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We celebrate 2025 Lunar New Year with new and forthcoming books by Asian-Canadian authors. From poetry to fiction to graphic novels and drama, there’s something for everyone.
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Longlisted for Canada Reads 2025
From the author of Dear Scarlet comes a graphic memoir about the obstacles one daughter faces as she attempts to connect with her immigrant parents
Beginning with her mother’s stroke in 2014, Teresa Wong takes us on a moving journey through time and place to locate the beginnings of the disconnection she feels from her parents. Through a series of stories – some epic, like her mother and father’s daring escapes from communes during China’s Cultural Revolution, and some banal, like her quitting Chinese school to watch Saturday morning cartoons – Wong carefully examines the cultural, historical, language, and personality barriers to intimacy in her family, seeking answers to the questions “Where did I come from?” and “Where are we going?” At the same time, she discovers how storytelling can bridge distances and help make sense of a life.
A book for children of immigrants trying to honour their parents’ pasts while also making a different kind of future for themselves, All Our Ordinary Stories is poignant in its understated yet nuanced depictions of complicated family dynamics. Wong’s memoir is a heartfelt exploration of identity and inheritance, as well as a testament to the transformative power of stories both told and untold.
LONGLISTED FOR THE GILLER PRIZE
A slow-burning story exploring the generational effects of repression and transgression, set against the raw, eerie landscape of the badlands
Regina is a socially awkward loner who is content to live a life withdrawn from everyone except her cherished pet bunny. But after seven years of silence, Regina’s brother, Ricky, shows up unannounced on her doorstep, along with his daughter, Jez – a peculiar six-year-old with an unnerving vicious streak – upending Regina’s quiet life.
It’s clear to Regina that something terrible has happened, though the truth won’t come to the surface easily. After all, Regina and Ricky lived a childhood fraught with secrets buried as deep as the fossils in the desolate landscape around them. But this secret is one that cannot stay buried for long, and its exposure sets off a calamitous journey through the plains and mountains of Alberta’s badlands to the coast of BC, forcing Regina to confront the brutality of family love and to question how far she is willing to go to preserve it.
By turns thrilling and heartwarming, rife with gothic tension, and carried by fervent compassion, Bad Land is a story about the toxic nature of guilt, the fragility of memory, and the ways we shape our own versions of the truth in order to survive.
In this arresting debut collection Ellen Chang-Richardson writes of race, of injury and of belonging in stunning poems that fade in and out of the page. History swirls through this collection like a summer storm, as she brings her father’s, and her own, stories to light, writing against the background of the institutional racism of Canada, the Chinese Exclusion Act, the head tax and more. From Taiwan in the early 1990s to Oakville in the late 1990s, Toronto in the 2010s, Cambodia in the mid-1970s and Ottawa in the 2020s, Blood Belies takes the reader through time, asking them what it means to look the way we do? To carry scars? To persevere? To hope?
From the acclaimed author of Chinatown comes a personal and political journey through Hanoi, Sài Gòn, Paris, Pyongyang, and Seoul. Elevator in Sài Gòn is part detective story, part historical romance, part postcolonial ghost story, and a biting satire of life in a communist state.
A Vietnamese woman living in Paris travels back to Sài Gòn for her estranged mother’s funeral. Her brother had recently built a new house there and staged a grotesquely lavish ceremony for their mother to inaugurate what was rumoured to be the first elevator in a private home in the country. But shortly after the ceremony, in the middle of the night, their mother dies after mysteriously falling down the elevator shaft.
Following the funeral, the daughter becomes increasingly fascinated with her mother’s past and begins to investigate and track a mysterious figure who emerges from her notebook named Paul Polotsky. Like an amateur sleuth, she trails Polotsky through the streets of Paris as he goes about his usual routines. Meanwhile, she zigzags across France and Asia, trying to find clues to the spiralling, deepening questions her mother left behind unanswered—and perhaps unanswerable.
Poems that reckon with identity, race, and fractured relationships through the lens of food.
Bittersweet, numbingly spicy, herbal and milky, Familial Hungers is a lyric feast. Ginger scallion fish, Sichuan peppercorns, ginseng tea, Chinese school and white chefs – the reader’s appetite is satiated with these poems’ complex palate. There are the bubbling expectations for immigrant daughters, the chewy strands of colonial critique, and dissolving crystals of language loss. Wu relentlessly searches the grocery shelves for the hard-to-digest ingredients of identity and belonging, offering us her nourishing honesty and courage pulled from the marrow.
from time to new by Lydia Kwa is a collection of poems that weaves themes of alienation and reconciliation between the past and the present. It is work that explores themes of grieving and recovery from illness, touching on the unseen aspects of surviving intergenerational trauma, on the challenges of being part of the Asian diaspora in North America in a time of rising violence against BIPOC people, and on the isolation that accompanies living through a global pandemic. Through all these elements, the collection asserts the love of self as inseparable from the care of others.
