An unnamed narrator abandons his unfinished thesis and returns to northern Alberta in search of what eludes him: the shape of the novel he yearns to write, an autobiography of his rural hometown, the answers to existential questions about family, love, and happiness.

What ensues is a series of conversations, connections, and disconnections that reveals the texture of life in a town literature has left unexplored, where the friction between possibility and constraint provides an insistent background score.

Whether he’s meeting with an auntie distraught over the imprisonment of her grandson, engaging in rez gossip with his cousin at a pow wow, or lingering in bed with a married man after a hotel room hookup, the narrator makes space for those in his orbit to divulge their private joys and miseries, testing the theory that storytelling can make us feel less lonely.

Populated by characters as alive and vast as the boreal forest, and culminating in a breathtaking crescendo, A Minor Chorus is a novel about how deeply entangled the sayable and unsayable can become—and about how ordinary life, when pressed, can produce hauntingly beautiful music.
(From Hamish Hamilton)

A failed musician obsessed with avant-garde art enters a shadowy world where bohemian excess meets the avaricious interests of a real estate cabal.

Alexander Otkazov is finished with Montreal. Having wasted his youth on the love of art, he’s ready for a life of anonymous condo towers and profitable boredom. But when he moves to Toronto, he is forced into a monkish existence by the unforgiving pressures of the city — until he stumbles across a story about an ambitious experimental music collective that could be his ticket to a better job and a better life.

Desperate to prove himself as a journalist, Alexander chases answers that take him from Forest Hill mansions to the bottom of Halifax Harbour, moving ever deeper into a shadowy world of amorphous real estate deals, creative megalomania, and finance capitalism, where avant-garde art is simply another mask for big money. In order to unravel the threads tying everything he loves to everything he hates, he will have to confront his own most sordid desires and the lengths he is willing to go to achieve his dreams of an easy life.
(From Dundurn Press)

Mackenzie, a Cree millennial, wakes up in her one-bedroom Vancouver apartment clutching a pine bough she had been holding in her dream just moments earlier. When she blinks, it disappears. But she can still smell the sharp pine scent in the air, the nearest pine tree a thousand kilometres away in the far reaches of Treaty 8.

Mackenzie continues to accidentally bring back items from her dreams, dreams that are eerily similar to real memories of her older sister and Kokum before their untimely deaths. As Mackenzie’s life spirals into a living nightmare—crows are following her around and she’s getting texts from her dead sister on the other side—it becomes clear that these dreams have terrifying, real-life consequences. Desperate for help, Mackenzie returns to her mother, sister, cousin, and aunties in her small Alberta hometown. Together, they try to uncover what is haunting Mackenzie before something irrevocable happens to anyone else around her.
(From HarperCollins Publishers Ltd./HarperCollins Publishers)

William Ping’s millennial life revolves around eating at restaurants, posting online about eating at restaurants, then overanalyzing it. This changes unexpectedly when a dinner with his Chinese girlfriend’s family goes sideways and his insecurity about his biracial identity and his ignorance of his own Chinese heritage overflow like lava. During a much-needed break from the dinner table, Will is visited in the men’s room by a sarcastic, bullying spirit named Mo. The spirit whisks him into the past to learn about the life of his grandfather, the first William Ping, who emigrated from China to Newfoundland in 1931 to work in a laundry.

Based on a true story, Hollow Bamboo recounts with humour and sympathy the often-brutal struggles, and occasional successes, faced by some of the first Chinese immigrants in Newfoundland. It is a journey of heartbreak, sacrifice, brotherhood and family ties. But most of all, it is about love and survival on the Rock.

Drawing on elements of magical realism, autofiction and satire, as well as deep historical research, Hollow Bamboo is a fresh and original portrayal of our past and our present, and the debut of an extraordinary new author.
(From HarperCollins Publishers)

How does memory become myth? How do lies become family lore? How do we escape the trauma of the past when the truth has been forgotten?

Barbados, 1962. Lost soul Iapetus roams the island, scared and alone, driven mad after witnessing his father’s death at the hands of his mother and his older brother, Cronus. Just before Iapetus is lost forever, he has a son, but the baby is not enough to save him from himself—or his family’s secrets.

Seventeen years later, Iapetus’s son, the stoic Atlas, lives in a loveless house, under the care of his uncle, Cronus, and in the shadow of his charismatic cousin Z. Knowing little about the tragic circumstances of his father’s life, Atlas must choose between his desire to flee the island and his loyalty to the uncle who raised him.

Time passes. Atlas’s daughter, Calypso, is a beautiful and wilful teenager who is desperate to avoid being trapped in a life of drudgery at her uncle Z’s hotel. When she falls dangerously in love with a visiting real estate developer, she finds herself entangled in her uncle’s shady dealings, a pawn in the games of the powerful men around her.

