Fifteen stories replete with an intimate, nuanced, and quietly profound realism by the Trillium Book Award–winning author of The Clarion. With crisp and penetrating prose, the stories in Suddenly Light are bracing, buoyant, and test the delicate threads that tie us together.

Nina Dunic is a two-time winner of the Toronto Star Short Story Contest, has been longlisted by the CBC Short Story Prize four times, and was nominated for The Journey Prize. CBC Books named Dunic in its 2023 Writers to Watch list. Her debut novel The Clarion won the 2024 Trillium Book Award, was longlisted for the 2023 Giller Prize, was selected as the Best Canadian Debut of 2023 by Apple Books, and was a Globe and Mail Best Book of 2023. Nina lives in Scarborough, ON.

A spare and luminous novel following three women, survivors of the Lord's Resistance Army, as they navigate their haunted past and present lives in Uganda.

In We, the Kindling we meet Miriam, Helen and Maggie—three friends who, years ago when they were school children, survived capture by the Lord's Resistance Army in northern Uganda. Now, as the women go about their new lives in the city, shopping, caring for their children, planning and thinking about what the future might hold, we come to understand how deeply their past haunts the present.

In graceful yet unflinching prose, Otoniya Okot Bitek weaves vivid folk tales with taut realism, revealing flashes of life before the war that ravaged Uganda, unspooling the terrible events that led to abductions of children from supposedly safe schools, and tracing perilous journeys home again. Facing endless treks across the ravaged countryside and through narrow mountain passes, gun battles and constant brutality, many girls did not survive. Those who did make it back home, some carrying small children of their own, bore the unspoken weight of their experiences within families and communities that often wished to forget and move on.

In We, the Kindling, Okot Bitek insistently refuses to turn away or to spectacularize tragedy, shaping a chorus of women's voices into a hauntingly beautiful novel, suffused with care and humanity.

Otoniya J. Okot Bitek writes poetry and fiction. Her first collection, 100 Days, won the 2017 IndieFab Book of the Year Award for poetry and the 2017 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry. Her second collection, A is for Acholi, won the 2023 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Her most recent collection of poetry, Song & Dread, is published by Talonbooks. Otoniya was born in Kenya to Ugandan parents and has lived in Canada for more than three decades. Her short story “Going Home” received a special mention in the 2004 Commonwealth Short Fiction Prize. We, the Kindling is her first novel.

Acclaimed author Saeed Teebi was at work on his first novel when the attacks on Gaza began in late 2023. The violence and cruelty of the attacks, accompanied by the assent and silence of international governments, stunned many across the globe, like Teebi, into a new state of permanent horror.

What does it mean to be of the Palestinian diaspora in such a moment? What does it mean to be of a people who have sustained such a large-scale assault not only on their homeland, but their entire identity? What is the role of art, of language—of imagination—in asserting one’s identity, when that very assertion is read as an act of subversion?

In this incisive work, Teebi explores, with searing, razor-sharp prose, the effects of genocide on the bodies, minds, and imaginations—of Palestinians especially, and humanity in general.

This is at once a memoir of one family’s displacement, a scathing indictment of global complicity in the face of brutality, and a profound rumination on art and imagination as a means of defiance. It is an astonishing work of resistance by a major intellect, and it is both urgent and timeless.

Saeed Teebi is an award-winning writer and lawyer. His debut short story collection, Her First Palestinian, was a finalist for several awards, including the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Prize. His nonfiction has appeared in The Globe and Mail and The New Quarterly. Born in Kuwait, he resettled in the United States, then Canada. He now lives in Toronto.

A hard-hitting and powerful look at hockey's moment of reckoning in Canada, and the ways in which a game that is so universally loved has been rocked in recent years by court cases involving sexual assault and startling incidents of hazing and abuse throughout junior hockey.

In We Breed Lions, award-winning journalist and bestselling author Rick Westhead does a deep-dive into the state of hockey in Canada today. He gives voice to those who have been sexually assaulted by hockey players, revealing the struggles they've had with local police officials in their efforts to seek justice. He also goes inside the dressing room to find out how attitudes of misogyny and homophobia continue to flourish, and speaks to former players who were forced to perform degrading acts of initiation in order to “be one of the guys.”

Westhead offers hope for hockey's future, profiling those individuals and organizations who are committed to educating players around issues of consent, putting an end to hazing and redefining what it means to be a man on and off the ice.

Rick Westhead is TSN’s Senior Correspondent and a two-time winner of Canadian Sports Writer of the Year, presented by Sport Media Canada. Canadian Journalists for Freedom of Expression recognized him in 2023 with the Arnold Amber Award for Investigative Journalism. Westhead breaks news of consequence and has won six Canadian Screen Awards for his original features for various TSN properties. In 2025, he was recognized for his “fearless reporting” by The Hockey News in its list of 100 People of Power and Influence in hockey. Prior to joining TSN, Westhead served as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star, where he reported on the ground in countries including Afghanistan, China, and Saudi Arabia.

Julie Chan has nothing. Her twin sister has everything—except a pulse.

