Bookville Lists

Browse the books that make up Bookville.

Browse by Category

  • Bookville 2023 - Drama & Plays

    Bookville 2023 – Drama & Plays

    For those with a flair for the dramatic, browse these handpicked Canadian plays! Read a play before you see it, or revisit a favourite.
  • Bookville 2023 - Fiction

    Bookville 2023 – Fiction

    Explore a wide range of Bookville fiction picks: from humorous, beach-ready reads to serious dramas to award-winners, there's something for every type of reader in this collection of fiction books.
  • Bookville 2023 - Graphic Novels

    Bookville 2023 – Graphic Novels

    Who said books with pictures were just for kids? This selection of graphic novels are perfect for the Bookville reader who loves gorgeous, engaging, and fun illustrations alongside a riveting narrative.
  • Bookville 2023 - Indigenous Lit

    Bookville 2023 – Indigenous Lit

    Browse Bookville's selection of Indigenous-authored books to get a sense of the diversity of voices and tremendous talent these writers have: perfect for gifting or to read yourself (or both!).
  • Bookville 2023 - Kids

    Bookville 2023 – Kids

    For the littlest Bookville citizens, browse this selection of Canadian-authored kids books.
  • Bookville 2023 - Mystery & Crime

    Bookville 2023 – Mystery & Crime

    There's a mystery afoot in Bookville… and you, sleuthing reader, can help solve it! Browse our selection of whodunits and thrilling crime fiction.
  • Bookville 2023 - Nonfiction

    Bookville 2023 – Nonfiction

    For the reader who likes fact more than fiction. Memoirs, art books, sports, social justice reads, and more: they're all to be found here among Bookville's nonfiction picks.
  • Bookville 2023 - Poetry

    Bookville 2023 – Poetry

    We at Bookville are proud purveyors of poetry: whether you're new to poetry or a seasoned poetry pro, you'll find beautiful poems with our picks below (that rhymed, didn't it?).

All Books in this Collection

Showing 33–48 of 107 results

  • Ghost’s Journey

    Ghost’s Journey

    $21.99

    When Indonesia becomes a dangerous place for the LGBTQ+ community, Ghost and her family are forced to leave their home and escape to freedom in Canada.Ghost’s Journey: A Reugee Story is inspired by the true story of two gay refugees, Rainer and Eka, and written from the perspective of their cat Ghost, with illustrations created from Rainer’s photographs. Written by award-winning author, Robin Stevenson, Ghost’s Journey is a perfect fit to teach young audiences about family diversity, human rights, and social justice. Shortlisted for the 2021 Silver Birch Express Award and the 2021 Rocky Mountain Book Award.Teacher resources available on publisher website: rebelmountainpress.com/ghosts-journey-teacher-resources

  • Good Arabs, The

    Good Arabs, The

    $17.95

    Swinging from post-explosion Beirut to a Parc-Extension balcony in summer, the verse and prose poems in The Good Arabs ground the reader in place, language, and the body. Peeling and rinsing radishes. Dancing as a pre-teen to Nancy Ajram. Being drenched in stares on the city bus. The collection is an interlocking and rich offering of the speaker’s communities, geographical surroundings both expansive and precise, and family both biological and chosen.

    The Good Arabs gifts the reader with insight into cycles and repetition in ourselves and our broken nations. This genre-defying collection maps Arab and trans identity through the immensity of experience felt in one body, the sorrow of citizens let down by their countries, and the garbage crisis in Lebanon. Ultimately, it shows how we might love amid dismay, adore the pungent and the ugly, and exist in our multiplicity across spaces.

  • Half-Cracked

    Half-Cracked

    $18.95

    Sisters Sissy and Yewina have been on their own for who knows how long exactly. It’s just them (and their hens) in a weathered farmhouse miles from town. Their rural, woodsy East Coast community has been losing residents for years, but the almost-forgotten stories have lived on for the sisters in different ways. While Yewina is more guarded and level-headed, dreamer Sissy has a flair for twisting fact with fantasy. When Scott, a folklorist from Scottsdale, Arizona, shows up at their door in hopes of chronicling whispers, he’s in for much more of a story than he expected. This unique and quirky ode to folklore storytelling and to small lives lived large illuminates how living our own truths can make us legends.

