social worker comes snooping. With no other family, he turns to Constantine, who reluctantly takes him in, and soon an unlikely bond forms between the two.
At least, that’s what Yu, the narrator of the story, wants to write.
The creator of a bestselling comic book, Yu struggles to continue the poignant tale of Benny and Constantine and can’t help but interject from the present day, slowly revealing a darker backstory. Can Yu confront the demons he’s spent his adult life avoiding? Or will he risk his own life...and Benny’s? (Book Jacket, Inside Flap)

2024 Winner Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction

From the acclaimed, boundary-breaking author of NISHGA comes a hypnotic and mystifying exploration of land and legacy.
Reimagining James Fenimore Cooper’s nineteenth-century text The Last of the Mohicans from the contemporary perspective of an urban Nisga’a person whose relationship to land and traditional knowledge was severed by colonial violence, Jordan Abel explores what it means to be Indigenous without access to familial territory and complicates popular understandings about Indigenous storytelling. Engaging the land through fiction and metaphor, the successive chapters of Empty Spaces move toward an eerie, looping, and atmospheric rendering of place that evolves despite the violent and reckless histories of North America. The result is a bold and profound new vision of history that decenters human perception and forgoes Westernized ways of seeing.
Jordan Abel’s extraordinary debut work of fiction grows out of his groundbreaking visual compositions in NISHGA, which integrated descriptions of the landscape from Cooper’s settler classic into his father's traditional Nisga'a artwork. In Empty Spaces, Abel reinscribes those words on the page itself, subjecting them to bold rewritings and inviting us to come to a crucial understanding: that the land knows everything that can and will happen, even as our world lurches toward uncertainty. (Publisher)

It's 1922 at Far Cry Cannery, a quarter mile of boardwalk and wooden buildings strung along the rocks of Rivers Inlet on the northwest coast of British Columbia. The time has come for Anders Viken, storekeeper and honorary uncle to the recently orphaned Kit, to give an account of his secret self: the reason why he fled the loving grip of his family in Norway, his years of rough living, and his impossible love--the kind in which pain and longing are braided together.
As the sockeye flood up the inlet, Anders spends his long nights recording his confessions for eighteen-year-old Kit, the only remaining member of his chosen family after Kit's mother, Bobbie, scandalized the cannery town by running off with the handsome Chinese camp cook, and her father, Frank, was found drowned beside his own boat in the harbour. While her uncle does his reckoning, Kit fends off the advances of the cannery manager and tries to earn her keep. Oars in hand, she glides her skiff out over the great returning school and casts her net. This, at least, makes sense to her, as opposed to the convoluted workings of love. (Book Jacket, Inside Flap)

Winner 2024 CBC Canada Reads

In an alternate history of Detroit, the Motor City was never surrendered to the US. Its residents deal with pollution, poverty, and the legacy of racism--and strange and magical things are happening: children rule over their own kingdom in the trees and burned houses regenerate themselves. When Gloria arrives looking for answers and her missing granddaughters, at first she finds only a hungry mouse in the derelict home where her daughter was murdered. But the neighbours take pity on her and she turns to their resilience and impressive gardens for sustenance.
When a strange intuition sends Gloria into the woods of Parc Rouge, where the city's orphaned and abandoned children are rumored to have created their own society, she can't imagine the strength she will find. A richly imagined story of community and a plea for persistence in the face of our uncertain future, The Future is a lyrical testament to the power we hold to protect the people and places we love--together. (Book Cover, Inside Flap.

An act of passion reverberates across continents when Visma Sen decides to remain in Calcutta when his family migrates to Canada.
Sabyasachi Nag evokes the rising heat of Calcutta in the early morning as masterfully as he depicts the calmness of a snow-lit evening street in Brampton, Ontario while the entangled lives of the Sens of Shulut unfurl over three decades. Each linked story is told through the voice of a different member of the Sen family, from Nilroy’s movingly excruciating rst day as caregiver to Aunt Rita with dementia to Milli’s ambition to host her guru Mata G. The experiences of each character draw a portrait of the Sen family, whose wounds drive them to pursue an ever-elusive happiness, while clearly yearning for identity and belonging. (Publisher)

