Books from Canada

Hannah Wells has worked hard to leave a painful past behind and build a steady life at Briar University. She has good grades, a plan, and a hopeless crush on a boy who barely notices her. What she does not have is any idea how to get his attention—until she winds up tangled with the last person she would ever choose. Garrett Graham is the star of the college hockey team, a golden boy whose future depends on keeping his grades up. When he fails a midterm badly enough to threaten his spot on the roster, he needs a tutor, and Hannah is the only one who can save him. She refuses, so he proposes a deal: she coaches him through the class, and in return he pretends to date her to make her crush jealous. What starts as a transaction turns into something neither planned. As fake dates blur into real feelings, Hannah has to decide whether to trust Garrett with the parts of herself she has kept hidden. The first book in the Off-Campus series, The Deal is a warm, funny new-adult sports romance about two people who agree not to fall for each other and fail spectacularly.

• fake dating

In the near future, a fundamentalist regime called the Republic of Gilead has overthrown the United States government. In response to plummeting birth rates, the new order strips women of their rights, their money, their names, and their autonomy. The few remaining fertile women are conscripted as Handmaids and assigned to powerful households to bear children for the ruling Commanders and their wives. Offred is one such Handmaid, serving in the home of the Commander and his wife Serena Joy. Through her quiet, watchful narration, she reconstructs the ordinary life that was taken from her — a husband, a daughter, a job, a name — and records the ceremonies, surveillance, and small rebellions that define her present. As she navigates the dangers of forbidden connection and a nascent resistance, she holds onto memory itself as a form of defiance. First published in 1985, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale is one of the defining dystopian novels of the twentieth century, a chilling meditation on gender, power, complicity, and reproductive control that has only grown in resonance. It inspired an acclaimed television adaptation and the 2019 sequel The Testaments.

Sloane Sutherland and Rowan Kane are both serial killers — but they only kill other killers, the predators the law never catches. When their paths cross during a competitive, invitation-only "game" that turns vigilante murder into an annual contest, the two rivals strike up an unlikely friendship built on gallows humor, shared trauma, and a mutual appreciation for creative violence. What starts as banter and one-upmanship slowly deepens into something neither of them expected or knows how to handle. But Sloane and Rowan both carry wounds from the past, and as their bond grows, an old threat begins closing in — one tangled up in the reasons they each became what they are. The first book in Brynne Weaver's Ruinous Love Trilogy, Butcher & Blackbird is a dark romantic comedy that swings between graphic horror and genuine tenderness. Following the Kane family and the dangerous women they love, it pairs an extremely violent premise with banter-driven, slow-burn romance — squarely for readers who like their love stories pitch-black.

• rivals
• morally grey
• found family
• slow burn

Emily Wilde is one of the world's foremost scholars of dryadology — the study of faeries — and by far the most awkward. Brilliant, blunt, and far more comfortable with folklore than with people, she arrives in the tiny, snowbound northern village of Hrafnsvik to complete her life's work: the first comprehensive encyclopaedia of faerie lore. What she lacks in social grace she intends to make up for in rigor, cataloguing the local Hidden Ones one careful field note at a time. Her plans are complicated by two things. The first is the villagers, whom she keeps offending. The second is her insufferably charming academic rival, Wendell Bambleby, who follows her to Hrafnsvik with secrets of his own — including one about his true nature that could change everything between them. Told through Emily's wry journal entries, Heather Fawcett's cozy fantasy blends folklore, mystery, and a slow-burn romance into a warm, witty adventure among the Folk — perfect for readers who like their faeries genuinely dangerous and their heroines gloriously prickly.

• slow burn
• fish out of water
• grumpy sunshine
• rivals

In the aftermath of a devastating pandemic, a nomadic troupe of actors and musicians brings art and connection to scattered settlements. They live by the creed "Because survival is insufficient," navigating a world forever changed by loss and the echoes of the past. Their journey takes a perilous turn when they encounter a dangerous prophet, threatening the fragile peace they've worked so hard to build.

• survival
• found family

Two rival agents, Red and Blue, fight for opposing futures up and down the threads of time — and begin smuggling letters to each other across centuries, until taunting turns into a love that could unmake them both.

