Shalini Abeysekara
Shalini Abeysekara is the #1 Sunday Times bestselling author of This Monster of Mine. As a former corporate lawyer, she enjoys using fantasy to interrogate reality, exploring monstrosity—perceived and real—and centering neurodivergent women of colour reckoning with themselves and their place in a world that tells them they’re too much and not enough. She is passionate about demystifying traditional publishing for all writers. When not writing, she games her life away and tries to make the perfect entremet. Most days though, she can’t believe she’s an adult, and hope you don’t either.
This Monster of Mine by Shalini Abeysekara. Published by Union Square & Co.
Eighteen-year-old Sarai doesn’t know why someone tried to kill her four years ago, but she does know that her case was closed without justice. Hellbent on vengeance, she returns to the scene of the crime as a Petitor, a prosecutor who can magically detect lies, and is assigned to work with Tetrarch Kadra. Ice-cold and perennially sadistic, Kadra is the most vicious of the four judges who rule the land – and the prime suspect in a string of deaths identical to Sarai’s attempted murder.
Certain of his guilt, Sarai begins a double life: solving cases with Kadra by day and plotting his ruin by night. But Kadra is charming and there’s something alluring about the wrath he wields against the city’s corruption. So when the evidence she finds embroils her in a deadly political battle, Sarai must also fight against her attraction to Kadra – because despite his growing hold on her heart, his voice matches the only memory she has of her assailant…
A dazzling Ancient Rome-inspired romantasy debut, This Monster of Mine is a bloodbath of manipulation, deception, and forbidden love.
Madhur Anand
Madhur Anand’s debut book of creative non-fiction This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart (2020) won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Nonfiction. Her debut collection of poems A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes (2015) was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and named one of 10 all-time “trailblazing” poetry collections by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Her second collection of poems Parasitic Oscillations (2022) was also a finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and named a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book. To Place a Rabbit is her first novel. Anand is a professor and the director of the Global Ecological Change and Sustainability Laboratory at the University of Guelph, Ontario.
To Place a Rabbit by Madhur Anand. Published by Penguin Random House.
This delightfully clever, artfully layered novel begins when a scientist who has written a popular book of non-fiction attends a literary festival, where she strikes up a friendship with a charismatic novelist. The novelist reveals that her new work is an experiment: a novella she wrote in English only to have it translated and published solely in French—a language the novelist cannot read. Moreover, she has lost her original English manuscript of this work. Hearing this, the scientist, who is fluent in French, impulsively offers to retranslate the novella back into English for the novelist.
As she embarks on this task, the scientist finds herself haunted by vivid memories and distracting questions—particularly about a passionate affair from her own life with a French lover. These insert themselves into her translation process, troubling it, then disrupting it entirely. She desperately tries to complete her task before losing control of both the work and her well-organized existence—but soon the novelist and the French lover reappear in the present, further complicating both life and art.
Lisa Baird
Lisa Baird is a queer poet, essayist and community acupuncturist. Her first poetry collection, Winter’s Cold Girls, was shortlisted for the 2020 Relit Award for poetry. Her chapbook Persephone’s Crickets was published by Baseline Press in fall 2024. Find her online at www.lisabaird.ca and on Insta @eramosageese.
When Wales Went Back to the Water by Lisa Baird. Published by University of Alberta Press.
Steely, tender, and sensual, Lisa Baird’s When Whales Went Back to the Water creates a reverent container for a broken world. These poems are hymns to living in wonder through loss, joy, motherhood’s sleepless nights, domestic violence, and isolation. Offering a courageous account of queer intimate partner violence, including the impacts of femme erasure in queer communities, this book is also grounded in the tastes and textures of a new parent’s everyday and is keenly interested in our capacities during personal and global catastrophe. Haunted by hawks, coyotes, frogs, and forests, the collection also speaks to the power of the beyond-human sphere in the translation and transformation of pain and sorrow. Reaching through stories of survivorship to touch on personal and collective pain with tension, nuance and care, Baird’s poems remind us that grief is inextricably intertwined with love and joy.
Mark Bourrie
Mark Bourrie is an Ottawa-based author, lawyer and university lecturer. He has written for major magazines and newspapers in Canada and is the author of sixteen non-fiction books. He has a PhD in history and a law degree. Mark was a member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery for 24 years. He’s won a National Magazine Award and the RBC Charlees Taylor Award for Literary Non-Fiction.
Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre by Mark Bourrie. Published by Biblioasis
Six weeks into the Covid pandemic, New York Times columnist David Brooks identified two types of Western politicians: rippers and weavers. Rippers, whether on the right or the left, see politics as war. They don’t care about the destruction that’s caused as they fight for power. Weavers are their opposite: people who try to fix things, who want to bring people together and try to build consensus.
Pierre Poilievre has enjoyed most of the advantages of the mainstream Canadian middle class. Yet he’s long been the angriest man on the political stage. In Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre, bestselling author Mark Bourrie, winner of the Charles Taylor Prize, charts Poilievre’s rise through the political system, from teenage volunteer to outspoken Opposition leader known for cutting soundbites and theatrics. Bourrie shows how we arrived at this divisive moment in our history, one in which rippers are poised to capitalize on conflict. He shows how Poilievre and this new style of politics have gained so much ground—and warns of what it will cost us if they succeed.
Melinda Burns
Melinda Burns is a status member of the Lower Mohawk First Nation. She is the daughter of a Mohawk mother and an English father. Her short stories have placed first in the 2001 Toronto Star Short Story contest and in the 2006 Elora Writers’ Festival contest. Her essay, Legacy, was a finalist in the 2023 Prism International Creative Non-fiction contest. Her stories, essays, and poems have appeared in the New Quarterly, Grain, the Fiddlehead, Canadian Notes and Queries, Native Skin, and One Art.
Homecoming by Melinda Burns. Published by BookLand Press
Homecoming is a poetry collection that reflects our human journey as we grow and learn, and author’s personal journey through childhood, marriage, divorce, parenthood, and parents’ old age, as well as the author’s quest to reclaim and celebrate her Native heritage. The poems in Homecoming are grouped according to the four directions of the Medicine Wheel: East for Beginnings, South for Innocence, West for Going Within, North for Elder and Wisdom, plus three poems for the Centre, the Great Mystery.
Catherine Bush
Catherine Bush is the author of the story collection Skin, and five novels, including the widely acclaimed Blaze Island and The Rules of Engagement, a New York Times Notable Book. Her books have been shortlisted for the Trillium Prize, City of Toronto Book Award, and Books in Canada First Novel Award. The recipient of numerous fellowships, she was the 2024 Writer-in-Residence/Landhaus Fellow at the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society in Germany. An Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Guelph, she lives in Toronto and eastern Ontario.
Skin by Catherine Bush. Published by Goose Lane Editions
In Skin, Catherine Bush plunges into the vortex of all that shapes us. Summoning relationships between the human and more-than-human, she explores a world where touch and intimacy are both desirable and fraught.
Ranging from the realistic to the speculative, Bush’s stories tackle the condition of our restless, unruly world amidst the tumult of viruses, climate change, and ecological crises. Here, she brings to life unusual and perplexing intimacies: a man falls in love with the wind; a substitute teacher’s behaviour with a student brings unforeseen risks; a woman becomes fixated on offering foot washes to strangers.
Bold, vital, and unmistakably of the moment, Skin gives a charged and animating voice to the question of how we face the world and how, in the process, we discover tenderness and allow ourselves to be transformed.
Joanna Cockerline
Joanna Cockerline is a CBC Literary Awards prizewinner who has been published in national and international journals and magazines such as Room, The Fiddlehead, En Route, and International Human Rights Arts. She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2022.
A long-time street outreach volunteer with an organization that won the City of Kelowna Volunteer Organization of the Year Award, Joanna has recently co-founded a street outreach organization dedicated to the unhoused community and, particularly, street-level sex workers.
Joanna lives with her family in the traditional, unceded Syilx Okanagan Territory of Kelowna, BC, where she teaches literature, communications, and creative writing at the University of British Columbia (UBC) Okanagan.
Still by Joanna Cockerline. Published by Porcupine’s Quill.
Still is the story of Kayla, who lives and works on the streets of Kelowna, Canada, and of Little Zoe, a woman working in the sex trade who is missing. Set in a vibrant and diverse community of people living unhoused, the novel explores sex work, street life, the opioid crisis, what it means to survive, and what it means to find a home—especially in one’s self.
As Kayla—whose past is darker than she tells—searches for her missing friend, she also uncovers much about her own life. The novel delves into both the pain and resiliency of childhood, with flashbacks to Kayla’s past with horses and how she came to be on the streets. Kayla also becomes friends with an outreach volunteer struggling with postpartum depression, alcohol abuse, and bipolar—yet who yearns to rekindle her passion for photography and share it with Kayla.
