Get lost in the winding words of 10 Canadian authors with new releases that explore Toronto across a diversity of genres, characters and experiences.
Whether you’re a lover of literature or simply someone looking to rediscover Toronto through a different perspective, these 10 books will have you turning pages—and streets—alike.
Pick A Colour
By Souvankham Thammavongsa
Turn a corner on any street in Toronto and you’ll likely stumble upon a nail salon like the one found in Souvankham Thammavongsa’s new book, Pick a Colour. The Giller Prize and O. Henry Award winner pens a story about Ning, a retired boxer, now known as Susan to the customers who visit her nail salon.
Told over the course of a single day, the friction between Ning's two identities—as an anonymous manicurist and brilliant observer of her own circumstances—builds until it releases with revelations and reckonings about loneliness, love, labour, and class.
And The Walls Came Down
By Denise Da Costa
Da Costa’s debut novel, And The Walls Came Down, follows Delia, a daughter of divorced Jamaican immigrants, who returns back to her childhood home in Don Mount Court, an east Toronto government housing complex, before it’s torn down.
Through the diary she went back for, Delia relives her teenage years growing up in the 1990s. Inspired by her entries to reunite her parents in an attempt to reclaim the idealistic life she feels she never had, she instead discovers the importance of community, home and embracing the life you do have.
I’m Glad We Had This Time Together
By Maurice Vellekoop
Winner of the Toronto Book Award and Trillium Book Award, this epic graphic memoir captures a young and very gay Maurice as he’s raised in suburban Etobicoke by a traditional Christian family. In spite of fundamental differences, his family instills a deep love of the arts, which leads him to the heart of the city in the 1980s to study at the Ontario College of Art.
Random House Canada writes, “I'm Glad We Had This Time Together is an enthralling portrait of what it means to be true to yourself, to learn to forgive, and to be an artist.”
Nobody Asked For This
By Georgia Toews
If you’re thinking, “Hey, that name rings a bell,” it’s because you’re right…it is familiar in the Canadian literature scene. Georgia Toews is the daughter of renowned CanLit author, Miriam Toews. But instead of following in her mother’s footsteps right away, Georgia became entrenched in the Toronto comedy scene—writing sets, bartending at venues, dating comedians—all of which have become fodder for her second novel.
A dramedy that is at once hilarious and heartbreaking, Nobody Asked For This captures themes of loss, ambition, abuse, love and friendship through Virginia, a 23-year-old stand-up comedian.
An Ordinary Violence
By Adriana Chartrand
An Ordinary Violence is a chilling read about a young Indigenous woman, Dawn, living in a shiny new Toronto condo while haunted by the oppressive legacies of colonization.
Darkly funny, the spirit realm and real world collide when her brother is unexpectedly released from prison. What unfolds is a reckoning with trauma and violence, loss and reclamation alongside a truth that—sometimes—the most dangerous monsters we may ever face are ones we already know.
Chartrand is half-Indigenous—her father is Red River Métis (Michif)—and as Reader’s Digest notes, her “desire to read about contemporary Indigenous life led her to her debut literary horror novel.”
Other Worlds
By André Alexis
Celebrated author André Alexis’ latest work, Other Worlds is a collection of short stories that transcend time, genre and themes. He transports us from 19th century Trinidad and Tobago to small-town Ontario, from Amherst, Massachusetts to contemporary Toronto in ways that both enlighten and bemuse.
Ben Berman Ghan hits the nail on the head when he writes for Ancillary Review of Books: “Alexis takes my home city of Toronto, and the surrounding towns of Ontario, and tells me that maybe these are places I’ve always known: a street I’ve walked down, a town I’ve driven through, it’s a person I’ve met. But actually, he tells me, I don’t know these places or these people like I thought I did, as the familiar becomes strange, the pedestrian becomes weird.”
Denison Avenue
By Christina Wong; illustrated by Daniel Innes
Visual art and fiction writing entwine poignantly in Denison Avenue, a graphic novel that illustrates Toronto’s gentrifying Chinatown and Kensington Market neighbourhoods through the eyes of the elderly Wong Cho Sum.
Collecting bottles and cans after the sudden loss of her husband to distract herself from grief and loneliness, she meets new friends, confronts classism and racism, and learns how to build a life as a widow in a neighbourhood that is being destroyed and rebuilt, leaving elders like her behind.
Much Ado About Nada
By Uzma Jalaluddin
Taking place in Scarborough’s (fictional) Golden Crescent neighbourhood, Much Ado About Nada is a Muslim love story inspired by Jane Austen’s Persuasion. Through the character of Nada Syed, Jalaluddin explores the desire to make a mark on the world through a legacy born from both career and family.
On the cusp of 30, still living at home with a failed tech startup and no love prospects, Nada’s best friend decides to shake things up by bringing her to a giant annual Muslim conference held downtown.
Anne of the Library-on-the-Hill
By Catherine Little; illustrated by Sae Kimura
Anne of the Library-on-the-Hill is the only children’s book to make the longlist for the 2025 Toronto Book Awards, and for good reason. The book tells the story of the legendary L.M. Montgomery's connection to midtown’s Bathurst and St. Clair area through the eyes of a different young reader named Anne (also spelled with an “e”).
Anne regularly visits the Wychwood Library with her father, an artist, who is later called to serve during the Great War. Subsequently, she escapes into the world of books, particularly those of Montgomery, and her imagination really takes off when she learns the beloved author is in town.
CanLit for Little Canadians writes that it “reminds us of the anchor that reading can be in a child's life and also the pillar that Anne of Green Gables is in both the CanLit world and internationally.”
The Master Plan
By Michael Healey
A play adapted from award-winning writer and The Globe and Mail journalist Josh O’Kane’s best-selling book Sideways: The City Google Couldn’t Buy, The Master Plan is a theatrical take on Toronto politics.
Turning the stunning failure to build a smart city by the waterfront into a biting satire, Healy fictionalizes the corporate drama, big tech, public opinion and iconic Canadian figures involved in the whole messy affair.
It was longlisted for the Toronto Book Awards 2024 and won the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding New Play 2024.
—This story has been updated with new details since it was first published in March 2021.
