Our Spring Preview continues (Most Anticipated Fiction is out already!) with nonfiction, all the best of memoir, food writing, biography, history, the environment, science, politics, and so much more.

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In Son of Elsewhere (May), Elamin Abdelmahmoud charts his life with wise, funny, and moving reflections on the many threads that weave together into an identity. In the innovative and intimate memoir I Am Because We Are (February), Chidiogo Akunyili-Parr tells the story of her mother, a pan-African hero who faced down misogyny and battled corruption in Nigeria. Animal as Machine (April), by Michel Anctil, explores the life, work, and ideas of scientists who, branding themselves as physiologists, subscribed to mechanistic concepts to explain how animals acquire and process food, breathe, circulate their blood, and sense their environment.

The world is desperate for cobalt. It fuels the digital economy and powers everything from cell phones to clean energy. But this “demon metal,” this “blood mineral,” has a horrific present and troubled history, as Charlie Angus shows in Cobalt: The Making of a Mining Superpower (January). Luanne Armstrong’s Going to Ground (March) is a deeply intimate and meditative collection of personal essays exploring the intersections of chronic pain, the myths and stories that make us human, and the unexpected magic of finding your rage and joy reflected back to you by nature. And Michael Barclay’s Hearts on Fire (April) is about the creative explosion in Canadian music of the early 2000s, which captured the world’s attention.

Maude Barlow counters the prevailing atmosphere of pessimism that surrounds us and offers lessons of hope that she has learned from a lifetime of activism in her memoir Still Hopeful (March). For fans of The Measure of My Powers and Notes from a Young Black Chef, Suzanne Barr’s My Ackee Tree : A Chef's Memoir of Finding Home in the Kitchen (April) is a memoir about food, family, and the recipes that brought one woman home when she needed it the most. And Len & Cub: A Queer History (April), by Meredith J. Batt and Dusty Green, is one of love and friendship that challenges contemporary ideas about sex and gender expression in the early 20th century.

So You Girls Remember That (April) collects wisdom, reflections, and stories from Indigenous Elder Gaadgas Nora Bellis of the Haida Nation. Neil Besner’s Fishing With Tardelli (May) is a literary meditation on memory, time, love, and loss. An impossible architectural walking tour, 305 Lost Buildings of Canada (March), by Raymond Biesinger and Alex Bozikovic, spans the country, its cities and countryside, and its history. In his essay collection The Call of the Red-Winged Blackbird (February), Tim Bowling picks up the common questions, and beauties, of life and examines them closely.

Heroin (June) is an illustrated history of Canadian heroin regulation over two centuries, Susan Boyd pointing to failure to address the overdose death epidemic caused by criminalizing drug users and to the decades of resistance to harm-reduction policies. David Camfield argues that even a ravaged planet is worth fighting for in Future on Fire (March)—and that ultimately the only solution to the ecological crisis created by capitalism is a transition to eco-socialism. And Timothy Christian’s Hemingway’s Widow (June) is a portrait of Mary Welsh Hemingway, the complicated woman who becomes Ernest Hemingway's fourth wife, exploring the tumultuous years of their marriage, and evoking her merry widowhood as she shapes Hemingway's literary legacy.

Harriet’s Legacies (May), by Ronald Cummings and Natalee Caple, recuperates the significance of Harriet Tubman’s time in Canada as more than just an interlude in her American narrative: it is a new point from which to think about Black diasporic mobilities, possibilities, and histories. Field Notes on Listening (June), by Kit Dobson, is a response to our lack of connection to the land we call home, the difficult history of how many of us came to be here and what we could discover if we listened deeply to the world around us. Black & White (February) is the anticipated debut by biracial community leader and citizen activist Stephen Dorsey, exploring his lived experience of systemic racism in North America and the paths forward. And Di-bayn-di-zi-win (To Own Ourselves): Embodying Ojibway-Anishinabe Ways (February), by Jerry Fontaine and Don McCaskill, is a decolonized world view for Indigenous leaders and academics seeking a path to reconciliation.