The book considers what home means, how picture-perfect lives are not always what they seem, how different forms of community are possible, and how we can tell the stories that are ourselves.
Andrew Coyne
Andrew Coyne is a columnist for The Globe and Mail. Mr. Coyne has written previously for The National Post and Maclean’s; in addition, his work has appeared in a wide range of publications in Canada and abroad, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, National Review, Saturday Night and The Walrus.
The Crisis of Canadian Democracy by Andrew Coyne. Published by Sutherland House Books.
With characteristic wit, insight, and rigor, Coyne dismantles the comforting myths Canadians tell themselves about their political system, revealing a parliamentary structure eroded by unaccountable leaders, disempowered MPs, manipulated elections, and systemic dysfunction. The Crisis of Canadian Democracy is both a wake-up call and a call to action, offering compelling solutions to restore genuine self-government to Canadian politics. Essential reading for leaders, citizens, and anyone who cares about the future of democracy in Canada—or anywhere else.
Laurel Croza & Matt James
Laurel Croza is the author of the picture book I Know Here, illustrated by Matt James. It won the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, the Ezra Jack Keats New Writer Award, and the Marilyn Baillie Picture Book Award among many other accolades. She also wrote the sequel, From There to Here, and the short story collection The Whirlpool. Laurel lives with her husband in Toronto.
MATT JAMES is a painter, author/illustrator and musician whose award winning books include Yellow Moon, Apple Moon by Pamela Porter; I Know Here by Laurel Croza, When the Moon Comes by Paul Harbridge and I Know How to Draw an Owl by Hilary Horder Hippely. Matt’s illustrations for Northwest Passage, a tribute to the Stan Rogers song, won the Governor General’s Literary Award. As a child Matt James liked to trace comics and pretend that tennis racquets were guitars —now he lives in Toronto and behaves more like a grown up.
Rock by Laurel Croza and Matt James. Published by Groundwood Books.
When a seagull mistakes a small rock for food, it angrily spits it out. “What do you think you are?” the seagull demands. “I am a rock,” the rock responds. But the seagull refuses to accept this, insisting that the rock is more like a pebble, or a stone. It predicts that the rock will be thrown into the water and sink, and even if it manages to be washed ashore, the same thing will happen again and again, until the rock is worn down to a mere speck. After all, the rock has no shine, color, crystals or speckles … In short, it is nothing special.
But a child enjoying a day at the beach sees the rock differently, and their creation in the sand affirms what the rock has known about itself all along.
Andrea Curtis
Andrea Curtis is an award-winning writer whose books have been published around the world. Her latest children’s books include Loop de Loop: Circular Solutions for a Waste-Free World as well as the ThinkCities series about sustainability and urban systems from Groundwood. Andrea also writes books for adults and is a former editor at some of Canada’s best-known magazines. She lives in Toronto with her family where she hikes, bikes and tends her tiny veggie patch.
The Story and Science of Hope by Andrea Curtis. Published by Groundwood Books.
All over the world, kids are struggling with grief, anxiety and fear about the climate crisis, war, and a future that seems out of their control. Sometimes it’s hard to have hope – but hope may be the one thing that can change the world! Modern researchers – called Hope Theorists – are helping us to understand that we can use hope to improve our own lives and those of our neighbors, friends and even the planet.
The Story and Science of Hope is an illustrated nonfiction book for middle-grade readers that weaves together ancient history with surprising new scientific research showing hope is more than a feeling — it’s essential for our well-being. People who are high in hope are happier and healthier, they live longer, do better in school and have stronger friendships. Learn the history of hope, how it can be measured, learned and practiced — even where you can find hope in your brain (spoiler: it’s the bilateral medial orbitofrontal cortex, above your eyes and a few centimetres inside your brain)!
Christopher DiCarlo
Dr. Christopher DiCarlo is a philosopher, educator, and author. He is the Principal and Founder of Critical Thinking Solutions, a consulting business for individuals, corporations, and not-for-profits in both the private and public sectors. He currently holds the position of Senior Researcher and Ethicist at Convergence Analysis – an international organization focusing on AI Risk and Governance.
Building A God: The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence and the Race to Control It by Christopher DiCarlo. Published by Archambault.
In Building a God, Christopher DiCarlo explores the profound implications of artificial intelligence surpassing human intelligence–a destiny that seems not just possible, but inevitable. At this critical crossroad in our evolutionary history, DiCarlo, a renowned ethicist in AI, delves into the ethical mazes and technological quandaries of our future interactions with superior AI entities.
From healthcare enhancements to the risks of digital manipulation, this book scrutinizes AI’s dual potential to elevate or devastate humanity. DiCarlo advocates for robust global governance of AI, proposing visionary policies to safeguard our society.
Antonio Michael Downing
Antonio Michael Downing is the author of the acclaimed memoir Saga Boy and children’s book, Stars in My Crown. Antonio Michael is the current host of the CBC Radio program The Next Chapter where he discusses books with authors and columnists. He spends his time writing books, singing songs, and trying to make his grandma proud. Black Cherokee is his debut novel.
Black Cherokee by Antonio Michael Downing. Published by Scribner Canada.
Queenie meets Frying Plantain in this courageous coming-of-age story, set in the 1990s, about a mixed-race Black girl fighting for recognition in a South Carolina Cherokee community that refuses to accept her ancestry as legitimate.
On the rain-swollen banks of the River Etsi in South Carolina, Ophelia Blue Rivers—six years old in 1992—catches frogs and stretches to reach the swaying sunflowers. She’s an orphan raised in a rustic cabin by her Grandma Blue, a descendent of the Black Cherokee Freedmen. Caught in deep currents of history that she doesn’t understand, she is, as her grandma says: “half Black, half Cherokee, and all mixed up.”
While Ophelia may not always understand where she came from, there’s no mistaking where she’d rather be: caught in the warmth of Grandma Blue’s cabin, listening to bedtime Cherokee legends as collard greens hiss in the frying pan.
But one day, a tall stranger with a black denim jacket and a charming smile appears, and his arrival shatters Ophelia’s world. She finds herself whisked away from all she knows to live with her Auntie Oba, the boisterous woman she had only met in rumours.
So begins Ophelia’s spirited, at times harrowing, search for home and family—a journey that takes her from a majority-white high school to the inner sanctum of a Black evangelical church to the throbbing dance floors of underground Southern clubs and to a final, devastating encounter with the scion of a wealthy, white family. She must ask herself: What does it mean to belong when the terms of that belonging come at such a high price?
Christine Estima
Christine Estima has written for The New York Times, New York Daily News, The Observer, the CBC, The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, The Walrus, VICE, Chatelaine, and many, many more. Her debut collection THE SYRIAN LADIES BENEVOLENT SOCIETY was named one of the Best Books of 2023 by the CBC. LETTERS TO KAFKA was named one of Indigo’s Most Anticipated Books of 2025. Christine holds a Masters Degree from York University and lives in Toronto.
Letters to Kafka by Christine Estima. Published by House of Anansi Press.
In 1919, Milena Jesenská, a clever and spirited twenty-three-year-old, is trapped in an unhappy marriage to literary critic Ernst Pollak. Since Pollak is unable to support the pair in Vienna’s post-war economy, Jesenská must supplement their income by working as a translator. Having previously met her compatriot Franz Kafka in the literary salons of Prague, she writes to him to ask for permission to translate his story The Stoker from German to Czech, becoming Kafka’s first translator. The letter launches an intense and increasingly passionate correspondence. Jesenská is captivated by Kafka’s energy, intensity, and burning ambition to write. Kafka is fascinated by Jesenská’s wit, rebellious spirit, and intelligence.
Jesenská and Kafka meet twice for lovers’ trysts, but can such an intense connection endure beyond a fleeting affair? In her remarkable debut novel, Christine Estima weaves little-known facts and fiction into a rich tapestry, powerfully portraying the struggles of a woman forced to choose between the roles of wife, lover, and intellectual.
Farah Ghafoor
Shadow Price is Farah Ghafoor’s debut collection. Her work has won the E.J. Pratt Medal and Prize in Poetry, and were finalists for the CBC Poetry Prize and the Far Horizons Award. It also appears in magazines such as The Walrus, Brick Magazine, and The Fiddlehead, art exhibitions like Who’s Afraid of Labour Justice? and FACE/WASTE, as well as anthologies and post-secondary course curriculums. Farah resides in Tkaranto (Toronto) where she writes about the intersection of climate change, colonialism, and capitalism.
Shadow Price by Farah Ghafoor. Published by House of Anansi Press.
Borrowing its title from a finance term—“the estimated price of a good or service for which no market price exists”—Shadow Price is a stunning debut that examines the idea of value in a world that burns under our capitalist lens.
