Sakiru Adebayo
The Wildfire Verses
Sakiru is a poet and an assistant professor and the James and Eva Good Chair of African and Postcolonial Literature at Western University. He is the author of Continuous Pasts: Frictions of Memory in Postcolonial Africa (shortlisted for the African Literature Association First Book Award and finalist for the Memory Studies Association First Book Award). Dr. Adebayo is also the winner of the 2022 Nigerian Prize for Literary Criticism and the 2023 Amilcar Cabral Prize. He is the host of “The New African Diaspora Podcast”.
Wildfire Verses begins from a deeply personal place: the author’s displacement after evacuation amidst the McDougall Creek Wildfire in the Okanagan in 2023. The poems in the collection explore what it means to feel like a climate refugee while under a state of emergency. The urgent, raw tone commands attention while commemorating and documenting “the trauma of fire and the fire of trauma” that engulfed the city of Kelowna in that year.
The poems also invite sustained engagement with the questions of climate change and the limits of the Anthropocene. They press upon readers the importance of thinking beyond the human in the thick of, and in the aftermath of, climate disasters. The work invites reflections on the ways in which the vulnerabilities of global warming are unequally distributed.
The poems, however, are not hopeless. Just as Adebayo paints the dire effects of the climate crisis, his poems also dwell on the place of planetary interdependence for the survival of human and non-human beings in our increasingly burning world. This collection emphasizes the importance of climate activism and eco-collectivism in the face of environmental collapse.
Kelly Anderson
The Wild Beneath
Dr. Anderson is a physician with fellowships in emergency medicine and HIV. She spent fifteen years at the Inner City Family Health Team at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto and built the clinical team at Felix Health. After completing the Bookends Novel Fellowship, she trained at the Gateless Writing Academy and is a certified Gateless writing teacher. Kelly spent much of her childhood in British Columbia and now lives in Guelph, Ontario, with her family. The Wild Beneath is her first novel.
For fans of Greenwood and Remarkably Bright Creatures, a love story as fierce and mysterious as the sea itself. Annie MacLeod always knew she was different, growing up on a sailboat in the Pacific Northwest, navigating by the stars and swimming in the ocean. But when a tsunami shatters her world and her parents are swept away, Annie is stranded on land, grief-stricken and forced to confront just how unconventional she is, despite her enduring love for her childhood sweetheart, Evan. In the wreckage, she rescues a wordless man named Walker, who emits a hum only she can hear. Their connection is instant, elemental. When Walker disappears—along with any explanation he might hold about who she really is—Annie is forced to decide between evacuating with Evan or staying to unlock a secret that feels vital to her survival. Six years later, Annie has buried the past. But when Walker’s otherworldly sound returns, it forces a reckoning with the wild life she’s left behind. Is the truth of the ocean more powerful than she knows? The Wild Beneath is a spellbinding story of soulmates, homecoming and the ancient bonds that tie us all to the natural world.
Kelley Armstrong
A Deadly Inheritance
Kelley is the author of the Rip Through Time and Haven’s Rock mystery series as well as the YA thriller A Deadly Inheritance. Past works include the urban fantasy Otherworld series, the Cainsville gothic mystery series, the Nadia Stafford thriller trilogy, the Darkest Powers & Darkness Rising teen paranormal series, the Age of Legends teen fantasy series and the Royal Guide to Monster Slaying middle-grade fantasy series.
In the wake of her mother’s death, Liliana Chamberlain’s estranged (and very wealthy) grandparents swoop in. Or their lawyer does. Her grandparents aren’t ready to meet her, but they want her to have the life her mother walked away from, starting with Westdale Academy, the elite boarding school her mother attended. It should be a Cinderella dream come true, but Lili has serious misgivings. Yet she doesn’t have a choice, being under eighteen and dead broke.
Westdale Academy is a school of secrets as well as intriguing classmates, including Hollywood golden boy Theo Dubois and the mysterious Maddox Moreno. As she gets to know them all, Lili realizes there’s more to the school than elite-level networking. Something deadly.
For the new girl at school, investigating the deaths of past students — including Maddox’s own sister — is a very dangerous game. Do those deaths have something to do with why her mother fled Westdale at the cost of her inheritance? When a fun night out turns bloody, Theo is the prime suspect, and Liliana must race against time to connect the past with the present and discover the truth behind her inheritance.
Linwood Barclay
Not a Word
Linwood is the New York Times bestselling author of numerous previous novels and two thrillers for children. His books have been translated into more than two dozen languages. He wrote the screenplay adaptation for his novel Never Saw It Coming and his books The Accident and No Time for Goodbye have been made into TV series in France. No Time for Goodbye was a global bestseller. A native of Connecticut, he now lives in Toronto with his wife, Neetha.
Every family has secrets, but when Reece visits his parents’ house, he’s shocked to find them in bed, dead. At first glance it looks like a murder-suicide perpetrated by his father, but on closer inspection there’s clearly more to the story. For starters, inconsistencies in the crime scene suggest his dad may not have shot himself.
As Reece, shaken by his horrifying discovery, awaits questioning from the police, his phone lights up with a call. It’s the last person he ever would have expected to hear from.
Reeling from the day’s events, Reece finds himself questioning everything he thought he knew about his parents—and whether he and his own family are in danger now. While the authorities work to untangle the baffling crime scene, Reece is pulled into a web of secrets linked to the unscrupulous pharma company his father worked for years ago.
In order to protect the people he loves most, he’ll have to dig deep into his own past to understand who his parents were, what they did, and who they hurt—before he ends up paying for their sins.
Laura Bontje
Marian’s Big Dig
Laura writes children’s books that celebrate curiosity, language, and STEM. Her books include the palindrome-packed adventure Was It a Cat I Saw? (illustrated by Emma Lidia Squillari), the cicada-inspired story When the Air Sang (illustrated by Sarah Whang), and her newest book, Marian’s Big Dig (illus. Scot Ritchie). Laura is also a freelance fiction editor whose clients include award-winning authors, Big 5 publishers, indie authors, and those just beginning their writing journeys. Raised in Calgary, Alberta, Laura now lives in London, Ontario with her family.
When rock-loving Marian stumbles upon a perfect, pointy stone in the park, she just knows it is a dinosaur fossil! But her geologist mom and her fossil-hunting hero remain unconvinced, so there’s only one thing to do — Marian has to find the rest of the dinosaur. One by one, she excavates more fossils in her backyard (though her parents keep mistaking them for gardening tools and household objects). Piecing them together is puzzling, but Marian’s dinosaur is shaping up to be her best discovery yet.
This playful story told through the eyes of imaginative Marian is accompanied by real facts about fossils, further reading, and details about real life fossil discoveries made by kids.
Karma Brown
Mother is Watching
Karma is the author of ten novels, including Mother is Watching, the #1 international bestseller Recipe for a Perfect Wife, What Wild Women Do, Come Away with Me (a Globe & Mail Best Book of 2015), Globe and Mail and Toronto Star best sellers The Choices We Make, In This Moment, and The Life Lucy Knew. She is also the author of the bestseller The 4% Fix: How One Hour Can Change Your Life. An award-winning journalist, Karma has been published in SELF, Redbook and Chatelaine, among other outlets. She lives just outside Toronto with her husband, teenage daughter, and a Labradoodle named Fred.
In a world shaped by climate crisis and population decline, motherhood has become both prized and quietly monitored. For thirty-nine-year-old art conservator Mathilde “Tilly” Crewson, that has meant years spent struggling to conceive, while navigating the growing social pressure surrounding women’s bodies and reproduction.
When Tilly is tasked with restoring The Mother, a fire-damaged painting believed to be the final work of a grieving surgeon-turned artist, she becomes consumed by its disturbing history. Soon after, Tilly discovers she’s unexpectedly pregnant and it isn’t long before the horrors begin: swarms of insects, whispers in the dark, visits from her dead mother, and an increasingly terrifying bond with the painting itself.
As this malevolence intensifies, Tilly fears the forces surrounding The Mother are not only feeding on her, but on the life growing inside her. To save herself and her family, she may have to destroy the painting once and for all.
But The Mother has plans of its own.
Perfect for fans of Nightbitch and The School for Good Mothers, this unsettling novel explores the intersection between motherhood, art, and ambition, and the terror of losing control over one’s body and mind.
