Event Details
Toronto provides the backdrop for stories of belonging, change, and the many ways we experience a city.
Event Details
Toronto provides the backdrop for stories of belonging, change, and the many ways we experience a city.
Speakers for this event
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Adrick Brock
Adrick Brock
Adrick Brock is a writer from Toronto Island. His fiction has appeared in The New Quarterly, EVENT, The Malahat Review, Prism International, Riddle Fence, The Dalhousie Review and has been short- and long-listed for the CBC Short Story contest. His first published story, ‘Nina In The Body Of A Clown,’ won the 2014 Western Magazine Award for Fiction. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and lives in Vancouver. Islanders is his debut novel.
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Arpita Ghosal
Arpita Ghosal
As a child, Arpita Ghosal pestered her storyteller grandmother for “just one more story” so incessantly that her mother taught her to read out of desperation. Her love of stories led her to a PhD in English literature, a career in public and post-secondary education, and a passion for arts journalism. Arpita writes constantly at Sesaya Arts Magazine (sesayarts.com), regularly interviewing artists and authors to help them share their stories. She works at the TDSB, where she has held various teaching and leadership roles. Her life as a mother to three remarkable children and a one-of-a-kind rescue dog yields wondrous stories and experiences. And she remains an avid reader with far too many books teetering on multiple surfaces.
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Carrianne Leung
Carrianne Leung
Carrianne Leung is a fiction writer and associate professor at the University of Guelph in Creative Writing. Her debut novel, The Wondrous Woo was shortlisted for the 2014 Toronto Book Awards. Her collection of linked stories, That Time I Loved You was named one of the Best Books of 2018 by CBC, shortlisted for the Toronto Book Awards 2019, long listed for Canada Reads 2019 and awarded the Danuta Gleed Literary Award 2019. Her most recent novel, Wonderland Road was published in April 2026 by Harper Collins Canada.
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Don Gillmor
Don Gillmor
Don Gillmor is the author of To the River, which won the Governor General’s Award for nonfiction. He is the author of five novels, Cherry Beach, Breaking and Entering, Long Change, Mount Pleasant, and Kanata; a two-volume history of Canada, Canada: A People’s History; and nine books for children, two of which were nominated for the Governor General’s Award. He was a senior editor at The Walrus, and his journalism has appeared in Rolling Stone, GQ, Saturday Night, Toronto Life, Globe and Mail, and the Toronto Star. He has won twelve National Magazine Awards.
Books
Cherry Beach
A brutal murder exposes secret real estate deals, a corrupt police force, and the dark heart of a city simmering with unrest.
When two girls are found murdered in a rundown Toronto highrise, Jamieson Abel and his partner are first on the scene. Abel is a law school dropout turned police detective, chronically at odds with his colleagues and perpetually on the brink of being terminated. Davis is the department’s only female officer of colour. Both understand their being partnered as a form of banishment, but when the details of the murder go public at the start of an excruciatingly hot summer, they find themselves thrust into the centre of a front page investigation that will bring to a head the city’s long history of shady real estate deals and racist disenfranchisement.
Intricately plotted and brilliantly layered, Cherry Beach is a gripping literary crime novel that examines class, race, and corruption in the most multicultural city in the world.
AuthorDon Gillmor
PublisherBiblioasis
Islanders
When Theo Frith, a teenager growing up on Toronto Island, discovers the body of artist Dan Rainier in the harbour ice, he’s thrust into the center of a drama that will alter the course of his life—and the lives of everyone around him. Dan’s sudden death jolts the close-knit island community, including Theo’s mom, Yvonne, who is struggling to keep her drinking in check, and Dan’s daughter, Maxine, who is left with the senselessness of losing her dad.
Moving through multiple timelines in the late 2000s, Islanders braids Yvonne and Dan’s mid-life reckonings with Theo and Maxine’s coming of age. Years after Dan’s death, the younger pair find themselves far flung, in Whitehorse, where Maxine is stationed as an ER nurse and Theo works on a historical television series about the Klondike. When their paths cross, a tentative love story takes shape. But four thousand kilometres from Toronto Island, they remain haunted by the place they tried to leave behind, with its beaches and lagoons, artists and eccentrics, winter isolation and summer crowds, and by the intimacy of a place where everyone knows everyone else’s business, even when they pretend not to.
Inhabiting the world of Toronto Island in vivid detail, Islanders captures the ache of isolation and belonging amidst the rare backdrop of one of Canada’s most unusual neighbourhoods.
AuthorAdrick Brock
PublisherNightwood Editions
Wonderland Road
An absorbing and heartfelt new novel about three people looking for a future when the world hangs by a thread, for readers of Moon on the Crusted Snow and The Future
Pauline has not spoken to her sister, Mei, in two decades, not since before the world changed. A rare letter arrives asking Pauline to return to their old neighbourhood to care for Mei’s young daughter while Mei goes to find work.
Twelve-year-old Jing is living in the Children’s House, where all the parentless children stay while their parents work at the Farms. She hasn’t heard from her mother in months and the food deliveries they were promised have dwindled. Her only friends in the neighbourhood are a crow named Iris, an older boy named Julian, and the ghosts of her ancestors in their abandoned apartment.
Julian, once a star athlete and student with a bright future, is one of the only young men left on Wonderland Road. He can’t leave his parents, and he knows there is nowhere left to go. But Julian dreams of a boy he met and a kiss shared in what feels like another lifetime.
These three people will cross paths on Wonderland Road, a community trying to survive in a world of massive disruption and uncertainty. When the future feels poised on a knife’s edge, they must find a way forward.
AuthorCarrianne Leung
PublisherHarperCollins Canada