What gives life value? How do we serve existing societal structures that determine its cost? Employing both surreal and documentary imagery, Farah Ghafoor’s arresting collection articulates how narrative is used to revise the past and manipulate the future, ultimately forming our present-day climate crisis. Interrogating personal complicity, generational implications, and the shock of our collective disregard for a world that sustains every living thing, Shadow Price captures the complexities of living and writing as a young poet born in the year that “climate change denial” first appeared in print. Mourning the loss of Earth’s biodiversity, from insects to mammoths to trees, these introspective poems invite us to consider the risks and rewards of loving what may vanish in our lifetime.
Shadow Price charges readers to contemplate their power and purpose in the world today, recognizing that there is hope even in the belly of the beast.
Kate Gies
Kate Gies is a writer and educator living in Toronto. She teaches creative nonfiction and expressive arts at George Brown College. Her writing has appeared in The Globe and Mail, The Walrus, The Malahat Review, The Humber Literary Review, Hobart, and the Best Canadian Essays 2024 Anthology.
It Must Be Beautiful To Be Finished by Kate Gies. Published by Simon and Schuster.
When Kate Gies was four years old, a plastic surgeon pressed a synthetic ear to the right side of her head and pulled out a mirror. He told her he could make her “whole”—could make her “right”—and she believed him. From the age of four to thirteen, she underwent fourteen surgeries, including skin and bone grafts, to craft the appearance of an outer ear. Many of the surgeries failed, leaving permanent damage to her body.
In short, lyrical vignettes, Kate writes about how her “disfigured” body was scrutinized, pathologized, and even weaponized. She describes the physical and psychic trauma of medical intervention and its effects on her sense of self, first as a child needing to be fixed and, later, as a teenager and adult navigating the complex expectations and dangers of being a woman.
It Must Be Beautiful to Be Finished is the story of a girl desperately trying to have a body that makes her acceptable and of a woman learning to own a body she has never felt was hers to define. In an age of speaking out about the abuse of marginalized bodies, this memoir takes a hard look at the role of the medical system in body oppression and trauma.
Adam Lindsay Honsinger
Adam is a writer, musician, and illustrator. He completed an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph, and his debut novel Gracelessland (Enfield & Wizenty) was published in 2015.
Many of Adam’s stories have been published in literary journals such as Descant, Prism International, and Exile Quarterly, two of which were nominated for The Journey Prize Anthology, and one was awarded a Silver at the National Magazine Awards.
Giving Up the Ghost by Adam Lindsay Honsinger. Published by The Porcupine’s Quill.
Giving up the Ghost by Adam Lindsay Honsinger is a novel that follows a family grappling with the repercussions (real and imagined) of the unresolved trauma that has sent each of them spiralling into their own separate orbits. Taking place primarily in the three days leading up to the anniversary of his son’s death, Dr. Vanderlay Stone self-medicates his way through a series of events that ultimately leaves his life in ruins. His estranged wife, Aria, whose grief has left her questioning her faith and her role as a mother, finds that, whether she believes in them or not, there are forces that must be reckoned with. Meanwhile, Dhani’s grandmother organizes a ceremony that she believes will both ensure that her grandson’s soul will transmigrate to a proper state and bring the family back together. As questions of fate and chance converge, these characters find their way, not necessarily back to the ones they love, but to a place where hope and reconciliation are possible.
Robert Hough
Robert Hough has been published to rave reviews around the world. He is the author of The Final Confession of Mabel Stark (Vintage Canada, 2002), shortlisted for both the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best first book and the Trillium Book Award; The Stowaway (Vintage Canada, 2004), one of the Boston Globe’s top ten fiction titles of 2004; The Culprits (Vintage Canada, 2008); Dr. Brinkley’s Tower (House of Anansi, 2012), shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for fiction and longlisted for the Giller Prize; The Man Who Saved Henry Morgan (House of Anansi, 2015), a finalist for the Trillium Book Award; Diego’s Crossing (Annick Press, 2015), shortlisted for the Arthur Ellis Award; and his recent novel, The Marriage of Rose Camilleri (2021). Hough lives in Toronto, ON.
Anarchists in Love by Robert Hough. Published by Douglas & McIntyre.
Following their chance meeting at a New York café in 1890—Emma is fleeing a loveless marriage, while Sasha is becoming convinced that only a new system of thought called anarchism will liberate working people from poverty—two poor, young immigrants join New York’s political underground to overthrow all forms of government. Swept up by her new egalitarian beliefs, Emma gains a reputation as a rousing public speaker, extolling the radical virtues of workers’ rights, free love and women’s liberation. At the same time, Sasha’s own ambitions become mired in jealousy and inhibition. But when shocking news arrives that industrialist Henry C. Frick has ordered the fatal shootings of striking steel-plant workers in Pennsylvania, Sasha and Emma plot a violent act that, they hope, will ignite a worldwide anarchist revolution.
As the first work of fiction to recount this captivating story, Anarchists in Love casts light not only on a politically charged chapter of history, but also on forces of desperation and insurgence that are still in effect today.
Uzma Jalaluddin
Uzma Jalaluddin 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.
Detective Aunty by Uzma Jalaluddin. Published by Harper Collins
After her husband’s unexpected death eighteen months ago, Kausar Khan never thought she’d receive another phone call as heartbreaking—until her thirty-something daughter, Sana, phones to say that she’s been arrested for killing the unpopular landlord of her clothing boutique. Determined to help her child, Kausar heads to Toronto for the first time in nearly twenty years.
Returning to the Golden Crescent suburb where she raised her children and where her daughter still lives, Kausar finds that the thriving neighborhood she remembered has changed. The murder of Sana’s landlord is only the latest in a wave of local crimes which have gone unsolved.
And the facts of the case are troubling: Sana found the man dead in her shop at a suspiciously early hour, with a dagger from her windowfront display plunged in his chest. And Kausar—a woman with a keen sense of observation and deep wisdom honed by her years—senses there’s more to the story than her daughter is telling. With the help of some old friends and her plucky teenage granddaughter, Kausar digs into the investigation to uncover the truth. Because who better to pry answers from unwilling suspects than a meddlesome aunty? But even Kausar can’t predict the secrets, lies, and betrayals she finds along the way…
Kasia Jaronczyk
Kasia Jaronczyk is a Polish-Canadian writer, artist and microbiologist. She immigrated to Canada at the age of 14. Her debut short story collection Lemons was published in 2017 by Mansfield Press. She is a co-editor of the only anthology of Polish-Canadian short stories Polish(ed): Poland Rooted in Canadian Fiction (Guernica Editions, 2017). Her stories were short-listed for the Bristol Prize 2016 and long-listed for CBC Short Story Prize 2010. She has published in Canadian literary magazines such as TNQ, Room, Prairie Journal, Carousel, The Nashwalk Review, Postscripts to Darkness, and in anthologies Wherever I find Myself. Essays by Canadian Immigrant Women (Miriam Matejova, Ed. Caitlin Press, April 2017) and The Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology (2016. Vol 9.) Find out more about Kasia on her website: https://kasiajaronczyk.weebly.com/
Voices in the Air by Kasia Jaronczyk. Published by Palimpsest Press.
What would drive women to risk the lives of their children and innocent people to leave their mother country forever?
On April 30, 1982, two women and their families hijack a Polish passenger plane flying from Breslau to Warsaw in a bold attempt to escape Martial Law in Communist Poland and find safety in West Berlin. Among the hijackers are a cotton spinner whose husband wants to avoid a long prison sentence, a schoolteacher with a sick daughter, a pregnant fourteen-year-old who has visions of the Virgin Mary, and an ambitious young filmmaker. Inspired by real events, Voices in the Air is told from the point of view of these four women and a stewardess in love with the married pilot. Will they find happiness beyond the Iron Curtain or was the hijacking not worth the risk?
Told using traditional narrative and documentary film-style interviews, Voices in the Air follows the main characters’ lives before and after the hijacking, and through real-life events as the fall of the Berlin Wall, the fight for women’s rights in modern Poland, the Covid pandemic and the refugee crisis on the Polish-Belarus border. A must-read novel exploring ambiguous moral choice, censorship, emigration, fate and regret.
Daniel Sarah Karasik
Daniel Sarah Karasik (they/them) is the author of many books, including two poetry collections, Plenitude and Hungry, and the short story collection Faithful and Other Stories. Their work has been recognized with the Toronto Arts Foundation’s Emerging Artist Award, the CBC Short Story Prize, and the Canadian Jewish Playwriting Award. They organize with the network Artists for Climate & Migrant Justice and Indigenous Sovereignty (ACMJIS), among other groups, and are the founding managing editor of Midnight Sun, a magazine of socialist strategy, analysis, and culture. They live in Toronto.