Su Chang
The Immortal Woman
Su Chang is a Shanghai-born Chinese-Canadian immigrant writer. Her debut novel, The Immortal Woman, was published with House of Anansi in 2025. The book is a CBC Best Fiction of 2025, a Toronto Book Award finalist, a Foreword INDIES finalist, shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, and won the 2025 Independent Publisher Book Award, among other accolades. CBC named her a “Writer to Watch” in 2025. Her short stories have won awards or been shortlisted by the Montreal Fiction Prize, SASFest Fiction Contest, Prairie Fire Fiction Contest, Canadian Authors’ Association National Contest, Disquiet Literary Prize, among others. She is a graduate of Humber School for Writers and a proud member of the Writers Union of Canada.
A sweeping generational story of heartbreak, resilience, and yearning, revealing an insider’s view of the fractured lives of Chinese immigrants and those they leave behind.
Lemei, once a student Red Guard leader in 1960s Shanghai and a journalist at a state newspaper, was involved in a brutal act of violence during the Tiananmen Square protests and lost all hope for her country. Her daughter, Lin, is a student at an American university on a mission to become a true Westerner. She tirelessly erases her birth identity, abandons her Chinese suitor, and pursues a white lover, all the while haunted by the scars of her upbringing. Following China’s meteoric rise, Lemei is slowly dragged into a nationalistic perspective that stuns Lin. Their final confrontation results in tragic consequences, but ultimately, offers hope for a better future. By turns wry and lyrical, The Immortal Woman reminds us to hold tight to our humanity at any cost.
Stephanie Cooke
Racc Pack: Prince and the Pawper
Stephanie Cooke is an award-nominated writer based out of Toronto. Some of her graphic novels include ParaNorthern, Oh My Gods!, and The Racc Pack, with bestselling creator, Whitney Gardner. She’s additionally worked on series such as My Little Pony, Cat Ninja, Archie, and more. She’s an avid reader, gamer, movie watcher, raccoon enthusiast, and pun connoisseur. Find out more about her at StephanieCooke.ca.
Dusty switches places with a pampered look-alike raccoon in this second “entertaining” (Kirkus Reviews) entry in the hilarious middle grade graphic novel series about a sneaky raccoon family who live life in the trash lane from Stephanie Cooke and Whitney Gardner!
The Bins siblings have their sights set on the big pet expo in the heart of downtown Toronto. Dusty, Scraps, and ReRe expect to loot the convention for the latest treats, and they definitely don’t expect to meet…Dusty’s doppelganger?!
Prince the Raccoon is everything Dusty isn’t—famous, pampered, and rich! But Prince wants to know what life is like outside his comfy digs and on the streets. So, with the Binses’ help, Dusty and Prince decide to switch places.
At first, Dusty has a great time living it up, but he soon learns the grass isn’t always greener on the other side… even when that side has all the snacks he can eat!
Nick Cutter
The Dorians
Nick Cutter is the pen name for Craig Davidson, a critically acclaimed Canadian author and horror novelist born in 1975 in Toronto, Ontario.
On a remote island in the Canadian wilderness, five elderly volunteers from different walks of life are given a tantalizing offer: to stall their biological clocks or even reverse them, restoring their lost youth. The chance to put death on pause — forever, perhaps. The remarkable secret lies in the high-tech harnessing of an ancient and extraordinary biological agent…one with no conscience, yet possessed with a single-minded purpose that has helped it persist for eons: the will to survive. The dark heart of unbridled human ambition finds its apex in an unholy experiment that now tests the limits of both creator and subject, eclipsing all bounds of morality and sanity…
Qurat Dar
Non-Prophet
Qurat is the author of Non-Prophet (icehouse poetry 2025), winner of the inaugural Claire Harris Poetry Prize. She was the City of Mississauga’s Youth Poet Laureate from 2021-2023 and the 2020 Canadian Individual Poetry Slam National Champion. Qurat was also a recipient of the Mississauga Arts Council’s Emerging Literary Arts Award, the Ron Lenyk Inspiring Youth Arts Award, and a Best of the Net finalist. Their poems have appeared in EVENT, Arc Poetry Magazine, and Room Magazine, as well as in the Art Gallery of Mississauga and across the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) network. Qurat has shared her words across the country on stages like The Moth, Hillside Festival, and the Ontario Summer Games.
Raw, reverent, and bursting with searing vulnerability, Non-Prophet canvases the electric tension between devotion and doubt to gods both personal and ubiquitous, and reflects on the natural and built worlds in their claims to the sacred. Winner of the inaugural Claire Harris Poetry Prize, Qurat Dar’s bold debut collection explores what it is to grapple with faith that’s “just another language you’re losing, or one you never learned to speak.”
Weaving through the boundaries of language and form, Non-Prophet meditates on things “just mundane enough to be holy / just holy enough to be mundane” — the death of a bird, the cries of mid-nightmare prayers, the misplaced shame of what it is to bleed. Dar’s poems both rage and reconcile, holding gently the pieces of a fractured identity.
Gillian Deacon
A Love Affair with the Unknown
Gillian is an award-winning broadcaster and writer. A familiar voice on CBC Radio, Gill spent over a decade as host of Here & Now, Toronto’s afternoon drive show on CBC Radio One. She is the author of the national bestsellers There’s Lead in Your Lipstick: Toxins in Everyday Bodycare and How to Avoid Them; Green for Life; and the memoir Naked Imperfection. Gill lives in Toronto with her husband and their three sons.
A refreshing look at the inevitability of uncertainty and how it can help make the hard parts of life more manageable. help make the hard parts of life more manageable.“Gill — high level of comfort with uncertainty,” a producer once noted. But Gill Deacon’s comfort level is put to the test over the course of an illness that is as mysterious as it is debilitating. During this time of not knowing, Deacon investigates the nature of uncertainty itself and demonstrates how we can choose to draw on our innate resilience and learn to thrive in an ever-changing world. She reminds us that, like comedy improvisation and jazz music, beautiful things can result from the unpredictable and unplanned. While providing evidence of the beauty in not knowing, she makes a clear and compelling case that uncertainty is a condition we are built for. In fact, our best shot at creativity, innovation, and human connection occurs when we radically embrace the uncertainty we habitually struggle against. This thoughtful examination of uncertainty by a warm and wise fellow traveller is a balm that can soothe us in troubling times.
Kim Echlin
Moderator and author of Tell Others
Kim Echlin is a Canadian novelist, translator, editor and teacher. She has written five novels. The Disappeared is translated into 20 languages and won the Barnes and Noble New Writing Award. Speak, Silence, about the International Criminal Court, won the City of Toronto Book award. Her new novel is about Enheduanna the first poet in the world to sign her own name to her poetry and to stand up against empire.
Her nonfiction focuses on social justice, women’s voices and freedom of expression. Her new collection of essays, Tell Others, reflects on literature and witness. She is a board member of PEN International.
In this moving collection, critically acclaimed novelist Kim Echlin examines how we turn to literature to measure our lives against the darknesses of our time. Tell Others explores how literature resists silencing and repression with truth and imagination.
Echlin skillfully blends her lived experience in different parts of the world—teaching in post-revolutionary China, researching war crimes in the former Yugoslavia, studying under one of Canada’s most respected Elders, Basil H. Johnston—with wide-ranging reading that offers solace and highlights the possibility to transform outrage into understanding and resistance.
Looking to her favourite writers—Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie, Ma Jian, Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, and Haruki Murakami, to name a few—Echlin grapples in fresh ways with tyranny, war, sexual violence, and censorship to bear witness to the past and look to the future. Written in characteristically unsparing and evocative prose, Tell Others is an invitation to all readers to acknowledge histories that are difficult to see and to make meaning from the stories that buried bones tell.
The author proceeds for this book will be donated to PEN Canada and PEN International.
Therese Estacion
Jelly Baby
Therese is the author of Phantompains (Book*hug Press), a poetry collection that explores her Filipinx heritage and physical disability. In 2021, the book was a finalist for both the Foreword INDIES Award for Poetry and the Firecracker Award for Poetry. She has been a guest editor for Arc Poetry magazine and Feels zine, and co-curated Smutburger’s 2023-2024 series. Based in Toronto, Estacion was an adjunct professor at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies and is training as a psychotherapist.
Defying genre and constraint, Estacion conveys how ableism has impacted her disposition and self-esteem. She also confronts her own internalized ableism and unpacks how she has come to terms with disability in all its complexity.