Winner 2024 Giller Prize

1917. On a battlefield near the River Escaut, John lies in the aftermath of a blast, unable to move or feel his legs. Struggling to focus his thoughts, he is lost to memory as the snow falls--a chance encounter in a pub by a railway, a hot bath with his lover on a winter night.
1920. John has returned from war to North Yorkshire, near a different river. He is alive but still not whole. Reunited with Helena, an artist, he reopens his photography business and tries to keep on living. But the past erupts insistently into the present, as ghosts begin to surface in his pictures: ghosts with messages he cannot understand.
So begins a narrative that spans four generations of connections and consequences that ignite and re-ignite as the century unfolds. In radiant moments of desire, comprehension, longing, and transcendence, the sparks fly upward, working their transformations decades later.
Held is affecting and intensely beautiful, full of mystery, wisdom, and compassion, a novel by a writer at the height of her powers. (Book Jacket, Inside Flap)

Canadian Writers in Person Lecture Series (2023)
https://www.yorku.ca/laps/huma/canadian-writers/

Elegant, surprising stories about Palestinian immigrants in Canada navigating their identities in circumstances that push them to the emotional brink.
Saeed Teebi’s intense, engrossing stories plunge into the lives of characters grappling with their experiences as Palestinian immigrants to Canada. A doctor teaches his girlfriend about his country, only for her to fall into a consuming obsession with the Middle East conflict. A math professor risks his family’s destruction by slandering the king of a despotic, oil-rich country. A university student invents an imaginary girlfriend to fit in with his callous, womanizing roommates. A lawyer takes on the impossible mission of becoming a body smuggler. A lonely widower travels to Russia in search of a movie starlet he met in his youth in historical Jaffa. A refugee who escaped violent circumstances rebels against the kindness of his sponsor. These taut and compelling stories engage the immigrant experience and reflect the Palestinian diaspora with grace and insight. (Publisher)

The hilarious and heartbreaking story of two William Pings in Newfoundland—the lost millennial and the grandfather he knows nothing about
William Ping's millennial life revolves around eating at restaurants, posting online about eating at restaurants, then overanalyzing it. This changes unexpectedly when a dinner with his Chinese girlfriend's family goes sideways and his insecurity about his biracial identity and his ignorance of his own Chinese heritage overflow like lava. During a much-needed break from the dinner table, Will is visited in the men's room by a sarcastic, bullying spirit named Mo. The spirit whisks him into the past to learn about the life of his grandfather, the first William Ping, who emigrated from China to Newfoundland in 1931 to work in a laundry.
Based on a true story, Hollow Bamboo recounts with humour and sympathy the often-brutal struggles, and occasional successes, faced by some of the first Chinese immigrants in Newfoundland. It is a journey of heartbreak, sacrifice, brotherhood and family ties. But most of all, it is about love and survival on the Rock.
Drawing on elements of magical realism, autofiction and satire, as well as deep historical research, Hollow Bamboo is a fresh and original portrayal of our past and our present, and the debut of an extraordinary new author. (Publisher)

2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize Shortlist
Canadian Writers in Person Lecture Series (2023)
https://www.yorku.ca/laps/huma/canadian-writers/

In post-Arab Spring Cairo, two unnamed characters meet and fall in love. She is a nostalgic daughter of Egyptian immigrants “returning” to a country she’s never been to before. He was a photographer of the revolution who is now unemployed and living in a rooftop shack. As their alternating perspectives unfold in blocks of taut poetic prose, their desire--for each other, for the selves they strive to become through the other--takes a violent turn.
A dark romance exposing the fraught fissures in American identity politics when exported overseas, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English is a lush postcolonial novel for the twenty-first century. (Back Cover)

The fates of two unforgettable women—one beginning a journey of reckoning and self-discovery, the other completing her last vital act—intertwine in this powerful novel set at the terminus of the Underground Railroad.
In the 1800s in Dunmore, a Canadian town settled by people fleeing enslavement in the American South, young Lensinda Martin works for a crusading Black journalist.
One night, a slave hunter is shot dead by an old woman who recently arrived. When the old woman refuses to flee, Lensinda is tasked with gathering testimony before she can be condemned for the crime.
But the old woman doesn't want to simply confess. Instead, she proposes a barter: a story for a story. So begins an extraordinary exchange that reveals a tapestry of interwoven histories, challenges Lensinda's notions of her past, and suggests that the old woman may carry a secret that could reshape her destiny.
Traveling along the path of the Underground Railroad from Virginia to Michigan, from the Indigenous nations around the Great Lakes to the Black refugee communities of Canada, In the Upper Country weaves together unlikely stories of love, survival, and familial upheaval that map the interconnected history of the peoples of North America in an entirely new and resonant way. (Book Jacket, Inside Flap)

