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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 17–32 of 41 results
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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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Misty Lake
$17.95Misty Lake tells the story of a young Metis journalist from Winnipeg who travels to a Dene reserve in Northern Manitoba to conduct an interview with a former residential school student. What Mary imparts in her interview will change Patty’s life profoundly, allowing the journalist to make the connections to her own troubled life in the city. Patty knows that her Metis grandmother went to residential school when she was a girl. But Patty hasn’t understood until now that she’s inherited the traumatic legacy of residential school that was passed down to her mother from her grandmother. With this new understanding, Patty embarks on a healing journey. It will take her to the Dene fishing camp at Misty Lake, a place of healing, where, with Mary, she will learn that healing begins when you can talk about your life.
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Northern Bull
$24.95Over the course of one bitterly cold winter day in Yellowknife, Northern Bull takes readers on a joyful and hilarious journey of love and friendship as a quirky cast of characters sets out to find a missing moose head.
It’s a cold, dark January day in Yellowknife. A down-on-his-luck fisherman, Jacques, needs to convince his landlord not to tear down his ramshackle house. But when his volatile hunting buddy, Craig, accuses him of stealing a prized moose head, Jacques must put everything aside to find the bull before midnight, or there’s no telling what Craig might do.
Meanwhile, Jacques’s next-door neighbour Maggie is trying to face her fears by writing a story for the annual community burlesque show. But when she accidentally breaks Jacques’s window, she is determined to help save his home and find the moose head—and maybe something more.
Over a single day, with flashbacks to the hunting trip that started it all and culminating in a wild night no one in Yellowknife will ever forget, we follow Jacques, Maggie and a quirky cast of supporting characters as they race against time—on snowmobiles—to find the moose, brave the stage, and take a chance on themselves and on love. A hilarious and charming ode to life in the north.
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Notes from the Ward
$20.00Notes from the Ward is a collection of poetry that explores bipolar disorder and psychotic break through lived experience and a poet’s eye. It is breathtakingly truthful and disarmingly direct, a powerful intrevention into a disgnosis that remains more medicalized and sensationalized than understood.
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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.
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Sisters of the Spruce
$26.00World War One is in high gear. Fourteen-year-old Khya Terada moves with her family to a remote, misty inlet on Haida Gwaii, then the Queen Charlotte Islands, in northern British Columbia, known for its Sitka spruces. The Canadian government has passed an act to expedite logging of these majestic trees, desperately needed for the Allies’ aircrafts in Europe. At a camp on the inlet, Khya’s father, Sannosuke—a talented, daring logger with twenty years of experience since immigrating from Japan—assumes a position of leadership among the Japanese and Chinese workers.
But the arrival of a group of white loggers, eager to assert their authority, throws off balance the precarious life that Khya and her family have begun to establish. When a quarrel between Sannosuke and a white man known as “the Captain” escalates, leading to the betrayal of her older sister, Izzy, and humiliation for the family, Khya embarks on a perilous journey with her one friend—a half-Chinese sex worker, on the lam for her own reasons—to track down the man and force him to take responsibility. Yet nothing in the forest is as it appears. Can they save Izzy from ruination and find justice without condemning her to a life of danger, or exposing themselves to the violence of an angry, power-hungry man?
Drawing on inspiration from her ancestors’ stories and experiences, Shimotakahara weaves an entrancing tale of female adventure, friendship, and survival.
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Slice the Water
$26.00Longlisted, Canada Reads
Born on the lush island nation of Mahana, Fred lives under the tyrannical rule of a book-burning king. Under the king’s rule, Mahanians are controlled by a military dictatorship and threatened with forced starvation, while people with disabilities are exiled. After Fred’s father suddenly disappears, Fred joins an underground movement of dissenters and becomes an unwitting global icon in the fight for Mahanian freedom. When he is recruited and relocated by an organization that appears sympathetic to Fred’s cause, he arrives in a seemingly peaceful foreign nation, where the impact of social media and technology creates a new, stranger struggle.
A dystopian thriller, a work of speculative fiction, and a coming-of-age story, Wong’s novel thrums with biting bursts of staccato-like prose — a fitting accompaniment to a fascinating exploration of contrasting political systems. As Fred unpeels layers of truth and sees beyond the optics of altruism and the illusion of choice, Slice the Water unpacks the myriad amplifying impacts of technology, addiction, and complacency.
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Starry Starry Night
$24.95From celebrated writer Shani Mootoo comes an innovative and revelatory work of autofiction about family secrets, trauma, race, class, and loss.
In Starry Starry Night, Mootoo gives us the singular voice of Anju Ghoshal, a young girl living in 1960s Trinidad. Through Anju’s innocent and clear-eyed observations, the reader becomes both a witness to and a participant in her negotiations of an unexpectedly new and complex life, spanning from the ages of four to twelve.
Set against the backdrop of a politically exciting time in Trinidad’s history, just before and after it gained independence, we meet Anju’s beloved Ma and Pa and her socially advancing family. While preoccupied with their own dramas, the adults around her often fail to recognize the needs of the children who depend on them.
Beautifully crafted and rich with sumptuous detail, this unique narrative coalesces into a portrait of a child who, despite her privileged appearance, must ultimately fend for herself because her safety depends on it.
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Straight Outta Busan
$19.99A collection of short cartoons from Stefano Jun chronicling his experiences growing up 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: Straight Outta Busan is a delight to read.
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Subterrane
$22.95Winner – 2025 Amazon Canada First Novel Award
A speculative comedy comprised of a carousel of Black and Queer voices being pushed further underground by urban prosperity.
