Coach House Books

5 à 7 season is back! Join us in front of the Coach House on Thursday, July 2 to hear readings from Kate Cayley and Jessica Moore!

We’ll have books for sale, squirrels aplenty, and light refreshments available.

Kate Cayley has previously published two short story collections and three collections of poetry, and her plays have been performed in Canada, the US, and the UK. She is the author of Property, out Fall 2025 with Coach House Books. She has won the Trillium Book Award, an O. Henry Prize, and the Mitchell Prize for Poetry, and been a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, among other awards. Her writing has appeared in Best Canadian Poetry, Best Canadian Stories, Brick, Electric Literature, Joyland, and The New Quarterly. She lives in Toronto.

Jessica Moore is an author and Booker-nominated literary translator. Her most recent book, The Whole Singing Ocean (2020), plunges us into memory, magic, ecological grief and the true story of a boat school. Jessica's first collection, Everything, now (Brick Books 2012), has been called “a powerful journey through love and loss – serving, ultimately, to unsettle any notion of a boundary between them.” Jessica lives in Toronto, near the shores of Lake Ontario, that inland sea.

A fantastic interview with Maggie Helwig is up now on thetorontoreview.ca!

Tonight in Toronto! Join Maggie Helwig as they launch their latest book: Instructions for the End of the World: Homilies of Comfort and Resistance.

Join Maggie Helwig as they launch Instructions for the End of the World: Homilies of Comfort and Resistance, in conversation with Noah Lamanna!

Book launch will start at 7 PM on Thursday, June 18, at St. Stephen-in-the-Fields Church (103 Bellevue Ave., Toronto), where Maggie Helwig is the rector. Instructions for the End of the World is available from a local bookstore near you on June 9!

❤️

‘Mother Maggie dares to reimagine the church as a space for provocative engagement. Poet, writer, and disruptor, she sheds light on our shortcomings and motivates us to unite to improve our shared experience.’ – Sook-Yin Lee

'Remarkable... [A]n edifying, beautifully composed wellspring of moral courage.' – Publishers Weekly, ★ STARRED Review

'In this stunning collection of sermons, Maggie Helwig offers a masterclass in public theology: grounded in biblical reflection and leadership in a particular community of faith, yet with an expansive view of the Church's role in serving the common good. With every word, she reminds us that prophetic witness is, at its core, a pastoral response to those whose lives are at risk. Read on, and be changed.' – Bishop Mariann Budde, author of How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith

An occasion for an occasion: please join editor Sina Queyras on Wednesday, July 22, as they launch On Occasion: Poems for the People in Toronto!

Sina Queyras will be joined by Leah Bobet, Ling Ge, Sally Cooper, Rachel Gerry, Christopher Patton, Ben Robinson, Maggie Helwig, Kirby, Aaron Kreuter, Kathryn Mockler, Barbara Tran, and Suzanne Zelazo. The launch will be held at the brand new Book Bar (600 Markham St.).

This Thursday! The event will be livestreamed if you're not able to join us in person: https://www.facebook.com/events/2828401624167506

Join Maggie Helwig as they launch Instructions for the End of the World: Homilies of Comfort and Resistance, in conversation with Noah Lamanna!

Book launch will start at 7 PM on Thursday, June 18, at St. Stephen-in-the-Fields Church (103 Bellevue Ave., Toronto), where Maggie Helwig is the rector. Instructions for the End of the World is available from a local bookstore near you on June 9!

❤️

‘Mother Maggie dares to reimagine the church as a space for provocative engagement. Poet, writer, and disruptor, she sheds light on our shortcomings and motivates us to unite to improve our shared experience.’ – Sook-Yin Lee

'Remarkable... [A]n edifying, beautifully composed wellspring of moral courage.' – Publishers Weekly, ★ STARRED Review

'In this stunning collection of sermons, Maggie Helwig offers a masterclass in public theology: grounded in biblical reflection and leadership in a particular community of faith, yet with an expansive view of the Church's role in serving the common good. With every word, she reminds us that prophetic witness is, at its core, a pastoral response to those whose lives are at risk. Read on, and be changed.' – Bishop Mariann Budde, author of How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith

Father's Day is this Sunday, June 21! There isn't a more perfect read (to gift a dad in your life, or yourself) than Jordan Abel's DAD ERA, especially considering that this Sunday is also National Indigenous Peoples Day here in Canada.