  • Hand on My Heart

    Hand on My Heart

    $26.00

    When Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) offered to send Maureen Mayhew to Taliban-occupied Afghanistan, she refused. Fearing she would be forced to give up her independence to preserve her safety, it was the last place on earth she wanted to volunteer medical expertise. But events didn’t unfold as she had anticipated and in April 2000, wrapped in unfamiliar clothing, she stepped out onto the Afghan dust for the first time. Walking toward Taliban immigration officials, a fire raged in her belly and a tremor shot through the hand grasping her blue knapsack. Little did she know that she would return to this country seven more times over the span of a decade, learn to converse in the regional Afghan language of Dari, and develop lasting relationships with women, men—even members of the Taliban—and families through her work as a physician.

    In Hand on My Heart: A Canadian Doctor’s Awakening in Afghanistan, Mayhew juxtaposes her experiences of Afghanistan as a foreign, female physician with her personal journey of questioning who she is as a professional woman in the 21st century. As she travels from one remote outpost to another, sharing cups of tea in secret, muddling through language barriers, and brokering trust with her patients, she finds her Western beliefs challenged and makes sense of her own struggles with gender roles. With curiosity and tenderness, Mayhew reflects on moments of disorientation, fear, wonder and joy. Hand on My Heart is a moving account that takes readers on an uncharted path into the mysteries of the human heart.

  • Hands Like Trees

    Hands Like Trees

    $21.95

    An act of passion reverberates across continents when Visma Sen decides to remain in Calcutta when his family migrates to Canada.

    Hands Like Trees, is Arundhati Roy as if written in the mode of Alice Munro. – George Elliott Clarke, author of Where Beauty Survived: An Africadian Memoir
    Sabyasachi Nag evokes the rising heat of Calcutta in the early morning as masterfully as he depicts the calmness of a snow-lit evening street in Brampton, Ontario while the entangled lives of the Sens of Shulut unfurl over three decades. Each linked story is told through the voice of a different member of the Sen family, from Nilroy’s movingly excruciating first day as caregiver to Aunt Rita with dementia to Milli’s ambition to host her guru Mata G. The experiences of each character draw a portrait of the Sen family, whose wounds drive them to pursue an ever-elusive happiness, while clearly yearning for identity and belonging.

  • Here Is Where We Disembark

    Here Is Where We Disembark

    $16.95

    With her remarkable debut collection, Yukon poet Clea Roberts proffers a perceptive & ecological reading of the Canadian North’s past & present.

    Roberts deftly draws out the moments that comprise a cycle of seasons, paying as much attention to the natural—the winter moon’s second-hand light that pools in the tracks of tree squirrels & loose threads of migrating birds—as she does to the manufactured—the peripheral percussion of J-brakes & half-melted ice lanterns. She also casts her gaze back to the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897-1898, raising the voices of those marked by a frenetic race for fortune: a seductive, edgy wolf, a disillusioned photographer, and a pragmatic prostitute, among others.

    Here Is Where We Disembark is a beautifully crafted book that ignites the senses, and its presence lingers, like woodsmoke, long after the final page has been turned.

  • Hotline

    Hotline

    $21.95

    A 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.

  • I am Everything In Between

    I am Everything In Between

    $13.95

    Sometimes it’s not as simple as being a boy or a girl. I Am Everything In Between highlights kids who may not fit into stereotypical gender ideals, and celebrates how they do identify by sending positive messages about gender identity. This book teaches children that regardless of biological gender, it’s OK to feel like a boy, or a girl, or even both! The illustrations include bright and bold examples of boys that like to play dress up and wear makeup, girls that like to play sports and get dirty, and kids that want to grow up to be astronauts! I Am Everything In Between uses diverse, relatable examples to help kids understand that sometimes it’s not as simple as being a boy or a girl. Teacher resources available on publisher website: rebelmountainpress.com/i-am-everything-in-between-teacher-resources

  • It’s Attachment

    It’s Attachment

    $25.00

    How do we make sense of our relationships — successes and failures, preferences and challenges, past and present. And after we make sense of them all — what do we do to increase the successes that we are striving to attain. In It’s Attachment, Kussin offers us a comprehensive overview of this dominant theory of human development and relationships in a way that gives us both understanding and practical ideas for constructive changes. She shows us the central features of the main attachment patterns that are present throughout childhood and adulthood as well as clear suggestions for how we might identify what pattern characterizes our own life. From there, her book provides practical insights into how our attachment pattern is central in our choosing a partner and being a parent. It also explores how we might change our pattern toward one that provides the greatest likelihood for developing an autonomous sense of self and satisfying reciprocal relationships.

