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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 33–48 of 138 results
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Forgiveness
$20.95Mitsue Sakamoto and Ralph MacLean both suffered tremendous loss during WWII: Mitsue as a survivor of a Japanese Canadian internment camp, and Ralph as a prisoner in a Japanese POW camp. In order to rebuild their lives and their families after the war, Ralph and Mitsue must find the grace and generosity necessary to forgive those who have wronged them. Their paths eventually cross in 1968 when Mitsue’s son and Ralph’s daughter begin dating, and Ralph is invited to Mitsue’s home for dinner.
This soaring adaptation of Mark Sakamoto’s award-winning memoir affirms the power of forgiveness and shows us that in our challenging times characterized by political divisiveness, xenophobia, and race hatred, the story of Mitsue and Ralph’s personal triumphs over hatred, injustice, violence, and bigotry remains vitally relevant and urgently necessary.
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Four Sufferings, The
$20.95Shiku hakku in Japanese means to endure, an expression that originates in Buddhism. This collection links Terry Watada’s past and present while acknowledging the fundamental suffering of human existence–in birth, aging, illness, and death–and the suffering endured in daily living–common frustrations, desire, separation. But at the same time it celebrates love, and in the end seeks an enlightened state of acceptance. Rise above life’s hardships and rejoice in the state of life is the overall theme of this collection.
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From the Shoreline
$20.00Steffi Tad-y’s debut collection brings forward diasporic experience as it intersects with mental illness. Family history and work lyrics occur against a tonal backdrop of the carceral. Yet Tad-y brings a tenderness to these fraught circumstances, finding beauty in detail and repetitive acts of love, in part due to the use of a multiplicity of forms that render a surplus of affect into beautiful images. Though danger properly exists in Tad-y’s world, her poetry takes its own advice in “Writer’s Archive”: “Look. Enough. Each full stop unspooling / the cardinal & bluebird privacy of things.”
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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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Gambatte
$32.95”Gambatte” means do your best and never give up, and that spirit is at the heart of David Tsubouchi’s life story. This memoir of the former Ontario cabinet minister begins as his family strives for acceptance amid the imprisonment of Canadians of Japanese descent and the confiscation of their property, possessions, and businesses by the Mackenzie King Liberal government in 1941. Despite growing up on the outside looking in, Tsubouchi never felt disadvantaged because he had a good family and was taught to persevere. Gambatte outlines his unusual career path from actor to dedicated law school student/lumber yard worker to politician. Tsubouchi was the first person of Japanese descent elected in Canada as a municipal politician and, as an MPP, to serve as a cabinet minister. His story also reveals an insider’s perspective of Mike Harris’s “Common Sense Revolution.”
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Game of 100 Ghosts, The
$20.95Inspired by an old Japanese parlour game of the Edo period (1603-1868), The Game of 100 Ghosts is a lyrical tribute to the poet’s friends and relations who recently departed their lives. In the game, participants gather in the dark at night and sit around 100 lit candles. Each player tells a ghost story, after which a candle is snuffed out. The last candle ends the spiritual evocation, which the participants hope will summon a supernatural being. This wonderful collection then evokes the spirits of lost friends and relations while paying tribute to a tradition.
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Ghost Face
$19.95‘Greg is clearly a poet of great vision and clarity. His voice is extremely confident and strong, with each poem well-crafted and lean… If you enjoy the work of Sarah Howe or Ocean Vuong, I would recommend this book with no hesitation.’ Stuart Buck, author of Become Something Frail
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Grappling Hook
$19.95Taking its title from Tomas Transtr�mer, Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang?s Grappling Hook sifts the debris of the twenty-first century for insights into identity, desire, and the everyday struggles inherent to motherhood. In doing so, she presents vivid portraits of the joys and perils of marriage, the evolving fight for social justice in a world divided by inequity, and the uncertain future thats?s left for children of the digital age. Grappling Hook is an impressive display of Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang?s considerable poetic gifts, and a love letter to those who are making meaningful change in unprecedented times.
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Harem, The
$22.95“I imagine a crowd of bottle blonde, husky voiced, fishnet-wearing hookers lounging on my couch. They sniff their coke and chat loudly about their Johns.”
How far would you go to be free?
Humorous, though tinged with a sense of the tragic, at times risqué, and utterly contemporary, The Harem is a fast-paced novel about young Asian women and their quest for freedom.
Farina has only one dream: to be free and move away from Peckville, a Muslim ghetto in a large city. She is eager to escape the clutches of her strict parents who will not let her drink, party or have any kind of contact with males. As soon as she turns eighteen, she sets her dream in motion and gets her own apartment. The only problem is that her minimum-wage job leaves her feeling anything but liberated. How can she resist when her ambitious best friend Sabrina proposes an infallible business idea? How harmful can running as escort agency really be? Will she finally be freed by her increasing wealth and independence, or will she remain enslaved by her increasing guilt?
