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Books for Black History Month
We’re honouring Black History Month with new and exciting books by Black authors in Canada.
All Books in this Collection
Showing 1–16 of 28 results
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A Mouth Full of Salt
$23.95The Nile brought them life, but the Nile was not their friend.
A small farming village in North Sudan wakes up one morning to the news that a little boy has drowned. Soon after, the animals die of a mysterious illness and the date gardens catch fire and burn to the ground. The villagers whisper of a sorceress who dwells at the foot of the mountains. It is the dry season. The men have places to go, the women have work to do, the children play at the place where the river runs over its own banks. Sixteen-year-old Fatima yearns to leave the village for Khartoum.
In Khartoum, a single mother makes her way in a world that wants to keep girls and women back. As civil war swells, the political intrudes into the personal and her position in the capital becomes untenable. She must return to the village.
A Mouth Full of Salt uncovers a country on the brink of seismic change as its women decide for themselves which traditions are fit for purpose – and which prophecies it’s time to rewrite. -
Aqueous
$20.00Aqueous by Nathanael Jones is a collection of prose poems that address the ways in which post-colonial realities in the black diaspora continue to fracture concepts of identity, history and memory, place, and community. Through the use of extended metaphors relating to the transatlantic slave trade, contemporary art, marine biology, and the commercial construction industry, both personal and collective experiences of being Afro-Caribbean Canadian in North America/Turtle Island are described and enacted as indefinitely liminal. Organized into three main poem sequences, the collection first uses a fictional sound art piece as a way of diagramming the kinds of fractured subjectivities engendered by colonialism and its after effects. In the second sequence, a beleaguered speaker navigates realities of manual labour and how they are used to shape racialized and gendered identities, and the pressures these forces exert upon interpersonal relationships. Lastly, the third sequence delves further into oceanographic themes in order to compose a portrait of Montreal’s black anglophone communities as both invisible and yet forever in the peripherals of mainstream cultures in Canada.
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Born to Walk: My Journey of Trials and Resilience
$26.00“My grandparents used to tell me Rwanda is a country unlike any other, and I knew they spoke the truth. Blessed with majestic mountains and breathtaking valleys, it is a sacred and spiritual land. And yet Rwandan men drenched the land in blood in acts of hate so horrific that the stains of those three years will not fade in one hundred lifetimes.”
At the age of eight, Alpha Nkuranga made a fateful decision. With war raging around her, she grabbed the hand of her younger brother, Elijah, and ran from her grandparents’ home. When they came to a swamp, they hid until it was safe to escape. Weeks later, they joined a group of refugees, who were fleeing to Tanzania. “If I kept walking,” Alpha remembers thinking, “I could tell my story.”
Nkuranga emigrated to Canada more than a decade later. She now works with women and children who face abuse and homelessness. In Born to Walk, she tells a remarkable story of resistance and survival.
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Bottom Rail on Top
$22.95FINALIST FOR THE 2024 A.M. KLEIN POETRY PRIZE
A rolling call and response between antebellum Black history and the present that mediates it.Somewhere in the cut between Harriet Jacobs and surveillance, Southampton and sneaker game, Lake Providence and the supply chain, Bottom Rail on Top sets off a mediation between the complications of legacy and selfhood. In a kind of archives-powered unmooring of the linear progress story, award-winning poet D.M. Bradford fragments and recomposes American histories of antebellum Black life and emancipation, and stages the action in tandem with the matter of his own life. Amidst echoes and complicities, roots and flights, lineage and mastery, it’s a story of stories told in knots and asides, held together with paper trails, curiosities, and hooks – a study that doesn’t end.
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Contraband Bodies
$20.95Contraband Bodies is a debut to be reckoned with. Jide Salawu shines in this personal record of migratory travails and a country lost to precarious politics. A conscious elegy of displacement and home regained through the tribute of roads, evoking diasporic conditions by highlighting syncopated language through pixelated imagery and lapidary details the diverse circumstances of being a Black migrant in Africa, Europe, and America. Contraband Bodies is a cogitation on the agony of Atlantic memories and dispersal. It confronts new forms of digital kinship activated through social waves across diasporic landscape. In Contraband Bodies, Salawu performs a poetic remittance on current exodus within Africa and outside of it as a form of resistance against all forms of oppression against Black migrant subjects in the world today.
