Important Shipping Notice: Due to the ongoing Canada Post strike, delivery times may be longer than usual. Where possible, we’ll use alternative shipping methods to help get your order to you sooner. We appreciate your patience and understanding as your order makes its way to you.

A note to US-based customers: All Lit Up is pausing print orders to the USA until further notice. Read more

You Told Us: Fave Canadian Reads from 2021-22

Usually on our birthdays we talk about our favourite reads, but this year, we turned it over to you, our readers. See what books ALU readers loved over the last year.

All Books in this Collection

  • The Sisters Sputnik

    The Sisters Sputnik

    By: Terri Favro
    $24.95

    “It does what readers ask of a Storyteller: keeps things fast-moving and entertaining. It’s a breezy joy.” — Publishers Weekly

    “Together, the Sisters Sputnik are the badassest kickass duo since Tank Girl and Jet Girl. If you like your speculative fiction sardonic, weird, sprightly, and intelligent, you will love this splendid book.” — Candas Jane Dorsey, author of Black Wine and Ice and Other Stories

    An odyssey wrapped in a love story, set in a near-future of artificial people

    The Sisters Sputnik are a time-traveling trio of storytellers-for-hire who are much in demand throughout the multiverse of 2,052 alternate worlds. Each world was created by the detonation of a nuclear bomb in Earth Standard Time, home of the Sisters’ leader, aging comic book creator Debbie Reynolds Biondi, her 20-something apprentice Unicorn Girl, and their pop culture–loving AI, Cassandra. Tales of Earth Standard Time-That-Was, from World Wars to the space race to Hollywood celebrities, have turned the Sisters into storytelling rock stars.

    In a distant reality where books and music have disappeared, Debbie finds herself in bed with an old Earth Standard Time lover who begs her to tell him a story. Over one long, eventful night, she spins the epic of the Sisters’ adventures in alternate realities, starting with the theft of a book of evil comic strips in a post-pandemic Toronto full of ghost kitchens and robot-worshipping lost children known as junksters, to a disco-era purgatory where synthetic people are sending humans into the past through a reverse-engineered Statue of Liberty, to a version of the 1950s where the Sisters meet a rising star named Frank Sinatra and his girlfriend, the once-and-future Queen of England.

  • Tumblehome

    Tumblehome

    By: Brenda Missen
    $22.95

    On a warm August evening, Brenda Missen, a 37-year-old single, unattached writer, pitches her tent beside a lake in Canada’s 7,600 square-kilometre [3,000 square-mile] Algonquin Provincial Park. She is on a four-night “reconnaissance mission,” an hour’s paddle from the parking lot, to find out if she has the capability-and nerve-to one day take a real canoe trip in the park interior by herself. Paddling and portaging from her campsite by day and surviving imaginary bear attacks by night, she decides she’s ready. Then a ranger arrives to check her permit, and an inexplicable, powerful intuition tells her this is the person she’s meant to marry. Going solo may not be necessary after all.

    But the fairy tale unravels. In the wake of a broken engagement to her One True Paddling Partner, Brenda ventures into the near wilderness on a series of solo canoe trips that blow all her perceptions of romance, relationships, God, and her own self (gently) out of the water. In our high-tech, urban age, when so many people are disconnected from the natural world, Tumblehome-part spiritual memoir, part travel adventure, and great part ode to the Earth-is a timely and important exploration of where our real roots lie.

  • Wan

    Wan

    By: Dawn Promislow
    $24.95

    Shortlisted for the 2023 Fred Kerner Book Award

    A Miramichi Reader Best Fiction of 2022

    “Wan is a masterpiece. This beautiful, painterly, sublime, and sonically exquisite novel by Dawn Promislow is a work of utter genius.” – Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, author of All the Broken Things

    Narrated in a completely distinctive and mesmerizing voice, Wan is the story of Jacqueline, a privileged artist in 1970s South Africa. After an anti-apartheid activist comes to hide in her garden house, Jacqueline’s carefully constructed life begins to unravel.

    Written in gorgeous and spare prose, this exquisite debut novel grapples with questions of complicity and guilt, of privilege, and of the immeasurable value of art and of life.

  • Wave Forms and Doom Scrolls

    Wave Forms and Doom Scrolls

    By: Daniel Scott Tysdal
    $20.00

    In this heart-twisting collection, Tysdal delves deep into the human experience. Throughout, Tysdal looks unflinchingly at the darkness of society, at suicide, at internet trolls, at violence, but the powerful empathy of his writing brings significance to even the most tragic moments. These stories have intricate and unexpected plots, filmic descriptions and crisp writing. These stories will break the reader’s heart and then put it back together again filled with compassion for these lost souls.