Books by Featured Speakers
CHERIE DIMALINE
The Marrow Thieves
Just when you think you have nothing left to lose, they come for your dreams.
Humanity has nearly destroyed its world through global warming, but now an even greater evil lurks. The Indigenous people of North America are being hunted and harvested for their bone marrow, which carries the key to recovering something the rest of the population has lost: the ability to dream. In this dark world, Frenchie and his companions struggle to survive as they make their way up north to the old lands. For now, survival means staying hidden — but what they don’t know is that one of them holds the secret to defeating the marrow thieves.
Empire of Wild
Broken-hearted Joan has been searching for her husband, Victor, for almost a year — ever since he went missing on the night they had their first serious argument. One hung-over morning in a Walmart parking lot in a little town near Georgian Bay, she is drawn to a revival tent where the local Métis have been flocking to hear a charismatic preacher. By the time she staggers into the tent the service is over, but as she is about to leave, she hears an unmistakable voice.
She turns, and there is Victor. Only he insists he is not Victor, but the Reverend Eugene Wolff, on a mission to bring his people to Jesus. And he doesn’t seem to be faking: there isn’t even a flicker of recognition in his eyes.
Inspired by the traditional Métis story of the Rogarou — a werewolf-like creature that haunts the roads and woods of Métis communities — Empire of Wild is a propulsive, stunning, and sensuous novel.
Hunting by Stars
Hunting by Stars is the thrilling follow-up to the bestselling, award-winning novel The Marrow Thieves. Years ago, when plagues and natural disasters killed millions of people, much of the world stopped dreaming. Soon, residential schools are re-opened across the land to bring in the remaining dreamers — the Indigenous people of North America — and harvest their dreams.
Seventeen-year-old French lost his family to these schools and has spent the years since heading north with his new-found family. But then French wakes up in a pitch-black room, locked in and alone, and he knows immediately where he is — and what it will take to escape. Meanwhile, out in the world, his found family searches for him and dodges new dangers — school Recruiters, a blood cult, even the land itself. When their paths finally collide, French must decide how far he is willing to go — and how many loved ones he is willing to betray — in order to survive.
Dimaline’s newest novel will be published October 19, 2021. It is available for preorder.
WAYDE COMPTON
The Outer Harbour
In his debut story collection, poet Wayde Compton explores the concept of place and identity in which characters and space merge to make narrative.
One strand of stories follows the relationship between an artist obsessed with shipping containers and a drug-addicted student, each of mixed-race, who seek in art a response to unclear identities. Another set of stories follows the geological development of a volcanic island in Burrard Inlet — Vancouver’s harbour — which becomes the site of a radical Indigenous occupation, and later, in increasingly absurd shadings, a real estate development, and then a detention centre for illegal migrants. And a final suite tells the story of Donald and Albert, biracial conjoined twins, and their father, an eccentric figure whose enigmatic expression divides them.
Moving from 2001 through to 2025, The Outer Harbour is at once a history book and a cautionary tale of the future. Collectively, these stories condense and confound our preconceived ideas around race, migration, and home, creating a singular world in a city built on the legacies of racism and colonialism, hurtling towards a future both impossible and inevitable.
The Blue Road: A Fable of Migration
In this stunning graphic novel, Lacuna is a girl without a family, a past, or a proper home. She lives alone in a swamp made of ink, but with the help of Polaris, a will-o’-the-wisp, she embarks for the fabled Northern Kingdom, where she might find people like her. The only way to get there, though, is to travel the strange and dangerous Blue Road that stretches to the horizon like a mark upon a page. Along the way, Lacuna must overcome trials such as the twisted briars of the Thicket of Tickets and the intractable guard at the Rainbow Border. At the end of her treacherous journey, she reaches a city where memory and vision can be turned against you, in a world of dazzling beauty, divisive magic, and unlikely deliverance. Finally, Lacuna learns that leaving, arriving, returning — they’re all just different words for the same thing: starting all over again.
The Blue Road — a graphic novel by writer Wayde Compton and illustrator April dela Noche Milne — explores the world from a migrant’s perspective with dreamlike wonder.
SALEEMA NAWAZ
Songs for the End of the World
This is the story of a handful of people who find themselves living through an unfolding catastrophe.
Elliot is a first responder in New York, a man running from past failures and struggling to do the right thing. Emma is a pregnant singer preparing to headline a benefit concert for victims of the outbreak — all while questioning what kind of world her child is coming into. Owen is the author of a bestselling plague novel with eerie similarities to the real-life pandemic. As the novel moves back and forth in time, we discover these characters’ ties to one another and to those whose lives intersect with theirs, in an extraordinary web of connection and community that reveals none of us is ever truly alone. Linking them all is the mystery of the so-called ARAMIS Girl, a woman at the first infection site.