In the early morning dark, Emer McConnell rises for a day of teaching music in the schools of rural Saskatchewan. While she travels the snowy roads in the gathering light, she begins another journey, one of recollection and introspection, and one that, through the course of Jane Urquhart’s brilliant new novel, will leave the reader forever changed.
Moving as effortlessly through time as the drift of memory itself, In Winter I Get Up at Night brings Emer and her singular story to life. At the age of 11, she is terribly injured in an enormous prairie storm—the “great wind” that shifts her trajectory forever. As she recovers, separated from her family in a children’s ward, Emer gets to know her fellow patients, a memorable group including a child performer who stars in a travelling theatre company, the daughter of a Dukhobor community, and the son of a leftist Jewish farm collective. The children are tended to by three nursing sisters and two doctors, whom the ever-imaginative Emer comes to call Doctor Angel and Doctor Carpenter.
Emer’s tale grows outwards from that ward, reaching through time and space in a dreamlike fashion, recounting the stories of her mother’s entanglement with a powerful yet mysterious teacher; her brother’s dawning spirituality, which eventually leads him to the priesthood; the remarkable lives of the nuns who care for her; and the passionate yet distant love affair of Emer and an enigmatic man she calls Harp—a brilliant scientist whose great discovery has forever altered millions of lives around the world.
In luminous prose, and with exhilarating nuance and depth, Jane Urquhart charts an unforgettable life, while also exploring some of the grandest themes of the twentieth century—colonial expansion, scientific progress, and the sinister forces that seek to divide societies along racial and cultural lines. In Winter I Get Up at Night is a major work of imagination and self-exploration from one of the greatest writers of our time. (Publisher)

Georgian Bay, 1901. When a terrible accident leaves her orphaned at fifteen, Mary Craven is sent to the wilderness of the Georgian Bay to live with an uncle she's never met.
At first, the impassive, calculating girl believes this new manor will be just like the one she left in Toronto: cold, isolating, and anything but cheerful, where employees are treated as staff and never like family. But as she slowly allows her heart to open like the first blooms of spring, Mary comes to find that this strange place and its strange people—most of whom are Indigenous—may be where she can finally call home.
Then one night, Mary discovers Olive, her cousin who has been hidden away in an attic room for years due to a "nervous condition." The girls become fast friends, and Mary wonders why this big-hearted girl is being kept out of sight and fed medicine that only makes her feel sicker. When Olive's domineering stepmother returns to the manor, it soon becomes clear that something sinister is going on.
With the help of a charming, vivacious Metis girl named Sophie, Mary begins looking for a way to free Olive. And some of the answers may lie within the walls of a hidden, overgrown, and long-forgotten garden the girls stumble upon while wandering the wilds... (Book Jacket, Inside Flap)

Canadian Writers in Person Lecture Series (2025)
https://www.yorku.ca/laps/huma/canadian-writers/
2023 Scotiabank Giller Prize Shortlist

Powerful stories that explore the legacy of colonialism, and issues of race, immigration, sexual discrimination, and class in the lives of Jamaican women across London, Panama, France, Jamaica, Florida and more
The Islands follows the lives of Jamaican women--immigrants or the descendants of immigrants--who have relocated all over the world to escape the ghosts of colonialism on what they call the Island. Set in the United States, Jamaica, and Europe, these international stories examine the lives of an uncertain and unsettled cast of characters. In one story, a woman and her husband impulsively leave San Francisco and move to Florida with wild dreams of American reinvention only to unearth the cracks in their marriage. In another, the only Jamaican mother--who is also a touring comedienne--at a prep school feels pressure to volunteer in the school's International Day. Meanwhile, in a third story, a travel writer finally connects with the mother who once abandoned her.
Set in locations and times ranging from 1950s London to 1960s Panama to modern-day New Jersey, Dionne Irving reveals the intricacies of immigration and assimilation in this debut, establishing a new and unforgettable voice in Caribbean-American literature. Restless, displaced, and disconnected, these characters try to ground themselves--to grow where they find themselves planted--in a world in which the tension between what's said and unsaid can bend the soul. (Publisher)

Canadian Writers in Person Lecture Series (2024)
https://www.yorku.ca/laps/huma/canadian-writers/

