Twenty-Seven Great Books to Read This Summer

It’s summertime, and the bright mornings and long evenings have begun to cast their spell.

Wherever this season takes you — on the road to visit some complicated family members, to the local beach with your kids or to a new city with the love of your life — we’ve got you covered with 27 excellent books to read on your journey.

Find some of the best new work from local authors and major forces changing the face of literature. And tell us what you’re reading in the comment section, below!

For anyone known to recount WikiLeaks’ highs and lows in slow moments at a party:

Chasing Shadows: Cyber Espionage, Subversion, and the Global Fight for Democracy
Ronald Deibert
(Simon & Schuster)

Chasing Shadows tells the story of how Toronto-based Citizen Lab shines a light on cyber espionage committed by governments against their own citizens — facilitated by secretive software developed by companies based in liberal western democracies. The book, an instant bestseller, often reads like an (albeit occasionally technical) non-fiction spy thriller. In an excerpt published with The Tyee, author and Citizen Lab director Ronald Deibert describes how the lab began to investigate spying in the Middle East.

For fans of the 1997 movie Titanic:

Beneath Dark Waters: The Legacy of the Empress of Ireland Shipwreck
Eve Lazarus
(Arsenal Pulp Press)

The Empress of Ireland was a CPR ocean liner that sank in just 14 minutes in the mouth of the St. Lawrence river in 1914, just two years after the sinking of the Titanic. Despite having a greater death toll for passengers than the Titanic, the Empress of Ireland’s story is much less well known. B.C.-based writer Eve Lazarus, who has written about historic crimes in several previous books, tackles this story with careful precision, outlining how the ship and its travellers fit into colonial Canadian society just a few months before the First World War would be declared.

This social history sets the stage for the horrific details of the collision that sent water pouring into the ship, and the aftermath of often false newspaper accounts that led to misperceptions of who was to blame for most of the women and children on board not surviving the disaster. This is a riveting account of a forgotten Canadian maritime disaster that will have you counting the lifeboats on your next museum boat tour.

A title to renew one’s faith in the democratic experiment:

Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America
Heather Cox Richardson
(Penguin Random House)

In a sea of misinformation and mendacity, American historian Heather Cox Richardson’s calm rationality and formidable intelligence shine as brightly as a lighthouse beam. The closing speaker in the Phil Lind Initiative series at Vancouver’s Chan Centre for Performing Arts this spring, Cox Richardson offered a heartening blend of insight, observation, and cogent analysis understood through with the lens of lessons offered by history.

She described her habit of looking for anomalies in the daily news cycle. She likened it to watching the stream of gravel, rocks and assorted gunk coming off the back of a cement truck. Amidst this stream of the greyish stuff, sometimes a bright strange bit pops up, akin to seeing a child’s bright orange fire truck. It’s these moments of oddity that signal something different is happening, or is about to take place. May this invite you to watch the news more carefully, sniffing the wind for the changes that are aborning.

For the moms who read Maggie Nelson at the playground:

Story of Your Mother
Chantal Braganza
(Penguin Random House)

Chantal Braganza’s Story of Your Mother is a memoir of motherhood and family that simultaneously unpacks and teases apart our understandings of motherhood. Bringing together migrations and returns; food and family; and history and colonialism, the book is both completely unsentimental, yet palpably full of familial love.

For your friend spending the summer with their aging parents:

The Tiger and the Cosmonaut
Eddy Boudel Tan
(Penguin Random House)

This is ideal reading for a season whose long, warm nights draw the mind to the summers of one’s youth. Vancouver author Eddy Boudel Tan’s third novel starts in a Vancouver apartment and takes readers up the Sunshine Coast to a small town where a trio of siblings reunites in their childhood home in unlucky circumstances: their father has gone missing. In their search for him, Tan gives voice to the silences, long-simmering tensions and anxieties at the heart of many Chinese Canadian families. The noirish page-turner tackles the immigrant experience, queerness and their intersections with rural life with bracing, lived-in clarity. The story uncovers a family secret that holds a mirror to how we deceive ourselves and our loved ones to survive, and the final scenes will take your breath away.

