This is How It is

By Sharon King-Campbell

***THE MIRAMICHI READER'S VERY BEST BOOK AWARDS, POETRY: LONGLIST***

Illuminating, poised, and wholly original, the poems of Sharon King-Campbell’s This Is How It Is range across the planet from New Zealand to Thailand to Newfoundland, gathering along the way voices both ... Read more

Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian)

By Hazel Jane Plante

The playful and poignant novel Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) sifts through a queer trans woman's unrequited love for her straight trans friend who died. A queer love letter steeped in desire, grief, and delight, the story is interspersed with encyclopedia entries about ... Read more

Taken by the Muse

By Anne Wheeler

Finalist for the Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize at the 2021 Alberta Literary Awards!
Finalist for the High Plains Book Awards in the Nonfiction Category
Finalist for Trade Non-Fiction Book of the Year at the 2021 Alberta Book Publishing Awards!

Laced with humour and ... Read more

Broke City

By Wendy McGrath

Broke City, the final book in Wendy McGrath's Santa Rosa trilogy, follows young Christine as she edges into self-awareness in the now-vanished Edmonton neighbourhood of Santa Rosa.

Budding with creativity that her working-class parents do not understand, Christine questions ... Read more

Blue Marrow

By Louise Bernice Halfe

The voices of Blue Marrow sing out from the past and the present. They are the voices of the Grandmothers, both personal and legendary. They share their wisdom, their lives, their dreams. They proclaim the injustice of colonialism, the violence of proselytism, and the horrors ... Read more

Watershed

By Doreen Vanderstoop

It is 2058, and the glaciers are gone. A catastrophic drought has hit the prairies. Willa Van Bruggen is desperately trying to keep her family goat farm afloat, hoping against hope that the new water pipeline arrives before the bill collectors do.

Willa's son, Daniel, goes to ... Read more

If Sylvie Had Nine Lives

By Leona Theis

Winner of the High Plains Book Award and the Saskatchewan Fiction Award. An innovative, gorgeously written story about the small decisions that shape our lives.

Meet Sylvie -- funny, sly, sensual and flawed. She can't always count on herself to make good choices. She may or ... Read more

One Madder Woman

By Dede Crane

A memorable and clandestine love story between two visionary artists in 19th-century Paris.

"These madmen -- and one madder woman -- paint as if suffering seizures! One cannot make heads or tails of the work without taking ten paces back. "

In One Madder Woman, Dede Crane vividly ... Read more

I Am the Big Heart

By Sarah Venart

Winner of the 2021 A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry * 2021 ReLit Awards Longlist

A love story to the emotional self—this heart is tender, but it also has a savage bite.

What does it mean to be the big heart? Or to hope to be the big heart? Or to fail to be that big heart? How far ... Read more

The Cyborg Anthology

By Lindsay B-e

2021 VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres Award Shortlist * 2021 Elgin Awards Longlist

Poems written by Cyborgs in the future—this collection melds sci-fi and poetry, human and machine.

The Cyborg Anthology takes place in a future where there was a thriving world of Robots and Cyborgs ... Read more

The Knowing Animals

By Emily Skov-Nielsen

2021 New Brunswick Book Awards Shortlist * 2021 ReLit Awards Shortlist

Poems that sing, in various notes of female voice, the human being as an embodied, contemplative, feeling animal.

In Skov-Nielsen's thrumming debut, The Knowing Animals, our consciousness is interconnected ... Read more

The Fifth

By MP Boisvert
Translated by Monica Meneghetti

Critically acclaimed in the original French, The Fifth offers a refreshing take on sexuality and desire. Alice, Gayle, Camille and Simon live together in a polyamorous relationship, affectionately referred to as the Family. Camille, a trans woman, and Gayle are lovers; Simon ... Read more

Atlas of Roots

By Beth Kope

Within us all are questions of identity, belonging, and connection. Beth Kope's third poetry collection, Atlas of Roots, is a work of the heart that uncovers the many facets of adoption. In poems that both witness and question, Kope shares her own quest to uncover family history ... Read more

Big

Edited by Christina Myers

Pop culture stereotypes, shopping frustrations, fat jokes and misconceptions about health are all ways society systemically rejects large bodies. BIG is a collection of personal and intimate experiences of plus-sized women, non-binary and trans people in a society obsessed with ... Read more

Lost Lagoon / Lost in Thought

By Betsy Warland

After moving to Vancouver's West End in 2014, The Human is drawn to a small body of water called Lost Lagoon in Stanley Park. Daytime visits, with a surprising array of wildlife, are quietly revelatory; but so is suddenly waking in the night when owl hoots, or geese startle ... Read more

I Can't Get You Out of My Mind

By Marianne Apostolides

Finalist for the 2020 Foreword Indies – Science Fiction Category

What does it mean to say "I love you"?

