Discover the stories of Black Canadians – the real histories and the novels that tell it like it is and was.
The Skin We’re In by Desmond Cole
Cole draws insistent, unyielding attention to the injustices faced by Black Canadians on a daily basis: the devastating effects of racist policing; the hopelessness produced by an education system that expects little of its black students and withholds from them the resources they need to succeed more fully; the heartbreak of those vulnerable before the child welfare system and those separated from their families by discriminatory immigration laws.
The Gospel of Breaking by Jillian Christmas
In The Gospel of Breaking, Jillian Christmas confirms what followers of her performance and artistic curation have long known: there is magic in her words. Befitting someone who “speaks things into being,” Christmas extracts from family history, queer lineage, and the political landscape of a racialized life to create a rich, softly defiant collection of poems. Christmas draws a circle around the things she calls “holy”: the family line that cannot find its root but survived to fill the skies with radiant flesh; the body, broken and unbroken and broken and new again; the lover lost, the friend lost, and the loss itself; and the hands that hold them all with brilliant, tender care. Expansive and beautiful, these poems allow readers to swim in Jillian Christmas’s mother-tongue and to dream at her shores.
Gutter Child by Jael Richardson 
Gutter Child is about a young girl growing up in a world divided: the Mainland, where people of privilege live, and the Gutter, a police state where the most vulnerable reside. A social experiment results in 100 babies born in the Gutter being raised in the Mainland. One of those babies is Elimina Dubois. But when Elimina’s Mainland mother dies, she is sent to an academy with rules and a way of life Elimina doesn’t understand.
Read an excerpt and see the trailer for Gutter Child by Jael Richardson
Jael Richardson is the founder and the artistic director of the Festival for Literary Diversity (FOLD) and the former books columnist for Q on CBC Radio. She is also the author of the nonfiction book The Stone Thrower, which was adapted into a picture book of the same name. Gutter Child is her first work of fiction.
Blood Like Magic by Liselle Sambury.
After failing to come into her powers, sixteen-year-old Voya–a Black witch living in near-future Toronto–is forced to choose between losing her family’s magic forever, a heritage steeped in centuries of blood and survival, or murdering her first love, a boy who is supposedly her genetic match.
Learning to Breathe by Janice Lynn Mather
Indy struggles to conceal that she is pregnant by rape and then, turned out by relatives, must find a way to survive on her own.
[Starred reviews]