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Pride Reads 2024
Get into the spirit of Pride Month with these books from the LGBTQ2SIA+ community.
All Books in this Collection
Showing 1–20 of 30 results
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A Seal of Salvage
$22.95Steeped in Newfoundland’s unique folklore and superstitions, A Seal of Salvage is a coming-of-age novel about unrequited love between adolescent boys that slips between history and mythology.
Set in 1950s rural outport Newfoundland and blending historical fiction with magic realism, A Seal of Salvage follows orphan Oliver Brown’s coming of age as a queer outsider. Oliver’s life in the small community of Salvage is overshadowed by lingering rumours about his mother, her mysterious past, and her untimely death.
But as Oliver grows up, he experiences a remarkable series of events of mythic proportions. Stories of Oliver’s mother become entangled with the folklore of the Selkie: people of the sea who live in the water as seals and come to land to find love as humans. While mostly unspoken, the speculations about Oliver’s bloodline become another excuse the town uses to marginalize him.
A Seal of Salvage explores the space where the natural and supernatural meet, as well as how the stories people tell can be fashioned to justify their own prejudice.
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Anatomical Venus
$20.00Anatomical Venus is a visceral collection of poems that invoke anatomical models, feminine monsters, and little-known historical figures. It’s a journey through car accidents and physio appointments, 18th century morgues and modern funeral homes. Grappling with the cyclical nature of chronic pain, these poems ask how to live with and love the self in pain. Magic seeps through, in the form of fairy tales, in the stories of powerful monsters, in the introspection of the tarot, and the transcendence of queer love.
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Anomia
$21.95In Euphoria, a small, fictional town that feels displaced in time and space, an affluent but isolated couple have vanished from their suburban home. Their estranged friend, Fir, a local video store employee, is the only person who notices their disappearance. When the police refuse to help, Fir recruits Fain, who moonlights as a security guard, and they set off on a seemingly hopeless search for the lost lovers. Their chance at an answer, if they can ever find it, lies on the wooded edge of Euphoria, where Slip, an elderly trailer park resident, finds a scattering of bones that cannot be identified. Distrusting everyone, Slip undertakes a would-be solitary quest to discover the bones’ identity. Yet secretly, Limn and Mal, two bored, true crime-loving teenagers from the trailer park, are dogging Slip. Determined to bring justice to the dead, Limn and Mal will instead bring the lives of all seven characters into fraught and tangled confrontation.
Beneath the familiar surface of this missing-persons novel lies an unparalleled experiment: the creation of a folkloric alternate reality where sex and gender have been forgotten. Expanding on the work of Anne Garréta’s Sphinx and Jeannette Winterson’s Written on the Body, and joining gender-confronting contemporaries like Joshua Whitehead’s Jonny Appleseed and Akwaeke Emezi’sThe Death of Vivek Oji, Anomia is an atmospheric exploration of a possible world, and a possible language, existing without reference to sex or gender.
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Body So Fluorescent
$18.95What happened last night on the dance floor? Gary knows he went to the club with his friend Desiree, but now all he has is a fuzzy memory and a text saying, “We’re done.” Desiree has known something’s been up with Gary, but she always kept her thoughts to herself. Until last night ended in an explosive fight. As Gary and Desiree retrace their steps to figure out the chain of events, perspectives shift from self to alter ego to untangle the facts. And after the dust settles, can their friendship be rebuilt? Body So Fluorescent is an electrifying exploration that asks difficult questions about Blackness, otherness, and appropriation.
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Channel Surfing in the Sea of Happiness
$24.95Channel Surfing in the Sea of Happiness is an iconoclastic romp through the end of the twentieth century. The misfit characters in this funny and poignant collection of stories find themselves adrift in an increasingly absurdist world — a world they must reinvent for themselves in order to find hope. How much of our identity is forged by direct experience, and how much is shaped by our constant exposure to a barrage of images and ideas imposed on us from elsewhere? From a story about a precocious teenage boy coming out in high school in the 1970s, to a series of tales about two queer con artists and their ridiculous get-rich-quick schemes, to a yarn about a famous transgender sex worker’s efforts to rally her community against redneck homophobes, to an account of a lesbian puppeteer’s AIDS activism in the 1980s, to a story about a sister coming to terms with her brother’s death from AIDS, the collection explores how the human heart stays afloat in a society entertaining, informing, and networking itself to death.
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Crushing It
$22.99After an epic grounding for some bad decisions with even worse friends, Tommy Fairfield is lucky to even go to the Door Tech March Break camp. There, he crosses paths with Carter Batudev, chemistry isn’t just for the classroom anymore.
With love and a renewed interest in STEM, Tommy returns home to Parry Sound, where, to the relief of his parents, he makes better friends, and joins the STEM club. When the club goes to the province-wide competition in Toronto, he is reunited with Carter, whose team is also competing. Ensues a wild ride full of romance, hijinks, STEM, and singing.
