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The Bibliophile: Welcome to work but not to remain

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An introduction to Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers by Marcello Di Cintio

In Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers, which publishes next Tuesday, Marcello Di Cintio travels across Canada (from the Okanagan, to Leamington, to Goose Bay, Newfoundland) to document the experiences of migrant workers, destabilizing the popular notion of Canada as a safe, welcoming space where migrants can escape the hardships of their home countries.

Contrarily, Di Cintio highlights a recent UN report that describes the Temporary Foreign Worker Program as a “breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery.”

Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers by Marcello Di Cintio. Cover designed by Kate Sinclair.

There was so much I didn’t know about migrant policy and programs, about the prevalent unsafe housing, constant harassment, and unstable pay experienced by the workers every day. Or I knew about some of it, but only vaguely, at the back of my mind, the way I imagine millions of Canadians “know” about these issues. Precarious is filled with many of the harrowing, chaotic stories of precarity that make up the modern migrant experience in Canada. In a time of heightened, near-propagandistic Canadian patriotism, Precarious feels like such an important book to recalibrate our sense of identity, and our sense of what can be done to improve, rather than abolish, migrant labour in Canada.

I recommend taking the time to read Di Cintio’s beautifully angry op-ed in today’s Globe and Mail, which he writes in response to Poilievre’s call to scrap the TFWP and deny visas to new migrants:

“I wonder . . . how many see the irony of being lectured about the ills of foreign labour by a recently unemployed man from 2,600 kilometres away—about as far from the riding as Chihuahua, Mexico—who showed up to take the job of a local resident.”

And I hope you’ll find the time to read the following excerpt from Precarious—taken from the introduction—which lays the groundwork for the book by pulling from Di Cintio’s familial experiences of migrant labour, and how these differ drastically from more recent experiences uncovered in later chapters.

Dominique
Publicity & Marketing Coordinator

An excerpt from Precarious

Introduction

My grandfather was a migrant worker before such a thing existed.

Amedeo Sorrentino was born in 1923 and hardly a man when Mussolini forced him into the Italian infantry. In my favourite photo of him, he is wearing his army uniform and holding a cigarette between his fingers. My grandfather never smoked, but the photographer told him the cigarette would make him look older. After the photo was taken, the army shipped Amedeo across the sea to North Africa, handed him a rifle, and sent him out into the desert. British soldiers quickly decimated his regiment, and Amedeo was taken prisoner. He spent the rest of the war in a London POW camp.

After the war, Amedeo returned to his hometown of Lanciano and learned that his mother had died. Shrapnel from a grenade struck her in the back and killed her instantly as she sat in the village square with Amedeo’s youngest brother on her lap. My grandfather never hesitated to retell his war stories, and they were harrowing, but he didn’t like talking about what his family endured during those years. “The real war was back home,” he’d say before growing quiet.

My grandfather met my grandmother, Giulia, a few years later. Amedeo was not the first suitor to come calling. There were “lots of boys to choose from,” she once told me. One was a police officer, but policemen were not allowed to marry until they were thirty, and Giulia didn’t want to marry an “old man.” She chose Amedeo because he was the only one to make her laugh. Their courtship involved walking back from church together with family chaperones following a few paces behind them.

An interview with Marcello Di Cintio in the Calgary Herald.

Because they were both poor, Giulia and Amedeo waited until after Easter to announce their engagement so they wouldn’t have to give holiday gifts to each other’s families. Giulia’s mother, Guiseppina, did not approve of the engagement. “Why do you want to marry someone poorer than you are?” she asked her eldest daughter. They married on a rainy day in 1948 after their borrowed car got stuck in the mud and had to be pulled free by an ox. The family ate the wedding dinner in Giulia’s parents’ bedroom, the largest room in the house. Afterwards one of Amedeo’s friends set off firecrackers he made from unexploded artillery shells he’d found in the fields.

Amedeo vowed never to leave home again. He’d found happiness with Giulia and wanted to raise a family with her in the country that he loved. Their first daughter, my mother, was born later that year, then two more girls in the years that followed. Amedeo toiled as a tenant tobacco farmer to support them. The landowner allowed Amedeo to keep and sell only half of the harvest. With no sons, Amedeo did most of the labour himself. He found extra work at his uncle Nicola’s olive oil press. Though Amedeo had little education—he’d reached only the fifth grade before leaving school—he was good with numbers and did his uncle’s accounting.

For all his love of Italy and his promise to never leave it, Amedeo knew he could never properly provide for his family by working on someone else’s farm. Men were leaving Italy every day to find work abroad, and Giulia persuaded Amedeo to follow his sister and brother-in-law to Canada, at least for a couple of years. Amedeo obliged and set off in 1956. He sent back a photo of himself waving from the deck of the Canada-bound ship. A note on the back written in black ink read: “As soon as I lifted my hand, my first thought was of returning soon to my family, and to my beautiful Italy.”

Before World War II and the Great Depression preceding it, most immigrant workers to Canada came to develop the agricultural economy of the Prairies. After the war, though, Canada’s booming industrial economy needed urban workers: people to build things, not just grow things. Many Italians ended up on construction sites in cities like Toronto, Montreal, and in my grandfather’s case, Calgary. Amedeo poured concrete during the day and tended to greenhouses at night. Years later, my grandfather would look out at the Calgary skyline and point to the buildings he helped build, including Foothills Hospital where I was born.

With the money Amedeo sent back to Italy, Giulia was able to buy a bicycle for her daughters and a record player for herself. One day, a vinyl record appeared in the mail from Canada: a recording of his cousins singing songs in a small Calgary studio. Amedeo was on the album, too. He had recorded a message for his wife and daughters, telling them that he loved and missed them. There were no telephones in Lanciano at that time, and this was the first Giulia had heard her husband’s voice in over a year. The arrival of the record was both a blessing and a tragedy. For all the marvellous joy it brought to hear Amedeo’s voice, the record reminded everyone that he was far away.