For the new parent in your life:

The Mother: A Graphic Memoir
Rachel Deutsch
(Douglas & McIntyre)

Montreal cartoonist Rachel Deutsch’s graphic memoir is a wildly funny romp that will have readers laugh-crying with recognition, especially if they’re reading it in the fleeting peace of naptime or while their little one is eating Cheerios off the kitchen floor. With the lived-in realism that Deutsch has become known for through her work in the New Yorker and McSweeney’s, the book traces Deutsch’s journey from being as a single woman to becoming a mother. "It was a massive transformation for myself in terms of identity, in terms of creative material," she told The Tyee’s Harrison Mooney in an interview. "Through this intense experience of care and creation of new life, your brain actually changes, your hormones change, what you notice, what you pay attention to, is different."

For anyone who needs some pictures to accompany all those words:

Muybridge
Guy Delisle
(Drawn & Quarterly)

Guy Delisle’s magnum opus, Muybridge, uses the details of pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge’s life and work to offer nothing less than the birth of the modern world. Muybridge was a fascinating figure in a turbulent period, and Delisle captures the excitement. He finds rich repositories of humour in Muybridge’s life story, from the time when he stripped down to the buff when the models he’d hired proved prudish, to the final scenes of the book, where the artist meets his end in proper sequential fashion.The book is an excellent way into a pivotal moment in time, all told with a light hand, quick wit and dedication to daylighting the weirdness of the most impactful folks in history. In other words (and images), it’s just a damn delight.

For anyone who wants a better vision of the future:

Ministry of the Future
Kim Stanley Robinson
(Hatchette Books)

This is an older title, but as the summer heat approaches and the world spins ever closer to a total meltdown, The Ministry for the Future is a welcome piece of reading. It’s a big book in a few ways, not only for the extremely close-to-home climate chaos drawn out in excruciating detail by Kim Stanley Robinson.

In a cultural moment where bleak, dystopic versions and visions of the future are so ubiquitous that they start to feel like training manuals, Ministry stands out for the very different possibilities that it presents. A far cry from utopic and pollyannish, humans are still very much humans in this epic, meaning they’re still largely a pain in the ass. By the end, when humanity has forged a different path out of climate tailspin, it’s hard not feel a tender green shoot of hope curl up and outwards in search of light and air.

For anyone who’s done their homework at their parent’s workplace:

Restaurant Kid: A Memoir of Family and Belonging
Rachel Phan
(Douglas & McIntyre)

Rachel Phan grew up the third of three kids in small-town Ontario, where her parents owned a Chinese Canadian restaurant they named after her, called the May May Inn. Restaurant Kid: A Memoir of Family and Belonging, documents Phan’s coming of age — the way her identity is tied to the restaurant her family runs; the way it feels to be the only Chinese Canadian girl at school; the pros and cons of being able to run wild in adolescence as her parents worked long hours and fought tooth and nail to survive; the anxiety of bringing a white boyfriend home to meet her family for the first time at their new restaurant, China Village. For more, read the excerpt published in The Tyee.

For young parents teaching their children to think for themselves:

The Bear Out There
Jess Hannigan
(Quill Tree Books)

Of all the new picture books published last year, none are as funny or surprising as The Spider in the Well, the debut offering from Hamilton, Ontario’s Jess Hannigan. Her vivid, colourful art and witty, subversive storytelling will make you rush to pre-order her follow-up project, The Bear Out There. It’s even better. Hannigan is a star.

A silly and subversive twist on modern children’s classic, The Monster at the End of This Book, The Bear Out There stars a young, unreliable narrator who whips up a panic about a big predator stalking the woods just outside. Should you believe her? Yes and no. There really is a bear, and there’s a reason to be anxious. It’s not what you think, though. Don’t panic, use your head, and don’t be misled by the kid who insists they know all about bears, but can’t draw one from memory.

