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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 128 resultsSorted by latest
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New Testament, A
$22.95The KANAVUCCHIRAI quintet develop the context of Sri Lanka’s tragic civil war. As the youth in the island village of Nainativu realize that their education and prospects are being curtailed by an increasingly Sinhala majoritarian nationalist government, they begin to rise up in opposition. Volumes 1 and 2, through its main characters, the young woman Rajalakshmi and her betrothed, Suthan, described the growth of the armed struggle from the 1980s onwards as the young people sail to Tamil Nadu in India to join the resistance.
Volumes 3 and 4 return to the micro-environment of Nainativu and the main island of Sri Lanka and the Tamil struggle as it takes shape there. Volume 5 returns to the surviving characters from the first two volumes, and serves more as an afterward that places their story in a global context, as international actors enter the scene. These novels also bring in other characters that speak to the different political and ideological movements at the time: both militant and pacifist, leftist and nationalist. Devakanthan shows how different political movements drew inspiration from each other, and how divisions appeared and grew within what was first seen as an unshakeable organization.
Devakanthan’s characters are richly detailed, both male and female protagonists endowed with internal lives. The quintet thoughtfully and sensitively narrates the story of simple men and women trapped within a national struggle. As a whole it describes how a movement united by lofty goals begins to fall apart, as disagreements appear and former allies go their separate ways.
The quintet won the Government of Tamil Nadu Novel of the Year Award (1998) for THIRUPPADAIYAATCHI (His Sacred Army), and the Tamil Literary Garden’s Best Novel Award (Canada, 2014).
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Magdaragat
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Dear Haider
$24.95Liz, born in China and raised in Montreal, is about to land in Germany for a summer physics internship at the end of her freshman year. Eager for a new beginning, she is hoping to break free of her unrealized childhood dream of becoming a pianist, a dead-end romantic relationship, and the tug of war between her Chinese and Canadian identities.
In Germany, she meets fellow intern Haider, an Indian Muslim from Toronto, and they fall in love against expectations. But summer doesn’t last forever. Once they return to Canada, culture clashes and family disapproval threaten to pull them apart. As her sense of self is pushed dangerously close to a tipping point, Liz must summon the courage to survive the chaos that her life has become.
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Dayo
$23.95Shortlisted Gerald Lampert Memorial Award
An elegant debut collection that illuminates the contours of un/belonging.
Dayo: a Tagalog word referring to someone who exists in a place not their own. A wanderer, migrant worker, exile or simply a stranger. At its core, the poems in Dayo interrogate whether belonging can exist in a society suffused with violence. Here, the poet, as a stranger, confronts the politics of recognition by offering his vision. Reflexive and lyrical, this collection embodies the true curiosity and tenacious spirit of a dayo seeking a place to replant, tend, and grow delicate roots.
“Great poetry re-creates the world, and Perez’s world is here, built from the fleeting moments you don’t always notice, built beautifully, built to last.”
– Wayde Compton, author of The Outer Harbour and The Blue Road: A Fable of Migration“By the end of all the belovedness catalogued in this book, you too will be heavier with the weight of all that is most gorgeous about this world.”
– Ed Bok Lee, author of Mithocondrial Night and Whorled“One of the things that most impresses me about this lush, lyrical and soulful collection is its ability to hold hope alongside melancholy and despair…With incredible empathy and insight, he writes for “the fragments of ourselves, pieced together by grief.”
– Jen Currin, author of Trinity StreetAt once cinematic and elegiac, this book is an unforgettable contribution and a remarkable achievement.”
– Adrian De Leon, author of barangay: an offshore poem -
impact statement
$23.95Longlisted Pat Lowther Award
A revolutionary call to arms wherein the arms are love, art, self-definition, and community care as an alternative to so-called care under carceral capitalism.