My grandfather didn’t want to stay in Canada. He wanted to save enough money to build a better life for his wife and daughters back home. Maybe buy some land and a bigger house. He wanted to be temporary. After two years, though, he and Giulia decided that it would be better for the family to live in Canada than to reunite back in Italy. Nonno resisted, but Nonna was stubborn. With the money Amedeo had sent them, Giulia and their daughters boarded the RMS Saxonia for the long, seasick journey west. The girls insisted on bringing their new bicycle with them. It lasted for decades, and I used to ride it around my grandparents’ neighbourhood when I was a child. Nonna left the behind the album that brought so much happiness for the family with Amedeo’s sister, Ersiglia. When Amedeo and Giulia returned to visit Italy years later and inquired about the album, Ersiglia claimed the mice ate it.

I doubt Amedeo and Giulia knew the role their whiteness played in their journey to Canada. The entry of non-white immigrants was restricted until 1962 when the federal government expunged overt racial discrimination from our immigration policy. Even afterwards, though, bigotry proved a tough habit to break. Anyone from anywhere was now permitted into the country as long as they demonstrated they could succeed here, but preference was given to people from Europe. And only Canadians from the United States and certain European and Middle Eastern nations could sponsor the immigration of their siblings. In the early sixties, my grandfather sponsored his sister and two brothers to come to Canada, a privilege he wouldn’t have enjoyed had he been Black or Asian.

My nonno died in July 2020 during the first fraught COVID summer. He’d been living in an extended-care facility since a stroke felled him a couple of years earlier. Nonno received initial treatment at the Foothills Hospital, and during a particularly painful injection quipped to my mother, “I never should’ve helped build this place.”

Due to the pandemic restrictions, fewer than fifty invited family members, masked and distanced, attended his funeral mass. When I stood at the front of the church to give his eulogy and looked out at the sparse attendees, I knew that the church would have overflowed with mourners had Nonno passed even a few months earlier. My grandfather was one of the first links in an immigration chain that brought dozens of families to Calgary. No doubt hundreds of the city’s Italians can trace their history back to my grandfather’s reluctant passage across the Atlantic.

Circumstances have changed for workers from abroad since then. Even though my grandfather came to work and never intended to stay, Canada granted him landed immigrant status upon his arrival. He had a choice to immigrate or not. Had my grandfather made the same journey even a decade later, he’d likely be considered a “temporary foreign worker”: welcome to work but not to remain. A labourer, yes. Not a link.

Marcello’s recent op-ed in the Globe and Mail.

Nonno’s passing made me think of his contemporary counterparts. My grandfather only wanted the best for his daughters, and he was willing to sacrifice years away from them for the opportunities Canada would eventually provide. No doubt today’s migrant workers make the same bargain. But what does it mean to voyage far from family to a nation that wants you to work but doesn’t want you to stay? Bring your arms and backs, Canada pleads, but leave the rest on the other side of the border. We need your sweat. We don’t need your stories.

But I did. After my grandfather died, I set out to hear the stories of migrant workers in Canada. I knew nothing about these newcomers. I wondered about their days in our country, the lives and loved ones they left behind, and what compelled them to first make their long journeys here. I wondered, too, if they believed their time in Canada made up for their sacrifices and absences. Was our country worth it?

I spent the following three years travelling the country to meet workers and their advocates, pausing my wanderings for intermittent pandemic shutdowns and travel restrictions. I quickly learned that my image of a migrant worker was sorely limited. I thought I’d be spending all my time speaking to Latino farmhands and Filipina “nannies.” But I found that migrant labour exists within all aspects of Canadian society. Temporary workers are everywhere. They build our homes, drive our trucks, clean our offices, and pour our coffee. Many of Canada’s post-secondary institutions are propped up with the foreign tuition paid by international students who, most of the time, are also migrant workers. The complexity overwhelmed me at times. The more people I spoke to, the more threads emerged. I wish I could have followed them all, but the diverse workers I did manage to speak to expanded my perspective of what migrant labour encompassed.

For the most part, I heard the kinds of stories I expected to hear. I learned about how calamities back home—a sick child, a dying wife, a hurricane—compelled people from around the world to seek financial opportunities here. I heard stories of redemption, reinvention, and romance. I learned about workers sending their overseas families gifts of maple syrup and Toronto Maple Leafs caps to stand in for the physical embraces their long separation denies them. I smiled at the baby photos on their cellphones. I cheered workers on soccer fields and watched the dance videos they recorded in their greenhouses. I heard about lovers the workers had left back home, and the lovers they found here.

What I didn’t expect, though, was how often Canada itself was the source of the migrants’ trauma. Despite the sufferings many workers escaped, a sea of troubles awaited them here. Nearly every worker I spoke to had been done wrong. Cheated. Threatened. Beaten. The abuse nearly always came at the hands of my fellow citizens. I realized I wasn’t just looking into the lives of workers who’d long been invisible to me; I was seeing a Canada I didn’t recognize. The more I learned the migrants’ stories, the more I learned our own. And the portrait of Canada I started to see wasn’t flattering.

In awards news:

In good publicity news:

  • Marcello Di Cintio, author of Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers was featured in several outlets this week:
    • Interview in the Calgary Herald: “What started off being a book about other people, about these workers, really also became at the same time a book about us, a book about how Canada has treated these people . . . I feel I’ve written an unpatriotic book in a very patriotic time.”
    • Op-ed in the Globe and Mail: “For a half century, TFWs have recounted stories of filthy and crowded bunkhouses, unsafe working conditions, wage theft, humiliation, physical and sexual assault, and all manner of cruelty. I heard many of these stories first-hand. Penalties for these crimes are too soft and too rare. Victims have little recourse.”
  • Old Romantics by Maggie Armstrong was reviewed in Heavy Feather Review: “Brilliantly oscillates between a focus on the inner world of a flawed woman’s personal journey through the land of modern romance and a spitting commentary on what it even means to be a wife, mother, and woman in the 21st century.”
  • Best Canadian Poetry 2026 edited by Mary Dalton was reviewed in the Washington Review of Books: “Reading Dalton, one really gets the sense that there was a poetic process enacting the selection process . . . I thank [Molly] Peacock for bringing the series to life, and [Anita] Lahey and Biblioasis for keeping it alive.”
  • Self Care by Russell Smith was reviewed in That Shakespearean Review: “You can always count on Russell Smith for a straightforward technique that hits you in the solar plexus.”
  • We’re Somewhere Else Now by Robyn Sarah was reviewed in The Tribune: “This collection grapples with contemporary life in a way that is both stylized and vulnerable . . . Sarah’s ability to tie scenes of everyday life to highly abstract concepts and ideas results in compelling poems.”

