River Street Writing

05/04/2026

Night Terminus by Ellis Scott, published by Dundurn Press, February 2026.

An evocative debut novel reflecting the determination and resilience of a gay diaspora as it faced extinction.

DM us to request a review copy. 🌈

Beginning with a chance encounter in 1985, an unnamed narrator embarks on a physical and spiritual sojourn over four decades. From a one-night stand in Paris with the troubled and enigmatic Louis; to Montreal, through a divided Europe, and into the Iranian desert with the sick yet determined Yuri; and finally to Provence, where he meets the gregarious but wistful Frank, the narrator encounters a cast of exiles, fugitives, rebels, and artists. In a journey across continents and decades, we watch the impacts of one of the greatest health crises of the last hundred years through the eyes of those who both survived it and must now remember those who didn’t.

At once an odyssey through time and a love story to the narrator’s found family, this haunting, lyrical novel in five parts explores questions of grief, statelessness, and memory and is a meditation on survival in the age of AIDS.

About the author:

Ellis Scott was born in the U.K. and grew up in Canada. He has published nine stories in literary journals, including The Iowa Review, Yolk, and The Fiddlehead. His first short story was nominated for a 2020 Pushcart Prize. Night Terminus is his first novel.

05/03/2026

ICYMI: The Unravelling of Ou by award-winning Iranian-Canadian author Hollay Ghadery was featured in Ms. Magazine!

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“This is the unique and touching story of Minoo, a woman struggling to let go of her dear friend and the novel’s narrator, a sock puppet named Ecology Paul. When Minoo’s grandchild is born, Ecology Paul helps her to confront her past to move forward.”

Thank you Karla Strand and Violet Pandya for including Canadian published literature in their column.

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Want to request a review copy of this book? Drop us a DM.

More about The Unravelling of Ou:

Moving on is hard. Even harder when it’s from a make-believe friend—someone, or in this instance, some thing—who’s been your strongest source of support. On what should be one of the happiest days ever, the day her granddaughter is born, Minoo is faced with a terrible choice: make a clean break from her constant companion, a sock puppet named Ecology Paul, or lose her daughter and granddaughter, and maybe all of the people she loves. On an emotional drive home from the hospital, Ecology Paul shares the story of how Minoo got to this point, recalling Minoo’s early teenage pregnancy in Iran, her exile to Canada, her questions about her sexuality, and how a ragtag sock puppet came to her when she desperately needed to be seen. Full of imagination, whimsy and heart, The Unravelling of Ou follows Minoo’s struggles to justify the puppet’s existence and untangle herself from her dependence on it, and reconnect with the people she loves.

05/02/2026

Congratulations to Tea Gerbeza who won the Saskatchewan Book Award for Poetry for her book, How I Bend Into More (Palimpsest Press) and to Melanie Schnell, who the City of Regina Award for her novel, The Chorus Beneath Our Feet (Radiant Press).

For everyone looking to read more Canadian published literature, these two books are awesome places to start—and you can grab them from wherever books are bought or borrowed. 📚

Congratulations to all the finalists, and thank you Saskatchewan Book Awards for all their work uplifting provincial literary artists.

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05/01/2026

Flying Books, CMU Press and River Street are delighted to host the Toronto launch of Nightberries by Elina Penner in conversation with Sherri Klassen.

RSVP here:

https://flyingbooks.ca/events/5167220260604

More info:

When: Thursday, June 4, 2026 starting at 6:30 PM.
Where: 784 College St., Toronto Ontario M6G1C6.

Dream or reality, nightmare or trustworthy memory?

Nightberries is a dark modern fairytale from German author Elina Penner about the enigma who is Nelli Neufeld. The quiet youngest daughter in a noisy, tangled German Mennonite family who fled from Russia in the 1990s, Nelli seems to be coping well in a traditional marriage. But what is going on in her memory? As we follow the events on two key days in 2020, we are asked riddles about Nelli that even she might not be able to answer. A hauntingly original, sometimes absurdly comic psychological tale from contemporary Germany, Nightberries has been translated into English by Bradley Schmidt from the 2022 novelNachtbeeren.

Elina Penner was born in 1987 as a Mennonite German in the former Soviet Union and moved to Germany in 1991. Plautdietsch (Low German) is her mother tongue. After time spent in Berlin and the US, she now lives with her family in the East Westphalia region of Germany. She is a successful personal essayist and blogger, with many of her non-fiction pieces gathered in the 2023 collection Migrantenmutti (Migrant Mother). Nachtbeeren was her first novel. In 2025, her second novel, Die Unbußfertigen (The Unrepentant), was released in Germany.