Written and revised between 2013 and 2019, Saleema Nawaz’s novel is a moving and hopeful meditation on what we owe to ourselves and to each other. It reminds us that disaster can bring out the best in people — and that coming together may be what saves us in the end.
Bone and Bread
Beena and Sadhana are sisters who share a bond that could only have been shaped by the most unusual of childhoods — and by shared tragedy. Orphaned as teenagers, they have grown up under the exasperated watch of their Sikh uncle, who runs a bagel shop in Montreal’s Hasidic community of Mile End. Together, they try to make sense of the rich, confusing brew of values, rituals, and beliefs that form their inheritance. Yet as they grow towards adulthood, their paths begin to diverge. Beena catches the attention of one of the “bagel boys” and finds herself pregnant at sixteen, while Sadhana drives herself to perfectionism and anorexia.
When we first meet the adult Beena, she is grappling with a fresh grief: Sadhana has died, her body lying undiscovered for a week before anyone realizes what has happened. Beena is left with a burden of guilt and an unsettled feeling about the circumstances of her sister's death, which she sets about to uncover. Her search stirs memories and opens wounds, threatening to undo the safe, orderly existence she has painstakingly created for herself and her son.
TONIA LAIRD
Poster Girl
(Interactive Novel)
Born the star of an ongoing propagandist documentary, a young colonist — orphaned after an accident on a migrant spaceship — finds out her family may still be alive. Abandoning her life of privilege, she risks everything to uncover a deadly web of lies created by her own government.
ANNE STONE
Girl Minus X
As the world around them collapses under the weight of a slow, creeping virus that erodes memory, fifteen-year-old Dany and her five-year-old sister are on the edge of their own personal apocalypse — fearing separation at the hands of child services. When a dangerous new strain of the virus emerges, Dany careens headlong into crisis, determined to save her sister. Together with her best friend and reluctant history teacher, they must flee the city. Along the way, Dany faces a series of devastating choices: Can she make the dangerous attempt to break her aunt out of the prison-hospice? And just how much is Dany willing to sacrifice to ensure her sister and her friends survive?
Girl Minus X is a meditation on the gift that is memory and its hidden costs, pitting a fear of forgetting against a desire to erase the past.
Delible: A Novel
Growing up on Toronto’s desolate margins in the eighties, sixteen-year-old Mel Sprague has a lot on her mind: The A-bomb. Acid rain. Where her dad’s been hiding out for the last fifteen years... Mel’s younger sister, Lora, knows that despite her sister’s ‘talent for misery,’ Mel’s preoccupations aren’t unusual. When she vanishes, however, what were once the diversions of a teenage girl are taken up as evidence, leading investigators to ask if Mel Sprague chose to run away, this time for good. Lora, for her part, just knows that someone has taken her sister and, disquietingly, fears that it wasn’t a stranger. Before her sister vanished, Lora’s world was relatively simple, but Mel’s disappearance creates a new and indelible division; everything changes, and there is nothing that is untouched by her loss.
MARLENE GOLDMAN
Forgotten: Narratives of Age-Related Dementia and Alzheimer's Disease in Canada
Since the 1860s, long before scientists put a name to Alzheimer’s disease, Canadian authors have been writing about age-related dementia. Originally, most of these stories were elegies, designed to offer readers consolation. Over time they evolved into narratives of gothic horror in which the illness is presented not as a normal consequence of aging but as an apocalyptic transformation.
Weaving together scientific, cultural, and aesthetic depictions of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, Forgotten asserts that the only crisis associated with Canada’s aging population is one of misunderstanding. Revealing that turning illness into something monstrous can have dangerous consequences, Marlene Goldman seeks to identify the political and social influences that have led to the gothic disease model and its effects on society. Examining the works of authors such as Alice Munro, Michael Ignatieff, Jane Rule, and Caroline Adderson alongside news stories and medical and historical discussions of Alzheimer’s disease, Goldman provides an alternative, person-centred perspective to the experiences of aging and age-related dementia.
Rewriting Apocalypse in Canadian Fiction
Traditional apocalyptic narratives highlight the drama of a chosen elect. Contemporary Canadian fiction, however, typically portrays the apocalypse from the perspective of marginalized individuals barred from Paradise, creating a distinctly anti-apocalyptic discourse. Marlene Goldman traces the history of the apocalyptic literary tradition and its key motifs in close readings of Canadian works that challenge rather than embrace apocalypse's key features.
