The Q&Q team reached out to reviewers, editors, authors, booksellers, and others in the publishing industry from across the country to find out which 2025 titles they’re still thinking about as the year draws to a close. We asked them for a favourite title, one that is particularly relevant to our times or has had great resonance in their community, or a title that they thought had not received the attention it deserves. 

Allan Cho, co-founder and director of LiterASIAN Writers Festival, executive director of the Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop (ACWW), academic librarian, writer, and editor, Vancouver

The Riveter
Jack Wang
House of Anansi Press

Jack Wang’s The Riveter unfolds as a haunting wartime epic destined for the Canadian canon. Josiah Chang yearns for Poppy Miller, yet discriminatory laws forbid their marriage. Choosing to prove his loyalty in war to a nation that denies him citizenship, Josiah stakes everything on service. From Fort Benning to Europe’s devastated front lines, Josiah’s path to liberation becomes an odyssey of duty, desire, and the profound price of belonging.

Stephen Davidson, bookseller and co-owner of The Spaniel’s Tale Bookstore, Ottawa

The Witch of Willow Sound 
Vanessa F. Penney
ECW Press

The Witch of Willow Sound is inspired by real witch lore and traditions of Eastern Canada. Our tough and strong-willed protagonist, Fade, is drawn back to a place that remembers her more than she expects, uncovering secrets that blur memory and myth. Perfect for anyone craving a haunting, emotional escape you can really sink into. It’s no surprise that it was chosen for The Booksellers’ List this past fall.

Shazia Hafiz Ramji, writer and reviewer, Toronto and London, U.K.

You Will Not Kill Our Imagination: A Memoir of Palestine and Writing in Dark Times
Saeed Teebi
Scribner Canada/Simon & Schuster

You Will Not Kill Our Imagination: A Memoir of Palestine and Writing in Dark Times by Saeed Teebi is an astonishingly astute and generous memoir. Teebi dives into his personal and family histories to story the intergenerational impact of displacement and genocide, weaving in necessary debates on freedom, the limits of witnessing, and censorship, with a sense of honesty and clear-sightedness that is unflinching and unparalleled. A very good book.

Marjorie Poor, editor of Prairie books NOW, Winnipeg

Abode
Jun-long Lee
Athabasca University Press
The interconnected poems in Jun-long Lee’s striking debut collection, Abode, explore the challenge of feeling at home – culturally and spiritually, in the body, and perhaps most poignantly, in language – in fresh and sometimes freaky ways. From organic (forest, caves, the sea) to architectural (doors, rooms, the cathedral) to in-between “haunted structures” like the grave, images and lines move associatively, led by sound to playful and hallucinatory effect, reflecting and evoking discomfort.

Anjula Gogia and Saul Freedman-Lawson, booksellers, Another Story Bookshop, Toronto

A Mouth Full of Salt
Reem Gaafar
Invisible Publishing

Reem Gaafar’s debut novel follows three Sudanese women and their families through personal and national upheaval, offering an intimate view of a complex history. The story is precise and masterful, shaped by tragedy but a true pleasure to read. A Mouth Full of Salt is as absorbing and disorienting as any of the best literary fiction.

Gendertrash From Hell: The First Print Collection of the Zine That Changed Everything
Mirha-Soleil Ross, ed.
LittlePuss Press

Thirty years after its first publication, Gendertrash From Hell continues to bring people together in powerful, unexpected ways. In 1993, Mirha-Soleil Ross and Xanthra Phillippa MacKay began publishing the Gendertrash zine as a voice for trans people who could not or did not want to assimilate: sex workers, prisoners, and other outlaws. It’s been a pleasure to join international trans and queer readers in celebrating a collection that remains as true, beautiful, and relevant as ever.

Robert J. Wiersema, author and reviewer, Victoria

Rufous and Calliope
Sarah Louise Butler
Douglas & McIntyre

At once a hallucinatory odyssey through the vanishing wilderness of interior British Columbia, a harrowing account of varying stages (and types) of loss, and a wondrous dreamscape of time blurring into a seeming perpetual present, Rufous and Calliope has stuck with me in a way that, unfortunately, too few books manage. A treasure.

