Recommended Reading Lists

Botanist Alfred Homer is invited on a road trip by Professor Morgan Bruno, his deceased parents’ friend, who is trying to unearth the story of an enigmatic (and perhaps dead) poet. They journey through a twisted version of southern Ontario — a land of werewolves, witches, and plants with unusual properties where they encounter towns that celebrate house burnings and communities where Black residents speak only in sign language. Days by Moonlight is a darkly comic portrait of two beings that asks deep philosophical questions about objective reality.

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It begins with a bet between the gods Hermes and Apollo: “that animals would be even more unhappy than humans are if they were given human intelligence.” This leads them to grant human consciousness and language to a group of dogs overnighting at a Toronto veterinary clinic. Suddenly capable of more complex thought, the pack is torn between those who resist the new ways of thinking and those who embrace the change. The gods watch from above as the dogs venture into their newly unfamiliar world, as they become divided among themselves, as each struggles with new thoughts and feelings. By turns meditative and devastating, charming and strange, André Alexis’s contemporary take on the moral fable offers a compelling and affecting look at the beauty and perils of human consciousness.

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Historically speaking, issues of race and skin colour have been interpreted along black and white lines, leaving out millions of people whose stories of migration and racial experiences have shaped our modern world. Brown is packed with storytelling and on-the-street reporting conducted over two years in ten countries from four continents that reveals a multitude of lives and stories. It contains striking research about immigration, workers’ lives and conditions, and the pursuit of a lighter shade of brown as a global status symbol. It is also a personal book, as the author reflects on his own identity and experiences as a brown-skinned person (in his case from Yemen) who has grown up with images of whiteness as the only indicators of beauty and desire. 

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Coming of age in The Park, a cluster of town houses and leaning concrete towers in the disparaged outskirts of a sprawling city, Michael and Francis battle against the careless prejudices and low expectations that confront them as young men of black and brown ancestry. Always Michael and Francis escape into the cool air of the Rouge Valley, a scar of green wilderness that cuts through their neighbourhood, where they are free to imagine better lives for themselves. But the bright hopes of all three are violently, irrevocably thwarted by a tragic shooting, and the police crackdown and suffocating suspicion that follow. 

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China Unbound chronicles the dramatic expansion of China’s influence across the world and why it should be cause for concern. Joanna Chiu shows how Western complicity, fueled by economic self-interest and belief in the myth of Chinese liberalization, is a major contributor to police state surveillance that goes beyond national borders. Chiu offers detailed accounts of Chinese crackdowns on civil society and growing technological prowess, uncovering the challenges that a powerful China poses to global community and security.

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Two elderly Barbadian men, childhood friends who haven’t seen each other in fifty years, collide in a snowstorm on a Toronto street. In the warmth of a nearby bar, through the afternoon and into the night, they relate stories, exchange opinions, and share memories of a past in Barbados when, as children, neither could conceive any other place existed for them. As these two men confess to each other their innermost truths, their exploits and their love affairs, one tells the haunting story of a young Chinese woman, the other of the real reason for his visit to Toronto. 

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Room is an emotionally powerful story of five-year-old Jack and his mother, who have been held captive in an eleven-by-eleven room for seven years. To Jack, Room is all that is real, but when he turns five he starts to ask questions, and his mother reveals to him that there is a world outside. Told entirely in the inventive, often funny voice of young Jack, this is not a horror story or tearjerker, but a celebration of resilience and the love between parent and child. 

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Butter Honey Pig Bread is an intergenerational saga about twin sisters and their mother. It is a story of their choices and their consequences, of motherhood, of the malleable line between the spirit and the mind, of finding new homes and mending old ones, of voracious appetites, of queer love, of friendship, faith, and above all, family. 

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Masculinity has all-too been narrowly defined in terms of aggression, competitiveness, emotional stoicism, and sexual dominance. Boys: What It Means to Become a Man places the term under scrutiny examining how toxic rules can hinder boys’ emotional and social development. Drawing on extensive research and interviews with educators, activists, parents, psychologists, sociologists, and young men, Rachel Giese highlights initiatives that demonstrate how damaging perceptions of masculinity can be unlearned. With lively reportage and clear-eyed analysis, Giese underlines how societal change towards gender equality can play a key role in creating a just and better society. 

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Tomson Highway grew up surrounded by his family and the vast, mesmerizing landscape of northern Manitoba; his was, in many ways, an idyllic far-north childhood. But five of Tomson’s siblings died in childhood, and his parents wanted their two youngest sons, Tomson and Rene, to enjoy opportunities as big as the world. And so the boys were sent south to attend a residential school. In 1990 Rene Highway, a world-renowned dancer, died of an AIDS-related illness. Permanent Astonishment is Tomson’s embrace of his younger brother’s final words: “Don't mourn me, be joyful.” His memoir offers insights, both hilarious and profound, into the Cree experience of culture, conquest, and survival. 

