National Network for Equitable Library Service

Longlist, Canada Reads 2025. A sweeping family saga set against the backdrop of a Sikh wedding. On the morning of his nephew's wedding, Devinder Gill is certain the delicate balance of his life will not be upset. Dev is married to Kuldip, and together they are raising two young children in Vancouver. But Dev also has a secret: an affair with his first love, an Irish Canadian woman named Emily Rice. Today, both women will attend the wedding.

Eighty-two-year-old Etta has never seen the ocean. So early one morning she takes a rifle, some chocolate, and her best boots, and begins walking the 3,232 kilometers from Saskatchewan to Halifax. Her husband Otto wakes to a note left on the kitchen table. I will try to remember to come back, Etta writes. Otto has seen the ocean, having crossed the Atlantic years ago to fight in a far-away war, so he understands. But with Etta gone, the memories come crowding in. The only way to keep them at bay is to keep his hands busy.

Legendary Canadian cartoonist Seth's magnum opus Clyde Fans, two decades in the making, appeared on twenty best of 2019 lists, including those from The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Washington Post, and was nominated for an Eisner Award and the Giller Prize. Clyde Fans peels back the optimism of mid-twentieth century capitalism, showing the rituals, hopes, and delusions of a vanished middle class—garrulous self-made men in wool suits extolling the virtues of their wares to taciturn shopkeepers.

Longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award Anita Rau Badami's acclaimed novel Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? chronicles the stories of three women, linked in love and tragedy, over a span of fifty years, sweeping from the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 to the explosion of Air India flight 182 off the coast of Ireland in 1985.

On Beauty is a provocative collection of moments, confessions, overheard conversations, and memories, both fleeting and crystalized, revolving around the small chasms and large craters of everyday life. Situated at the crossroads of prose and poetry, these 33 vignettes explore the rhythm, textures, and micro-moments of lives in motion, asking how decisions might connect and in turn affect the future. rob mclennan's brief stories play with form and language, capturing the act of record-keeping while in the process of living those records, offering a dappled, polaroid-like effect.

In seven-and-a-half interlinked stories, Aaron Kreuter’s Rubble Children tackles Jewish belonging, settler colonialism, Zionism and anti-Zionism, love requited and unrequited, and cannabis culture, all drenched in suburban wonder and dread. Sometimes realist, often satirical, and with a dash of the speculative, the book introduces readers to a startling world of character and place, a world which orbits Kol B'Seder, a fictional Reform synagogue in the Toronto suburb of Thornhill.

Playful, witty, and sharp, We are Already Ghosts is a summer book, a family story, a meditation of the persistence of place, and a chronicle of a time only just passed into memory. The Briscoe-MacDougall family retire to their lakeside cabin each summer. This annual vacation is at time to unwind and refresh, a time to relax away from the hustle and bustle of city life. We are Already Ghosts joins the Briscoe-MacDougalls in the summer of 1996 and returns to them at five-year intervals.

During the 15 Year War fought between Japan and China, the eldest daughter of the Akamatsu family buried a bag of money in the back garden of her home in Hiroshima. The money had been given to her by her brother who was off to fight in China. When the Atom Bomb was dropped on the city by the Americans during the heights of the Second World War, the intensity of the bomb managed to reach the bag buried at least two feet below ground, and burn up all the paper money.

A novel about Mina, a woman in Montreal who has Down Syndrome. Mina lives alone, with the support of her older brother Bruno, who lives nearby; in her spare time, Mina embroiders. One day in the park, Mina meets Iris, a designer who sees Mina's bold textile creations and recognizes her artistic genius - and who becomes tempted with the possibility of marketing Mina's work as "outsider art." But is that what Mina wants? And what can - or should - Bruno do about it?

Every Night I Dream I'm a Monk, Every Night I Dream I'm a Monster offers an unfolding puzzle of the human psyche that is at once explosive, funny, dark, sweet, pained, and utterly strange. From the tangled threads of a messed-up family to the timeless themes of consciousness, love, art, and death, Damian Tarnopolsky's narrative journey takes readers through past, present, and future, with stories spanning from 1980s England to Renaissance France to present-day Canada to a world yet to come.