Fiction Books

Including five new, never before published Christmas stories and the classic "Dave Cooks the Turkey," this special collection from the Vinyl Cafe is Stuart McLean at his finest.

Christmas has always been a special time at the Vinyl Cafe. For two decades, Stuart McLean travelled across the country every December with The Vinyl Cafe Christmas tour, bringing the gift of laughter and light during the darkest days of the year. The hilarious world of Dave and Morley was even more real--more vibrant--during the holidays. For many, the Vinyl Cafe Christmas stories became beloved family traditions. From mishaps with the Turlingtons and the tale of a young Dave's first holiday disaster to the surprising "Christmas Ferret" and the touching sign-off in "The Christmas Card," these wonderful new stories will delight for years to come.    

Brimming with charm and humour (often at Dave's expense), these twelve stories entertain on every page, reminding us what the holidays are all about.

STUART McLEAN was the writer and host of the popular CBC Radio show The Vinyl Cafe. He is the author of the bestselling books Vinyl Cafe Diaries, which won the short fiction award from the Canadian Authors Association; The Morningside World of Stuart McLean, which was a finalist for the City of Toronto Book Awards; Welcome Home: Travels in Smalltown Canada, which won the CAA's award for nonfiction; and Home from the Vinyl Cafe, Vinyl Cafe Unplugged, and Secrets from the Vinyl Cafe, all three of which won the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour. He received the Canadian Booksellers Association Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014. He passed away on February 15, 2017.

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AINSLIE HOGARTH is the author of the YA novels The Lonely and The Boy Meets Girl Massacre (Annotated). She lives in Canada with her husband, kids, and little dog.

WJB's Book Club Pick for September 2026!

Use code BOOKCLUB to get 20% off at checkout. 

An electric examination of women and men, sex and love, self-loathing and twenty-first century loneliness.

Between writing a weekly column for The Hype Report and managing her mood stabilizers, Gloria navigates a series of quasi-relationships while commiserating with her best friend about dating apps and dick pics, married men and questionable boundaries. But when she makes a glib pass at Daryn, a stranger on a subway platform crowded with young anti-immigration protesters, and finds him waiting for her outside her health club a couple of days later, a surprising curiosity leads her not to consider a restraining order, but to talk to him.

Claiming she wants to interview him for an article on the incel movement, Gloria meets Daryn for coffee and soon invites him back to her apartment—where his earnestness and painfully restrained desire inspire her to dominate him sexually. As their physical relationship intensifies, so does their emotional connection, and Gloria can’t shake the sense that she’s headed in a dangerous direction.

An electric examination of sex and love, self-loathing, and twenty-first century loneliness, Self Care is a devastating novel about women and men, what they want and what they say they want, and the violent tension between the two.

Praise for Self Care

“You can always count on Russell Smith for a straightforward technique that hits you in the solar plexus . . . The novel’s title proves piercingly ironic: this is a book about people whose absolute inability to care for themselves is the product of social alienation and a world in which everything—from proscribed gender roles to the ravages of unfettered capitalism—is stacked against them. That the only escape from this cycle of despondency appears to be violent is the ultimate indictment in this bleak, acerbic fable of our benighted time.”
—Steven W. Beattie, That Shakespearean Rag

“Smith’s writing is at its best when he’s skewering the often performative nature of sex, dating, and politics, as well as the solipsistic delusion of 21st-century life. [Self Care is] an uncomfortable, disturbing, and timely examination of relationships between men and women.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“A searing indictment of shallow, self-obsessed online culture and the deep disconnects in society, Canadian writer Smith’s latest examines trauma and tragedy and delves into the difference between performing care and actually caring.”
—Booklist

“A perverse, bleak, often hilarious Romeo-and-Juliet tale for our cultural moment. Smith renders the self-obsessed urban landscape with absolute precision.”
—Mark Kingwell, author of Question Authority: A Polemic About Trust in Five Meditations

“A gripping, unforgettable story about a young journalist and her secret incel lover that explodes the fairy tale of the frog prince. It had me sitting on the edge of my seat.”
—Susan Swan, author of Big Girls Don’t Cry

“A millennial tragedy that is also smart, funny, and mercifully free of piety and exculpation. Self Care is a book and an attitude adjustment that CanLit could really use.”
—Timothy Taylor, author of The Rule of Stephens