When a rock, a threatening letter, and a burning Quran are thrown into a mosque on the outskirts of Toronto, religious leaders and the police shrug it off as an isolated incident. But many see it as a hate crime. Among them is Kashif Siddiqui, the son of Pakistani immigrants. Kashif joins a group of volunteers at an Islamic Cultural Centre on a security watch during the festive Eid night, a potential target of another attack. When an attack materializes, Eid night becomes a test of friendship, family, and faith for the community; it also ends in near-tragedy and a declaration of love and reconciliation. (Back Cover)

Fall 1913, St. Catharines, Ontario:
Thirteen-year-old Hoi Wing Woo, the son of a scholar, is forced to give up his dreams of an education when he is sent to work in a Chinese laundry in Canada.
Hoi Wing is promptly thrust into relentless, mind-numbing toil, washing clothes by hand for sixteen hours a day, six days a week. Isolated and friendless, Hoi Wing falls into despair.
When he meets Heather, an Irish scullery maid who shares his love of books, Hoi Wing's outlook immediately begins to brighten. Together, they escape the drudgery of their work by retreating to a secret hideout where they read novels and confide in each other. As their friendship grows, they defy the restrictions of their lowly social station and embark on a plan to better their lives.
But Hoi Wing's dreams will not go unchallenged. Jonathan Braddock, a wealthy and influential entrepreneur who heads the Asiatic Exclusion League, has decided to run for mayor. If Braddock is elected, Hoi Wing will be sent back to China.
The Laundryman's Boy is a moving coming of age story that bravely examines notions of race, duty and friendship in early Canada. (Inside Book Flap)

In the late 1990s, culture writer Lydia Perović immigrated from Montenegro to the open, optimistic country of Canada and threw herself into its vibrant artistic and cultural communities. She was happy with her decision until about five years ago, when Canada began to change. It turned inward, lost its will to be a nation and a culture, and grew increasingly illiberal in speech and imagination. At the same time, Perović noticed that Canadian arts journalism and criticism began to disappear, leaving her colleagues to take their expertise in topics like literature and opera to the United States, or even to real estate journalism.
Just as she felt she was losing her country, Perović lost her mother, and found herself at a crossroads, questioning all of her life choices. Is she really a Canadian? Is the Canadian project a lost cause? What is a life without a national culture? Why is it so difficult to find oneself an orphan in middle age?
In the company of Janet Ajzenstat, Charles Taylor, Northrop Frye, and Alice Munro, Perović explores some of the most profound questions of our times. Is it possible to feel at home anywhere anymore? Are meaningful lives and lasting friendships the inevitable casualties of our precarious political environment, ethnocentrism, and global media platforms?
Lost in Canada is a shrewd and moving account of one immigrant’s second thoughts about her second home, and a call for all Canadians to think harder about the future of their country and its culture. (Publisher)

2024 CBC Canada Reads Finalist

You and me in one year...Don't let me down.
Fern Brookbanks has wasted far too much of her adult life thinking about Will Baxter. She spent just twenty-four hours in her early twenties with the aggravatingly attractive and idealistic artist, a chance encounter that spiraled into a daylong adventure in the city. The timing was wrong, but their connection was undeniable: they shared every secret, every dream, and made a pact to meet one year later. Fern showed up. Will didn't.
At thirty-two, Fern's life doesn't look at all how she once imagined it would. Instead of living in the city, Fern's back home, running her mother's lakeside resort, something she vowed never to do. The place is in disarray, her ex-boyfriend is the manager, and Fern doesn't know where to begin.
She needs a plan--a lifeline. To her surprise, it comes in the form of Will, who arrives nine years late, suitcase in tow and an offer to help on his lips. Will may be the only person who understands what Fern's going through. But how can she possibly trust this expensive suit-wearing mirage who seems nothing like the young man she met all those years ago? Will is hiding something, and Fern's not sure she wants to know what it is.
But ten years ago, Will Baxter rescued Fern. Can she do the same for him now? (Back Cover)

2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize Longlist
Canadian Writers in Person Lecture Series (2024)
https://www.yorku.ca/laps/huma/canadian-writers/

An unnamed narrator abandons his unfinished thesis and returns to northern Alberta in search of what eludes him: the shape of the novel he yearns to write, an autobiography of his rural hometown, the answers to existential questions about family, love, and happiness.
What ensues is a series of conversations, connections, and disconnections that reveals the texture of life in a town literature has left unexplored, where the friction between possibility and constraint provides an insistent background score.
Whether he’s meeting with an auntie distraught over the imprisonment of her grandson, engaging in rez gossip with his cousin at a pow wow, or lingering in bed with a married man after a hotel room hookup, the narrator makes space for those in his orbit to divulge their private joys and miseries, testing the theory that storytelling can make us feel less lonely.
Populated by characters as alive and vast as the boreal forest, and culminating in a breathtaking crescendo, A Minor Chorus is a novel about how deeply entangled the sayable and unsayable can become—and about how ordinary life, when pressed, can produce hauntingly beautiful music. (Publisher)