Rewriting Apocalypse in Canadian Fiction explores the literary, psychological, political, and cultural repercussions of the apocalypse in the fiction of Timothy Findley, Michael Ondaatje, Margaret Atwood, Thomas King, and Joy Kogawa before 2005. Goldman demonstrates that they share a marked concern with purgation of the non-elect, the loss experienced by the non-elect, and the traumatic impact of apocalyptic violence.
DWAYNE BRENNA
New Albion
New Albion follows the lives of the employees of the New Albion theatre in London, England, in 1850, through the journal entries of the stage manager, Emlyn Phillips. Fighting its own reputation, hindered by its location and "sketchy" (at best) audience, as well as a police commissioner who demands "morally upstanding" plays, and a playwright so decrepit and addicted to laudanum that the actors of the New Albion are never sure what to expect, the troupe attempts to put on the best show possible, each and every night. As the theatre encounters problem after problem, Phillips must decide how much he’s willing to sacrifice for the sake of his passion.
Books by Participants
KATŁĮÀ (CATHERINE) LAFFERTY
Northern Wildflower
This is the story of how a young northern girl picked herself up out of the rough and polished herself off like the diamond that she is in the land of the midnight sun.
Northern Wildflower is the beautifully written and powerful memoir of Catherine Lafferty. With startling honesty and a distinct voice, Lafferty tells her story of being a Dene woman growing up in Canada’s North and her struggles with intergenerational trauma, discrimination, poverty, addiction, love, and loss. Focusing on the importance of family ties, education, spiritualism, cultural identity, health, happiness, and the courage to speak the truth, Lafferty’s words bring cultural awareness and relativity to Indigenous and non-Indigenous readers alike, giving insight into the real issues many Indigenous women face and dispelling misconceptions about what life in the North is like.
Land-Water-Sky / Ndè-Tı-Yat’a
A vexatious shapeshifter walks among humans. Shadowy beasts skulk at the edges of the woods. A ghostly apparition haunts a lonely stretch of highway. Spirits and legends rise and join together to protect the north.
Land-Water-Sky/Ndè-Tı-Yat’a is the debut novel from Dene author Katłıà. Set in Canada’s far north, this layered composite novel traverses space and time, from a community being stalked by a dark presence, a group of teenagers out for a dangerous joyride, to an archeological site on a mysterious island that holds a powerful secret.
Riveting, subtle, and unforgettable, Katłıà gives us a unique perspective into what the world might look like today if Indigenous legends walked amongst us, disguised as humans, and ensures that the spiritual significance and teachings behind the stories of Indigenous legends are respected and honored.
AMY LeBLANC
I know something you don't know
Amy LeBlanc’s debut poetry collection, I know something you don’t know, resides in the intersection of folklore and femininity. With fairy-tale lucidity and fluid voice, the poems in this collection weave through the seams between story and fact. This debut collection is alluring and noxious like hemlock, foxglove, and blooming wildflowers.
Unlocking
Louise Till, mother of two, has inherited her father’s hardware store after her parents’ unexpected deaths. She begins to cut copies of her customers’ keys for herself, each one a talisman against grief and the terrible guilt she feels at not having realized that her parents were desperately unhappy. Louise could use the keys, but she doesn’t. Not until her life is overturned, again, when her marriage falls apart. Lou gives in to temptation, letting herself into Euphemia Rosenbaum’s home. What follows is a tale of blackmail, break-ins, an unsolved mystery, and more secrets than Lou ever wanted to know.
Lou must confront not only the lives of her neighbors, but the unspoken truths of her family and the doors within herself for which there are no keys. Told over the course of one long winter, Unlocking is a poignant and penetrating exploration of grief, community, family, and the secrets we keep, even from ourselves.
ROBERT MCGILL
War Is Here: The Vietnam War and Canadian Literature
In this account of Canadian literature related to the Vietnam War, Robert McGill observes how celebrated books of the era channel Vietnam, sometimes in subtle but pervasive ways. He examines authors' attempts to educate their readers about American imperialism and Canadian complicity, often through speculative dramatizations of Canada-US conflict, and he discusses how writers repeatedly used language evoking militarism and violence to make Canadians feel more intensely about their country. McGill also addresses the recent spate of prize-winning Canadian novels about the war that have renewed Vietnam's resonance in Canada in the wake of twenty-first century conflicts involving America.