Disobedience by Daniel Sarah Karasik. Published by Book*Hug Press.
Shael lives in a vast prison camp, a monstrosity developed after centuries of warfare and environmental catastrophe. As a young transfeminine person, they risk abject violence if their identity and love affair with Coe, an insurrectionary activist, are discovered. But desire and rebellion flare, and soon Shael escapes to Riverwish, a settlement attempting to forge a new way of living that counters the camp’s repression.
As the complexities of this place unfold before Shael, Disobedience asks: How can a community redress harm without reproducing unaccountable forms of violence? How do we heal? What might a compassionate, sustainable model of justice look like?
This is a remarkable work of queer and trans speculative fiction that imagines how alternative forms of connection and power can refuse the violent institutions that engulf us.
Thomas King
Thomas King is an award-winning writer and photographer. His critically acclaimed, bestselling books include Medicine River; Green Grass, Running Water; One Good Story, That One; Truth and Bright Water; A Short History of Indians in Canada; The Back of the Turtle (winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction); The Inconvenient Indian (winner of the RBC Taylor Prize); Indians on Vacation; Sufferance; and the poetry collection 77 Fragments of a Familiar Ruin. A Companion of the Order of Canada and the recipient of a National Aboriginal Achievement Award, Thomas King lives in Guelph, Ontario.
Aliens on the Moon by Thomas King. Published by Harper Collins.
In Thomas King’s new novel, the citizens of a small Ontario town face life-changing decisions. Bria’s grandmother asks her to take her great-grandmother’s rosary to Edmonton and return it in person to the pope. When she flings it into the lake, the rosary somehow hits the pope on the cheek, thousands of kilometres away. It is the same rosary. How is this possible? Thea is furious at her son for putting her in an old-age home. She should have had a daughter. A daughter would never have forced her from her home. Darlene is mixed up with the no-good petty thief Billy. When she ends up in the hospital, she finds Thea’s fanny pack on the floor. Darlene needs the $265 tucked inside, but she also wants a reward for returning the fanny pack. Herb has bought the drive-in movie theatre on the edge of town and has turned it into his home. He watches movies on the big screen while treating the parking lot as his personal driving range. Should he travel west to see his family on the reserve? Nico has a Subaru whose battery keeps failing, but there are no replacements in North America. Gary and Brenda from the dealership are having an affair. Richard wants to set up a dating profile but has no cell phone.
Just the stuff of ordinary life except for one thing: Aliens have landed on the moon. They are watching Earth and earthlings. What is their plan? With the arrival of the aliens, ordinary life is upended in ways that are both hilarious and revealing. While some people fear the aliens’ three-part mandate to save the planet (which might have been written by a grade 9 student in the US), others think the arrival of the aliens is a golden opportunity for a deep discount weekend at Costco that could possibly rival Amazon’s Black Friday.
Zane Koss
Zane Koss is a poet and translator living in Guelph, ON. He is the author of Harbour Grids (Invisible Publishing, 2022) and several chapbooks of poetry. He is the co-translator of Hugo García Manríquez’s Commonplace (Cardboard House, 2022) and Karen Villeda’s String Theory (Cardboard House, 2024), with the North American Free Translation Agreement (NAFTA). He was born and raised in the East Kootenays, BC, and earned a doctorate at New York University.
Country Music by Zane Koss. Published by Invisible Publishing.
Zane Koss grew up listening to stories. Often these were told late at night around kitchen tables or campfires against the backdrop of rural British Columbia. The stories themselves, punctuated by the humour and violence of life in the mountains, offer a means of critiquing “extractiveness”—both the violence of settler-colonial capitalism and the systems of class privilege that devalue rural, working-class experience. Mining these materials for a rural poetics—a country music—Koss begins to understand both his working-class upbringing and academic surroundings. Country Music is a book that wants to find a way forward through the imperfect inheritance we’re given. Shifting between the poetic inquiries of Lisa Robertson and the vernacular improvisations of Fred Wah, the book offers an investigation of identity, family, and place.
Shari Lapena
Shari Lapena is the #1 internationally bestselling author of eight suspense novels, all of which have been NY Times, Sunday Times (UK) and Globe and Mail bestsellers.
She Didn’t See It Coming by Shari Lapena. Published by Penguin Random House.
When a beloved wife and mother disappears, a luxurious condo building transforms into a potential crime scene, and the investigation begins: Can the detectives find her before it’s too late?
Bryden and Sam have it all: thriving careers, a smart apartment in a luxury condominium, supportive friends and a cherished daughter. The perfect life for the perfect couple.
Then Sam receives a call at his office. Bryden—working from home that day—has failed to collect their daughter from daycare. Arriving home with their little girl, he finds his wife’s car in the underground garage. Upstairs in their apartment her laptop is open on the table, her cell phone nearby, her keys in their usual place in the hall.
Except Bryden is nowhere to be seen. It’s as if she just walked out. How can she have disappeared from her own home? And did she even leave the building at all?
With every minute that passes—and as questions swirl around their community—Bryden and Sam’s past seems a little less perfect, their condominium less safe, their friends, neighbours and relatives no longer quite so reliable . . .
Y. S. Lee
Y. S. Lee’s debut picture book, Mrs. Nobody (illus. Marie Lafrance), received starred reviews from School Library Journal and Foreword. Her fiction includes the critically acclaimed YA mystery series The Agency, which was translated into six languages and won the Canadian Children’s Book Centre’s inaugural John Spray Mystery Award. She is also a poet.
Mrs. Nobody by Y. S. Lee. Published by House of Anansi Press.
Mrs. Nobody wants Alice to play Puppy. But when Alice pushes back (she was Puppy last time!), she feels the wrath of Mrs. Nobody, who grows bigger and bigger and louder and louder before disappearing altogether.
Although Alice suffers a long, lonely night without the company of Mrs. Nobody, she finds some solace in the sound of her own voice. When Mrs. Nobody reappears the next day, Alice knows what she must say.
This debut picture-book by award-winning novelist and poet Y. S. Lee puts a surprising spin on the concept of setting boundaries — particularly with those closest to us. Readers will find themselves immersed in the fanciful world of Alice and Mrs. Nobody — brilliantly rendered by internationally acclaimed illustrator Marie Lafrance — while delighting in the twists of an imaginary friendship gone awry.
M. K. Lobb
M. K. Lobb is a fantasy writer with a love of all things dark— be it literature, humour, or general aesthetic. She grew up in small-town Ontario and studied political science at both the University of Western Ontario and the University of Ottawa. She now lives by the lake with her partner and their cats. When not reading or writing, she can be found at the gym or contemplating the harsh realities of existence.
To Steal From Thieves by M. K. Lobb. Published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers.
Zaria Mendoza is a talented alchemologist, like her late father, able to create any magically powered weapon her dark market clients ask of her. But the work is piling up, materials aren’t cheap, and life in Devil’s Acre is getting more dangerous by the day. And though Zaria doesn’t like to talk about it—even with her childhood friend, Jules—creating magic is slowly draining her life away.
Ward, the kingpin of the dark market, has an impossible task for Kane Durante: steal a certain necklace. It doesn’t matter that the necklace is part of the Great Exhibition in London’s Crystal Palace, where thousands of people, including the Queen, will be in attendance. If successful, Kane’s best friend, Fletcher, will be freed from the kingpin’s command. Fail, and Ward will kill Fletcher himself.
Zaria’s fate becomes linked with Kane’s when she agrees to help him with his heist—as long as extra jewels from the Crystal Palace are part of the deal. This is Zaria and Jules’s only chance out of the hellhole they call home. There are just two problems: Zaria needs that necklace just as much as Kane does, and Kane has no intention of stealing extra jewels.
D.A. Lockhart
D.A. Lockhart is the author of seven collections of poetry, including Devil in the Woods (Brick Books 2019) and Tukhone: Where the River Narrows and the Shores Bend (Black Moss Press 2020). His work has appeared in Best Canadian Poetry in English 2019, TriQuarterly, ARC Poetry Magazine, Grain, Belt, and the Malahat Review among many.
He is a Turtle Clan member of Eelünaapéewi Lahkéewiit (Lenape), a registered member of the Moravian of the Thames First Nation, and currently resides at the south shore of Waawiiyaatanong (Windsor,ON-Detroit, MI) and Pelee Island.
Commonwealth by D.A. Lockhart. Published by Kegedonce Press.
Commonwealth is a profound lyrical meditation on the pre- and post-colonial migrations of the Lenape population throughout the American Midwest, from the watershed of Weli Sipu (the Ohio River) in the Commonwealth of Kentucky to Indiana and beyond. This is a book that transcribes the languages of rivers, highways, rail lines, and buffalo traces. It seeks—or is pushed toward—destinations that are always over the horizon. It is about the fluidity of space and time, and the tangibility of history. As the Lenape journey ever northward and westward, they both create and are created by a collective body of stories: stories of belonging and exclusion, of freedom and confinement, of aspirations and hard truths.