“With Self Care, Smith writes with the exacting and intimate observation for which he is known and loved, offering an unflinching play-by-play of protagonist Gloria’s murky interiority as she navigates an insidious but intimate relationship with incel Daryn. Think sharp psychological realism of Kristen Roupenian’s “Cat Person” or Graham and Thorne’s Adolescence. Smith’s ability to bravely take readers to the very edge of tenderness in the face of danger leaves one with something more profound than a lesson and more encompassing than a fact. Self Care is a story as hard to look at as it is well-observed. It haunted me and I couldn’t put it down.”
—Aley Waterman, author of Mudflowers

“Consumed this jewel of a novel in a single sitting . . . Upsetting and hilarious by turns, it is a sort of updated comedy of manners, really, about a wellness blogger who dominates an incel. By one of Canada’s closest social observers.”
—Stephen Marche, author of On Writing and Failure

Praise for Russell Smith

“For me at least, Canada’s most fascinating writer, the author whose new books and stories I most eagerly anticipate, whose fiction I approach with a hopeful curiosity.”
—Jeet Heer

“Russell Smith is one of the best stylists of my generation. His prose is exact, surprising, and written by a man with a fine ear.”
—Andre Alexis, author of Fifteen Dogs

“Smith writes some of the most luminous prose in Canadian fiction . . . He mines and refines the best of what has come before on the way to making it his own.”
—Montreal Gazette 

“[Confidence is] a poisonously funny portrait of the so-hip-it-hurts fashion, food, and bar scene.”
—Maclean’s

“Smith . . . is a gifted anthropologist of the urbane. Those gifts are on full display throughout Confidence.”
—Globe and Mail

*LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 GILLER PRIZE*

From the author of the nationally bestselling Strangers saga comes a heartrending story of two Michif sisters who must face their past trauma when their mother is called out for false claims to Indigenous identity.

June and her sister, lyn, are NDNs—real ones.

Lyn has her pottery artwork, her precocious kid, Willow, and the uncertain terrain of her midlife to keep her mind, heart and hands busy. June, a Métis Studies professor, yearns to uproot from Vancouver and move. With her loving partner, Sigh, and their faithful pup, June decides to buy a house in the last place on earth she imagined she’d end up: back home in Winnipeg with her family.

But then into lyn and June’s busy lives a bomb drops: their estranged and very white mother, Renee, is called out as a “pretendian.” Under the name (get this) Raven Bearclaw, Renee had topped the charts in the Canadian art world for winning awards and recognition for her Indigenous-style work.

The news is quickly picked up by the media and sparks an enraged online backlash. As the sisters are pulled into the painful tangle of lies their mother has told and the hurt she has caused, searing memories from their unresolved childhood trauma, which still manages to spill into their well curated adult worlds, come rippling to the surface.

In prose so powerful it could strike a match, real ones is written with the same signature wit and heart on display in The Break, The Strangers and The Circle. An energetic, probing and ultimately hopeful story, real ones pays homage to the long-fought, hard-won battles of Michif (Métis) people to regain ownership of their identity and the right to say who is and isn’t Métis.

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katherena vermette (she/her/hers) is a Michif (Red River Métis) writer from Treaty 1 territory, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. Her first book, North End Love Songs (Muses’ Company), won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. Her novels The Break (House of Anansi), The Strangers and The Circle (Hamish Hamilton) were all national bestsellers and won multiple literary awards. Her work for children and young adults includes the picture book The Girl and the Wolf (Theytus) and the graphic novel series A Girl Called Echo (Highwater). She holds a Master of Fine Arts from the University of British Columbia, and an honourary Doctor of Letters from the University of Manitoba. katherena lives with her kids—fur and human—in a cranky old house within skipping distance of the temperamental Red River.

WJB Book Club Pick for September 2023!

Use code BOOKCLUB for 20% off this title, and meet us to discuss it on Thursday September 29th at 6:00pm!

“A nuanced, complex, and highly original novel.” —Charles Yu, National Book Award–winning author of Interior Chinatown

A fresh, unique work of metafiction that follows a graphic novelist who loses control of his own narrative when he attempts to write the story of his fraught upbringing in 1980s Chinatown.

In a Chinatown housing project lives twelve-year-old Benny, his ailing grandmother, and his strange neighbor Constantine, a man who believes he’s a reincarnated medieval samurai. When his grandmother is hospitalized, Benny manages to survive on his own until a social worker comes snooping. With no other family, he is reluctantly taken in by Constantine and soon, an unlikely bond forms between the two.

At least, that’s what Yu, the narrator of the story, wants to write.

The creator of a bestselling comic book, Yu is struggling with continuing the poignant tale of Benny and can’t help but interject from the present day, slowly revealing a darker backstory. Can Yu confront the demons he’s spent his adult life avoiding or risk his own life...and Benny’s?

