Books by Black Authors

Fifteen Dogs

By: Andre Alexis

$19.95

An utterly convincing and moving look at the beauty and perils of consciousness.

WINNER OF CANADA READS 2017

WINNER OF THE 2015 GILLER PRIZE

WINNER OF THE 2015 ROGERS WRITERS’ TRUST FICTION PRIZE

FINALIST FOR THE 2015 TORONTO BOOK AWARDS

— I wonder, said Hermes, what it would be like if animals had human intelligence.

—I’ll wager a year’s servitude, answered Apollo, that animals – any animal you like – would be even more unhappy than humans are, if they were given human intelligence.

And so it begins: a bet between the gods Hermes and Apollo leads them to grant human consciousness and language to a group of dogs overnighting at a Toronto veterinary clinic. Suddenly capable of more complex thought, the pack is torn between those who resist the new ways of thinking, preferringthe old ‘dog’ ways, and those who embrace the change. The gods watch from above as the dogs venture into their newly unfamiliar world, as they become divided among themselves, as each struggles with new thoughts and feelings. Wily Benjy moves from home to home, Prince becomes a poet, and Majnoun forges a relationship with a kind couple that stops even the Fates in their tracks.

André Alexis’s contemporary take on the apologue offers an utterly compelling and affecting look at the beauty and perils of human consciousness. By turns meditative and devastating, charming and strange, Fifteen Dogs shows you can teach an old genre new tricks.

Finding Edward

By: Sheila Murray

$24.95

Shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award
Longlisted for the Toronto Book Award
Longlisted for Canada Reads 2023
A Globe and Mail Best Book

Cyril Rowntree migrates to Toronto from Jamaica in 2012. Managing a precarious balance of work and university he begins to navigate his way through the implications of being racialized in his challenging new land.

A chance encounter with a panhandler named Patricia leads Cyril to a suitcase full of photographs and letters dating back to the early 1920s. Cyril is drawn into the letters and their story of a white mother’s struggle with the need to give up her mixed race baby, Edward. Abandoned by his own white father as a small child, Cyril’s keen intuition triggers a strong connection and he begins to look for the rest of Edward’s story.

As he searches, Cyril unearths fragments of Edward’s itinerant life as he crisscrossed the country. Along the way, he discovers hidden pieces of Canada’s Black history and gains the confidence to take on his new world.

Finish this Sentence

By: Leslie Roach

$20.95

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 racism can provoke. Rather, one is powerful and able to arrest those harmful thoughts. Awakening to these truths have helped Leslie to heal. She hopes that her work will be beneficial to others as well.

Glint of Light, The

By: Clarence Major

$32.95

“This naturalistic novel follows a Black environmental scientist [Mark Smith]. The story is shaped by several cataclysmic events, which suit the novel’s backdrop, in which the Presidency of Barack Obama corresponds with a rise in white nationalism, though climate crisis and racially charged incidents.” – The New Yorker

Mark Smith, is a sensitive thirty-seven-year-old environmental scientist of mixed race. He tries to come to terms with his mother’s painful death as he goes through the stages of grief. Mark is also reassessing his relationship with his gay twin sister, Maria, a lawyer. After several failed relationships with women in college, Mark, while at his mother’s funeral in Chicago, reconnects with his high school girlfriend, Christy, an artist who paints self-portraits. He now believes he has finally found true and lasting love, but the country’s civil unrest and political division plague the opportunity at a second chance. Major has devised a powerful novel about the cumulative unease and random violence that grip American life and ask what we should do about it.

How Black Mothers Say I Love You

By: Trey Anthony

$17.95

From the author of the blockbuster hit ‘da Kink in my hair comes an emotional and raw look into family dynamics, trust, resolution and change.

Claudette still can’t forgive her mother for leaving. For six years of her childhood, Claudette and her sister Valerie were left with their grandmother while their mother, Daphne, moved from Jamaica to the United States to start a new chapter for their family. But in that time, Daphne remarried and had another daughter.

Claudette, now in her late thirties, travels to visit her dying mother in Brooklyn, but that doesn’t stop her anger and abandonment issues from bubbling up. It doesn’t stop Daphne from voicing her opinions on how Claudette lives her life, either. With Daphne, Claudette, and Valerie all under one roof again, each family member is forced to confront their emotions while there’s still time.