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Dandelion Daughter
$21.95A runaway bestseller in Québec, where it has captured the hearts of readers and pushed trans-identity into the mainstream conversationDandelion Daughter is an intimate, courageous portrait of what it’s like to grow up having been assigned the wrong sex at birth. Set against the windswept countryside of the remote Charlevoix region some five hours north of Montreal, Gabrielle Boulianne-Tremblay’s autobiographical novel immortalizes her early years as an alienated boy trapped in a world of small-town values and her parents’ dissolving marriage, through complex adolescent years of self-discovery and first loves, to the harrowing episodes that fuel the growing realization that she must transition and give birth to her new self if she is to continue living at all. One of the first novels of its kind to appear in Québec, this inspiring story has already connected with a wide readership, and has been adopted by many schools to help expand worldviews and curriculums.
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Deuce
$22.95Gilda Peterborough has always worried about her twin, but when Pete deletes his Facebook page, she is doubly concerned. Pete, A.K.A. Philippa, A.K.A. Phil, is intersex, and Gilda credits all of Pete’s social problems with this biological fact. As far as Pete is concerned, however, the problems all lie with Gilda, who is constantly on his case for reasons that are unclear to him. Meanwhile, Pete and Gilda’s mother Beth frets about both of her twins, neither of whom seem to be thriving. Beth tries desperately to be a patient and laid back parent, but when Pete abruptly decides to move away from Edmonton to Montreal, both Gilda and Beth are separately compelled to try to find him and somehow reconcile the family’s unresolved past, a family history haunted by the influence of Ralph Peterborough, a father who has never accepted his child for who they are.
Events in Edmonton and Montreal spiral with the dual reckoning of Beth in one city and Pete and Gilda in another, but ultimately Beth, Pete and Gilda will have the final say in their relationships and their identities.
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Disobedience
Shael lives in a vast prison camp, a monstrosity developed after centuries of warfare and environmental catastrophe. As a young transfeminine person, they risk abject violence if their identity and love affair with Coe, an insurrectionary activist, are discovered. But desire and rebellion flare, and soon Shael escapes to Riverwish, a settlement attempting to forge a new way of living that counters the camp’s repression.
As the complexities of this place unfold before Shael, Disobedience asks: How can a community redress harm without reproducing unaccountable forms of violence? How do we heal? What might a compassionate, sustainable model of justice look like?
This is a remarkable work of queer and trans speculative fiction that imagines how alternative forms of connection and power can refuse the violent institutions that engulf us.
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El Ghourabaa
$21.95Seeking uncanny, fun, experimental, creepy, sarcastic, playful, vulgar, inventive, sexual, weird, sweet, and evocative works, editors Samia Marshy and Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch set out to collect Arab and Arabophone queer writing. The result is an anthology brimming with gems by emerging and established writers and an homage to the lineages and complexities of queer Arab life. Multi-genre, multi-generational, and global, El Ghourabaa is an enigma, a delight, and a contribution to an ongoing conversation and creative outpouring.
In addition to Marshy and El Bechelany-Lynch, contributors include: Leila Marshy, Trish Salah, Olivia Tapiero, Maisie-Nour Symon Henry, Yehia Anas Sabaa, Nofel, Hoda Adra, Ralph Haddad, Seif Siddiq, Karim Kattan, Andrea Abi-Karam, Bazeed, George Abraham, Sarah O’Neal, Micaela Kaibni Raen, Nour Kamel, Barrak Alzaid, and Rabih Alameddine.
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Electric Vice
$24.992022 ALBERTA BOOK AWARDS ‘GRAPHIC NOVEL OF THE YEAR’
1973: a chance encounter between Ed and the captivating androgynous singer of the pulse-pounding glam rock band ELECTRIC VICE, pulls Ed into a world of mascara, weathered leather, platform heels and neon. Book 2 in the award-winning series. A queer love story set in the outrageous world of 1970s glam rock, Pass Me By: Electric Vice is a journey of self-discovery, heartache, glam rock, and love. An inverted coming of age story about understanding queer identity and what happens to the stories you never tell.
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Enough
$24.00You can’t win a race you’re kept from running.
Set amid the cubicles and courtyards of Toronto City Hall, Kimia Eslah’s third novel centres on three women of colour navigating labyrinths at work, in love and in life. Faiza Hosseini is a cutthroat executive with a proven record — she knows she’s enough, but can she circumvent the old boys’ club? Sameera Jahani is passionate about equity but her girlfriend isn’t — can she bridge this gap, or has she had enough? Goldie Sheer has triumphantly landed her first job, but unexpected work drama makes her question — is she really enough? With grace and insight, Eslah bares three women’s experiences of structural discrimination, from microagressions to corruption.
Enough is an empathetic missive to anyone working on equity, diversity and inclusion — in cubicles, courtyards and countless other spaces.
