Miriam Toews’s Women Talking (Knopf Canada), Rawi Hage’s Beirut Hellfire Society (Knopf Canada), Paige Cooper’s Zolitude (Biblioasis), and Larry Mathews’s An Exile’s Perfect Letter (Breakwater Books). These are the books I have devoured while on the road, that have touched me deeply and blown my mind, all for very different reasons, and in different ways. But all of them are complex, intense, and altering. –Lisa Moore

I recently read Little Fish by Casey Plett (Arsenal Pulp Press) – we were in the writing program at Columbia together – and the book is beautifully executed. She’s able to create and sustain emotion in such a raw and visceral way. –Lindsay Wong

Vivek Shraya’s I’m Afraid of Men (Penguin Canada) is life-changing writing. Smart, vulnerable, brave, and incisive, this book is essential and incredibly generous. Shraya’s perspectives and lived observations on gender, violence, the patriarchy, and race are vitally important, and there’s so much to love about her voice, the flow of her sentences, the language of her resistance. –Andrea Warner

More author favourites…

• Young Frances
  Hartley Lin
  (AdHouse Books)
  –selected by Aminder Dhaliwal
• Dear Evelyn
  Kathy Page
  (Biblioasis)
  –selected by K.D. Miller

Bookseller picks

The Amateurs
Liz Harmer
Knopf Canada

The book has a lot of local ties, because [the setting is based on] Hamilton. She actually features our old store location on James Street. –King Books, Hamilton

Songen
Patrick Friesen
Mother Tongue

The poet uses words from middle English and low German. I heard him read as part of the shortlist for the city of Victoria’s Butler Book Prize and the poems were very moving. There is a sense of sound and use of language that is really wonderful. –Munro Books, Victoria

History Matters: Stories from Saskatchewan
Bill Waiser
Self-published

It’s just been blasting off the shelf here. It’s interesting stories, [including] Saskatchewan’s first Gopher Day, and the sacred Indigenous boulder that was unceremoniously blown up to make way for the South Saskatchewan River Dam Project. –McNally Robinson, Saskatoon