Cecil Foster, author of They Call Me George: The Untold Story of Black Train Porter and The Birth of Modern Canada, explores the origins, legacy, and potential of Canadian multicultural policy in Multiculturalism (February). Good Mom on Paper (May), edited by Stacey May Fowles and Jen Sookfong Lee, is a collection of twenty essays that goes beyond cliche to explore the fraught, beautiful and complicated relationship between motherhood and creativity. In This Has Always Been a War (March), essays that are both accessible and inspiring, Lori Fox examines their confrontations with the capitalist patriarchy through their experiences as a queer, non-binary, working-class farm hand, labourer, bartender, bush-worker, and road dog, exploring the ugly places where issues of gender, sexuality, class, and the environment intersect.

Who By Fire: War, Atonement, and the Resurrection of Leonard Cohen (March), by Matti Friedman, is the never-before-told story of Leonard Cohen’s 1973 tour of Israel during the Yom Kippur War. Readers follow the path of the 13 Ojibway moons with animal spirits as guides to unlock powerful teachings that will help them directly experience their own medicine connection to inherent healing powers in Asha Frost’s You Are the Medicine (March). Based on interviews conducted for the her 2020 podcast, Kate Graham provides readers with a rare glimpse into the lives of female political leaders, from the perspectives of the women who know this story best in No Second Chances (May). And in The Girl in the Middle (April), with compassion and vivid storytelling, Anais Granofsky, Lucy from TV’s Degrassi Junior High, shares her experience of living in opposite worlds, and demonstrates how generational shame, grief, and prejudice ultimately lead to love and forgiveness. 

This Is Assisted Dying (March), by Stefanie Green, is a transformative and compassionate memoir by a leading pioneer in medically assisted dying who began her career in the maternity ward and now helps patients who are suffering explore and then fulfill their end of life choices. From the charges of transmitting immoral, indecent, and scurrilous literature laid against him, to his dismissal from his teaching post at Ryerson University for being a sex worker, the memoir Immoral, Indecent, and Scurrilous (April) candidly chronicles Gerald Hannon’s life as an unrepentant sex radical. And in Search for the Unknown (April), Matthew Hayes uncovers the history of the Canadian government’s investigations into reports of UFOs, revealing how these reports were handled, deflected, and defended from 1950 to the 1990s. 

Poet and essayist Emma Healey creates a unique snapshot of the gig economy that is also a timeless meditation on identity, value and language in Best Young Woman Job Book (March). And a Dog Called Fig (March) is a memoir of the writing life told through the dogs Helen Humphreys has lived with and loved over a lifetime, culminating with the recent arrival and settling in of Fig, a Vizsla puppy. Sophia Burthen’s account of her arrival as an enslaved person into what is now Canada sometime in the late 18th century was recorded by Benjamin Drew in 1855, and in It Was Dark There All the Time (January), Andrew Hunter builds on the testimony of Drew’s interview to piece together Burthen’s life, while reckoning with the legacy of whiteness and colonialism in the recording of her story.

A captivating account of the formative years of one of Canada’s best-known artists, Douglas Hunter's Jackson’s Wars (May) follows A.Y. Jackson’s education and progress as a painter before he was a well-known artist and his time on the battlefield in Europe, before he cast his lot in with a group of like-minded Toronto artists. Catapult editor-in-chief and award-winning voice actor Tajja Isen explores the absurdity of living in a world that has grown fluent in the language of social justice but doesn’t always follow through in essay collection Some of My Best Friends (April).

The Clocks Are Telling Lies (January), by Scott Alan Johnston, is an exploration of why we tell time the way we do, demonstrating that organizing a new global time system was no simple task. Jackie Ronne is given her rightful place in polar history as the first American woman in Antarctica in Joanna Kafarowski’s Antarctic Pioneer: The Trailblazing Life of Jackie Ronne (May). And in A Life Spent Listening (June), Dr. Hassan Khalili reflects on four decades of being a front-line community psychotherapist and shares the wisdom he has learned over the years from his experience as a young Iranian immigrant in Newfoundland and Labrador to his role as one of the top psychologists in the province, illuminating what it means to seek contentment and how we hold the key to our own happiness.

