Ghosts, doppelgangers, and a man who turns into a tree: a startling fiction debut that strives to articulate the Asian immigrant body.

In the beltline of a run-of-the-mill Canadian metropolis, an apartment complex called Cambrian Court has become the focal point of an outlandish unfurling, where even the laws of physics are becoming questioned. Embr …

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 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 …

Amazon Canada First Novel Award finalist

A brilliant novel whose lead character returns home to their long-estranged mother who is now suffering from dementia.

Alani Baum, a non-binary photographer and teacher, hasn't seen their mother since they ran away with their girlfriend when they were seventeen - almost thirty years ago. But when Alani gets a …

An NPR Best Book of the Year

Pierre is a young man at a crossroads. He drops out of architecture school and decides to travel to Vals in the Swiss Alps, home to a thermal springs complex located deep inside a mountain. The complex, designed by architect Peter Zumthor, had been the subject of Pierre's thesis. The mountain holds many mysteries; it was …

A Quill and Quire Best Book of the Year

In this stunning graphic novel, Lacuna is a girl without a family, a past, or a proper home. She lives alone in a swamp made of ink, but with the help of Polaris, a will-o'-the-wisp, she embarks for the fabled Northern Kingdom, where she might find people like her. The only way to get there, though, is to trav …

For readers of Brother by David Chariandy and Scarborough by Catherine Hernandez, Adnan Khan's blistering debut novel investigates themes of race, class, masculinity, and contemporary relationships.

Omar Ali is a ticking time bomb. A phone call from his ex-girlfriend Anna's father plunges him into darkness when he learns that she's committed suicide …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize finalist

Set in the early 1990s, Ashley Little's follow-up to her award-winning novel Anatomy of a Girl Gang introduces readers to unforgettable eleven-year-old Tucker Malone--the only child of a narcoleptic touring stripper--who believes his father is Sam Malone from Cheers. He and his mother move from motel to motel unti …

Arthur is a young gay man in Montreal at a crossroads. He gets lost in a blizzard of boys and endless possibilitiesâ??looking to fall in love and to experience devotionâ??but finds himself increasingly immersed in a world of hedonism and deception, especially as he deals with the messy remains of his relationship with Jeremy, his chimerical ex-bo …

Prize-winning writer Jane Eaton Hamilton's novel explores the complexities of contemporary queer love.

On her fiftieth birthday, crazy-in-love Ajax visits her mercurial lover Logan, who trails their tarnished reputation like a lapsed halo. Logan has secrets, but so does Ajax, and during their weekend getaway to Ontario's cottage country, some of the …

1983. Vancouver is on the precipice of transforming itself from a dirty little town to a blandly sophisticated big city. Convertibles cruise beneath runty palm trees, and the air is filled with the delicious tang of ocean breezes, cheeseburgers, and pot smoke.

In this fast and furious crime novel set in the midst of a long west coast summer, an East …

Winner, Philip K. Dick Award for Distinguished Science Fiction

This unsettling novel is set thirty years in the future, in the wake of a third world war. Runaway effects of climate change have triggered the collapse of nation/states and wiped out over a third of the global population. One of the survivors, a former soldier nicknamed Mercy, suffers f …

A Globe 100 Best Book of the Year

Lambda Literary Award winner

The debut book by Hasan Namir is a revelatory novel about being queer and Muslim, set in war-torn Iraq in 2003. Ramy is a closeted university student whose parents have died, and who lives under the close scrutiny of his strict brother and sister-in-law. They exert pressure on him to fin …

A stirring graphic novel based on the extraordinary book by Irene Nemirovsky.

Suite Francaise, an extraordinary novel about village life in France just as it was plunged into chaos with the German invasion of 1940, was a publishing sensation ten years ago; Irene Nemirovsky completed the two-volume book, part of a planned larger series, in the early …

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 …

A novel about a boy with a stutter, and the tangled barbs of repressed memory.

Montreal, 1979. A boy's speech starts to fracture along with the cement of le Stade olympique. Do they share a fault line? Daniel Allen Cox's unconventional fourth novel tells the story of a boy with a stutter who grows up and uses sound to remember the past. A coming-of- …

By the author of Blue Is the Warmest Color: a stunning graphic novel on the downfall of a rock legend.

Jul Maroh burst onto the scene in 2013 with Blue Is the Warmest Color, a tender, bittersweet graphic novel about lesbian love, in which a young woman named Clementine becomes infatuated with Emma, a girl with blue hair. The book spawned a controver …

City of Vancouver Book Award Winner

In his debut story collection, poet Wayde Compton explores the concept of place and identity in which characters and space merge to make narrative. These interconnected stories, imbued with the colour of speculative fiction, are towering in their conceits. As much as characters are revealed by what they do and say …

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 …

First published to acclaim in Australia, Look Who's Morphing by Asian-Australian writer Tom Cho is a funny, fantastical, often outlandish collection of stories firmly grounded in pop culture. The book's central character undergoes a series of startling transformations, shape-shifting through figures drawn from film, television, music, books, porn f …

Sarah Schulman's surprising novel about a brokenhearted waitress looking for love in New York's Lower East Side.