Jelly, Baby fearlessly uncovers the trauma, grief, and rage inherent to the struggle to accept one’s own vulnerability and reach a place of love. Inspired by Estacion’s psychotherapy training, this book is a tender examination of some of the most vulnerable aspects of the self, and a head-on challenge of self-loathing. The result is a beautiful and astute meditation on ableism and a transformative journey deep into the psyche.
Leilani Farha
Housing Inc.
Leilani is Global Director of The Shift, an international human rights organization focused on housing, finance, and climate. She was UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Housing and is a world expert on human rights and housing. She has visited hundreds of people in their homes worldwide and engages with activists and decision makers at all levels. Leilani is a lawyer, an advocate, and a dreamer who works with anyone interested in creating a just world. She lives in Ottawa, Canada.
Housing has become a crisis of humanity — one created by design and decades in the making. Leilani Farha has been in more homes than most people will ever visit — a fourdoor sedan in San Diego, a lean-to by railway tracks in Lagos, a windowless motel room in Paris, a tent on a Toronto beach. What people tell her first is never that they need housing, it’s that they want to be treated like human beings. Housing Inc. explains why they have to ask. Writing from the centre of global housing debates, Farha reckons with a crisis four decades in the making, engineered by dictators, presidents, and prime ministers, and perfected by the financial firms that turn homes into sites of extraction. The same logic that justifies dispossessing Indigenous Peoples of their lands and resources now prices out a generation, displaces tenants, destroys communities, and disappears homeless people. This crisis of humanity plays out in every country in the world. With fierce clarity, Farha argues that the fight for home requires not just better policy, but a different ideology altogether — one rooted in law, humanity, and imagination — where every person counts.
Stacey May Fowles
The Lost Season
Stacey is an award-winning journalist, author of six books and editor of four anthologies. Her writing has appeared in the Globe and Mail, the National Post, Reader’s Digest, Elle Canada, Toronto Life, The Walrus, and many others. Her non-fiction collection, Baseball Life Advice, was a national bestseller, and was selected by the Globe and Mail, the National Post, and Maisonneuve as a best book of the year, and her children’s book, The Invitation, received a Canadian Children’s Centre best book citation. Fowles lives in Toronto with her husband and daughter.
The bestselling author of Baseball Life Advice, Stacey May Fowles returns with the honesty, humour, and heart that readers love in a memoir exploring infertility, motherhood, mental health, and the work demanded of women.
After years of struggling with the pain of infertility, Stacey May Fowles had her beautiful daughter. But while motherhood brought with it many joys, it also meant losing so much of what had gotten her through those years of wanting. With her characteristic introspection, Stacey May explores what it means to create life with a traumatized body, the sometimes uncomfortable fit of wearing both motherhood and ambition, and the ways in which our ideas of how a mother moves through the world limit and hurt us — and often sever our connections to one another.
The follow up to Baseball Life Advice, a Globe and Mail and National Post best book, The Lost Season is a raw, powerful exploration of undoing and becoming.
Bar Fridman-Tell
Honeysuckle
Bar Fridman-Tell is the author of the USA Today and national indie bestselling novel Honeysuckle. She has a BA in art history and an MA in English literature. (She gleefully wrote her thesis about Victorian vampires.) She is currently studying for a master’s in library and information sciences, hoping to stay in a library for good. She lives in Toronto with her professor husband and two very fluffy cats.
In a lush, quiet field, a girl made of flowers opens her eyes and meets Rory, a boy who is desperate to have a friend. Magic and horror collide in this stunning debut that explores power, consent, loneliness, and what makes a person.
She was made for him.
Daye was woven together from flowers and magic to be the perfect playmate for Rory, a young boy left isolated in a remote country estate. In the early years, their friendship, almost eerily in sync, is everything the two lonely children could dream of.
But the threat of Daye literally — and gruesomely — falling apart whenever the seasons change drives Rory to learn ever deeper and stranger magic, until the line between what he can do and what he should do begins to blur. And the further Rory experiments, the higher the stakes climb — until the cost of a mistake might be either Daye’s freedom or her life.
Daye can’t help but love Rory, even as he keeps disappearing: into his studies, into the city—a place she, a girl whose heart is built of petals and berries, could never enter without falling apart. But as her choices narrow with each new experiment, Daye begins to wonder at what point the price for loving Rory might be too high.
Loosely based on Welsh mythology, Honeysuckle is a heartbreaking fable of longing and need — for love, for control, and for freedom — and a psychological fairy tale perfect for readers of Eowyn Ivey and V. E. Schwab. Part Wuthering Heights, part Frankenstein, it is its own fantastically twisted tale from a singular new talent in Bar Fridman-Tell.
Alison Gadsby
Breathing is How Some People Stay Alive
Alison Gadsby, a second-generation Canadian writer, lives in a multigenerational home on Treaty 13 land in Tkaronto. Author of story collection Breathing Is How Some People Stay Alive (Guernica Editions, 2026) and other short fiction that has appeared in Literary Heist, The Temz Review, The Ex-Puritan, failbetter and more. Dreams of the Weary, her debut novel, is forthcoming with Palimpsest Press (2028). She holds an MFA from the UBC, and an HBA in English & Creative Writing from York University. She is the host of Junction Reads, a prose reading series, and co-host on HOWL, a literary radio show on CIUT, 89.5 FM.
Breathing Is How Some People Stay Alive blurs the lines between horror, catastrophic speculative fiction, and psychological realism in a collection that might best be described as weird fiction. These connected stories offer dark reconstructions of lives brimming with desperate loneliness. They allow us to bear witness to the life-altering love of sisters, brothers, mothers… the life-altering love that buoys them as they struggle to stay afloat in the wake of childhoods they merely survived.
Priya Guns
Hustle Baby
Priya is the author of the critically-acclaimed novel Your Driver Is Waiting. A former teacher, she is an actor and an arborist in training whose previous work has been published in short story anthologies, gal-dem, Spring magazine, and anonymously in the Guardian.
From the incendiary voice behind Your Driver is Waiting, a riotous novel following a family of Tamil refugees who fled civil war in Sri Lanka to pursue a better life, just for it to be up-ended by the schemes of a self-proclaimed day-trading savant, jeopardizing everything they’ve worked so desperately to secure.
It’s hard enough to be a teenager at the turn of the millennium, and especially so for Dilo, who on top of juggling school and caring for her baby-cousin Maysha, is tasked with hustling to help her family get by. After Dilo’s born-again Christian mother, Mary, and Aunt Anji relocated the family from Sri Lanka fleeing the civil war, one thing’s become blindingly clear — the “rags-to-riches” fairytale they were promised is bullshit. The system is rigged, so sometimes you have to cheat to win.
Their family operates on the margins, working constantly to earn just enough to pay off their last meal. But they can only ignore stacks of overdue rent notices for so long, and when both matriarchs unexpectedly lose their jobs, desperation begins to set in. With eviction imminent, they are thrown a lifeline when they meet Mark, a swaggering day-trader, who promises to turn their small initial investment into thousands of dollars overnight on the stock exchange. At last, a miracle, and the family quickly become his apostles, recruiting investors by spreading the good word of his perpetual 10% returns. But they soon discover what really fuels Mark’s seemingly endless generosity, and when the markets turn they are left to navigate treacherous but familiar terrain. They must do what they always have, find a path where there isn’t one — survive.
Kevin Hardcastle
County Road Six
Kevin is the award-winning author of the debut story collection Debris, which won the Trillium Book Award and the ReLit Award for Short Fiction and was a finalist for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award and the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize. His critically acclaimed debut novel, In the Cage, has been published in France and Germany, and film rights have been optioned. His work has been published in numerous literary journals and anthologies, and he was a finalist for the 24th annual Journey Prize. His short story, “Old Man Marchuk,” was included in the 26th annual The Journey Prize Stories and recently re-published in Journey, a compendium of the best short fiction published throughout the thirty-five years of the anthology. He grew up in Simcoe County, Ontario, and now lives in Toronto.
A taut, propulsive family drama steeped in mystery, menace and a long-buried secret from award-winning author Kevin Hardcastle.
It has been years since Mara O’Hare has come home to North Simcoe County. But she is forced to return after her father’s death. Arthur O’Hare—the meanest, most vicious man in the townships—laid low, isolated, angry and sullen before he took his own life.
Mara is reunited with her two sisters, Beth and Emma. Soon, the three women are fighting to retain ownership of the farm they have inherited from their father. But Arthur O’Hare’s legacy is not just land. He has also left his daughters an unanticipated inheritance of violence and terror, born out of a long-buried family secret.