CROSSES IN THE SKY shortlisted for the J.W. Dafoe Book Prize!

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We’re thrilled to share that on September 25, 2025, the shortlist for the 2025 J.W. Dafoe Book Prize was announced, and included Crosses in the Sky: Jean de Brébeuf and the Destruction of Huronia by Mark Bourrie! View the full shortlist and announcement on their website here.

The winner of the J.W. Dafoe Book Prize, valued at $12,000, will be announced on October 14.

The J.W. Dafoe Prize memorializes Canadian editor John Wesley Dafoe, and is one of the richest book awards for exceptional non-fiction about Canada, Canadians, and the nation in international affairs.

A huge congratulations to Mark from all of us at Biblioasis.

Grab a copy of the book here!

ABOUT CROSSES IN THE SKY

From the bestselling author of Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre Esprit-Radisson

This is the story of the collision of two worlds. In the early 1600s, the Jesuits—the Catholic Church’s most ferocious warriors for Christ—tried to create their own nation on the Great Lakes and turn the Huron (Wendat) Confederacy into a model Jesuit state. At the centre of their campaign was missionary Jean de Brébeuf, a mystic who sought to die a martyr’s death. He lived among a proud people who valued kindness and rights for all, especially women. In the end, Huronia was destroyed. Brébeuf became a Catholic saint, and the Jesuit’s “martyrdom” became one of the founding myths of Canada.

In this first secular biography of Brébeuf, historian Mark Bourrie, bestselling author of Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson, recounts the missionary’s fascinating life and tells the tragic story of the remarkable people he lived among. Drawing on the letters and documents of the time—including Brébeuf’s accounts of his bizarre spirituality—and modern studies of the Jesuits, Bourrie shows how Huron leaders tried to navigate this new world and the people struggled to cope as their nation came apart. Riveting, clearly told, and deeply researched, Crosses in the Sky is an essential addition to—and expansion of—Canadian history.

ABOUT MARK BOURRIE

Mark Bourrie is an Ottawa-based author, lawyer, and journalist. He holds a master’s in journalism from Carleton University and a PhD in history from the University of Ottawa. In 2017, he was awarded a Juris Doctor degree and was called to the bar in 2018. He has won numerous awards for his journalism, including a National Magazine Award, and received the RBC Charles Taylor Prize in 2020 for his book Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson. His most recent books include Big Men Fear Me: The Fast Life and Quick Death of Canada’s Most Powerful Media Mogul, the national bestseller Crosses in the Sky: Jean de Brébeuf and the Destruction of Huronia, and Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre.

CROSSES IN THE SKY longlisted for the J.W. Dafoe Book Prize

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We’re excited to share that on September 2, 2025, the longlist for the 2025 J.W. Dafoe Book Prize was announced, and included Crosses in the Sky: Jean de Brébeuf and the Destruction of Huronia by Mark Bourrie! View the full longlist and announcement on their website here.

The shortlist will be announced on September 25, and the winner of the J.W. Dafoe Book Prize, valued at $12,000, will be named on October 14.

The J.W. Dafoe Prize memorializes Canadian editor John Wesley Dafoe, and is one of the richest book awards for exceptional non-fiction about Canada, Canadians, and the nation in international affairs.

Congratulations to Mark from all of us at Biblioasis.

Grab a copy of the book here!

ABOUT CROSSES IN THE SKY

From the bestselling author of Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre Esprit-Radisson

This is the story of the collision of two worlds. In the early 1600s, the Jesuits—the Catholic Church’s most ferocious warriors for Christ—tried to create their own nation on the Great Lakes and turn the Huron (Wendat) Confederacy into a model Jesuit state. At the centre of their campaign was missionary Jean de Brébeuf, a mystic who sought to die a martyr’s death. He lived among a proud people who valued kindness and rights for all, especially women. In the end, Huronia was destroyed. Brébeuf became a Catholic saint, and the Jesuit’s “martyrdom” became one of the founding myths of Canada.

In this first secular biography of Brébeuf, historian Mark Bourrie, bestselling author of Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson, recounts the missionary’s fascinating life and tells the tragic story of the remarkable people he lived among. Drawing on the letters and documents of the time—including Brébeuf’s accounts of his bizarre spirituality—and modern studies of the Jesuits, Bourrie shows how Huron leaders tried to navigate this new world and the people struggled to cope as their nation came apart. Riveting, clearly told, and deeply researched, Crosses in the Sky is an essential addition to—and expansion of—Canadian history.

ABOUT MARK BOURRIE

Mark Bourrie is an Ottawa-based author, lawyer, and journalist. He holds a master’s in journalism from Carleton University and a PhD in history from the University of Ottawa. In 2017, he was awarded a Juris Doctor degree and was called to the bar in 2018. He has won numerous awards for his journalism, including a National Magazine Award, and received the RBC Charles Taylor Prize in 2020 for his book Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson. His most recent books include Big Men Fear Me: The Fast Life and Quick Death of Canada’s Most Powerful Media Mogul, the national bestseller Crosses in the Sky: Jean de Brébeuf and the Destruction of Huronia, and Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre.

The Bibliophile: The ghost in the machine

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Want to get new excerpts, musings, and more from The Bibliophile right away? Sign up for our weekly online newsletter here!

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It surprised me that the most riveting book I’ve read this year is on a topic I knew nothing about and didn’t think I would care to know much about anyway. But Don Gillmor hooked me. That won’t surprise anyone who has read him before. In On Oil, Gillmor, a journalist and former roughneck, takes us through the rise and fall of the oil industry. He had a front row seat to Alberta’s oil boom in the ’70s while working on the oil rigs and he uses that perspective to show how it transformed the province and the wide-ranging influence oil has had across the world. It has given some countries immense wealth and power. It has also corrupted governments, started wars, and worsened our environment.

Photo: On Oil by Don Gillmor. Designed by Ingrid Paulson.