Sherri (S.L.) Klassen is the author of Menno-Nightcaps: Cocktails Inspired by that Odd Ethno-Religious Group You Keep Mistaking for the Amish, Quakers or Mormons (Touchwood, 2021. She has also published in the Conrad Grebel Review and The Journal of Mennonite Writing. She was long known for her Mennonite-themed blog: The Drunken Mennonite, some pieces of which were reprinted in The Anabaptist World Review. She has recently started writing on substack and has two novels in progress. She lives in Toronto and eats zwieback and verenijke from time to time, but never verenijke made with nightberries.

05/01/2026

Chuffed to see Sunny Dhillon’s Hide and Sikh and Hollay Ghadery’s The Unravelling of Ou included here. Thanks, All Lit Up!

w/ Wolsak & Wynn Publishing Ltd & Palimpsest Press ♥️

It's ! Check out our (non-exhaustive) roundup of 12 new and newish books by Asian-Canadian authors (+100 more), all available to discover on All Lit Up:

https://alllitup.ca/book-list/asian-heritage-month/

05/01/2026

Today is , and we’re spotlighting Nova Scotia author and retired paramedic and fire service captain Sean Paul Bedell. His powerful novel, Shoebox (NoN Publishing, 2025), is a a gritty and emotional exploration of the human condition, through the eyes of a dedicated paramedic.

Sean was recently featured in Canadian Firefighter, where he was interviewed by Brittani Schroeder about “about his experience as a first responder, the psychological effects of serious calls, the evolution of mental health supports, and how he found a cathartic release for years of internalized trauma.” (Canadian Firefighter.)

Read this fascinating interview:

https://www.cdnfirefighter.com/not-every-call-is-fixable/

And thank you to all first responders for your service and your compassion. 🫶🏼

04/30/2026

ICYMI: CBC Books published list of 2026 books by past CBC Poetry Prize winners and finalists, which features five of the AMAZING authors we’ve been celebrating!

Thank you to CBC Books and CBC editor, Daphne Santos-Vieira, for putting this feature together. 🫶🏼

Books featured here:

💛: Descântec For My Split Tongue (poetry) by Adriana Oniță forthcoming with Palimpsest Press, May 15, 2026

🌊: Yield by Jamie Forsythe, released with Wolsak & Wynn, April 2026

🌾: Calling it Back to Me (poetry) by Laurie D. Graham, released March 2026 by McClelland & Stewart

💜: Weird Babies (short fiction) by Jaclyn Desforges, released April 1, 2026 with Gordon Hill Press

🌙: NIGHTSTEAD (poetry) by David Martin, released February 2026 with Palimpsest Press

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04/29/2026

“While Gunraj provides an education – one with a decolonial lens, on indentured labour – the brilliance of her analysis is evident in how she sees the reverberations of this little-known history.”

—excerpt from “Andrea Gunraj’s non-fiction debut explores ‘undertold’ legacy of indentured labour” by Sadiya Ansari, The Globe and Mail, April 28, 2026.

Thank you to Sadiya Ansari for spending time with Andrea’s powerful book and to The Globe & Mail for spotlighting it. ✨

More about Go-Between Girl:

In Go-Between Girl, Andrea Gunraj explores the under-told legacy of indentured labour and its lasting impacts on descendants across diasporas, from the Caribbean and Latin America to Canada, the United States, and beyond. She captures the complexities of belonging and the challenges of navigating dichotomies. Through the concept of “go-betweenness,” Gunraj illustrates her path from the intersections of race, class, and identity to a broader understanding of colonial histories.

Go-Between Girl is a timely and important read. As Andrea puts it herself, “Aren’t the factors that pushed vulnerable people into unfree labour arrangements then still driving billions today? Don’t economic and state leaders uphold the conditions for bonded and indebted labour, profiting from impoverished and subjugated people’s limited choices? Isn’t racialized indentureship and unfree work arrangements, as much as any other exploitative historical force, an ever-living template for so much of how the world runs now, whether or not we can stomach that fact?”

Weaving memoir with history and cultural criticism, Go-Between Girl is both accessible and profound, intimate and political. Gunraj invites readers to reconsider their narratives about work, love, and heritage. Her essays are a touching testament to the enduring quest for justice, offering a powerful contribution to contemporary conversations on race, feminism, and the unfinished legacies of colonialism.

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