For the kid who’s feeling body-conscious at the beach:

Everybelly
Thao Lam
(Groundwood Books)

Learning to accept and even love your own body, just as it is, can be a lifelong journey. For Toronto children’s author and illustrator Thao Lam, it took years to get right with her relationship with herself. Her mother, as she describes it in the dedication to her latest picture book, “measured beauty in pounds.” But having a daughter of her own changed how she viewed herself. “I wanted to have the conversation: this thing that everybody has a love-and-hate relationship with is just a thing,” she told The Tyee. Everybelly is a no-holds-barred celebration of the many shapes, sizes and colours that bellies — and the bodies they’re part of — can be. Here, we see stretch marks, a glucose monitor, top surgery scars and prosthetics. All of which proudly thrive in the world of Everybelly, lounging by the pool and lining up for something delicious.

For the family that loves walks in the woods (until the fires start):

The Land Knows Me: A Nature Walk Exploring Indigenous Wisdom
Leigh Joseph, illustrated by Natalie Schnitter
(Quarto)

A hike in Squamish territory isn’t a walk in the park — it’s a stroll through the first grocery store, pharmacy and garden. Part cultural plant guide, part storybook, part recipe book, part Sḵwxú7mesh-English dictionary, The Land Knows Me introduces young readers to the region’s food and plant medicines — such as Yetwán (salmonberry) and Schí7i (wild strawberry) — and shares their importance to the Sḵwxú7mesh peoples. Lush illustrations and suggested activities make The Land Knows Me more than just a bedtime read.

For the person who needs a good laugh in the darkest timeline:

That’s How They Get You: An Unruly Anthology of Black American Humour
Edited by Damon Young
(Pantheon)

We love a good beach read, but who has the time for a long read when the water is so warm? Give us an anthology. Give us short stories and essays full of wisdom, heart and humour. Give us life. Curated by Damon Young, the very smart brotha who co-founded VerySmartBrothas, the blue-ribbon blog of the Blog Era, That’s How They Get You is chock-full of laugh-out-loud writing and clear-headed, cultural insight from some of the best and the brightest in Black thought: Wyatt Cenac, Roy Wood Jr., Kiese Laymon, Hanif Abdurraqib, Deesha Philyaw.

Young’s introductory essay promises total transcendence of format and form. "Fiction, nonfiction, autofiction and parody. Short story and memoir… Deaths and divorces, good teeth and bad sex." Then it totally delivers. For years now, Young has been hailed as a masterful satirist and cultural anthropologist. With That’s How They Get You, it’s clear he’s a masterful anthologist too. This is an essential collection.

For your cousin grappling with climate grief:

Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
(Alchemy by Knopf Canada)

Lyrical and meditative, provocative and clarifying, Michi Saagiig Nisnaabeg writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s latest work opens in the snowy trails near her home, where she finds refuge in skiing. While moving through the snow and ice, she contemplates the uncertainty of the world and how to address its injustices while contemplating the ground beneath her feet. She considers how Indigenous peoples across history have interacted with water in all forms, and her innovative essay collection puts forward a bold vision for how to meet our shared future with lessons from water, a universal life force that, in Simpson’s essays, form a basis for transformation.

For your loved one who could use a reminder that life is beautiful:

Blue Sky Through the Window of a Moving Car
Jordan Bolton
(Andrews McMeel Publishing)

Fans of short fiction will appreciate British comic artist Jordan Bolton’s oeuvre. Poetic, contemplative and rendered with heart, his work offers readers a welcome invitation to pause and remember that grace lives in small moments. Blue Sky Through the Window of a Moving Car is a quietly cinematic comics collection that exposes the heartbreak and hopefulness alive in the everyday.

For that road trip where the car is packed with old mixtapes featuring Built to Spill, Wilco and Radiohead:

The Dad Rock that Made Me a Woman
Niko Stratis
(University of Texas Press)

Evocative, empathetic and often funny, Toronto culture writer Niko Stratis’s first book is a memoir about how music can be a balm and a catalyst for a person struggling to find their way in the world. In an essay collection organized like a mixtape, Stratis traces her adolescence and young adulthood in Whitehorse, Yukon, where she worked in the local grocery store and eventually as a journeyman glazier before coming out as trans and pursuing a writing career. “Dad rock” saw her through, offering a tender-hearted, instructive counterweight to the hyper-masculine spaces that ruled her early life. "Dad rock," Stratis writes, "exemplifies this ideal, an earnest spirit made quiet and calm, finally able to breathe out and share words of gentle encouragement on how to keep going."