Reading this book I learned that one of the first oil companies was started by a devout Baptist and some of the biggest oil companies were run by Christian evangelicals, which aided in building the mythology of oil as the key to a kingdom on earth. And now, as Gillmor says, “we find ourselves in a landscape that looks increasingly like the Book of Revelation. ‘A third of the earth was burnt up, and a third of the trees were burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up.’”

Please enjoy this short excerpt from On Oil, which will be released on April 22.

Ahmed Abdalla,
Publicist

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Babylon

In boardrooms in Houston, Calgary, Kuwait, and a dozen other oil capitals, and on the floor of the New York and Chicago Mercantile Exchanges, oil was a global chess game where commodity futures were sold and bartered, oil shipped and traded. Millions of barrels lurched across the globe each day, traders hunched over streaming charts, puzzling over contracts for difference. Over the years, oil has won wars, started others, been a force for nationalism and colonization, and provided a stubborn mythology. It is the one true global religion. A glimpse of oil’s reach can be seen in America’s oil industry. Under Joe Biden, it produced 13.3 million barrels per day, enough to meet the US’s own needs. But in 2023 it imported 8.51 million barrels per day (bpd) from dozens of countries, and exported 10.15 million bpd to 173 countries. The oil network envelops the world in a complex web of shipping and refining capacity and capability, depending on cost-effectiveness and the grade of oil. Part of this is economic; it can be cheaper to import from countries with lower labour and capital costs and fewer environmental regulations. And part of it is chemistry; the heavy, sour (high sulphur content) oil that the US was importing from Venezuela and Mexico when it still needed to import oil requires a specific kind of refinery. Some of the refineries on the Gulf coast are equipped to process that oil (along with Canadian bitumen), as opposed to the light, sweet oil that Texas produces. Refineries take years to build and are expensive—between US$5 and 15 billion. With the exception of a small North Dakota refinery that came online in 2020, no US refineries have been built since 1976. Past the economics and chemistry, there are the geopolitics. Countries (Russia, Saudi Arabia, the US) sell oil at advantageous prices to other countries to gain influence and status. It is the world’s most pervasive diplomatic tool.

Photo: We’re hiring a new sales coordinator! See our website for more details.

Canada’s oil landscape is equally byzantine. Canadian pipelines tend to run south rather than east, so Ontario and Quebec get their oil from an evolving patchwork of sources that shifts depending on economics and politics. Since 1988, eastern Canada has imported more than $500 billion in foreign oil, coming from the US, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Nigeria, Norway, and others. The landscape can shift quickly. In 2012, Quebec got 92 percent of its oil from Kazakhstan, Angola, and Algeria, and just 1 percent from Alberta. Five years later, it was getting 44 percent of its oil from Alberta, the result of Enbridge’s Line 9 pipeline.

It binds us all. Oil has a pulse, it evolves and migrates, transforming cities and governments, entire countries. It fuelled economic growth and triggered recessions and gave us the romance of the open road. But at its source, in Texas and Oklahoma and Louisiana and in camps in the Arctic, and outside Medicine Hat, it was men trudging onto the drilling floor, labouring in the heat or cold amid a symphony of engine noise, wrestling with drill pipe, spinning chains, tongs and slips, the kelly hose bobbing above them as they punched another hole in the earth. Even for us, oil remained an abstraction. I never saw it; there were no dramatic gushers, black oil spewing from the earth, coating everything. It powered our cars and homes and was used in the manufacture of a thousand products, from plastics to fertilizers to Aspirin. It powered our lives: We are Hydrocarbon Man, Homo Oleum. Yet it remains unseen, the ghost in the machine.

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After graduating from university, I worked on an oil rig for a hundred straight days, with what was probably the oldest crew in the oil patch, weathered, gnarled men in their late sixties, one in his seventies, ancient for rig work, their lives a country and western song. Pete, the wobbly seventy-two-year-old derrickman, came home to find his wife gone, along with all the furniture, appliances, and curtains. There was a note on the floor: “Your dinner’s in the oven.” There was no oven. The driller was a ropy-muscled troll who had worked on the killing floor of a meat-packing plant but quit finally, saying it took too much of you, all that death. My fellow roughneck was a farmer whose modest crop had been lost to drought. He was in his late sixties, with a deeply lined face, a face that could hold a spring rain, as my grandmother might have said. Between connections he would roll a cigarette and walk to the edge of the lease and smoke and stare at the horizon.

Photo: Check out Don Gillmor’s new feature in Maclean’s.

I went up in the derrick when Pete was drunk or too hungover to climb the thirty metres onto his perch. We were south of Calgary and I was ten storeys off the ground, a view of the Rockies to the west and limitless prairie to the east, farms and ranches laid out like a Mondrian painting, a glorious solitude.

With my first paycheque I bought a plane ticket to Europe, then counted the days like a convict. Four months later, I was sitting on a beach on the Greek island of Crete, blobs of sticky oil dotting the sand around me. A tanker carrying crude oil from Libya had run aground off the south coast of Crete and here was the residue. Only two months earlier, the Amoco Cadiz had split apart off the Brittany coast in France, spilling 230,000 tonnes of oil, at that point the largest spill in history. Twenty thousand birds were killed and millions of sea creatures. Two months after the spill, six thousand French soldiers were still cleaning up the coastline.

The 1970s was a banner decade for oil tanker spills. More happened in that decade than any decade before or since. It was peak spill, with an alarming 788 of them (by contrast, the 2010s saw 63 spills). Millions of tonnes spilled into the seas. The world was awash in oil.