'Jordan Abel’s DAD ERA further advances his long-standing experiment with form and Indigenous narrative. The book teaches us how to read polyphonically, how to read multiple narrative threads at once. DAD ERA is indeed about fatherhood but it also about aesthetic complexity and formal restlessness in life and art. It is moving and funny and, like all of his work, deeply considered.’ – Billy-Ray Belcourt

This new collection of poetry from Abel is available at your local independent bookstore now. 🧡

Instructions for the End of the World: Homilies of Comfort and Resistance by Maggie Helwig is available now!

Join Maggie Helwig as they launch this newest book, in conversation with Noah Lamanna, at St. Stephen-in-the-Fields Church on Thursday, June 18 at 7 PM.

❤️

When lifelong activist and celebrated author Maggie Helwig became an Anglican priest, she brought both her hard-earned social justice wisdom and her incomparable literary prowess to the role. Where the homily – the weekly act of taking biblical texts and making them speak to one's time, place, and community – can easily become a rote exercise, Helwig takes the language and narrative very seriously. The homilies in this book, selected from those presented to her congregation over the last five years, talk about the Bible, and by extension, the world, through both an activist and a literary lens.

‘Instructions for the End of the World’ is how Helwig describes the gospels. As we live through the climate crisis and the rise of fascism around the world, Helwig’s responses to the ancient texts feel urgent and necessary, reminders of hope and meaning during a time of great anxiety and fear. Whether you’re religious or not, these homilies offer a basis for resistance and resources for building communities that may sustain us all.

'Riverwork is a hymn to slowness and close reading, unknowability, imperfection, wobbly human labor, false starts, and angry love; it is a scream against the increasingly omnipresent, automatically generated offers to synopsize, or synthesize, and therefore to strangle. It opts for excess.'

Claire Foster on Lisa Robertson's Riverwork in Bookforum's Spring 2026 issue. 🌷

There is much to dive into with Riverwork! Read Claire's piece, in print and online (🔗 in bio), and then listen to Lisa's interview with David Naimon for Between the Covers, which opens with a reading of Claire's quote above. Riverwork is available everywhere you buy books now.

Now announcing the Coach House Books Fall 2026 slate of releases! 🌟

We’re delighted to bring you new translated fiction from Quebec by Sébastien Dulude and Dominique Fortier, and to re-introduce Maggie Helwig’s 2008 novel Girls Fall Down. New nonfiction includes Women, Walking, an anthology about moving through the world on foot as a woman, featuring contributors such as Jenny Odell, Miriam Toews, Andrea Gibson, Zalika Reid-Benta, Janika Oza, Ann-Marie MacDonald, and Catherine Hernandez, and Nowtown, a collection of essays exploring everything that makes Calgary unique. We’re also excited to publish new books of poetry from Nasser Hussain, Dominique Béchard, and Leigh Kotsilidis.

All Fall books are now available to pre-order at chbooks.com, or from your local independent bookstore!

‘Hachemi (in a lovely and undoubtedly exhausting translation by Julia Sanches) never loses sight of the *play* that is so important in writing good science-fiction. You can almost feel the author grinning at you as you read, and I daresay you’ll end up grinning back by the end.’ – Drew Broussard, Literary Hub

THE MULAI, out from Coach House Books July 17, is a must-read summer novel!

🌀

An archeologist travels to a distant planet to spend time among a mysterious community: a people who live in temperature-controlled domes, worship a deity called Dog, and repeat an elliptical phrase from which they draw their name: mulai, the tree comes. The descendants of a long-forgotten space mission, the Mulai have abandoned the social norms that once bound them to Earth.

Over centuries of isolation, their language has become more about change than stability, and the ways they eat, write, reproduce, bury their dead, and understand gender have all transformed into something almost unrecognizable. As the archeologist records his attempts to understand their world – a strange negative of our own – questions of translation, meaning-making, and the ultimate precarity of civilization come to the fore.

Drawing on Borges, Le Guin, and Calvino, The Mulai is a mind-bending work of metafiction whose interlocking puzzles resound with Munir Hachemi’s singularly playful and eclectic style.