  • Junie

    Junie

    $23.00

    Winner of the City of Vancouver Book Award
    Longlisted for the 2023 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction
    Longlisted for CBC Canada Reads 2024

    A riveting exploration of the complexity within mother-daughter relationships and the dynamic vitality of Vancouver’s former Hogan’s Alley neighbourhood.

    1930s, Hogan’s Alley—a thriving Black and immigrant community located in Vancouver’s East End. Junie is a creative, observant child who moves to the alley with her mother, Maddie: a jazz singer with a growing alcohol dependency. Junie quickly makes meaningful relationships with two mentors and a girl her own age, Estelle, whose resilient and entrepreneurial mother is grappling with white scrutiny and the fact that she never really wanted a child.

    As Junie finds adulthood, exploring her artistic talents and burgeoning sexuality, her mother sinks further into the bottle while the thriving neighbourhood—once gushing with potential—begins to change. As her world opens, Junie intuits the opposite for the community she loves.

    Told through the fascinating lens of a bright woman in an oft-disquieting world, this book is intimate and urgent—not just an unflinching look at the destruction of a vibrant community, but a celebration of the Black lives within.

  • Kitotam: He Speaks to it

    Kitotam: He Speaks to it

    $20.00

    The Neyhiyawak (Plains Cree) word “Kitotam” translates into English as, “He Speaks to It.” This is a collection of free-verse poetry by Indigenous poet and artist John McDonald. Written in two parts, these poems chronicle John’s life and experiences as an urban Indigenous youth during the 1980s. The second half of the book is a look into the inspirations and events, that shaped John’s career as an internationally known spoken word artist, beat poet, monologist and performance artist.

  • Klondikers

    Klondikers

    $24.95

    For readers of The Boys in the Boat and Against All Odds

    Join a ragtag group of misfits from Dawson City as they scrap to become the 1905 Stanley Cup champions and cement hockey as Canada’s national pastime

    An underdog hockey team traveled for three and a half weeks from Dawson City to Ottawa to play for the Stanley Cup in 1905. The Klondikers’ eagerness to make the journey, and the public’s enthusiastic response, revealed just how deeply, and how quickly, Canadians had fallen in love with hockey.

    After Governor General Stanley donated a championship trophy in 1893, new rinks appeared in big cities and small towns, leading to more players, teams, and leagues. And more fans. When Montreal challenged Winnipeg for the Cup in December 1896, supporters in both cities followed the play-by-play via telegraph updates.

    As the country escaped the Victorian era and entered a promising new century, a different nation was emerging. Canadians fell for hockey amid industrialization, urbanization, and shifting social and cultural attitudes. Class and race-based British ideals of amateurism attempted to fend off a more egalitarian professionalism.

    Ottawa star Weldy Young moved to the Yukon in 1899, and within a year was talking about a Cup challenge. With the help of Klondike businessman Joe Boyle, it finally happened six years later. Ottawa pounded the exhausted visitors, with “One-Eyed” Frank McGee scoring an astonishing 14 goals in one game. But there was no doubt hockey was now the national pastime.

  • Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century

    Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century

    By: Kim Fu
    $21.95

    WINNER OF THE 26TH ANNUAL DANUTA GLEED LITERARY AWARD

    SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE

    KIRKUS REVIEWS BEST BOOKS OF 2022

    THE GLOBE 100: THE BEST BOOKS OF 2022

    CBC BOOKS: THE BEST CANADIAN FICTION OF 2022

    Featured on CBC’s The Next Chapter with Shelagh Rogers

    TIME MAGAZINE’S 10 BEST FICTION BOOKS OF 2022

    LITHUB BEST REVIEWED SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS 2022

    LITHUB BEST REVIEWED SCI-FI, FANTASY AND HORROR OF 2022

    LONGLISTED FOR THE 2023 JOYCE CAROL OATES PRIZE

    SHORTLISTED FOR THE WILLIAM SAROYAN INTERNATIONAL PRIZE FOR WRITING

    The debut collection from PEN/Hemingway Award finalist and ‘propulsive storyteller’ (NYT Book Review), with stories that are by turns poignant and pulpy

    In the twelve unforgettable tales of Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, the strange is made familiar and the familiar strange, such that a girl growing wings on her legs feels like an ordinary rite of passage, while a bug-infested house becomes an impossible, Kafkaesque nightmare. Each story builds a new world all its own: a group of children steal a haunted doll; a runaway bride encounters a sea monster; a vendor sells toy boxes that seemingly control the passage of time; an insomniac is seduced by the Sandman. These visions of modern life wrestle with themes of death and technological consequence, guilt and sexuality, as they unmask the contradictions that exist within all of us.

