Set in the downtown Toronto of the 1980s, these two stories are told with an intricacy which powerfully evokes both sense and dream. An anorexic who embraces poverty after a childhood of privilege attends a small dinner party where she confronts secrets and lies of the past and present. Dominant in his relationships with an Ojibwe wife and a ballet …

Winner of the 1997 Howard O’Hagan Short Fiction Award!

“In the Diamond, at the end of a long green vinyl aisle between two booths of chrome, Naugahyde, and Formica, are two large swinging wooden doors, each with a round hatch of face-sized window. Those kitchen doors can be kicked with such a slap they’re heard all the way up to the soda fount …

Winner, 2011 Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction
Longlisted for the 2013 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
Longlisted for CBC Canada Reads 2016

Swiftly paced, poignantly moving, and beautifully imagined, Niko is the powerful epic story of what it takes to survive after war, of what to hold dear and what to leave behind in a world that won’t …

Winner of the 2016 Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award at the East Coast Literary Awards!
Shortlisted for the Book Design Award at the 2016 Alberta Book Publishing Awards!
Shortlisted for the 2015 New Brunswick Book Awards!

In this collection of stories, author and filmmaker R. W. Gray (Crisp) finds the place where the beautiful, the strange, and …

Jenkins never dreamed he'd live long enough to be dating again. Two years after his wife's death, he's testing the waters and realizing he's still no wiser than a schoolboy. When Jenkins hears his recently widowed high-school sweetheart is in town, he sees a chance to rekindle an old flame. But when her son greets him at the door with a list of rul …

In 1966, Ken Leishman stepped onto the Winnipeg Airport tarmac and into the pages of Canadian history as the mastermind behind the country's largest gold theft. Known as the "flying bandit" or the "gentleman bandit," Leishman had already gained Dillingeresque notoriety as a bank robber when he stole the public's imagination with his last great expl …

The landscape of Prince Edward Island set Lucy Maud Montgomery's imagination on fire. This book explores the places where she grew up and explores the settings of her most famous works of fiction.
Green Gables, once the home of Montgomery's relatives, is now furnished and decorated based on descriptions in her most famous novel. Nearby is the aut …

Poet Alice Major was given a book on relativity at the impressionable age of ten, so she never quite understood why science came to be dismissed as reductive or opposite to art. She surveys the sciences of the past half-century -- from physical to cognitive to evolutionary -- to shed light on why and how human beings create poems, challenging some …

Polyamorous Love Song, a novel of intertwined narratives concerning the relationship between artists and the world. Shot through with unexpected moments of sex and violence, readers will become acquainted with a world that is at once the same and opposite from the one in which they live. With a diverse palette of vivid characters - from people who …

The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches, originally published in French as La Petite Fille qui Aimait Trop les Alumettes, dominated the bestseller lists and captured major media attention when it appeared in Quebec. It was the first novel published in Quebec ever to be nominated -- let alone become a finalist -- for France's prestigious Prix Re …

The latest from Governor General’s Literary Award winner Perrine Leblanc is a mesmerizing story about the disappearance of three young women and a deeply disturbing portrait of a small town gone bad.

In between the mountains and the sea, on the north shore of the Baie des Chaleurs, there’s a village called Malabourg. The village is surrounded by …

Just Fine traces the mishaps and misadventures of a conflicted agoraphobe: a woman psychologically restricted to a life indoors but spiritually inclined to wander the meadows, roads, and community beyond the house and river of her youth.

Her struggle assumes historic proportions when her neighbours dream of their own escapes from the insular, predic …

From the author of the award-winning The Sisters Brothers comes a dark, boozy, and hilarious tale from the LA underworld.

A nameless barman tends a decaying bar in Hollywood and takes notes for a book about his clientele. Initially, he is morbidly amused by watching the regulars roll in and fall into their nightly oblivion, pitying them and their lo …

Last Leaf First Snowflake to Fall takes us on a dreamlike voyage into nature at that secret moment when fall turns into winter. We find ourselves in a kind of paradise, which humans may be part of but which they have not despoiled.

A father and son lead us through forests, down rivers, over lakes and ponds. Along the way we experience the primordia …

Anansi is thrilled to reissue Orphan Love, Nadia Bozak’s critically acclaimed debut — now featuring the first chapter of her second novel, El Niño.

Winter is giving way to spring in Black Dew Seat, a rugged outpost buried in the backwoods of northern Ontario. The year is 1989, and Bozak is on the run, fleeing a buried body and an unthinkable be …

Here is the best of Bill Gaston's stories since the publication of his Giller Prize nominated collection, Mount Appetite (2002). In this extraordinary work, Gaston crafts his fiction around the idea of the gargoyle -- the concrete representation of extremes of human emotions.

In Gaston's marvellous, riotous, Rabelaisian world, Gargoyles are physical …

Helen, alias "Joe," would rather be a boy and have all kinds of adventures like Lady Oscar, her favourite cartoon heroine. She daydreams about living in another time and achieving great things, but she must be content delivering newspapers and working at the bingo hall. After all, she is only eight years old, even though she claims to be ten.