Borrowing and disrupting the forms of patient records, psychiatric assessments, and court documents, Jody Chan’s impact statement traces a history of psychiatric institutions within a settler colonial state. These poems bring the reader into the present moment of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, capitalism and “money models of madness,” and “wellness” checks. Forming a ghost chorus, they sing an impact statement on migration and intergenerational trauma, gentrification, and police neglect of racialized violence against queer communities in Toronto–and how the “wrong” kinds of desire, be it across class, race, or gender lines, or towards other worlds, are often punished or disappeared. And yet, these poems also make space for what can take root, despite the impacts–care teams, collective grief rituals, dinners around a table with too many friends to fit. impact statement imagines, and re-imagines, and re-imagines again, a queer, disabled, abolitionist revolution towards our communal flourishing.
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New
$18.95It’s 1970s Winnipeg—a time of revolution and radical possibilities—and an apartment building of Indian immigrant friends is about to be transformed by their latest arrival. A young Bengali Muslim woman, Nuzha, has just married Qasim over the phone at his mother’s insistence, and can’t wait to start her new life with him. But Qasim struggles to let go of his true love, a Canadian nurse named Abby, making him an emotionally and physically distant husband. Broken-hearted but full of pluck, Nuzha finds comfort and adventures on her own terms by exploring everything her new community has to offer. From braving the bus schedule to building close relationships with Qasim’s friends, Nuzha’s discoveries are thrilling, enriching, and crack open new possibilities for everyone.
From the creator of the powerful solo show Crash, Pamela Mala Sinha’s New is an evocative, emotionally astute comedy about the complex nature of love and sacrifice, joyful togetherness and piercing loneliness, and what it means to create entirely new ways of life through our willingness to tread uncharted territory.
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In the Key of Decay
$21.95Triangulated against the backdrop of a deteriorating world, In the Key of Decay pushes past borders both real and imagined to attend to those failed by history. Attuned to scientific racism, systemic medical failures, and climate change, Em Dial’s poems incisively carve out space for interrogation. Their place-finding and place-making is often surprising, centring care and desire, where Dial’s speaker “calls for someone to call me what I am and for that someone to be a lover, bare on silk sheets, inside walls of confidential lilac.” In the Key of Decay doesn’t just hum along, it sings.
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The Lantern and the Night Moths
$23.95the lantern light seems to have written a poem;
they feel lonesome since i won’t read them.
—“lantern” by Fei MingThe work of Tang Dynasty Classical Chinese poets such as Li Bai, Du Fu, and Wang Wei has long been celebrated in both China and internationally, and various English translations and mistranslations of their work played a pivotal yet often unacknowledged role in shaping the emergence and evolution of modern Anglophone poetry.
In The Lantern and the Night Moths, Chinese diaspora poet-translator Yilin Wang has selected and translated poems by five of China’s most innovative modern and contemporary poets: Qiu Jin, Fei Ming, Dai Wangshu, Zhang Qiaohui, and Xiao Xi. Expanding on and subverting the long lineage of Classical Chinese poetry that precedes them, their work can be read collectively as a series of ars poeticas for modern Sinophone poetry.
Wang’s translations are featured alongside the original Chinese texts, and accompanied by Wang’s personal essays reflecting on the art, craft, and labour of poetry translation. Together, these poems and essays chart the development of a myriad of modernist poetry traditions in China that parallel, diverge from, and sometimes intersect with their Anglophone and Western counterparts.
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The Red One
$22.95Nisha, “Azar’s beautiful wife,” lives a life surrounded by all the modern luxuries of a wealthy suburban home in Toronto. Her father is a taxi driver, her mother a conservative religious housewife jealously craving a better material life. Tormented by her childhood memories of serial sexual abuse by a family friend, contemptuous of the lies lived by her circle of fake friends, Nisha is unwilling to have a child by her dominant, patronizing husband. She finds escape in mindless shopping sprees and secretly spirals into an addiction to a drug called the “red powder.” In this state one day she meets the mysterious Red One, an archetypal strong man to whom she’s instantly and dangerously attracted, who promises her release from her pain. But is he real or a figment of her fervid imagination? In a thrilling denouement to the novel she finds the answer.
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Precedented Parroting
$21.95Opening 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.”
