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Welcome to your next indie book
With winter looming and pandemic life in full swing, staying at home is the new national hobby.
Luckily, we have good books to keep us company. Canadian Independent literary presses publish books that reflect the richness and diversity of Canadian stories. Whether your taste is fiction, memoir, poetry, plays, or graphic novels, indie presses gift us with inventive, edgy, award-winning, homegrown books that inspire, awaken, challenge, and provoke.Books on All Lit Up belong to some of Canada’s best independent presses—all of which are small businesses. And now, more than ever, we want our purchases to support local companies, not internet giants. Scroll down to discover, buy, and collect their new releases.
All Books in this Collection
Showing 33–48 of 99 results
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Hotline
$21.95A 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.
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I Want to Tell You Lies
I Want to Tell You Lies
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If Sylvie Had Nine Lives
$22.95Winner of the High Plains Book Award and the Saskatchewan Fiction Award.
An innovative, gorgeously written story about the small decisions that shape our lives.
Meet Sylvie—funny, sly, sensual and flawed. She can’t always count on herself to make good choices. She may or may not recognize a life-or-death moment, may or may not cancel her own wedding with a day to spare, might just try to walk past store security with a little something in her pocket. Like all of us, Sylvie must make decisions that have reverberations for years to come. Unlike the rest of us, Sylvie gets to live more than one life.
In airy prose imbued with humour, this novel asks the big questions: is there a right path and a wrong path, or does each possibility hold its share of pleasure and pain? Does a person have an immutable self, or is her essence dependent on circumstances? In this energetic and innovative book, Leona Theis creates a world without the usual limits and a protaganist who is conflicted, charismatic, brave, and full of curiosity. If Sylvie Had Nine Lives is for everyone who has ever asked, What if…?
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In the Beggarly Style of Imitation
$19.95Born on the twin backs of torpidity and obsession, In the Beggarly Style of Imitation is a voyage into the mind of one of the Canadian literary underground’s most unruly writers. Equal parts tribute to the historical genesis of the novel and the well-trodden subject of love, the exercises of imitation contained in this collection offer a brief survey through the illustrious forms and genres of literary expression: epistolary, aphorism, essay, picaresque, romance and satire culminate in a celebratory brand of fiction that proves with finality that imitation is truly the vilest form of flattery.
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it was never going to be okay
$18.95it was never going to be okay is a collection of poetry and prose exploring the intimacies of understanding intergenerational trauma, Indigeneity and queerness, while addressing urban Indigenous diaspora and breaking down the limitations of sexual understanding as a trans woman. As a way to move from the linear timeline of healing and coming to terms with how trauma does not exist in subsequent happenings, it was never going to be okay tries to break down years of silence in simpson’s debut collection of poetry:i am fivemy sisters are saying boyi do not know what the word means but—i am bruised into knowing it: the blunt b,the hollowness of the o, the blade of y
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Kate Wake
$21.95An intriguing story of a woman and artist in the grip of a major personal crisis and whose life becomes intertwined with that of her extraordinary, great grandmother, also called Kate. Written with great delicacy and acute understanding of the complexities of mind and heart, and enriched by the importance of film and painting in the heroine’s life, Kate Wake offers an original, multi-genre narrative of woman in search of historical and contemporary truths. A novel as contemporary as the present moment, it is also a book deepened by connections with the past. Accessible, lyrical, factual, simple and complex, the writing conveys the many dimensions of the heroine’s experiences and feelings. Kate Wake is a novel that narrates a working-through of loss by an individual compelled to return to the original scene (of loss), a sort of underworld rule by sleep, memory and the unconscious.
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Kinmount
$20.00Rod Carley has concocted another hilarious romp behind the theatre curtain – a showdown between artistic freedom and censorship in rural Ontario. Kinmount is the last place down-and-out director Dave Middleton wants to revisit yet there he is directing an amateur production of Romeo and Juliet for an eccentric producer in farm country. And there his quixotic troubles begin. From cults to karaoke, anything that can go wrong does. In one hilarious chapter after another, Dave becomes the reluctant emissary of truth in a comic battle between artistic integrity and censorship. Add in a pesky ghost and a precocious parrot and the stage is set for a summer Kinmount won’t soon forget.
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Krillian Key, The
$24.00“My million years of immortality have barely begun…” Pursued by warring human/alien hybrids, the immortal Kyrill, also known as Salamander, is the key to a prison forged by the seven gods of creation. While one of the warring factions moves to protect him, the other seeks to use him to open the prison. The Krillian Key, Salamander Run is a sassy, fast-paced Indigenous-themed graphic novel set in the post-apocalyptic future of Neo-New York circa 2242, with flashbacks to modern-day Canada.
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Land-Water-Sky / Ndè-Tı-Yat’a
$24.00A vexatious shapeshifter walks among humans. Shadowy beasts skulk at the edges of the woods. A ghostly apparition haunts a lonely stretch of highway. Spirits and legends rise and join together to protect the north.
Land-Water-Sky/Ndè-Tı-Yat’a is the debut novel from Dene author Katłıà. Set in Canada’s far north, this layered composite novel traverses space and time, from a community being stalked by a dark presence, a group of teenagers out for a dangerous joyride, to an archeological site on a mysterious island that holds a powerful secret.