When R …

In Augustino and the Choir of Destrucion literary legend and three-time winner of the Governor General's Literary Award Marie-Claire Blais delivers the third volume in the prize-winning series (These Festive Nights, Thunder and Light, Augustino and the Choir of Destruction, and Rebecca, Born in the Maelstrom) acclaimed as one of the greatest undert …

Girl Runner is the story of Aganetha Smart, a former Olympic athlete who was famous in the 1920s, but now, at age 104, lives in a nursing home, alone and forgotten by history. For Aganetha, a competitive and ambitious woman, her life remains present and unfinished in her mind.

When her quiet life is disturbed by the unexpected arrival of two young s …

Lisa Moore's Alligator gives dramatic birth to a new kind of fiction: North Atlantic Gothic. The story moves with the swiftness of a gator in attack mode through the lives of a group of brilliantly rendered characters in contemporary St. John's, Newfoundland-- a city whose spiritual location is somewhere in the heart of Flannery O'Connor country. I …

In the spirit of Emma Donoghue’s international bestseller Room, Captive throws readers into the mind of a woman who wakes to find herself in a terrifying and surreal situation: she’s confined to a small grey room and she has no idea why she’s there.

Emma has an unremarkable life, a mundane job, and very little contact with her family and frien …

The writer Alain Farah is living in two time periods, and he feels out of place in both. At the opening of his story, we find ourselves at McGill in 1962 and 2012. But the real problem lies elsewhere: on campus, a psychiatrist is conducting dangerous and unethical experiments on his patients. The writer’s uncle, Nab Safi, knows something about it …

From one of Canada’s brightest emerging writers comes an unforgettable tale of love, art, and life. Set in the vividly imagined streets of 1920s Montreal, Serafim and Claire is the beautiful, moving, and compulsively readable story of two dreamers whose worlds become forever connected.

Claire Audette is a dancer whose reputation in the vaudeville …

Winner of the Helen and Stan Vine Jewish Book Award and finalist for the Man Booker Prize

In Far to Go, one of our most accomplished young writers takes us inside the world of an affluent Jewish family in Prague during the lead-up to Hitler's invasion of Czechoslovakia.

In 1939, Pavel and Anneliese Bauer are secular Jews whose lives are turned upside …

From the author of the wildly controversial books Liar and Paul's Case comes one of the most anticipated — and perhaps, in some quarters, feared — books of the year. This is author Lynn Crosbie at her most honest, most cutting, most hilarious, and most heartbreaking. The stories told here are at once a cache, a repository, of a seven-year perio …

Nominated for the BMO Winterset Award and the ReLit Award

From award-winning author Edward Riche comes an immensely readable and sharp novel about "C"-list screenwriter and wannabe vintner Elliot Johnson. With his life growing more ruinous by the day -- his writing career is on the rocks, his struggling vineyard is being investigated by the feds, an …

Inspired by J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, El Niño tracks the survival of one woman and a young, undocumented migrant as they journey through the no-man’s-land of a remote southwestern desert.

Honey hasn’t seen her mother, Marianne, in more than two years. She drives deep into the once-prosperous border region of the Oro Desert for a surprise visi …

Nominated for the Governor General's Literary Award: Translation and the ReLit Awards

As a small child, Askia was forced, along with his family, to wander the African desert as if under a curse. First driven from their home by drought and hunger, they were then kept from the villages they passed through by the fear and suspicion of others, who did n …

The O'Briens follows the family from The Law of Dreams two generations later: Joe O'Brien is coming of age in a new century in remote Pontiac County, Quebec, with his brothers and sisters by his side.

Their father has abandoned the family and died in the South African war; their frail mother has remarried the abusive and lecherous Mick Heaney. Joe a …

A dazzling portrait of twenty-somethings who grew up on text-messaging and the war on terror.

In this robust, elegantly plotted, and ultimately life-affirming novel, Zoe Whittall presents a dazzling portrait of the Millennial Generation — the twenty-five-year olds who grew up on anti-anxiety meds, text-messaging each other truncated emotional reac …

Shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award: Fiction and selected as a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book

Juliet Friesen is ten years old when her family moves to Nicaragua. It is 1984, the height of Nicaragua's post-revolutionary war, and the peace-activist Friesens have come to protest American involvement. In the midst of this tumult, Juliet's …

Longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award: Fiction

Bonus e-book content includes two out-takes from the novel -- how Antonio Garcia got his beautiful horse and how Miguel Orozco became mayor -- and two essays by Robert Hough: the true history of Dr. Brinkley and Robert Hough's decades-long i …

With this astounding fourth novel in her ongoing series of contemporary masterpieces (These Festive Nights, Thunder and Light, Augustino and the Choir of Destruction, and Rebecca, Born in the Maelstrom), Marie-Claire Blais invites us again to enter a complex circle of unforgettable characters. But this time, the tone is different: Blais' writing ha …

Set against the backdrop of Stalinism and then the collapse of the USSR, Kolia is a luminous and unforgettable story about a boy born in a Siberian Gulag and his eventual freedom and life as a clown in the Moscow circus in the 1960s.