Julie Chan, a supermarket cashier barely scraping by, finds herself thrust into the glamorous yet perilous world of her late twin sister, Chloe VanHuusen, a popular influencer. Separated at a young age, the identical twins were polar opposites and rarely spoke, except for one viral video that Chloe initiated (Finding My Long-Lost Twin And Buying Her A House #EMOTIONAL).

When Julie discovers Chloe’s body, she doesn’t call the police. Instead, she slips into her dead sister’s meticulously curated life: luxury fashion, high-end skincare, and a devoted online following who never noticed they weren’t quite the same.

At first, the transformation is seamless. Julie relishes the perks of influencer fame, but quickly learns that behind Chloe’s flawless feed lay secrets far darker than she imagined. Her sister’s final days were shadowed by paranoia, manipulation, and something far more sinister.

Now, trapped on a private island retreat with Chloe’s inner circle—an elite clique of influencers obsessed with status and secrecy—Julie is forced to keep up the act while being haunted by her sister’s untimely death. As events spiral out of control, Julie uncovers the sinister forces that may have led to her sister’s demise and realizes she might be the next target.

Darkly funny, fiercely paced, and full of sharp commentary on identity, fame, and the cost of visibility, Julie Chan Is Dead is a twisted thrill ride where fitting in could be fatal—and the people behind the posts are the real danger.

Liann Zhang is a second-generation Chinese Canadian who splits her time between Vancouver, British Columbia and Toronto, Ontario. After a short stint as a skincare content creator, she graduated from the University of Toronto with a degree in psychology and criminology. Julie Chan Is Dead is her first novel.

Borrowing its title from a finance term—“the estimated price of a good or service for which no market price exists”— Shadow Price is a stunning debut that examines the idea of value in a world that burns under our capitalist lens.

What gives life value? How do we serve existing societal structures that determine its cost? Employing both surreal and documentary imagery, Farah Ghafoor's arresting collection articulates how narrative is used to revise the past and manipulate the future, ultimately forming our present-day climate crisis. Interrogating personal complicity, generational implications, and the shock of our collective disregard for a world that sustains every living thing, Shadow Price captures the complexities of living and writing as a young poet born in the year that “climate change denial” first appeared in print. Mourning the loss of Earth’s biodiversity, from insects to mammoths to trees, these introspective poems invite us to consider the risks and rewards of loving what may vanish in our lifetime.

Shadow Price charges readers to contemplate their power and purpose in the world today, recognizing that there is hope even in the belly of the beast.

Based in Tkaranto (Toronto), Farah Ghafoor is the author of Shadow Price (House of Anansi, 2025). A finalist for the Toronto Book Awards, selections of Shadow Price won the E.J. Pratt Medal and Prize in Poetry, and were finalists for the CBC Poetry Prize and the Far Horizons Award. Her work appears in magazines such as The Walrus, The Offing, Brick Magazine, and The Fiddlehead, art exhibitions like Who's Afraid of Labour Justice? and FACE/WASTE, as well as anthologies and post-secondary course curriculums.

In her signature epic vision, Canisia Lubrin distills a radiant elegy for her mother along an interwoven and unresolvable axis of astonishment, belonging as much to history as to today. Grief, tender and searing, is the channel through which the poet refracts the realm of contemporary life to reveal the blistering paradox of its private and public entanglements. This is poetry of haunting gravity and resonance, with meditations on love, time, and loss, at once meticulously far-seeing, interior, and inexpressible.

Canisia Lubrin’s books include Voodoo Hypothesis and The Dyzgraphxst. Lubrin’s work has been recognized with the Griffin Poetry Prize, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry, the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, the Writer’s Trust of Canada Rising Stars prize, and others. Also a finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and the Governor General's Literary Award, Lubrin has held fellowships at the Banff Centre, Civitella Ranieri in Italy, Simon Fraser University, Literature Colloquium Berlin, Queen’s University, and Victoria College at the University of Toronto. She studied at York University and the University of Guelph, where she now coordinates the Creative Writing MFA in the School of English & Theatre Studies. In 2021, Lubrin received a Windham-Campbell Prize for poetry, and the Globe and Mail named her Poet of the Year. Code Noir: Metamorphoses is her debut fiction, and includes stories listed for the Journey Prize (2019, 2020), Toronto Book Award (2018) and the Shirley Jackson Award (2021). Born in St. Lucia, Lubrin now lives in Whitby, Ontario, and is the poetry editor at McClelland & Stewart.

Revolutions sifts through the grains of Muslim daughterhood to reveal two metaphorical circles inextricably overlapping: shame and pleasure. In an extended conversation with Mona Hatoum’s artwork + and –, Revolutions asks how young Arab women – who live in homes and communities where actions are surveilled and categorized as 3aib or not 3aib, shameful or acceptable – make and unmake their identities. Working between a Palestinian and Iraqi poetics drawing from artists like Mahmoud Darwish and Naseer Shamma and a feminist Canadian poetics inspired by Erín Moure, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Nicole Brossard, Revolutions spirals and collapses as we turn and re-turn around its circles.

Hajer Mirwali is a Palestinian and Iraqi writer living in Toronto. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Her work has been published in The Ex-Puritan, Brick Magazine, Room Magazine, and Joyland.