Though rooted in buried strife and sadness, How Black Mothers Say I Love You is full of humour, love and tenderness as it explores the complicated perceptions of immigrant mothers.

How She Read

By: Chantal Gibson

$20.00

How She Read is a collection of genre-blurring poems about the representation of Black women, their hearts, minds and bodies, across the Canadian cultural imagination.

Drawing from grade-school vocabulary spellers, literature, history, art, media and pop culture, Chantal Gibson’s sassy semiotics highlight the depth and duration of the imperialist ideas embedded in everyday things, from storybooks to coloured pencils, from paintings to postage stamps.

A mediation on motherhood and daughterhood, belonging, loss and recovery, the collection weaves the voices of Black women, past and present. As Gibson dismantles the grammar of her Queen Elizabeth English, sister scholars talk back, whisper, suck teeth, curse and carry on from canonized texts, photographs and art gallery walls, reinterpreting their image, re-reading their bodies and claiming their space in a white, hegemonic landscape.

Using genre-bending dialogue poems and ekphrasis, Gibson reveals the dehumanizing effects of mystifying and simplifying images of Blackness. Undoing the North Star freedom myth, Harriet Tubman and Viola Desmond shed light on the effects of erasure in the time of reconciliation and the dangers of squeezing the past into a Canada History Minute or a single postage stamp. Centrefolds Delia and Marie Therese discuss their naked Black bodies and what it means to be enslaved, a human subject of art and an object of science, while Veronica? tells it like it is, what it means to hang with the Group of Seven on the walls of the Art Gallery of Ontario amongst the lakes, the glaciers, the mountains and the dying trees. Supported by the voices of Black women writers, the poems unloose the racist misogyny, myths, tropes and stereotypes women of colour continue to navigate every day.

Thoughtful, sassy, reflective and irreverent, How She Read leaves a Black mark on the landscape as it illustrates a writer’s journey from passive receiver of racist ideology to active cultural critic in the process of decolonizing her mind.

In the Black

By: B. Denham Jolly

$29.95

Winner of the 2017 Toronto Book AwardA remarkable memoir about achieving prosperity in the face of relentless prejudiceIn the Black traces B. Denham Jolly’s personal and professional struggle for a place in a country where Black Canadians have faced systematic discrimination. He arrived from Jamaica to attend university in the mid-1950s and worked as a high school teacher before going into the nursing and retirement-home business. Though he was ultimately successful in his business ventures, Jolly faced both overt and covert discrimination, which led him into social activism. The need for a stronger voice for the Black community fuelled Jolly’s 12-year battle to get a licence for a Black-owned radio station in Toronto. At its launch in 2001, Flow 93.5 became the model for urban music stations across the country, helping to launch the careers of artists like Drake.Jolly chronicles not only his own journey; he tells the story of a generation of activists who worked to reshape the country into a more open and just society. While celebrating these successes, In the Black also measures the distance Canada still has to travel before we reach our stated ideals of equality.

Live from the Afrikan Resistance!

By: El Jones

$22.00

Live from the Afrikan Resistance! is the first collection of spoken word poetry by Halifax’s fifth Poet Laureate, El Jones. These poems speak of community and struggle. They are grounded in the political culture of African Nova Scotia and inherit the styles and substances of hip- hop, dub and calypso’s political commentary. They engage historical themes and figures and analyze contemporary issues — racism, environmental racism, poverty and, violence — as well as confront the realities of life as a Black woman. The voice is urgent, uncompromising and passionate in its advocacy and demands. One of Canada’s most controversial spoken word artists, El Jones writes to educate, to move communities to action and to demonstrate the possibilities of resistance and empowerment. Gathered from seven years of performances, these poems represent the tradition of the prophetic voice in Black Nova Scotia.

Maame (Mother)

By: Elizabeth Allua Vaah

$22.95

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 fathers and already with other wives.

Ahu, a young widow of eighteen, has no choice but to marry an older relative. But she refuses to have more children and returns to Aakonu. Overcoming all odds, she sets up a village eatery and raises her children, educating them all and finally sending the eldest girl, Bomo, to university. Her rebellion and success are an inspiration for the generation of girls growing up, to reach out beyond the limits imposed upon them by ancient tradition. Through these beautifully told, lyrical stories about herself, her daughter Bomo, the beautiful but tragic Ebela, and the childless Aso, and others, Ahu introduces us to her community, and the beliefs and customs that keep its families together but in the end also stifle its girls’ futures.

