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Endling: A Novel
By Maria Reva. 2025
In the absurdist literary tradition of George Saunders and Percival Everett comes a brilliant debut novel by a writer who…
is "bang-on brilliant" (Miriam Toews), about a biologist in Ukraine battling to save the country’s snail species from the brink of extinction.One of Literary Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2025 • One of 49th Shelf's Most Anticipated 2025 Spring FictionUkraine, 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 give up, 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—a flamboyant protestor who vanished after years of fierce activism against the romance tours. So begins a 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 as 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? Endling is a tour de force from an author on the cutting edge of fiction, weaving a story of love, loss, humor, and devastation that only she can tell.See Less
Crackdown: Surviving and Resisting the War on Drugs
By Garth Mullins. 2025
Part memoir, part manifesto, Crackdown is a story of the drug war, told from the frontlines.Garth Mullins was born into…
a world too bright for him to fully see, and too unforgiving to fully accept him. Bullied by both kids and adults, who mocked his albinism and trivialized his blindness, Garth turned to activism and punk rock, seeking escape, and discovered a scene that embraced him for who he was. And yet he still couldn't quell a haunting pain that had overwhelmed him since he was a child, a deep need to "blank it all out." Until he tried heroin.Garth's experience as a heroin user—including dopesickness, incarceration and overdose—is an all-too-common story for those struggling with drug addiction. And for Garth, it was this revelation that propelled him to the forefront of drug user activism. He was witnessing firsthand the failure of abstinence-based recovery programs; the ceaseless deaths of friends and community members from unregulated, toxic drug supply and a lack of safer alternatives; the over-representation of drug users, particularly Indigenous and Black users, in jails and prisons. And he saw that far from the decades-long war on drugs being a success, it had been a deadly failure. Crackdown is an intimate portrait of Garth's relationship with opioids, and a searing indictment of a broken system that is failing drug users and non-users alike. With street drugs getting more toxic by the day, drug users and their families, friends and communities are left to pay the price. Crackdown asks us to radically reimagine our approach to drug use, and to envisage a system that helps rather than harms.
The cree word for love: Sakihitowin
By Tracey Lindberg. 2025
Bestselling author of Birdie, Tracey Lindberg, and renowned artist George Littlechild join together in a stunning collaboration of story and…
art to explore love in all its forms—romantic, familial, community and kin—in the Cree experience In The Cree Word for Love, author Tracey Lindberg and artist George Littlechild consider a teaching from an Elder that in their culture, the notion of love as constructed in Western society does not exist. Here, through original fiction and select iconic paintings, Lindberg and Littlechild respond. Together they have created and curated this collaboration which travels, season by season, mirroring the four rounds in ceremony, through the themes of the love within a family, ties of kinship, desire for romantic love and connection, strength in the face of loss and violence, and importance of self-love, as well as, crucially, a deeper exploration of the meaning of "all my relations." Together, art and story inspire and move readers to recall our responsibilities to our human and more than human relations, to think about the obligation that is love, and to imagine what it could possibly mean to have no Cree word for love. The result is a powerful story about where we find connection, strength, and the many forms of what it means to live lovingly
Searching for serafim: The life and legacy of serafim "joe" fortes
By Ruby Smith Díaz. 2025
The life and legacy of Serafim "Joe" Fortes, a trailblazing Black lifeguard, who became a cultural icon in a racist…
society Searching for Serafim is a layered exploration of the life of Vancouver's first lifeguard, Serafim "Joe" Fortes. A Trinidad native who arrived on the shores of Canada in 1885, Fortes was heralded as a hero in Vancouver for saving dozens of people from drowning, and his funeral drew the largest crowd ever recorded in the city's history. Since his passing, Fortes has been commemorated with a Canada Post-issued stamp and local buildings named in his honour. Yet, little has been discussed about how he navigated an openly white supremacist society as an Afro Latino man. In Searching for Serafim , author Ruby Smith Díaz seeks to unravel the complicated legacy of a local legend to learn more about who Fortes was as a person. She draws from historical documents to form an insightful critique of the role that settler colonialism and anti-Black racism played in Fortes's publicized story and reconstructs his life, from over a century later, through a contemporary Black perspective, weaving poetry and personal reflections alongside archival research. The result is a moving and thought-provoking book about displacement, identity, and dignity. Searching for Serafim conjures a new side to one of Vancouver's most beloved — and misunderstood — public figures
Searching for serafim: The life and legacy of serafim "joe" fortes
By Ruby Smith Diaz. 2025
Searching for Serafim is a layered exploration of the life of Serafim "Joe" Fortes. A Trinidad native who arrived on…