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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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Help! I’m Alive
$22.95A powerfully emotional story of four people touched by a teen’s death, award-winning author Gurjinder Basran’s Help! I’m Alive is a clear-eyed exploration of meaningful connection in the modern era
After video footage of Jay’s death is shared on social media, a suburban Vancouver community is left to try to make sense of what happened to Jay and whether his death was an accident or a suicide.
Help! I’m Alive explores the aftermath through the eyes of four people all suddenly confronted with who they have been and how they should be in the wake of such loss. Jay’s former best friend, Ash, wonders what happened to their friendship and questions the relationships he has now; Winona, Jay’s troubled girlfriend struggles with guilt and abandonment; Anik, Ash’s older brother, is on a search for the meaning of life but hasn’t left his basement apartment in months; and Pavan, Ash and Anik’s mother, finds Jay’s death lays bare all her personal and maternal anxieties.
Unflinching but life-affirming, Help! I’m Alive is a Gen Z and Gen X coming-to-terms story about loneliness and connection, love and suffering, and the moments that bring us together and drive us apart.
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Home Sickness
$21.95The characters in these ten stories are longing for escape and attempt to leave home, but inevitably and perhaps ironically find themselves homesick. Chih-Ying Lay, a Montreal-based expatriate from Taiwan familiar with both homesickness and home sickness, probes our desperate need for home, often matched with an equally desperate need to get away from it. Lay’s characters are outsiders, whether queer, indigenous, unloved or lost, and each discovers that home is not the sanctuary it was meant to be. Sometimes, they find a place to call their very own, as if to tell the reader: You can, too.
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Hotline
$21.95A 2023 Canada Reads FinalistLonglisted for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller PrizeA vivid love letter to the 1980s and one woman’s struggle to overcome the challenges of immigration.It’s 1986, and Muna Heddad is in a bind. She and her son have moved to Montreal, leaving behind a civil war filled with bad memories in Lebanon. She had plans to find work as a French teacher, but no one in Quebec trusts her to teach the language. She needs to start making money, and fast. The only work Muna can find is at a weight-loss center as a hotline operator.All day, she takes calls from people responding to ads seen in magazines or on TV. On the phone, she’s Mona, and she’s quite good at listening. These strangers all have so much to say once someone shows interest in their lives–marriages gone bad, parents dying, isolation, personal inadequacies. Even as her daily life in Canada is filled with invisible barriers at every turn, at the office Muna is privy to her clients’ deepest secrets.Following international acclaim for Niko (2011) and The Bleeds (2018), Dimitri Nasrallah has written a vivid elegy to the 1980s, the years he first moved to Canada, bringing the era’s systemic challenges into the current moment through this deeply endearing portrait of struggle, perseverance, and bonding.
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How Does A Single Blade of Grass Thank the Sun?
$19.95Building on the success of the Journey Prize-shortlisted title story, the stories of How Does a Single Blade of Grass Thank the Sun? present an updated and whimsical new take on what it means to be Canadian. Lau alludes to the personal and political histories of a number of young Asian Canadian characters to explain their unique perspectives of the world, artfully fusing pure delusion and abstract perception with heartbreaking reality.Correspondingly, the book’s title refers to an interview with Chinese basketball star Yao Ming, who when asked about the Shanghai Sharks, the team that shaped his formative sporting years, responded, “How does a single blade of grass thank the sun?” Lau’s stories feature the children and grandchildren of immigrants, transnational adoptees and multiracial adults who came of age in the 1990s–all struggling to find a place in the Western world and using the only language they know to express their hopes, fears and expectations.
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How to Hold a Pebble
$20.95How do we scale up our imagination of the human? How does one live one’s life in the Anthropocene?
How to Hold a Pebble–Jaspreet Singh’s second collection of poems–locates humans in the Anthropocene, while also warning against the danger of a single story. These pages present intimate engagements with memory, place, language, migration; with enchantment, uncanniness, uneven climate change and everyday decolonization; with entangled human/non-human relationships and deep anxieties about essential/non-essential economic activities. The poems explore strategies for survival and action by way of a playful return to the quotidian and its manifold interactions with the global and planetary. Of loss no scale remains no seawall… Between one’s despairs / they will brighten / Hope’s in-built traces.
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Hsin
$21.95Nanci Lee’s debut explores 4th Century Su Hui’s palindrome of longing. Hsin arises from an ancient Chinese ethical philosophy, less a set of moral standards than an appeal to tune.
Heart-mind and nothingness are fair English translations of Hsin, but their tidiness risks losing some of the sharper, wider sides of absence and appetite. As a historical process, according to Hang Thaddeus T’ui-Chieh, Hsin frustrates, “the psychological fragmentation and compartmentalization of the West.”
Born to a Syrian father and a Chinese mother, who gave her up for adoption, Lee explores her origins in a compendium of poem fragments where form embraces the process of its unfolding. These are Koan-like poems, resonant with tones at turns ageless and contemporary; Hsin holds silence in ways that both claim and keep at bay.