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In good publicity news:

  • Don Gillmor, author of On Oil, was interviewed on TVO’s The Agenda, and wrote the article “Why Trump Needs Canadian Oil” for Maclean’s.
  • Ripper was mentioned in The Hill Times: “A bracing reminder of some of the reputations Poilievre has ruined, the malicious fictions he has promoted, [and] the tiresome slogans he stitches into every utterance.” Mark Bourrie was also featured in Vancouver CityNews’s Bookshelf.
  • Question Authority by Mark Kingwell was reviewed in the New York Journal of Books: “A master of words . . . [Kingwell] writes with deep affection and hope for humanity and openly shares his darkest and brightest moments along life’s bumpy road.”
  • A few of our titles appear in the Literary Review of Canada’s May 2025 issue:
    • Review of On Book Banning by Ira Wells: “Persuasively explains how book banning reduces and devalues art and how it constitutes an attack on intellectual autonomy and on ‘your right to determine the future of your own mind.’”
    • Review of Baldwin, Styron, and Me by Mélikah Abdelmoumen (trans. Catherine Khordoc): “Demonstrates the good faith conversations being held within a cultural scene that is both local and transnational in its outlook.”
    • Review of UNMET by stephanie roberts: “With a resolute inward stare, Roberts reveals the cumulative nature of life.”

The Bibliophile: 2025 Staff Picks

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In which! The crew of the good ship Biblio sails into the new year with a preview of some of their most anticipated 2025 titles. (Yes, we made them choose. No, they didn’t like it.)

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Vanessa’s Picks

 

Cover design by Kate Sinclair.

Dark Like Under by Alice Chadwick

My new year’s resolution was to not complain about having to choose from among our books, and so I guess that’s all I’m allowed to say about that. Instead I’ll say how excited I am that we’ll be sharing Alice Chadwick’s debut with you. It’s a circadian novel, set over the course of a single day in the 1980s, and it follows a large cast of characters at an elite secondary school in a rural English town as they grapple with the surprising death of a beloved member of the faculty. It’s a book about resilience and connection, systems and resistance, renewal and what we leave behind, and a work of great poetic insight, keenly sensitive to paradox: that the old ways oppress while the ancient can illuminate, that the pastoral can be claustrophobic as well as restorative, that time is both a line and a circle. The form itself works into and against the conventions of Western narrative, the Western mind: in following the hours of the clock, around which human action revolves, we are reminded that although the earth turns circles inside of circles, somehow we still believe we travel a straight line, even in spite of having watched the hands sweep around and around. It’s the kind of fiction, and vision, that is for me the antidote to the disaffected irony and fashionable despair of a great deal of contemporary fiction, a book that risks all those old-fashioned ideas: generosity, forgiveness, love—even hope.

Cover design by Ingrid Paulson.

On Oil (Field Notes #10) by Don Gillmor

If you’d told me a year ago that I would spend a late afternoon inhaling a nonfiction book about the history and culture of oil in North America, stopping only because it was time for dinner and picking it back up to finish as soon as the dishes were done, I’d have been, admittedly, surprised. But if you’d told me Don Gillmor was the author, I wouldn’t have argued. Gillmor, a novelist, memoirist, historian, children’s author, journalist, and, it turns out, former roughneck, can do just about anything. In On Oil, Gillmor draws on the latter two professions to chart the rise and imminent fall of the oil industry, beginning with firsthand experience on oil rigs during the seventies oil boom in Alberta and traveling across the continent and then the globe to show the complex and maddening means by which oil has captured government interests and profoundly impacted—for better, and more often for worse—life on Planet Earth. The picture, I found out, is both more and less grim than one might think, but I’ve always been with Francis Bacon on difficult truths: knowledge is power.

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Ahmed’s Picks

 

Cover design by Zoe Norvell.

The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana

This was the first book I read as an official Biblioasis employee and I was floored. It was the prose that first did it, beautifully tense, controlled, electric. And then the questions this novel raises—about masculinity, violence, personal responsibility—all lingered in my mind for weeks after. We follow two young men who hit the road with no real plan other than to get away from their lives and their town. But, moment by moment, we see how they become more and more violent, until they cross a line from which they can never return. It’s all a game to them and it makes you wonder if we could ever learn anything from those who commit such violent acts. There are no neat and tidy answers, but I think that’s what’ll keep me coming back to this book. It’s a tragic story that stays with you because it insists we don’t look away anymore.

Cover design by Ingrid Paulson.

On Book Banning (Field Notes #9) by Ira Wells

The increase in book bans across the country is startling and alarming. Some people want to ban books with LGBTQ+ characters because they think those books are indoctrinating their children. And some people want to ban classics and important contemporary works because they contain language deemed offensive today. I wonder what books will be left on the shelf. Probably bland ones. With the forces of censorship seemingly getting stronger, I’m really grateful for what Wells does in this short book. It’s both a history lesson and passionate defense for the right to read. From ancient to recent cases, Wells walks us through the history of censorship and shows how and why book bans are making a comeback. On Book Banning is an excellent distillation of how we treat books today and how book bans are connected to the need to control others. It’s a useful reminder of why the freedom to read is crucial and what we lose when it is taken away. A very important read today and, I think, for the years to come.

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Dominique’s Picks

 

Cover design by Ingrid Paulson.

Baldwin, Styron, and Me by Mélikah Abdelmoumen, translated from the French by Catherine Khordoc

I read Baldwin, Styron, and Me in two sittings; the book’s hybrid form is addictive—it’s at once a memoir of Québecois identity, a literary history of the friendship between James Baldwin and William Styron, and a thoughtful critique of race, cultural appropriation, and the possibility for meaningful disagreement and debate. Abdelmoumen is a champion of resisting certainty, and her commitment to this is refreshing and inspiring (and important as we enter the increasingly politically-fraught new year).

Cover design by Ingrid Paulson.

UNMET by stephanie roberts

I’ve already read this collection a few times, and it’s impressive. roberts’ poems lean against surrealism without losing their humanity, their creatureness, their affinity for the real. And these sentences are just so pleasurable to read: they sinew and worm into a world-expanding illogic. I’ll be reading her first collection, rushes from the river of disappointment, soon. I’m thrilled UNMET is making its way into the world next year; I think roberts is one of Canada’s best, most original voices.

Cover design by Ingrid Paulson.

Dust: More Lives of the Poets (with Guitars) by Ray Robertson

I love reading about music almost as much as listening to it. And Robertson writes from a loving, considerate space that avoids the hyper-analytical, that instead creates a kind of music to live alongside the music. I can tell from this book’s setlist (Alex Chilton, Captain Beefheart, Muddy Waters, etc.) and from his previous Lives of the Poets (which includes some truly beautiful pieces on Gram Parsons and Townes Van Zandt), that this book will be a fount of joy and discovery for me in the new year.