“Instructive as it is inspiring, The Double Life of Benson Yu is a phenomenal example of a writer taking real risks in order to reveal and reckon with deep-rooted, tormenting truths as a means of moving forward. Kevin Chong has crafted a novel that will get your heart pumping, mind jumping, and, best of all, fingers turning” (Mateo Askaripour, New York Times bestselling author).

Kevin Chong is the award-winning author of several books of fiction and nonfiction. His work has appeared in The Guardian, The Rumpus, and more. He currently lives in Vancouver and is an associate professor at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan campus.

WJB's Book Club Pick for March 2026!

Use code BOOKCLUB to get 20% off at checkout. 

Winner of the 2025 Giller Prize

From Giller Prize and O. Henry Award winner Souvankham Thammavongsa comes a revelatory novel about loneliness, love, labour, and class. An intimate and sharply written book following a nail salon owner as she toils away for the privileged clients who don't even know her true name.

"One of the greatest novels I have ever read." RITA BULLWINKEL
"A knockout: every punch lands." ELEANOR CATTON

Ning is a retired boxer, but to the customers who visit her nail salon, she is just another worker named Susan. On this summer's day, much like any other, the Susans buff and clip and polish and tweeze. They listen and smile and nod. But beneath this superficial veneer, Ning is a woman of rigorous intellect and profound depth. A woman enthralled by the intricacy and rhythms of her work, but also haunted by memories of paths not taken and opportunities lost. A woman navigating the complicated power dynamics among her fellow Susans, whose greatest fears and desires lie just behind the gossip they exchange.
     As the day's work grinds on, the friction between Ning's two identities—as anonymous manicurist and brilliant observer of her own circumstances—will gather electric and crackling force, and at last demand a reckoning with the way the world of privilege looks at a woman like Ning.
     Told over a single day, with razor-sharp precision and wit, Pick a Colour confirms Souvankham Thammavongsa's place as literature's premier chronicler of the immigrant experience, in its myriad, complex, and slyly subversive forms.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

Finalist for the Amazon Canada First Novel Award

Cityline Book Club Pick 

“A deep, unflinching yet loving look at injustice and power.” —Chatelaine 

“A powerful and unforgettable novel” (Quill and Quire, starred review) about a young woman who must find the courage to secure her freedom and determine her own future

Set in an imagined world in which the most vulnerable are forced to buy their freedom by working off their debt to society, Gutter Child uncovers a nation divided into the privileged Mainland and the policed Gutter. As part of a social experiment led by the Mainland government, Elimina Dubois is one of just one hundred babies taken from the Gutter and raised in the land of opportunity.

But when her Mainland mother dies, Elimina finds herself alone, a teenager forced into an unfamiliar life of servitude, unsure of who she is and where she belongs. Sent to an academy with new rules and expectations, Elimina befriends children who are making their own way through the Gutter System in whatever way they know how. But when her life takes yet another unexpected turn, Elimina will discover that what she needs more than anything may not be the freedom she longed for after all.

Gutter Child reveals one young woman’s journey through a fractured world of heartbreaking disadvantages and shocking injustices. As a modern heroine in an altered but all-too-recognizable reality, Elimina must find the strength within herself to forge her future in defiance of a system that tries to shape her destiny.

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JAEL RICHARDSON is the executive director of the Festival of Literary Diversity, a books columnist on CBC Radio’s q and an outspoken advocate on issues of diversity. She is the author of The Stone Thrower: A Daughter’s Lesson, a Father’s Life, a memoir based on her relationship with her father, CFL quarterback Chuck Ealey, and the children’s book Because You Are. Jael Richardson received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Guelph. She lives in Brampton, Ontario.

A unique and eerily convincing masterwork, American War takes a scalpel to American politics, precisely dissecting it to see what would happen if their own policies were turned against them. The answer: inevitable, endless bloodshed.

In a disturbingly believable near future, the need for sustainable energy has torn the United States apart. The South wants to maintain the use of fossil fuels, even though the government in The North has outlawed them. Now, unmanned drones patrol the skies, and future martyrs walk the markets. For the first time in three hundred years, America is caught up in a civil war. Out of this turmoil comes Sarat Chestnut, a southern girl born into the ongoing conflict. At a displaced persons camp, a mysterious older man takes her under his wing, and while her family tries to survive, Sarat is made into a deadly instrument of war, with consequences for the entire nation.

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OMAR EL AKKAD is an author and a journalist. He has reported from Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, and many other locations around the world. His work earned Canada's National Newspaper Award for Investigative Journalism and the Goff Penny Award for young journalists. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Le Monde, Guernica, GQ, and many other newspapers and magazines. His debut novel, American War, is an international bestseller and has been translated into thirteen languages. It won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award, the Oregon Book Award for fiction, and the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, and has been nominated for more than ten other awards. It was listed as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, GQ, NPR, and Esquire, and was selected by the BBC as one of 100 Novels That Shaped Our World.