Ellen Kartz, executive director of LitFest, Edmonton

Dark Chapters: Reading the Still Lives of David Garneau
Arin Fay and David Garneau; Nic Wilson, ed.
University of Regina Press

Dark Chapters: Reading the Still Lives of David Garneau raises the concept of an anthology to a new level. This ekphrastic collection lines up notable Canadian authors penning work in response to the visual art of Governor General’s Award–winning artist David Garneau. Complex and nuanced, this anthology lives at the heart of Garneau’s work, at the confluence of visual art and literature. Dark Chapters includes contributions from Billy-Ray Belcourt, Cecily Nicholson, Fred Wah, Jesse Wente, Larissa Lai, Lillian Allen, Paul Seesequasis, Peter Morin, Rita Bouvier, Susan Musgrave, Trevor Herriot, and others.

Stacey May Fowles, author, editor, and reviewer, Toronto

A Song for Wildcats
Caitlin Galway
Dundurn Press

Diving headfirst into difficult subject matter while also delivering some of the most incredible sentences I read all year, A Song for Wildcats is an exquisite short fiction debut. Galway has a gift for capturing the gorgeous and the grotesque (often at the same time). The worlds she creates are rife with shimmering detail and her characters wholly heartbreaking. A remarkable, inventive collection.

Steven W. Beattie, writer, editor, critic, and publisher of That Shakespearean Rag, Stratford, Ontario

Baldwin, Styron, and Me
Mélikah Abdelmoumen; Catherine Khordoc, trans.
Biblioasis
Born in Chicoutimi, Quebec, of a Tunisian father and “old stock” mother, Mélikah
Abdelmoumen is well attuned to the nature and vicissitudes of living between cultures. This gives her a privileged perspective on the friendship between American authors William Styron and James Baldwin, the controversy surrounding the former’s 1968 novel The Confessions of Nat Turner, about a Black man who led a slave revolt in the South, and the thorny questions of identity and appropriation the text provoked. Part memoir, part literary criticism, part admiring portrait of Baldwin, one of the author’s heroes, Abdelmoumen’s book resonates clearly with our own contentious moment.

What We Know So Far Is …
Conor Mc Donnell
Buckrider Books
Toronto poet Conor Mc Donnell’s third book of poetry is a wild, cacophonous, allusive text that recalls T.S. Eliot’s modernist masterpiece “The Waste Land” in its interrogation of the limits of language to capture the spirit and tenor of an age. History and science and invocations of pop culture – the Smashing Pumpkins, Joy Division – are violently yoked together to indicate the ways syntax is manipulated and mutated in our current, meme-driven culture. Words, the poet writes, “shit the page with self-implication,” and this electrifying volume remains attentive to the various ways language benefits and betrays us, sometimes simultaneously.

Leslie Hurtig, artistic director, Vancouver Writers Fest, Vancouver

Three Parties
Ziyad Saadi
Hamish Hamilton/Penguin Random House Canada

Ziyad Saadi’s Three Parties arrived on my desk last summer, just as I was embarking on a nine-hour journey up B.C.’s coast. Its fabulous, subversive party setting, and mix of emotionally complex characters had me deep-diving those pages until I realized I had arrived, as if by magic, at my destination! I love a good retelling of a classic, and like another Mrs. Dalloway–influenced book, Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, this book deserves a wide readership and plenty of acclaim of its own.

Jo Treggiari, author and bookseller, co-owner of Block Shop Books, Lunenburg, Nova Scotia

Bluenose Ghosts
Helen Creighton
Nimbus Publishing

The third edition of this perennial favourite, a collection of supernatural tales and Maritime myth mined through countless interviews by Creighton, a renowned folklorist, and loosely presented by type: forerunners, ghosts, phantom ships, haunted houses, and poltergeists, along with other things that go bump in the night. Fascinating from a historical perspective on the area, in addition to the gruesome, shiver-inducing nature of the stories.

Disruptive Women: The Untold Story of Nova Scotia’s Pioneers of Peace and Suffrage
Sharon M. H. MacDonald
Nimbus Publishing

A meticulously researched and fascinating dive into the lives of two largely forgotten Nova Scotia women, mother and daughter Mary and Polly Chesley, tireless advocates for peace and suffrage in Canada and beyond during the 19th and 20th centuries. Archival documents, letters, and photographs bring to light their considerable achievements and honour their legacies.