Linden MacIntyre
Linden MacIntyre’s bestselling first novel, The Long Stretch, was nominated for a CBA Libris Award and his boyhood memoir, Causeway: A Passage from Innocence, won both the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-fiction and the Evelyn Richardson Award. His second novel, The Bishop’s Man, was a #1 national bestseller, won the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Dartmouth Book Award and the CBA Libris Fiction Book of the Year Award. Linden is a distinguished broadcast journalist who was born in St. Lawrence, Newfoundland, and grew up in Port Hastings, Cape Breton, spent twenty-four years as the co-host of the fifth estate. He has won ten Gemini awards for his work. MacIntyre lives in Toronto with his wife, the journalist and author Carol Off. They spend their summers in a Cape Breton village by the sea.
An Accidental Villain by Linden MacIntyre. Published by Penguin Random House.
After distinguishing himself on the battlefields of the First World War, Major-General Sir Hugh Tudor could have sought a respectable retirement in England, his duty done. But in 1920, his old friend Winston Churchill, Minister of War in Lloyd George’s cabinet, called on Tudor to serve in a very different kind of conflict—one fought in the Irish streets and countryside against an enemy determined to resist British colonial authority to the death. And soon Tudor was directing a police force waging a brutal campaign against rebel “terrorists,” one he was determined to win at all costs.
Tudor left few traces of his time in Ireland. No diary or letters that might explain his record as commander of the notorious Black and Tans. Nothing to justify his role in Bloody Sunday, November 21, 1920, when his men infamously slaughtered Irish football fans. And why did a man knighted for his efforts in Ireland leave his family and homeland in 1925, moving across the sea to Newfoundland?
An Accidental Villain delivers a consequential and fascinating account of how events can bring a man to the point where he acts against his own training, principles and inclination in the service of a cause—and ends up on a long journey toward personal oblivion.
Bianca Marais
Bianca Marais cohosts the popular podcast The Shit No One Tells You About Writing, which is aimed at helping emerging writers get published. She teaches creative writing through the podcast and was named a winner of the Excellence in Teaching Award for Creative Writing at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies. She lives in Toronto, where she loves playing escape-room games and writing about strong female protagonists.
A Most Puzzling Murder by Bianca Marais. Published by Harper Collins.
Destiny Whip is a former child prodigy, world-renowned enigmatologist and very, very alone. A life filled with loss has made her a recluse, an existence she’s content to endure until a letter arrives inviting her to interview for the position of Scruffmore family historian. Not only does an internet search for the name yield almost nothing, it’s a role she never applied to in the first place!
After she decodes the invitation’s hidden message with ease, the promise of her family secrets being revealed is too powerful a draw for the orphaned Destiny, who soon finds herself on Eerie Island. It’s a place whose inhabitants are almost as inhospitable as the tempestuous weather. The Scruffmores themselves turn out to be not much better, a snarled mess of secrets and motives connected by their mistrust for one another.
Their newly arrived guest proves to be just as much an enigma to them as they are to her. While Destiny slowly works to unravel the mysteries hidden throughout the ominous castle, she struggles to interpret disturbing nightly visions of what is to come. In the midst of cryptic ciphers, hidden passages, and the family’s magical heritage and line of succession, Destiny is certain of two things: one of the Scruffmores is going to die and she’s running out of time to stop it.
Keriann McGoogan
Keriann McGoogan is passionate about primates. She holds her PhD in Biological Anthropology from the University of Toronto and her Master’s from the University of Calgary. While studying howler monkeys in Belize, she spent her days in the humid, tropical forests and kayaked gorgeous (but crocodile-filled) rivers. McGoogan lived in Madagascar for nearly two years studying critically endangered lemurs. McGoogan’s memoir Chasing Lemurs: My Journey Into the Heart of Madagascar, chronicled her first visit to Madagascar and she considers it a love letter to the amazing island nation. Her writing has also appeared in Outpost Magazine and the Toronto Star, and as part of the anthology Bad Artist: Creating in a Productivity Obsessed World. In 2021, McGoogan was selected as a Writers’ Trust Rising Star. When she’s not writing, McGoogan volunteers as a board member for Planet Madagascar, a charity that aims to conserve Madagascar’s unique biodiversity and help the local Malagasy community.
Sisters of the Jungle: The Trailblazing Women Who Shaped the Study of Wild Primates by Kariann McGoogan. Published by Douglas & McIntyre.
Since the 1970s, the science of primatology has been dominated by women—a unique reversal, with men usually outnumbering women in other science, technology, engineering and math fields.
Sisters of the Jungle shines a light on a scientific discipline in which women take the lead while transporting readers to the far corners of the earth to understand our closest living relatives. Keriann McGoogan’s journey as a primatologist has taken her to Belize and Madagascar studying wild primates, including howler monkeys (the loudest living primate) and lemurs (the most endangered group of animals on the planet). Against this backdrop, she explores the stories of the many women who came before her. Intrepid scientists like Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, Birutė Galdikas and Alison Jolly broke boundaries, made astonishing discoveries and ultimately shaped the trajectory of an entire branch of science.
Sean Michaels
Sean Michaels is the author of Do You Remember Being Born?, a story of AI and poetry. He is also the author of the novels Us Conductors and The Wagers, and founder of the pioneering music blog Said the Gramophone. His non-fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, McSweeney’s, and Pitchfork. Sean is a recipient of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the QWF Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize, the Grand Prix Numix, the Prix Nouvelles Écritures, and he has been nominated for the Dublin Literary Award, the Kirkus Prize, the Peabody Awards, and the Prix des libraires du Quebec. Born in Stirling, Scotland, Sean lives in Montreal, Canada.
do you remember being born? by Sean Michaels. Published by Penguin Random House.
At 75, Marian Ffarmer is almost as famous for her signature tricorn hat and cape as for her verse. She has lived for decades in the one-bedroom New York apartment she once shared with her mother, miles away from any other family, dedicating herself to her art. Yet recently her certainty about her choices has started to fray, especially when she thinks about her only son, now approaching middle age with no steady income. Into that breach comes the letter: an invitation to the Silicon Valley headquarters of one of the world’s most powerful companies in order to make history by writing a poem.
Marian has never collaborated with anyone, let alone a machine, but the offer is too lucrative to resist, and she boards a plane to San Francisco with dreams of helping her son. There, she encounters Charlotte, their state-of-the-art poetry bot.
Over the conversations to follow, the poet is intrigued, confused, moved and frightened by Charlotte’s vision of the world, by what it knows and doesn’t know. This is a relationship, a friendship, unlike anything Marian has known, and as it evolves she is forced to confront the secrets of her past and the direction of her future. Who knew that a disembodied mind could help bend Marian’s life towards human connection, that friendship and family are not just time-eating obligations but soul-expanding joys. Or that belonging to one’s art means, above all else, belonging to the world.
Kate J. Neville
Kate Neville is an associate professor in Political Science and the School of the Environment at the University of Toronto, where she studies global energy politics, resource governance, and community resistance. When not in Toronto, Kate can be found in a cabin in northern British Columbia.
Going to Seed by Kate J. Neville. Published by University of Regina Press.
An abandoned place, a disheveled person, a shabby or deteriorating state: we describe such ruin colloquially as “going to seed.” But gardeners will protest: going to seed as idle? No, plants are sending out compressed packets filled with the energy needed to sow new life. A pause from flowering gives a chance for the seeds to form. In a time of urgent environmental change, of pressing social injustice, and of ever-advancing technologies and global connections, we often respond with acceleration—a speeding up and scaling up of our strategies to counter the damage and destruction around us. But what if we take the seeds as a starting point: what might we learn about work, sustainability, and relationships on this beleaguered planet if we slowed down, stepped back, and held off?
Going to Seed explores questions of idleness, considering the labour both of humans and of the myriad other inhabitants of the world. Drawing on science, literature, poetry, and personal observation, these winding and sometimes playful essays pay attention to the exertions and activities of the other-than-human lives that are usually excluded from our built and settled spaces, asking whose work and what kinds of work might be needed for a more just future for all.
Chiedza Pasipanodya
Chiedza Pasipanodya is an artist, curator and writer. Their first book, grace: Notes on Survival (Sorplusi Institute Press), a collection of poems and photos on love and loss was published in 2014. Chiedza lives and works in Bloomfield Hills US, and Toronto, CA.
The Sweet Spot by Chiedza Pasipanodya. Published by Hush Harbour Press.
