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All the Parts We Exile
by Roza Nozari
From a queer Muslim woman and artist, a generous, insightful memoir that traces her journey toward radical self-acceptance and of exile from her ancestral home. As 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. Eventually they visited Iran and she fell in love with its 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.
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Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community
by Maggie Helwig
An activist priest provides sanctuary for an encampment of unhoused people in her churchyard. "Encampment" tells the story of Helwig's life-long activism as preparation for her fight to keep her churchyard open to people needing a home. More importantly, it introduces us to the Artist, to Jeff, and to Robin: their lives, their challenges, their humanity. It confronts our society's callousness in allowing so many to go unhoused and demands, by bringing their stories to the fore, that we begin to respond with compassion and grace
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The Knowing
by Talaga, Tanya
For generations, Indigenous People have known that their family members disappeared, many of them after being sent to residential schools, "Indian hospitals" and asylums through a coordinated system designed to destroy who the First Nations, Métis and Inuit people are. This is one of Canada's greatest open secrets, an unhealed wound that until recently lay hidden by shame and abandonment. "The Knowing" is the unfolding of Canadian history unlike anything we have ever read before. Anishinaabe author Tanya Talaga retells the history of this country as only she can--through an Indigenous lens.
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The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse: A Memory of Vietnam
by Vinh Nguyen
A compelling memoir about one man’s harrowing escape from Vietnam and the mystery of his father’s disappearance along the way. With the Fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, the war in Vietnam ended, but the refugee crisis was only beginning. Among the millions of people who fled Vietnam by boat was Vinh Nguyen, along with his mother and siblings, and his father, who left separately and mysteriously vanished in the open waters. Decades later, Nguyen goes looking for answers. What he discovers is a sea of questions and buried truths.
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Unlike the Rest: A Doctor's Story
by M.D. Oriuwa, Chika Stacy
A psychiatry resident pulls back the curtain on the challenging personal journey to becoming a doctor as a Black woman, as a daughter, as a mother and as an advocate who had no choice but to step into the spotlight. From childhood, Chika Oriuwa dreamed of being a doctor. Every toy was a make-believe patient for the junior physician in training. She knew that she was destined to wear the white coat one day, no matter what it took, but she didn’t realize the turns that path would take, nor the challenges that lay ahead.
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The Immortal Woman
by Su Chang
Lemei, a former Red Guard disillusioned by Tiananmen, and her daughter Lin, a Chinese immigrant rejecting her heritage while studying in America, clash over identity, assimilation and nationalism, culminating in a tragic confrontation that reveals the deep scars of political trauma and cultural disconnection. Original.
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Nobody Asked for This: A Novel
by Toews, Georgia
A razor-sharp dramedy following a 20-something female comic as she navigates family grief, a dysfunctional friendship, and a date gone very wrong. Virginia is 23 and a stand-up comedian. In between working the rounds of Toronto’s small comedy club circuit and auditioning for paper towel commercials, she is tiptoeing around her depressed roommate and childhood friend, Haley, and having biweekly dinners with her bereaved stepdad, Dale, while trying to manage her own grief at the loss of her mother. She is also secretly working to get the green card that will be her ticket to LA. But not every experience can be neatly packaged into a “bit,” and not every friendship is meant to last.
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Widow Fantasies
by Hollay Ghadery
Despite the book’s title, a few of the protagonists are young girls and men. Through humorous sleights-of-hand, the obliviousness and outer bravado of these men reveal the ways their daughters, granddaughters, and former partners have escaped their control. Perhaps surprisingly, the title story is not of an older woman, but a farm wife with four young children, one a nursing infant. As Leyla cooks breakfast early in the morning, her understated, and understandable, desire to be left alone turns into a nightmare.
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Other Worlds: Stories
by Andre´ Alexis
In this dazzling collection of stories, André Alexis draws fresh connections between worlds: the ones we occupy, the ones we imagine, and the ones that preceded our own. He introduces us to characters during moments of profound puzzlement, and transports us from 19th century Trinidad and Tobago to small-town Ontario, from Amherst, Massachusetts to contemporary Toronto. These captivating stories reveal flashes of reckoning, defeat, despair, alienation, and understanding, all the while playfully using a multitude of literary genres.
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Shadow Price: Poems
by Farah Ghafoor
"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.
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Story of Your Mother
by Braganza, Chantal
In her debut book of essays, Chantal Braganza explores the space where identity and motherhood meet. How do we tell our children who they are when we’re still struggling to find that language to describe ourselves? Journalist Chantal Braganza, who once thought of herself as “an assemblage of parts,” reflects on her upbringing as a daughter of Mexican and Indian immigrants while raising her own multiracial sons. She explores what shapes identity, and the things we reach for as we search for our family’s place in the world. Engaging with a unique structural style, Braganza weaves dreamlike memoir sections of her childhood - with urgent essays about identity.
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Anne of the Library-on-the-Hill
by Catherine Little
Growing up in the shadow of the Great War, Anne finds comfort in her neighbourhood library, where she loses herself in books, often imagining herself as part of the story. She particularly loves the books of LM Montgomery -- and her imagination really takes off when she learns her beloved author is in town. Author Catherine Little was inspired to write this book after discovering, from the journals of L.M.Montgomery, that Montgomery had once visited her Toronto neighbourhood.
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