With an intimate awareness of place and time, a deep sensitivity to family, and a poetic delight in travel, local food and wine, and dogs, Blue Portugal and Other Essays (April) offers up a sense of wonder at the interconnectedness of all things, revealing essayist Theresa Kishkan as a virtuoso of her craft. Unravelling a complex history of cultural migration and world politics, Cheuk Kwan narrates a fascinating story of culture and place in Have You Eaten Yet?: Stories from Chinese Restaurants Around the World (January), ultimately revealing how an excellent meal always tells an even better story. And Kiss the Red Stairs (April) is a compelling memoir by award-winning journalist Marsha Lederman delving into her parents’ Holocaust stories in the wake of her own divorce, investigating how trauma migrates through generations with empathy, humour, and resilience.

Smart streetlights, water and air quality tracking, autonomous vehicles: with examples from all over the world, including New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Portland, and Chicago, John Lorinc’s Dream States (May) unpacks the world of smart city tech, but also situates this important shift in city-building into a broader story about why we still dream about perfect places. In essay collection Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female (June) Tanis MacDonald walks the reader down many paths, pointing out the sights, exclaiming over birds, sharing stories and asking questions about just who gets to walk freely through our cities, parks and wilderness. Part debate, part dialogue, Rehearsals for Living (June), by Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, is lively and detailed familial correspondence between two razor-sharp writers convening on what it means to get free as the world spins into some new orbit.

Kathleen McDonnell shares her love of cold water swimming and the lessons she has learned from a slow and steady commitment to the waves in Growing Old, Growing Cold: Notes on Swimming, Aging, and Finishing Last (May). In heartfelt memoir The Ex-Boyfriend Yard Sale: Finding a Formula for the Cost of Love (February), Haley McGee sets out to calculate—with mathematical precision—the exact cost of love, and whether all of her former relationships were worth it. Celebrated artist and social activist, Antoine Bear Rock Mountain shares his moving, personal story of healing and the reclamation of his Dene identity in From Bear Rock Mountain (May).

Written over the course of four years of interviews and research, Christine Mowat’s The Life and Legacy of Muriel Stanley Venne (April) is the first authorized biography of this remarkable Métis matriarch and community leader. Former MP Peggy Nash's Women Winning Office (May) is a practical handbook for activist women on how to open doors and take their place in the political process. Through a wealth of fascinating stories and colourful detail, Cultivating Communities (February), by Jodey Nurse, adds a new dimension to the social and cultural history of rural women, placing their activities at the centre of the agricultural fair. And from Ed O’Loughlin, author of Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist Minds of Winter, comes The Last Good Funeral (March), a pensive and poignant recollection of love, loss, marriage, and the life events that have shaped his identity.

The illustrated book Abortion to Abolition (May), by Martha Paynter, illustrated by Julia Hutt, tells the empowering true stories behind the struggles for reproductive justice in Canada, celebrating past wins and revealing how prison abolitionism is key to the path forward. Erin Pepler’s Send Me Into The Woods Alone (April) is an honest, heartfelt, and often hilarious collection of essays on the joys, struggles, and complexities of motherhood. Oscar-nominated screenwriter, director, and actor Sarah Polley’s Run Towards the Danger (March) explores memory and the dialogue between her past and her present.

From Leanne Prain, the co-creator of the seminal craftivism book Yarn Bombing, The Creative Instigator's Handbook (April) is a guide for creatives to making impactful, socially engaged art projects. Rooms: Women, Writing, Woolf (May), from LAMBDA Literary Award winner Sina Queyras, offers a peek into the defining spaces a young queer writer moved through as they found their way from a life of chaos to a life of the mind. And Mark Raboy’s Looking For Alicia (April) is the biography of a radical young idealist, her determination to make a difference in the world, and her disappearance in 1976, revealing the human cost and undying legacy of Argentina’s descent into rightwing madness.

