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It’s 1976 in South Africa, and four young people are living in Johannesburg and its black township, Soweto: Zanele, a black female student organizer; Meena, a South Asian girl working at her father's shop; Jack, an Oxford-bound white student; and Thabo, a teen-gang member, or tsotsi. From each of their points of view, this book explores the roots of the Soweto Uprising and the edifice of apartheid in a South Africa about to explode.

Following the death of the family patriarch, a box of newly procured family documents reveals writer-filmmaker Chase Joynt’s previously unknown connection to Canadian media maverick Marshall McLuhan. Vantage Points takes up the surprising appearance of McLuhan in Joynt’s family archive as a way to think about legacies of childhood sexual abuse and how we might process and represent them.

In late 2007, as the world’s economy crumbles, the remarkably unremarkable Milton Ontario - not to be confused with Milton, Ontario - leaves his parent’s basement in Saskatchewan and sets forth to find fame, fortune, and love in the electric sexuality of Montreal, to bask in endless Millennial adolescence, to escape the infinite flatness of Saskatchewan, and to find his messiah: Leonard Cohen.

In May 2021, the world was shocked by news of the detection of 215 unmarked graves on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School (KIRS) in British Columbia, Canada. Ground-penetrating radar confirmed the vestiges of children as young as three on this site of the infamous residential school system, which systematically removed children from their families and brought them to the schools.

Regina is a socially awkward loner who is content to live a life withdrawn from everyone except her cherished pet bunny.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.

Disappearing Moon Café was a stunning debut novel that has become a Canadian literary classic. An unflinchingly honest portrait of a Chinese-Canadian family that pulses with life and moral tensions, this family saga takes the listener from the wilderness in 19th-century British Columbia to late 20th-century Hong Kong, to Vancouver's Chinatown. Intricate and lyrical, suspenseful and emotionally rich, it is a riveting story of four generations of women whose lives are haunted by the secrets and lies of their ancestors.

Peter plays the trumpet and works in a kitchen; Stasi tries to climb the corporate ladder and lands in therapy. These sensitive siblings struggle to find their place in the world, seeking intimacy and belonging—or trying to escape it. A promising audition, a lost promotion, intriguing strangers and a silent lover—in rich, sensual scenes and moody brilliance, The Clarion explores rituals of connection and belonging, themes of intimacy and performance, and how far we wander to find, or lose, our sense of self.

In Téa Mutonji’s disarming debut story collection, a woman contemplates her Congolese traditions during a family wedding, a teenage girl looks for happiness inside a pack of cigarettes, a mother reconnects with her daughter through their shared interest in fish, and a young woman decides to shave her head in the waiting room of an abortion clinic. These punchy, sharply observed stories blur the lines between longing and choosing, exploring the narrator’s experience as an involuntary one.

Badeeah Hassan was just 18 when she witnessed firsthand the horrors of the 2014 genocide of the Yazidi people by ISIS forces. Captured by ISIS, known locally as Daesh, Badeeah was among hundreds forced into a brutal human trafficking network made up of women and girls of Yazidi ethnicity, a much-persecuted minority culture of Iraq. Badeeah’s story takes her to Syria where she is sold to a high-ranking ISIS commander known as Al Amriki, the American, and kept as a house slave. Badeeah’s story is about the resilience of women, girls, and persecuted groups everywhere.

Award-winning author Darcy Tamayose returns with Ezra’s Ghosts, a collection of fantastical stories linked by a complex mingling of language and culture, as well as a deep understanding of grief and what it makes of us. Within this book a scholar writes home from the Ryukyu islands, not knowing that his hometown will soon face a deadly calamity of its own. Another seeker of truth is trapped in Ezra after her violent death, and must watch how her family—and her killer—alter in her absence.

Roland Keener is an aging hairstylist who’s lived and worked in Winnipeg all his life. He’s more or less content with the quiet and predictable days he shares with his partner of twenty-five years, Tony. That is, until he hears that Birdy O’Day—washed-up music icon and Roland’s childhood best friend and first love—is playing his first concert in Winnipeg since fleeing decades earlier. Holing up with a scrapbook of news clippings about Birdy, Roland recalls his childhood in the ’60s and his friendship with Birdy until the pair became estranged when Birdy left in pursuit of stardom.