Ariadne is a single, fortysomething writer and mother embroiled in an affair with a married man. At the core of her current manuscript, a book about the declaration of love, ... Read more

Polar Vortex

By Shani Mootoo

Finalist for the 2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize

Some secrets never die…

Priya and Alexandra have moved from the city to a picturesque countryside town. What Alex doesn't know is that in moving, Priya is running from her past—from a fraught relationship with an old friend, Prakash, ... Read more

In Memory of Memory

Original author Maria Stepanova
Translated by Sasha Dugdale

Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize
Longlisted for the National Book Awards: Translated Literature
Longlisted for the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize
Winner of the 2018 Bolshaya Kniga Award
Winner of the 2019 NOS Literature Prize

An exciting contemporary Russian writer ... Read more

Woman in Valencia, The

By Annie Perreault
Translated by Ann Marie Boulanger

Bittersweet

By Natasha Ramoutar

Shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, 2021

Reflections on a reconstructed homeland and Scarborough.

Bittersweet is an exciting, accomplished collection of poems evoking both a reconstructed homeland and Scarborough (Ontario). Using memory--intimate as well as collective--prompted ... Read more

Maame (Mother)

By Elizabeth Allua Vaah

In Aakonu, a small village on the coast of Ghana, life is a constant tussle between the reality of the mundane and the superstitions presided over by the local priestess. In this setup, girls in their puberty can only look forward to marriage--often to men old enough to be their ... Read more

Finish this Sentence

By Leslie Roach

Finish this Sentence is about a personal experience in dealing with racism and healing from its effects. As this book weaves through the anger and anxiety provoked by racism, it points to the ultimate realization: one is neither the conditioning nor the incessant chatter that ... Read more

Just Pervs

By Jess Taylor

Finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Awards, Bisexual Fiction Category.

Two sex addicts meet and fall in love. A woman catches her husband cheating on her with their dog and escapes to her sister's horse farm. Four friends—fellow pervs—grow up and drift apart, pining for ... Read more

Nobody Cares

By Anne T. Donahue

“The internet’s best friend. ” — Flare

From the author of the popular newsletter That’s What She Said, Nobody Cares is a frank, funny personal essay collection about work, failure, friendship, and the messy business of being alive in your twenties and thirties.

As ... Read more

26 Knots

By Bindu Suresh

A CBC Best Book of 2019

A crackling debut, 26 Knots starts with a fire and never stops smouldering.

Grand in scope, spare in execution, and lush in language, 26 Knots is a fable-like tale of love, obsession, and everything in between. Araceli loves Adrien. Adrien loves Pénélope. ... Read more

Gold Rush

By Claire Caldwell

From the Klondike to an all-girls summer camp to the frontier of outer space, Gold Rush explores what it means to be a settler woman in the wilderness. Drawing on and subverting portrayals of nature from Susanna Moodie to Cheryl Strayed, Caldwell’s poems examine the tension ... Read more

Always Brave, Sometimes Kind

By Katie Bickell

Winner of the 2021 Alberta Literary Awards’ George Bugnet Award for Fiction
Winner of the 2021 Indie Author Project Award for Alberta
Shortlisted for the 2021 ReLit Award for Fiction
A Casual Optimist Book Cover of Note

An exciting debut novel told in connected short stories ... Read more

Dance Me to the End

By Alison Acheson

A profoundly honest and intensely personal story of a woman who cares for her husband after the devastating terminal diagnosis of ALS.

Marty, age 57, was given a preliminary diagnosis of ALS by his family doctor. Seven weeks later, the diagnosis was confirmed by a neurologist. ... Read more

Anna, Like Thunder

By Peggy Herring

In 1808, the Russian Ship St. Nikolai ran aground off the Olympic Peninsula; this novel is based on this astounding historical event and the lives of the people affected.

In 1808, eighteen-year-old Anna Petrovna Bulygina is aboard the Russian ship St. Nikolai when it runs aground ... Read more

Radiant Voices

Compiled by Carla Bergman

A collection of essays inspired by EMMA Talks, a speakers’ series committed to amplifying the voices of thinkers, activists, scholars, artists, and community builders who are also women-identified, trans, and gender-nonconforming folks.