Malcolm Fraser, editor, Montreal Review of Books, Montreal

Gesticulating Gentrification
Rick Trembles
Conundrum Press

Amid the wealth of literary talent coming out of our local community, one book that’s stayed with me t is the graphic memoir Gesticulating Gentrification. Rick Trembles has been a mainstay of Montreal’s underground music and comics communities since the punk era of the late 1970s. He recounts his lifelong difficulty sustaining a place to live, with both hilarious and horrifying examples aplenty. Trembles lays bare the facts that many artists elide, the fundamental crisis of trying to live as an artist in a Darwinian capitalist jungle. His style, with its cartoony figures and text-heavy panels, can be a bit much to take in one sitting (better to take breaks), but here he reveals both his skill as an illustrator, and the vulnerability behind his aloof underground persona with bracing honesty.

Jean Marc Ah-Sen, writer and reviewer, Toronto

The Damagers
Rob Benvie
Knopf Canada/Penguin Random House Canada

Before ’60s hippie free love, before the eschatological whimperings of Manson’s helter-skelter, there was the postwar spiritual vacuum that could not be filled by a surfeit of modern conveniences – electrical blenders, Eisenhower’s expansive interstate highway system, and the wide availability of “bop” pills were all ineffective against the pangs of yearning stirring in the bellies of the North American middle class. Rob Benvie’s The Damagers is so much more than a quaint historical imagining of an obscure cult’s rise to power and disappearance into obscurity – it is a spirituous rumination about demagogues, the call of the wild, and the fracturing of community-centred political organizing. It’s the best Canadian novel I have read this year.

Megan Bishop, executive director of the Book Publishers Association of Alberta, Edmonton

The Longest Night
Lauren Carter
Freehand Books

Eerie yet heartfelt, The Longest Night is one of my favourite books of 2025. The novel is about 18-year-old Ash, who is held captive by a sinister man. When she attempts to escape, Ash is bewildered to find herself transported 20 years back in time, with the unique opportunity to alter her family’s tragic past. Seamlessly blending horror, suspense, and magical realism, Carter crafts a captivating story through which to examine the impact of generational trauma.

Heather Fegan, journalist, writer, and editor of Atlantic Books Today, and managing director of the Atlantic Publishers Marketing Association (APMA), Halifax

Every Little Thing: How Small Acts of Kindness Make a Big Impact
Janice Landry
Pottersfield Press

This slim book from Atlantic Canada packs a big punch with stories that highlight the helpers among us and demonstrate the impact small acts of kindness can have, especially on our mental health. Recovering from a tough battle with Lyme disease, Landry reflected on how one tiny tick had such a big impact on her life, sparking the idea for this book. It’s a compilation of good news stories, thoughtfully connected, that are good for the soul.

Micheline Maylor, poet, editor, and reviewer, Canmore, Alberta

Wellwater
Karen Solie
House of Anansi Press

Karen Solie’s Governor General’s Award–winning poems in Wellwater exhibit a sublime, intimate catalogue of time, in which “an essential knowledge or intuition” exists at the heart level. Solie spans subjects: portrait, appliance, dwelling, ecology. “There isn’t any sense of origin . . .  the chemical is wedded to the seed.” The breadth of contemplation couples with linguistic prowess without a hint of sappiness. Wellwater is a must-have collection for 2025. 

Brett Josef Grubisic, author, reviewer, and co-editor for The British Columbia Review, Salt Spring Island, B.C.

I Remember Lights
Ben Ladouceur
Book*hug Press

Property
Kate Cayley
Coach House

Runs in the Blood
Matthew J. Trafford
Arsenal Pulp Press

Three Parties
Ziyad Saadi
Hamish Hamilton/Penguin Random House Canada

The Tiger and the Cosmonaut
Eddy Boudel Tan
Viking/Penguin Random House Canada

In a glum news year buoyed by must-reads, a quintet of queer fiction held me in thrall, deeply so. With crystalline yet distinctive notes, each virtuoso soloist held their own with seeming effortlessness. Collectively, though, Ben Ladouceur‘s I Remember Lights, Eddy Boudel Tan’s The Tiger and the Cosmonaut, Ziyad Saadi’s Three Parties, Matthew J. Trafford’s Runs in the Blood, and Kate Cayley’s Property register as a thing of rare beauty – at once inventive, cerebral, clever, tender, intense, and deserving of attention far and wide.