If you’re a dour biblical literalist, Anthony Oliveira’s Dayspring may not be for you. But if your conception of the divine is expansive enough to contain multitudes, this cheeky, earthy, mystical, queer, wildly poetic postmodern riff on the gospels might be the delight you’ve been looking for.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE 2024 DAYNE OGILVIE PRIZE FOR LGBTQ2S+ EMERGING WRITERS • One of Indigo's Top 10 Literary Fiction Books of 2024 and Top 100 Books of 2024 • One of CBC's Best Canadian Fiction of 2024
A singular, stunning debut that transcends and transfigures genre—at once a bold retelling of biblical tales and an unforgettable contemporary coming-of-age story, connected in collapsing time across millennia.
There are few love stories in the holy books. Love is what ruins. Love is what costs. Love is a flaming sword at our backs, a garden left to ruin and to…
Johnny Delivers roundhouse-kicks the Johnnyverse up a notch. You don’t have to have read Wayne Ng's previous book Letters From Johnny to appreciate it, but you’ll want to. Same dysfunctional family life in Toronto’s Chinese community in the 70s, new levels of trouble, with Bruce Lee tagging in for Dave Keon as Johnny’s fantasy ally. As always, Wayne has a deep, sympathetic insight into unsettled lives.
Eighteen-year-old Johnny Wong's dead-end life consists of delivering Chinese food and holding his chaotic family together in Toronto. When his sweet but treacherous Auntie, the mahjong queen, calls in their family debt, he fears the family will lose the Red Pagoda restaurant and break apart.
Invoking the spirit of Bruce Lee and in cahoots with his stoner friend Barry, Johnny tries to save his family by taking up a life of crime delivering weed with a side of egg rolls. He chases his first love, but his hands are already full with his emotionally distant mother, his dream-crushing father, and…
Austin is living in a former mop factory when an eyeless street cat adopts him. Then it dies. Then shit gets weird. Sara Flemington’s novel R.I.P. Scoot has a sense of humour so dry it’d snap if you stepped on it. So I don’t recommend that. But I do recommend the book. Very much.
Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest and Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time meet The Big Lebowski in this literary mystery that asks us to examine what stories, real or fiction, become the metaphors we use for working through our own challenges and uncertainties.
Twentysomething Austin lives alone in a crumbling office-turned-studio apartment of a former mops, brushes and brooms factory in Toronto. After a deformed and lice-ridden cat turns up at his door, then abruptly dies three weeks later, Austin begins to find frightening coincidences connecting him to a squatter living in his local Walmart, a…
When King Priam's pregnant daughter was fleeing the sack of Troy, Stan was there. When Jesus of Nazareth was beaten and crucified, Stan was there - one cross over. Stan has been a Hittite warrior, a Roman legionnaire, a mercenary for the caravans of the Silk Road and a Great War German grunt. He’s been a toymaker in a time of plague, a reluctant rebel in the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, and an information peddler in the cabarets of post-war Berlin. Stan doesn't die, and he doesn't know why. And now he's being investigated for a horrific crime. As Stan tells his story, from his origins as an Anatolian sheep farmer to his custody in a Toronto police interview room, he brings a wry, anachronistic perspective to three thousand years of Western history. Call Me Stan is the story of a man endlessly struggling to adjust as the world keeps changing around him. It is a Biblical epic from the bleachers, a gender fluid operatic love quadrangle, and a touching exploration of what it is to outlive everyone you love. Or almost everyone.