From Idle No More to Black Lives Matter ... Read more

The Rage Room

By Lisa de Nikolits

What if you made the worst mistake of your life and got the chance to fix it? Only you made it so much worse? From the incomparable crafter of nine cross-genre works of fiction, Lisa deNikolits expands her horizons to pen a grab-you-by-the-throat, feminist speculative-fiction ... Read more

The Narrows of Fear (Wapawikoscikanik)

By Carol Rose GoldenEagle

Finalist for the 2021 Rasmussen & Co. Indigenous Peoples' Writing Award

The Narrows of Fear (Wapawikoscikanik) weaves the stories of a group of women committed to helping one another. Despite abuse experienced by some, both in their own community and in residential schools, these ... Read more

Paper Stones

By Laurie Ray Hill

From the moment she holds her baby niece, Rose is on a mission. Terrified that her baby niece will fall victim to the sexual abuse rampant in the family, Rose tells us in her own warm, funny, down-to-earth voice, how she reluctantly agrees to join a therapy group, hoping she ... Read more

Echolocation

By Karen Hofmann

Winner of Best Cover Design at the 2020 Alberta Book Publishing Awards!
Third Place in the Prose Category at the 2019 Alcuin Society Awards for Excellence in Book Design in Canada!
All Lit Up Book Club Selection

In this provocative collection of short stories, Karen Hofmann creates ... Read more

The Adventures of Isabel

By Candas Jane Dorsey

Book one in a new playful and trope-bending mystery series featuring a queer, nameless amateur detective.

“Candas Jane Dorsey’s terrific mysteries are what would happen if Raymond Chandler and Frank N. Furter collaborated on cozies and the heroine were a pansexual private ... Read more

Why Birds Sing

By Nina Berkhout

After a very public onstage flameout, a disgraced opera singer is confronted with her crumbling marriage, a prickly and unexpected brother-in-law, and a cheeky parrot named Tulip — and she must learn to whistle her way through it all.

From the author of Harper’s Bazaar ... Read more

Voodoo Hypothesis

By Canisia Lubrin

Voodoo Hypothesis is a subversion of the imperial construct of "blackness" and a rejection of the contemporary and historical systems that paint black people as inferior, through constant parallel representations of "evil" and "savagery. " Pulling from pop culture, science, pseudo-science ... Read more

Girl Minus X

By Anne Stone

As the world around them collapses under the weight of a slow, creeping virus that erodes memory, fifteen-year-old Dany and her five-year-old sister are on the edge of their own personal apocalypse – fearing separation at the hands of child services. When a dangerous new strain ... Read more

Falling for Myself

By Dorothy Ellen Palmer

In this searing and seriously funny memoir, Dorothy Ellen Palmer falls down, a lot, and spends a lifetime learning to appreciate her disability. Born with two very different, very tiny feet, she was adopted as a toddler by an already wounded 1950s family. From childhood surgeries ... Read more

Paper Houses

By Dominique Fortier
Translated by Rhonda Mullins

Emily Dickinson is as famous for being a recluse as she is for her poetry. In this stunning novel, we see her struggling to reconcile spirit and flesh, preferring letters and reflecting that the only way to have books and life is to live through one’s own writing. Dominique ... Read more

Now You See Her

By Amy Nostbakken, Norah Sadava, Lisa Karen Cox, Raha Javanfar, Cheyenne Scott, and Maggie Huculak

Now You See Her nominated for three Dora Mavor Moore Awards; Outstanding New Play, Outstanding Costume Design & Outstanding Sound Design/Composition.

Now You See Her named one of Toronto’s Top Ten Plays of 2018 by the Toronto Star.

Six diverse women’s voices merge into one ... Read more

Disfigured

By Amanda Leduc

A CBC BOOKS BEST NONFICTION OF 2020
AN ENTROPY MAGAZINE BEST NONFICTION 2020/21
A NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY BOOK OF THE DAY (07/23/2022)

Fairy tales shape how we see the world, so what happens when you identify more with the Beast than Beauty?

If every disabled character is mocked ... Read more

Pretty Goblins

By Beth Graham

From holding hands in the womb to holding each other’s hair back when they puked, twins Laura and Lizzie grew up only having each other. They couldn’t count on their practically feral mom, absent dad, or even the boys they liked. They’re polar opposites—Laura’s reserved ... Read more

Inquirer, The

By Jaclyn Dawn

Shortlisted for Best Trade Fiction at the 2020 Alberta Book Publishing Awards!

When an accident jeopardizing the family farm draws Amiah Williams back to Kingsley, Alberta, population 1431, she doesn't expect her homecoming to make front-page news. But there she is in The Inquirer ... Read more

If Tenderness be Gold

By Eleanor Albanese

If Tenderness Be Gold is set in 19th-century and early 20th-century northern Ontario and Manitoba. An Irish mother, an Italian herbalist, and a Scottish midwife come together on the night of a difficult birth, and the result of their union has effects that echo through the generations. ... Read more