A lyrical commitment to recalibration, The Sweet Spot draws us into the scintillating space between collapse and revival. Pasipanodya’s poetic voice wades through the mess and mire of their journey beyond survival, stumbling towards a quiet yet vibrant thrivance. Deftly framed by both poetry and photography, each measure of verse acts as a sensitive intimation to find one’s centre amidst the swing from one side of life’s pendulum to the other.
Terese Mason Pierre
Terese Mason Pierre (she/her) is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in The Walrus, ROOM, Brick, Uncanny, and Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction, among others. She is one of ten winners of the Writers’ Trust Journey Prize, and was named a Writers’ Trust Rising Star. Terese is an editor at Augur Magazine, a Canadian speculative literature journal, and co-Director of AugurCon, Augur’s speculative literature conference. She is the author of Myth, a poetry collection, and the editor of As the Earth Dreams, an anthology of Black Canadian speculative fiction. Terese lives and works in Toronto, Canada.
As the Earth Dreams edited by Terese Mason Pierre. Published by House of Anansi Press.
This bold and innovative anthology of speculative short fiction reveals and uplifts the spectacular imaginings, reveries, reflections, experiments, and hopes of Black writers in Canada. A woman attends her mother’s latest resurrection, only to encounter family she’s never met. A postdoc instructor navigates an almost-life in an Elsewhere realm of safety and comfort. After social collapse, a former sex worker leaves her precarious station, and her memories, behind. A woman isolating from a new virus starts hallucinating. In lyrical fragments, a young nanny accepts a job with a peculiar employer. A medium is tasked with summoning a spirit that hits too close to home. And two teenagers test a friendship over magic carpet flying practice. These breathtaking stories explore natural and urban landscapes, living and dead relationships, economic catastrophe, love, and desire—all while celebrating the persistent and ever-changing self, and envisioning beautiful Black futures.
Myth by Terese Mason Pierre. Published by House of Anansi Press.
Myth, the much-anticipated debut collection from the multi-talented Terese Mason Pierre, weaves between worlds (‘real’ and ‘imaginary’) unearthing the unsettling: our jaded and joyful relationships to land, ancestry, trauma, self, and future. In three movements and two interludes, the poems in Myth move symphonically from tropical islands to barren cities, from lucid dreams to the mysteries of reality, from the sea to the cosmos. A dynamic mix of speculative poetry and ecstatic lyricism, the otherworldly and the sublime, Pierre’s poems never stray too long or too far from the spell of unspoiled nature: “The palm trees nod / at the ocean / the ocean does / what it always does / trusts the moon completely.”
Friends ‘with benefits’ tour the wonders of Grenada’s landscapes; extraterrestrials visit the Caribbean and the locals don’t seem phased; red birds “saunter airily like tourists,” La Diablesse lures helpless suitors to their dooms. This collection asks: How can myths manifest themselves in our daily lives? What do we actually mean when we say we love ourselves and others? And how do we pursue/create futures that honour our truths, histories and legacies?
Pratap Reddy
Pratap Reddy immigrated to Canada from India in 2002. The challenges which newly arrived immigrants in Canada encounter spurred him to weave tales of fiction about immigrant experience. The manuscript of this collection Weather Permitting & Other Stories was selected by Diaspora Dialogues for their mentoring program and subsequently Guernica Editions published the book in 2016.
Remaindered People & Other Stories by Pratap Reddy. Published by Guernica Editions.
The author’s first collection Weather Permitting & Other Stories was centred on the predicament of new immigrants who are coping with the challenges they face immediately upon arrival in Canada. In this new collection the focus is on the other side of immigration, exploring the often-neglected aspects: the plight of empty nesters left behind in India, parents compelled to immigrate with their adult children, about immigrants returning to their home country for good or for holiday, of people aspiring to migrate but falling by the wayside. Whatever the surrounding circumstances, all the stories are about people on the move, people who often don’t seem to know where they are headed.
Michael Redhill
Michael Redhill is a poet, novelist, and playwright. His most recent novel, Bellevue Square, won the 2017 Giller Prize. He lives and tries to work in Toronto.
The Trial of Katterfelto by Michael Redhill. Published by Penguin Random House.
“I will grant here at the outset that the Doctor was not who he seemed, but this shall turn out to be of little import in the tale to come. He is, as am I, but a charge in a wire. We were conductors for another force, vassals to a vessel. This vessel I cannot speak of for some pages however central it will become, but I gallop ahead of myself. . . . I believe it is important that you see how I came to meet the good Doctor, and for you to meet us for who we were. Perhaps you will marvel, as have I, at how chance encounters can be charged with the power to alter the course of one’s life, or even history.”
In the late-eighteenth century, the conjurer and amateur scientist Gustavus Katterfelto has made a name for himself travelling across the English countryside with a bag of tricks. For audiences, his astonishing stunts are pure magic. For Katterfelto, each one is carefully engineered and executed with the help of his colleague, confidante and amanuensis, and our narrator, Roger Gossage.
Yet one day in their travels, the two men come across a mystifying object beyond their ken: a metal horn that emits a disembodied woman’s voice. She calls herself Siri of Toronto, and claims to speak from a place plagued by climate catastrophe and social unrest. As they begin to use the horn in their magic shows, Gossage and Katterfelto must work to understand the origin and intent of Siri’s call—a quest that will put them up against the limits of reason and test Roger’s allegiance to the man he calls his friend.
Maria Reva
Maria Reva was born in Ukraine and grew up in Canada. Her fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, McSweeney’s, The Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere, earning a National Magazine Award. She also works as an opera librettist.
Endling by Maria Reva. Published by Penguin Random House.
Ukraine, 2022. Yeva is a loner and a maverick scientist who lives out of her mobile lab. She scours the country’s forests and valleys, trying and failing to breed rare snails, while her relatives urge her to settle down and finally start a family of her own. What they don’t know: Yeva already dates plenty of men—not for love, but to fund her work—entertaining Westerners who come to Ukraine on guided romance tours believing they’ll find docile brides untainted by feminism and modernity.
Nastia and her sister, Solomiya, are also entangled in the booming marriage industry, posing as a hopeful bride and her translator while secretly searching for their missing mother, who vanished after years of fierce activism against the romance tours. Together they embark on the journey of a lifetime across hundreds of miles: three angry women, a truckful of kidnapped bachelors, and Lefty, a last-of-his-kind snail with one final shot at perpetuating his species.
But their plans come to a screeching halt when Russia invades. In a stunningly ambitious and achingly raw metafictional spiral, Endling brilliantly balances horror and comedy, drawing on Reva’s own experiences as a Ukrainian expat tracking her family’s delicate dance of survival behind enemy lines. As fiction and reality collide on the page, Reva probes the hard truths of war: What stories must we tell ourselves to survive? To carry on with the routines of life under military occupation? And for those of us watching from overseas: Can our sense of normalcy and security ever be restored, or have they always been a fragile illusion?
David A. Robertson
David A. Robertson is a two-time Governor General’s Literary Award winner and has won the TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award and the Writer’s Union of Canada Freedom to Read award. He has received several other accolades for his work as a writer for children and adults, podcaster, public speaker, and social advocate. He has been honoured with a Doctor of Letters from the University of Manitoba in 2023, and a Doctor of Laws from the University of Lethbridge in 2025. He is a member of Norway House Cree Nation and lives in Winnipeg.
52 Ways to Reconcile by David A. Robertson. Published by Penguin Random House.
52 Ways to Reconcile is an accessible, friendly guide for non-Indigenous people eager to learn, or Indigenous people eager to do more in our collective effort towards reconciliation, as people, and as a country. As much as non-Indigenous people want to walk the path of reconciliation, they often aren’t quite sure what to do, and they’re afraid of making mistakes. This book is the answer and the long overdue guide.
The idea of this book is simple: 52 small acts of reconciliation to consider, one per week, for an entire year. They’re all doable, and they’re all meaningful. All 52 steps take readers in the right direction, towards a healthier relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people and a time when we are past trauma. By following these steps, we can live in stronger and healthier communities equally, and respectfully, together.
Coltrane Seesequasis
Coltrane Seesequasis is a fantasy writer of Indigenous heritage who grew up in Gatineau, Quebec. He first began his writing journey on long bus rides to school where he would alleviate the boredom by daydreaming of fantastical worlds, noble heroes, and unwavering villains. Eventually, he put those ideas to paper and started writing stories of his own with the hopes that they would one day morph into something more than just a passion. His debut novel, Secrets of Stone, is the first book of a planned series that follows a young wolf called Silversong, in a fantasy world similar to our own. Inspired by a love of nature as well as myths and folklore that challenge the limits of creativity, Coltrane joins a new generation of writers, adding his voice to the immersive genre of fantasy.
The Threads of Time by Coltrane Seesequasis. Published by Kegedonce Press.