Award-winning author Kevin Hardcastle has written a propulsive, powerful, and thrilling novel that lays bare the best and worst of human nature and examines the muddy places in between. County Road Six is an unforgettable family saga about gender and class, rural communities, fathers and daughters, and what we leave behind.
Nicholas Herring
Your Breath in Charcoal
Nicholas Herring’s debut novel, Some Hellish, won the prestigious Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. He lives in Murray Harbour, PEI, where he works as a fisherman and a carpenter.
Knickle is a young Islander with no friends, direction, or purpose in his life. When he drives to northern New Brunswick to pick up an acquaintance’s brother from a mental health hospital, the pair make a sudden decision to travel further west to try to find a life amidst the chaos of Upper Canada. In the big city of Tah-ron-ah for the first time, Knickle discovers love, hope, and profound loss.
A hilarious, sensitive, and heady working-class odyssey rife with metaphorical richness and references to literature, film, and 90s music, Your Breath in Charcoal peers into the mind of its irrepressible and relentlessly quotable East Coast everyman. A follow-up to Some Hellish, Herring’s breathtaking Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize-winning debut novel, Your Breath in Charcoal marks yet another galvanizing entry into the East Coast literary canon.
Naseem Hrab
Every Space Between
Naseem is the award-winning author of stories for children including How to Party Like a Snail; Weekend Dad, a Governor General’s Literary Award finalist; and The Sour Cherry Tree, a Governor General’s Literary Award winner. Her work has been translated into several languages and praised by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, NPR and more. She worked as a librarian for a time and currently works in children’s publishing. She lives in Toronto, Ontario.
Playful and poetic, Every Space Between highlights the little moments tucked between beginnings and endings, between actions and reactions, between you and me — and shows how special an ordinary day can become if you pay close enough attention.
You can find in-betweens everywhere! Some are as overlooked as the space between an itch and a scratch. Others are as thrilling as the pause between making a wish and blowing out your birthday candles. How you feel about an in-between really does depend on your perspective… and each one is full of potential.
Once you spot the spaces in-between, everything changes. Instead of rushing from one thing to the next, you can pause to collect and reflect. Is this something you really want to do? How much longer can you wait? Maybe it’s time to say… sorry?
Uzma Jalaluddin
Moonlight Murder
Uzma is a critically acclaimed and bestselling novelist, playwright, and teacher. She writes nuanced and entertaining stories about Muslims, South Asians, and Canadians and is the author of Much Ado About Nada, Three Holidays and a Wedding, Hana Khan Carries On, and Ayesha at Last. as well as her first play, The Rishta. Her novels have been optioned for film and television, including by Amazon Studios and Mindy Kaling. A high school English teacher, Jalaluddin is also a former contributor to the Toronto Star and the Atlantic. She lives near Toronto with her family.
Kausar Khan, the Detective Aunty, returns in a new case about the mysterious death of a young man in the Golden Crescent neighbourhood, which draws her back to the unresolved death of her son twenty years ago…
When Kausar Khan decided to move back to Toronto to be closer to her family, she didn’t expect to have another murder investigation on her hands so soon – or rather, she didn’t expect to have another murder investigation on her hands ever. But when a young man named Qasim is found dead in their Golden Crescent neighborhood, and when it turns out Qasim was close with Kausar’s granddaughter, Maleeha, what’s a grandmother to do but try to solve the case?
It’s not just a devastated Maleeha that is spurring Kausar on to find answers; it’s also how much the circumstances of Qasim’s death remind her of her own teenage son, Ali, and his mysterious death nearly twenty years before. Kausar knows firsthand what a difference closure could make to a grieving parent–and the more she seeks to find that for Qasim’s parents, the more she begins to realize that perhaps it’s time she finds it for herself as well.
As Kausar conducts parallel investigations into both Qasim’s and Ali’s deaths and her “aunty” skills continue to bring information to light, she can’t help but wonder if the similarities in the two cases are more than just mere coincidence–but how could two deaths, twenty years apart, possibly be related?
Detective Aunty is determined to find out…
Wayne Johnston
The Novice of Holloway Hall
Wayne was born and raised in Goulds, Newfoundland. His #1 nationally bestselling novels include First Snow, Last Light; The Custodian of Paradise; The Navigator of New York; and The Colony of Unrequited Dreams. Baltimore’s Mansion, a memoir about his father and grandfather, won the inaugural Charles Taylor Prize for literary non-fiction. The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, published in 1998, was nominated for sixteen national and international awards including the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, and was a Canada Reads finalist defended by Justin Trudeau. In 2011, Johnston was awarded the Writers’ Trust Engel/Findley Award honouring the work of a writer in mid-career. In 2023, his memoir Jennie’s Boy won The Stephen Leacock Gold Medal for Humour and was also a Canada Reads finalist, in 2025.
At twenty-eight, Vivvy Holloway is nearly the same height as when she was five. Though she hides her face behind a veil, a different colour and fabric for each day of the week, she brandishes an acerbic wit that far outweighs her small stature. Having just spent eight years of the 1930s in a convent failing to become a nun, Vivvy is now returning to Holloway Hall, the largest private dwelling in Newfoundland and the crumbling seat of her formidable family.
Vivvy’s sister Freda, a doctor, now rules the estate and its fortune. She is also its sole occupant, save for the five-year-old “special member of the family” known as Ivan, who came home with Freda after her failed marriage in the Congo, where she and her husband were missionaries until tragedy struck. Tasked with caring for the boy while Freda works long shifts — and displays increasingly erratic behaviour — Vivvy begins to suspect that something is dangerously amiss in Holloway Hall.
Over the course of a single turbulent week, Vivvy faces off against her domineering sister, her ten cleric brothers, and a host of meddling hangers-on, unearthing long-buried secrets that threaten not only her and Ivan’s place in the family, but the fate of the entire Holloway name.
Tamara Jong
Worldly Girls
Tamara is a Tiohtià:ke (Montréal) born writer of Chinese and European ancestry. Her work has been published in literary magazines, and long and shortlisted for various creative non-fiction prizes. She is a Writer’s Studio graduate and lives on Treaty 3 territory, (Guelph, ON). Worldly Girls (Book*hug) is her first book.
With clear-eyed honesty and written in sparse yet searing prose, Jong collects the fragments of her unconventional childhood, with her busy schedule of Jehovah’s Witness meetings, Bible study, and door-to-door ministering. She also details her emotionally distant father and alcoholic mother’s tumultuous marriage, her deep yearnings to become a mother after the loss of her own and her struggles with mental health.
After corporate and spiritual burnout, and a suicide attempt at the age of thirty-two, Jong comes to understand that the strict religion she had long believed would protect her prevented her from pursuing her true sense of self. In a story that traverses a wide range of potent themes—including addiction, estrangement, grief, infertility, and forgiveness—the ultimate message of Worldly Girls is one of hope as Jong finds her own path to healing and belonging.
Jackie Khalilieh
Everything Comes Back to You
Jackie is a Palestinian Canadian author who believes that young adult readers should have the option and freedom to read about evergreen issues facing teens in an authentic, positive way. Like many autistic women, she received her diagnosis as an adult. Something More, her debut YA novel, was shortlisted for the Ruth & Sylvia Schwartz Award, as well as the Snow Willow Award and the Amy Mathers Teen Book Award, and was selected for several Best Books of 2023 lists, including the New York Public Library and Audible Canada. You Started It received a starred review from SLJ and was a JLG Gold Star selection, as well as one of Indigo’s Best Teen Books of 2025. She resides just outside Toronto, Canada, with her husband, two daughters, and Samoyed, Pearl.
Lennon has always tried to live up to her Palestinian Canadian father’s exacting standards, even if her older sister hasn’t, but when a crush on an older white boy develops into something more, she must find the strength to balance her own desires against her father’s expectations.
Lennon is excited and apprehensive about starting high school, where her older sister is going to be a senior. Then her sister drops a bombshell: she is pregnant. Her Palestinian Canadian parents are devastated, and Lennon finds herself under even more pressure to be a “good girl” – a role autistic Lennon has always played well. But after a chance encounter with John, a white boy in the grade above, Lennon finds herself nursing a crush on someone her parents would definitely not approve of—which only seems to intrigue her more.