Kolia’s life begins in a labour camp in eastern Siberia in 1937. Iosif, a prisoner originally from Western Europe, …

For Sure is among other things a labyrinth, a maze, an exploration of the folly of numbers, a repository, a defense and an illustration of the Chiac language. Written in dazzling prose — which is occasionally interrupted by surprising bits of information, biography, and definitions that appear on the page — Daigle perfectly captures the essence …

Indian summer, 1607. Intrepid explorer and map-maker Samuel de Champlain has founded a new and precarious settlement in Annapolis Royal, New France (present-day Nova Scotia). As winter looms, two threats emerge: boredom amongst the men and the deadly sickness scurvy. Champlain hits upon the idea of a moveable feast -- an order of good cheer -- wher …

Does true love have supernatural power?

Where Did You Sleep Last Night is a love story about a teenage girl who embarks on a relationship with Kurt Cobain.

Evelyn Gray is a sad and lonely sixteen-year-old from Carnation, Washington who is terrorized by her classmates at school. She spends most of her time in her room reading, writing letters to dead …

Featuring a preview of Carrie Snyder’s highly anticipated debut novel, Girl Runner.

Anansi Digital brings you Carrie Snyder’s debut collection, Hair Hat, “a potent work of original imagination.” (Edmonton Journal)

In these mysterious and wondrous stories, eleven disparate people — some of them related, some of them neighbours, glancing acqu …

The companion volume to the recently reissued Second Words, Moving Targets is an essential collection of critical prose by Margaret Atwood, now available in a handsome new A List edition.

The most precious treasure of this collection is that it gives us the rich back-story and diverse range of influences on Margaret Atwood’s work. From the aunts …

The A List edition of Michael Winter’s brilliant fictional memoir, This All Happened depicts one man’s descent from love to fury over a calendar year. Featuring an introduction by Lisa Moore.

In this journal-a-clef, we are exposed to the kernel of truth that exists in each day. Told from the viewpoint of Gabriel English, This All Happened opens …

Longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Selected as an Amazon.ca Best Book.

October 1970. Two kidnappings. One dead. A crisis unlike anything the country had ever seen — here is the story behind history…

Thirty years after the October Crisis, Sam Nihilo, a freelance writer whose career is in a slump, is drawn to the conspiracy theories that h …

The Good Body is a triumphant blend of mordant humour and heartbreak. It tells the comic and poignant story of a retired pro-hockey ruffian named Bobby Bonaduce who is stubbornly ignoring a disease - multiple sclerosis - that may be killing him. Bobby returns to his hometown and scams his way into university in a misguided attempt to redeem his mes …

Against his will and his nature, the hulking Gordon Rankin ("Rank") is cast as an enforcer, a goon -- by his classmates, his hockey coaches, and especially his own "tiny, angry" father, Gordon Senior.

Rank gamely lives up to his role -- until tragedy strikes, using Rank as its blunt instrument. Escaping the only way he can, Rank disappears. But almo …

Balancing wisdom and innocence, joy and foreboding, Sheila Heti’s completely original stories lead you to surprising places. This edition featuring nine new stories.

A frog doles out sage advice to a plumber infatuated with a princess, a boy falls hopelessly in love with a monkey, and a man with a hat keeps apocalyptic thoughts at bay by resolving …

The Sisters Brothers meets Master and Commander in Robert Hough’s rollicking and raucous new historical novel.

The year is 1664, and Benny Wand, a young thief and board game hustler, is arrested in London for illegal gaming. Deported to the city of Port Royal, Jamaica, known as “the wickedest city on earth,” Wand is forced by his depleted circ …

Winner of the Governor General's Award for Fiction, the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, the Prix des libraires du Quebec and the Stephen Leacock Medal. Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the Walter Scott Prize.

Hermann Kermit Warm is going to die: Eli and Charlie Sisters can be counted on for that. Though Eli …

A classic of Canadian literature by the great Quebecoise writer, Kamouraska is based on a real nineteenth-century love-triangle in rural Quebec. It paints a poetic and terrifying tableau of the life of Elisabeth d'Aulnieres: her marriage to Antoine Tassy, squire of Kamouraska; his violent murder; and her passion for George Nelson, an American docto …

Exclusively available from Anansi Digital, Communion is one of the lost, great works by a Canadian literary titan.

Originally published in 1971, Communion continues the story of Felix Oswald that began in Five Legs. We meet Felix Oswald again, a self-mocking and obsessed hero, a voyeur, and all-time loser, after he graduates from school and accepts …

Fifty writers on life, art and writing from twenty-two years of Brick, A Literary Journal.

Founded in 1977, Brick, A Literary Journal features a great many of the world’s best-loved writers, and has readers in every corner of the planet. The magazine prizes the personal voice and celebrates opinion, passion, revelation, and the occasional bad joke …

In the spirit of Amy Tan’s international bestselling novel The Joy Luck Club, Mirrors and Mirages is an intricately woven, deftly told story that follows the lives of women and their daughters.

In Mirrors and Mirages, Monia Mazigh lets us into the lives of six women. They are immigrant mothers — Emma, Samia, and Fauzia — guardians of tradition …