A “most enjoyable read,” this novel set in rural western Australia in the 1960s recounts the tumultuous coming-of-age of Cheryl, the daughter of a hard-working woman who sells bait worms. —Valerie Green reviews The Worm Lady’s Daughter, by Peter Freeman (Salt Spring Island: Ensilwood Publishing, 2025) $19.95 / 9781990415166
“Cumulatively, the effect is like a nocturnal landscape that is suddenly lit up by flashes of lightning. This is not a book to devour at one sitting but to savour briefly and return to often.” —Christopher Levenson reviews Dog and Moon, by Kelly Shepherd (Regina: U Regina Press, 2025) $19.95 / 9781779400383
Historical fiction—set in northern Alberta circa 1806—features winter storms, intrigue, romance, and a cougar attack. Given “that few white females were part of the fur trade in the far north of Canada in the early 1800s,” our reviewer has some reserve about the novel’s focus on Abigail Williams. —Ron Verzuh reviews The Fort, by Christy K. Lee (Toronto: Rising Action Publishing, 2025) $24.99 / 9781998076413
A quest to make it—in 1997, as a screenwriter, in Hollywood—animates a lively debut novel that’s mostly lighthearted as captures “the irrepressible youth, hope, and need for external validation endemic to striving twentysomethings.” —Jessica Poon reviews Charity Trickett Is Not So Glamorous, by Christine Stringer (Toronto: SparkPress, 2025) $25.99 / 9781684633166
“Though marketed as a middle-grade novel, Oasis will resonate with many adult audiences, too. Not only is the art style captivating, but the story has a level of simple sophistication that lingers like an affecting dream.” —Zoe McKenna reviews Oasis, by Guojing (New York: Godwin/Henry Holt, 2025) $19.99 / 9781250818379
In a vibrant picture book for kids, a sleeping girl’s dreamscape grows uncomfortable and threatening. With the help of a radiant and wise elephant god (who sings too), she learns practical lessons about perspective that she can apply to real life.—Brett Josef Grubisic reviews I Dream of Ganesha, by Sonali Zohra (Boulder: Shambhala Publications, 2024) $18.95 / 9781645472957
Set on and near the Okanagan Indian Reserve during the summer of ’68, a graceful novel captures the wonders and joys as well as the pains and missteps of sixteen-year-old Lewis Toma. —Trish Bowering reviews Bones of a Giant, by Brian Thomas Isaac (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2025) $35.00 / 9781039011779
Characterized by “portraits of the hard side of urban life,” “sparse lines and raw subject matter,” and a “steady current of hopelessness and aimlessness,” a novelist’s sophomore volume of poetry seems apropos for uncertain and accelerated times. —Kelly Shepherd reviews After Sunstone, by Dustin Cole (St. Louis: Farthest Heaven, 2025) $15.00 / 9798990692527
An author’s second book of fiction—a “peculiar and spirited and discombobulating” story—is intense and immersive, but may not charm readers who “expect direct exposition, methodical character development, a navigable timeline, a clear delineation between fiction and reality, and a traditional narrative arc.” —Marcie McCauley reviews Endling, by Maria Reva (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2025) $36 / 9780735278448
“[T]his is exactly what I want from a Helen Thorpe mystery: wonderful characters both old and new; a crime that’s solved with a combination of mindfulness and smarts; and a beneficial dose of equanimity.” —Trish Bowering reviews Contemplation of a Crime, by Susan Juby (Toronto: HarperCollins Canada, 2025) $24.99 / 9781443469715
“Derksen has the gift of being able to embrace the language of institutions and structures—with their cold terms and semantics—into modes, sometimes personal, sometimes societal comment, that draw engagement, critique, and are accessible.” —Steven Ross Smith reviews Future Works, by Jeff Derksen (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2025) $18.95 / 9781772016284
“While the detail in these poems can be distressing, the writer has shown in-depth feeling and in-depth writing that cannot be denied, but laid out, shared, even while the narrator is sometimes wildly enraged.” —Cathy Ford reviews allostatic load, by Junie Désil (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2025) $18.95 / 9781772016062
The wonderstruck child narrator of a striking picture book for youngsters recalls four seasons worth of meals, adventures, and sights—and feels grateful for each and every one. —Brett Josef Grubisic reviews Wôpanâak / Seasons, by Carrie Anne Vanderhoop / illustrated by Mangeshig Pawis-Steckley (Vancouver: Tradewinds Books, 2025) $24.95 / 9781926890418
Cerebral, inventive, challenging, and deeply, well, bookish, the “whole novel glows with similar interplays of similarly repeated words and issues, ones that touch on the most fundamental nature of the human experience—truth and knowledge, beauty (especially of music), love, and, perhaps most fundamentally, happiness.”—Theo Dombrowski reviews The Book of Records, by Madeleine Thien (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2025) $36.95 / 9781039009561
With eclectic figures and images—from the Grim Reaper and the banshee to ripe fruit, seeds, and soil—a poet cannily examines “our frail human presence,” aging, and death with calm, humour, and wisdom. —Jane Frankish reviews Becoming the Harvest, by Pauline Le Bel (Qualicum Beach: Caitlin Press, 2025) $20 / 9781773861562
Seattle-set debut novel features a procrastinating romance author whose DIY cure for the blues involves the lives of strangers she observes. Contact with others, she soon learns, comes with responsibilities. And consequences.
—Jessica Poon reviews Inside Outside, by Faye Arcand (Okanagan Falls: Blue Robin Books, 2024) $19.99 / 9781069029508
Poetic voices from coast to coast are gathered in a volume that reflects on our era—an “age of unprecedented environmental crises.” Collectively, their work strives to create room for “dreaming and transformation.” —Mary Ann Moore reviews Speech Dries Here on the Tongue: Poetry on Environmental Collapse and Mental Health, by (eds.) Hollay Ghadery, Rasiqra Revulva, and Amanda Shankland (Guelph: The Porcupine’s Quill, 2025) $20.00 / 9780889844902
In an exhilarating YA novel, Gold Rush riches are the goal for Scottish teenager Callum McBay. With theft, attacks, miscreants, shambling outposts, and one “toad-faced abomination,” there’s plenty of hardship before any reward. —Ron Verzuh reviews The Cariboo Trek of Callum McBay, by Colin Campbell (Vancouver: Tradewind Books, 2025) $14.95 / 9781990598333
“Circa 2025, Emma would be in therapy; in Atkins’ 1704, though, knife battles, duels, betrayals, and violent power struggles are just a Tuesday afternoon.” —Brett Josef Grubisic reviews Back to the New Adventure, by Trevor Atkins (Coquitlam: Silverpath Publishing, 2024) $14.95 / 9781989459041
Written “with wit and great insight,” a sophomore story collection often focussed “on women who live in world of uncertainty and stress,” conveys the unsteady state of mind that can occur when there’s always “one more thing to look out for.” —Bill Paul reviews Welcome to the Neighbourhood: Stories, by Clea Young (Toronto: House of Anansi, 2025) $22.99 / 9781487013196