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Reads for Asian Heritage Month
May is Asian Heritage Month, and the perfect chance to check out new and new-to-you books by Asian-Canadian writers.
All Books in this Collection
Showing 17–32 of 128 resultsSorted by latest
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Tabako on the Windowsill
$23.95An altar is a door; wonder is the key.
What losses and intimacies bring you to this threshold? Tabako on the Windowsill contends tenderly with such questions, initiating through them the work of transformation.
To shape an entire book around portals and thresholds is to search for living myth. Hari Alluri’s poems build from comic books, television, paintings, folklore, music, and a unique imagination. Following an immigrant point of view while maintaining home in a language that engages with blood and chosen family, Alluri offers multiple lived and ancestral spaces in India, the Philippines, Nigeria, the U.S., and Canada. Guided by a burning attention – to braids of displacement, loss, and joy, to multiple beginnings – Alluri creates moments where we can expand through the personhood of perception into wider, overlapping worlds of perspective and possibility.
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i cut my tongue on a broken country
$19.95A debut poetry collection about reconciling with oneself and learning to love, through a youthful, queer diasporic Korean lens
Lotus flowers, youthful hunger, and other temporary beauties intertwine to tell this coming-of-age story, a set of pulsating poems that move toward a distant memory or a flaming future.
Kyo Lee’s intimate debut poetry collection is simultaneously a vulnerable confession and a micro study of macro topics including lineage, family, war, and hope. i cut my tongue on a broken country explores the Asian American diaspora, queerness, girlhood, and the relationships between and within them, pushing and pulling on the boundaries of identity and language like a story trying to tell itself.
i cut my tongue on a broken country documents a search for love. It’s a eulogy for the things we gave up to get here. It’s an ode to tenderness. It blossoms and bleeds in your hands.
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The Road Between Us
$23.95A lover’s knot of a novel that spans continents and decades, The Road Between Us delves into the entangled lives of its ensemble cast.
Estela, a lawyer, struggles professionally after a deep childhood loss and an ill-advised undergraduate dalliance. Ash is a diplomat posted to Buenos Aires and Beijing who wants what he can’t have. Ophélie, a nurse, makes a grievous medical error that alters the course of her life. And Roman is an academic whose careless sexual escapades after a painful divorce lead to even more painful consequences.
Tense, poetic, and as binge-worthy as a miniseries, The Road Between Us explores why we make the decisions we do, and how those decisions affect the people we love.
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Woman Life Freedom
$25.00This international anthology marks a world-historical moment: the first ever feminist revolution. The slogan chanted by the demonstrators in Iran is Woman, Life, Freedom, and it encompasses hopes and ideals for all people everywhere. This anthology echoes that cry. The poems here might be reflections on the present moment, denunciations of injustice, examinations of the poet’s own conscience, laments for the fallen, bitter curses, prayers, celebrations of life, and visions of a better future. Bänoo and Cy aim to raise awareness of the women’s revolution in Iran and show the world that this cause is alive and will not be put down.
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Little Pretty and The Exceptional
$18.95In the vibrant heart of Toronto’s Gerrard India Bazaar, Dilpreet and his daughters, Jasmeet and Simran, are frantically preparing to open their new sari shop in time for Canada Day. While Jasmeet prepares designs for the store’s logo and signs, she is also preparing for her high-school prom. Meanwhile, Simran anxiously awaits her LSAT scores that will grant her access to the best law schools in the country. Amidst the flurry of activity, Simran experiences a mental-health crisis, threatening to derail not only her future but the family’s shared dream. As she spirals into a dangerous breakdown, the family’s dedication to their shop and to each other is put to the ultimate test.
Little Pretty and The Exceptional is a candid and compassionate portrait of a family haunted by a traumatic past, exposing the stigmas surrounding mental health in the South Asian community. This heartfelt tale reveals what it truly means to support and care for our loved ones during their darkest times.
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My Thievery of the People
$24.95From the highways of Cairo to the outports of Newfoundland, the soul-crushing cubicles of city work and the deceptive perils of the Quebec countryside, these brilliant short stories lay bare the workings of power and the small acts of both courage and compromise by which those on the margins defy them.
Beautifully cohesive across the stunning depth and range of setting and subject, there is nothing predictable about My Thievery of the People.