WJB's Book Club Pick for January 2026!

Use code BOOKCLUB to get 20% off at checkout. 

In these nine stories, Elise Levine illuminates the aspirations of women and men (and one sassy millennia-old being) as they sift through the midden of their regrets, friendships, and marriages, and seek fresher ways of inhabiting older selves.

Two young women hitchhike around Europe, a lurid secret between them. A team in space is left reeling after a colleague’s unexpected death. Ambitious brothers take to the skies in an aerostat in 19th-century Paris. Big of You contains stories of real and fantastical life, each with its own distinctive voice and wild vocabulary.

At turns playful, blistering, unabashed, these stories examine the nuanced, kaleidoscopic dimensions of character, of people driven by ambition yet contending with the hauntings of the past. Spanning various settings and time periods, Big of You captures the everyday and the extraordinary in collisions soaring and earthy, exuberant and visceral.

Praise for Big of You

“Playful hilarity on some pages is matched by striking loss on others. Levine is a maestro of pacing and a magpie of mesmeric diction.”
—Literary Review of Canada

“Throughout, the writing is like a Modernist poem . . . filled with startling images, but also half-thoughts and half-sentences, leaving the reader, like the characters, on the tenterhooks of understanding. Fiction that makes artful demands, and in return, offers substantial rewards.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“The stories in Elise Levine’s latest collection, Big of You, are great travellers. They move through time, scene, and setting like water, seamless and fluid, burbling with questions of personal identity and what it takes to change one’s present or put to bed one’s past.”
—Katherine Abbass, The Ex-Puritan

“In Elise Levine’s high-voltage collection, she transports us everywhere from a casino to Europe to outer space. These stories crackle with restlessness, longing, and mischief, as characters peel away layers of identity to glimpse what’s underneath. Fraught, honest and hilarious, Big of You stretches our imaginations and delightfully capsizes our expectations of selfhood, story, and reality.”
—Erika Krouse, author of Save Me, Stranger

“In Big of You, Elise Levine is expert at conveying confusion and dislocation in a magic shorthand that is all hers. Each ingenious sentence blends beauty and sorrow in an intimate voice close to your ear. The writing is whip-smart with heart, it’s nutritious, it’s everything you need.”
—Mark Anthony Jarman, author of Burn Man

“Big of You moves through the contours of grief, the gradients of memory, and the foils of artistic ambition, all in honor of the shattered human heart. These stories are both painfully funny and refreshingly earnest, a feat so striking it feels almost impossible that one writer can have such electrifying breadth. When I read Elise Levine, I lose and find myself anew in her lucid prose. That’s the power of an Elise Levine sentence—she is singular.”
—Alejandro Heredia, author of Loca

Praise for Elise Levine

“Levine uses raw, hallucinatory prose to tell this curious story of a woman becoming undone . . . [Blue Field‘s] visceral wordplay, rough sexuality, and anguished depiction of survivor’s guilt are bound to captivate its audience. A transgressive, gut-wrenching portrayal of grief that asks what it’s like to drown.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Reading [Blue Field] is a sensation akin to drifting weightlessly beneath the surface of the text . . . dazzling, textured, tightly woven.”
—Music and Literature

“Elise Levine writes with a new and exciting type of lyric rhythm. These are stories with the beating heart of poems.”
—Rion Amilcar Scott, winner of the 2017 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction

“Elise Levine’s startling sentences alternate between serrated sentiment and lyrical reverie, offering readers that rarest commodity—genuine surprise.”
—Jeff Jackson, author of Destroy All Monsters

“Levine addresses questions of identity and the impact of violence as well as addiction, consent, and society’s exploitation of trauma, and does so in gorgeous, surprising, and utterly gripping prose.”
—Elizabeth Hazen, Baltimore Fishbowl

An instant classic and eerily prescient cultural phenomenon, from “the patron saint of feminist dystopian fiction” (New York Times). Now an award-winning Hulu series starring Elizabeth Moss.

In this multi-award-winning, bestselling novel, Margaret Atwood has created a stunning Orwellian vision of the near future. This is the story of Offred, one of the unfortunate “Handmaids” under the new social order who have only one purpose: to breed. In Gilead, where women are prohibited from holding jobs, reading, and forming friendships, Offred’s persistent memories of life in the “time before” and her will to survive are acts of rebellion. Provocative, startling, prophetic, and with Margaret Atwood’s devastating irony, wit, and acute perceptive powers in full force, The Handmaid’s Tale is at once a mordant satire and a dire warning.