A sparkling second-chance romance inspired by Jane Austen's Persuasion.
Nada Syed is stuck. On the cusp of thirty, she's still living at home with her brothers and parents in the Golden Crescent neighborhood of Toronto, resolutely ignoring her mother's unsubtle pleas to get married already. While Nada has a good job as an engineer, it's a far cry from realizing her start-up dreams for her tech baby, Ask Apa--the app that launched with a whimper instead of a bang because of a double-crossing business partner. Nothing in her life has turned out the way it was supposed to, and Nada feels like a failure. Something needs to change, but the past is holding on too tightly to let her move forward.
Nada's best friend, Haleema, is determined to pry her from her shell . . . and what better place to do so than at the giant annual Muslim convention held downtown, where Nada can finally meet Haleema's fiancé Zayn. And did Haleema mention Zayn's brother, Baz, will be there?
What Haleema doesn't know is that Nada and Baz have a past--some of it good, some of it bad, and all of it secret. At the convention, that past comes hurtling at Nada, bringing new complications and a moment of reckoning. Can Nada truly say goodbye to what once was, or should she hold on to her dreams . . . and find a new beginning? (Back Cover)

Canadian Writers in Person Lecture Series (2024)
https://www.yorku.ca/laps/huma/canadian-writers/

It is the early 1990s, in Kabul, Afghanistan. The Russian occupation has ended, and civil war has broken out, but life roars on in full force in the working-class town of Wazirabad.
A rash of burglaries has stolen people’s sleep. Fifteen-year-old Aziz awakens from a dark dream that prompts him to plant shards of glass along the wall surrounding his house to protect his family against theft. Aziz’s sister, Seema, decorates kites with her calligraphy and sells fresh scorpions to spare her mother from servicing the local soldiers. Along the main street, three militiamen wait for the fighting to resume, while the Baker, the Watchmaker, the Tailor, and the Vegetable Seller make their modest livings and the Bonesetter reads poetry to his cat. Every day at noon, a flaming red rooster walks three blocks to visit his favourite hens.
But tensions rise among the townspeople. The militiamen are on the hunt for the thief who stole their dog—and their ammunition. And a widow, who is the target of men’s lust and women’s scorn, soon finds herself on the periphery of terrible violence. While the armed conflict rages on in the background, rumours swirl with a feverish frenzy, culminating in the collective chorus of the town’s living, breathing dreams.
In this brilliantly kaleidoscopic, darkly funny, and wholly captivating novel about peace in a time of war, Jamaluddin Aram breathes life into the families and friends, lovers and loners, neighbors and sworn enemies who wander the winding alleys of Wazirabad. (Book Jacket, Inside Flap)

In his downtown Toronto condo, Dr. Chen awakens to the sound of streetcars below, but it is not the early morning traffic that keeps him from sleep. News banners run across his phone: Fentanyl Crisis; Toxic Drug Supply; Record Number of Deaths. From behind the headlines, on the same screen, glow the faces of his patients, the faces of the what-ifs: What if he had done more, or less? Or something different? Would they still be alive?
Claire is a violinist; she feels at one with her music, taking flight in its melody, free in its movement. But now she rises and falls with the opioids in her system, becoming increasingly reckless. After two overdoses in twenty-four hours, she sits in the blue light of her computer, searching a notice board for recommendations: my doctor saved my life; my doctor is just another dealer. And then another message catches her attention, about Chen’s clinic: be a guinea pig—why not get paid to take it?
When Claire’s life intersects with Chen’s, the doctor is drawn ever more deeply into the complexities of the doctor-patient relationship, the implication and meaning of his intention to treat. Chen must confront just how far he would go to save a life. (Publisher)

2024 Giller Prize shortlist

Engrossing, witty yet devastating stories about diasporic Indians that deftly question what it means to be safe, to survive, and to call a place home.
An underappreciated coffee shop server haunted by her past attracts thousands of followers on social media with her peacock jewellery. A hotel housekeeper up against a world of gender and class inequity quietly gets revenge on her chauvinist boss. And a foster child, orphaned in an accident directly attributable to climate change, brings down her foster father, an oil lobbyist, in spectacular fashion.
With an intense awareness of privilege and the lack of it, the fourteen stunning stories in Peacocks of Instagram explore what it means to be safe, to survive, and to call a place home. (Publisher)

