Winner, Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Emerging Writers (Writers' Trust of Canada) and the Indigenous Voices Award; finalist, Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature

In her powerful debut collection of poetry, Arielle Twist unravels the complexities of human relationships after death and metamorphosis. In these spare yet pow …

In an era when talks of reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples strive to atone for past wrongs (and tragic injustices that persist to this day), Ryan McMahon's debut story collection takes a sharp, unwavering, and yes, hilarious look at the paradoxical state of Aboriginal-settler relations, and the ironies, pitfalls, and sweet …

Sixteen-year-old Bart Lively desperately wants to feel comfortable in his own skin. Being a jock doesn't mean he isn't the target of gay jokes, and the macho culture of his swim team is wearing him down. When he gives in to his curiosity and tries synchronized swimming, he discovers he has a natural talent -- not to mention a spark with one of the …

Sketchtasy takes place in that late-night moment when everything comes together, and everything falls apart: it's an urgent, glittering, devastating novel about the perils of queer world-making in the mid-'90s.

This is Boston in 1995, a city defined by a rabid fear of difference. Alexa, an incisive twenty-one-year-old queen, faces everyday brutality …

The traditions of Syrian cooking, which go back hundreds of years, are notable for their sensory components, in which aroma and texture are as important as taste and nutrition. Over the centuries, the unique dishes of Greater Syria (bilaad al-shaam) were preserved by those who cooked them. For cooks in imperial households, family homes, or on simpl …

Finalist, Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction

In their new, long-awaited collection of essays, Lambda Literary Award-winning writer and longtime disability justice activist and performance artist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha explores the politics and realities of disability justice, a movement that centres the lives and leadership of sick an …

2019 CANADA READS FINALIST

Shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust of Canada Prize for Nonfiction; Winner, Hubert Evans Nonfiction Prize; Longlisted for the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour

In this jaw-dropping, darkly comedic memoir, a young woman comes of age in a dysfunctional Asian family who blame their woes on ghosts and demons when t …

Finalist for Bill Duthie Booksellers' Choice Prize (BC Book Prizes); Crime Writers of Canada Arthur Ellis Award; City of Vancouver Book Award

When forty-year-old Esther Castellani died a slow and agonizing death in Vancouver in 1965, the official cause was at first undetermined. The day after Esther's funeral, her husband, Rene, packed up his girlfr …

WINNER, Lambda Literary Award

In this visionary novel by Larissa Lai -- her first in sixteen years -- a community of parthenogenic women, sent into exile by patriarchal and corporate Salt Water City, go to war against disease, technology, and an economic system that threatens them with extinction.

Kirilow is a doctor apprentice whose lover, Peristrop …

Jim Wong-Chu is a legend in the Asian Canadian writing community. As founder of the Asian Canadian Writers' Workshop (and its magazine Ricepaper), he constantly encouraged and inspired writers across the country to get their work published and acknowledged, from Paul Yee and Evelyn Lau to Madeleine Thien and Catherine Hernandez. When Jim passed awa …

The shocking images of neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville, Virginia, in the summer of 2017 linger, but so do those of the passionate anti-fascist protestors who risked their lives to do the right thing. In this stirring graphic non-fiction book by the author of The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book, Gord Hill looks at the history of fascism ove …

Drawn from 22 books of poetry published by David Bromige in his lifetime, if wants to be the same as is chronicles the career of one of contemporary poetry's most distinctive writers. Born in London, England, in 1933, raised in Canada, and a resident for most of his adult life of California, David Bromige is just as difficult to pin down in terms o …

2021 CANADA READS WINNER

WINNER, Lambda Literary Award; Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction

Finalist, Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction; Amazon Canada First Novel Award; Indigenous Voices Award; Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award; Firecracker Award for Fiction

Longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize

A Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year

A to …

American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book

A moving and intimate LGBTQ graphic novel about two women, both of whom are trying to put the pieces of their lives back together.

Still smarting years after a horrible breakup, Rayanne diligently buries herself in her work. Aside from work, she has her cat. And other than her cat, she has her crushes …

WINNER, Amazon Canada First Novel Award; Lambda Literary Award; Firecracker Award for Fiction

Finalist, Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award

A Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year

It's the dead of winter in Winnipeg and Wendy Reimer, a thirty-year-old trans woman, feels like her life is frozen in place. When her Oma passes away Wendy receives an unexpect …

The worlds of urban gentrification, overpriced real estate, and gang violence collide in this wry and sardonic crime novel by author and comedian Charles Demers (Vancouver Special, The Horrors).

As a shaky truce between suburban gangsters starts to unravel, schlubby civilian Scott Clark has other things on his mind: if he can't afford to buy out his …

A modern retelling of the Camus classic that posits its story of infectious disease and quarantine in our contemporary age of social justice and rising inequity.