It is now 2019. Calypso’s son, Nautilus, is on a path of self-destruction as he grapples with his fatherless condition, his mixed-race identity and his complicated feelings of attraction towards his best friend, Daniel. Then one night, after making an impulsive decision, Nautilus finds himself exiled to Canada.

The Island of Forgetting is an intimate saga spanning four generations of one family who run a beachfront hotel. Loosely inspired by Greek mythology, this is a novel about the echo of deep—and sometimes tragic—love and the ways a family’s past can haunt its future.
(From HarperCollins Publishers Ltd./HarperAvenues)

The fates of two unforgettable women—one just beginning a journey of reckoning and self-discovery and the other completing her life’s last vital act—intertwine in this sweeping, deeply researched debut set in the Black communities of Ontario that were the last stop on the Underground Railroad.

Young Lensinda Martin is a protegee of a crusading Black journalist in mid-18th century southwestern Ontario, finding a home in a community founded by refugees from the slave-owning states of the American south—whose agents do not always stay on their side of the border.

One night, a neighbouring farmer summons Lensinda after a slave hunter is shot dead on his land by an old woman recently arrived via the Underground Railroad. When the old woman, whose name is Cash, refuses to flee before the authorities arrive, the farmer urges Lensinda to gather testimony from her before Cash is condemned.

But Cash doesn’t want to confess. Instead she proposes a barter: a story for a story. And so begins an extraordinary exchange of tales that reveal the interwoven history of Canada and the United States; of Indigenous peoples from a wide swath of what is called North America and of the Black men and women brought here into slavery and their free descendents on both sides of the border.

As Cash’s time runs out, Lensinda realizes she knows far less than she believed not only about the complicated tapestry of her nation, but also of her own family history. And it seems that Cash may carry a secret that could shape Lensinda’s destiny.

Sweeping along the path of the Underground Railroad from the southern States to Canada, through the lands of Indigenous nations around the Great Lakes, to the Black communities of southern Ontario, In the Upper Country weaves together unlikely stories of love, survival, and familial upheaval that map the interconnected history of the peoples of North America in an entirely new and resonant way.
(From Viking Canada)

Billy-Ray Belcourt is a writer from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He won the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize for his debut collection, This Wound Is a World, which was also a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award. His best-selling memoir, A History of My Brief Body, won the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize, and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the Governor General’s Literary Award. A recipient of the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship and an Indspire Award, Belcourt is an assistant professor of Indigenous Creative Writing at UBC.

André Forget was born in Toronto and raised in Mount Forest, Ontario. He is the former editor-in-chief of the Puritan, and his work has appeared in a variety of magazines and newspapers in Canada and the United States. He currently lives in Sheffield, England.

Jessica Johns is a Nehiyaw auntie with English-Irish ancestry, and is a member of Sucker Creek First Nation in Treaty 8 territory in Northern Alberta. The former managing editor of Room Magazine, she now co-organizes the Indigenous Brilliance reading series. Johns’s writing has been published in Grain, Glass Buffalo, SAD Mag, Red Rising Magazine, and Canadian Art, among others. Her debut poetry chapbook, How Not to Spill, was a co-winner of the bpNichol Chapbook Award, and her short story, “Bad Cree,” upon which her novel is based, won the Writers’ Trust of Canada Journey Prize, and Silver at the National Magazine Awards.

William Ping is a Chinese-Canadian writer from Newfoundland. After completing his master of arts at Memorial University in 2020, he was named a Fellow of the School of Graduate Studies. He received the 2022 Cox & Palmer Creative Writing Award, as well as the 2021 Landfall Trust. His debut novel, Hollow Bamboo, which he wrote for his master’s degree, received the Award for Thesis Excellence from the English department. His work has appeared in Riddle Fence, in the anthologies Us and Now and Hard Ticket, and with the CBC.

Jasmine Sealy is a Barbadian-Canadian writer based in Vancouver. Her work has been published in The New Quarterly, Adda Stories, Cosmonauts Avenue, GEIST, Room Magazine, Prairie Fire and Best Canadian Stories 2021. A graduate of the MFA program in creative writing from UBC, Sealy is the former prose editor at PRISM international. Her short fiction has been shortlisted for several prizes, including Prairie Fire Annual Fiction Contests, the CBC short story prize and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. In 2020 The Island of Forgetting won the UBC/HarperCollins Best New Fiction Prize.

Kai Thomas is a writer, carpenter, and land steward. He is Afro-Canadian, born and raised in Ottawa, descended from Trinidad and the British Isles.

Ria Baxi is a seventeen-year-old from Brampton, Ontario. She enjoys writing poetry and fiction, and her previous work has been published. She has goals of writing her own novel one day. In her free time, she enjoys reading, listening to music, and watching movies.

