Books from Canada

In this powerful and mesmerizing debut, Joseph Boyden reinvents the tradition of Great War epics like All Quiet on the Western Front and Birdsong. It is 1919 and Niska, an Oji- Cree medicine woman, has left her home in the bush of northern Ontario to retrieve Xavier Bird, her only relation, who has returned from the trenches of Europe. Gravely wounded and addicted to morphine, Xavier recounts how he and his best friend, Elijah Whiskeyjack, prowled the battlefields as snipers of enormous skill—and how the circumstances of their deadly craft led them to very different fates. Told with unblinking focus, this is a stunning tale of brutality, survival, and rebirth that marks the arrival of a prodigious new talent.

Every summer, a quiet, solitary man known only as the Driver travels along the coast of Quebec in his bookmobile, bringing books to small villages too remote to have their own libraries. As he visits his regular readers, he listens to their stories and offers companionship through the simple pleasures of books and conversation. This year’s journey, however, may be his last. The Driver meets Marie, a captivating woman travelling with a troupe of musicians, jugglers, and performers, and finds himself drawn into a world of unexpected connections. Set against the vast landscapes of rural Quebec, Autumn Rounds is a tender, bittersweet meditation on ageing, loneliness, love, and the quiet ways people make one another’s lives more meaningful. With understated humour and gentle melancholy, Poulin celebrates the restorative power of literature and the possibility of new beginnings at any age.

In 1898, thirteen-year-old Pirbhai leaves his village in India, lured by the promise of work in East Africa. Instead, he is forced into labour on the British railway, where a desperate act committed in the name of survival becomes a secret that will haunt his descendants for generations. Years later, Pirbhai builds a family with Sonal in Uganda. Their children and grandchildren grow up amid the final years of British colonial rule, the country’s struggle for independence, and the political turmoil that follows. Among the next generation are three sisters, each with her own ambitions and understanding of what it means to belong. When Idi Amin orders Uganda’s Asian population to leave in 1972, the family is scattered across continents, carrying with them the memories, silences, and secrets of their past. Spanning more than a century and moving between India, East Africa, and Canada, A History of Burning traces how one act of survival reverberates through generations. Janika Oza weaves together colonial exploitation, political upheaval, family loyalty, and the search for home in an intimate multigenerational saga about the stories families preserve—and those they struggle to forget.

At an Islamic boarding school in rural Ontario, four teenage boys navigate the boundaries between faith, friendship, and freedom. When they stumble upon the diary of a girl who attended the school decades earlier, her words awaken new possibilities and inspire a daring plan to escape. As their secret grows, each boy must confront his own beliefs, desires, and fears about the world beyond the school gates. Blending humour with tenderness, Land of No Regrets explores the challenges of growing up between tradition and independence, asking what it means to belong to a community while finding the courage to forge your own path.

What happens when you grow up between cultures, build a life of your own, and still struggle to feel that you belong? In this intimate, witty collection of stories, Sima Qadeer explores the lives of South Asian women navigating marriage, motherhood, sexuality, faith, and the expectations of family and society. From a middle-aged woman who discovers the freedom of an unexpected friendship to a mother seeking to reconnect her children with their Muslim heritage, these characters confront the compromises they have made and the selves they have kept hidden. Tender, irreverent, and sharply observant, the collection explores the lifelong journey toward self-acceptance and the courage to belong without abandoning who you are.

Missy Djalo has spent years chasing her dream of becoming an actress, enduring failed auditions and struggling to escape the shadow of her fractured relationship with her Cameroonian mother. Broke and desperate, she receives an unexpected opportunity to audition for a mysterious company called Air Free. Welcomed into a beautiful house by a charismatic couple, Missy soon realises that the audition is unlike anything she has experienced before. As reality and fantasy begin to blur, she faces an unsettling question: how much of herself must she sacrifice to become the person she longs to be? A surreal, unsettling tale of ambition, memory, and identity, this philosophical horror explores the frightening possibility that achieving your dreams might mean losing yourself.

When teenager Janie Yearling vanishes from the small town of Gold River, her grieving parents become the centre of a media frenzy. Her mother, Annette, turns her pain into a carefully maintained public image, while her father, Calvin, becomes a figure of suspicion. Fifteen years later, a podcaster with a troubled past offers to reopen the case, stirring up old rumours about a mysterious spirit said to haunt the nearby woods. As the investigation unfolds, the boundaries between truth, superstition, and spectacle begin to blur. A chilling, darkly comic novel about grief, obsession, and the stories we tell to make sense of tragedy.