A LAMBDA Award winner and breakout fiction sensation returns with a darkly funny slice of friendship strife
We arrive to wreckage—a restaurant smashed to rubble, with tables and chairs upended riotously. Under the swampy nighttime cover of a Montreal heat-wave, this is where we meet our protagonist, Cannon, dripping in little beads of regret sweat. She was supposed to be closing the restaurant for the night, but instead, well, she destroyed it. The mess feels a bit like a horror-scape—not unlike the horror films Cannon and her best friend, Trish, watch together. Cooking dinner and digging into deep cuts of Australian horror films on their scheduled weekly hangs has become the glue in their rote relationship. In high school, they were each other's lifeline—two queer second-generation Chinese nerds trapped in the suburbs. Now, on the uncool side of their twenties, the essentialness of one another feels harder to pin down.
Yet, when our stoic and unbendingly well-behaved Cannon finds herself—very uncharacteristically—surrounded by smashed plates, it is Trish who shows up to pull her the hell outta there.
In Cannon, Lee Lai’s much anticipated follow-up to the critically acclaimed and award-winning Stone Fruit, the full palette of a nervous breakdown is just a slice of what Lai has on offer. As Cannon’s shoulders bend under the weight of an aging Gung-gung and an avoidant mother, Lai’s sharp sense of humor and sensitive eye produce a story that will hit readers with a smash.

Lee Lai is an Australian cartoonist living in Tio’tia:ke (colonially known as Montreal, Canada). In 2021, she was selected as one of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 for her debut graphic novel, Stone Fruit, which went on to win several awards, including the Lambda Literary Award for Graphic Novel, the Cartoonist Studio Prize, the Lynd Ward Graphic Novel Prize, and two Ignatz Awards. Her comics have appeared on the New Yorker, McSweeney’s, the New York Times, Granta Magazine, and the Museum of Modern Art Magazine.

Lee Lai's profile page

In Cannon, Lee Lai has performed a rare and powerful act of alchemy—the images, narrative, and writing not only capture a life, but combine so that the book itself feels alive.

Stag Dance

A beautifully-drawn slice of life, filled with the kind of intimate, specific details that make the best fiction seem autobiographical.

Shortcomings

It’s rare, and precious, when a moment—in a movie, in a poem, in a comic—surges up at you as being True. And in Cannon, Lee Lai does it again and again.

The Hard Tomorrow

Beguilingly drawn, Cannon depicts a wide spectrum of adulthood with nuance and complexity. From one story unravels many stories, about friendships, situationships, work, familial obligations. I was struck by its attention and care.

Bliss Montage