As Lennon and John are drawn together and pulled apart throughout her four years of high school, Lennon wrestles with feelings of shame and yearning, obedience and rebellion through the lens of her autism, trying to both please her parents and herself. When a relationship with a different boy challenges her notions of family and happiness, her way forward becomes clear, even if it might mean losing everything and everyone she loves.
Dr. Joanne Liu
Ebola, Bombs, and Migrants
Dr. Liu is a Canadian practicing paediatric emergency physician and professor at McGill University’s School of Population & Global Health, director of Pandemic & Emergency readiness lab (PERL), where she focuses on polycrisis and health emergencies. Prior to joining McGill, she was the International President of Médecins Sans Frontières for over six years from 2013-2019. Through her leadership, she spearheaded the emergency responses to humanitarian and health emergencies including outbreaks/epidemics in West (Ebola 2014-2016) and denounced the attacks on hospitals at the UNSC on May 2016 which led to the UNSC resolution 2286 on the Protection of the Medical Mission in conflict zones. She practices mediation/negotiation in conflict zones and medical emergency aid delivery in the humanitarian aid sector.
A searing account of three interconnected global crises that defined the 2010s, and a powerful invitation to respond with compassionate solidarity.
In Ebola, Bombs, and Migrants, Dr. Joanne Liu, former International President of Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières, draws on frontline experience to examine three major humanitarian crises of the 2010s, revealing the global obsession with national security and its capacity to overshadow our responsibility to protect vulnerable populations.
Since the early 2000s, a world shaped by 9/11 has retreated into fear, strengthening borders and eroding the mechanisms of international cooperation. From West Africa to the Mediterranean and into Afghanistan, Dr. Liu shows how, despite the best efforts of frontline responders, the international community has repeatedly chosen containment over compassion, and politics over principle.
This urgent, authoritative work urges readers to connect past tragedies to current circumstances, reckoning with the cost of disengagement to ultimately reclaim a vision of shared humanity in the face of global crisis.
Nadja Lubiw-Hazard
The Life of a Creature
Nadja is a Toronto-based writer and veterinarian. She is the author of the novel The Nap-Away Motel (Palimpsest Press) and two children’s books. As a manuscript, The Life of a Creature won the Siskiyou Prize for New Environmental Literature.
Creatures swim, slither, and soar their way through this stunning short story collection about the inextricable nature of humans and animals that celebrates and bears witness to our fellow creatures and to the complex emotional terrain of our own lives.
A woman’s personal trauma and anxiety are intertwined with the lives of the feral dogs abandoned in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. As a lesbian love affair unravels, the secrets of a gift-giving crow are revealed. The life of a veterinarian is told through the animals that she has loved and that she has tried to save. A dying man dreams of returning as a vulture after death. The plight of sea turtles on the brink of extinction weaves through a mother’s devastation over the loss of a daughter.
Beautiful in its renderings of human experience, The Life of a Creature is a tender and haunting book imbued with the deeply sensory intimacies of the animal world.
Syrus Marcus Ware
Free to Be More: Creative Activism in the Era of Black Lives Matter
(appearing on opening night at the Art Gallery of Guelph, September 18th)
Syrus Marcus Ware is a Vanier Scholar, visual artist, activist, curator, educator and co-founder of Black Lives Matter Canada. An assistant professor at the School of the Arts, McMaster University, he is the co-editor of the bestselling Until We Are Free: Reflections on Black Lives Matter in Canada. He lives in Tkaronto.
Celebrating the artists at the forefront of a Black aesthetic renaissance and how they harness the arts to shape a freer future
In the wake of the murder of George Floyd by Derek Chauvin of the Minneapolis Police Department and the death of Regis Korchinski-Paquet during a health episode attended by Toronto Police Services in the turbulent summer of 2020, communities rose up in rage, grief, and resistance. Alongside mass protests came an outpouring of creative expression by Black artists, producing art that helped make sense of the moment and mobilize for change.
Today, as anti-Black violence persists—fueled by the rise of white supremacy and fascism, even within the highest levels of government—Black artists, too, persist in painting, dancing, drawing, writing, and expressing their outrage and hope.
Free to Be More honours the creative revolutionary labour of Black artists, past and present. This vibrant collection of essays, poems, images, and interviews affirms the deep connection between art and activism. More than that, it’s a testament to how art can amplify a movement and offer tools to gather, organize, and enact transformative interventions in anti-Black racism.
Continuing and expanding the conversation from the bestselling Until We Are Free, Free to Be More brings together contributions from Rodney Diverlus, Ravyn Wngz, Aisha Sasha John, Camille Turner, and other visionary artists to serve as both a singular creative archive and a rallying cry for future changemakers.
Colin McAdam
Daphnis and Chloe
Colin is an internationally acclaimed novelist with a PhD from Cambridge on translations of Ancient Greek — the original language of Daphnis and Chloe. He has written non-fiction for Harpers, Granta and Hazlitt, among other journals, and his novels have won or been shortlisted for several prizes including the Amazon Best First Novel Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Governor General’s Award, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Prize and the Giller Prize. He lives in Quebec.
A fable about love and innocence and beauty, and finding a light through the darkness.
There’s a city on an island in the Pacific that can only be reached by ferry, a city where a mechanic named Frank opens a garage with his old friend Charlie. Both men marry the women they love but are unable to have children. There are drugs on the streets of this city that take away pain for strings of minutes and bring synthetic rapture; and by these streets the couples are given two babies, abandoned under strange circumstances. The boy they name Daphnis, and the girl Chloe.
And so begins a book unlike anything else, a modern retelling of an ancient story. Part Ovid and part True Romance, and narrated by Eros himself, Daphnis and Chloe offers a pulpy meditation on love and beauty, on people triumphing over darkness by wrestling deep within it, on the solace of art, and on the simple but profound pleasure provided to a blind old man as he holds his wife’s hand and listens to an increasingly familiar story.
Jeff Miller
Temporary Palaces
Jeff Miller’s debut novel Temporary Palaces was published by the House of Anansi Press in April. He is also the author of the award-winning creative nonfiction collection Ghost Pine: All Stories True from Invisible Publishing. He holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia and lives in rural Nova Scotia.
In the fevered summer of 2001, charismatic activist Rob and his collective set up a squat in an abandoned house. His bandmate and lover, Ben, watches anxiously as his own plans are threatened by Rob’s choice of radical politics over music. Meanwhile, photographer Alex finds herself torn between documenting the chaos of the scene and saving the friendship that binds them together. When the police break up the squat, Rob vanishes, and the dream dies.
Ten years later, Alex and Ben find each other again—she’s conquering Montreal’s contemporary art world, he’s running a thriving restaurant in Ottawa. But their success feels hollow. As they excavate their shared past, they must confront the ghost of Rob’s disappearance and the trauma that pushed them apart.
Pulsing with the raw energy of basement punk shows and DIY creativity, late-night manifestos and first heartbreaks, Temporary Palaces is a blazing debut that captures a generation caught between idealism and survival, art and activism, the dreams that define us and the compromises that save us.
Mai Nguyen
Cleo Dang Would Rather Be Dead
Mai Nguyen is a Vietnamese Canadian author whose debut novel, Sunshine Nails, was longlisted for Canada Reads and named one of the best books of 2023 by NPR and CBC. Her journalism has appeared in Wired, The Washington Post, and The Toronto Star. Raised in Halifax, she now lives in Toronto with her husband, daughter, and French bulldog.
A darkly humorous yet uplifting novel about a grieving mother who starts working at a funeral home and discovers that the best way to honor the dead is to live — from the author of Sunshine Nails.
All Cleo Dang has ever wanted was to be a mother. The day she discovers she’s pregnant is the happiest of her life, especially when she learns that her best friend, Paloma, is also expecting. It’s a wonderful surprise and together, they enjoy their pregnancies. But when they both go to the hospital in labor, something goes very, very wrong. Paloma comes home with a baby. Cleo does not.
Now a grieving Cleo must navigate life after losing her baby. She alienates herself from the world, especially her best friend who is living the life she so desperately wanted. Forced to quit her demanding job as an actuary, Cleo manages to find a job at a funeral home where she meets a revolving door of bereaved locals and discovers the power of confronting grief.