• epistolary
• enemies to lovers
• forbidden love
• rivals

John Logan has always been the dependable one—the Briar University hockey player who holds his team together and quietly holds up a family falling apart at home. He is not looking for anything serious the night he meets Grace Ivers, and their first encounter goes about as badly as a one-night stand can. But he cannot stop thinking about her, and when he decides he wants a real chance, he discovers that a first impression this bad is not easy to undo. Grace has spent her freshman year finding her footing and has no interest in being anyone's second choice, least of all a cocky athlete who already blew it. As Logan sets out to prove he has changed, he is also wrestling with pressures he hides from everyone: a struggling father, an uncertain future, and feelings for his best friend's girl that complicate everything. The second book in Elle Kennedy's Off-Campus series, The Mistake is a steamy, emotional new-adult sports romance about second chances, growing up, and earning back the trust you carelessly threw away.

• second chance

Rival hockey captains Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov have spent years as the faces of the sport's fiercest rivalry — and years hiding the relationship they carry on in private. A slow-burning, explicit enemies-to-lovers romance, second in Rachel Reid's Game Changers series.

• enemies to lovers
• rivals
• forbidden love
• slow burn

A talkative, imaginative orphan girl with a penchant for dramatic storytelling is sent by mistake to live with two elderly siblings who had hoped for a boy instead. Settling into life at Green Gables in the fictional town of Avonlea on Prince Edward Island, Anne Shirley navigates school, friendship, and her own growing sense of belonging while transforming the lives around her.

• found family
• fish out of water

Rhett Eaton lives for three things: riding bulls, raising hell, and doing exactly as he pleases. When a viral outburst threatens to derail his rodeo career, his team hires a professional fixer to keep him in line — enter Summer Hamilton, a polished PR rep with zero patience for cowboys, rodeos, or babysitting an overgrown troublemaker. The problem is that they’re now stuck with each other for the entire season. He thinks rules are made to be broken; she practically wrote the rulebook. But somewhere between forced road trips, staged smiles, and late-night honesty, the line between can’t-stand-you and can’t-stop-thinking-about-you starts to blur. The first Chestnut Springs novel kicks off the series with a grumpy-sunshine, opposites-attract romance set in the world of the Eaton family ranch.

• grumpy sunshine
• forced proximity

Bunny is Mona Awad's cult dark-academia novel — a surreal, savagely funny, horror-tinged satire of female friendship, creative ambition, and the ache to belong. Samantha Mackey is a scholarship outsider in the tiny, hyper-selective MFA fiction program at New England's Warren University. She loathes her cohort: a clique of twee, wealthy women who call one another "Bunny" and seem to move and speak as a single saccharine organism. Then an invitation arrives, and against every instinct Samantha finds herself pulled into their orbit — and into the strange, ritualistic "Workshop" they hold off campus. As Samantha sinks deeper into the Bunnies' cloying, sinister world, the line between imagination and reality dissolves. Awad twists the familiar "outsider joins the mean-girl clique" story into something grotesque and hallucinatory, equal parts campus comedy and body-horror fever dream. Unsettling, allusive, and deliberately disorienting, Bunny rewards readers who like their literary fiction genuinely strange.

• unreliable narrator
• found family
• dark academia

Persephone Fraser hasn't been back to Barry's Bay in over a decade. Now a Toronto magazine editor, Percy is pulled home to the small Ontario lake town by a phone call she never expected, and back into the orbit of Sam Florek, the boy who once knew her better than anyone. Over six teenage summers spent swimming in Kamaniskeg Lake and working in the Florek family's tavern, Percy and Sam grew from inseparable friends into something deeper, until a single choice tore them apart. Told across those six past summers and one present-day weekend, the novel traces how first love forms us and how the decisions we make at seventeen can echo for years. It is a nostalgic, emotionally charged story about the people and places that mark us permanently.

• second chance
• dual timeline

Fifteen years after The Handmaid's Tale, three women—among them the powerful Aunt Lydia—give testimony as the theocratic regime of Gilead begins to rot from within. Margaret Atwood's Booker Prize-winning sequel is a propulsive tale of secrets, resistance, and reckoning.

