H Felix Chau Bradley

Cannon is a testament to the importance of learning to balance external demands with internal needs.

Jacob Wren’s novel grapples with questions of violence, complicity, authority, collectivity, resistance, and doubt.

Chris Bergeron's novel mines elements of her own past and present to project trans lives into an unstable future.

Daniel Allen Cox’s memoir is a captivating, richly layered text that dismantles any reductive ideas readers may hold.

Michel Jean talks about the new collection of Indigenous science fiction stories that he edited.

Photography is a prominent organizing principle of Rawi Hage’s new collection of short stories, Stray Dogs.

Scott’s modes of questioning vary over time, but her concerns remain constant: feminism, queerness, class struggle, resisting capitalism and neoliberalism, the shape of sentences.

Tawhida Tanya Evanson is a seasoned poet, spoken word performer, and oral storyteller, and her craft is evident in this first work of prose fiction.

Eva Crocker’s debut novel, which was longlisted for the Giller Prize, originated as a script for a playwriting class. All I Ask is a carefully crafted, observant novel, whose dialogue and scene composition retain an intimacy and immediacy that hint at its theatrical origins. 

Addie Tsai’s journey towards publishing Dear Twin, her first book, has been circuitous – with many side roads, some dead ends, and plenty of footnotes, not unlike the novel itself.

In her lively debut collection of short comics, Ebony Flowers illustrates the lives of Black women and girls, using hair as a way to explore self-image, intimacy, family bonds, friendship, racism, and colonization.

Heroine, Gail Scott’s classic feminist Montreal novel, balances on the border of these two eras. Gail, our narrator, soaks in the bath in a rented room in 1980, recalling her recent experiences as a young would-be militant during the heady days of separatist revolutionary fervour. As she remembers, she also reconfigures what happened, visiting and revisiting her relationships, her moods, and her own trajectory as both an observer and an actor in a time of personal and political upheaval.

atherine Lalonde’s The Faerie Devouring likewise centres on an intimate familial relationship: the sprite, a young girl, is raised by her staunch grandmother among a gaggle of other children in rural Quebec. In contrast with the precise, crystalline images and mood of The Embalmer, Lalonde’s language is organic, pulsing, and repetitive in the way of fairy tales. The Faerie Devouring is a loose, impressionistic text that captures the fraught, shifting relationship between the sprite and her Gramma. Lalonde’s characters are physical before anything else, moving constantly but barely speaking.

Helen Chau Bradley reviews two of Metatron's latest fiction books

Zolitude is Cooper’s first short story collection, but it reads like the work of a far more seasoned writer. Her stories are painful and wise, ugly and moving, and at their best, reveal uncomfortable truths about human connection and its limits.

Julie Maroh, known for her lyrical, evocative graphic novels, including Blue is the Warmest Colour and Skandalon, delves into the quotidian details of love in this newly translated work. She seeks to present the ins and outs of romance and sex as experienced by those whose stories are less often told. From her introduction: “I want this book to be an homage to all the loving beings who go against what is expected of them, sometimes risking their lives in the process.”

Getting Out of Hope, James Cadelli’s debut graphic novel, opens with a literal cliffhanger: Justin and his two friends, a trio of hippie dudes from “Halifax-ish,” are road-tripping across the country in a creaky RV, having pledged to “do anything and everything that’s fun, funny and dumb.”