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Diverse Books for Diverse Readers
A curated selection of books by diverse authors that showcases bold storytelling and a wide range of voices and experiences that reflect the richness of our communities.
All Books in this Collection
Showing 1–16 of 41 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. -
Âmî Osâwâpikones (Dear Dandelion)
$23.99A debut picture book that celebrates self-love, care, and resilience with one of the most widespread plants—the dandelion.
Both a love letter to the dandelion and a call to love ourselves in a difficult world, Âmî Osâwâpikones reminds us that we are not defined as others see us. Following our young protagonist and the dandelions through the seasons, we are reminded that we are resilient, we are healers, we are funny, and we are loved.
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Bad Land
$24.95LONGLISTED FOR THE GILLER PRIZE
A slow-burning story exploring the generational effects of repression and transgression, set against the raw, eerie landscape of the badlands
Regina is a socially awkward loner who is content to live a life withdrawn from everyone except her cherished pet bunny. But after seven years of silence, Regina’s brother, Ricky, shows up unannounced on her doorstep, along with his daughter, Jez – a peculiar six-year-old with an unnerving vicious streak – upending Regina’s quiet life.
It’s clear to Regina that something terrible has happened, though the truth won’t come to the surface easily. After all, Regina and Ricky lived a childhood fraught with secrets buried as deep as the fossils in the desolate landscape around them. But this secret is one that cannot stay buried for long, and its exposure sets off a calamitous journey through the plains and mountains of Alberta’s badlands to the coast of BC, forcing Regina to confront the brutality of family love and to question how far she is willing to go to preserve it.
By turns thrilling and heartwarming, rife with gothic tension, and carried by fervent compassion, Bad Land is a story about the toxic nature of guilt, the fragility of memory, and the ways we shape our own versions of the truth in order to survive.
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Beautiful Beautiful
$24.95Imbued with passion, creativity and insight, Brandon Reid’s debut novel is a wonderfully creative coming-of-age story exploring indigeneity, masculinity and cultural tradition.
Twelve-year-old Derik Mormin travels with his father and a family friend to Bella Bella for his grandfather’s funeral. Along the way, he uncovers the traumatic history of his ancestors, considers his relationship to masculinity and explores the contrast between rural and urban lifestyles in hopes of reconciling the seemingly unreconcilable, the beauty of each the Indigenous and “Western” way of life—hence beautiful beautiful.
He travails a storm, meets long-lost relatives, discovers his ancestral homeland; he suffers through catching fish, gains and loses companions, learns to heal trauma. In Beautiful Beautiful we delve into the mind of a gifted boy who struggles to find his role and persona through elusive circumstance, and—
All right, that’s quite enough third-person pandering; you’re not fooling anyone. Redbird here, Derik’s babysitter, and narrator of this here story. Make sure to smash that like button. We’re here to bring light to an otherwise grave subject, friends. It’s only natural to laugh while crying. I bring story to life. One minute I’m a songbird singing from a bough, the next, I’m rapture. I connect you to the realm of spirit… Well, as best I can, given your mundane allocation.
Follow us through primordial visions, dance with a cannibal (don’t worry, they’re friendly once tamed) and discover what it takes to be united. Together, we’ll have fun. Together, we are one. So tuck in, and believe what you’ll believe, for who knows what yesterday brings. Amen and all my relations, all my relations and amen.
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Between the Island and the Turtle
$21.95In the tumult of the pandemic, a writer hopes the quarantine might provide the space to finally complete a decades-old project on her travels throughout Latin America. But an unexpected disease suddenly clouds her eyes. Poetic, inventive, introspective, Between the Island and the Turtle follows the author’s shifts in vision from past to present, shedding light on what it is to witness suffering, questioning how literature might help us bear it.
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Black Girl in The Ring
$19.95Juxtaposing experiences of discrimination with love and resilience, this debut poetry collection is a critique of intimate and institutional violence and hostility, entwined with a celebration of beauty and fierceness.
What is the difference between institutional violence enacted by trusted individuals and intimate violence enacted by loved ones? This collection of free verse, haiku, and narrative poetry takes the reader by the hand and walks them through these parallel experiences from a personal perspective. In a study of relationships of power, these poems delve into the complex structures of feminism, nature, and discrimination. A balanced mixture of reflection, celebration, energy, and sadness unfolds within the pages; drawing on a contemporary style, the author creates the space to feel grief, loss, sorrow, and disappointment in equal measure with joy, contemplation, excitement, and elation.
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Blood Belies
$22.00In this arresting debut collection Ellen Chang-Richardson writes of race, of injury and of belonging in stunning poems that fade in and out of the page. History swirls through this collection like a summer storm, as she brings her father’s, and her own, stories to light, writing against the background of the institutional racism of Canada, the Chinese Exclusion Act, the head tax and more. From Taiwan in the early 1990s to Oakville in the late 1990s, Toronto in the 2010s, Cambodia in the mid-1970s and Ottawa in the 2020s, Blood Belies takes the reader through time, asking them what it means to look the way we do? To carry scars? To persevere? To hope?
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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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Event Horizon
$24.95From the acclaimed author of The Singularity comes a unique and daring, formally inventive novel about rebellion, political protest, and a young woman’s firm belief in a better world.