• multiple povs
• morally grey

In 1912, Edwin St. Andrew, exiled from England to the Canadian wilderness after a dinner-party outburst, experiences a strange, disorienting moment in the forest — a rush of darkness and the sound of a violin that shouldn't be there. Two centuries later, novelist Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour on Earth, far from her home on a moon colony, promoting a bestseller about a pandemic just as a real one begins to spread. In 2401, detective Gaspery-Jacques Roberts is hired to investigate reports of an identical anomaly recurring across centuries, a case that leads him to Edwin, to Olive, and to a childhood friend from his own moon-colony neighborhood — and toward a decision about whether, and how, to intervene in what he finds. Sea of Tranquility is a slim, deliberately paced novel that treats time travel less as an action premise than a way of asking what continuity and simulation mean across centuries. Mandel folds in a few quiet callbacks to Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel, but the book stands on its own and doesn't require having read either.

• time loop
• multiple povs

This collection of poems explores the complexities of love, loss, and self-discovery. Through raw and honest verse, the authors delve into the experiences of young women navigating relationships, identity, and the challenges of growing up. It's a powerful exploration of vulnerability and resilience.

In a fantasy metropolis where jade is the source of magic and power, the Kaul family has long protected the island of Kekon. Now, with an ancient war over, a new generation must navigate a changing world. When a dangerous new drug allows anyone to wield jade, long-simmering tensions with the rival Ayt family explode into open conflict, threatening the future of their clan and their home.

• rivals
• morally grey
• revenge

Lachlan Kane is a contract killer who wants nothing more than to walk away from the underworld for good. Instead, a botched job leaves him cornered, and his only way out runs through Lark Montague — an indie musician with a bright public persona and dark secrets of her own. Lark offers Lachlan the freedom he's desperate for, on one impossible condition: he has to marry her, then help her hunt down a killer. There's just one problem. Lachlan and Lark can't stand each other. Their fake marriage is all sharp edges and simmering resentment — until proximity, banter, and a shared taste for danger start dissolving the line between loathing and want. And as they close in on their target, they realize someone else is hunting them, someone who wants them both dead. The second book in Brynne Weaver's Ruinous Love Trilogy, Leather & Lark turns to the middle Kane brother for a marriage-of-convenience dark romance. Just as violent and profane as its predecessor but with more emotional bruising underneath, it's a hate-to-love story for readers who want their romance dangerous and their heroines armed.

• marriage of convenience
• fake dating
• enemies to lovers
• forced proximity

In a republic where witches are hunted, Rune Winters plays the vapid socialite by day and smuggles condemned witches to safety by night as the masked Crimson Moth. To protect her secret she courts the enemy: Gideon Sharpe, a Blood Guard witch hunter closing in on the Moth. A dual-POV enemies-to-lovers romantasy, first of a duology.

• enemies to lovers
• secret identity
• multiple povs
• forbidden love

Ten years Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov have been together, keeping their relationship a secret from everyone, including their hockey league. Shane fears that going public could jeopardize his career, while Ilya is tired of hiding and longs for their relationship to be open. They must now decide what is more important: their love or their careers.

• forbidden love

Emily Wilde, curmudgeonly professor of dryadology, has agreed to marry her former academic rival Wendell Bambleby — but first she must help him reclaim the faerie realm stolen from him by his stepmother. Their search for the hidden nexus that leads to Wendell's kingdom takes them from Cambridge to the Austrian Alps, tracing the research of a discredited scholar and a rare, dangerous species of Folk tied to the door between worlds. Along the way, assassins sent by Wendell's family threaten them both, and Emily's niece Ariadne joins the search through an Alpine village where faerie doors are simply part of the landscape. Told again through Emily's dry, meticulous field notes, this second installment keeps the folklore-heavy worldbuilding of the first book while raising the stakes of the romance and the court intrigue awaiting them on the other side.

• quest
• court intrigue
• portal fantasy
• grumpy sunshine

An empire conquers a continent. Gods scheme. An elite squad of soldiers are trapped between.