2024 Giller Prize Shortlist

Métis cousins Isidore “Ezzy” Desjarlais and Grey Ginther have beef with their world. With the latest racist policy rolling out. With whatever new pipeline plowing through traditional territory. With the way a treaty (aka the army) forced the Papaschase Cree off their home on the prairie. And, on the other hand, with how Grey's friends think if they all just went back to the Rez or the settlement, life would be so much better--pretty, like an Instagram ad. Then there's the warming planet. And their future, which they seem to be screwing up quite well on their own. Being alive can't be all cribbage, Lucky Lager, and swiping the occassional catalytic converter.
One night, the cousins hatch a plan to capture a herd of bison from a nearby national park and release the animals in downtown Edmonton. They want to be seen, to be heard, and to disrupt the settler routines of the city, yet they have no idea what awaits them or what the fateful consequences of their actions will be. Balancing wit and sorrow with satire, social commentary, and whip-smart storytelling, Prairie Edge follows Ezzy and Grey's inspired misadventures as their zealous ideas about bringing about real change do indeed elicit change, just in unexpected and sometimes disastrous ways.
Conor Kerr imagines a web of Métis relationships strained by dislocation, poverty, violence, and cultural drift, but he also laces the ties that bind Ezzy and Grey--and forever bind the Métis to the land--to explore the radical possibility that a couple of inspired miscreants might actually have the power to make a difference. (Book Jacket, Inside Flap)

From the author of the nationally bestselling Strangers saga comes a heartrending story of two Michif sisters who must face past trauma when their mother is called out for false claims to Indigenous identity. (Back Cover)

From the Giller-nominated author of Frying Plantain comes an exhilarating magical realist novel about a millenial Black woman who navigates her quarter-life-crisis while embarking on a quest through the streets of Toronto.
Alicia has been out of grad school for months. She has no career prospects and lives with her mom, who won’t stop texting her macabre news stories and reminders to pick up items from the grocery store.
Then, one evening, the Jamaican water deity, River Mumma, appears to Alicia, telling her that she has twenty-four hours to scour the city for her missing comb.
Alicia doesn’t understand why River Mumma would choose her. She can’t remember all the legends her relatives told her, unlike her retail co-worker Heaven, who can reel off Jamaican folklore by heart. She doesn’t know if her childhood visions have returned, or why she feels a strange connection to her other co-worker Mars. But when the trio are chased down by malevolent spirits called duppies, they realize their tenuous bonds to each other may be their only lifelines. With the clock ticking, Alicia’s quest through the city broadens into a journey through time—to find herself and what the river carries.
River Mumma is a powerful portrayal of diasporic identities and a vital examination into ancestral ties. It is a homage to Jamaican storytelling by one of the most invigorating voices in Canadian literature. (Inside Book Flap)

2022 CBC Canada Reads Finalist
2017 Toronto Book Awards Finalist

Scarborough is a low-income, culturally diverse neighbourhood east of Toronto, the fourth largest city in North America; like many inner-city communities, it suffers under the weight of poverty, drugs, crime, and urban blight. Scarborough the novel employs a multitude of voices to tell the story of a tight-knit neighbourhood under fire: among them, Victor, a black artist harassed by the police; Winsum, a West Indian restaurant owner struggling to keep it together; and Hina, a Muslim school worker who witnesses first-hand the impact of poverty on education.
And then there are the three kids who work to rise above a system that consistently fails them: Bing, a gay Filipino boy who lives under the shadow of his father's mental illness; Sylvie, Bing's best friend, a Native girl whose family struggles to find a permanent home to live in; and Laura, whose history of neglect by her mother is destined to repeat itself with her father.
Scarborough offers a raw yet empathetic glimpse into a troubled community that locates its dignity in unexpected places: a neighbourhood that refuses to be undone. (Publisher)

Winner 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize
Canadian Writers in Person Lecture Series (2024)
https://www.yorku.ca/laps/huma/canadian-writers/