For anyone suffering through the heat and wondering how we got here:

On Oil
Don Gillmor
(Biblioasis)

On Oil offers an overview of the oil and gas industry, from its beginnings in the mid-1800s through two world wars and Alberta’s oil boom. As an English major moving to Calgary in 1971, author Don Gillmor knew that the colourful characters he worked alongside on the rigs would one day provide literary inspiration. More than 50 years later, the tales of debauchery and deplorable work-safe practices provide a compelling hook into the history of the fossil fuel industry, unheeded warnings about climate change and government’s current capture by the oil and gas industry. Read Amanda Follett Hosgood’s interview with Don Gillmor.

For your friend grappling with big questions about how race, class and whiteness have shaped their life:

I’m Laughing Because I’m Crying: A Memoir
Youngmi Mayer
(Little, Brown)

Devastating, hilarious and wildly intimate, New York City comedian Youngmi Mayer’s first book is an expansive, must-read exploration of the biracial experience and the layered social, economic and political forces that shape our relationships with ourselves, our jobs and the people with whom we end up in bed. The wide-ranging book takes us to the island off the coast of Korea where Mayer grew up in the 1980s and ‘90s, to the San Francisco food and restaurant scene of the 2010s and, among other places, to present-day New York City, where Mayer now lives with her son. Her infectious wit and empathy invites readers to contemplate their own complicity in the systems that both shape us and hold us back, offering an invitation for readers to see how goodness and cruelty exist on the same plane.

For a reminder that empathy takes all of us:

The Emperor of Gladness
Ocean Vuong
(Penguin Press)

Now 36 years old, Ocean Vuong is one of the most influential voices in Asian American literature, and The Emperor of Gladness builds upon the themes he explored in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, his 2019 epistolary novel. Emperor traces a year in the life of a 20-year-old man and his unlikely friendship with the elderly woman who takes him in on a stormy night when he attempts to take his own life. He gets a job at a fast-casual restaurant in rural Connecticut, where Vuong also grew up and worked in fast food. “A huge portion of how this country is formed is through circumstantial family,” Vuong told the New York Times in an interview about the book. “Labour, this arbitrary cobbling of strangers thrown together. Human beings, no matter where they are, will find relationships.” With empathy and humour, Vuong shines a light on those who don’t usually get to be the main characters of major works of literature: people who are poor, hooked on painkillers, stuck in their circumstances and finding a way to survive even so. "What is kindness exhibited knowing there is no payoff?," Vuong noted to the Times. The Emperor of Gladness takes up the worthy work of answering this question.

For the armchair adrenaline aficionado:

Flow: Women’s Counternarratives from Rivers, Rock, and Sky
Edited by Denisa Krásná and Alena Rainsberry
(Rocky Mountain Books)

Want to feel the thrill of adventure, the adrenaline rush, the sweat bead on your palms — but without leaving your chair? Crack open Flow to live vicariously through women across the world who highline over canyons, kayak choppy waters, and scramble up sheer cliff faces for fun. If the gorgeous, anxiety-inducing photography isn’t inspiring enough, reading about the struggle for women of different ages, skill levels, backgrounds and cultures to be taken seriously in male-dominated sports is rousing for even the most reticent recreationist.

For your superstar teacher friend who spends part of her summer break in search of new resources for her students:

A Stronger Home
Katrina Chen and Elaine Su
(Orca Book Publishers)

When the storm is not outdoors, but inside your own home, where do you turn? Former Burnaby-Lougheed MLA Katrina Chen and New Westminster teacher-librarian Elaine Su have teamed up to co-author a powerful, survivor-centred book that walks young readers through the process of seeking safety from family violence. Delphie Côte-Lacroix’s watercolour illustrations reflect experiences for which it can be difficult to find the words to describe, especially among children. “Stories have a great capacity to change the way discourse happens amongst young children who don’t often have the vocabulary or conscious recognition to speak about it, but they know when something’s wrong,” Su told Jeevan Sangha in a recent Tyee interview.