the shores of Canada in 1885, Fortes was heralded as a hero in Vancouver for saving dozens of people from drowning as the city's first lifeguard, and his funeral drew the largest crowd ever recorded in the city's history. Since his passing, Fortes has been commemorated with a postage stamp and local buildings named in his honour. Yet, little has been discussed about how he navigated an openly white supremacist society as an Afro Latino man. In Searching for Serafim, author Ruby Smith Díaz seeks to unravel the complicated legacy of a local legend to learn more about who Fortes was as a person. She draws from historical documents to form an insightful critique of the role that settler colonialism and anti-Black racism played in Fortes's publicized story and reconstructs his life, from over a century later, through a contemporary Black perspective, weaving poetry and personal reflections alongside archival research. The result is a moving and thought-provoking book about displacement, identity, and dignity. With black-and-white photos
Messy perfect
By Tanya Boteju. 2025
Perfect for fans of Mason Deaver and Becky Albertalli, this tender, raucous novel follows a rule-following, perfectionist teen who starts…
an underground GSA club at her conservative Catholic high school, from the acclaimed author of Kings, Queens, and In-Betweens. Cassie Perera is a star student in St. Luke's junior class. But the new school year brings an unwelcome surprise—the return to St. Luke's of Cassie's former friend, Ben, who left a few years ago after a homophobic bullying incident Cassie knows she didn't do enough to prevent. Still harboring guilt from her inaction, Cassie decides, in her usual, overzealous way, to team up with the neighboring public school to found an underground Gender and Sexuality Alliance—as a complicated strategy for making things up to Ben. Secretly, Cassie is also tempted by the possibility of opening up about her own sexuality for the first time. As Cassie's new friends urge her out of her comfort zone, she unlocks a kind of joy and freedom she's never felt before—even as she struggles to balance these experiences with her typical tightrope of being the perfect daughter, student, and Catholic. Cassie's perfectly curated life unravels into turmoil, but can she embrace the mess enough to piece together something new?
We survived the night
By Julian Brave NoiseCat. 2025
We Survived the Night interweaves oral history with hard-hitting journalism and a deeply personal father-son journey into a searing portrait…
of Indigenous survival, love, and resurgence. Julian Brave NoiseCat’s childhood was rich with culture and contradictions. When his Secwépemc and St’at’imc father, an artist haunted by a turbulent past, abandoned the family, NoiseCat and his non-Native mother were embraced by the urban Native community in Oakland, California, as well as by family on the Canim Lake Indian Reserve in British Columbia. In his father’s absence, NoiseCat immersed himself in Native history and culture to understand the man he seldom saw—his past, his story, where he came from—and, by extension, himself. Years later, NoiseCat sets out across the continent to correct the erasure, invisibility, and misconceptions surrounding the First Peoples of this land as he develops his voice as a storyteller and artist. Told in the style of a "Coyote Story," a legend about the trickster forefather of NoiseCat’s people who was revered for his wit and mocked for his tendency to self-destruct, We Survived the Night brings a traditional art form nearly annihilated by colonization back to life on the page. Through a dazzling blend of history and mythology, memoir and reportage, NoiseCat unravels old stories and braids together new ones. He grapples with the erasure of North America's First Peoples and the trauma that cascades across generations, while illuminating the vital Indigenous cultural, environmental, and political movements reshaping the future. He chronicles the historic ascent of the first Native American cabinet secretary in the United States and the first Indigenous sovereign of Canada; probes the colonial origins and limits of racial ideology and Indian identity through the story of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina; and hauls the golden eggs of an imperiled fish out of the sea alongside the Tlingit of Sitka, Alaska. This is a rewriting and a restoration—of Native history and, more intimately, of family and self, as NoiseCat seeks to reclaim a culture effaced by colonization and reconcile with a father who left. Virtuosic, compelling, and deeply moving, this is at once an intensely personal journey and a searing portrait of Indigenous survival, love, and resurgence. Drawing from five years of on-the-ground reporting, We Survived the Night paints a profound and unforgettable portrait of contemporary Indigenous life, alongside an intimate and deeply powerful reckoning between a father and a son. A soulful, formally daring, and indelible work from an important new voice
Rufous and calliope: A novel
By Sarah Louise Butler. 2025
In this stunning tale of love and loss, a middle-aged cartographer, suffering from memory loss and claustrophobia, hikes through the…
interior of British Columbia in search of a treehouse where he spent one memorable summer on the run with his four siblings. In Rufous and Calliope, Sarah Louise Butler takes readers deep into the rugged British Columbia Interior, where the mysteries of nature collide with the fragile threads of memory. Rufous Flanagan, a modern-day cartographer, embarks on a solo trek through an ancient mountain pass in search of the treehouse hideaway where he spent one memorable childhood summer on the run with his three older half-siblings and his twin sister, Calliope. With every step, the vast, untamed wilderness presents both a physical and emotional challenge, as Rufous must confront not only treacherous terrain, but the unravelling of his own mind. His memories-sometimes vivid, sometimes slipping away-become a map guiding him through towering forests, dry creek beds and smoke-filled skies. Yet, in this wilderness, not everything is as it seems. Echoes of the past lead Rufous on a journey that blurs the line between dream and reality. As the elements close in, this novel offers an unforgettable tale of survival, memory and the bond between siblings.