It’s 1929, and Baxter is considered lucky, as a Black man, to have a job as a sleeping car porter on a train that crisscrosses the continent. He has to smile for the white passengers, not too much and not too little, and when they call him 'George', he just has to nod and look invisible. Meanwhile, he's obsessed with teeth, and saving up enough nickel and dime tips to pay for dentistry school.
On this particular trip out west, the passengers are more unruly than usual, especially when the train is stranded for days in the mountains - the passengers' secrets start to leak out and blur with the sleep-deprivation hallucinations Baxter is having. And then, when he finds an illicit postcard of two men, Baxter’s memories and longings are reawakened; keeping the postcard puts his job in peril, but he can’t part with it or his thoughts of a certain Edwin Drew, Porter Instructor.
The Sleeping Car Porter brings to life a long-neglected part of Black and queer histories through the spellbinding, magical story of the singular - and unforgettable - Baxter. (Back Cover)

A stunning new novel from the author of Scarborough, finalist for Canada Reads and an award-winning film, about starting a new life and the unbreakable bond between the women of a family
Mary Grace Concepcion has left her family in Manila to find a better life for them all. After three years in Hong Kong, Mary Grace arrives in Toronto in the dead of winter to work as a live-in nanny. As she rises at 5 a.m. each day to care for other people's children, she reminds herself of the reason for sacrifice. In two years, if all goes well, she can bring Ale, her husband, to Canada to join her.
But this vast new city, so different from heat and bustle of their San Marcelino neighbourhood back home, is as cold and bewildering as the false smiles and growing demands of her employers, who soon drop her without a second thought. Mary Grace must find new work to keep her visa and her dream of reunification with her family alive. Although, after so much time away, she wonders if her family is falling apart.
It isn't until Mary Grace begins caring for Liz, an Alzheimer's patient, in a quiet bungalow beside the Rouge River in Scarborough, that she begins to build a surprising new community for herself. The floodgates of memory are opened, for Mary Grace and for Liz, about the women who have given them strength and love in the past and who hold the promise of what the future could be.
Beautifully narrated through the all-seeing eye of the newest member of Mary Grace's family, The Story of Us is a novel about the strength and connections of women, about blood and chosen family, and how belonging can be found where we least expect it. (Inside Book Flap)

Canadian Writers in Person Lecture Series (2024)
https://www.yorku.ca/laps/huma/canadian-writers/
Winner 2023 Scotiabank Giller Prize
2023 Booker Prize Shortlist

For readers of Shirley Jackson, Iain Reid, and Claire-Louise Bennett, a haunting, compressed masterwork from an extraordinary new voice in Canadian fiction.
A young woman moves from the place of her birth to the remote northern country of her forebears to be housekeeper to her brother, whose wife has recently left him.
Soon after her arrival, a series of inexplicable events occurs - collective bovine hysteria; the demise of a ewe and her nearly born lamb; a local dog's phantom pregnancy; a potato blight. She notices that the local suspicion about incomers in general seems to be directed with some intensity at her and she senses a mounting threat that lies 'just beyond the garden gate.' And as she feels the hostility growing, pressing at the edges of her brother's property, she fears that, should the rumblings in the town gather themselves into a more defined shape, who knows what might happen, what one might be capable of doing.
With a sharp, lyrical voice, Sarah Bernstein powerfully explores questions of complicity and power, displacement and inheritance. Study for Obedience is a finely tuned, unsettling novel that confirms Bernstein as one of the most exciting voices of her generation. (Publisher)

Three times the holiday magic. Three times the chaos.
As strangers and seatmates Maryam Aziz and Anna Gibson fly to Toronto over the holidays—Maryam to her sister’s impromptu wedding, and Anna to meet her boyfriend’s wealthy family for the first time—neither expect that severe turbulence will scare them into confessing their deepest hopes and fears. At least they’ll never see each other again. And the love of Maryam’s life, Saif, wasn’t sitting two rows behind them hearing it all. Oops.
An emergency landing finds Anna, Saif, Maryam, and her sister’s entire bridal party snowbound at the quirky Snow Falls Inn in a picture-perfect town, where fate has Anna’s actor-crush filming a holiday romance. As Maryam finds the courage to open her heart to Saif, and Anna feels the magic of being snowbound with an unexpected new love—both women soon realize there’s no place they’d rather be for the holidays. (Back Cover)

Raymond Dossougbé flees the misery of his hometown in Benin and arrives in Toronto, which as soon as he arrives charms him. He sees the city as a place of freedom and light, a sanctuary where he, like so many others, can begin anew. He is thrilled by its fast, organized pace, and by its vastness and diversity of peoples. Without prejudices or preconceptions, he allows himself to be fraternized by both the white and the black segments of society. He sees deep poverty, extreme wealth, and racism, and also the different aspects of the global black experience. Eventually he finds his bearings in this new world and comes to a better understanding of himself and the colourful characters around him.
Toronto, je t'aime won the Prix Trillium when it first came out in 2000. (Back Cover)