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Remembering Taiyaki
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Seeking Spirit
$22.95In 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.
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Fugue Body
$19.95“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.”
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Familial Hungers
$23.95Poems 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.
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Journeys North, Journey’s End
$24.95Kue Young came to Canada from Hong Kong to study medicine at McGill University, Montreal. He devoted his subsequent years working with Northern and Indigenous communities of Canada and other circumpolar regions. He also worked in Tanzania training rural health workers. This memoir traces his complex journeys and provides the context to his rather unusual and winding career path. Partly political and historical, and partly a primer on Northern, Indigenous, and Global Health, as well as deeply personal, his story is an inspiration for Canadians to look beyond their own communities, learn about and from other peoples and cultures, and seek opportunities to make the world a better place.
This book should be of particular interest to students and practitioners who work in, care for, or are curious about Canada’s North and its Indigenous peoples.
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Elegy for Opportunity
$20.00In her debut collection, Natalie Lim asks: How do we go on living and loving in a time of overlapping crises?
Anchored by elegies for NASA’s Opportunity rover and a series of love poems, this collection explores the tension and beauty of a world marked by grief through meditations on Dungeons & Dragons, Taylor Swift’s cultural impact, the all-engulfing anxiety of the climate crisis and more. Confessional, funny and bursting with joy, Elegy for Opportunity extends a lifeline from Earth that will leave you feeling comforted, challenged and a little less alone in the universe.
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Heliotropia
$23.95WINNER OF THE 2025 ARCHIBALD LAMPMAN AWARD FOR POETRY
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 OTTAWA BOOK AWARD
“Where fear collides with the little shield of love.”
Manahil Bandukwala’s second collection of poems is a meditation on love during times of social and political upheaval. As a sunflower’s growth reaches toward the sun, so, she suggests, is a lover’s growth compelled by the gravitational pull and soul-light of their beloved. Many of these poems are in conversation with other poets and artists, creating a lineage of call and response. Against a backdrop of terrestrial crisis, come, spend your precious minutes in love’s Heliotropia, where we are magnetized by the unfathomable dark matter of another person, and know ourselves as celestial bodies flowering in spacetime, together.
“Intergalactic yet deeply earthly, intertextual yet wonderfully original…”
—Mikko Harvey, author of Let the World Have You
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Johnny Delivers
$22.95Eighteen-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.
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echolalia echolalia
$23.95Shortlisted Raymond Souster Award
Interviewed on CBC Books
CBC Best Poetry Book 2024
Relentlessly inventive poetry that proclaims a diasporic, queer, and disabled self-hood.
In Jane Shi’s echolalia echolalia, commitment and comedy work together to critique ongoing inequities, dehumanizing ideologies, and the body politic. Here are playful and transformative narratives of friendship and estrangement, survival and self-forgiveness. Writing against inherited violence and scarcity-producing colonial projects, Shi expresses a deep belief in one’s chosen family, love and justice.
“Shi extends her poetics in all directions with silky skill. Language flourishes in the realm of a poet like this.”
– T. Liem, author of Slows: Twice and Obits.
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I Left You Behind
$22.95Spanning several decades and three countries, these enchanting short stories dwell unsentimentally on shifting homes and lost ancestral homelands, distant memories and fragmented family ties. Largely inspired by the author’s own life experiences, they depict close parental bonds, poignant encounters, tragedies and personal triumphs.
Injustice, the importance of education and a love of literature are recurring themes in the more autobiographical stories. At the age of thirteen in Pakistan “the girl” is forced to learn to read the Quran, without understanding its verses until adulthood. During a school year spent in Texas, she witnesses the ugly realities of American racism and segregation. At university in Pakistan, she visits a teenaged royal bride who is forced to observe purdah, to whom she later sends samples of classical English fiction, in the hope of inspiring her, and being a comfort and an inspiration. Years later, she visits her former philosophy professor at Oxford, with whom she shares her decision to become a writer.
These are stories of dislocation, relocation, and longing, evoking the physical and mental isolation made so tangible during the Covid pandemic. Rich in dialogue and description, the seventeen stories are Persian carpets, interwoven with numerous threads to produce a vivid tapestry of lives lived.