Reconciling: A lifelong struggle to belong
By Larry Grant. 2026
It's taken most of Larry Grant's long life for his extraordinary heritage to be appreciated. He was born in a…
hop field outside Vancouver in 1936, the son of a Musqueam cultural leader and an immigrant from a village in Guangdong, China. In 1940, when the Indian agent discovered that their mother had married a non-status man, Larry and his two siblings were stripped of their status. With one stroke of the pen, they were disenfranchised—no longer recognized as Indigenous. Reconciling is a series of conversations between Larry and writer Scott Steedman as they visit pivotal geographical places together. Larry tells the story of his life, including his thoughts on reconciliation and the path forward for First Nations and Canada. His life echoes the barely known story of Vancouver and spans key events of the last two centuries, including Chinese immigration and the Head Tax, the ravages of residential school and now Indigenous revival and the accompanying change in worldview. When Larry talks about reconciliation, he uses the verb reconciling , an ongoing, unfinished process we're all going through. "I have been reconciling my whole life, with my inner self," he explains. "To not belong was forced upon me by the colonial society that surrounded me. But reconciling with myself is part of all that."
Reconciling: A lifelong struggle to belong
By Larry Grant. 2025
A personal and historical story of identity, place, and belonging from a Musqueam-Chinese Elder caught between cultures. It's taken most…
of Larry Grant's long life for his extraordinary heritage to be appreciated. He was born in a hop field outside Vancouver in 1936, the son of a Musqueam cultural leader and an immigrant from a village in Guangdong, China. In 1940, when the Indian agent discovered that their mother had married a non-status man, Larry and his two siblings were stripped of their status. With one stroke of the pen, they were disenfranchised—no longer recognized as Indigenous. Reconciling is a series of conversations between Larry and writer Scott Steedman as they visit pivotal geographical places together, including the Musqueam reserve, Chinatown, the site of the Mission residential school, the Vancouver docks and the University of British Columbia. Larry tells the story of his life, including his thoughts on reconciliation and the path forward for First Nations and Canada. His life echoes the barely known story of Vancouver and spans key events of the last two centuries, including Chinese immigration and the Head Tax, the ravages of residential school and now Indigenous revival and the accompanying change in worldview. When Larry talks about reconciliation, he uses the verb reconciling , an ongoing, unfinished process we're all going through, Indigenous and settler, immigrant and Canadian-born. "I have been reconciling my whole life, with my inner self," he explains. "To not belong was forced upon me by the colonial society that surrounded me. But reconciling with myself is part of all that."
The last exile (Wakeland #5.0)
By Sam Wiebe. 2026
Maggie Zito is being held for murder. The volatile single mother is accused of killing the retired leader of the…
notorious Exiles motorcycle gang and his wife aboard their million-dollar houseboat. With a mystery witness putting Maggie at the scene, and the Exiles baying for her blood, it's unlikely she'll make it to the trial alive. Desperate, Maggie's lawyer, Shuzhen Chen, calls in a favor to Dave Wakeland: Find evidence of Maggie's innocence and get her client out of custody. Wakeland reluctantly returns to a changing city, full of unfamiliar dangers. To prove Maggie's innocence, he and Shuzhen must reckon with the Exiles crime syndicate and their bloodthirsty leader. The bikers are on the verge of a civil war, and an unseen foe is gunning for the top spot. Dave and Shuzhen have to put aside their complicated past to learn the identity of the witness, and find out why Maggie was framed for this killing. To complicate matters, Wakeland's business partner is nowhere to be found. The security firm they started teeters on the verge of bankruptcy. Even if the case can be solved, and the business saved, can the partners ever trust each other?
