A poignant bilingual YA graphic novel about a teenage girl's harrowing experience crossing the Mexico-US border.

This compelling young adult graphic memoir, based on real events, tells the story of Gricelda, a fifteen-year-old Mexican girl who attempts to cross the border into America with her mother and younger brother in search of a better life. T …

A visually stunning graphic non-fiction book on queer and trans resistance.

Over the past ten years, we have witnessed the rise of queer and trans communities that have defied and challenged those who have historically opposed them. Through bold, symbolic imagery and surrealist, overlapping landscapes, queer illustrator and curator Syan Rose shines …

Indigenous Voices Award finalist

A celebratory, slyly funny, and bluntly honest take on sex and romance in NDN Country.

nedi nezu (Good Medicine) explores the beautiful space that being a sensual Indigenous woman creates - not only as a partner, a fantasy, a heartbreak waiting to happen but also as an auntie, a role model, a voice that connects to ot …

Iron Goddess of Mercy by Lambda Literary Award winner Larissa Lai (for the novel The Tiger Flu) is a long poem that captures the vengeful yet hopeful movement of the Furies mid-whirl and dance with them through the horror of the long now. Inspired by the tumultuous history of Hong Kong, from the Japanese and British occupations to the ongoing pro-d …

A visionary young-adult illustrated novel about Eggs, a homeless girl who knows how to fly.

In a rusted unnamed city full of five-dollar hotels and flea markets, a young homeless girl named Eggs is trying to make her way in the world. She's shy and bold at the same time, and wary of strangers, but she is convinced beyond all reason that she can fly. …

2021 CANADA READS FINALIST

Winner, Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers (Writers' Trust of Canada); Longlisted for the 2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize; finalist, Governor General's Literary Award; finalist, Amazon Canada First Novel Award; finalist, Lambda Literary Award

An intergenerational saga about three Nigerian women: a novel about fo …

A moving and honest graphic memoir about the unexpected cancer journey of a young, queer, mixed-race woman.

At the age of twenty-five, Kimiko Tobimatsu was a young, queer, mixed-race woman with no history of health problems whose world was turned upside down when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. In an instant, she became immersed in a new and c …

Governor General's Literary Award finalist

Searing, intimate poems that render a history of trauma, addiction, and recovery through dreams and waking experience.

Render (v.tr.): to submit, as for consideration; to give or make available; to give what is due or owed; to give in return, or retribution; to surrender; to yield. To represent; to perform a …

The latest from Vivek Shraya's VS. Books: a poetic exploration of Black identity, history, and lived experience influenced by the constant search for liberation.

In this incendiary debut collection, activist and poet Cicely Belle Blain intimately revisits familiar spaces in geography, in the arts, and in personal history to expose the legacy of colo …

A moving, honest memoir about a man who returns to his rural hometown to take care of his cranky elderly father.

George K. Ilsley explores his complex relationship with his aging father in this candid memoir full of sharp emotion and disarming humour. George's father is ninety-one years old, a widower, and fiercely independent; an avid gardener, he' …

A defiant, beautifully realized story collection about the messy complications of contemporary queer life.

A young teenager runs from her family's conservative home to her sister's NY apartment to learn a very different set of rules. A woman grieves the loss of a sister, a "gay divorce," and the pain of unacknowledged abuse with the help of a lone w …

Finalist, Jim Deva Prize for Writing that Provokes

In her novels, poetry, and prose, Amber Dawn has written eloquently on queer femme sexuality, individual and systemic trauma, and sex work justice, themes drawn from her own lived experience and revealed most notably in her award-winning memoir How Poetry Saved My Life.

In this, her second poetry col …

Winner, Writers' Trust of Canada Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers
Shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award and the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award

In The Gospel of Breaking, Jillian Christmas confirms what followers of her performance and artistic curation have long known: there is magic in her words. Befitting someone who "spe …

American Library Association Stonewall Book Awards Honor Book; Winner, Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature

What can we hope for at the end of the world? What can we trust in when community has broken our hearts? What would it mean to pursue justice without violence? How can we love in the absence of faith?

In a heartbrea …

Finalist, Lambda Literary Award and Doug Wright Award

In the fall of 2017, the acclaimed writer and musician Vivek Shraya began receiving vivid and disturbing transphobic hate mail from a stranger. Celebrated artist Ness Lee brings these letters and Shraya's responses to them to startling life in Death Threat, a comic book that, by its existence, be …

Longlisted for Canada Reads; Finalist, City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize

In this intimate and moving graphic memoir, Teresa Wong writes and illustrates the story of her struggle with postpartum depression in the form of a letter to her daughter Scarlet. Equal parts heartbreaking and funny, Dear Scarlet perfectly captures the quiet desperation …

CANADA READS RUNNER-UP, 2024

Winner, Trillium Book Award and Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction; Finalist, Rogers Writers' Trust of Canada Fiction Prize; a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year

In Tea Mutonji's disarming debut story collection, a woman contemplates her Congolese traditions during a family wedding, a teenage girl looks for happiness …

Finalist, Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry

In their fourth collection of poetry, Lambda Literary Award-winning poet and writer Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha continues her excavation of working-class queer brown femme survivorhood and desire.

