Mawenzi House: 55 books

Sheniz Janmohamed's second collection continues the poet's journey, tracing the inception and annihilation of sacred fire. In a series of highly evocative, personal poems, Firesmoke explores the meaning of truth and the self, finding them both in form and emptiness. In her unorthodox, broadminded...

John arrives in a Montreal airport with a suitcase in hand. We do not know where he is from, or who he is. The novel sets out to explore his identity by following his daily movements and intimate thoughts, as well as his connections to those coming into contact with him. He writes his own reflections...

Now entering his nineties, Rienzi Crusz is widely published, and respected and loved for his unabashedly romantic and finely crafted poetry, though always existing below the mainstream radar.  How to Dance in this Rarefied Air offers select and new poems setting out his journey as a poet...

“‘Half century under Japan then half century under Kuomintang . . .too much,’ my mother would sigh and shake her head.” Miah means “fate” in Taiwanese. Spanning much of the twentieth century, these linked, subtly understated stories trace the destinies of simple folk from the brutal...

Translated from French by Phyllis Aronoff and Howard Scott. From Goncourt Prize finalist a beautiful and brilliant new novel.  With a nod to Samuel Beckett and Bohumil Hrabal, a young dramatist from a West African nation describes a student protest against a brutal oligarchy and its...

The Youth of God tells the story of Nuur, a sensitive and academically gifted seventeen-year-old boy growing up in Toronto’s Somali neighbourhood, as he negotiates perilously between the calling of his faith and his intellectual ambitions. Trying to influence him are a radical Muslim imam and a...

When at age 51, Joshua Éclair—victim of a pygmalianism gone awry—emerges from amnesia in a hospital in Montreal, he must explore what makes him want to erase his identity, and must undertake the process of exorcising what has brought him to this pass. This is the gripping story of a man’s...

This long poem addresses the imaginations of cultural hybridity as they are formed through passages between real and imagined homelands and host lands, be they Guyana, Canada, or India. The speaker narrates his own past through a splicing of moving pictures taken from a wide selection of twentieth-century...

You remember the tragedy. But how do you begin to live again? One morning in the 1990s in Kosovo, the Albanian population of Gjakova find their front doors marked with a white cross. Fearful for their lives, the Albanians in one neighbourhood hide their women and children inside a basement....

These sardonic, wry, and sometimes playful stories, set in Toronto and the Indian subcontinent, describe the lives of people caught in diverse situations characterized by their recent unsettled, alien status. A disgruntled yoga teacher; an ardent epistolarian; a school custodian who has lost a winning...

“I imagine a crowd of bottle blonde, husky voiced, fishnet-wearing hookers lounging on my couch. They sniff their coke and chat loudly about their Johns.” How far would you go to be free? Humorous, though tinged with a sense of the tragic, at times risqué, and utterly contemporary,...

Coming out in South Africa … At what cost? All his life Kabelo Mosala has been the perfect child to his doting absent parents, who show him off every chance they get. Both his parents and his small community look forward to him coming back after medical school and joining his father’s practice....

In Cape Town’s District 6, despite the brutality of apartheid laws, the lives of people go on. In these five connected stories, the central character is a precocious little girl called Rosa. Through her adventures in the neighbourhood we come to meet and know the District and its many colourful...