An incendiary anti-capitalist response to climate change rooted in hope for the future, this book is a tool or a…
weapon, depending on how you use it Despite the naysayers, climate change is a fact. We know that global temperatures are rising, that weather patterns are changing, that forest fires, droughts, flooding, severe storms, and heat waves are the new normal. We know this planet is teetering on the edge of climate collapse, an apocalyptic event that threatens not only the future of human civilization, but also the millions of other unique life forms on Earth. We know it's all our fault-it's the direct result of human beings burning fossil fuels and spewing out carbon emissions at such a fantastic pace that we've changed the fate of the entire planet, and it leaves most of us feeling helpless. What can any of us really do? This Book Is a Knife is a startling essay collection that explores the origins and dangers of climate change through a critique of capitalism and an exploration of the ways in which we might radically reimagine our world before it's too late. Rooted in L.E. Fox's background as a science journalist, This Book Is a Knife is a frank, plain-spoken, and sharply incisive series of missives designed to wake us up to the urgent reality of climate change and the lies we are fed based on the fact that the real issue is neither climate nor the environment-it's capitalism. Fierce and unapologetic, This Book Is a Knife is a passionate and unique dissection of climate change that offers new possibilities for saving the world.
Contemplation of a crime: A novel
By Susan Juby. 2025
Buddhist butler and reluctant investigator Helen Thorpe bands together with her fellow butler-school graduates to rescue her very wealthy employer…
and his son in this new mystery by bestselling author Susan Juby Butler Helen Thorpe is not one to judge, but the participants in Close Encounters for Global Healing are astonishingly unpleasant. The five-day program brings together people from across the political spectrum with the goal of helping them bridge their ideological and personal differences. Helen and her employer, Mr. Levine, have come to Side Island to assist David, his youngest son, who is facilitating the course. The motley assortment of participants includes a burned-out environmental activist, an internet troll, a clued-out consumerist, an alleged white nationalist, and a man who was arrested at the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa. No one seems interested in a civil conversation, much less global healing, and each person has shown up with their own secret agenda. No rapprochement between the warring-or at least endlessly bickering-parties seems possible. But when something deadly happens, they must learn to work together. First, however, they must figure out who among them can be trusted.
Meltdown: The making and breaking of a field scientist
By Sarah Boon. 2025
In Meltdown, Sarah Boon tells us about field adventures in snow and ice, the tough decision of choosing an academic…
career over that of a writer, and the challenges she faces as a woman in science. Her story blends adventure and academia as she traverses John Evans Glacier on Ellesmere Island, builds weather stations in northern British Columbia, samples proglacial rivers, and scares away grizzlies with helicopters. Along the way, Boon finds inspiration in the stories of historic female explorers like Mary Schäffer Warren and Phyllis Munday, celebrating the tenacity of women in the field. But her path isn't without obstacles. In addition to the physical and psychological rigors of fieldwork, Boon faces gender bias, departmental politics, and job insecurity in academia. Her journey is also marked by injury, struggles with imposter syndrome, and a serious mental health diagnosis. Meltdown is an honest and reflective narrative about the process of finding your identity, the need for open conversations around mental health and science, and one woman's pursuit of balance between her career and personal life.
Among ghosts
By Rachel Hartman. 2025
A few things to know about the town of St. Muckle's: It's too out-of-the-way to interest greedy lords, and too…
damp and muddy for marauding dragons to burn. And anyone, from a humble serf to a runaway nun, may earn their freedom by living for a year and a day within the town walls. Seven years ago, Charl and his mother fled to St. Muckle's and made it their safe-haven, building a new life in this so called Peasant's Paradise. But when Charl sees something impossible-a ghost-soon the embers of his past are threatening to engulf his world in flame. A tragic accident is quickly followed by murder, a deadly plague, and a mercenary dragon. Charl manages to escape to an abandoned abbey outside of town, but finds no safety within those ruined walls. A treacherous nun, a chorus of murdered girls, and the fearsome Battle Bishop await, ready to ensnare him in a complex web of history, magic and fate. For some things should never be forgotten, however much they haunt us, and Charl will need all his wisdom and resiliency if he is to fight for the world he knows...and the people he calls home.
The book of z
By Rahat Kurd. 2025
The Book of Z reconsiders mystical possibilities - above all, longing for divine union - found by poets within scriptural…
language. For a thousand years the story of Zulaykha - "the wife of Aziz" in the Qur'an - and her passion for Yusuf has been celebrated in classical and contemporary Persian and Urdu poetry, in Muslim folk traditions, and in Persian and Mughal miniature painting. At the same time, as the Biblical "wife of Potiphar" she has been just as indelibly cast as temptress in misogynistic cautionary tales and canonical Western art. Rahat Kurd writes in the vividly imagined voice of a Zulaykha who considers her Abrahamic lineage from its estranged and fragmented reality, asking what consolation human desire and divine longing might offer our shared present tense.