Amanda Peters
The Birthing Tree
Amanda is a writer of Mi’kmaq and settler ancestry and a member of Glooscap First Nation. Her debut novel, The Berry Pickers, was the winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, the Barnes and Noble Discover Prize, the Dartmouth Book Award and the Crime Writers of Canada Best Crime First Novel Award, and was shortlisted for the Amazon Canada First Novel Award and the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. It was named a New Yorker Best Book of the Year. She lives and writes in the Annapolis Valley in Nova Scotia, where she is an associate professor in the department of English and theatre at Acadia University. The Birthing Tree is her second novel.
Born under the shadow of a birthing tree sacred to generations of Mi’kmaq women, Aliet Paul grows up outside a small Nova Scotia town with her fierce, loving grandmother Kiju. Her mother died bringing Aliet into the world under that very tree; her father remains a mystery no one will name. Aliet’s childhood is shaped by seasonal apple pickers, the medicinal wisdom of the old ways, and the quiet, steadfast presence of John, a boy who becomes her anchor.
But the world beyond their community is changing. Traditional midwifery is condemned, prejudice deepens, and when the wrong person witnesses a birth, the consequences are disastrous. As Aliet comes of age, she navigates love, loss, and a personal tragedy that veers her from the path her grandmother wanted for her. She becomes a nurse trained in modern medicine, yet she carries Kiju’s teachings close, tucked beside memories of the tree that once welcomed new life.
Years later, when the call comes that Kiju has died, Aliet returns home to a crumbling house, a community scattered, and a past she thought she’d outrun. As Aliet restores the house room by room, something inside her stirs awake: the threads of her lineage, the old ways of her grandmother, and the mystery of her own bloodline.
As Aliet digs to uncover who her family really is, each revelation pulls her deeper into a web of long-guarded silences, dangerous loyalties, and generational wounds that refuse to stay buried: Someone knew the truth about her mother’s final moments. Someone knew what happened in the orchard all those years ago. And someone wants the past to remain undisturbed.
Spanning decades of loss and reclamation, this sweeping yet intimate novel follows one woman’s journey to protect the land, the traditions, and the memory of the women who came before her—and to decide which parts of her inheritance she will carry into the future.
Michelle Porter
A Glacier’s Guide to Dying
Michelle is the descendent of a long line of Métis storytellers. Many of her ancestors told stories using music and today she tells stories using the written word. She holds degrees in Journalism, Folklore, English, and a PhD in Geography. Her academic research and creative work focus on home, memory, and women’s changing relationships with the land.
Her most recent book, Scratching River, a memoir exploring the meaning of her Métis heritage through her older brother’s life story, was published by Wilfrid Laurier Press in April 2022. She’s also published a book of creative nonfiction about her great-grandfather, a fiddler from the Red River, called Approaching Fire (shortlisted for the Indigenous Voices Award 2021) and a book of poetry, Inquiries, (shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award). Michelle has won numerous awards for her poetry and journalism and her work has been published in literary journals and magazines across the country. Currently she is teaching creative writing and Métis Literature at Memorial University. She is a member of the Manitoba Métis Federation and she lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador.
Robbie is torn: between trying to “rescue” his stubborn Métis mother — determined to stick with her abusive second husband and her home in the path of ravenous wildfires in Canada—and the quest to find his father, a white man often absent due to mental health challenges but now long missing in the mountains south of the border.
After he and his American uncle find themselves following a very pregnant bison up the slopes of a huge glacier named Omega, Robbie must also navigate between fear and wonder as he starts hearing the ancient voice of Omega giving him guidance. Has Robbie accessed a deep connection to the land, one he can trust? Or is he succumbing to the same illness that had wreaked havoc on his father’s life?
Michelle Porter brings her distinctively musical, energetic, witty, sometimes bawdy style to a powerful contemporary story of identity and belonging, loss and healing, within families and with the immortal land itself.
Rachel Phan
That Asian Girl is a Problem
Rachel (she/her/hers) is an award-winning and bestselling Chinese Canadian author. A graduate of Toronto Metropolitan University’s Master of Journalism program, she and her work have been featured on CBC, The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Toronto Star, Chatelaine, and Maclean’s. Her instant national bestselling book, Restaurant Kid: A Memoir of Family and Belonging, was longlisted for Canada Reads in 2026 and named one of CBC Books’ Best Books of 2025.
In a world that tells women of colour they are either too much or not enough, Rachel Phan asks: What if being a “problem” is actually the point?
That Asian Girl Is a Problem is a bold, witty, and uncompromising collection about what it means to live as a racialized woman in spaces that were never built for you. Drawing from her own experiences, Phan dives into the contradictions of being the “problem” woman in the workplace, in family, in faith, in marriage and even in her own body. With sharp humour and unflinching honesty, she exposes the absurdity of a society that demands gratitude, silence and smallness from women of colour—and explores what happens when they finally refuse.
From a court transcript satirizing how racialized women are “tried” for being too much at work, to a tongue-in-cheek recipe for the perfect Asian female body, to searing reflections on filial pity, interracial marriage, queerness and imposter syndrome, That Asian Girl Is a Problem blends memoir, cultural critique and playful experimentation to expose the pressures racialized women face—and the thrill of living on your own terms.
Part social commentary, part coming-of-age, part rebellion, this book transforms every insult and “flaw” into an act of resilience and defiance. For anyone who’s ever been called difficult, too much, or simply a problem, Rachel Phan offers both recognition and a rallying cry: being a problem might be the most honest and freeing way to live.
“Simultaneously introspective and cheeky, Phan’s candid writing will be relatable to anyone—especially Asian girls—striving to break expectations. This book is an important reminder for us all to live authentically and freely.”
Greg Rhyno
Moderator and author of Who by His Own Hand
Greg Rhyno is the author of Who by Fire, first of the Dame Polara Mysteries, which was nominated for a Crime Writers of Canada Award of Excellence. His debut novel, To Me You Seem Giant, was nominated for a ReLit Award and an Alberta Book Publishing Award. His latest novel, Who by His Own Hand, is now available from Cormorant Books.
Single mother and reluctant detective Dame Polara just wants to keep her family safe. When her two-year-old daughter is kidnapped by her old nemesis, she is forced to draw on her unusual talents to rescue Rosie. To make matters worse, Dame’s dad — retired private eye Dodge Polara — is hospitalized after suffering a second stroke, and Dame uncovers a strange connection between her mother’s murder and the apparent suicide of a former city counsellor.
Scouring the Greater Toronto Area in search of Rosie, Dame relies on her friends, her father’s shady connections, and even her former adversaries for aid. Her investigation leads her to a federal prison in Gravenhurst, an abandoned Queensway motel, and a Toronto Argonauts home game.
But when Dame learns that Rosie’s abduction is part of a larger criminal conspiracy, she may be forced to betray her own ideals to save her family.
Frankie Scott (AKA Zoe Whittall)
Chasing Summer
Frankie Scott is the romance-writing pen name of bestselling novelist and award-winning TV writer Zoe Whittall. Her most recent novels are The Fake, The Spectacular, and The Best Kind of People, which was a finalist for the Giller Prize and named Indigo’s #1 book of the year. She won a Lambda Literary Award for her second novel, Holding Still for as Long as Possible. She has worked on the Baroness von Sketch Show, Schitt’s Creek, Degrassi, and other TV shows. She lives in Prince Edward County, Ontario.
When rom-com film writer, Elise gets fired from her latest Christmas movie, she retreats to Prince Edward County where her sister is getting married. There, she runs into a handsome actor she knows named Ben, who agrees to be her fake boyfriend for her sister’s wedding.
Ben invites Elise to stay for the summer to work with him at his family’s film camp for kids. But when Elise moves into her summer cabin, she soon discovers her neighbour is Dave, her first true love, who ghosted her more than a decade before.
There’s also tension between Dave and Ben – and not just over their shared feelings for Elise. They used to be best friends, until a personal tragedy led to their estrangement. When her difficult mother shows up unannounced to stay at her cabin, Elise’s summer takes another complicated turn.
As Elise tries to work through her unresolved feelings for Dave, her fake feelings for Ben start to feel real, leaving her torn between the love of her life and the opportunity to start over with someone new.
Niigaan Sinclair
Truth Before Reconciliation: Confronting Residential School Denialism
(appearing on opening night at the Art Gallery of Guelph, September 18th)
Niigaan Sinclair is Anishinaabe (St. Peter’s/Little Peguis) and a professor at the University of Manitoba where he holds the Faculty of Arts Professorship in Indigenous Knowledge and Aesthetics in the Department of Indigenous Studies. Niigaan is also an award-winning writer, editor, and activist who was named to the “Power List” in 2022 by Maclean’s magazine as one of the most influential individuals in Canada.