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Abducted as an 11-year-old child from her village in West Africa and forced to walk for months to the sea in a coffle, Aminata Diallo is sent to live as a slave in South Carolina. But years later, she forges her way to freedom, serving the British in the Revolutionary War and registering her name in the historic Book of Negroes. This book, an actual document, provides a record of freed Loyalist slaves who requested permission to leave the US for resettlement in Nova Scotia, only to find that the haven they sought was steeped in an oppression all of its own. Aminata’s eventual return to Sierra Leone — passing ships carrying thousands of slaves bound for America — is an engrossing account of an obscure but important chapter in history that saw 1,200 former slaves embark on a harrowing back-to-Africa odyssey. 

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Stephen Harper reshaped Canada into a more conservative country. He has made government smaller, justice tougher, and provinces more independent. Under its 22nd prime minister, Canada showed the world a plainer, harder face. Those who praise Harper point to the Conservatives’ skillful economic management, an impressive trade agreement, tax cuts, and a balanced budget. Critics point to punitive punishments, muzzled scientists, assaults on the judiciary, and contempt for parliament. But what about the man? In this definitive new biography, John Ibbitson explores the life of one of the most important Canadians of our time. 

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A chance discovery of letters written by her immigrant grandfather leads Jessica J. Lee to her ancestral homeland, Taiwan. There, she seeks his story while growing closer to the land he knew. Throughout her travels, Lee unearths surprising parallels between the natural and human stories that have shaped her family and their beloved island. Two Trees Make a Forest encompasses history, travel, nature, and memoir to tell a narrative that shows how geographical forces are interlaced with our family stories. 

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In All the Parts We Exile, queer Muslim artist Roza Nozari explores identity, belonging, and family history in a heartfelt and insightful memoir. Born in Canada to Iranian immigrants, Roza grows up yearning for connection to her roots. As she uncovers hidden truths about her mother's past and their migration story, Roza’s journey intertwines a search for understanding with liberation and political awakening. Eventually learning more about her mother’s past — from protesting for the Islamic revolution to her ambivalence about getting married — Roza braids a tender narrative of her mother’s life together with her own ongoing story of self, weaving a powerful narrative of queer identity, cultural memory, and intergenerational resilience.   

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 Anthony Oliveira’s Dayspring is a bold retelling of biblical tales and a contemporary coming-of-age story connected in collapsing time across millennia. Oliveira weaves together stories of passion, grief, destruction, and survival into a narrative unmoored in space and time, one that reexamines and reframes great and doomed figures from scripture and history, even as it casts its keen eye on the trials of modern life. 

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In a series of 248 brief and urgent notes, Christina Sharpe explores profound questions about loss and the shapes of Black life that form in the wake. Weaving together past artifacts, present-day realities, and possible futures, she constructs an immersive portrait of everyday Black existence. Ranging in theme and tone from memory and memorial, art and beauty, history and literature, the presence of the author’s mother is constant, urging her onwards to new ways of seeing. The result is a new literary form that is as multivalent as the ways of Black being it traces.

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Glue doesn’t care about much. He returns to Hong Kong, the city he grew up in, and teaches ESL to placate his parents. But he shows up hungover to class, barely stays awake, and prefers to spend his time smoking weed until dawn breaks. As he watches the city he loves fall — the protests, the brutal arrests — life continues around him, so he drinks more and picks more fights. The very little he does care about are his sister, who deals with Hong Kong’s demise by getting engaged to a rich immigration consultant; his on-and-off-again relationship with a woman who steals things from him; and memories of someone he once met in Canada. When the government tightens its grip, language starts to lose all meaning, and Glue finds himself pulled into an unsettling venture.   

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Leanne Betasamosake Simpson finds refuge in cross-country skiing, often following the trail beside a beloved creek near her home. Recently, her mind turned to the snow beneath her feet and she asked herself, what does it mean to truly listen to water?  This began her quest to discover, understand, and trace the historical and cultural interactions of Indigenous peoples with water in all its forms. Simpson reflects on the teachings, traditions, stories, and creative work of others in her community and reads deeply the words of thinkers from other communities whose writing expands her own. This shapes a “Theory of Water” that reimagines relationships among all beings and life-forces.   

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In 1966, twelve-year-old Chanie Wenjack froze to death on the railway tracks after running away from residential school. An inquest was called and four recommendations were made to prevent another tragedy. None of those recommendations were applied. More than a quarter of a century later, from 2000 to 2011, seven Indigenous high school students died in Thunder Bay, Ontario. The seven were hundreds of miles away from their families, forced to leave home and live in a foreign and unwelcoming city. Using a sweeping narrative focusing on the lives of the students, Tanya Talaga delves into the history of this small northern city that has come to manifest Canada’s long struggle with human rights violations against Indigenous communities.  

