Set in Montreal and Bangalore over a span of 63 years, a smart and emotionally resonant novel captures the life and times of “[g]uarded, imaginative, prickly, sentimental, [and] superstitious” Asha Mohan. A touch pessimistic and fatalistic, this intriguing, complex character holds the view that “the worst possible scenarios have shaped my life always.” —Alexander Sallas reviews Asha in Her Garden, by Anita Rau Badami (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2026) $36.00 / 9780735274341
Set in Alberta, a “thoughtful and timely” debut novel offers a “story for everyone, particularly those of us who make up this messy, wonderful, sometimes dysfunctional but very necessary place we call home.” —Trish Bowering reviews Inheritance, by Jane Park (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2026) $26.99 / 9781487013998
Vancouver Island-set early chapter book tells an “engrossing initiation story”: “Young readers can not only empathize with the protagonist’s sorrow, alienation, and confusion; they can also learn about the collaboration, flexibility, and patience requisite for the growth from innocence to maturity.” —Ginny Ratsoy reviews Eleven Out of Ten, by Stacey Matson (Toronto: Scholastic Canada, 2026) $12.99 / 9781039708792
Northern Alberta-set novel tells of a bequest of an abandoned, off-the-grid farmhouse (that must be lived in for a year before it can be sold). Who doesn’t like a challenge?!? It’s “a sweet, easy to digest summer novel about coming to understand your own ancestral history,” in our writer’s view. —Kenna Clifford reviews Wildwood, by Elinor Florence (Toronto: Simon & Schuster Canada, 2026) $25.99 / 9781668227619
New edition of a celebrated, bestselling 2015 book features a striking cover. Relating a dream-like journey to coastal BC, the debut novel also depicts a protagonist’s troubled past and uncertain steps toward healing. The current edition “contains no supplementary materials. A missed opportunity, in my opinion,” our reviewer remarks. —Sophia Wasylinko reviews Birdie (Canadian Classics Edition), by Tracey Lindberg (Toronto: HarperCollins Canada, 2026) $22.99 / 9781443478700
A follow-up to a 2023 novel features a story-within-a-story and settings in present day Canada and the Cold War. Reflecting one another, the tales balance humour and seriousness as they portray perilous times and the men and women in them trying to get by. —Ace Baker reviews The Book of Gronsky by Bill Engleson (Altona: Friesen Press, 2026) $26.95 / 9781038360816
With characters that “can be awful, but authentic,” a debut YA novel “offers a well-written and brutally realistic rendering of divorce in a short number of pages.” —Isabella Ranallo reviews Our Square of Sky, by Robin Lamarche (Gibsons: Prose-Star Communications, 2026) $19.95 / 9781068981890
“Playfully serious, raucous and ribald, light-hearted and ‘heavy’ (in the ‘70s sense), Pearl is the final note in a symphony that rings out long after the applause has ended, and the musicians have packed up their instruments and left. Pearl is full of wisdom, full of beautiful gems, and so earns its title, but it also pays homage to Bowering’s mother, Pearl, in a poem appropriately placed at the centre of his book.” —Al Rempel reviews Pearl, by George Bowering (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2026) $19.95 / 9781772017137
An artist, an oligarch, an ex-resistance operative who’s 94, a family vineyard in Crete… In a thought-provoking, prettily descriptive novel, the heist elements grab and hold a reader’s attention (while that’s less true for the protagonist’s erotic awakening). —Valerie Green reviews The Angels’ Share, by Jane Bow (New York: Red Elixir, 2026) $37.00 / 9781966293309
In a poet’s Jerusalem-set first novel, sixteen-year old Aziz seeks “the right side” as he wanders and works—and learns about himself, his family, and his society. “Zaghal invites us into Aziz’s world, shows us what he’s up against, and elicits our compassion for a young man finding his way against all odds,” our reviewer writes. —Janet S. Pollock reviews Seven Heavens Away, by Ashraf Zaghal (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2026) $26.99 / 9781487013486
A novel’s pensive narrator, a museum curator smitten with the realms of art history and ideas, recalls her childhood, marriage, and quest for personal alchemical gold. A slim book with many literal questions and much philosophizing, it left our reviewer wanting less as well as more. —Brett Josef Grubisic reviews The Alchemy of Paradise, by Susannah M. Smith (Halifax: Invisible Publishing, 2026) $24.95 / 9781778430855
