''What is for you the breath of life?'' Someday—itsuka—Naomi Nakane will answer this question. In Obasan, Naomi's childhood was torn apart by Canada's betrayal of Japanese Canadian citizens during the 1940s. Now, years later, Naomi's scars have left her fragile and uncertain. Quietly teaching school on the prairies, she watches as her family sl …

The fifth novel in the Desrosiers Diaspora series from Québécois national treasure Michel Tremblay.

It’s May 1922, and preparations are in full swing for the marriage of Nana and Gabriel, which will take place the following month. There’s just one problem: Nana’s wedding dress has yet to be bought. Nana’s mercurial mother, Maria, torn bet …

Emotional and uplifting, Outside is the story of a teacher's escape to Japan from classroom, country, and self in the wake of a small-town Ontario tragedy.

David Woods, a first-year teacher, shares his grade-4 students' passion for nature and their reluctance to be hemmed in by classroom walls. He pushes the boundaries of risk and the constraints of …

"Absolutely brilliant!" — Guy Maddin
The sentimental and financial education of a young Jewish Winnipegger in and around 1968.

1968. Winnipeg Beach. Summer. Poor Jewish boy meets rich Jewish girl. The sun is high, libidos soar, even the high is high. And as the poor boy tries to marry up, the Jacob-Rachel myth gives way to an Icarian leap.

The stil …

With this special 20th Anniversary edition, Richard Van Camp re-releases his first bestselling collection of short stories. There is pain in these stories and there is loss. There is death, but there is also rebirth, and there is always the search from each of the narrators for personal truth. This collection of hilarious and profound stories is w …

It’s summer 2017 in Vancouver, BC, where economic imperatives are making space less and less accessible to low-income residents. The rental crisis is intensifying, ravenous real-estate development is thriving and there is a province-wide forest fire emergency blanketing the city in smoke.

Notice is the Kafkaesque story of a man under threat of ren …

Fake It So Real takes on the fallout from a punk-rock lifestyle—the future of “no future”—and its effect on the subsequent generations of one family. In June of 1983, Gwen, a gnarly Nancy Spungen look-alike, meets Damian, the enigmatic leader of a punk band. Seven years and two unplanned pregnancies later, Damian abandons Gwen, leaving her …

CA

The English poet, William Blake said, "joy and woe are woven fine." So it is in The Crooked Thing. A collection of intense and emotional stories, there are traumas and betrayals, loves and losses, missed opportunities and discoveries, and above all, hope. In tales delicate and steely, a troubled young ferryman finds himself with an unexpected passe …

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 …

Bill Arnott guides readers on an epic literary odyssey following history’s most feared and misunderstood voyageurs: the Vikings!

To “go Viking” is to embark on an epic journey. For more than eight years, Bill Arnott journeyed throughout the northern hemisphere, discovering sites Scandinavian explorers raided, traded, and settled – finding Vi …

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 …

Searing and lyrical, Marie-Sissi Labrèche's auto-fictional novel, Borderline, describes a young girl's experience growing up in Montreal's working-class neighbourhood of Hochelaga-Maisonneuve. Raised by her "two mothers" - a stern grandmother and a mother struggling with schizophrenia, the story's protagonist, Sissi, is artistic, feral, fragile, i …

"Andra-Warner has given us a great read with this slim biography. Her story-telling skills excel at distilling historical facts into compelling narrative."—Thunder Bay Chronicle-Review

A quick-paced and engaging biography of Canada's favourite northern poet, Robert Service.

Born in England in 1874 to Scottish parents, Robert William Service was rai …

Born on the twin backs of torpidity and obsession, In the Beggarly Style of Imitation is a voyage into the mind of one of the Canadian literary underground’s most unruly writers. Equal parts tribute to the historical genesis of the novel and the well-trodden subject of love, the exercises of imitation contained in this collection offer a brief su …

Bestselling author Alice Livingstone is dead. She leaves her philosopher husband, Antoine, to deal with her legacy, towards which he feels increasingly estranged. Confronted with his wife’s much-reported disappearance, Antoine revisits their past relationship: open and liberal on the outside, but constrained and deviant on the inside. The news o …

When underachieving writer Larry Mann is granted the lucrative opportunity to ghostwrite the memoirs of the notorious and eccentric businessman-turned-politician Maxime Montblanc, he accepts immediately, tantalized by the financial benefits he’s promised. However, as the two men begin to learn about and confide in one another, hints of their past …

Seven Floors Down follows the lives of Ryder and Kendall through bouts of homicide and homelessness, beginning when Ryder gets out of jail and crashes with his alcoholic friend who, on the verge of being evicted, remains infuriated with an ex-cop who owes him thousands. Kendall is a raconteur who entertains with countless stories, often while lying …

Told from two points of view—a mother and her daughter—Mad Cow examines farming life in small-town Alberta, a life fourteen-year-old Allyson wants only to escape. Meanwhile her mother, Donna, dealing with her own assortment of problems and setbacks, soldiers on through the daunting days. But when a strange affliction starts picking off the loca …

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 …

Wanting Everything presents the collected works of Vancouver writer Gladys Hindmarch. In addition to reproducing newly revised editions of her book-length works (The Peter Stories, A Birth Account, and The Watery Part of the World), the volume collects unpublished works of prose as well as correspondence, criticism, oral history interviews, and occ …

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 …

1950s, New Denver: Pavel and Nina are among 200 Russian Doukhobor children separated from their families and community, and placed in a residential facility in the Kootenay region of BC. Forcibly removed from their homes by the RCMP, the children attend mandatory school. They must speak in English and observe Canadian customs and religious practice …

ADel Hanks is on the verge of academic tenure, but at forty she’s also perched on the precipice of either the beginning or the end of the rest of her life.