Maple Leaf Rag

By: Kaie Kellough

$14.95

Maple Leaf Rag is a dynamic, jazz-infused riff on Canadian culture. With rhythm and edge, Kaie Kellough’s verbal soundscape explores belonging, dislocation and relocation, and national identity from a black Canadian perspective. This collection of poems is both written word and musical score-a dictated dub replete with references to African Canadian and African American culture (current and dated), Canadian history and politics, and characters ranging from dancers to piano players to boxers.

My Totem Came Calling

By: Blessing Musariri, Thorsten Nesch

$18.95

Chanda is a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl in Harare, Zimbabwe, who suddenly starts suffering from memory lapses, which become even more worrisome when she starts seeing a zebra in all sorts of places. The trouble is, nobody else can see it. Afraid of being institutionalized in a hospital, she follows the advice of an old aunt and sets off for her ancestral village, a primitive settlement with none of the amenities she is used to in the city. But there she meets the rest of her family, including her strange and mysterious grandmother, and learns the hard way who she really is–not a superficial, rich city girl with foreign habits but someone who is somebody, whose name carries a history of her African people.

Nehanda

By: Yvonne Vera

$22.95

Introduction by M G Vassanji

In the late nineteenth century white settlers and administrators arrive to occupy the African country of Zimbabwe (Rhodesia). Nehanda, a village girl, is recognized through omens and portents as a saviour. The resulting uprising by the Africans is brutally crushed but looks forward to the war of independence that succeeded a century later. Told in lucid, poetic prose, this is a gripping story about the first meeting of a people with their colonizer.

No Crystal Stair

By: Mairuth Sarsfield

$21.95

First published in 1993, No Crystal Stair is an absorbing story of Montreal in the 1940s. Raising her three daughters alone, Marion discovers she can only find gainful employment if she passes as white. Set in Little Burgundy against the backdrop of an exciting cosmopolitan jazz scene–home of Oscar Peterson, Oliver Jones, and Rockhead’s Paradise–and the tense years of World War II, No Crystal Stair is both a tender story and an indictment of Canada’s “soft” racism.

In 2005, No Crystal Stair was nominated for that year’s Canada Reads and was defended by Olympic fencer Sherraine MacKay.

Not Anyone’s Anything

By: Ian Williams

$21.95

Ian Williams’s Not Anyone’s Anything is a trio of trios: three sets of three stories, with three of those stories further divided into thirds. Mathematical, musical, and meticulously crafted, these stories play profoundly with form, and feature embedded flash cards and musical notations, literal basements, and dual narratives, semi-detached. Roaming through Toronto and its surrounding suburbia, Williams’s characters wittily and wryly draw attention to the angst and anxieties associated with being somewhere between adolescence and more-than-that. They are disastrously ambitious, performing amateur surgery or perfecting Chopin; they are restless and bored, breaking into units of new subdivisions hoping for a score; they continually test the ones they love, and, though every time feels like the last time, they might be up for one more game.

Other Side of the Game

By: Amanda Parris

$17.95

I don’t think you can expect society to change if you’re not ready to take the first step.

In the 1970s Beverly walks into an office of Black activists, wanting to join the Movement, and has to prove she’s committed enough to fight. Some forty years later, in the Hip Hop Generation, Nicole reunites with her ex-boyfriend on a basketball court, wondering where he’s been, when a police officer stops them.

In this striking debut, Amanda Parris turns the spotlight on the Black women who organize communities, support their incarcerated loved ones, and battle institutions, living each day by a ride-or-die philosophy, strengthening their voices and demanding to be heard.

Personals

By: Ian Williams

$16.95

These are not love poems. These are almost-love poems. Jittery, plaintive, and fresh, these are poems voiced through a startling variety of speakers who continually rev themselves up to the challenge of connecting with others, often to no avail. Ian Williams writes in traditional poetic forms: ghazals, a pantoum, blank sonnets, mock-heroic couplets. He also invents his own: poems that spin into indeterminacy, poems that don’t end. With a deft hand and playful ear, Williams entices the reader to stumble alongside his characters as they search, again and again, for intimacy, for love, and for each other.

All Books in this Collection