• morally grey
• anti hero
• multiple povs
• quest

Sixteen-year-old Angela Wong disappeared without a trace, and no one suspected her best friend Geo Shaw. Fourteen years later, Angela's remains are found near Geo's childhood home — and the secret Geo has carried since high school, wrapped up in her volatile first love, begins to unravel as new bodies appear bearing the same signature. A propulsive psychological thriller about guilt, complicity, and how long a person can live with a lie.

• dual timeline
• morally grey
• betrayal
• unreliable narrator

After a frantic letter from her newly married cousin Catalina, Mexico City socialite Noemí Taboada is sent into the mountains to find out what has become of her. What she finds is High Place: the mouldering mansion of the Doyles, an English family whose silver fortune ran out long ago and whose grip on the surrounding town has not.

• forced proximity
• survival
• morally grey

In a world where giant mechs are the only defense against alien threats, a young woman named Zetian seeks vengeance for her sister's death. She becomes an 'Iron Widow,' a pilot who can power her mecha by sacrificing boys. Zetian must navigate a treacherous political landscape and a forced partnership with a controversial male pilot, all while fighting for her own survival and aiming to dismantle the oppressive system.

• revenge
• sacrifice
• forced proximity
• morally grey

Ford Grant has just been crowned Forbes’ “World’s Hottest Billionaire,” and he wants nothing to do with the title. He trades the city for the small town of Rose Hill, where he spent his childhood summers, planning to set up a quiet recording studio for his record label. His plans for peace evaporate when Rosie — his best friend’s little sister and the woman he’s secretly wanted for years — lands back in town freshly fired, and he can’t help offering her a job. Then his life tilts again when a twelve-year-old girl shows up claiming to be his daughter. The first Rose Hill novel mixes a best-friend’s-little-sister romance with surprise fatherhood, set in the tight-knit mountain town that anchors the series — now being adapted as a Prime Video drama.

• slow burn
• forbidden love
• grumpy sunshine
• workplace romance

Former enemies unite against a cannibal theocracy. Sacrifice defines them all.

• morally grey
• anti hero
• multiple povs
• found family

Freya guts fish beside a husband she never chose, dreaming of the shield maiden's life her late father hid her from. When a duel against Bjorn, firstborn son of Jarl Snorri, exposes the drop of the goddess Hlin's blood in her veins, Snorri binds her with a blood oath to make her the weapon that will win him a fractured Skaland — and sets his son to guard her.

• enemies to lovers
• forbidden love
• chosen one
• reluctant hero

Betrayed and hunted, Rune Winters allies herself with the ruthless Cressida Roseblood, who means to tear down the Republic and put witches back in power. Gideon Sharpe, the witch hunter who exposed her, is sworn to stop that future at any cost — even if it means destroying Rune. Forced back into each other's path, the two must decide what they're willing to sacrifice for love, for country, and for each other. The explosive conclusion to The Crimson Moth duology.

• enemies to lovers
• betrayal

Pi Patel — full name Piscine Molitor Patel — grows up the son of a zookeeper in Pondicherry, India, a curious, spiritually voracious boy who decides, to the bafflement of everyone around him, to practice Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam all at once. When his family sells the zoo and sails for Canada with some of their animals, disaster strikes: the ship sinks in the Pacific, and sixteen-year-old Pi survives in a lifeboat with the unlikeliest of companions — a wounded zebra, a hyena, an orangutan, and a 450-pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. What follows is 227 days adrift: a harrowing, luminous story of survival in which a boy must feed, outwit, and coexist with a predator in the middle of an indifferent ocean. Faith, reason, and the raw will to live are all put to the test, until Pi reaches shore and offers his rescuers a second, very different account of what happened. Yann Martel's Booker Prize–winning Life of Pi is a modern fable about storytelling itself — about the tales we choose to believe and why. By turns thrilling, funny, and philosophical, it asks whether the truest story is the one that happened, or the one that makes us see the world with God in it.

Alice Everly is happiest behind a camera. The summer she turns thirty-three, she brings her grandmother back to Barry's Bay, the Ontario lake town where Nan once spent a golden season of her own. Their quiet stay is upended by a familiar yellow boat and the grown-up flirt driving it, Charlie Florek. Over one slow lakeside summer, Alice has to decide whether to keep watching life through a lens or step into a picture of her own. A warm return to the world of Every Summer After that stands fully on its own.