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Spiritual Pursuits and Other Stories
$22.95Lien Chao’s new collection of stories is about Toronto as a meeting place for people of all backgrounds. Set in the decades from the 1980s to the 2020s, the stories depict the ripple effects of China’s economic success, the peak of business globalization, and its inevitable decline during the COVID-19 pandemic. The author has chosen an unhampered social and geographical setting to observe Canadians in the world and at home, including immigrants and refugees. The author has depicted in great detail friendships among neighbours and single women. As Canadians merge into mixed neighbourhoods, spiritual pursuits in individual lifestyles are shared socially as communal rituals.
These five long stories touch on a number of social groups. Newcomer portrait artists build their businesses on the streets of downtown Toronto in the 1990s; a Canadian business club tries hard to enter the retail markets in China in the 2010s; a multi-millionaire from China organizes an artists’ salon in Scarborough; a group of spiritual pursuers meet weekly in Markham Village for meditation and discussion of ancient Chinese wisdom and spirituality.
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The Legend of Baraffo
$23.00In Baraffo, a town gripped by revolutionary fervour, a boy named Mazzu grapples to understand the motivations of Babello, a man imprisoned for an act of arson. When Babello begins a hunger strike and another building is set ablaze, tensions mount among the citizens and Mazzu considers a risky solution.
Within an extraordinary world, this sweeping and mythical story asks prescient questions about the nature of social change: is it better accelerated by those who seek total transformation or attained by those trying to work within the system?
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They Will Not Listen to Reason
$22.95In sparkling, clear prose, understated yet unflinching, Open Season probes deep into the fissures of caste, class, religion, and gender in our world. Located mostly in India and Canada, the stories describe a world of global flows where a woman returns to India after her two daughters are killed in a school shooting in the US; in the title story a Muslim young man is lynched in an Indian town on the false charges that his fridge contains beef; “Light as a Butterfly” draws our attention to the ongoing degradation of the environment; in “All Cut Up,” set in a suburb of Toronto, seven-year-old Zoya is heroically protected by her mother Zarina from her community’s demand that she be circumcised. The stories speak of a world familiar and yet all too elusive, of a gentler, mellower, more hopeful time; they explore the charms and constraints of life in a small town and question assumptions and beliefs and dreams.
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我的名是张欣恩 (Gimme chance leh)
$19.95Kris, a young diasporic Chinese woman, attempts to reconcile her upbringing between Canada and Singapore. In doing so, she comes face to face with herself as she pulls apart the tactics she uses in an attempt to fit into two wildly different cultures. Weaving in and out of English, Mandarin, and Singlish, Kris uses storytelling to navigate beauty standards, body image, family, food, and an unexpected friendship with a Chicken Rice Uncle.
Deftly unravelling stereotypes and addressing the universal through Kris’s determined persistence and heartwarming sense of humour, 我的名是张欣恩 (Gimme chance leh) is about celebrating difference and existing in the in-between.
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Catinat Boulevard
$25.00Beginning in Saigon during the Vietnam War and ending in present day New York, Catinat Boulevard tells the story of two friends Mai and Mai Ly. While Mai flirts with American GIs in rowdy bars along Catinat Boulevard, Mai Ly joins the communist resistance in the jungle. The story also follows Nat, Mai’s half Vietnamese-half African-American son abandoned in a Saigon orphanage.
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Baby Book
$22.952023 Governor General’s Award for Poetry Finalist* Longlisted 2024 Gerald Lampert Award* Longlist 2025 Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry*
“God is personal,” the astrologer said. Terrifying and also personal, like a baby.
Direct and humorous, Baby Book stacks story upon story to explore how beliefs are first formed. From a family vacation on a discount bus tour to a cosmogony based on cheese, these poems accumulate around principles of contingency and revelation. Amy Ching-Yan Lam describes the vivid tactility of growth and death — how everything is constantly, painfully remade — offering a vision against the stuck narratives of property and inheritance. Power is located in the senses, in wind: multiple and restless.