At first it's the dead rats; they start dying in cataclysmic numbers, followed by other city creatures. Then people begin experiencing flu-like symptoms as well as swellings in their lymph …

Lambda Literary Award and Sunburst Award finalist; a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year

It's the summer of 1990, and Crystal Beach in Ontario has lost its beloved, long-running amusement park, leaving the lakeside village a virtual ghost town. It is back to this fallen community Starla Mia Martin must return to live with her overbearing mother aft …

A Queer Film Classic on a controversial 1980 film by queer Filipino filmmaker Ishmael Bernal.

A Queer Film Classic on Ishmael Bernal's 1980 film that follows a dozen characters, all denizens of Manila's sordid yet exuberant underworld, as they pursue life, love, and pleasure. Bernal cited Robert Altman's Nashville as one of the influences on his epi …

From the author of Blue Is the Warmest Color: a beautiful, bittersweet graphic novel on the complexities of love.

Jul Maroh's first book, Blue Is the Warmest Color, was a graphic novel phenomenon; it was a New York Times bestseller, and the controversial film adaptation by French director Abdellatif Kechiche won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Fes …

The hidden life of Howe Sound and the transformative power of Coast Salish culture and environmental science. An exhilarating mix of natural history and personal exploration Whale in the Door is a passionate account of a woman's transformative experience of her adopted home. For thousands of years, Howe Sound, an inlet in the Salish Sea provided ab …

A new edition of the colourful history of Vancouver's Penthouse Nightclub, which celebrates its seventieth anniversary in 2017.

The after-hours watering hole for the famous and infamous, the Penthouse was opened in 1947 by brothers Joe, Ross, Mickey, and Jimmy Filippone and soon became the place to see and be seen in Vancouver in the 1950s and '60s. …

Winner, George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature
Finalist, Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize (BC Book Prizes)
Finalist, Vancouver Book Award

North America is in the grips of a drug epidemic. While deaths across the continent soar, Travis Lupick's Fighting for Space explains the concept of harm reduction as a crucial component of a city' …

A sequel to the acclaimed Such a Lovely Little War: growing up Vietnamese in swinging London as the Vietnam war intensifies.

Marcelino Truong's first book about the early years of the Vietnam war, the graphic memoir Such a Lovely Little War (2016), received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews and was named "one the season's best …

A wickedly funny book in which the author recasts historical events and personalities from her own feminist perspective.

What I Think Happened, the debut book by comedian Evany Rosen, is really two books: a savvy, no-holds-barred romp through the history of the western world, and the personal story of a self-described "failed academic" who recasts …

Taste Canada Award finalist

A modern take on Dutch cuisine that highlights the ways that simple meals bring joy and comfort.

In the same way that British, Scandinavian, and German food have undergone a renaissance in recent years, Dutch cuisine is going to be the next big thing, according to writer and blogger Emily Wight. Her new cookbook reimagines …

A magic-realist novel set in seventh-century China featuring ghosts, martial arts, and the transformative oracle bone.

Life in seventh-century China teems with magic, fox spirits, and demons; there is a fervent belief that the extraordinary resides within the lives of both commoners and royalty. During the years when the empress Wu Zhao gains ascend …

A magical gender variant child brings transformation and change to the world around them thanks to their mother's enduring love.

In the magical time between night and day, when both the sun and the moon are in the sky, a child is born in a little blue house on a hill. And Miu Lan is not just any child, but one who can change into any shape they can …

A powerful dystopian novel set during a new American civil war, about a polygamist cult leader and his followers.

In this eerily relevant, cautionary novel, a civil war is brewing in America. Below ground, a cult led by the deluded and narcissistic Father Ernst is ensconced in an underground bunker, waiting out the conflict. When the "Family" runs o …

Finalist, Governor General's Literary Award for Non-Fiction

A Globe 100 Best Book of the Year

Finalist, Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize (BC Book Prizes)

When Carys Cragg was eleven, her father, a respected doctor, was brutally murdered in his own home by an intruder. Twenty years later, and despite the reservations of her family and friends, she decid …

The latest by Angie Abdou: young Eli invokes the spirit, and the mistakes, of his great-great-grandfather.

In Canada Reads finalist Angie Abdou's fifth work of fiction, Eli and his parents have returned to their family home in Coalton, a small mountain town. The parents, Nicholas and Lucy, hope that by escaping their hectic city lives, they will res …

An offbeat story collection about strange, imperfect people doing strange, imperfect things.