What compelled you to write this story?
I have always liked reading stories that focused on personal journeys. I was motivated to write a story that deeply fleshes out its characters, such as ​​Circe by Madeline Miller. I love that sort of creative narration, and therefore wrote a story about connections between identity and expectations that make us.

Clover Long is a seventeen-year-old from Toronto, living in a hobbit hole with her parents and their silly dog. She enjoys tea time, drawing comic book characters, walking in the woods, and things that are spooky.

What compelled you to write this story?
There are a lot of outdoor cats in my neighbourhood; some of them belong to specific houses, but mostly they just roam and wander. Over the last year, I’ve befriended and grown fond of a few of them. I often wonder what they get up to when we’re not looking. What do they think about? Do they stray far from home? Do they have relationships with each other? What is their opinion of us?

Anna Pan is a fifteen-year-old from Richmond Hill, Ontario. She has enjoyed literature since becoming literate.

What compelled you to write this story?
A combination of my irritation at all the subtle anti-Chinese hate that has been accumulating, even before the COVID-19 pandemic, and my desire to write a story of an exceedingly capable character who nonetheless fails in the end. This would be an excerpt from the beginnings of that story, when all has yet to fall apart.

Danica Popovic is a seventeen-year-old writer from Calgary. She enjoys reading in her spare time, especially psychological fiction and classic literature written by women.

What compelled you to write this story?
The dangers of abusing television and media escapism.

Anneka Tracey is from Vancouver. She loves to read, write, and practice yoga. She loves to draw inspiration from her summers on the West Coast.

What compelled you to write this story?
I really love to adapt real-life experiences into fiction–it preserves them in a way that my memory can’t. This story was inspired by summers with my father on Savary Island, and I thought I needed to write something that encapsulated all of those summers in their totality. I wanted the reader to get a laugh at our expense, and have a piece of the lovely pie that is the West Coast.

Maggie Yang is a sixteen-year-old writer and artist from Vancouver. Her poetry has been recognized by the Poetry Society, the League of Canadian Poets, and appears, or is forthcoming in Ghost City Review, Split Rock Review, and West Trestle Review, among others. Her art appears in The Adroit Journal. She hopes you have a wonderful day.

What compelled you to write this story?
I was inspired to write this story by the idea of music being a bonding and snapping point in relationships, especially between an immigrant parent and their first generation child. Of how, like the delicate yet sturdy frame of one’s hands on the keyboard, familial ties can be both fraught and frail, weaving a poignant yet bittersweet journey of recollection and reflection.

Sharon Bala’s best-selling debut novel, The Boat People, won the 2020 Newfoundland & Labrador Book Award and the 2019 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction. It was a finalist for Canada Reads 2018, the 2018 Amazon Canada First Novel Award, the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award, the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award, and was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award and the Aspen Words Literary Prize. The Boat People is on sale worldwide, with translations in French, German, Arabic, and Turkish.

In 2017, Sharon won the Writers’ Trust McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize for her short story “Butter Tea at Starbucks”, and had a second story on the longlist. Her short fiction has been published in The Journey Prize 29, Hazlitt, Grain, PRISM international, The Dalhousie Review, The New Quarterly, Maisonneuve, the Newfoundland Quarterly Online, Room Magazine, and Riddle Fence.

Sharon is a member of the Port Authority Writing Group. She lives in St. John’s, where she’s working on her second novel and a play.

Zalika Reid-Benta is a Toronto-based writer, whose debut story collection, Frying Plantain, won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award and the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for Literary Fiction. Frying Plantain was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and was shortlisted for the Toronto Book Award, the White Pine Award, and the Trillium Book Award. In 2023, Penguin Canada will publish Zalika’s second book, River Mumma, a magical realist novel that incorporates Jamaican legends and folklore. The main character is a millennial Black woman who navigates her quarter-life-crisis while embarking on a quest through the streets of Toronto.

Zalika served as the 2021-2022 Writer in Residence at Western University, and was the chair of the 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize. She received an MFA in fiction from Columbia University, was a John Gardner Fiction Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and is an alumnus of the Banff Centre Writing Studio.

Kim Fu is the author of the story collection Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, a finalist for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize. She has been longlisted for the 2023 Joyce Carol Oates Prize for mid-career authors. Fu’s first novel, For Today I Am a Boy, won the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction and the Canadian Authors Association Emerging Writer Award. It was shortlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, and a Lambda Literary Award; it was also a Book Review Editors’ Choice in the New York Times. Her second novel, The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the Ontario Library Association Evergreen Award.

Fu’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, Granta, The Atlantic, enRoute, Hazlitt, and the TLS. Born in Calgary and raised in Vancouver, Fu currently lives in Seattle, Washington.

Heather O’Neill is the best-selling author of numerous works of fiction, including Lullabies for Little Criminals, The Lonely Hearts Hotel and When We Lost Our Heads. She is also an essayist, known for her writings on feminism, literature and horror.