After uncovering long forgotten secrets hidden deep beneath the earth, Silversong now finds himself in the middle of a battle for the soul of the Four Territories. On one side is the Heretic, the leader of the exiles intent on destroying the Wolven Code and conquering all wolfkind by force. On the other side is the Warden, who aims to impose her dogmatic and oppressive interpretation of the Wolven Code on all the packs.
Silversong understands that the Four Territories cannot truly thrive when confined to the Warden’s narrow vision, but he also can’t let the Heretic bring devastation to all who resist him. By using his newfound powers, Silversong takes it upon himself to break the boundaries between the Four Territories and unite them as one, undermining the Warden’s authority in the process. Only by standing together as true allies can they hope to defeat the enemy.
Sarah Selecky
Sarah Selecky is the author of This Cake Is for the Party, a finalist for both the Giller Prize and Commonwealth Prize for Best First Book in Canada and the Caribbean, and was longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. The New York Times called the stories “utterly fascinating.” Her novel Radiant Shimmering Light was optioned by Amy Adams for HBO. Selecky holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and brings a contemplative approach to her work as an author and writing mentor. In 2011, she founded the Sarah Selecky Writing School, fostering a global community of writers dedicated to developing both craft and creative intuition. She lives in Prince Edward County, Ontario.
Story Is a State of Mind: Writing and the Art of Creative Curiosity by Sarah Selecky. Published by Assembly Press.
Cultivate a state of mind to help your writing flow with acclaimed writing instructor and Giller Prize finalist Sarah Selecky.
Celebrated author Sarah Selecky brings the spirit of her popular online writing school to the page in Story Is a State of Mind. Short, personable essays deliver gentle coaching, practical advice, and heartfelt encouragement, alongside writing exercises and meditations that offer abundant opportunities to build awareness, confidence, and technique.
Designed for authors seeking support on individual projects or their practice as a whole, this book is overflowing with tips and tools to develop and support creative curiosity and whole-minded writing.
Ardra Shephard
Ardra Shephard is a writer, consultant, podcaster and speaker whose award-winning blog, Tripping On Air, has an international reach and reputation. She is the creator and host of AMI-tv’s lifestyle series Fashion Dis. Her personal essays and non-fiction work have appeared in FASHION, InStyle, Best Health, BezzyMS and other magazines and online publications. Yahoo Lifestyle reported that “@ms_trippingonair is the number-one chronic illness account to follow on Instagram.” Ardra lives in Toronto, ON.
Fallosophy: My Trip Through Life with MS by Audra Shephard. Published by Douglas & McIntyre.
Twenty-three-year-old Ardra Shephard is sleeping with the wrong guy, living in a crappy apartment, and spending money she doesn’t have on designer shoes, boozy brunches and weekends in NYC. She hates her office job, but it pays for the lessons she needs to make it as an opera singer. She isn’t thrilled about her current situation, but she isn’t panicked. She knows she’s got time! Making mistakes while you figure stuff out is what your twenties are all about. But then when a doctor tells Ardra she has MS, those two letters split her life into a Before and After.
While over a million people in Canada and the United States live with Multiple Sclerosis, there is no certainty when it comes to the progression of the disease. By her mid-thirties, Ardra is struggling to walk, and it’s terrifying. When she starts using mobility aids, she faces feelings of otherness and not belonging like never before. As Ardra’s deepest fears keep coming true, she starts to learn the most important lesson: She’s been sold a lie about disability—it isn’t a fate worse than death. Having so far survived all of her worst-case scenarios, she begins to realize that a difficult life doesn’t have to be a joyless life.
Today, twenty years after her diagnosis, Ardra’s journey isn’t over. MS will always be a force to be reckoned with, but the woman Ardra is, day after day, is no longer negotiable. Fallosophy serves up wisdom like a seasoned bartender who’s seen it all, and doesn’t try to sugarcoat what it’s really like to live with a progressive, disabling illness in a world that would rather not build a ramp.
Ariel Sim
Ariel Sim is a designer and researcher whose work bridges civic engagement, participatory systems, and interspecies design. She was one of several contributors to the NYU MOTH Life Project (More-Than-Human), a collaborative exploration of multispecies collaborations and inter-species justice. She was serving as a full-time Human Rights & Regenerative Design Fellow at the time that More Than Human Rights: An Ecology of Law, Thought and Narrative for Earth Flourishing (César Rodríguez-Garavito, ed) was published.
Ariel is also developing her own toolkit for designing with the more-than-human world, titled Beyond HCD: A Practitioner Toolkit. Developed through her project Beyond HCD, the toolkit draws from Ariel’s background exploring new design methods that support the public interest, regenerative cities, and behavioural systems. We’re excited to highlight her ideas in this year’s festival panel on democracy and representation.
More Than Human: How Can We Design for All Planetary Life? presented by Ariel Sim. Published by Azure Magazine.
More-Than-Human: How Can We Design for All Planetary Life? explores how designers are moving beyond human-centered approaches to embrace multispecies, ecological, and interdependent ways of thinking. It highlights projects and philosophies that prioritize the needs and rights of non-human life, calling for a fundamental shift in how we define design, ethics, and responsibility on a planetary scale.
It explores a series of design questions that are hosted by Beyond Human Centred-Design (Beyond HCD). Beyond HCD is a long-term effort to expand traditional human‑centered design to embrace a more‑than‑human world—plants, animals, fungi, ecosystems, developing tools and facilitation methods that amplify all forms of life. The collective has taken an approach to learning in public, prototyping and refining these inclusive practices through ongoing design and engagement projects. Supporting and co‑creating a new wave of multispecies, equity‑centered design, the initiative asks, “how might we design for all planetary life?”
Damian Tarnopolsky
Damian Tarnopolsky’s most recent book is a collection of linked short stories. He is also the author of a previous book of short fiction, a novel, a play, and a chapbook. His work has been nominated for several awards including the Journey Prize, the Amazon First Novel Award, and the Austin Clarke Prize in Literary Excellence, and he won the Voaden Prize in 2019. He teaches at the Narrative-Based Medicine Lab at the University of Toronto.
Every Night I Dream I’m a Monk, Every Night I Dream I’m a Monster by Damian Tarnopolsky. Published by freehand books.
Every Night I Dream I’m a Monk, Every Night I Dream I’m a Monster offers an unfolding puzzle of the human psyche that is at once explosive, funny, dark, sweet, pained, and utterly strange. From the tangled threads of a messed-up family to the timeless themes of consciousness, love, art, and death, Damian Tarnopolsky’s narrative journey takes readers through past, present, and future, with stories spanning from 1980s England to Renaissance France to present-day Canada to a world yet to come.
Each tale stands alone in its stylistic direction, only to connect and reflect back on each other in unexpected, touching, and sometimes jarring ways. As characters from different times and places converge, the result is a mosaic of emotions and insights that mirror the complexities of a self in time.
With echoes of Chekhov, Olga Tokarczuk, and Jennifer Egan, this is a collection that transcends the boundaries of traditional storytelling, offering a glimpse into the workings of human relationships, inheritance, and experience.
Souvankham Thammavongsa
Souvankham Thammavongsa is the author of four poetry books, and the short story collection HOW TO PRONOUNCE KNIFE, winner of the 2020 Giller prize. Her stories have won an O. Henry prize and have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and Granta.
Pick A Colour by Souvankham Thammavongsa. Published by Penguin Random House.
Ning is a retired boxer, but to the customers who visit her nail salon, she is just another worker named Susan. On this summer’s day, much like any other, the Susans buff and clip and polish and tweeze. They listen and smile and nod. But beneath this superficial veneer, Ning is a woman of rigorous intellect and profound depth. A woman enthralled by the intricacy and rhythms of her work, but also haunted by memories of paths not taken and opportunities lost. A woman navigating the complicated power dynamics among her fellow Susans, whose greatest fears and desires lie just behind the gossip they exchange.
As the day’s work grinds on, the friction between Ning’s two identities—as anonymous manicurist and brilliant observer of her own circumstances—will gather electric and crackling force, and at last demand a reckoning with the way the world of privilege looks at a woman like Ning.
Told over a single day, with razor-sharp precision and wit, Pick a Colourconfirms Souvankham Thammavongsa’s place as literature’s premier chronicler of the immigrant experience, in its myriad, complex, and slyly subversive forms.
Matthew J. Trafford
Matthew J. Trafford (he/him) holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia. His first collection of stories, The Divinity Gene (Douglas & McIntyre), garnered critical acclaim in the US and Canada. He continues to write and teach fiction and has recently developed a fibre arts practice, knitting and designing knitwear as Fairy Godfather Knits. He lives in Toronto, Ontario.
Runs in the Blood by Matthew J. Trafford. Published by Arsenal Pulp Press.