For everyone who’s been cautioned they’re overthinking things:

Unravel
Tolu Oloruntoba
(McClelland & Stewart)

The way when I grow up I want to be
a choking hazard: one of the small
people clogging the airway of dominion.

Unravel is award-winning Calgary author Tolu Oloruntoba’s third collection of poetry. His first, The Junta of Happenstance, won the Griffin prize. Unravel is a seeker’s book, exploring making and unmaking, doing and undoing, the twin existential horrors of ending and endlessness. It is heartfelt and clever, probing and funny, putting God and gods in its sights alongside other human creations — language, art, drama. (Side note: Isn’t it fun to be living through the second, or maybe even third, golden age of McClelland & Stewart poetry?)

For anyone who’s been unwell and paved their own long path to healing:

allostatic load
Junie Désil
(Talonbooks)

Junie Désil’s second poetry collection, allostatic load, plumbs the interconnections between chronic illness and systemic and racial injustice. Find patient health questionnaires juxtaposed with the experience of not being seen — recognized, understood — at the doctor’s office; take a close poetic look at the experience of not being listened to, or heard, at work, where one is to care for others. The book braids together the intimate and personal with the systemic, and asks where true, reparative healing begins.

For readers who live in the overlap between art and poetry:

Revolutions
Hajer Mirwali
(Talonbooks)

Revolutions, the debut collection of poetry from Palestinian and Iraqi writer Hajer Mirwali, tackles shame, pleasure and Arab Muslim girlhood. Mirwali’s poetry plays with language, both in grammar and as concrete, artistic form, in part through a conversation with artist Mona Hatoum’s artwork + and –. It poses many poignant questions. Among them: does a circle mean you can return? Does a circle mean you can’t leave?

For every politician who needs to 'hear both sides' on LGBTQ2S+ issues:

Shame-Sex Attraction
Edited by Lucas F.W. Wilson
(Jessica Kingsley Publishers)

Shame-Sex Attraction is an anthology of survivor’s stories of conversion therapy. It opens with the 1990s story of a gay man whose therapist encourages him to smell dog feces while looking at photos of men he finds attractive. Later in the book comes the story of a trans person whose mother seems to accept their sexual orientation — but refers to their desire for top surgery as “cutting up your beautiful body,” encouraging the writer to instead “see a professional.” The book is tough to read for the same reason that makes it important to read: it’s hard to believe that conversion therapy was ever an accepted practice — and being familiar with the facts and survivor testimonies is key to ensuring it’s never considered acceptable again.

For everyone with a morbid curiosity:

The Secret Life of a Cemetery
Benoît Gallot, translated by Arielle Aaronson
(Greystone Books)

There’s no better way to get a peek inside Paris’s famous Père LaChaise cemetery than through the eyes of its curator, Benoît Gallot, who must balance the exigencies of this ironically living museum, replete with tourists, alongside those of the families of loved ones needing to be cremated or buried. It’s a rare window into the practicalities of running the final home of celebrities like Edith Piaf and Oscar Wilde — and attending to the needs of the friends and family of far less famous people who’ve recently passed.

For the Vancouverite wishing to experience their city from another dimension:

Astrid Falls: A Legend of Vancouver
Andrew Cownden
(Self-published)

Astrid Falls invites readers to board the Stanley Park Special to the Astral Plane, where the lions guarding Lions Gate Bridge offer dubious prophecies and Vancouver is crumbling — literally — under the power of a sadistic suit that has taken hold of the city’s mayor.

Astrid O’Brien, believing herself the Chosen One, gathers an eclectic group of protagonists to save the world as landmarks like the Pantages Theatre, Sing Kew Theatre and Ross Street Temple dissolve into sand. This debut novel examines community, culture and identity through the lens of history, from colonization through subsequent waves of immigration, ultimately landing on our shared humanity.

With contributions from andrea bennett, Amanda Follett Hosgood, Katie Hyslop, Harrison Mooney, Jen St. Denis, Dorothy Woodend and Jackie Wong.