New Stockholm, a metropolis like any other across North America, is unofficially divided between two worlds. Its upwardly mobile form the centre of its gleaming eye, but their prosperity and affluence are not the focus of Zeynab’s government-funded abstract documentary. Her lens trails to the city’s margins instead, in polluted industrial wastelands such as Cipher Falls, one of New Stockholm’s last affordable neighbourhoods, where creatives and other anti-capitalist voices increasingly find themselves pushed into demeaning, dead-end jobs. In this growing underground network, Zeynab’s lens focuses on the mysterious demise of Doudou Laguerre, whose death may be related to his activism against a construction project.
Subterrane connects us to a constellation of Black and Queer voices, the hair braiders, tattoo artists, holistic healers, weed dealers, and sidewalk horticulturists struggling to make a life in New Stockholm. Together, they illustrate how in cities across the continent, entire communities are being sidelined in the name of prosperity.
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Super Castle Fun Park
$24.95A wild, beguiling novel about isolation, technology, and raising the dead by the co-editor of Queer Little Nightmares
The dead want to speak to you. But are you ready to hear their words? Super Castle Fun Park explores a group of people tending wistfully to their precarious lives. Dario is an aimless pessimist staying at a themed hotel who is tasked with the care of his aunt at the end of her life. Jeremy is Dario’s anxious boyfriend who is trapped in his home, plagued by disturbing visions. Chelsea is an ornery medium who spends her free time on her phone trolling a group of misfits in an online game. Each of them is at the precipice of change, and the people they are interconnected to, including the dead, will be there when it happens.
Moving seamlessly between quiet melancholy, wry humour, and the supernatural, Super Castle Fun Park is a novel that defies expectations: a tragicomic, very human story about isolation, ghosts, technology, and our deep, abiding need for connection.
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Syncopation
$24.00In the aftermath of a Memory War, society is fragmented into strange new cultures, castes and coalitions. Set against a backdrop of retrofitted food garages, microchip-sorting factories and hyperloop terminals, Whitney French brings us a dazzling novel-in-verse where memory is the highest currency and love, like all revolutions, is dangerous, unruly and singed with hope.
O and Z are two young women searching for purpose in a world where a decades-long earthquake reverberates through the Earth’s crust, and the population scrambles to hide from deadly acid rain. Descended from space pirates, O is drawn to the sky, while Z is earthbound, a skilled forager with connections to the black market. The two become travel companions and lovers until, torn between choosing their values or each other, a fateful decision must be made at the el Corazón space station.
In this speculative and intoxicating novel, French offers readers an intricate future-world that resonates so powerfully with our own, as it explores a people gripped in the war-torn politics of migration, memory-keeping, labour, and survival.
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The Pages of the Sea
$24.95Shortlisted for the 2025 RSL Christopher Bland Prize • Shortlisted for the 2025 OCM Bocas Prize in Fiction • A Globe 100 Best Book of 2024 • A Guardian Best Fiction Book of 2024 • A CBC Best Fiction Book of the Year
On a Caribbean island in the mid-1960s, a young girl copes with the heavy cost of migration.
When her mother emigrates to England to find work, Wheeler and her older sisters are left to live with their aunts and cousins. She spends most days with her cousin Donelle, knocking about their island community. They know they must address their elders properly and change their shoes after church. And during the long, quiet weeks of Lent, when the absent sound of the radio seems to follow them down the road, they look forward to kite season. But Donelle is just a child, too, and though her sisters look after her with varying levels of patience, Wheeler couldn’t feel more alone. Everyone tells her that soon her mother will send for her, but how much longer will it be? And as she does her best to navigate the tensions between her aunts, why does it feel like there’s no one looking out for her at all?
A story of sisterhood, secrets, and the sacrifices of love, The Pages of the Sea is a tenderly lyrical portrait of innocence and an intensely moving evocation of what it’s like to be a child left behind.
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The Seers
$21.95Longlisted for the 2025 Republic of Consciousness Prize
Longlisted for the 2025 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize
With echoes of Zora Neale Hurston and Clarice Lispector, Sulaiman Addonia turns from the broader immigration narrative of land and nations to look closely at the erotic and intimate lives of asylum seekers.
Set around a foster home in Kilburn and in the squares of Bloomsbury where its protagonist Hannah sleeps, The Seers chronicles the first weeks of a young Eritrean refugee in London. As Hannah grapples with her own agency in a strange country, her sexual encounters become an unapologetic expression of self—a defiant cry against the endless bureaucracy of immigration.
In a single, gripping, continuous paragraph, The Seers moves between past and present to paint a surreal and sensual portrait of a life being burned up in search of refuge. For Hannah, caught between worlds in the UK asylum system, the West is both saviour and abuser, seeking always to shape her, but never succeeding in suppressing her voice.
“A provocative, multi-faceted gem. Full of fierce anti-colonial rage and
subtle artistry, addressing what it means to be a migrant in today’s
fractured Britain.”—2025 Republic of Consciousness Prize Judges’ Citation
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The Siren in the Twelfth House
$21.95“Truthfully I can only tell you what’s missing” writes the heartbroken protagonist at the beginning of Victoria Mbabazi’s The Siren in the Twelfth House. But this isn’t a book that succumbs to grief. Mbabazi’s poems are siren songs, reclaiming love from pain, and rediscovering joy through the destruction and eventual rebuilding of astrological houses. Prepare to slow dance through this profound and powerful debut.