House of Anansi Press

Uplifting stories, vignettes, and reflections to inspire gratitude, love, joy, and hope in navigating life in a changing, challenging world.

This beautiful and welcoming book can be read cover to cover or used as a daily source of guidance, providing gentle wisdom that inspires and empowers. Through the lens of five transformative practices — gratitude, love, joy, happiness, and hope — bestselling author Monique Gray Smith weaves together short stories, poignant reflections, and thoughtful questions that invite readers to pause and reconnect with their inner light. And as an Indigenous author, Monique brings her cultural wisdom and unique perspective to each offering. 

Sharing the Light is a powerful reminder that when we embrace our light and share it with the world, that energy not only transforms us but ripples out to uplift everyone around us.

From Teva Harrison, the award-winning author and illustrator of In-Between Days, comes a powerful work of poetry and art in which she continues to explore what it means to live with metastatic breast cancer.

In this remarkable, frank, and gut-wrenching mix of words and images, Teva continues on her journey, grappling with what it means to live with metastatic breast cancer. She plunges deep into her inner world, shadowing the progression of the disease. Reality takes on sharp edges: the swell of cancer and its retreat with chemo. Her inner corporeal reality versus her outer manifestation of health, vitality, and femininity. Holding fast to the great love of her life, while preparing to leave him behind. Contemplating who she was before cancer, and who she is now.

Starkly honest and wholly profound, Not One of These Poems Is About You distills life to its essence. Teva Harrison continues to gift the world with her clear-eyed insight and her open heart.

Discover Toronto’s wild, weird history and the 100 unique beers it inspired!

Did you know that Babe Ruth hit his first home run in Toronto? Or that the city’s first taxi service was operated by a former slave from the American South? Or that, during the Second World War, anti-submarine technology was developed in a carriage house at Casa Loma? These are the sorts of stories Henderson Brewing Company has been celebrating with their monthly “Ides” series: unique brews that pay tribute to just-as-unique moments in Toronto’s history.

Toronto in 100 Beers is more than a history of Henderson’s limited releases, it’s a history of the city itself—a city that has nurtured the lives and legends of artists, golfers, boxers, prog rockers, prestidigitators, hockey legends, and even a few ghosts. This book collects their stories and those of the beers dreamt up in their honour. Toronto is a wild, weird city whose rich history is worthy of celebration—so raise a glass to Toronto and to the Henderson Brewing Company.

From the author and illustrator of the critically acclaimed graphic memoir In-Between Days comes a splendid new colouring book of original new illustrations with a few choice words of hope that will inspire and delight.

When Teva Harrison was first diagnosed with cancer, she felt lost, cast adrift. In order to pull herself out of depression, to draw herself forward, she started to draw. In the beginning, the drawings were tiny wildflowers photographed on her travels. Something about that act of looking, drawing the edges until flowers emerged, focusing on something so short-lived, resilient, and beautiful changed the nature of her days. It let the joy back in. This colouring book is an expansion on that germ of hope. Having cancer has made the world feel especially precious to Harrison, and she finds magic and delight everywhere: symbol-enriched heraldry, animals and birds, everyday objects that give her pleasure, foliage and flowers, and a few choice words of inspiration and hope.

tawâw [pronounced ta-WOW]:
Come in, you’re welcome, there’s room.

Acclaimed chef Shane M. Chartrand’s debut cookbook explores the reawakening of Indigenous cuisine and what it means to cook, eat, and share food in our homes and communities.

Born to Cree parents and raised by a Métis father and Mi’kmaw-Irish mother, Shane M. Chartrand has spent the past ten years learning about his history, visiting with other First Nations peoples, gathering and sharing knowledge and stories, and creating dishes that combine his interests and express his personality. The result is tawâw: Progressive Indigenous Cuisine, a book that traces Chartrand’s culinary journey from his childhood in Central Alberta, where he learned to raise livestock, hunt, and fish on his family’s acreage, to his current position as executive chef at the acclaimed SC Restaurant in the River Cree Resort & Casino in Enoch, Alberta, on Treaty 6 Territory.

Containing over seventy-five recipes — including Chartrand’s award-winning dish “War Paint” — along with personal stories, culinary influences, and interviews with family members, tawâw is part cookbook, part exploration of ingredients and techniques, and part chef’s personal journal.