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Ashley’s Picks

 

Cover design by Natalie Olsen.

Heaven and Hell by Jón Kalman Stefánsson, translated from the Icelandic by Philip Roughton

Your Absence Is Darkness was one of my favourite reads of last year, so I was quite pleased to find out that we’re not only publishing more of Stefánsson’s work, but a full trilogy is on the way. Heaven and Hell is a brilliant start to The Trilogy About the Boy, with everything I loved from Your Absence returning here, in perhaps what some might find a more accessible introduction to his writing (translated in excellent form by Philip Roughton). Stefánsson has this way of describing the world—from the way two distant lovers look up at the same moon, to the chill of a stormy ocean soaking a man to the bone, to the slow loss of sight—that really strikes a reader, and makes me consider things in a different way. It’s poetic and straightforward, and complements the emotions woven through the story, of the boy’s struggle with life or death, and the ways in which he connects with the people around him and remembers those who have passed. I look forward to reading more of this journey.

Cover design by Ingrid Paulson.

Sacred Rage: Selected Stories by Steven Heighton

I first learned of this forthcoming collection of the late Steven Heighton’s stories in the form of a handwritten table-of-contents, passed along from editor John Metcalf, to our publisher Dan, and then along to me—for compilation. Consequently, I’ve gotten to know this collection quite well already, having spent the last few months gradually acquiring, scanning, and cleaning up the converted text of a majority of these stories from older editions without available digital files. Heighton takes his readers across the world, from the back kitchen of a chicken restaurant to an onsen in Japan. Reading a collection in bits and pieces, before it’s been neatly woven together in order and packaged in its usual final book form, is a strange but exciting experience; I can say I’ve read Sacred Rage already in one sense, but what I’m looking forward to most is the day we receive our printed copies in-office, so I can finally sit down and enjoy these brilliantly written short stories—without the need to hunt for missing characters and lost italicizations—and be properly reintroduced to Heighton’s best works.

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Emily’s Picks

 

Cover design by Natalie Olsen.

Near Distance by Hanna Stoltenberg, translated from the Norwegian by Wendy Harrison Gabrielson

I’m not a reader who is typically drawn to a domestic drama or narrative centered around motherhood. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve read plenty of amazing literary books about just these things—but they’re rarely a narrative I find myself naturally delighting in. I was surprised and delighted as soon as I opened Near Distance by Hanna Stoltenberg (trans. Wendy Harrison Gabrielson). Taut and sparse, it’s the story of a mother (Karin) who has largely opted out of her daughter’s (Helene) life. When Helene asks Karin to travel with her to London, the result is an emotionally tense and very uneasy road trip story. It’s cold, sparse, and elegant, and made me chuckle darkly several times. What luck to start 2025 with such a beautiful and understated bang—Near Distance would have been a one sitting read for me had life not interrupted.

Cover design by Fiachra McCarthy.

Old Romantics by Maggie Armstrong

If you read our holiday Bibliophile, you may remember I’m a short story superfan. I won’t wax poetic about the form again, but you need to know that Old Romantics is a remarkably good story collection made even more remarkable by the fact that it’s debut. From the very first story, Maggie Armstrong made me laugh out loud in recognition (I mean we’ve all either been someone or known someone whose terrible boyfriend wouldn’t even chip in for a slice of pizza, right?) Witty and wry, the stories offer a distinctly literary and nuanced take on the popular “sad girl” genre. As I read through, I recognized shades of Fleabag and Halle Butler in the character variations. And impressively, while the stories stand alone taken together they are “a novel in stories” about an artist’s growth and maturity. Every character’s name is an alternative form of “Maggie,” and the reader gets the sense they’re watching the author grapple with Irish patriarchy and history in real time. When you pick up Old Romantics you’re not only picking up a very good book—you get to enjoy the next great voice in Irish literature.

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Dan’s Picks

 

Cover design by Ingrid Paulson.

I’m no more able to tell you what my favourite books for 2025 will be than I was able to declare my favourites from the past year. This is complicated further by the fact that the 2025 list is still taking shape. We’re still reading in the hopes of locating an international title or two for fall, and there are a handful of Canadian titles that may or may not be ready in time for the latter part of the 2025 season. And we have at least one title that we’re not in a position to announce anything about quite yet, though I promise it will stir things up something fierce.

What I can promise is a list that rivals all others before it, brimming with exceptional works of short fiction and novels and poetry and translations and history and cultural and social criticism, our yearly Best Canadian anthologies, and seasonal ghost stories (with a special addition in that department, to be revealed at a later date). It’s a heady mix of the new and familiar. As difficult as it is for me, I won’t repeat anything about the titles that others have highlighted above (except to say that there isn’t a person reading this who shouldn’t have Jón Kalman Stéfansson’s Heaven and Hell high on their to-be-read list: this series, of which this is only the introductory volume, is one of the great modern classics by my estimation, finally available here for the first time). But there are a few forthcoming titles from this fall that most staff haven’t had the opportunity to read quite yet. These include Russell Smith’s long-awaited and quite savagely propulsive new novel Self Care, about a young woman who gets involved, against her better judgement, with an incel; there’s a meditation on the spirit of sport in a new Field Note, On Sports, by David Macfarlane, that captures well my own ambivalence about what has long been one of my very favourite things; there’s a new work of memoir/cultural investigation by Elaine Dewar, tentatively titled Growing Up Oblivious in Mississippi North, about which I should say little else for now; and an important, timely, and moving investigation into the lives of migrant workers in Canada in Marcello Di Cintio’s Precarious. With, as I said, more to come.

Cover design by Kate Sinclair.

The best way to ensure that you don’t miss any of these publications is to either pre-order them from your favourite independent (it’s so easy to do, especially with those shops that use the Bookmanager interface), or to take out a subscription directly from the press: we have several options available, that cover all aspects of our list. There’s no better way to ensure that independent publishers can continue to do the work that we do in this increasingly precarious time.

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In good publicity news:

Celebrate Mother’s Day with Biblioasis!

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Mother’s Day is fast approaching! We have some great gift ideas for your mom or any mother figures in your life.