In poet Dina Del Bucchia's debut story collection, an older woman becomes obsessed with the state of her lawn, a pet architect jeopardizes her relationship with her wife over a wild bird, a cement mixer helps a woman fulfill her dreams, a former model become …

“Literary escapades enlighten and entertain in this boundary-pushing collection.” (Foreword Reviews)

“The maestro is at it again” (The Vancouver Sun)

Ten Women is a new collection of short fiction from one of Canada’s preeminent writers. Each of these stories offers us a portrait of a woman with whom the author may or may not have had eithe …

The time is the early 1980s. Judith Plant and her new partner, Kip, are ready for a change. Inspired by the charismatic Fred Brown, their communications professor at Simon Fraser University, they join a commune in a remote valley near the Yalakom River, deep in BC's Coast Mountains. Culture Gap: Towards a New World in the Yalakom Valley tells the s …

A Queer Film Classic on John Waters' 1974 dark comedy.

The first title in the Queer Film Classic series to focus on the work of legendary director and cinematic camp icon John Waters, best known for the underground classic Pink Flamingos and his later more commercial works such as Crybaby, starring Johnny Depp, and Hairspray, which was also made int …

Finalist, Crime Writers of Canada Arthur Ellis Award

During his forty-two-year-career he helped detectives in Vancouver, Victoria, and throughout BC solve hit-and-runs, safe-crackings, and some of the most sensational murder cases of the 20th century. Vance was constantly called to crime scenes and to testify in court because of his skills in serolo …

SHORTLISTED FOR CANADA READS 2022

NOW A MOTION PICTURE directed by Shasha Nakhai and Rich Williamson; screenplay by Catherine Hernandez

Trillium Book Award and City of Toronto Book Award finalist; Edmund White Debut Fiction Award finalist; A Globe 100, National Post and Quill and Quire Best Book of the Year

Scarborough is a low-income, culturally dive …

A cookbook inspired by how food from around the world not only connects us all, but also reminds us of home.

Cooking outside one's comfort zone is now easier than ever: ingredients once considered exotic are available at supermarkets across the country, and we're more open to exploring the far reaches of the world through food. This tantalizing cook …

Winner, Writers' Trust of Canada's Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Emerging Writers; American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book; Finalist, Lambda Literary Award and Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender Variant Literature

This extraordinary poetry collection is a vivid, beautifully wrought journey to the place where forgotten ancestors …

Winner, ReLit Award; Finalist, Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize (BC Book Prizes)

A YouTube star becomes famous after he documents his breakup online. An anxious, lactose-intolerant office worker obsesses over a stranger who says "Nice shorts, bro" to him in passing. A couple wants to open up their relationship to a ghost. A monster just wants to find love …

A YA novel about Keira, a figure skater just entering high school who's intrigued about kissing both boys and girls.

In this compelling novel for young adults, Keira is a quirky but shy teen entering her first year of high school; she navigates her growing interest in kissing both girls and boys, while not alienating her BFF, boy-crazy Sita. As the …

Few recent events in British Columbia have seized the public mind like the 2006 sinking of the BC Ferries passenger vessel Queen of the North. Across Canada, it was one of the top news stories of the year. In BC it has attained the status of nautical legend. Ten years later, questions are still being asked. How did a ship that sailed the same cours …

A Queer Film Classic on 1974's Arabian Nights by Pier Paolo Pasolini, the controversial Italian director who was murdered under mysterious circumstances in 1975.

Already internationally distinguished as a poet, novelist, and outspoken social critic of the postwar period, Pasolini turned to filmmaking around 1960. In little more than a decade, he pro …

With an eye for style and appreciation for seasonal ingredients, the proprietors of Chowgirls Killer Catering, one of the Midwest's leading catering companies, share their inspired ideas for delicious appetizers, small plates, and cocktails that are perfect for home entertaining. Amy and Heidi were early adopters of the local, organic, sustainable, …

From intimate relationships to global politics, Sarah Schulman observes a continuum: that inflated accusations of harm are used to avoid accountability. Illuminating the difference between Conflict and Abuse, Schulman directly addresses our contemporary culture of scapegoating. This deep, brave, and bold work reveals how punishment replaces persona …

This riveting, beautifully produced graphic memoir tells the story of the early years of the Vietnam War as seen through the eyes of a young boy named Marco, the son of a Vietnamese diplomat and his French wife. The book opens in America, where the boy's father works for the South Vietnamese embassy; there the boy is made to feel self-conscious abo …

Lambda Literary Award winner

To remedy means to heal, to cure, to set right, to make reparations.

The Remedy invites writers and readers to imagine what we need to create healthy, resilient, and thriving LGBTQ communities. This anthology is a diverse collection of real-life stories from queer and trans people on their own health-care experiences and …

Shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust of Canada Prize for Nonfiction; Longlisted for the BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction; Stonewall Book Award Honor Book winner; Longlisted for Canada Reads

Ivan Coyote is a celebrated storyteller and the author of ten previous books, including Gender Failure (with Rae Spoon) and One in Every C …

Charles Demers is a thirtysomething comedian and the author of three books; George Bowering is eighty, Canada's first poet laureate, and the author of more than eighty books. Charlie and George are also the best of friends. And the fathers of daughters.

In this unique book of correspondence, these two men from different generations write to each oth …