“Without truth, justice is not served, healing cannot happen, and there can be no genuine reconciliation”—The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada
The TRC’s Final Report, released in 2015, is the outcome of many years of research and rigorous scholarship by hundreds of academics across Canada. More than 5 million documents from governments, churches, and schools, hundreds of secondary sources, and the testimonies of over 6,000 residential school Survivors informed the Commission’s work.
Despite six volumes evincing the genocide, some Canadians choose to deny, downplay, and disparage these findings in a battle for public memory waged in popular media and across social media platforms. Denialists do not refute the existence of the schools or that abuse happened. Rather, they cherry-pick and distort facts to minimize the harms done to Indigenous communities as they seek to turn reconciliation into a partisan issue and preserve national myths of benevolence.
Countering soundbites with substance, Sean Carleton and Niigaan Sinclair, along with a team of expert historians, educators, Survivors, archivists, and archeologists, analyze the genesis, methods, and consequences of denialism; push back on denialist claims; and highlight some of the primary sources and peer-reviewed scholarship that denialists ignore or misrepresent. Importantly, they also document the harms denialists have inflicted on Survivors and communities.
Embedded in the lived experiences of Survivors and supported by the evidentiary record, Truth Before Reconciliation is a valuable tool to help develop the historical and information literacy needed to identify and combat denialism and anti-Indigenous racism as we collectively build a more honourable future for all.
Sue Sinclair
Newfangled Rose
Sue grew up in Newfoundland on the ancestral homelands of the Beothuk. She is the author of six previous collections of poetry, including most recently Almost Beauty: New and Selected Poems (Goose Lane Editions, 2022), winner of New Brunswick’s Fiddlehead Poetry Book Prize. Heaven’s Thieves (Brick Books, 2016) won the Pat Lowther Award for the best book of poetry by a Canadian woman. Sue teaches creative writing at the University of New Brunswick on Wəlastəkwey territory, land of the “beautiful and bountiful river.”
Like a rose blooming out of season, the poems in Sue Sinclair’s newest collection are unexpected, unforgettably beautiful, and an unwavering gesture toward the slow emergency of the climate crisis. With the lyrical brilliance and keen eye trained on beauty that’s characteristic of Sinclair, New-Fangled Rose reaches toward the light with reverent hands, photosynthesizing it into poems that are deft, musical, and unquestionably alive.
These poems cast a wide gaze over a fragile world, offering vibrant elegies to luna moths and crab apples, fireflies and trilliums. They examine what it is to build relationships in a world that feels increasingly precarious, like at any moment, something may end; like at any moment, something may begin.
Kathy Stinson
Boogy & Tee and Twinkle & Hew
(appearing as part of the authors in school program)
Kathy has loved reading all her life but was almost thirty before she discovered she loves writing too. She has become the author of many picture books that have been published internationally, including the classic Red Is Best, and the award-winning The Man with the Violin. The Rock and the Butterfly was a GG Literary Awards Finalist. She is also a published novelist, short story writer, and poet.
When not reading or writing, Kathy enjoys photography, jigsaw puzzles, word puzzles, and walking in the woods and fields near her home in Rockwood, Ontario.
Two boats at sea, struck by a storm, are impacted very differently — a tale about economic inequality and climate change, patterned on a classic poem.
Four characters go to sea in two very different boats for two very different reasons — Boogy and Tee set off in a luxury yacht for a vacation, while Twinkle and Hew set out in a tiny fishing dory in search of their next meal. When a storm blows up, the fishing dory soon breaks apart, casting Twinkle and Hew into the sea. The yacht hits a large rock, and as water pours into the hold, Boogy can do nothing but wail about losing his precious possessions. Then Tee spots Twinkle and Hew clinging to the remains of their boat and insists they go to the rescue — a decision that saves them all.
Inspired by Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat,” Kathy Stinson’s story-poem with its rollicking, sea-faring rhythm and sprinkling of invented vocabulary combines with Mark Hoffmann’s quirky, playful art to create a funny tale that speaks to urgent issues. Includes as afterword a brief quotation adopted and retweeted by Greta Thunberg: “Stop saying that we’re all in the same boat. We’re all in the same storm. But we’re not all in the same boat.”
Chanel Sutherland
Layaway Child
Chanel Sutherland is a Vincentian Canadian writer of fiction and creative nonfiction. She won the 2021 CBC Nonfiction Prize and the 2022 CBC Short Story Prize and was named one of CBC Books 30 Writers to Watch in 2022. Chanel is also the overall winner of the 2025 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. She has a BA in English literature from Concordia University and lives in Montreal, Quebec.
Magnificent stories about Caribbean immigrants navigating the emotional terrain of girlhood, displacement, longing, and identity across continents.
Layaway Child is a luminous debut short story collection by award-winning writer Chanel Sutherland that explores the emotional landscapes of Caribbean families fractured by migration, especially the harrowing yet resilient journeys of Black girls and women. In lyrical, linked stories, Sutherland traces the lives of mothers working abroad as housekeepers and nannies, and the children they left behind.
From lush island childhoods marked by absence and community, to the cold, alienating spaces of Canadian cities, Layaway Child captures the complexity of growing up between worlds. A mother, newly arrived in Montreal, is kept from speaking to her daughters by her own mother’s misguided attempt to help her let go of home. A schoolgirl becomes a spectacle under the gaze of white classmates. A young girl’s curiosity about the cosmos collides with the confusion of puberty. Sutherland brings deep compassion and sharp insight to each moment, revealing both the beauty of island life and the harshness of immigration’s toll.
Kai Cheng Thom
The Shapeshifter’s Guide to Gym Class
Kai Cheng Thom is a Chinese-Canadian writer, performance artist, mental health community worker, youth counsellor, and former social worker. Thom, a non-binary transgender woman, has published five books, including the novel Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir (2016), the poetry collection a place called No Homeland (2017), a children’s book, From the Stars in The Sky to the Fish in the Sea (2017), I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl’s Notes from the End of the World (2019), a book of essays centered on transformative justice, and Falling Back in Love With Being Human: Letters to Lost Souls (2023).
She won the 2017 Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers and was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Prize both in 2016 for Transgender Fiction and in 2017 for Transgender Poetry. In 2019, actress Emma Watson chose Fierce Femmes as the March/April pick for the international feminist book club, Our Shared Shelf. In April 2024, her most recent book Falling Back in Love With Being Human was nominated for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award.
Most recently, Kai Cheng added “advice columnist” to her repertoire with her new column for Xtra, “Ask Kai: Advice for the Apocalypse”. Kai Cheng Thom lives in Toronto.
Nor Numinem. A town of hope and beauty. A place where freedom for all blooms as abundantly as the flowering vines that cover the buildings on every street. Yet even in this beautiful town, a kid like Maia’s got problems.
Maia is a shapeshifter.
And worse, she’s starting middle school.
In every generation, a special few of Nor Numinem are born shapeshifters: children who develop the mysterious ability to transform into a part-animal shape. Unfortunately for Maia, her ability is merely this: to grow giant moth wings that grow uncontrollably out of her back whenever she’s excited, or upset, or for some reason, whenever her new classmate Luke looks at her in a particular way. Worse than worse? Maia’s wings are useless. Weak and fragile — unlike her talented friends.
But Maia’s problems are about to get much harder than even she knows. A strange illness is spreading through the gardens of Nor Numinem. The very gardens that feed and sustain this once-perfect town. Worse still, some of the adults think the shapeshifter children are to blame. As rumors turn into hate, life gets tougher for those who aren’t seen as “normal”. Maia and her friends will soon discover that there is a dark rift in Nor Numinem, one that will take all their talents, known and unknown, to heal.
Merritt R. Turetsky
Bogland
Merritt is a university professor and ecologist. She has served as a science adviser for Eos Magazine and has been featured in Time Magazine and on CNN, PBS NewsHour, and the BBC. She lives in Boulder, Colorado.
From a stunning new voice in popular science, a beguiling invitation to discover the hidden power of one of Earth’s most mysterious landscapes.
Not quite land and not quite water, boglands have long been dismissed as wastelands — too sodden to farm, too perilous to cross, too unruly to be considered beautiful. Come closer, however, and a strange truth emerges: These wild, eerie landscapes stretch our minds, hold the history of humanity, and will shape the future of our planet. In Bogland, acclaimed ecologist Merritt R. Turetsky invites readers to discover the elusive magic and surprising power of these misunderstood places, where the boundaries blur between life and death, past and present, refuge and peril.