Tunnel island: Stories
By Bill Gaston. 2025
Set on an island in BC's Salish Sea, a richly imagined and often hilarious collection of linked stories by Bill…
Gaston, a master of the art of short fiction. Eleven stories feature a cast of characters striving to overcome pasts that often include a catastrophic error. On Tunnel Island, moral misjudgments, semi-legal schemes, and antisocial gaffes abound as characters seek a remedy for what ails them: loneliness, heartbreak, grief. Jack ekes out a living doing odd jobs and minding the estates of absent owners, until he takes a lover's bad advice and rents their houses through Airbnb. A dying woman retains her wry Wiccan sense of humour while lovingly ministered to by her partner - in between his trips to hand out Halloween candy at their door. The almost mystical disappearance of a toddler is revisited years later when her parents remarry in a surreal outdoor ceremony. Highly original and empathetic, Tunnel Island is electrified by dark undercurrents that jolt and illuminate by turns. Bill Gaston's bighearted vision of life on a heavily forested island immerses readers in a world rendered tender and tolerable by human folly and our stumbling attempts at redemption.
Buzzkill clamshell
By Amber Dawn. 2025
Amber Dawn's latest poetry collection flaunts the chronically pained body as a source of lewd feminine power As a novelist,…
memoirist, and poet, Amber Dawn regularly lays her heart bare in work that is fiery, raw, and intensely personal. In Buzzkill Clamshell, her third poetry collection, Amber Dawn circumvents the expectations of so-called confessional poetry, offering twisted mythmaking, extreme hyperbole, and lyrical gutter-mouthing that explore themes of sick and disabled queerness, aging, and desire. With poems populated by severed heads, domme swan maidens, horny oracles, and other horrible purveyors of pleasure, Buzzkill Clamshell reads as if a leather dyke and a demonic goat had a baby-gleefully embracing the perverse while stomping its way through chronic pain and complex PTSD. Already acclaimed for her candid and often kinky verse, Amber Dawn pushes further into trauma-informed eroticism with self-assured irreverence and uncomfortable abjectivity. Beneath her brilliant, carnivalesque imagery lies a prayer-not for the pain to end, but for finding fantastic new ways to cope with it.
Messy Perfect
By Tanya Boteju. 2025
Perfect for fans of Mason Deaver and Becky Albertalli, this tender, raucous novel follows a rule-following, perfectionist teen who starts…
an underground GSA club at her conservative Catholic high school, from the acclaimed author of Kings, Queens, and In-Betweens.Cassie Perera is a star student in St. Luke's junior class. But the new school year brings an unwelcome surprise—the return to St. Luke's of Cassie's former friend, Ben, who left a few years ago after a homophobic bullying incident Cassie knows she didn't do enough to prevent.Still harboring guilt from her inaction, Cassie decides, in her usual, overzealous way, to team up with the neighboring public school to found an underground Gender and Sexuality Alliance—as a complicated strategy for making things up to Ben. Secretly, Cassie is also tempted by the possibility of opening up about her own sexuality for the first time.As Cassie’s new friends urge her out of her comfort zone, she unlocks a kind of joy and freedom she’s never felt before—even as she struggles to balance these experiences with her typical tightrope of being the perfect daughter, student, and Catholic.Cassie’s perfectly curated life unravels into turmoil, but can she embrace the mess enough to piece together something new?
Among Ghosts
By Rachel Hartman. 2025
Set in the world of New York Times bestseller Seraphina, a boy on the run from a dragon — among…
other dangers — seeks refuge in a haunted abbey in this wholly original YA ghost story about what haunts us, and what connects us.A few things to know about the town of St. Muckle's: It's too out-of-the-way to interest greedy lords, and too damp and muddy for marauding dragons to burn. And anyone, from a humble serf to a runaway nun, may earn their freedom by living for a year and a day within the town walls. Seven years ago, Charl and his mother fled to St. Muckle's and made it their safe-haven, building a new life in this so-called Peasant's Paradise. But when Charl sees something impossible — a ghost — soon the embers of his past are threatening to engulf his world in flame. A tragic accident is quickly followed by murder, a deadly plague, and a mercenary dragon. Charl manages to escape to an abandoned abbey outside of town, but finds no safety within those ruined walls. A treacherous nun, a chorus of murdered girls, and the fearsome Battle Bishop await, ready to ensnare him in a complex web of history, magic, and fate. For some things should never be forgotten, however much they haunt us, and Charl will need all his wisdom and resiliency if he is to fight for the world he knows . . . and the people he calls home.Discover more critically acclaimed fantasy from Rachel Hartman!SeraphinaShadow ScaleTess of the RoadIn the Serpent's Wake