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Margaret Atwood, whose work has been published in more than forty-five countries, is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry, critical essays, and graphic novels. In addition to The Handmaid’s Tale, now an award-winning TV series, her novels include Cat’s Eye, short-listed for the 1989 Booker Prize; Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy; The Blind Assassin, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize; Oryx and Crake, short-listed for the 2003 Man Booker Prize;The Year of the Flood, MaddAddam; and Hag-Seed. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the Franz Kafka Prize, the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Los Angeles Times Innovator’s Award. In 2019, she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for services to literature.

World-renowned cartoonist Seth returns with three new ghost stories for 2024.

When a group of tourists visits the deserted island of Podolo, one wants to rescue a feral cat they find there, and the others reluctantly agree. Unfortunately, the rescue proves more difficult than they expect—and they soon discover they’re not alone on Podolo.

Praise for Christmas Ghost Stories

#1 INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
THE TIMES (LONDON) THRILLER OF THE YEAR PICK
AN INDIGO BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
"Exciting." —Andy Weir, author of The Martian
"Nail-biting." —James Cameron, writer and director of Avatar and Titanic
"Not to be missed." —Frederick Forsyth, author of The Day of the Jackal

The #1 bestselling Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield is back with an exceptional Cold War thriller from the dark heart of the Space Race.

1973. A final, top-secret mission to the Moon. Three astronauts in a tiny module, a quarter of a million miles from home. A quarter of a million miles from help.
 
As Russian and American crews sprint for a secret bounty hidden away on the lunar surface, old rivalries blossom and the political stakes are stretched to breaking point back on Earth. Houston flight controller Kazimieras "Kaz" Zemeckis must do all he can to keep the NASA crew together, while staying one step ahead of his Soviet rivals. But not everyone on board Apollo 18 is quite who they appear to be.
 
Full of the fascinating technical detail that fans of The Martian loved, and reminiscent of the thrilling claustrophobia, twists and tension of The Hunt for Red October, The Apollo Murders puts you right there in the moment. Experience the fierce G-forces of launch, the frozen loneliness of Space and the fear of holding on to the outside of a spacecraft orbiting the Earth at 17,000 miles per hour, as told by a former Commander of the International Space Station who has done all of those things in real life.

Strap in and count down for the ride of a lifetime.

CHRIS HADFIELD is one of the most seasoned and accomplished astronauts in the world. The top graduate of the U.S. Air Force test pilot school in 1988 and U.S. Navy test pilot of the year in 1991, Colonel Hadfield was CAPCOM for twenty-five Shuttle missions and NASA’s Director of Operations in Russia. Hadfield served as Commander of the International Space Station where, while conducting a record-setting number of scientific experiments and overseeing an emergency spacewalk, he gained worldwide acclaim for his breathtaking photographs and educational videos about life in space. His music video, a zero-gravity version of David Bowie's “Space Oddity,” has nearly 50 million views, and his TED Talk on fear has been viewed over 10 million times. He helped create and host the National Geographic miniseries One Strange Rock, with Will Smith, and has a MasterClass on exploration. Chris Hadfield's books, An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth, You Are Here and The Darkest Dark, have been bestsellers all around the world, topping the charts for months in his Canadian homeland.

Note: Special Edition Hardcover features:

A stunning collectible edition of Emily St John Mandel’s global phenomenon Station Eleven. This edition features:

• gorgeous sprayed edges
• an illustration of the Mandelverse
• beautiful endpapers featuring original art of the Dr. Eleven comic
• A Sea of Tranquility story
• ribbon bookmark

New York Times and Globe and Mail bestseller • Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the Toronto Book Award • Finalist for a National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Sunburst Award and CBC Canada Reads • Longlisted for the Baileys Prize and for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction • An acclaimed TV series

One snowy night, a famous Hollywood actor dies onstage during a production of King Lear. Hours later, the world as we know it begins to dissolve. Moving back and forth in time—from the actor’s early days as a film star to fifteen years in the future, when a theatre troupe known as the Travelling Symphony roams the wasteland of what remains—this suspenseful, elegiac, spellbinding novel charts the strange twists of fate that connect five people: the actor, the man who tried to save him, the actor’s first wife, his oldest friend and a young actress with the Travelling Symphony caught in the crosshairs of a dangerous self-proclaimed prophet. Sometimes terrifying, sometimes tender, Station Eleven tells a story about the relationships that sustain us, the ephemeral nature of fame and the beauty of the world as we know it.