What's in the works?
A look at forthcoming Biblioasis titles
Scottish and Irish novels, short story collections, poetry, hard-hitting nonfiction, and more! As the weather warms and we veer towards the sunny months of summer, the Biblioasis crew is working tirelessly on our forthcoming books for the rest of 2025.
There’s something for pretty much anyone here, and we hope you’ll be as excited as we are to check them out.
Ashley Van Elswyk
Editorial Assistant
Dark Like Under by Alice Chadwick
June 17, 2025
In the aftermath of a surprising death, students and teachers at an English school grapple with their grief. Yet the bell continues to ring, and normal life—lessons, arguments, flirtations—goes on. As the heat of the late spring day intensifies, allegiances strain and rivalries escalate, and old secrets start to surface. Set against a backdrop of strikes, economic unrest, and the stratified milieus of a small town in the 1980s, Dark Like Under thrums with the richly detailed inner lives of its varied cast of characters. Alice Chadwick’s luminous debut captures the promise and risk of late adolescence in a profound exploration of resilience and connection, frustration and grief, renewal and the legacies we leave.
Sacred Rage by Steven Heighton
August 19, 2025
Sacred Rage selects stories spanning the range of the late Steven Heighton’s career as a fiction writer, including works from Instructions for the Drowning (A New Yorker Best Book of 2023), Flight Paths of the Emperor, The Dead Are More Visible, and On Earth As It Is.
We’re Somewhere Else Now by Robyn Sarah
September 2, 2025 (CAN) / October 7, 2025 (US)
In We’re Somewhere Else Now, Robyn Sarah’s new poems move with ease from the particular to the abstract. These are poems of grief and unexpected change, but the tone is considerate and meditative, resulting in poems of quiet awe at the human experience. Sarah’s newest collection shifts with ease between various perspectives: from the first to the third person to a collective we. Each poem is a lit room for the reader to look into: “lit room to lit room.”
We’re Somewhere Else Now is essentially a collection that chronicles the COVID lockdown, tracking empty, desultory days of isolation and uncertainty, while also highlighting reasons for continuing to pay attention: playing with a grandchild, the rarity of a leap year, the call of the birds.
Big of You by Elise Levine
September 9, 2025 (CAN) / October 7, 2025 (US)
Two young women hitchhike around Europe, discovering uneasy secrets about each other. A casino worker navigates her sad-sack, unlucky life. A team in space is left reeling after a colleague’s unexpected death. A sassy millennia-old being is on display as a roadside attraction. Big of You contains stories of real and fantastical life, each with its own distinctive voice and wild vocabulary. Levine’s characters grapple with ambition, striving, performativity, and self-sabotage, including the sabotage of memory and memory loss.
At turns playful, blistering, unabashed, defiant, these stories examine striving and ambition under the spectre of late-stage capitalism while contending with the hauntings of the past. The language is turbo-charged, highly expressive, conveying a sense of letting loose. In keeping with its transgressive vocabulary, Big of You captures experiences beyond the norms of realist fiction.
Self Care by Russell Smith
September 16, 2025 (CAN) / October 21, 2025 (US)
Between Daily Self Care, the weekly column she writes for the website The Hype Report, and managing her mood stabilizers, Gloria navigates her quasi-relationship with Florian and commiserates with Isabel, her best friend, about dating apps and dick pics, married men and questionable boundaries. But when she makes a glib pass at Daryn, a stranger wearing a sad face pin on a subway platform crowded with young male protestors leaving an anti-immigration rally, and finds him waiting for her outside her health club the next day, curiosity leads her not to consider a restraining order, but to talk to him.
Claiming she wants to interview him for an article she’s writing on the incel movement, Gloria meets Daryn for coffee and soon invites him back to her apartment—where his strange earnestness and painfully restrained desire inspire her to dominate him sexually. As their sexual relationship intensifies, so does their emotional connection, and Gloria can’t shake her sense that she’s headed in a dangerous direction. An electric examination of women and men, sex and love, self-loathing and twenty-first century loneliness, Self Care is a devastating novel about all the ways we try to cope—with ourselves, and with each other.
Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers by Marcello Di Cintio
September 30, 2025
In 2023, United Nations Special Rapporteur Tomoyo Obokata spent two weeks in Canada, meeting with representatives from federal and provincial governments and human rights commissions, trade unions, civil society organizations, and academics—as well as migrants working in agriculture, caregiving, food processing, and sex work. His conclusion: the country’s Temporary Foreign Worker program is “a breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery.” “I am deeply disturbed by the accounts of exploitation and abuse shared with me by migrant workers,” Obotaka said in a statement. Workers complained of excessive hours and unpaid overtime; of being forced to perform dangerous tasks or ones not specified in their contracts; of being denied access to health care, language courses, and other social services; of being physically abused, intimidated, sexually harassed; of the overcrowded and unsanitary living conditions that deprived them of their privacy and dignity. In response, some farm owners and their advocates, angry at Obokata’s comparison to slavery, defended the program, citing long standing relationships with workers who returned to their operations year after year. “If the program is so damned bad,” one farmer advocate asked, “why do these guys keep coming back?”