Bounding across the centuries—1983, the 2090s, 2586—a debut novel begins with a lonely girl, a budding computer coder. From there, an eclectic, compelling story unfolds. “It’s raw, tragic, and fearful to a degree that’s sometimes difficult to look at, and has a sneaking vulnerability that draws you in bit by bit until it is nearly too much to bear. Yet, more often, it is earnest, hopeful, and intensely heartfelt,” our reviewer says. —Zoe McKenna reviews Homebound, by Portia Elan (Toronto: Scribner Canada, 2026) $26.99 / 9781668206225
“These are the dichotomies of human experience: keeping grudges, granting forgiveness; making up lies, trying perhaps to undo them; dealing with the miracles of new life or of death. All of them are here, encapsulated in five amazing stories, ones you may perhaps never forget.” —Heidi Greco reviews Like a River Divides the Earth: Five Stories, by Dora Dueck (Calgary: Freehand Books, 2026) $22.95 / 9781997534204
“Keeping the Books is a family history par excellence, the best of its genre that I have read, which traces the life of Alene Peck, a homesteader’s daughter in the Peace River district of British Columbia. It was a colourful life that Alene has chronicled and saved through a trove of letters, notes, and photographs that upon her death were bequeathed to her son, Ross Peck, who lives today in Skookumchuck, in BC’s Kootenays.” Kenneth Favrholdt reviews Keeping the Books: The life and times of a Peace River Homesteader’s Daughter, by Ross Peck (Cranbrook: Wild Horse Creek Press, 2025) $21.95 / 9781069794703
BC-set debut novel portrays environmental politics and a volatile family of five in 1989, 2001, and 2022. Against a forested backdrop, the novel “explores how a thriving family is a unique ecosystem with its own fragility and resilience.” —Trish Bowering reviews The Fall-Down Effect, by Liz Johnston (Toronto: Book*hug, 2026) $24.95 / 9781771669627
Across a collection of twenty autofictional stories, an author examines her history, with a particular emphasis on childhood and youth. Despite some compelling, powerful material, our reviewer finds the autofiction genre more hindrance than benefit. —Candace Fertile reviews Growing My Way Home: Stories of Resilience and Care, by Jenn Ashton (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2026) $24.95 / 9781772017038
“[E]xcellent” debut YA novel reflects an author who “put his heart and soul into this book.” Plus: “Coming to this book in middle age, and as a fairly non-sentimental reader, the novel surprised me when I actually almost cried at one point, so invested was I in this wonderfully well-developed character of Ramin Abbas.” —Trish Bowering reviews Ramin Abbas Has MAJOR Questions, by Ahmad Saber (Toronto: Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books, 2026) $29.99 /9781665960694
An immersive and satisfying sequel to a 2015 debut novel finds a youthful protagonist—”a force unto himself,” who’s “always compelling on the page”—in literal wilderness as he sorts himself. —Trish Bowering reviews When the World Was Twice as Big, by Aaron Cully Drake (Gibsons: Nightwood Editions, 2026) $23.95 / 9780889715042
“Food is never merely sustenance; it is narrative layered with memory and meaning. In October 2025, I travelled to Rome and Oxford as part of Simon Fraser University’s Graduate Liberal Studies Program, culminating in a project that combined two themes: Italy in the ancient and modern imagination (with a focus on food history) and life writing (an exploration of how lives are represented across time, genre, and media). I deepened my understanding of the links between food writing, memory, and culture by studying the works of three contemporary authors. Ada Boni (1881-1973), codified Italian home cooking and idealized domesticity during Mussolini’s era; Elizabeth David (1913-1992), a wry aristocrat who sought to liberate postwar Britain from culinary blandness by introducing Mediterranean sensuality; and Patience Gray (1917-2005), an eccentric British artist who followed a vein of marble through Italy with her sculptor partner, documenting rural foodways for posterity. Melanie Monk presents her essay Minestrone and Women’s Lives: A Culinary Palimpsest of Lives Written, Tasted, Remembered.
A quarter-century career retrospective commands attention. Our reviewer concludes that the book “is a remarkable oeuvre that includes poems of great beauty that intertwine light and dark, fire and water and earth and dust or ashes, and all these poems so magnificently held together by love.” —gillian harding-russell reviews Two Songs: Selected Poems 2000-2025, by Russell Thornton (Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing, 2026) $26.96 / 9781998526574