NINA MUNTEANU
A Diary in the Age of Water
A Diary in the Age of Water follows the climate-induced journey of Earth and humanity through four generations of women, each with a unique relationship to water. Centuries from now, in a post-climate change dying boreal forest of what used to be northern Canada, Kyo, a blue water being, discovers a diary that may provide her with the answers to her yearning for Earth’s past — to the Age of Water, when the “Water Twins” destroyed humanity. The diary spans a twenty-year period in the mid-twenty-first century of 33-year-old Lynna, a single mother who works in Toronto for CanadaCorp, an international utility that controls everything about water, and who witnesses disturbing events that she doesn’t realize will soon lead to humanity’s demise. The novel explores identity and our concept of what is “normal” — as a nation and an individual — in a world that is rapidly and incomprehensibly changing.
Natural Selection
Natural Selection is a short story collection by acclaimed SF author and ecologist Nina Munteanu that explores humanity’s co-evolution with our environment and technology. A man uses cyber-eavesdropping to make love. A technocratic government uses gifted people as tools to recast humanity. The ruins of a city serve as battleground between pro-technologists and pro-naturalists. From time-space guardians to cybersex, GMO, and biotech implants, this short story collection is a journey of great scope, imagination and vision. “Munteanu shines a light on human evolution and how the choices we do or don’t make today, may impact our planet and future generations” (Amazon Review).
Darwin's Paradox
Darwin’s Paradox “is a thrill ride that makes you think and tugs the heart” (Robert J. Sawyer, Hugo Award-winning author of Rollback). Imagine a mysterious virus that devastates half a population, while giving certain individuals enhanced mental abilities, allowing them to “psychically” link to a server containing an artificial intelligence that seems to be developing autonomy. What if that virus turned out to be deliberately engineered? Julie Crane must confront the will of the ambitious virus lurking inside her to fulfill her final destiny as Darwin’s Paradox, the key to the evolution of an entire civilization. "Nina Munteanu serves up a dually plotted story that's part novel, part philosophical treatise on the nature of mankind and its inexorable evolution, driven by both natural and man-made pressures” (Amazon Review).
WENDY ROY
The Next Instalment: Serials, Sequals, and Adaptations of Nellie L. McClung, L.M. Montgomery, and Mazo de la Roche
What happens next? Early-twentieth-century authors Nellie L. McClung, L. M. Montgomery, and Mazo de la Roche answered that question through the writing and dissemination of further instalments. McClung’s Pearlie Watson trilogy (1908–1921), Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables books (1908–1939), and de la Roche’s Jalna novels (1927–1960) were read avidly not just as sequels but as serials in popular and literary newspapers and magazines. A number of their books were also adapted to stage, film, and television. The Next Instalment argues that these three Canadian women writers, all born in the same decade of the late nineteenth century, were influenced by early-twentieth-century publication, marketing, and reading practices to become heavily invested in the cultural phenomenon of the continuing story. Rather than existing as separate cultural productions, their serials, sequels, and adaptations are part of a cultural and material continuum that encourages repeated consumption through development and extension of the original story.
SHEHERYAR B. SHEIKH
The Still Point of the Turning World
A bomb goes off on a college campus. A shaken Sara and Omar first notice each other. Their eyes lock and there it is — a beginning sparked in chaos, an end foretold. Four years later, their story is remembered, retold by friends, spoken of fondly by their teachers. That story unfolds between these covers: one about the noise that balloons make when they burst; of lessons on using your mother’s death to your advantage; about a cry for help even though all you did was barely scrape your knee; about running faster than the wind, climbing mountains, and learning how to keep your balance in a thunderstorm. This is a tale of Pakistan and what it means to live and love in apocalyptic times. It is an ode to life in college — with all its hopes and despairs, plans and uncertainties, falling in love and trying to keep up the grades, figuring the possibilities of the self and letting go of who we are. Sheheryar B. Sheikh’s The Still Point of the Turning World is a haunting meditation on young people and their awakening — into adulthood, romance, and a political space that is constantly shifting around them.
Call Me Al: The Hero's Ha-Ha Journey
Altamaash the entertainer misstepped on to history’s stage to become a politician and created a lifetime’s worth of chaos and destruction in Pakistan. Now exiled to a London mansion, abandoned even by sycophants, Al yearns to relive the glory days of his rise to power. But the old guard has passed, and the colonial hangover in his home country has almost disappeared. Democracy is taking root, and with it is coming a fragile stability to the Third World. In these times Al’s desire for doing his best — what’s worst for the rest of us — flows into two acts of massive evil: one double-murder that shakes his own complacent party back to full attention; and a countrywide riot — the biggest the world has ever witnessed. All this Al orchestrates while perched luxuriously in exile in the UK. Woe to the day when he returns to claim the bloodstained crown. But cometh the hour, cometh the man! Sheheryar B. Sheikh’s new novel is a ripping rollercoaster ride through shenanigans of subcontinental politics, and it will keep you riveted.