Riveting, subtle, and unforgettable, Katłıà gives us a unique perspective into what the world might look like today if Indigenous legends walked amongst us, disguised as humans, and ensures that the spiritual significance and teachings behind the stories of Indigenous legends are respected and honored.
We acknowledge the support of Arts Nova Scotia.
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Lightness
$16.95Told with startling, unapologetic honesty and in a haunting, minimalist style, Lightness is the story of a woman’s profound sense of alienation, beginning with her own physical body and its desires. In this original and moving take on anorexia, we go deep into the mind of the narrator as she carries out her secret, prolonged hunger strike against the constraints of her life.
The original French version of Lightness (Déterrer les os) won the Best First Novel Prize at the Biennale littéraire des Cèdres in 2018 and was adapted for stage at the Centre du Théâtre d’Aujourd’hui in Montreal.
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Like Rum-Drunk Angels
$22.95Winner, Spur Award for Best Western Traditional Novel and Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize
Longlisted, Leacock Medal for HumourFrancis Blackstone is a fourteen-year-old gunslinger with a heart of gold.
He’s fallen for the governor’s daughter and resolves to make his mark, and his fortune, to win her favour. And what better way than to rob a Manhattan Company bank? Enter Bob Temple, the volatile outlaw who takes Francis under his wing— though not without a degree of suspicion— and so begins the adventures of the Blackstone Temple Gang as they crisscross the west in search of treasure, redemption, and the possibility of requited love.
After an encounter with a rival gang, Francis and Bob Temple are chased over the Sierras to California, where they enjoy unexpected fame as gentleman bandits. But their newfound celebrity brings hardships as well, and when their final job takes a startling turn, Francis is forced to discover what it means to make peace with a world that stands against him.
At once a tribute to boyhood enthusiasm and the heroes of classical quests, Like Rum-Drunk Angels is an offbeat, slightly magical, entirely original retelling of Aladdin as an American western.
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Little Russia
$24.95Guyenne is a small village north-east of Amos. Unlike other communities in Abitibi, Guyenne is a cooperative: 50% of all the money its inhabitants make goes to developing the colony. People in the vicinity have a nickname for it: they call it “Little Russia.” Inspired by the story of his grandparents, who lived in Guyenne from 1948 to 1968, Little Russia sees author Francis Desharnais delving into his own family’s past to explore Quebec’s rural heritage through the lens of both grassroots socialism and early feminism. An intimate story of epic scale, Little Russia is a fascinating foray into an unusual and largely forgotten social experiment.
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Lo (or Dear Mr. Wells)
$15.95Ten years ago, Laura was a student in Alan Wells’ English class. She was uncharacteristically smart for a fifteen-year-old–perceptive and vulnerable–a dream for a flailing teacher. Now, at twenty-five, Laura has written her first novel. She’s called it Dear Mr. Wells, and Alan is the first person she wants to read it. Weaving seamlessly from present to past, Lo (or Dear Mr. Wells) burrows in the grey areas of consent. A coming-of-age story, a love story, a vindication, Lo (or Dear Mr. Wells) examines a formative relationship that both corrupts and liberates.
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Lonely Boys
$27.95After a year of radio silence, Ella bursts back into the lives of her former roommates, Jen and Lucie. Her intentions seem simple enough: she wants to mend fences and regain their trust. But it won’t be that easy. Lonely Boys is a story of friendship, sisterhood and self-affirmation. It captures life at twenty-something as three young women navigate the challenges of work, sex and romantic relationships, all the while trying to hold on to the connection they share despite the hurt it carries.
What can be done about the friendships that are bound to break your heart?
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Maame (Mother)
$22.95In Aakonu, a small village on the coast of Ghana, life is a constant tussle between the reality of the mundane and the superstitions presided over by the local priestess. In this setup, girls in their puberty can only look forward to marriage–often to men old enough to be their fathers and already with other wives.
Ahu, a young widow of eighteen, has no choice but to marry an older relative. But she refuses to have more children and returns to Aakonu. Overcoming all odds, she sets up a village eatery and raises her children, educating them all and finally sending the eldest girl, Bomo, to university. Her rebellion and success are an inspiration for the generation of girls growing up, to reach out beyond the limits imposed upon them by ancient tradition. Through these beautifully told, lyrical stories about herself, her daughter Bomo, the beautiful but tragic Ebela, and the childless Aso, and others, Ahu introduces us to her community, and the beliefs and customs that keep its families together but in the end also stifle its girls’ futures.
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Melt
$22.95***IPPY AWARDS: BEST REGIONAL FICTION: CANADA-EAST – SILVER***
***THE GLOBE AND MAIL SUMMER’S HOTTEST READS***
Jess is a sensitive creature of habit. Cait is her passionate and impulsive best friend. And in Melt, Heidi Wicks follows the lives of these characters from their teenage years into their late thirties—through drifting desires, fake tans, economic turbulence, kids, grief, job loss, love loss, and personal renewal. Shifting radiantly between the late nineties and the present day, Melt explores the life-sustaining anatomy of friendship and the complex relationships we have with our pasts.