Ecological gardening with ease and simplicity.

Gardening Naturally offers a wealth of information and practical advice for growing indoor and outdoor plants based on sustainability, a rejection of artificial chemicals, and respect for biodiversity and the natural world. From advice on planning your garden and dealing with disease, insects, and the arrival of cold weather, to tips for starting your own compost, repotting effectively, and choosing which local and native flowers to best attract pollinators, Gardening Naturally will interest anyone who wants to add flowers, edibles, and greenery to their daily life, no matter the size of their balcony or the extent of their garden.

After the extraordinary success of Three Times a Day, Marilou and Alexandre Champagne are back with a beautiful second volume featuring more than 100 brand new recipes.

Marilou and Alexandre Champagne are back with Three Times a Day: Simple and Stylish. Featuring more than 100 brand new recipes themed around practical categories like Indulgence, Entertaining, Quick & Easy, Gluten Free, Lactose Free, Vegetarian, and His Choice, this new volume is illustrated with more than 300 pages of delicious recipes and beautiful colour photography throughout.

From Dr. David Posen, the bestselling author of Is Work Killing You? and The Little Book of Stress Relief, comes a book about listening to your body, understanding your mind, and making better choices in your life.

For over thirty years, Dr. David Posen has counselled patients suffering from severe stress, anxiety, and depression. Over that time, he noticed a pattern. As our lives have become faster and increasingly fragmented, many of us have become disconnected from our true selves. Using a holistic approach that combines elements of physiology, psychology, and philosophy, Authenticity teaches readers to acknowledge and accept their true selves in order to make better and more informed life choices. Drawing on real-life examples from his experience in stress management, Dr. Posen has identified five common sources of conflict: personality traits, time and speed, sleep, values, and passions. For each of these areas, the solution is surprisingly simple. We must learn to live in a way that is authentic and true to our unique selves; we must live in harmony with who we truly are.

An actionable guide to mindfulness and practical ethics for any creative professional who wants to make a living without selling their soul.

It can be difficult to live according to our values in a complicated world. At a time when capitalism seems most unforgiving but the need for paying work remains high, it is important to learn how we can be more mindful and intentional about our impact — personal, social, economic, and environmental.

As designer and creative director Kelly Small had to do to navigate a crisis of ethics and burnout in their career in advertising, we can admit our complicity in problematic systems and take on the responsibility of letting our own conscience guide our decisions.

Start with one or many of these 100+ rigorously researched, ultra-practical action steps:

• Co-create and collaborate
• Get obsessed with accessibility
• Demand diverse teams
• Commit to self-care
• Make ethics a competitive edge
• Be mindful of privilege
• Create for empowerment, not exploitation

With a humorous and irreverent tone, Small reveals how when we release unnecessary judgement and become action-oriented, we can clarify the complicated business of achieving an ethical practice in the creative industries. Discover the power of incremental, positive changes in our daily work-lives and the fulfillment of purposeful work.

A brilliant exploration of the body as a site of settler colonial impact, centring embodied wholeness as a pathway to our collective liberation.

Through reflections on childbirth, parenting, creative practice, and expansive responsibility as pathways to wholeness, Anishinaabe visual artist Quill Christie-Peters explores how reconnecting with the body can be an act of resistance and healing. She shows that wholeness—despite pain and displacement—is not just possible but essential for liberation, not only for Indigenous people but for all of us.

In poetic and raw storytelling, Quill shares her own experiences of gendered violence and her father’s survival of residential school, revealing how colonialism disconnects us from ourselves. Yet, through an Anishinaabe lens, the body is more than just flesh—it extends to ancestors, homelands, spirit relations, and animal kin.

This fierce and enlightening book reimagines the way we understand settler colonialism—through the body itself. On Wholeness takes us on a journey that begins before birth, in a realm where ancestors and spirits swirl like smoke in the great beyond. 

While bok choy is now a staple on Western grocery store shelves, other Asian vegetables remain unknown—even though they’re delicious, nutritious, and easy to grow in northern climates. 

Caroline, Stéphanie, and Patricia Wang, three sisters of Cantonese descent, have made it their mission to introduce gardeners, cooks, and vegetable lovers of all flavours to wider sources of sustenance.