Black Star is a dark comedy, both bitingly funny and transgressive, an unflinching and unsentimental exploration of the female experience, academia, and the idea of power that burns in the mind …

His Hopi princess bride has left him for the head of the philosophy department and his PhD thesis is stalled; what is left for an Iowa farmboy to do but to board a slow boat to Yokohama? John Fox leaves the academic desert of New Mexico for Japan, in search of fame and inspiration among the Ainu, the white aborigines of Hokkaido. While his adventu …

A powerful novel of redemption and revenge inspired by a real American Civil War mystery.

For Clayton Monroe, the last hope for refuge is a struggling settlement at the far northwest corner of Vancouver Island. San Josef is his sanctuary from the imagined demons and real enemies who have pursued him for three decades, from the Civil War battlefields …

At the crossroads at the end of childhood, Nana faces the hectic passing of her adolescence and the arrival of new responsibilities as her grandmother Joséphine approaches her last hours. To calm the storm, Nana reads the enthralling tales of Josaphat-the-Violin – a returning character in Tremblay’s Plateau-Mont-Royal Chronicles. Three of Josa …

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 provocative, beautiful and visionary novel of first contact by New York Times bestselling author Steven Erikson.
Imagine a First Contact without contact, and an alien arrival where no aliens show up. Imagine the sudden appearance of exclusion zones all over the planet, into which no humans are allowed. Imagine an end to all violence, from the sc …

There are too many stories about Indigenous women who go missing or are murdered, and it doesn’t seem as though official sources such as government, police or the courts respond in a way that works toward finding justice or even solutions. At least that is the way Wren StrongEagle sees it.

Wren is devastated when her twin sister, Raven, mysterious …

Preying on loving parents is second nature to Suzanne Foley. So is drinking to oblivion while shilling for the publicly-supported Alberta Broadcasting System (ABS). When new management from Toronto threatens to gut the station, Suzanne rallies reluctant coworkers to fight back. Sex with a younger man, intrusive memories and regular trips to the pre …

When Annika Torrey is diagnosed with cancer, she has no one in her life she can turn to.  Divorced and estranged from her fundamentalist family, she sells her life insurance policy for cash, hoping to live out her final days in peace. But then Annika is given a rare second chance. Meanwhile, struggling real-estate agent Matt Campbell is drowning in …

Highlighting the tension between insiders and outsiders, and set against a sinister backdrop, Fireweed and Bracken follows the life of Effie Cambridge who, awkward and searching, leaves her complicated life in Ontario to work as a high school teacher in Charlottetown, PEI, where she makes friends, courts rejection, finds love, and struggles to come …

Cheap Thrills takes place over the course of a single weekend, beginning with the incessantly stoned Ethan and his roommate Phil discovering the body of their weed dealer in a Vancouver alley alongside a box of porno magazines and crime noir paperbacks. Tasked by his eccentric boss with locating the money the dealer had been carrying, gang member W …

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 …

Oh my goodness. Did you ever get to thinking that "down on your luck" isn't just an expression? And that what we need here is a bigger statement? Something that adequately describes the scope of the situation? Like when your ex-wife spends all of her time angrier than a five-dollar pistol at everything on the planet, but mostly at you (well, really …

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 …

Shortlisted for the 2020 ReLit Award for Short Fiction

A collection of captivating stories that explore family dynamics and frailty, loss and atonement, faith and redemption.

A young man takes his father to Hawaii, even though he’s been dead for months. An organ player won’t let her newly amputated arm stand in the way of Sunday duties. A grad st …

A picturesque, reflective journey along the route of the ancient Milk River, from southern Alberta into northern Montana.

The Milk River is a small and dreamy river, flowing lazily through some of the loneliest lands of North America, the dry plains of Alberta and Montana. Dwarfed by such giants as the Saskatchewan and Mississippi Rivers, it is inde …

Formally inventive, Simon Brousseau’s Synapses orchestrates a series of beautifully crafted literary snapshots, each involving a different character, eloquently presented using a sole, twisting and turning, stylistically accomplished sentence written in the second-person singular. Brousseau depicts a vast society of differing psyches and souls, a …

In Like Joyful Tears, readers see first-hand the trauma and havoc wreaked by civil war. Victoria Deng of southern Sudan is sixteen when her school is attacked by northern soldiers and everyone but herself and her sister Mary are massacred. The girls are soon rescued by southern rebel soldiers, who are escorting hundreds of children on the harrowing …

An anonymous writer stays up late into the night penning personal and inappropriate letters to a local public official. A new father and cook at a Montreal café chronicles the tyrannical rise of a new manager. An eccentric young student, in trying to carve out a space for herself, deals an existential blow to her roommate. Dead Flowers is a collec …

Composed over a period of profound illness, Visual Inspection is a searching reflection on poetry, power and our embodied lives. Shaped by matching elements of literary history, poetic practice, contemporary art, politics and ecology with Rader’s own experience of chronic illness and pain, Visual Inspection writes into and through what is accessi …

The characters of Moccasin Square Gardens inhabit Denendeh, the land of the people north of the sixtieth parallel. These stories are filled with in-laws, outlaws and common-laws. Get ready for illegal wrestling moves (“The Camel Clutch”), pinky promises, a doctored casino, extraterrestrials or “Sky People,” love, lust and prayers for peace. …