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Cotton Blues
$22.95Translated from French by Phyllis Aronoff and Howard Scott.
In an African town somewhere between the Sahel and the Atlantic coast, cotton planter Toby Kunta takes a Berlin journalist hostage in a museum showroom. Kunta asks for monetary compensation for himself and a group of peasants ruined by the production of genetically modified cotton. As the tension rises inside the museum and a standoff begins with the chief of police, Kunta begins to burn the exhibited works one by one and threatens to do the same with his prisoner.
With this standoff behind closed doors, where words and gestures get exchanged with anger and hope, Edem Awumey takes us on a contemporary journey on the cotton road, from the African Savannah to the American South, from the luxurious salons of Berlin to the fields of Indian Rajasthan sprayed with glyphosate, from the valleys of Uzbekistan covered with white fibre to the spinning mills of Dhaka in Bangladesh. Cotton Blues is a novel of the crossing of worlds in a struggle against the global domination of the multinationals. It is the great lamentation of the African people enslaved by the Western world’s thirst for wealth. It is a cry for freedom too long held back that finally bursts out with thunderous violence.
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Crowd Source
Crowd Source parallels the daily migration of crows who, aside from fledgling season, journey across metro Vancouver every day at dawn and dusk. Continuing Nicholson’s attention to contemporary climate crisis, social movements, and Black diasporic relations, this is a text for all concerned with practising ecological futurities befitting corvid sensibilities.
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Eyes Have Seen
$24.95At the age of fifteen, Fred Anderson left home and was sucked into the maelstrom of the U.S. southern civil rights movement. He became active with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and other civil rights organization, working with some of the well-known leaders including John Lewis, Bob Moses, Stokely Carmichael, Fannie Lou Hamer and more. As the movement voiced opposition to the Vietnam War and support for liberation movements in Africa and other Third World countries, including Palestine, the FBI targeted it, while military draft boards systemically and disproportionately inducted social activists and poor Blacks, including Fred Anderson. When he refused to go to war, he chose ‘Flight to Canada,’ where he became Clifford Gaston, the name he went by until the amnesty granted draft dodgers in 1977.
Eyes Have Seen: From Mississippi to Montreal is a memoir about embracing the racial and tyrannical crosswinds of Hattiesburg and the south of the 1960’s and riding the tailwinds of SNCC, civil rights, anti-Vietnam War activism and reimagining the underground railroad to Canada.
From the author: “Little did I know that the internal and public outcomes of the waning Mississippi Freedom Summer and my personal fate would collide with my ancestral struggles and hurl me into the narrative of runaway fugitives seeking exile in Canada.”
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Fifteen Dogs
$24.95WINNER OF CANADA READS
WINNER OF THE GILLER PRIZE
WINNER OF THE WRITERS’ TRUST FICTION PRIZE
A special edition celebrating the tenth anniversary of André Alexis’s modern masterpiece, with a foreword by Eileen Myles and an afterword by André Alexis.
— 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.
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, preferring the old ‘dog’ ways, and those who embrace the change. The gods watch from above as the dogs venture into their transformed world, as they become divided, as each struggles with their new existence.
First published in 2015, now slightly revised and including an afterword by the author, this 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.
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Freedom: A Mixtape
$19.95Freedom: A Mixtape is a soulful artistic response to recent and historical violence on Black bodies, presented through a collection of original songs, stories, poems, anecdotes, spoken-word pieces, and musical instrumentation from folks living in Ontario’s Niagara Region. A community conversation about our complicated relationship with emancipation and the human right to be free, Freedom: A Mixtape is a compilation album that is part protest and part celebration. It is history and the present moment all at once, a reminder that this moment is part of a larger, ongoing movement. Familiar pains are felt deeply in moments both bygone and bitingly present, setting the tone—and stage—for action.
Analog field recordings and soothing talk-radio energy give voice to the residue of intergenerational trauma, the depths of colonialism, resilience amidst oppressive conditions, and a clarion call that joy is a birthright for everyone. With emotional precision and softness, Freedom: A Mixtape offers a radical reminder that in our bleakest moments, we rise up through love of self and community.