Iceland is the best place on earth to be a woman—but why? Eliza Reid, the Canadian first lady of Iceland, writes about why this tiny nation is leading the charge in gender equality in Secrets of the Sprakkar: Iceland's Extraordinary Women and How They Are Changing the World (February). Bonnie Robichaud tells her story of her historical fight for justice after workplace sexual harassment in her memoir It Should Be Easy to Fix (March). A writer friend once pointed out that whenever Stuart Ross got close to something heavy and “real” in a poem, a hamburger would inevitably appear for comic relief. In hybrid essay/memoir/poetic meditation The Book of Grief and Hamburgers (April), Ross shoves aside the heaping plate of burgers to wrestle with what it means to grieve the people one loves and what it means to go on living in the face of an enormous accumulation of loss.

In the vein of Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, Lost in the Valley of Death (January), by Harley Rustad, is about one man’s search to find himself, in a country where, for many Westerners, the path to spiritual enlightenment can prove fraught, even treacherous, and a story about all of us and the ways, sometimes extreme, we seek fulfillment in life. Donald Savoie looks to the United States, Great Britain, France, and Canada in Government: Have Presidents and Prime Ministers Misdiagnosed the Patient? (May) to assess two of the most important challenges confronting governments throughout the Western world: the concentration of political power and the changing role of government bureaucracy. And in her memoir Can’t Help Falling (April), Tarah Schwartz puts words to excruciating loss as she recounts her unexpected and deeply inspiring journey to motherhood.

Joan Scottie's I Will Live for Both of Us (April) is a reflection on recent political and environmental history and a call for a future in which Inuit traditional laws and values are respected and upheld. The Hidden Kingdom of Fungi (May), by Keith Seifert, urges us to better understand our complex relationship with fungi—and to plan our future with them in mind. From award-winning author Merilyn Simonds, Woman, Watching: Louise de Kiriline Lawrence and the Songbirds of Pimisi Bay (May) is a remarkable biography of an extraordinary woman—a Swedish aristocrat who survived the Russian Revolution to become an internationally renowned naturalist, one of the first to track the mid-century decline of songbirds.

From Lilly Singh, bestselling author of How to Be a Bawse comes Be a Triangle (April), an honest, funny, and inspiring primer on learning to come home to your truest and happiest self. 56 contributors illuminate the kind of gritty, body mind soul transformations that only the mothering myth can evoke in the anthology (M)Othering (June), edited by Anne Sorbie and Heidi Grogan. And Madeline Sonik, the award-winning author of Afflictions & Departures, turns her multifaceted lens on England in the 1970s in Queasy (March), a series of linked memoirs.

A father reflects on the rich life of his son, who died suddenly at age 26 after living with schizophrenia in Fraser Sutherland’s memoir The Book of Malcolm (January). Chasing Baby (May), by Morwnna Trevenan, is a raw, sarcastic, and sometimes funny account of the struggles of growing up, dealing with infertility. And Chris Turner moves past the despair and futile anger over ecological collapse and harnesses that passion toward the project of building a twenty-first century quality of life that surpasses the twentieth-century version in every way in How to Be a Climate Change Optimist (May). 

Martha Wainright’s Stories I Might Regret Telling You (March) is a memoir about growing up in a bohemian musical family and her experiences with love, loss, motherhood, divorce, the music industry, and more. Enough Light for the Journey (April) tells the story of Annie Wenger-Nabigon and her husband Herb Nabigon, an Oji-Cree Anishinabe elder, and shares the Oji-Cree teachings Herb wanted to pass on. And  Modern Whore (April) by Andrea Werhun and Nicole Bazuin documents Andrea’s sex work career in lush photography and powerful words—in all its slippery, sexy, silly and sometimes heartbreaking glory.

In Up the Coast (May), Kathryn Willcock shares stories of growing up in logging camps on the coast of B.C. in the 1960s  when children were set loose to play in the wilderness, women kept rifles next to the wood stove, and loggers risked their lives every single day. And examining what it means to relate whole worlds across the boundaries of language, culture, and history, Exactly What I Said (May), by Elizabeth Yeoman, offers an accessible, engaging reflection on respectful and responsible translation and collaboration.