Cree Thunderboy wants nothing less than to be the next great blues man. But playing to tiny audiences in shabby rooms like Shelly’s Crab Shack, his career is stalled. Then at the race track he meets Win Hardy, a charming rogue who spots Cree’s knack for picking winning horses. He offers to record his first CD and send him on tour, as long as Cree can keep coming up with the hot tips at the track. Then Cree discovers Win’s mob connections. When things inevitably go bad, Cree discovers that in life and in gambling, there is never really the next sure thing.

God Loves Hair is a collection of short stories that follows a tender, intelligent, and curious child who navigates the complex realms of gender creativity, queerness, brownness, religion, and belonging.

Mink is a witness, a shape shifter, compelled to follow the story that has ensnared Celia and her village, on the West coast of Vancouver Island in Nuu’Chahlnuth territory. Celia is a seer who—despite being convinced she’s a little “off”—must heal her village with the assistance of her sister, her mother and father, and her nephews. While mink is visiting, a double-headed sea serpent falls off the house front during a fierce storm. The old snake, ostracized from the village decades earlier, has left his terrible influence on Amos, a residential school survivor.

Rebee Shore’s life is fragmented. She’s forever on the move, ricocheting around Alberta, guided less than capably by her dysfunctional mother Elizabeth. The Shore Girl follows Rebee from her toddler to her teen years as she grapples with her mother’s fears and addictions, and her own desire for a normal life. Through a series of narrators - family, friends, teachers, strangers, and Rebee herself - her family’s dark past, and the core of her mother’s despair, are slowly revealed.

Joanne’s husband, Zack, recently elected mayor of Regina, is optimistic that he can garner the public support necessary to make Regina a city that works—not just for the few, but for the many. Their oldest son Peter is marrying Maisie Crawford, a woman as clever and forthright as she is lovely. Their lakeside wedding is a dream come true, but when a former lover of a member of the bridal party shows up, the dream becomes a nightmare. Before the bride's bouquet has wilted, there's an act of sickening cruelty; soon afterwards, there’s a murder.

It’s a long way from a basement apartment in a Montréal suburb to a new life on a fictional planet, but that’s the destination our unnamed narrator has set his sights on, bringing listeners with him on an off-beat and often hilarious journey. Along the way, he writes poems, buys groceries at the dollar store, and earns minimum wage at a dead-end supermarket job. In between treatments for his cystic fibrosis and the constant drip-drip-drip of disappointment, he dreams of a new life on Tatouine, where he’ll play Super Mario Bros and make sand angels all day.

Ladies of the Night is set in Toronto and Antigua. With women's loves and lives as their focus, the stories contain dramatic twists and turns: some humorous, others shocking and disturbing, all leaving a haunting melody behind. The Toronto stories capture the issues women face as they walk the ground of intimate and family relationships in that city. The Antiguan setting of some of the stories are reflective of Prince's insight into relationships, captured in her novel and essays.

From John Elizabeth Stintzi, the mind that created the daringly bizarre novel My Volcano, comes an electrifying collection of strange and dark tales. In the surreal, often precarious realities of Bad Houses, a doctor discovers a double-edged cure for the Ebola virus, a college student loses a different body part each time they return home for the summer, Midas's hairdresser strives to keep his secrets, and a young girl develops a fascination with the trolls who harvest her father's pumpkin patch. At once humourous and horrifying, these stories will inevitably take residence in your mind.

Joanne’s husband Zack is the leading progressive candidate in a neck-and-neck race, with the existing mayor, for Regina’s top job. The tough campaigning is well underway when a disturbing threat disrupts the celebration for the opening of the Racette-Hunter Centre — a project Zack has been spearheading, intended to benefit the impoverished community of North Central Regina. Joanne soon realizes that sinister interests are working behind the scenes of the election, and another savage act makes clear that someone will stop at nothing to maintain the status quo.