    “Fu joins recent maestros Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (Friday Black, 2018), Charles Yu (Sorry Please Thank You, 2012), and Seong-nan Ha (Bluebeard’s First Wife, 2020) in creating irrefutably fantastic fiction.” – Booklist, starred review

    Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century is one of those rare collections that never suffers from which-one-was-that-again? syndrome. Every story here lights a flame in the memory, shining brighter as time goes by rather than dimming. Kim Fu writes with grace, wit, mischief, daring, and her own deep weird phosphorescent understanding.” – Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Ghost Variations: One Hundred Stories

    “When a collection is evocative of authors as disparate as Ray Bradbury and Stephanie Vaughn, the only possible unifier can be originality: and that’s what a reader finds in Kim Fu’s Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century. The strangest of concepts are tempered by grounded, funny dialogue in these stories, which churn with big ideas and craftily controlled antic energy.” – Naben Ruthnum, author of A Hero of Our Time

    “How I loved the cool wit of these speculative stories! Filled with wonder and wondering, they’re haunted too by loss and loneliness, their imaginative reach profoundly rooted in the human condition.” – Peter Ho Davies, author of A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself

    “Precise, elegant, uncanny, and mesmerizing–each story in this collection is a crystalline gem. Kim Fu’s talent is singularly inventive, her every sentence a surprise and an adventure.” – Danya Kukafka, author of Notes on an Execution

    Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century is for the adventurous reader–someone willing to walk into a story primed for cultural critique and suddenly come across a plot for murder, or to consider the dangers of sea monsters alongside those posed by twenty-first-century ennui. Each story is spectacularly smart, hybrid in genre, and bold with intention. The monsters here are not only fantastical figures brought to life in hyper-reality but also the strangest parts of the human heart. This book is as moving as it is monumental.” – Lucy Tan, author of What We Were Promised

    “Kim Fu’s Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century crushes the coal-dark zeitgeist between its teeth and spits out diamonds, beautiful but razor-sharp. This will be one of the best short story collections of the year.” – Indra Das, author of The Devourers

  • Letters From Johnny

    Letters From Johnny

    $20.00

    Winner of BEST CRIME NOVELLA at The Crime Writers of Canada Awards of Excellence 2022

    Set in Toronto 1970, just as the FLQ crisis emerges to shake an innocent country, eleven year old Johnny Wong uncovers an underbelly to his tight, downtown neighbourhood. He shares a room with his Chinese immigrant mother in an enclave with American draft dodgers and new Canadians. He is befriended by Rollie, one of the draft dodgers who takes on a fatherly and writing mentor role. Johnny’s mother is threatened by the “children’s warfare society.” A neighbour is found murdered. He suspects the feline loving Catwoman next door and tries to break into her house. Ultimately he is betrayed but he must act to save his family. He discovers a distant kinship with Jean, the son of one of the hostages kidnapped by the FLQ who have sent Canada into a crisis. As his world spins out of control, his only solace are letters to Dave Keon, who “as Captain of the Toronto Maple Leafs, can be trusted.”

  • Little Housewolf

    Little Housewolf

    $17.95

    Medrie Purdham‘s Little Housewolf delves deeply into the world of domestic miniatures, a realm where thimbles, baby teeth, push pins, keyholes, teacups, and wedding rings become meticulously realized scale models of one’s terrors and joys. Purdham uses the fine-grained signatures of her poetry–close observation, exact detail, precise sounds–not only to examine childhood and its fascination with size and scale, but also to measure herself against the larger, untamed landscapes she feels increasingly alienated from (“It is all anachronism, / grasses vintage wild”). Marked by bold emotion and arresting imagery, Little Housewolf is a brilliant debut.

  • Little Russia

    Little Russia

    $24.95

    “Everyone should read it.”
    –Mike Donachie, The Toronto Star

    A small village in the north of Quebec, Guyenne is run as a cooperative, with 50% of the inhabitants’ paychecks going into a communal pot to develop the colony–hence the village’s nickname of “Little Russia.” Based on the memories of author Francis Desharnais’ grandparents, who lived in Guyenne from 1948 to 1968, this moving graphic novel delves into family history to explore Canada’s rural heritage through the lens of both grassroots socialism and early feminism. An intimate story of epic scale, and the winner of multiple “Best Book” awards, Little Russia is a fascinating foray into an unusual and largely forgotten social experiment.