For the mom who keeps up with the bestsellers: A Ghost in the Throat

“A powerful, bewitching blend of memoir and literary investigation … Ní Ghríofa is deeply attuned to the gaps, silences and mysteries in women’s lives, and the book reveals, perhaps above all else, how we absorb what we love—a child, a lover, a poem—and how it changes us from the inside out.”—Nina Maclaughlin, New York Times

For the mom who wants a challenge: Ducks, Newburyport

“Lucy Ellmann has written a genre-defying novel, a torrent on modern life, as well as a hymn to loss and grief. Her creativity and sheer obduracy make demands on the reader. But Ellmann’s daring is exhilarating—as are the wit, humanity and survival of her unforgettable narrator.”—2019 Booker Prize Jury Citation

For the mom who attends open mic night: Hail, the Invisible Watchman

“Alexandra Oliver, Canada’s sublime formal poet, grabs centuries-old traditions by the throat and gives them a huge contemporary shaking in Hail, the Invisible Watchman. Terrifyingly clever, dazzlingly skilled, and chillingly accurate in her social observations, she plunges from lyric to narrative and back again in this, her third volume, where a housewife has ‘a waist like a keyhole’ and a ‘good mood’ has a ‘scent’ … With Hail, the Invisible Watchman Oliver again alters the landscape of Canadian poetry.” —Molly Peacock, author of The Analyst

For the mom who loves historical fiction: The Barrøy Chronicles

“A profound interrogation of freedom and fate, as well as a fascinating portrait of a vanished time, written in prose as clear and washed clean as the world after a storm.”—The Guardian

For the mom who is everyone’s best friend: The Last Goldfish

“Lahey is a writer of extraordinary gifts, evoking the world of two raucous schoolgirls growing up in the 1980s in astonishing, at times laugh-out-loud funny, detail … Lou couldn’t have asked for a more stalwart, loyal friend than Anita Lahey; we couldn’t ask for a more acutely observant and empathetic writer.”—Moira Farr, author of After Daniel: A Suicide Survivor’s Tale

For the mom who wants to be surprised: Biblioasis Mystery Box

Each box is unique and carefully curated. Tell us some of your favourite books or genres in the notes box, so we can pick books specially for you, or leave it blank for a complete surprise!

Happy Mother’s Day from all of us at Biblioasis!

Spotlight On: THE YEAR OF NO SUMMER by RACHEL LEBOWITZ

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With a new month comes another addition to the Biblioasis Spotlight series! For May, we’re weaving through time and place, and history and memory in Rachel Lebowitz’s haunting collection of essays, The Year of No Summer.

THE YEAR OF NO SUMMER

“Darkly fascinating…Lebowitz highlights the parables, fables and myths we humans created in order to weave meaning into our lives and to which we return for comfort.” —Atlantic Books Today

On April 10th, 1815, Indonesia’s Mount Tambora erupted. The resulting build-up of ash in the stratosphere altered weather patterns and led, in 1816, to a year without summer. Instead, there were June snowstorms, food shortages, epidemics, inventions, and the proliferation of new cults and religious revivals.

Hauntingly meaningful in today’s climate crisis, Lebowitz’s lyric essay charts the events and effects of that apocalyptic year. Weaving together history, mythology, and memoir, The Year of No Summer ruminates on weather, war, and our search for God and meaning in times of disaster.

Rachel Lebowitz is the author of Hannus (Pedlar Press, 2006), which was shortlisted for the 2007 Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize (BC Book Prize) and the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction. She is also the author of Cottonopolis (Pedlar Press, 2013) and the co-author, with Zachariah Wells, of the children’s picture book Anything But Hank! (Biblioasis, 2008, illustrated by Eric Orchard). She lives in Halifax, where she coordinates adult tutoring programs at her neighbourhood library.

Get your copy of The Year of No Summer here!

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

What does it mean to be human?

Photo Credit: Nancy McCarthy

“What are you writing these days?” In Fall 2019, I took a leave of absence from one of my day jobs, so I could have time to figure out where I needed to go. I was taking a “writing leave,” I told people, but that of course was a mistake, because the expectation from all of us was that I would write, and then not doing so felt like a failure. We need to give permission for writing to encompass walking and thinking and reading and sitting with a mug of tea, watching the crows. As Rebecca Solnit puts it, “Remember, writing is not typing.”

I walked, I thought, I noticed birds and the sound of the wind. I thought about how noticing is an honouring. And I read. I read and read and put sticky notes in books and then typed them up into my ever-growing notes file, and then, five months later, just when I thought maybe I’m ready to write, the pandemic hit, and I homeschooled my kid and read escapist fiction instead because my brain stopped being able to process anything. Then my leave ended and I went back to working almost full-time in a pandemic, which meant moving from online to in-person to online to in-person, and that’s how it’s been for two years. I have written bits and pieces in that time, but nothing that coheres.

Lately, however, I’ve been obsessively thinking about this book-to-be which is always a good sign. So what am I working on these days? Like many artists, I am trying to make sense of the world. With this climate emergency, I asked myself, “How did we get here?” I asked a question that started with The Year of No Summer: “What does it mean to be human?” I wasn’t done with this question and I wasn’t done with fairytales, either. So, from these has come a grappling. I am using the ancient Greek idea of the elements: Earth, Air, Fire, Water and linking each with specific fairytales (some of our oldest stories). I am writing—or thinking out—essays that use as a jumping off point a fairytale to then delve deeper into humans and our relationship with the natural world, moving from the Neolithic Revolution to 19th Century mariners. Lately, I have read about the California and Klondike gold rushes, the history of spinning, and the Middle Ages. I am a frail thing, watching the crows in the trees, and the tide coming in.

THE MUSIC GAME, SAY THIS, CHEMICAL VALLEY, POGUEMAHONE, A FACTOTUM IN THE BOOK TRADE, ON DECLINE: March Media Medley!

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IN THE NEWS!

THE MUSIC GAME

An excerpt of The Music Game (February 8, 2022) by Stéfanie Clermont, trans. by JC Sutcliffe, has been published in Literary Hub! The excerpt was published online on February 28, 2022.

Read the full excerpt here.

