A vivid love letter to the 1980s and one woman’s struggle to overcome the challenges of immigration.

It’s 1986, and Muna Heddad is in a bind. She and her son have moved to Montreal, leaving behind a civil war filled with bad memories in Lebanon. She had plans to find work as a French teacher, but no one in Quebec trusts her to teach the language. She needs to start making money, and fast. The only work Muna can find is at a weight-loss center as a hotline operator.

All day, she takes calls from people responding to ads seen in magazines or on TV. On the phone, she’s Mona, and she’s quite good at listening. These strangers all have so much to say once someone shows interest in their lives–marriages gone bad, parents dying, isolation, personal inadequacies. Even as her daily life in Canada is filled with invisible barriers at every turn, at the office Muna is privy to her clients’ deepest secrets.

Following international acclaim for Niko (2011) and The Bleeds (2018), Dimitri Nasrallah has written a vivid elegy to the 1980s, the years he first moved to Canada, bringing the era’s systemic challenges into the current moment through this deeply endearing portrait of struggle, perseverance, and bonding.

An unflinching allegorical novel that explores trauma, women’s rights, and religious tradition.

In the slums of Tehran, seven-year-old Sara witnesses the horrific murder of her sister Setayesh, an event leaves her in shock and unable to speak. As the neighbourhood frantically searches for the missing girl, Sara is locked inside herself, unable to tell her parents or police all she knows.

Over time, the mute Sara develops a strange allergic reaction, in which hair covers her face every time a man approaches her. One day in school, when an imam gets too close, she faints. After Sara reawakens, classmates show her video of her speaking freely and eloquently while unconscious… in Polish. These are only the first of many unexpected developments in Sara’s life, as she grapples with how to live with her sister’s memory in a world that abuses women from a very early age.

Prophetess is a fearless novel of gripping and surreal turns that push the limits of the imagination in their collision of tradition and nonconformity. Baharan Baniahmadi has crafted a wild, allegorical interrogation of trauma, women’s rights, and religious tradition.

Anita Lahey writes the kind of rigorously observed, emotionally charged poetry few can match. In While Supplies Last, her first collection in eleven years, Lahey throws herself on the mercy of a changing climate, takes refuge in art and revels in everyday wonders. In the final section, about a forest fire that devastated the Cape Breton village of Main-à-dieu in 1976, she becomes a custodian of local histories. No matter the subject, whether traffic reports during the pandemic, a fossilized baby mammoth, or Toronto’s iconic Don River, Lahey extends the sense of what language can do and say. This is tour de force writing: mischievous, unpredictable, urgent, never boring. In While Supplies Last, Lahey comes fully into her own.

After Realism: 24 Stories for the 21st Century is the first anthology to represent the generation of millennial writers now making their mark. Diverse, sophisticated, and ambitious in scope, the short stories in this ground-breaking book are an essential starting point for anyone interested in daring alternatives to the realist tradition that dominated 20th century English-language fiction. After Realism offers twenty-five distinctive talents who are pushing against the boundaries of the “real” in aesthetically and politically charged ways—forging their styles from influences that range from myth to autofiction, sci-fi to fairy tale, documentary to surrealism. Even those who continue to work in the realist tradition are doing so critically, with an eye to renovation. The selection is accompanied by comprehensive and provocative essay by editor André Forget that explains the themes, tendencies and concerns of this group. In bearing witness to an extraordinary flowering of contemporary fiction, After Realism will supply a new standard for Canadian writing.

With stories by Jean Marc Ah-Sen, Ryan Avanzado, Carleigh Baker, Tom Thor Buchanan, Paige Cooper, Marcus Creaghan, Paola Ferrante, Camilla Grudova, David Huebert, Jessica Johns, Cody Klippenstein, Michael LaPointe, Julie Mannell, Sofia Mostaghimi, Téa Mutonji, Fawn Parker, Casey Plett, Rudrapriya Rathore, Naben Ruthnum, Eliza Robertson, Cason Sharpe, John Elizabeth Stintzi, Gavin Thomson, and Christiane Vadnais.