Organized around fifteen Asian vegetables that are presented according to the rhythm of the seasons, this lush, full-colour book offers advice on growing and harvesting organic crops intended for both weekend and commercial gardeners, along with a host of ideas to preserve and prepare them, including over forty recipes, some of which have been developed by renowned chefs.

The Wang sisters complement the book’s practical advice by offering thoughts on Asian vegetables from a cultural point of view and sharing the importance of these foods within their own family, members of whom left China to immigrate to Madagascar before settling in Canada.

Asian Vegetables is a generous and gorgeous tribute to good food, to the land, and the importance of strong roots.

A unique guided journal designed to empower writers at every stage of their careers.

In Safekeeping, award-winning writer and author care specialist Chelene Knight offers tangible, structured guidance for new and established authors at different stages, including those not aiming for publication. This journal nurtures a new generation of healthy and supported authors, helping them avoid imposter syndrome, burnout, and the trap of comparing themselves to their peers, all while learning how to show up as their most authentic selves. Through a blend of thought-provoking writing prompts, tips, introspective exercises, and mindset-building activities, Safekeeping equips authors with the tools to construct their own roadmap to a sustainable and fulfilling creative practice.

The journal doubles as a valuable keepsake, documenting the entire publishing journey from the inception of an idea to the post-publication phase, ensuring writers can hold on to their experiences while planning for future projects. With warmth and compassion, Safekeeping equips authors with the tools to successfully bring their books into the world.

Taking as her starting point the inspiration and wisdom that can be derived from myth, fairy tales, and folk culture, Dr. Sharon Blackie offers a set of practical and grounded tools for enchanting our lives and the places we live, so leading to a greater sense of meaning and of belonging to the world.

Enchantment. By Dr. Blackie’s definition, a vivid sense of belongingness to a rich and many-layered world, a profound and whole-hearted participation in the adventure of life. Enchantment is a natural, spontaneous human tendency — one we possess as children, but lose, through social and cultural pressures, as we grow older. It is an attitude of mind which can be cultivated: the enchanted life is possible for anyone. It is intuitive, embraces wonder, and fully engages the mythic imagination — but it is also deeply embodied in ecology, grounded in place and community.

To live this way is to be challenged, to be awakened, to be gripped and shaken to the core by the extraordinary which lies at the heart of the ordinary.

A colourful illustrated history of the buildings in Vancouver’s Chinatown, celebrating the richness, diversity, and vibrancy of the Chinese community.

Buildings are more than just bricks and mortar; they are keepers of secrets and history. With more than seventy vibrant illustrations, writeups on the buildings, interviews with community members, and select archival photographs, Chinatown Vancouver celebrates the invaluable contributions of the Chinese to Canada. The colourful illustrations portray Chinatown during its thriving days as a commercial hub when iconic businesses such as Cathay Importers, Ho Inn Restaurant, Ming Wo Cookware, and Ho Ho Restaurant were pillars in the community.

Early Chinese settlers in Vancouver demonstrated immense resilience and perseverance in creating a self-sustaining safety net to weather racial hostility, discrimination, and segregation from broader Canadian society. The protection of cultural sites like Chinatown helps us understand our connection to place, the past, and the future. In showcasing the unique architecture, Chinatown Vancouverhonours the neighbourhood as an irreplaceable living heritage site and cultural asset for all Canadians.

A stylish and inspiring guide to living a happier life in balance with the natural world

Minimal offers readers inspiration and tools to embrace simple living and create meaningful, lasting change in their lives. From advice on home decorating and decluttering, and easy-to-follow recipes for making your own cosmetics and cleaning products, to tips for shopping sustainably, composting, and restoring old furniture, Minimal provides a host of small but powerful ways to live a more balanced life while being good to the planet.

33 personal stories that redefine how Canadians see themselves.

We are more than just landscapes, polar bears, Mounties, and canoes. More than just “thank yous,” “sorrys,” hot prime ministers, and doughnut shops. We are also tattoo artists who have discovered the secret to cheating death. Designers hell-bent on winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Super soldiers who take “live vests” off suicide bombers. Freethinkers who refuse to be tamed. We are global-village visionaries, world record setters, ambassadors of the imagination, and conquerors of the Rockies. We are Canadian. We are whoever we dream ourselves to be. Meet the glorious and free.