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 Vietnam is a haunted country, and Dr. Nguyen Georges-Minh is a haunted man. In 1908, the French rule Saigon, but uneasily; dissent whispers through the corridors of the city. Each day, more Vietnamese rebels are paraded through the streets towards the gleaming blade of the guillotine, now a permanent fixture in the main square and a gruesome warning to those who would attempt to challenge colonial rule. It is a warning that Georges-Minh will not heed. A Vietnamese national and Paris-educated physician, he is obsessed by guilt over his material wealth and nurses a secret loathing for the French connections that have made him rich, even as they have torn his beloved country apart. 

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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 novel set in the Black communities of Ontario that were the last stop on the Underground Railroad. 

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A couple in a crumbling marriage faces divine intervention. A woman dies in her dreams again and again until she finds salvation in an unexpected source. A teenage misfit discovers a darkness lurking just beyond the borders of her suburban home. Chrysalis is a genre-blending, debut short story collection that takes aim at the ways in which racialized women are robbed of power and revels in the journeys they undertake to reclaim it. 

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Grappling with the pain of being separated from her mother and sister, Cedar goes to live with her estranged father hoping for a new chapter in life. From a youth detention centre, her sister gives birth to a baby she’ll never get to raise. Their mother, struggling with addiction, is determined to turn her life around and strives to be someone her daughters can depend on. In this companion to her bestselling debut The Break, Vermette’s The Strangers is an intergenerational saga that searingly explores race, class, inherited trauma, and matrilineal bonds that—despite everything—refuse to be broken. 

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Jenny Heijun Wills was born in Korea and adopted as an infant into a white family in small-town Canada. In her late twenties, she developed a relationship with her birth family that was fraught with the trauma of separation and of cultural illiteracy. Throughout the next decade, she slowly learns and relearns her stories and those of her biological kin, piecing together a fragmented life. Delving into gender, class, racial, and ethnic complexities, Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related. describes the painful ripple effects that follow a child’s removal from a family and the rewards that can flow from both struggle and forgiveness. 

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Does our data-intensive world come at the cost of human autonomy, community, dignity, and equality? Wendy H. Wong explores pressing conversations around technology, ethics, and policy and raises important questions about facial recognition and data literacy. Her research is a loud reminder that we are all stakeholders in a digital world and are currently being left out of key decision-making. We, the Data makes a compelling case for holding data collectors accountable and offers a foundation upon which to claim human rights in the age of data.   

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For generations, Indigenous people have known that their family members disappeared, many of them after being sent to residential schools, “Indian hospitals,” and asylums through a coordinated system designed to destroy who the First Nations, Métis, and Inuit people are. Anishinaabe author Tanya Talaga retells history through an Indigenous lens, beginning with the life of her great-great grandmother Annie Carpenter and her family as they experienced decades of government and Church-sanctioned genocide. The Knowing unravels the centuries-long oppression of Indigenous people that continues to reverberate in these communities today.  

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Ebele wishes more than anything to have a memorable, gift-filled Christmas with his widowed mother, but with her barely able to afford food and the harsh ridicule of his friends, Ebele is disheartened. When a strange man comes to town, the boy opens his heart and home reluctantly. In return, the stranger teaches him there is more to Christmas than just gifts, and that kindness is a virtue rewarded by great fortune. 

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Wild Failure is Zoe Whittall’s collection of powerful feminist and queer short fiction. The title story is a doomed love story between an agoraphobic and a wilderness hiker. A group of idealistic roommates find themselves the subject of a true crime podcast in “Murder at the Elm Street Collective House.” In “The Sex Castle Lunch Buffet,” a woman reflects on her brief stint at 90s strip club after she learns of the death of a former client. The characters in Whittall’s stories encounter feelings of shame, desire, attachment, and disconnection as they find themselves navigating their way through bad decisions, unusual situations, and fraught relationships. 

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A memoir written in prose poetry, No Credit River probes a period of six years marked by abandoned love, the pain of a lost pregnancy, and pandemic isolation. Zoe Whittall’s book is a reckoning with the creative instinct itself and a unique examination of anxiety in complex times. 

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Much of our communication now exists in the dimension of the online space and it’s changing how we regard each other and how we converse. In the digital realm, anonymity can result in false and hurtful comments without consequence in a hurried scroll of clicks and swipes. But a good conversation takes time, patience, and courage. What I Mean to Say seeks to ignite a conversation about conversation, to confront the deterioration of civic and civil discourse, and to reconsider the act of conversing as the sincere, open exchange of thoughts and feelings.  

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As a transnational and transracial adoptee, Jenny Heijun Wills has spent her life navigating the fraught spaces of ethnicity and belonging. As a pan-polyam individual, she lives between types of family and community, heteronormativity and queerness, commitment and constellations of love. As a parent with an eating disorder, her love language is to feed but daily she wishes her body would disappear. Everything and Nothing At All weaves together a lifetime of literary criticism, cultural study, and personal history into a fearless vision of kinship.  

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Faced with a tyrannical emperor determined to wage war, three sisters sublimely gifted in music manage to fend for themselves and their parents with the power and magic they create with their instruments. Can the beauty of their music change the emperor’s heart and bring peace? 

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