Tonguebreaker is about surviving the unsurvivable: living through hate crimes, the suicides of queer k …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

This extraordinary graphic novel is a powerful denunciation of sexual violence against women. As seen through the eyes of a twelve-year-old girl named Una, it takes place in northern England in 1977, as the Yorkshire Ripper, a serial killer of prostitutes, is on the loose and creating panic among the townspeople. As the police struggle in their clu …

In this beautiful children's picture book by Vivek Shraya, author of the acclaimed God Loves Hair, a five-year-old boy becomes fascinated with his mother's bindi, the red dot commonly worn by South Asian women to indicate the point at which creation begins, and wishes to have one of his own. Rather than chastise her son, she agrees to it, and teach …

Adult colouring books (such as Secret Garden) have exploded in popularity in recent years, embraced for their calming, therapeutic effect. This elegant, imaginative colouring book explores the dynamic, fanciful creations of iconic fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, who headed the House of Dior at the age of twenty-one before launching his own des …

In this lavish colouring book for adults, the fanciful, elegant world of artist, playwright, and filmmaker Jean Cocteau comes alive. As a playwright, he is best known for The Human Voice (1930); as a filmmaker, for directing Beauty and the Beast (1946) and Orpheus (1948). In the 1910s, he was a prominent member of the Paris avant-garde, forming fri …

QUEER FILM CLASSICS is a critically acclaimed series that launched in 2009, edited by Thomas Waugh and Matthew Hays, covering some of the most important and influential films about and/or by LGBT people made between 1950 and 2005, and written by leading LGBT film scholars and critics.

A Queer Film Classic on the 1992 Canadian feature documentary sub …

A bold YA novel about a South Asian teenager struggling with anorexia.

Just days before her eighteenth birthday, Lila has resolved to end her life. The horror of becoming an adult, and leaving her childhood behind, has broken her heart.

Faerie, a novel for young people, is the fierce yet gently unfolding story of a hyper- imaginative girl who is on a …

A funny, poignant graphic novel about a young woman's coming out amidst both Islamic and western cultures.

In this fresh, often funny autobiographical graphic novel, Beldan Sezen depicts her coming of age, and her coming out as lesbian, in both western and Islamic cultures (as the daughter of Turkish immigrants in western Europe)?to friends, family, …

Darkly off-kilter stories about the moving parts to being human.

A blind date blooms in a grocery store parking lot. Lake Erie forms the backdrop to a botched assisted suicide. A neurotic, dog-loving caretaker writes a complaint letter after an unfortunate leg-waxing incident. While his uncle lies in a coma, a young man befriends a dead homeless guy …

The first full-length poetry book by the Lambda Literary and Vancouver Book Award Winner.

Finalist, Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize

Award-winning writer Amber Dawn reveals a gutsy lyrical sensibility in her debut poetry collection: a suite of glosa poems written as an homage to and an interaction with queer poets, such as the legendary Gertrude Stein, C …

Sharp-eyed tales about outsiders, non-conformists, and iconoclasts.

In Nothing Looks Familiar, Shawn Syms' debut story collection, characters from a wide swath of society chart paths from places of danger or unhappiness into the great unknown, each grappling with a central and sometimes unanswerable question: if you fight to change your circumstance …

Angie Abdou's latest: a novel on the complexities of class, gender, parenthood, and desire.

Vero and her husband Shane have moved out of the sweet suite above his parents' garage and found themselves smack in the middle of adulthood--two kids, two cars, two jobs. They are not coping well. In response to their looming domestic breakdown, Vero and Sha …

On February 28, 2013, Benedict XVI became the first pope in nearly 600 years to resign. In abandoning a role that nearly every one of his predecessors had seen as a calling from God to be heeded until death, Joseph Ratzinger, the man who became Benedict, also relinquished a controversial religious career in which he was largely responsible for the …

Finalist, City of Vancouver Book Award

"V6A" is the postal prefix for what is often described as "the poorest neighbourhood in Canada"--Vancouver's Downtown Eastside (DTES). Statistics about the area depict conditions related to crime, drugs, sex work, and poverty that overshadow another reality based on self determination.

The anthology V6A refracts …

A Queer Film Classic on the groundbreaking 1977 documentary that profiles the lives of ordinary gay men and lesbians of different ages, races, and backgrounds. Word Is Out found a wide audience theatrically and, perhaps more importantly, had a national public-television broadcast. The film provided an intimate portrait of gay men and lesbians, and …

Beauty plus pity--that is the closest we can get to a definition of art." -Vladimir Nabokov

In this tragicomic modern immigrant's tale, Malcolm Kwan is a slacker twentysomething Asian-Canadian living in Vancouver who is about to embark on a modelling career when his life is suddenly derailed by two near-simultaneous events: the death of his filmmake …

The punk band D.O.A., established in 1978, is considered one of the founders of hardcore punk, alongside such other seminal groups as Black Flag and Minor Threat. Their raw, melodic sound, which drew comparisons to the Clash and the Ramones, has always been matched by the band's acute political sensibility; known for its uncompromising and outspok …

As seen in People and The New Yorker

Over the last 100 years, the image of the physically strong, confident, muscular woman has been the object of derision, fascination, and erotic fantasy; she is often portrayed, in both photography and illustration, as a sexy dominatrix, sexless mannequin, or sideshow freak. In this fascinating collection of rare …

Fire: A Queer Film Classic delves into the controversial 1996 lesbian love story by Indian-born director Deepa Mehta. Set in a contemporary middle-class Hindu household in the heart of Delhi, Fire is the story of Radha and Sita, the wives of two brothers, who fall in love with one another. Crisis overtakes the extended family when a servant discove …

Lambda Literary Award Finalist

Now in its second printing

Alternately unsettling and affirming, devastating and delicious, The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You, is a new collection of essays on gender and identity by S. Bear Bergman that is irrevocably honest and endlessly illuminating. With humour and grace, these essays deal with issues from women's …

When it was first published in 1988, Pat Califia's Macho Sluts, a collection of S/M stories set in San Francisco's dyke bathhouses, sex parties, and S/M gay bars, shocked the lesbian community and caused an upheaval in the field of queer publishing. Nobody had ever written so frankly about the kinky potential of woman-to-woman sex (and nobody has e …