The Bibliophile: The Biblioasis Holiday Book Guide (Part I)
Recommendations from the Biblioasis crew!
As we come to the end of another busy year, we’re taking a look back at the incredible books we’ve published throughout 2025. Some were anticipated, others were unexpected but welcome drop-ins. There were debuts and long-awaited returns; authors from Canada, Ireland, Iceland, and beyond; and a rich berth of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
There’s been so much to read, in fact, that we’ve decided to split our staff recommendations across two weeks! So please enjoy this first half of our Biblioasis Holiday Book Guide, and keep an eye out for more great works next Friday. We hope you’ll find something new here for your holiday TBR.
Ashley Van Elswyk
Editorial Assistant
Hilary Ilkay
Sales Coordinator
Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way by Elaine Feeney
Elaine Feeney hooked me from the title, which is taken from Anne Carson’s translation of Sophocles’s tragedy Electra, and she didn’t disappoint. This is a novel of immense depth and substance, interweaving the present grief and past trauma of a family with western Ireland’s violent history. Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way explores the difficulty of homecoming, the relationship between domesticity and femininity, the vicissitudes of love, and losing oneself in order to discover oneself anew. Expect lyrical, dazzling prose with incisive dialogue and a wry sense of humour.
Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide by Batool Abu Akleen, Sondos Sabra, Nahil Mohana, and Ala’a Obaid
In the welcome proliferation of voices from Palestine receiving publication and translation, Voices of Resistance stands out as a deeply moving and powerful account of life in Gaza. Featuring the day-by-day diaries of four women—Batool Abu Akleen, Sondos Sabra, Nahil Mohana, and Ala’a Obaid—the book signifies a refusal to be silenced or erased and to let unfathomable loss and constant acts of violence give in to nihilism and despair. As the women suffer displacement and fear for their lives and those of their loved ones, they affirm community, solidarity, love, and hope for a different future. This is a must read.
Dominique Béchard
Publicity & Marketing Coordinator
We’re Somewhere Else Now: Poems 2016–2024 by Robyn Sarah
You can’t go wrong with a Robyn Sarah collection. These are plainspoken, thoughtful, gently philosophical poems. I’m left with a warm uncertainty after reading them: everything cast by doubt, yet in a way that feels vital and forgiving. Favourite poems are “In the Medical Building Lobby Café,” “An Abdication,” and the long, final poem “In the Wilderness,” which turns from the lyrical precision of her earlier poems, towards something opaque, shapeshifting, and uncontainable.
The sentences are just so incredible—the ways in which they twist around their speakers, revealing a suite of strange, charismatic, deeply unique characters. Elise Levine writes like nobody else, which sounds like a throwaway thing to say, but trying to come up with a comp (or even a blurb) for Levine feels like a disservice to the breadth of her writing. The story “Cooler” blew up any preconceptions I had about what a short story could do, and the last story, “Witch Well,” broke my heart. If you’re bored with the millions of formulaic books out there, this is the one to bring back that old, fundamental love of literature.
Ahmed Abdalla
Publicist
Old Romantics by Maggie Armstrong
Maggie Armstrong told me that an “old romantic” is a hapless fool who continually authors their own destruction by way of repeated mistakes and self delusion. They tend not to make good friends, but they are rich for fiction. Old Romantics is an arresting collection of linked short stories about one such hapless fool and about love’s beginnings and ends. The collection follows Margaret from young adulthood to middle age, depicting all the drama, heartache, and trivial misfortunes that come her way. These stories are delectable and addictive, with witty, sardonic lines and entertaining scenes, they made me laugh and cringe as I recognized in Margaret the fool I have sometimes been. It’s hard to talk about what makes something funny, but I hope you’ll trust me when I say Armstrong’s dark comedy is first-rate.“The Dublin Marriage” was a particular standout story for me and one I often go back to.
The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana
This was the first book I worked on when I started at Biblioasis, so I suspect it will always have some kind of hold on me personally. It’s a damn fine piece of writing that grabs you by the shoulders, shakes you, and engages in questions—about masculinity, violence, identity, loneliness—that we tend to shy away from. It’s about two young men on an aimless summer road trip and the murders they commit for reasons they can’t even explain. It covers uncomfortable ground and gives no easy answers, but reading Khurana is a pleasurable experience for his distinctive voice and how he renders the claustrophobia of being on the open road. Perhaps not the most festive of books, but it will linger in your mind for months, maybe years, maybe forever.
Ashley Van Elswyk
Editorial Assistant
Seth’s Christmas Ghost Stories 2025
I’ve been banging the drum for years about how fun these spooky little books are, and I’m at it again today! This year’s trio presents such a great range of ghost stories, and while the melancholic but beautiful Lady Ferry looks to be a favourite among readers, and The Mistress in Black is a tragic but cathartic schoolhouse tale not to be ignored, I’d have to say my personal pick is Lucky’s Grove, which involves a classic demonic haunting and takes place over Christmas (gather ’round the blazing tree!). And of course, I can’t go without praising Seth—this series wouldn’t exist without his fine illustrations, striking covers, and eye for classic ghostly tales.
Dark Like Under by Alice Chadwick
We’ve published a number of stellar novels over 2025, but if I’m going to recommend one I was really drawn into, it’s Alice Chadwick’s debut Dark Like Under. In this circadian novel, Chadwick takes us through a single day following the students and staff of a rural English school in the 80s after the unexpected death of one of the teachers. The teens are restless, grappling with their own personal troubles and relationships with one another, and everyone is dealing with the sudden change in their lives. The characters of Tin and Robin are particularly fascinating to follow, complex but sympathetic. Chadwick’s voice is grounded and real, and there’s some truly beautiful writing in here as she deftly tackles grief, hope, and the hard path to moving forward.
In good publicity news:
- The Globe and Mail’s Globe 100 list includes seven Biblioasis books this year! Featured are: Baldwin, Styron, and Me by Mélikah Abdelmoumen; Benbecula by Graeme Macrae Burnet; Big of You by Elise Levine; Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way by Elaine Feeney; Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers by Marcello Di Cintio; Sacred Rage by Steven Heighton; Self Care by Russell Smith.
- Elaine Feeney, author of Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way, is the An Post Irish Book Awards’ Library Association of Ireland Author of the Year winner! Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way was also reviewed in the Winnipeg Free Press: “With richly textured description, Feeney takes readers through several layers of troubled Irish history and suffering across generations.”
- Benbecula by Graeme Macrae Burnet was reviewed in the Winnipeg Free Press: “Continues Burnet’s stringent deconstruction of the crime genre, which began with His Bloody Project . . . Burnet catches the somewhat formal 19th-century cadences of Malcolm’s voice and wrings a kind of bleak, beautiful poetry from the harsh, impoverished lives of the MacPhee family.”
- Ray Robertson was interviewed in the Windsor Star about Dust: More Lives of the Poets (with Guitars), ahead of last night’s Windsor launch. Don’t miss tonight’s launch in Chatham!
- Jón Kalman Stefánsson virtually joined the Winnipeg Free Press book club to talk about Heaven and Hell. Its sequel, The Sorrow of Angels, was reviewed in roughghosts: “Stefánsson’s language is poetic, his characters are pushed to their limits—physically and emotionally—and the remoteness and ruggedness of the remote reaches of northern Iceland a century ago is portrayed with relentless intensity. A thoroughly enjoyable read.”