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For Both Resting and Breeding
$15.95It is 2150 in M-City, a society without gender where everyone uses the pronoun ish. When two historians discover an abandoned millennium-era house, they hatch a plan to turn the building into a museum that re-enacts life in the year 2000. The historians gather a group of locals, including a student, an engineer, and a community elder, to restore the building and animate the site for local visitors. Together, the volunteers explore the fashion, furnishing, and family roles of their millennial forebears, all through the lens of binary gender roles. But the project turns risky when one of the historians and the youngest volunteer start to explore illegal sexual acts in secret. When the others discover what they’ve been up to, they must decide if the project can go ahead or if it threatens to upend the values of their society.
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From Sweetgrass Bridge
$22.00A nation holds its breath.
On a perfect prairie summer evening, Saskatchewan Roughrider Dustin Thomson goes missing. As the Green & White’s first primary quarterback born in the province and first Indigenous quarterback, Thomson is beloved and celebrated. Mistrusting the police investigation, the family hires Merry Bell P.I. to find the football star. From the dark waters below Sweetgrass Bridge to the lands of Little Turtle Lake First Nation, Merry seeks answers while dealing with her continuing transition, swelling loneliness, a floundering career, well-meaning crossdressing assistant and having to decide whether the people in her life are friend or foe.
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Gay Girl Prayers
$23.95A collection of poetry reclaiming Catholic prayers and biblical passages to empower girls, women, and members of the LGBTQIA+ community.
The extreme level of sass in Emily Austin?s Gay Girl Prayers does not mean that this collection is irreverent. On the contrary, in rewriting Bible verses to affirm and uplift queer, feminist, and trans realities, Austin invites readers into a giddy celebration of difference and a tender appreciation for the lives and perspectives of “strange women.”
Packed with zingy one liners, sexual innuendo, self-respect, U-Hauling, and painfully earnest declarations of love, this is gayness at its best, harnessed to a higher purpose and ready to fight the powers that be.
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Hot, Wet, and Shaking
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Jump Scare
At once raw and skillful, painful and funny, personal and pervasive, the poems in Jump Scare dig deep into mental health, neurodivergence, grief, dreams, monstrosity, sexuality, pop culture, queer consumer culture, and the commodification of identity. Jump Scare tackles isolation and loss head-on and thinks hard and with wry humour about how to position ourselves in our lonely, scary, compelling lives.
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Late September
$22.95Late September is an intimate queer coming-of-age tale exploring the nuances of love, trauma and mental health. A compelling literary fiction pick for readers of Heather O’Neill and Zoe Whittall.In the summer of 2000, Ines, a grief-stricken skateboarder beginning to explore her sexuality, leaves behind her sheltered hometown on a Greyhound bus bound for Montreal. In awe of the city’s vibrancy, and armed with a journal and a Discman, Ines sets out to find a new way, befriending April, a latex-loving goth who gets her a job as a cam-girl. In the midst of a bar fight Ines meets Max, a magnetic skateboarder, whom she quickly falls for.As summer fades to fall Ines tries to uphold the bliss of their intoxicating summer, realizing that while she has escaped the confines of her small-town life, she cannot escape her past. The city changes and their romance darkens as Ines learns that Max is experiencing mental health challenges, all while a regular at the cam studio gets threateningly close. Ines learns that loving herself first requires trial and error—and that love is not always an innocent word.
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Mehndi Boy
$11.99“Delightful . . . the world needs more ‘mehndi boys!’” —Vivek Shraya, author of The Boy & the Bindi and God Loves Hair
“I was totally charmed by it.” —Ali Sethi, musician and author
Now in paperback! An artistic, fashion-loving boy unlocks a new talent—and learns to stand up for it—in this chapter book perfect for fans of the Sadiq series and Meet Yasmin!
The first time Tehzeeb tries mehndi, his passion for the art form blossoms. Soon, he’s creating designs for all his friends and family, and dreams of becoming the most in-demand mehndi artist in town. So Tez is hurt and confused when his favorite uncle tells him mehndi isn’t for boys. His art brings people joy. How could it be wrong? Tehzeeb doesn’t want to disappoint his uncle. But when a crisis before his cousin’s wedding puts his talents to the test, Tehzeeb must find the courage to be his true creative self.
Jani Balakumar’s expressive, vibrant illustrations bring Tehzeeb’s designs—and his community—to life. This charming, affirming story by debut author Zain Bandali will have you celebrating creativity, artistic expression, and being unapologetically yourself.
Readers can learn more about mehndi at home with activities at the end of the book.
“A triumph.” —Danny Ramadan, author of Salma the Syrian Chef and the Salma series
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My Love in Stitches
$20.00Frankie is young monster who’s life often feels like it’s about to unravel– she can’t even count on getting through a softball game with all her limbs still attached! When she meets Momo, a girl who– despite being made of squishy, pink slime– is as sharp as she is cute, Frankie wants nothing more than to get closer to her. In order to do that however, Frankie now finds herself having to thread the needle around a new job, a scheming skeleton and the world’s hairiest ex-girlfriend drama. Join Frankie in a world full of monsters, magic and (hopefully!) love, as she tries her best to set the seams on an exciting new life!