$2 from each book sale will be donated to PEN Canada in support of its efforts to defend freedom of expression. Why? Because living glorious and free involves challenging, exploring, and imagining a better world — and being whoever we dream ourselves to be. And freedom of expression protects our right to do all of that.

In the spirit of French Women Don’t Get Fat and Bringing Up Bébé comes the quintessential book about what French women can teach us about the world of lingerie.

American women wear underwear. French women wear lingerie.

French women seem inherently more confident in their bodies, able to embrace the sensuality of life and love. What’s their secret?

Lingerie.

Paris Undressed will help women feel at ease with their figures and show them how to integrate a lingerie lifestyle à la française to enhance their own femininity, confidence, and joie de vivre. It will transform the way women perceive their undergarments — and their bodies — and reveal how to co-ordinate a lingerie wardrobe to reflect personality and to meet lifestyle needs with the right dose of reverie. This book goes behind the seams, combining cultural references, expertise, and practical advice to inspire every woman to reconsider her underwear drawer.

Finalist, 2025 Taste Canada Awards

Elevate your summer entertaining with beach town classics from Heydays at The June Motel.  

Located on the shores of Lake Huron in beautiful Sauble Beach, Ontario, Heydays at The June Motel is a retro-inspired restaurant that offers guests a chance to experience the good old days of summer. Serving reinvented coastal classics and elevated comfort food, Heydays is a place to come together with friends and family over a glass of rosé and fresh oysters while the sun goes down and a warm breeze blows in off the water. 

This collection of over 120 recipes offers home cooks a delectable range of mouth-watering dishes to savour and share—from their signature buttered Hot Lobster Rolls and Charred Broccoli Caesar Salad to Old Bay Fried Chicken and béchamel-covered Classic Mac and Cheese. Written with humour and warmth, and filled with absolutely stunning photography, Heydays at The June Motel: Beach Town Classics invites readers to take home the beach and create summer memories that will last a lifetime.

Winner, 2019 Taste Canada Award — Single-Subject Cookbooks, Silver
An Eat Northi Best Cookbook of the Year
A Now Magazine Best Cookbook of the Year

Everything you’ve ever wanted to know about seafood — what to look for at the fish counter, how to ensure what you’re buying has been responsibly farmed, and what to do with it when you get it home — by one of the food industry’s most-beloved and respected authorities on all things fish.

John Bil, one of the food industry’s most beloved and respected authorities on all things fish, gives seafood lovers the knowledge and confidence they need to make smart decisions about the fish they consume. Why does halibut cost what it does? Were those wild spot prawns responsibly sourced? How do you clean a squid? And what’s the best way to prepare those live cherrystone clams when you get them home?

Ship to Shore: Straight Talk from the Seafood Counter features over fifty delicious recipes accompanied by elegant, full-colour photography that will have you lining up at your local fish counter.

Tessa and Scott share their incredible and inspiring story — now updated and expanded with a new introduction, over 100 dazzling new photographs, and three all-new chapters covering the pair’s stunning performances at the Sochi and PyeongChang Olympic Games and beyond.

Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir are the most decorated figure skaters in the history of the sport, and are widely celebrated by peers and fans alike for their superior athleticism, one-of-a-kind partnership, and generosity of spirit. In these pages, they share their incredible story with the world.

Tessa and Scott: Our Journey from Childhood Dream to Gold offers an intimate and revealing behind-the-scenes look at the iconic duo. Veteran sports columnist Steve Milton draws from hours of conversations with Tessa and Scott as they take us from their first meeting in 1995 to their impressive debut and rapid rise on the international scene; from the highs and lows of competitive skating to the profound impact of Tessa’s injury and subsequent recovery; and from their unprecedented Olympic achievements in Vancouver in 2010 and Sochi in 2014, through to their exhilarating triumph in Pyeongchang in 2018, when their performance capture hearts the world over and catapulted them into unparalleled international acclaim.

Lavishly illustrated with over 100 new photos, this updated and expanded edition is filled with personal stories and recollections from Tessa, Scott, and those close to them — including family members, friends, and coaches past and present. Tessa and Scott is as much a spectacular visual history as it is a celebration of two of the world’s premier athletes.