“I did not know there was a sound / silence made as it laps at the body’s shore,” observes Bridget Huh in her debut collection, Fugue Body-a book in which the body becomes a site of inquiry: a compositional space of melody, counterpoint, and theme. In surprising and intricately orchestrated poems that range from the lyric to the essayistic, Huh meditates on linguistic and racial identity, considers generational differences in an immigrant context, and recounts the life of the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius. In doing so, she renders the music of a restless, relentless mind with remarkable candour and beauty. “I want all the violins to shimmer,” writes Huh, “I want them to stand for impermanence.”
Through the lives of three siblings living in Hiroshima, Japan, Terry Watada explores the sweep of history during the years 1930 to 1945, known in Japan as the Fifteen Year War. The youngest, Chisato Akamatsu, travels to Canada looking for a new life and runs into unexpected brutalities in immigration, a troubled marriage and the humiliation of the internment in her new home during World War Two. Hideki, the only brother, joins the military to fight for the Emperor and find “glory” in China. What he finds is the fallacy of patriotism, the brutality of war, and the futility of existence. Chiemi, the oldest, was in the city when to the atom bomb hit. She then desperately searches for her twin babies. The three encapsulate the hopes, fears, dreams, the inhumanity of the period and resiliency of humans caught in historic eventsThe bomb money, a mass of melted coins found after the bomb blast, stands as a symbol of the fate of the family. In his fourth novel, Canadian poet, dramatist, and novelist Terry Watada delves into the Pacific War, looking at WWII from a Japanese perspective, unique in Canadian literature.
Eighteen-year-old Johnny Wong’s dead-end life consists of delivering Chinese food and holding his chaotic family together in Toronto. When his sweet but treacherous Auntie, the mahjong queen, calls in their family debt, he fears the family will lose the Red Pagoda restaurant and break apart.
Invoking the spirit of Bruce Lee and in cahoots with his stoner friend Barry, Johnny tries to save his family by taking up a life of crime delivering weed with a side of egg rolls. He chases his first love, but his hands are already full with his emotionally distant mother, his dream-crushing father, and his reckless, sardonic little sister.
As he fights to stay ahead of his Auntie, sordid family secrets unfold. With lives on the line, the only way out is an epic mahjong battle. While Johnny is on a mission to figure out who he is and what he wants, he must learn that help can come from within and that our heroes are closer than we think.
Dripping with 1970s nostalgia, Johnny Delivers is a gritty and humorous standalone sequel to the much-loved and award-winning Letters From Johnny.
Opening with an exit, the poems in Precedented Parroting accept no assumptions. With the determination and curiosity of a problem-solving crow, this expansive debut plumbs personal archives and traverses the natural world, endeavouring to shake the tight cage of stereotypes, Asian and avian. Praised as “lively and intelligent” and “lyrically delicious,” Barbara Tran’s poetry offers us both the keen eye and grace of a hawk, “red-tailed gliding / on time.”
Remembering Taiyaki
The Sacred Heart Motel is a map for lapses in time, for the air between the dust. Poems in a multiverse narrative bring the reader on a tour of the motel, from amenities to rooms to back alleys, through the generations of ghosts and queer love stories, until they are left alone with the heart at the centre of the narrative. Music forms the rungs of this manuscript, from nighttime quiet to an orchestral intermission to a crescendo of exposed interiors. New poet Grace Kwan is ruthless and nimble, guiding us through the recesses of body and roadside space.
In her memoir Seeking Spirit: A Vietnamese (Non)Buddhist Memoir, Linda Trinh says she had everything she thought an immigrant woman should want: motherhood, career, and security. Yet she felt empty. Growing up in Winnipeg, Linda helped her mom make offerings to their ancestors and cleaned her late dad’s altar. These were her mother’s beliefs, but was Buddhism Linda’s belief? In her late-twenties, Linda sought answers in Egypt and China and prayed during corporate downsizing, seeking meaning in contemporary life. Via a collection of essays, she plays with form and structure to show the interconnection of life events, trauma, and spiritual practice, to move from being a passive believer to an active seeker.
World War One is in high gear. Fourteen-year-old Khya Terada moves with her family to a remote, misty inlet on Haida Gwaii, then the Queen Charlotte Islands, in northern British Columbia, known for its Sitka spruces. The Canadian government has passed an act to expedite logging of these majestic trees, desperately needed for the Allies’ aircrafts in Europe. At a camp on the inlet, Khya’s father, Sannosuke—a talented, daring logger with twenty years of experience since immigrating from Japan—assumes a position of leadership among the Japanese and Chinese workers.
But the arrival of a group of white loggers, eager to assert their authority, throws off balance the precarious life that Khya and her family have begun to establish. When a quarrel between Sannosuke and a white man known as “the Captain” escalates, leading to the betrayal of her older sister, Izzy, and humiliation for the family, Khya embarks on a perilous journey with her one friend—a half-Chinese sex worker, on the lam for her own reasons—to track down the man and force him to take responsibility. Yet nothing in the forest is as it appears. Can they save Izzy from ruination and find justice without condemning her to a life of danger, or exposing themselves to the violence of an angry, power-hungry man?
Drawing on inspiration from her ancestors’ stories and experiences, Shimotakahara weaves an entrancing tale of female adventure, friendship, and survival.