A dark and funny short story collection that reveals poignant truths about queer chosen family
A lesbian mother feels out of place taking her daughter to a princess party; a gay couple turns to unconventional means to create their baby; a grieving man winds up on a date with a centaur; an agoraphobic must make an impossible choice before time runs out. This is the unnerving world of Runs in the Blood, Matthew J. Trafford’s sophomore story collection, and it pulses with humour, anxiety, and profound disquiet.
Darkly satirical and unflinchingly human, the stories of Runs in the Blood unsettle our notions of family, whether biological or chosen. Careening through the space beyond nature versus nurture, its characters – betrayed, wounded, unequipped – wrangle with their own worst instincts and the grotesqueries of the modern world, attempting to create families worth holding on to and to protect the children they love.
Kira Vermond
Kira Vermond received her first (friendly) rejection letter from a kids’ magazine when she was 11, but that didn’t stop her from wanting to be a writer. Today, she’s a prolific author and journalist with over 2,000 published articles and seven books – plus two more on the way. Her book, Why We Live Where We Live won the Norma Fleck Award for Canadian Children’s Non-Fiction while, Trending: How and Why Stuff Gets Popular earned the Forest of Reading Yellow Cedar Award.
The Buzz on Wild Bees by Kira Vermond. Published by Owlkids Books.
Say the word “bee,” and most kids think of honeybees or bumblebees. But there are around 20,000 discovered species of bees-and most of these are wild, solitary bees that don’t live in hives. Readers will discover fascinating facts about these lesser-known bee species, from mason bees and mining bees to leafcutter bees and vulture bees.
Using clear, concise language and plenty of fun word play, this introduction to wild bees describes their life cycles, habitats, and behaviors … some of which are weirder than others! It also explains the importance of wild solitary bees to many ecosystems, the challenges these bees face, and the things we can do to be part of the solution.
Vibrant, detailed illustrations created with pencil, crayon, and watercolor provide close-up views that are buzzing with life. Full of fun facts, The Buzz on Wild Bees invites readers to celebrate and protect all the world’s bees.
A. J. Vrana
A. J. Vrana is a Serbian-Canadian academic and writer from Toronto, Canada. Her published works include The Hollow Gods (2020), The Echoed Realm (2021), and Wildblood (2024) from Parliament House Press, “These Silent Walls” (2020), from Three Crows Magazine, and “Sapling,” from the horror anthology This Fresh Hell.
Wildblood by A. J. Vrana. Published by Parliament House Press.
Kai Donovan has always had sharp teeth. Earning his keep as an underground fighter in South Boston, he revels in well-earned notoriety. Wild. Irreverent. Vicious. His secret: he’s the monster from a fable.
But when Kai loses a match against a mysterious opponent whose ferocity rivals his own, he finds himself beholden to the underworld. What he owes isn’t money, but the recovery of an elusive prize coveted by the city’s most dangerous criminals.
His partner Miya—burdened with the ability to traverse dreams—spends her days investigating supernatural phenomena. When she receives a shadowy proposal to find a missing teenager, she’s confronted with the possibility that another like her exists.
As Kai and Miya chase ghosts, the threads of their pursuits weave into a menacing tapestry. Kai’s dark past returns to haunt him, threatening the bonds he believed to be ironclad. Unhealed wounds fester as he’s faced with a ruinous choice: unravel his blood-soaked history or lose himself and the life he’s scavenged together.
Karin Wells
Karin Wells is a journalist, lawyer and much acclaimed author. Her previous books are “The Abortion Caravan” short listed for the Shaughnessy Cohen award for political writing and winner of the Alison Prentice Award for women’s history and “More than a Footnote: Canadian Women You Should Know”.
Women Who Woke Up the Law by Karin Wells. Published by Second Story Press.
Behind every “landmark case” is a woman with a story.
“Who was the woman trying to convince a jury in a tiny courthouse in Nova Scotia that it was self-defense when she killed her partner; and who was the young woman walking into the palais de justice in small-town Quebec arguing that it was her choice, not his, to have an abortion? What was it that pushed these women on, even when the lawyers said it was hopeless?”
From the award-winning author of The Abortion Caravan and More Than a Footnote, Karin Wells once again pulls us into the lives—and this time, the legal trials—of a group of women integral to the advancement of women’s rights in Canada. Eliza Campbell, Chantale Daigle, Jeannette Corbiere Lavell—these Women Who Woke Up the Law often had no idea what they were facing in the courts, or the price they would have to pay. Some never saw justice themselves, but they left a legal legacy. Their bold determination is something we need now more than ever to guard the hard-won gains in women’s rights.
Ian Williams
Ian Williams is the author of seven acclaimed books of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. He delivered the 2024 CBC Massey Lectures, What I Mean to Say, on rehabilitating conversations. His previous book, Disorientation, was selected as a best book of the year by the Boston Globe. Williams’s debut novel, Reproduction, won the Giller Prize. His poetry collection, Word Problems, won the Raymond Souster Award, and his previous collection, Personals, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Robert Kroetsch Poetry Book Award. Williams’s short story collection, Not Anyone’s Anything, won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for the best first collection of short fiction in Canada. He is a trustee for the Griffin Poetry Prize and a professor of English and director of the Creative Writing program at University of Toronto.
You’ve Changed by Ian Williams. Published by Penguin Random House.
Middle-aged and about to be dumped from his construction job, Beckett is not feeling his best—especially since his wife, Princess, is already pressuring him to improve himself. She’s a fitness instructor who spends a lot of time and energy finetuning every inch of her body. They both think their marriage is basically fine, until a couple of friends show up for a visit, their mutual affection and sexual chemistry loudly on display. In one weekend, they upset the tenuous balance between Beckett and Princess, throwing them into parallel midlife crises.
Princess thinks the problem is physical, and attempts to revive Beckett’s interest with relentless surgical alterations and bodily enhancements that have the opposite effect on her husband. Beckett tries to woo Princess back to him by relaunching his contracting business, laying his manly accomplishments at her feet. Then, while Princess is away pursuing even more drastic beauty measures, Beckett meets Gluten, an energetic and erratic man devoted to living in the moment, whom Beckett feels drawn to in ways that surprise him. Beckett is changing, Princess is changing: what will happen to their already stressed marriage?
You’ve Changed is a wild ride exploring identity, insecurity, intimacy and desire, and who individuals become when they unite, and how they change despite promising not to.
Em Wright
Em Wright is a musician, poet, performer and arts facilitator based on Treaty 3 territory. She divides her time largely between DJing for queers and freaks, organizing experimental music events and writhing/screaming on stages, floors and in the arms of loved ones.
Her life’s goal is to provide spaces that are as accessible, safe and adventurous as possible for all who attend/perform, and to blur the line between the arbitrary categories of “artist” and “audience.” It’s all about community building and allowing people the space to exist as the truest, freest versions of themselves, even if only for one night.
Speak Birth, 1997 by Em Wright. Published by Publication Studio Guelph.
Speak Birth 1997 is her first collection of poetry, gathering works written from 2017–2023 exploring the violence of being forced to exist in a body and unraveling her embodied memories of childhood illness.
Liann Zhang
Liann Zhang is a second-generation Chinese Canadian who splits her time between Vancouver, British Columbia and Toronto, Ontario. After a short stint as a skincare content creator, she graduated from the University of Toronto with a degree in psychology and criminology. Julie Chan Is Dead is her first novel.
Julie Chan Is Dead by Liana Zhang. Published by Simon and Schuster.
Julie Chan, a supermarket cashier barely scraping by, finds herself thrust into the glamorous yet perilous world of her late twin sister, Chloe VanHuusen, a popular influencer. Separated at a young age, the identical twins were polar opposites and rarely spoke, except for one viral video that Chloe initiated (Finding My Long-Lost Twin And Buying Her A House #EMOTIONAL).
When Julie discovers Chloe’s body, she doesn’t call the police. Instead, she slips into her dead sister’s meticulously curated life: luxury fashion, high-end skincare, and a devoted online following who never noticed they weren’t quite the same.
At first, the transformation is seamless. Julie relishes the perks of influencer fame, but quickly learns that behind Chloe’s flawless feed lay secrets far darker than she imagined. Her sister’s final days were shadowed by paranoia, manipulation, and something far more sinister.
Now, trapped on a private island retreat with Chloe’s inner circle—an elite clique of influencers—Julie is forced to keep up the act while being haunted by her sister’s untimely death. As events spiral out of control, Julie uncovers the sinister forces that may have led to her sister’s demise and realizes she might be the next target.
Darkly funny, fiercely paced, and full of sharp commentary on identity, fame, and the cost of visibility, Julie Chan Is Dead is a twisted thrill ride where fitting in could be fatal.