Venturing from the boreal forests of Canada to the jungles of Borneo, and from the planet’s oldest bog in Greece to some of its newest in Greenland, Turetsky unveils bogs as marvelous paradoxes that defy categorization and their own systemic undervaluation. Here, radical life forms — acid-flinging mosses, amphibian-eating plants — spring from layers upon layers of dead matter. The past and present commingle with uncanny intimacy as peat safeguards artifacts for centuries, along with ancient lives unearthed later as “bog bodies” so remarkably preserved they are sometimes mistaken for the recently missing. Proverbially dangerous, bogs have offered shelter throughout history to the marginalized and resistance movements from Virginia to Vietnam. Crucially, they also regulate the planet’s climate, sequestering nearly one-third of Earth’s soil carbon while covering just 3 percent of its surface — even as accelerating exploitation risks transforming them from climate allies to climate foes, and erasing these ecosystems just as we’re learning to appreciate them.
The debut of an extraordinary nature writer, Bogland is an ode and a call to action: to defend bogs’ strangeness and stillness from rising destruction, to value them precisely for their refusal to conform, and to learn from them new ways to adapt, endure, and belong on our changing planet — before it’s too late.
Vikki VanSickle
The Mystic and the Missing Girl
VIKKI VANSICKLE is the author of thirteen books for children, including the award-winning The Winnowing, fan-favourite If I Had a Gryphon, and a collection of Halloween poems called Mother Boo, among many others. Her first adult novel, The Mystic and the Missing Girl, is a charming mystery about a tarot reader who uses her skills to solve a cold case involving her aunt, a former TV psychic. Vikki can be seen monthly on CTV Your Morning, where she curates a regular book segment. Originally from Woodstock, ON, Vikki now lives in Toronto with her semi-wild kitten.
Small town secrets, a reluctant psychic, and the cold case that could expose them all
Drew Benson has a secret. She gets visions, something she hasn’t tapped into since she was a teenager, when her late aunt, a TV psychic known as Hannah Mystic, became the scapegoat in the unsolved disappearance of a local teenager. Twenty years later, Drew is happy to ignore her gift, focusing instead on keeping the metaphysical shop she inherited from Hannah afloat, wrangling her sole, astrology-obsessed employee, and dodging local rake Foster Banks in her picturesque lakeside hometown.
But when Drew’s arch-nemesis from high school, now a big city reporter, decides to investigate the cold case from all those years ago, it’s Drew’s ability that could finally
make a break in the decades old mystery. With bills piling up, a disapproving mother laying on the guilt, and a local vandal who wants Drew and her witchy store gone, Drew has a lot to lose. But what she stands to gain―finding out what happened to the missing teen, clearing her aunt’s name, and a second chance at belonging―could change everything.
In The Mystic and the Missing Girl, Vikki VanSickle seamlessly draws readers into an utterly charming world in this unputdownable, small town mystery.
Sanna Wani
Lantern
Sanna is a Kashmiri writer, editor, and translator based in Toronto. Her debut collection, My Grief, the Sun, won the 2023 Trillium Award for Poetry. Her writing has been widely published, including in Best Canadian Poetry, Brick, Hazlitt, and Poem-A-Day. She is the creator and host of the podcast, Poet Talk; poetry editor at The Ex-Puritan; and Publicity Manager at Between the Lines. Learn more at sannawani.com.
Meditating on the beauty of an ordinary life, Sanna Wani’s Lantern explores how we fall in love and make a home. What does it mean to belong to a city, or to truly enter adulthood? Imbued with a quiet queerness, this book is a guide for living in the aftermath of familial rifts, crises of faith, political struggle, and intergenerational grief—all while remaining devoted to an idea of goodness. Taking stock of one precious life, Lantern, Wani’s second poetry collection, invites us to consider our responsibilities—to ourselves and each other—and to choose who we might become.
Emily A. Weedon
Hemo Sapiens
Emily is the CSA award–winning screenwriter of Chateau Laurier and Red Ketchup, and the author of the epic dystopia Autokrator. She played Lucy in two separate productions of Dracula, and growing up probably checked out Dracula and other vampire books more than anyone else in the Coe Hill library, so it was inevitable that she would write a novel about vampires. Hemo Sapiens is her second novel. She lives in Toronto.
Detective Luke Stockton is preparing for his first child with his wife, Beatrice, but balancing work and home is a challenge as she is behaving with increasing strangeness. Beatrice begins to frequent a medspa offering mysterious prenatal checkups, leech treatments, and vampire facials. And, against his will, Luke finds himself irresistibly drawn to the spa’s sophisticated owner, Cleo, who has a deadly secret to keep.
The pressure builds for Luke as he investigates a series of murders involving exsanguinated runaway boys. Trailing a perplexing killer, and bent on protecting his wife and their child, Luke is thrust into a shadowy, erotic world of wealth, subterfuge, and danger. And the closer he gets to the truth, the more danger he courts for himself and his family.
Hemo Sapiens is an audacious and bloodthirsty fairy tale, pitting one man against a community beyond good and evil, in a modern tale of intrigue and female sexuality.
Dan Werb
Our Wild Familiars
Dan Werb, PhD is an award-winning writer and epidemiologist whose work has appeared in The Globe and Mail, The New York Times, Salon, Believer Magazine, and many other outlets in Canada and the US. He is an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Toronto, and Assistant Professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases and Global Public Health at the University of California San Diego. Werb is the author of two previous books, City of Omens and The Invisible Siege, which won the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction. Dan Werb lives in Toronto.
A dazzling journey into the hidden lives of synanthropes, the wild animals who’ve found ingenious ways to survive and thrive in human communities—from award-winning writer and scientist Dan Werb
Synanthropes have always been an immutable part of the tapestry of our lives. They are the reason we hear birdsong in the morning and skittering throughout the day, and why we take such pains to fix lids to our garbage cans. But they are so much more than that, too: epidemic vectors, churners of soil, ecosystem evolvers, spiritual lodestars, and, sometimes, sharp-toothed marauders making their way through our most intimate spaces with cruel intent. But beyond their quotidian impact on our lives, synanthropes have a critical part to play in how our communities are shaped and how sustainably they function. These creatures are ambassadors from nature, arbiters of our planet’s future, and a key influence on our species’ ongoing evolution; and recently, something essential has shifted with them.
We are in a fraught era of environmental disruption, habitat destruction, and human population expansion that is ravaging formerly wild and untouched habitats. That’s caused us to become ever more inundated with synanthropes, which are bringing delight, chaos and danger to our doorstep. These species, so long dismissed, are forcing us to reckon with them—from the hundreds of thousands of raccoons in urban spaces that spread our refuse no matter how many “raccoon-proof” bags and bins we invent, to the invasive kudzu plants that grow a foot a day, enveloping houses, telephone poles, trees, and any other structures into their green abyss. Now, as urban spaces increasingly become wild spaces, we have a choice: continue to resist them by any means necessary, or take the opportunity to promote a more harmonious coexistence.
Through vivid storytelling, Our Wild Familiars brings to spectacular life the world’s most successful synanthropes, from bats, raccoons, and crows, to some of its weirdest, including the Giant Pacific Octopus. Acting as a guide to the curious, Werb reveals how the cracks in our millennia-long efforts to shield ourselves against the outside world might just lead us to a new and necessary balance with nature—or to an ever more savage future.
Ashraf Zaghal
Seven Heavens Away
Ashraf Zaghal is a poet, novelist, and environmentalist. He is the author of four poetry collections and Seven Heavens Away, a novel set in Jerusalem and recently published by House of Anansi. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia.
In this taut and heartbreaking debut novel, described by author Saeed Teebi as “Nuanced, searing and unforgettable”, a Palestinian teenager comes of age amid escalating violence in Jerusalem. After their friend Hassan is killed by an Israeli, Aziz and Mustafa are shaken to their core, drawn into the orbit of Hassan’s father — a respected community leader known for his charity and fiery speeches — as they grapple with grief, guilt, and an uncertain future. As Aziz’s forbidden feelings for Dafna, a Jewish girl, deepen and his mother searches for a way to secure his safety, he’s forced to confront painful truths about loss, survival, and what it means to find hope amid the ruins.