In Precarious: the Lives of Migrant Workers, Marcello Di Cintio seeks the answers to both the question and illuminates the charges that compelled it, researching the history of Canada’s migrant labour program and speaking with migrant workers across industries and across the country to understand who, in this global elaborate enterprise, stands to gain, who to lose, and how a system that depends on the vulnerability of its most disenfranchised actors can—or can’t—become more just.
Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way by Elaine Feeney
October 7, 2025
When Claire O’Connor leaves London to care for her dying father, she leaves everything—including her boyfriend, Tom. But when Tom ends up moving to the same small Irish town for work, he’s not the only aspect of the past she must reckon with. Living in the house she grew up in, on the site where generations of her family lived, Claire couldn’t be on more familiar ground, yet she struggles with uncertainty—about her relationship, and about how to manage the collision of her worlds, the child she was and the person she’s been trying to become. She constructs a routine, spending days at work and evenings on the internet, inspired by influencers as she fixes up the house, but memories of the place, both her own and those of her ancestors, can’t be tidied away. As old secrets come to light, Claire must confront the ways that the past creates the future—and in finding her own way, learn to face herself.
A story of grief and inheritance, homecoming and reckoning with your roots, Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way is a profoundly moving exploration of family, violence, history, and hope.
The Sorrow of Angels by Jón Kalman Stefánsson (trans. Philip Roughton)
November 4, 2025
It’s been three weeks since the boy came to town, carrying a book of poetry to return to the old sea captain—the poetry Bárður died for. Just three weeks, but already Bárður's ghost has faded. Snow falls so heavily that it binds heaven and earth together.
As the villagers gather in the inn to drink schnapps and coffee while the boy reads to them from Hamlet, Jens the postman stumbles in half-dead, having almost frozen to his horse. On his next journey to the fjords, Jens is accompanied by the boy, and both must risk their lives for each other, and for an unusual item of mail.
The second installment in Stefánsson’s Trilogy About the Boy, The Sorrow of Angels is a timeless and lyrical story that evokes the human struggle within the ferocious majesty of nature.
Dust: More Lives of the Poets (with Guitars) by Ray Robertson
November 11, 2025
Dust: More Lives of the Poets (with Guitars) is a collection of a dozen biographical and critical portraits of some of the twentieth century’s most innovative, influential, and fascinating musicians. From rock to folk, blues to gospel, country to the unclassifiable; from the famous, to the forgotten, to the barely known, Ray Robertson combines a novelist’s eye for dramatic detail with an unapologetic fanboy’s obsession with the lives and lasting artistic achievements of twelve of his musical heroes, among them Alex Chilton, Duane Allman, Nick Drake, and Muddy Waters.
Benbecula by Graeme Macrae Burnet
November 11, 2025
Summer 1857. Angus MacPhee returns from a fortnight’s work as a servant at a house a few miles away. He seems to have lost his mind. His family are forced to keep him shackled to his bed. When he appears to have come to his senses he is allowed to go at large, but his erratic behaviour gives rise to suggestions that he should be confined in an asylum. Neither the family nor the local community are able to meet the required costs.
Liniclate, 1862. Malcolm MacPhee is living alone in the house where his brother’s madness led to horrifying ends. His only contact with the outside world are a neighbour and the local priest. Isolated, ostracised by the small community, Malcolm is haunted by visions of his family’s fate. Is he afflicted by the same madness? Worse, there are questions about his sister, Marion. Malcolm says she left long ago with their brother John, but no one saw her board the ship from Lochmaddy. Has something more sinister occurred?
In Benbecula, Booker-nominated author Graeme Macrae Burnet returns to the historic Scotland of His Bloody Project to tell, for the first time, the story of the MacPhee family. Drawing on letters, asylum records, postmortem reports, and witness statements, Burnet constructs a beguilingly layered narrative about madness, murder, and the uncertain nature of the self.
In good publicity news:
Old Romantics by Maggie Armstrong was reviewed in L’Esprit: “Irresistible . . . a fresh and formally inventive character study.”
On Oil by Don Gillmor was reviewed in the Winnipeg Free Press: “Gillmor’s eloquence, humour and pointedness help unpack our species’ complex relationship with oil.” Don Gillmor also wrote an op-ed in the Globe and Mail.
Pascal’s Fire by Kristina Bresnen was reviewed in Arc Poetry #106: “Pascal’s Fire’s theme and variations bring us to a threshold that can be plumbed but never passed.”