2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize Shortlist

For readers of Homegoing and The Boat People, a compelling and profound debut novel about a Tibetan family's journey through exile.
In the wake of China’s invasion of Tibet throughout the 1950s, Lhamo and her sister, Tenkyi, arrive at a refugee camp on the border of Nepal, having survived the dangerous journey across the Himalayas into exile when so many others did not. As Lhamo—haunted by the loss of her homeland and her mother, the village oracle—tries to rebuild a life amid a shattered community, hope arrives in the form of a young man named Samphel and his uncle, who brings with him the ancient statue of the Nameless Saint, a relic long rumoured to vanish and reappear in times of need.
Decades later, the sisters are separated, and Tenkyi is living with Lhamo’s daughter, Dolma, in Toronto's Parkdale neighbourhood. While Tenkyi works as a cleaner and struggles with traumatic memories, Dolma vies for a place as a scholar of Tibetan Studies. But when Dolma comes across the Nameless Saint in a collector’s vault, she must decide what she is willing to do for her community, even if it means risking her dreams.
Breathtaking in scope and powerfully intimate, We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies is a gorgeously written meditation on colonization, displacement, and the lengths we'll go to remain connected to our families and ancestral lands. Told through the lives of four people over fifty years, this beautifully lyrical debut novel provides a nuanced portrait of the world of Tibetan exiles. (Publisher)

2024 Giller Prize Shortlist

As a boy in 1960s Cairo, Tarek knows that his entire life is written in advance. He'll be a doctor like his father, marry, and have children. Under the watchful eyes of his mother and his sister, he starts to do just that - until Ali enters his life and turns it upside down. The two men, from very different worlds, embark on an unsayable relationship that threatens to tear apart Tarek's family.
Years later, as Tarek is living a solitary life in Montreal, someone starts writing about him and to him, piecing together a past he wants only to forget. But who is the writer of this tale? And will he figure it out in time? (Back Cover)

2023 Giller Prize Shortlist

The story of the restorative power of art in one man’s life, set against the sweep of the twentieth century—from Toronto in the ’20s and ’30s, through the killing fields of World War II, to 1960s Sicily.
Henry, born 1916, thin-as-sticks, nearsighted, is an obsessive doodler—copying illustrations from his Boy’s Own magazines. Left in the care of a nurturing, Shakespeare-quoting grandmother, eight-year-old Henry receives as a gift his first set of colouring pencils (and a pocket knife for the sharpening). As he commits these colours to memory—cadmium yellow; burnt ochre; deep scarlet red—a passion for art, colour, and the stories of the great artists takes hold, and becomes Henry’s unique way of seeing the world. It is a passion that will both haunt and sustain him on his journey through the century: from boyhood dreams on a summer beach to the hothouse of art academia and a love cut short by tragedy; from the psychological wounds of war to the redemption of unexpected love.
Projected against a backdrop of iconic masterpieces—from the rich hues of the European masters to the technicolour magic of Hollywood—All the Colour in the World is Henry’s story: part miscellany, part memory palace, exquisitely precise with the emotional sweep of a great modern romance. (Book Jacket, Inside Flap)

A collection that takes us into a fiery near-future and a notorious feminist's personal past, from a near-drowning to a fake breakdown, through mothers who fail us to crummy jobs, to thieves, to grief, to revenge with a bottle of tabasco sauce. With work by established practitioners alongside that of lesser-known writers, this year's Best Canadian Stories shows how the short form can evoke the experience of a person on the brink. Including 2023 Metcalf-Rooke Award winner Caroline Adderson, and featuring, in tribute, two stories by the late Steven Heighton, this year's collection draws together beloved Canadian masters of the form and thrilling new voices to continue not only a series, but a legacy in Canadian letters.
Featuring works by:
Caroline Adderson * David Bezmozgis * Jowita Bydlowska * Kate Cayley * Tamas Dobozy * Omar El Akkad * Christine Estima * Naomi Fontaine * Sara Freeman * Kathryn Gabinet-Kroo * Steven Heighton * David Huebert * Philip Huynh * Alexandra Mae Jones * Carmelinda Scian (Back Cover)