Martha Sharpe (Lynn Crosbie)

Flying Books founder and publishing industry veteran Martha Sharpe credits the growth of her business over the last 10 years – from one table-top bookshelf in a downtown Toronto store to a two-storefront retail operation, publishing house, writing school, and mentorship program – to a very simple choice she continues to make: not saying no.

In August 2015, Sharpe built a bookshelf to set up in The Weekend Variety, an art and gift shop owned by the late gallerist Katharine Mulherin, in a bid to bring books to more downtown spaces.

As she was out in the city slinging books, Sharpe began to talk to the people who would come in to look at them, and it was through these conversations that Flying Books began a writing school – run by Sharpe and Adam Sol – in 2017, and a mentorship program conceived of and overseen by Rudrapriya Rathore in 2018. Meanwhile, that bookshelf in one shop expanded to  bookshelves in multiple stores in the city.

The pandemic and its lockdowns forced Flying Books out of its multiple homes and onto the internet, with Sharpe delivering books to the city’s readers, just like other independent booksellers. In December 2021, Sharpe opened her first bricks-and-mortar Flying Books in Toronto’s Little Italy neighbourhood. And in 2024, a new and unexpected opportunity arose when restaurateur Noah Goldberg, who had been running a storefront space next to his restaurant Peter Pan Bistro, got in touch to see if Sharpe would be interested in partnering for a combined bookstore and cafe/wine bar. Flying Books at Neverland opened in June 2024.

“An opportunity presents itself and you can say, in that moment, no – or you can say, well, hold on, maybe, and then you just keep going and you keep not saying no, and that’s what happened,” Sharpe says. “Maybe the biggest risk ever was building a shelf in the house I was renting, and saying, ‘I’m going to do this.’”

Still, Sharpe admits that when she asked the artist and graphic novelist Leanne Shapton to design a logo for Flying Books, she made sure the resulting image (a portrait of Amelia Earhart) was one she could put on the spine of a book someday.

“I didn’t have an immediate plan at all, but [publishing] is just in my makeup, it’s what I do in the world – I’m an editor and a publisher,” Sharpe says.

In September 2020, Flying Books launched their first book, Marlowe Granados’s Happy Hour, the result of a partnership between Sharpe and writer and former Coach House Books editor Emily Keeler. (The book came to the pair in a suitably happenstance way: Granados left a glove at Keeler’s house after a party, and when the pair met up for coffee to exchange the forgotten item, she mentioned her manuscript.)

The book was well received in Canada. It was longlisted for CBC’s Canada Reads and was a finalist for the 2021 Amazon Canada First Novel Award. Sharpe sold rights and the novel was published in the U.S. by Verso in 2021, garnering a positive reception stateside.

The next two similarly well-received titles are Anna Fitzpatrick’s Good Girl, published in 2022, and Tomas Hachard’s City in Flames, published in 2023.

Flying Books’s fourth title, which is planned for publication in fall 2026, has been a quarter-century in the works. While at House of Anansi Press, Sharpe published Mark Anthony Jarman’s 19 Knives. A story in that collection, “Skin a Flea for Hide and Tallow,” features an unnamed character who fights for Custer at Little Bighorn.

“I’ve asked Mark for 25 years, ‘This is a guy in a novel, right, do you have any more stories?’” Sharpe says.

Jarman did have more stories, and they are coming together in Wild West, a second novel by the dedicated short-story writer.

Sharpe intends to continue publishing, but has no immediate plans to speed up the pace (“clearly I’m not in a hurry,” she says). She is focused on building a list without feeling pressured to fill a list, and likes it that way.

Flying Books is marking its 10th anniversary with a limited-edition zine that features contributions by Flying Books authors, top-10 lists from Flying Books booksellers, photos of events, and an excerpt from Jarman’s forthcoming Wild West.

Sharpe is optimistic about the future of books – opening a bookstore has revealed just how passionate and dedicated readers are, and she is thankful for the chance to pause and reflect on how Flying Books has grown over its first decade.

“This is an opportunity for me to genuinely thank everybody who has recognized it and seen and bought one book or even stolen a bookmark (they’re not actually stealing, [the bookmarks] are free),” Sharpe says. “That’s the thing about a 10th anniversary, or any anniversary: it lets you pause, and go, wow. This is here because you guys keep coming here, and it definitely wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for that.”