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Get That Hope
$18.95Daddy wants to win the lottery, Mommy is still bitter about getting knocked up at twenty, Simeon has war-related PTSD, and Rachel just wants to get out of her parents’ Oakwood/Eglinton place and have a home of her own, but first there are a few things she’s got to get off her chest. It’s Jamaica’s Independence Day, Toronto is sweltering, and everyone is on edge–then the air-conditioner breaks. Loosely inspired by Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, Andrea Scott’s Get That Hope looks at the dysfunction of a Jamaican-Canadian family that has no idea how to communicate without wounding.
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Glint of Light, The
$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.
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Long Exposure
$21.95After Hurricane Katrina, the photographer Robert Polidori flew to New Orleans to document the devastation. In the wreckage he witnessed, and in her questions about what she saw in what he saw, Stephanie Bolster found the beginnings of a long poem. Those questions led to unexpected places; meanwhile, life kept pouring in. The ensuing book, Long Exposure, is Bolster’s fifth, a roaming, associative exploration of disasters and their ongoing aftermaths, sufferings large and small, and the vulnerability and value of our own lives. Incremental, unsettling, Long Exposure rushes to and through us.
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Moon Honey
$23.95Nominated for the Henry Kreisel Award for Best First Book and the Georges Bugnet award for Best Novel!In this modern, magical tale, Carmen and Griffin, young and white, are goofy, head-over-heels in love. When Carmen turns into a black woman, Griffin thrills at a love turned exotic. But Carmen’s transformation means trouble for Griffin’s racist mother, already struggling with a new lover and a husband nicknamed God. The question is, can love be relied on to save the day?Moon Honeyis an inventive, funny, sexy tale of love affairs and magical transformations.This updated Landmark Edition includes an author interview with Karina Vernon and an Afterword by award-winning poet and novelist Kaie Kellough.
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Perfect Little Angels
$24.95Finalist, Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers (Writers’ Trust of Canada); Runner-up, Danuta Gleed Literary Award
A beautifully imagined story collection set largely in Nigeria that explores themes of masculinity and repressed desires through the lens of (un)conditional love
In this stunning debut story collection set largely in Nigeria, questions abound: What happens when we fall short of society’s – and our own – expectations? When our personal desires conflict with the duties we are bound to? The characters in Perfect Little Angels confront these dilemmas and more in these brilliantly imagined tales.
In a boarding school, tensions brew between students and vengeful staff. An addict seeks a fresh start in pottery class. A man returns home from university abroad with confessions that unravel his mother’s world. Amid winter storms, a ghost delights her grief-stricken partner. And atop a hill surrounded by rot and garbage, two lovers dare to embark on a secret, dangerous romance. Human desires – for connection, salvation, and understanding – imbue these deeply Nigerian stories with universal resonance.
In Vincent Anioke’s tenderly written stories, characters seek love in different permutations from teachers, parents, dead partners, and even God. Perfect Little Angels is a nuanced exploration of masculinity, religion, marginalization, suppressed queerness, and self-expression through the lens of (un)conditional love.
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Searching for Serafim
$21.95Finalist, Governor General’s Literary Award
The life and legacy of Serafim “Joe” Fortes, a trailblazing Black lifeguard, who became a cultural icon in a racist society
Searching for Serafim is a layered exploration of the life of Vancouver’s first lifeguard, Serafim “Joe” Fortes. A Trinidad native who arrived on the shores of Canada in 1885, Fortes was heralded as a hero in Vancouver for saving dozens of people from drowning, and his funeral drew the largest crowd ever recorded in the city’s history. Since his passing, Fortes has been commemorated with a Canada Post-issued stamp and local buildings named in his honour. Yet, little has been discussed about how he navigated an openly white supremacist society as an Afro Latino man.
In Searching for Serafim, author Ruby Smith Diaz seeks to unravel the complicated legacy of a local legend to learn more about who Fortes was as a person. She draws from historical documents to form an insightful critique of the role that settler colonialism and anti-Black racism played in Fortes’s publicized story and reconstructs his life, from over a century later, through a contemporary Black perspective, weaving poetry and personal reflections alongside archival research.
The result is a moving and thought-provoking book about displacement, identity, and dignity. Searching for Serafim conjures a new side to one of Vancouver’s most beloved – and misunderstood – public figures.
With black-and-white photos.