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All the Parts We Exile
by Roza Nozari
The youngest of three daughters, and the only one born in Canada soon after her parents' emigration from Iran, Roza Nozari began her life hungry for a sense of belonging. From her earliest years, she shared a passion for Iranian cuisine with her mother and craved stories of their ancestral home. Eventually they visited and she fell in love with Iran's sights and smells, and with the warm embrace of their extended family. Yet Roza sensed something was amiss with her mother's happy, well-rehearsed story of their original departure. As Roza grew older, this longing for home transformed into a desire for inner understanding and liberation. She was lit up by the feminist texts in her women's studies courses, and shared radical ideas with her mother-who in turn shared more of her past, from protesting for the Islamic revolution to her ambivalence about getting married. "In All the Parts We Exile", Roza braids a tender narrative of her mother's life together with her own ongoing story of self, as she arrives at, then rejects, her queer identity, eventually finds belonging in queer spaces and within queer Iranian histories, and learns the truth about her family's move to Canada.
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Everything Is Fine Here
by Iryn Tushabe
A CBC Best Book of 2025 A beguiling coming of age novel set in Uganda in which a young woman grapples with the truth about her sister in a country that punishes gay people. Eighteen-year-old Aine Kamara has been anticipating a reunion with her older sister, Mbabazi, for months. But when Mbabazi shows up with an unexpected guest, Aine must confront an old fear: her beloved sister is gay in a country with tight anti-homosexuality laws. Over a weekend at Aine's all girls' boarding school, sisterly bonds strengthen, and a new friendship emerges between Aine and her sister's partner, Achen. Later, a sudden death in the family brings Achen to Mbabazi's and Aine's village, resulting in tensions that put Mrs. Kamara's Christian beliefs to the test. Aine runs away to Mbabazi's and Achen's home in Kampala, where she reconnects with her crush, Elia, a sophomore at Makerere University. In acclaimed writer Iryn Tushabe's dazzling debut novel, Aine must make hard choices, with inevitable and harrowing results.
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Fallosophy: My Trip Through Life with MS
by Ardra Shephard
Award-winning writer, podcaster, disability advocate, and TV fashion show host Ardra Shephard tells her story of living with Multiple Sclerosis in a debut memoir full of witty humor and hard-won wisdom. 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. "Fallosophy" isn't about fighting an unwinnable battle. It's not about overcoming impossible odds. This is a story about Plan Bs and pivots. Ardra serves up wisdom like a bartender who has been there: with good humor and a gentle refusal to sugarcoat reality.
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Horsefly
by Mireille Gagné
A chilling tale about what happens when we mess with nature.In 1942, a young entomologist, Thomas, is sent to a remote island to work on biological weapons for the Allied military. The scientists live like prisoners while they produce anthrax and look for the perfect virus carrier among the island's many insects.Sixty years later, in the same region of Quebec, a heat wave unleashes swarms of horseflies while humans fall prey to strange flights of rage. Theodore is living a simple life, working double shifts and drinking to forget, when a horsefly bite stirs him from his apathy. He impulsively kidnaps his grandfather, whose dementia has him living in the past on Grosse Île. The horseflies, meanwhile, know a few secrets...Loosely based on historical fact, "Horsefly" is a terrifying tale about the ways in which we try to dominate nature, and how nature will, inevitably, wreak retribution upon us.
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It Must Be Beautiful to Be Finished: A Memoir of My Body
by Kate Gies
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. "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 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 medical system's role in body oppression and trauma.
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Seventhblade
by Tonia Laird
After the murder of T'Rayles's adopted son, the infamous warrior and daughter of the Indigenous Ibinnas returns to the colonized city of Seventhblade, ready to tear the streets asunder in search of her son's killer. T'Rayles must lean into the dangerous power of her inherited sword and ally herself with questionable forces, including the Broken Fangs, an alliance her mother founded, now fallen into greed and corruption, and the immortal Elraiche, a powerful and manipulative deity exiled from a faraway land. Navigating the power shifts in a colonized city on the edge and contending with a deadly new power emerging from within, T'Rayles must risk everything to find the answers, and the justice, she so desperately desires.
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The Tiger and the Cosmonaut
by Eddy Boudel Tan
A noirish page-turner about a mysterious disappearance and a moving portrait of a Chinese Canadian family navigating insecurities, expectations, and simmering anger in their small BC town. Casper Han grew up the dutiful son of immigrants who never felt entirely welcome in their remote corner of British Columbia. Now an adult, living in Vancouver with a boyfriend whose privilege he quietly resents, Casper rarely returns to his hometown, the site of a grief his family doesn’t discuss: the loss of his twin, Sam. Over 20 years have passed since Sam went missing, and a pressing crisis has brought Casper and his siblings back. Their father has vanished, only to be found wandering the vast woods beyond the family home, confused and clutching a pair of scissors, seemingly trapped in the memory of that tragic night.
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Waiting for the Long Night Moon: Stories
by Amanda Peters
In her debut collection of short fiction, Amanda Peters describes the Indigenous experience from an astonishingly wide spectrum in time and place--from contact with the first European settlers, to the forced removal of Indigenous children, to the present-day fight for the right to clean water. In this intimate collection, Amanda Peters melds traditional storytelling with beautiful, spare prose to describe the dignity of the traditional way of life, the humiliations of systemic racism and the resilient power to endure. At times sad, sometimes disturbing but always redemptive, the stories in "Waiting for the Long Night Moon" will remind you that where there is grief there is also joy, where there is trauma there is resilience and, most importantly, there is power.
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What I Know About You
by Éric Chacour
In a tight-knit Levantine Christian family in 1960s Cairo, Tarek's entire life is written in advance. He'll be a doctor like his father, marry, and have children. Under the watchful eye of the family's strong women, he starts to do just that - until a patient's son, Ali, enters his life and turns it upside down. The two men's unsayable relationship sparks a series of events as dramatic as the Six-Day War and assassination of President Anwar Sadat playing out in the background. The turn of the millennium finds Tarek living as a doctor in Montreal. Someone is writing about him and to him, piecing together a past he wants only to forget. But who is the writer of this tale? And will Tarek figure it out in time? From Cairo's grand boulevards and hidden alleys to Montreal's grim winter, from the reign of Nasser to the early 2000s, 'What I Know About You' tells the heartbreaking story of a family torn apart by an epic love.
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Where the Jasmine Blooms
by Zeina Sleiman
Yasmine enters Lebanon escaping a messy divorce and seeking the family, culture, and connection that her Palestinian mother hid during their life in Toronto. It's 2006, and she's meeting her cousin Reem for the first time after connecting over social media. Reem teaches Arabic and lives in a refugee camp with her mother and sister. Her brother Ahmed lived there too until he went to Syria for work and then disappeared. When Yasmine receives a package of mysterious letters suggesting her father might still be alive, the cousins embark on a discovery of political secrets no one in the family wants them to know. Set amid the arid glamour of Lebanon's beaches and urban landscapes, "Where the Jasmine Blooms" is at once a political historical thriller and a Muslim feminist love story.
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