Voracious readers can sometimes feel like they’ve seen, or read, it all. But every once in a while, a book crosses our desk that is utterly incomparable to anything we’ve read before. Discover not one, not two, but three astonishingly original works of speculative fiction that will invigorate the imaginations of even the most ravenous readers. Amanda Leduc’s mythical Wild Life follows two hyenas as they speak with humans over decades, producing a strange new religion. The heroine of It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over—Anne de Marcken’s Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction-winning novel—is alive in the afterlife, and narrates her journey across time and space with dark humour and soul-stirring insight. From Yiming Ma comes These Memories Do Not Belong to Us, a mesmerizing sci-fi debut set in a near-future dystopia where citizens can transfer memories between minds. Moderated by Jael Richardson.
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ANNE DE MARCKEN lives in the United States on the unneeded land of the Coast Salish people. She is the founding editor and publisher of The 3rd Thing.
AMANDA LEDUC is a disabled writer whose non-fiction book, Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space was nominated for the 2020 Governor General’s Award. Amanda holds a Master’s degree in Creative Writing from the University of St. Andrews. She has cerebral palsy and presently makes her home in Hamilton, Ontario.
YIMING MA grew up in Toronto and spent a decade across New York, London, Berlin, and South Africa. He went to Stanford and holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College, where he was a Carol Houck Smith Scholar. His work has appeared in the New York Times, The Guardian, Literary Hub and elsewhere. His story Swimmer of Yangtze won the 2018 Guardian 4th Estate Story Prize.
JAEL RICHARDSON is the founder and Executive Director of the Festival of Literary Diversity (FOLD) and the co-host of Into the FOLD: A Book and Lit Fest podcast. She has written a memoir, a novel and three children’s picture books. Her debut novel, Gutter Child was a finalist for the Amazon First Novel Award and the White Pine Award, and her middle grade anthology Today I Am: 10 Stories of Belonging was a finalist for the Ruth and Sylvia Schwartz Children’s Book Award. Richardson holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph and lives in Brampton, Ontario.