In this new edition of Sarah Schulman's acclaimed 1988 novel, the unnamed narrator is a no-nonsense coffee-shop waitress in New York's bohemian Lower East Side who is nursing a broken heart after her girlfriend Dolores leaves her for anot …

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

A sharply observed novel told in six voices, Anatomy of a Girl Gang is the powerful exploration of a young girl gang in Vancouver called the Black Roses: Mac, the self-appointed leader and mastermind; Mercy, the Punjabi princess with a skill for theft; Kayos, their fo …

A beautiful suite of stories set in Spain, Africa, and North America: an elegy to love, longing, and the eternal outsider.

The truth I seek lies beneath the skin, under flesh, below bone, beyond scalpel's reach.
In the 1990s, Patrick Roscoe was known as the great iconoclast of Canadian fiction. As author of such acclaimed short-story collections as …

Kelli Deeth's first book since her acclaimed 2001 debut The Girl without Anyone (a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year) is a collection of stories about missed connections and unrequited desire. Deeth's female protagonists confront the emotional complexities of marriage, childlessness, adoption, adolescent longing, friendship, and death; they mour …

Rent boys, aristocrats, artists, and criminals populate this sweeping novel in which author Jonathan Kemp skillfully interweaves the lives and loves of three very different men in gay London across the decades.

In the 1890s, a young man named Jack apprentices as a rent boy and discovers a life of pleasure and excess that leads to new friendships, mo …

Lambda Literary Award Finalist

Transgender indie electronica singer-songwriter Rae Spoon has six albums to their credit, including 2012's I Can't Keep All of Our Secrets. This first book by Rae (who uses "they" as a pronoun) is a candid, powerful story about a young person growing up queer in a strict Pentecostal family in Alberta.

The narrator atten …

Lambda Literary Award and Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction Finalist

A frustrated Canadian geologist studying global warming becomes obsessed with eating rocks after embarking on his first same-sex relationship in Europe. Back home, his young sister is a high-school girl who suddenly starts to ooze honey through her pores, an affliction that attr …

Danuta Gleed Literary Award runnerup

A line-dancing aficionado visits his brother in jail in hopes of mending their relationship, and instead discovers his own unwitting role in his brother's failed life. After the death of his wife and children, a logger tries to survive the Thanksgiving weekend on his own. A delinquent teen's life is changed fore …

In this taut, beautifully layered novel by Lambda Literary, ReLit, and Ferro-Grumley Award finalist Cox (Shuck, Krakow Melt), Michael-David is a paranoid actor who feels that fame has ruined him. When a film shoot with wolves for co-stars takes a troubling turn, he disappears shortly before the premiere and barricades himself in an L.A. hotel, conv …

Crossings was Betty Lambert's only novel; published by Pulp Press in 1979, it was revolutionary for its frank and unsettling portrayal of Vicky, a female writer in Vancouver in the early 1960s, an educated and intelligent woman who struggles to come to terms with herself as she navigates an emotionally abusive relationship with Mik, a violent logge …

PAPERBACK EDITION

Sarah Schulman's acclaimed dystopian satire about urban mores is set in New York sometime in the future, when the city has morphed into an idealized version of itself: rent is cheap, homelessness is nonexistent, and the only job left is in marketing. But all is not as it seems, when a murder is committed by a prominent New York …

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 …

During the last eighteen years of his life (1968-86), Jean Genet was preoccupied with the struggles of the disenfranchised and displaced: among them, the Black Panthers, the Baader-Meinhof, and the Palestinians. Hadrien Laroche's book is a careful philosophical and historical reading (though fascinating as a political thriller) of the acts and thou …

Heartways, a collaboration between the Whitney Museum of American Art, Printed Matter Inc, and Arsenal Pulp Press, is an extraordinary faux romance compilation that deconstructs art, literature, sex, and desire in one fell swoop. Constructed as a "novel," each chapter is written by a different contributor, all of whom create romantic tableaux that …

American Whiskey Bar is a remarkable faux memoir about the un-making of a film--a film which Michael Turner was commissioned to write. However, whether or not this film was ever made is debatable. And only one print is said to exist. Nevertheless, American Whiskey Bar, a film seen by only a handful of people, is well on its way to becoming a curiou …

They were falling through time together. Moth was being clubbed by Travis in perpetual night, in foreign landscapes. It was Day One. The sky was blue and Moth was dead. He fought Travis in the ring, in a palace, on a barge. He could see every fight imposed on the fight before, the past getting smaller the closer it got to the bottom of the tunnel. …

The boy sleeps and dreams and wakes and feels the same. Different, but the same. The core of his body burns bright, hazy but strong. He's never felt so strong as he does now, on the verge of something he's not sure about, and terribly excited.
-from "The Boy Who Stopped"

In these raw, uncompromising stories, author George K. Ilsley explores the thi …

Step into a world of dream, of fantasy, of erotic tales spiked with poetic imagery. Step into Quixotic Erotic, the new collection of lesbian erotica from Tamai Kobayashi.

Like being awakened from a dream by a soft, sensuous caress, the stories in Quixotic Erotic stimulate the senses. From a birthday surprise to a torrid office dalliance, these tales …