Seventeen-year-old Milde is from the Outskirts, a place beyond the mountains where the dirt is corpse-rich, where mothers and daughters, banished from society, make their living—without rights, access to care, or legal status. But Milde refuses to accept the order of things and, together with some friends, she revolts against the government’s injustice. Arrested, imprisoned, and tortured, Milde is eventually presented with a final choice: to be executed publicly or, as part of an experiment, to be launched into space, into a black hole called the Mass. She chooses the Mass, opting to face its fathomless depth and loneliness rather than hurt the morale of her weary allies back home. Collapsing and expanding myth and reality, Event Horizon is an exquisite existential work of speculative fiction, dark as deep space, woven with reflections on exile, oppression, solidarity, trauma, and loss.
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Familial Hungers
$23.95Poems that reckon with identity, race, and fractured relationships through the lens of food.
Bittersweet, numbingly spicy, herbal and milky, Familial Hungers is a lyric feast. Ginger scallion fish, Sichuan peppercorns, ginseng tea, Chinese school and white chefs – the reader’s appetite is satiated with these poems’ complex palate. There are the bubbling expectations for immigrant daughters, the chewy strands of colonial critique, and dissolving crystals of language loss. Wu relentlessly searches the grocery shelves for the hard-to-digest ingredients of identity and belonging, offering us her nourishing honesty and courage pulled from the marrow.
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Grande Prairie With an E
$19.99Following the success of Straight Outta Busan, Stefano returns with more cartoons from his hit web comic series Modern Asian Family. This second collection of short cartoons from Stefano Jun chronicles his experiences as a Korean immigrant in Western Canada. Having moved to Canada as an 8 year old with no knowledge of English, Stefano encounters culture shock, family love, friendship, and ultimately finding a place for himself in the vast country he has called home for 20 years now.
These slice of life stories are a keenly observed insight into the experience of growing up in an unfamiliar place. Full of emotion, humour and surprise, Modern Asian Family: Grande Prairie With an E is a delight to read.
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Green Fuse Burning
$19.99After the death of her estranged father, artist Rita struggles with grief and regret. There was so much she wanted to ask him – about his childhood, their family, and the Mi’kmaq language and culture from which Rita feels disconnected. But when Rita’s girlfriend Molly forges an artist’s residency application on her behalf, winning Rita a week to paint at an isolated cabin, Rita is both furious and intrigued. The residency is located where her father grew up.
On the first night at the cabin, Rita wakes to strange sounds. Was that a body being dragged through the woods? When she questions the locals about the cabin’s history, they are suspicious and unhelpful. Ignoring her unease, Rita gives in to dark visions that emanate from the forest’s lake and the surrounding swamp. She feels its pull, channelling that energy into art like she’s never painted before. But the uncanny visions become more insistent, more intrusive, and Rita discovers that in the swamp’s decay the end of one life is sometimes the beginning of another.
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Hiroshima Bomb Money
$22.95Through the lives of three siblings living in Hiroshima, Japan, Terry Watada explores the sweep of history during the years 1930 to 1945, known in Japan as the Fifteen Year War. The youngest, Chisato Akamatsu, travels to Canada looking for a new life and runs into unexpected brutalities in immigration, a troubled marriage and the humiliation of the internment in her new home during World War Two. Hideki, the only brother, joins the military to fight for the Emperor and find “glory” in China. What he finds is the fallacy of patriotism, the brutality of war, and the futility of existence. Chiemi, the oldest, was in the city when to the atom bomb hit. She then desperately searches for her twin babies. The three encapsulate the hopes, fears, dreams, the inhumanity of the period and resiliency of humans caught in historic eventsThe bomb money, a mass of melted coins found after the bomb blast, stands as a symbol of the fate of the family. In his fourth novel, Canadian poet, dramatist, and novelist Terry Watada delves into the Pacific War, looking at WWII from a Japanese perspective, unique in Canadian literature.
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Homecoming
$18.95“Wasn’t I enough to cross an ocean?”
Three generations of Filipina women converge across time and continents as they attempt to bridge the emotional and physical distances that have kept them apart. Sisters Tess and Vicky are inseparable as children, climbing mango trees and sharing dreams in their small Philippine barangay. But when Tess leaves for Canada, their world fractures, leaving Vicky to shoulder the weight of familial responsibilities. More than thirty years later, a funeral brings Vicky to Vancouver to reunite with Tess and her daughter, Ana. Together, the women grapple with the unspoken tensions of the past, hoping to reconcile—but is it too late?
Weaving seamlessly between dreams and memories, Kamila Sediego’s Homecoming tenderly navigates the ripple effects of immigration on those who leave, those who stay, and the generations that follow. A rich tapestry of culture, language, humour, and food, this soaring and heartbreaking drama reminds us that even across great distances, some bonds can never be broken.
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Hot, Wet, and Shaking
$23.95Winner of the 2015 Evelyn Richardson Non-fiction Award
Revised and expanded tenth anniversary edition, featuring new essays and an introduction by Christa Couture.
This is a sex book. It’s a book about fucking yourself, fucking someone you love, fucking strangers. It’s about saying words like cunt and come, and all manner of perverse verbiage. Mostly, it’s about speaking honestly about our bodies and our vulnerability, recognizing we’re all imperfect, worthy, and desirable.
In this ten year anniversary edition of Hot, Wet & Shaking, Kaleigh Trace—disabled, queer, sex therapist—chronicles her journey from ignorance to bliss as she shamelessly discusses her sexual exploits and bodily negotiations. Trace’s memoirs and essays generously welcome the reader into her world, modelling a humour and radical self acceptance that can teach us all how to talk about sex, and then some.