2026 is well underway with spring fast approaching, and there have already been lots of great books by small presses released to start off the year. But there are plenty more coming out soon and it’s never too late to add to your reading challenge, whether you’ve set an official one on Goodreads, joining many other avid readers, or something more casual, such as a list of titles you’ve been meaning to get to before the year is out. However you like to enjoy your reading, without further ado, here are 10 books published by Canadian small presses that you should consider adding to your 2026 reading challenge, and why they deserve to be there. 

Let us accept the crowd-fostered confusion of person. Let us precariously enjoy the close-call near-cliché which hugs us with homely familiarity: are we nearly there yet?  Let us reconsider the title: The Character Actor Convention. Convention – is this the only  Convention we may find? Or not?

As a follow-up to Grantrepreneurs, his wickedly witty 2023 debut novel, Jake Swan raises the stakes and widens his scope with Oliver Bell and the Infinite Multiverse (Galleon Books, 2025). This detailed and often dense melding of science fiction and demonology is liberally sprinkled with Swan’s trademark caustic social commentary. Comparisons to Douglas Adams may be inevitable, but add a dash of Tolkien and a pinch of Pynchon to this cosmological smorgasbord of a novel and you’ve got yourself one engagingly volatile page-turner.

There is a school of thought that says we should live every day like it is our last. The impracticality of doing that should be obvious enough, although the spirit of that ideal carries a certain allure. Suzy Krause manages to capture something of both the impracticality and the allure, not to mention the sheer nightmarish absurdity of the world’s impending doom in her novel I Think We’ve Been Here Before (Radiant Press, 2024). Love, both romantic and familial, are put through the wringer in this story of human foibles juxtaposed against global doom. It is a kind of sci-fi tragi-rom-com, if you will.

After finishing A Simple Carpenter (Radiant Press, 2024) by Saskatchewan-based poet and novelist Dave Margoshes, the opening sentence from David Copperfield came to mind: “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.” 

This not-so-simple story of a ship’s carpenter, who has no memory of who he is or where he came from and goes by various names but finally settles on Yusef, chronicles his search for identity, his past and his place in the world in the modern-day Middle East.

The main narrative thrust of Yellow Barks Spider (Radiant Press, 2024), the debut coming-of-age novella by Saskatchewan-born trans-woman, filmmaker, sound artist and writer Harman Burns, is a rural boy’s journey toward transitioning to a woman. But to describe the experience of reading it in terms of coining a genre, I’d have to call it a Prairie Gothic Phantasia. 

Memoirist and poet, Hollay Ghadery has described her first book of fiction, Widow Fantasies (Gordon Hill Press, 2024) as “the result of my struggling to make sense of my fantasising about planning my husband’s funeral.” Not that she wants him dead, but rather because of her need for a more equitable partnership in her marriage, such are the circuitous paths of the psyche. 

Widow Fantasies is a unique collection of micro-fictions where Ghadery condenses her narratives into semi-oblique snapshots

The reality of poetry is its ability to speak to a part of ourselves that is asleep much of the time. When that part awakens, what is real and what is metaphor can seem indistinguishable. A sense of unreality enters our belief systems, altering how we see the world. 

Having a middle-grade author on our blog is a first for us, and we are delighted to kick off what will hopefully be the first of many middle-grad lit features with Anna Rosner, the award-winning author of Eyes on the Ice (Groundwood Books, 2024).

This story follows ten-year-old Lukas and his brother Denys, who want nothing more than to play hockey, but it’s 1963, and they live in Czechoslovakia, where everyone is on the lookout for spies of the state.

This is a thrilling read, and one young readers have been enjoying.

Welcome to the Power Q & A series, Anna!

Everyone has parents. Everyone’s parents die. Yet the stories where parents and death intersect are unique.

George K. Ilsley’s recent memoir tells one such story. As a young adult, George left his Nova Scotia home, heading west, eventually landing in Vancouver—as far away as he could get while remaining in North America. Then, as he turns 50, his father turns 90, and his father needs, but doesn’t especially want, Ilsley’s care.