The Music Game was also featured on the blog, Buried In Print. Read the full article here.

In the post, they write:

“Readers get a clear sense of that fog of youthfulness (where inherently ideas contain dichotomies like ‘clarity’ and ‘confusion’) but also a sense of lived-in and vibrant Montreal (and Ottawa) … It’s not the kind of story that makes you feel like you need to know what happens—because, actually, very little “happens”—but it’s the kind of storytelling that makes me care about the characters’ daily lives and lifelong dreams.”

In celebration of International Women’s Day, CBC Books put together a list of ’22 women writers in Canada you should read in 2022.’ Included on the list is The Music Game by Stéfanie Clermont, trans. by JC Sutcliffe. You can view the full list here.

The Music Game was listed by both Literary Hub and 49th Shelf as recommended reads for March! You can read the full list from Literary Hub here, and the full list from 49th Shelf here.

In her recommendation for Literary Hub, bookseller Kay Wosewick writes:

The Music Game is a delicious sneak peek into Millennial life, one that acknowledges few boundaries, alternates between excess and emptiness, repeatedly taste-tests and spits out adulthood, and ebbs and flows within the surrounding cacophony. Simultaneously exciting and unsettling.

The Music Game was reviewed in the latest issue of the Montreal Review of Books! The review is printed in their Spring 2022 issue and was posted online on March 2, 2022. You can check out the full review here.

In her review, Roxane Hudon writes:

“Clermont is relentless in her writing, and pain seems to await these characters at every corner, but by concluding this way, with everyone together and alive sharing music and stories, she’s showing us that, even for a generation often teetering on the edge, there is beauty, and friendship, and hope.”

The Music Game was reviewed in the Winnipeg Free Press! The review was posted online on March 12, 2022. Read the full review here.

In her review, Sara Harms writes:

“Montreal author Stéfanie Clermont’s award-winning debut is a stunning, incisive immersion into a community of young radical activists finding love, experiencing violence, rejecting hegemony, and struggling to survive financially in a world of dead-end jobs.”

The Music Game was also reviewed in The Charlatan, posted online on March 10, 2022. Read the full review from The Charlatan here.

In her review, Melissa White writes:

“Canadian author Stéfanie Clermont delivers in her debut novel, The Music Game, pushing the boundaries of narrative structure through intimate portrayals of young adulthood … Similar to the extremely successful Irish-millennial author Sally Rooney, she portrays the complex feelings and emotions of her characters in simple terms, thus making them feel universal.”

Pick up your copy of The Music Game here!

SAY THIS

Elise Levine, author of Say This (March 1, 2022), was interviewed in The Baltimore Fishbowl. It was published on March 2, 2022. Read the full interview here.

An excerpt from the interview:

BFB: […] Has form always been a central consideration in your writing?

EL: I’ve always understood form and style as elements in service of character. But with Say This I felt greater freedom to formally experiment. Here I was writing a novella— when I’d previously written short stories and novels—and then a second one, so why not take things further? Especially in light of the characters’ experiences with the unsayable, the unanswerable, which called out for me to push hard on the use of fragments and white space as a kind counter-text.

Say This was reviewed in Toronto Star. It was published online on March 11, 2022, and can be read here.

An excerpt from the review:

“Levine repeats the phrase “everything has already happened” in both novellas and the line is key to the book as a whole. It is both the truth and wishful thinking: the crime is done, it’s already happened, this much is true. But for these characters, the crime is never in the past. It is always happening, a constancy of pain and loss that will forever shape their lives.

Say This is a breathtaking, daring exploration of that constancy, of the lingering power of trauma, and the roots and branches of violence and despair.”

Author Elise Levine was also interviewed by PEN America on March 3, 2022. You can find the full interview here.

An excerpt from the interview:

I used fragments as a way of working against the truisms and conventional handlings of narratives surrounding violent crime. By their very nature, fragments embody what is missing; they convey a sense of absence, what remains unvoiced, including hard-to-name desires and the power imbalances that fuel abuse and thrive on the silences surrounding them. The fragments in the book highlight these silences and absences, reflecting how partial, how broken the characters’ understanding might be, and how difficult if not impossible it is for them to access an all-encompassing, consoling truth.

Say This was also named an Editors’ pick for March 2022 by 49th Shelf. You can see the full list here.

Get your copy of Say This here!

POGUEMAHONE

Poguemahone by Patrick McCabe (May 3, 2022) has been reviewed in Publishers Weekly. The review was published online on March 8, 2022, which you can read here. Poguemahone has also been selected as an Indie Next pick for May!

Publishers Weekly writes:

“McCabe draws the reader into a rambling web replete with Gaelic folklore, IRA agitation, and a soundtrack of glam and progressive rock. Lively and ambitious in form, this admirably extends the range of McCabe’s career-long examination of familial and childhood trauma.”

Preorder Poguemahone from Biblioasis here!

A FACTOTUM IN THE BOOK TRADE

A Factotum in the Book Trade by Marius Kociejowski (April 26, 2022) was featured in Hamilton Review of Books as part of “What We’re Reading: Editors’ Picks, Spring 2022.” The article was published online on March 9, 2022. You can read the full list here.

Preorder A Factotum in the Book Trade today here!

CHEMICAL VALLEY

Chemical Valley cover

Chemical Valley by David Huebert (October 19, 2021) was named a semi-finalist for the Siskiyou Prize for New Environmental Literature! The announcement was made on March 7, 2022. Congratulations, David!

Chemical Valley also received an excellent review from Kirkus! The review was posted online on February 25, 2022. You can read the full review here.

Kirkus wrote:

“Huebert has a razor-sharp wit and an exacting eye for human foibles … [he] manages to offer intimate portraits of human lives without ever letting readers forget the climate bubbling just outside their windows … A masterful assemblage of environmentally minded tales.”

Order your copy of Chemical Valley here!

 

ON DECLINE

On Decline cover

Andrew Potter, author of On Decline (October 19, 2021) was a guest on the podcast Lean Out with Tara Henley. Host Tara Henley is a former CBC reporter, journalist, and bestselling author. The episode was published online yesterday, March 16, 2022. You can listen to the full episode here.

Pick up your copy of On Decline here!

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