The Handmaid’s Tale: the Graphic Novel (Margaret Atwood, art & adaptation by Renée Nault)

Margaret Atwood’s classic dystopian novel of totalitarian patriarchy has become a global phenomenon, adapted for film, opera, TV, and now as a graphic novel, with art by Canadian illustrator Renée Nault. Nault’s dark, Sumptuous ink-and-watercolour art perfectly captures the flavour of the novel, with an original style that departs from other adaptations. It’s sure to delight and disturb readers new to the story, while surprising those who thought they knew it.

Guestbook: Ghost Stories (Leanne Shapton)

The multitalented Leanne Shapton presents us with another unclassifiable treasure! Guestbook is a collection of stories told through Shapton’s own illustrations and a curiosity cabinet of found photographs, artifacts, and ephemera. Each of the brief vignettes concerns ghosts, in some sense: hauntings and visitations, but also memories and bits of surreal history, narrated in Shapton’s inimitably offbeat style.

A Mind Spread Out on the Ground (Alicia Elliott)

Through her writing for CBC Arts, The Globe and Mail, Vice, Macleans, and beyond, Alicia Elliott (a Tuscarora writer from Six Nations of the Grand River) has become one of Canada’s most essential new Indigenous voices. This hotly-anticipated book (Elliott’s debut) takes its title from her Malahat Review essay that won Gold at the National Magazine Awards in 2017, which discussed Indigenous depression as an effect of ongoing colonialism; like the other essays collected here, it deftly establishes large and small connections between the past and present, the political-historical and the intimately personal.

Magnetic Equator (Kaie Kellough)

In Kaie Kellough’s third collection of poems place is never far from the mind. His words weave their way through the Americas, haunting prairies and finding ancestry in the Atlantic ocean. In fluid and weighted language the novelist, poet, and sound performer speaks to being hemisphered, to existing in one place while living in another.

Pleasure Activism (adrienne maree brown)

The mind behind Emergent Strategy is back, this time tackling the thorny question of how to make social justice the most pleasurable human experience. Operating from the assumption that making the world a better place should never be just another form of work, brown draws from black feminist tradition to discuss everything from sex work to climate change, interviewing such luminaries as Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Sonya Renee Taylor, and Audre Lorde.