Meet the Canada Reads 2025 contenders

Canada Reads is back! This year, the great Canadian book debate is looking for one book to change the narrative. 

The books on this year’s show all have the power to change how we see, share and experience the world around us.

The 2025 contenders are:

The debates will take place March 17-20. 

If you’d like the Canada Reads books in an accessible format, both CELA and NNELS provide books in audio, braille, print braille and text formats. You can find out which formats are available for each of the books here for CELA and here for NNELS. 

The five panellists were on CBC Radio’s Commotion to reveal the books they will be championing in the debates.

WATCH | The Canada Reads 2025 contenders speak with CBC Radio’s Commotion: 

Canada Reads will be hosted by Ali Hassan and will be broadcast on CBC Radio One, CBC TV, CBC Gem, CBC Listen and on CBC Books. Canada Reads airs at 10 a.m. ET (11 a.m. AT, 1:30 p.m. NT) on CBC Radio One and 1 p.m. ET (2 p.m. AT, 2:30 p.m. NT) on CBC TV. You can tune in live or catch a replay on the platform of your choice.

“I’m very excited for this 2025 panel to introduce many of us to new authors, beautiful and thought-provoking writing and fresh perspectives about the world around us,” said Hassan in an email. “This year’s shortlisted books have the power to change how we see, share and experience the world around us and remind us that humour books and thrillers can be profound.

“No pressure, of course! But if anyone can do it, this panel can!”

Hassan has been the host of Canada Reads since 2017. He is an actor, comedian and host of CBC Radio’s Laugh Out Loud and a frequent guest host of The Next Chapter, As it Happens and Q. He can also be seen in his TV roles on Designated Survivor, Odd Squad and the CBC shows Sort of and Run the Burbs. He is also the author of the comedic memoir Is There Bacon in Heaven?.

2025 marks the 24th edition of Canada Reads. 

Canada Reads premiered in 2002. The first winning book was In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje, which was defended by musician Steven Page. In 2021, CBC Books put together a retrospective to look back at the show’s biggest moments and its impact on Canadian literature.

Last year’s winner was author Heather O’Neill, who championed The Future by Catherine Leroux, translated by Susan Ouriou.

Other past Canada Reads winners include Ducks, championed by Jeopardy! star and now Bookends host Mattea Roach, Five Little Indians by Michelle Good, championed by fashion journalist Christian Allaire, Lawrence Hill’s The Illegal, championed by Olympian Clara Hughes, Kim Thúy’s Ru, championed by TIFF artistic director Cameron Bailey and Lisa Moore’s February, championed by comedian Trent McClellan. 

You can see a complete list of past winners and contenders here.

Teachers, bookstores, community groups and librarians can order a Canada Reads poster here. Teachers will be able to check out the resources at Curio.ca to bring Canada Reads into classrooms.

Learn more about the Canada Reads 2025 contenders below.

Watch Out for Her is about a young mother named Sarah who thinks her problems are solved when she hires a young babysitter, Holly, for her six-year-old son. Her son adores Holly and Holly adores Sarah, who is like the mother she never had. But when Sarah sees something that she can’t unsee, she uproots her family to start over. Her past follows her to this new life, raising paranoid questions of who is watching her now? And what do they want?

Samantha M. Bailey is a journalist and editor in Toronto. Her first thriller, Woman on the Edge, was released in 2019 and was an international bestseller. Her other novels include A Friend in the Dark and Hello, Juliet. Her journalistic work can be found in publications including NOW Magazine, The Village Post, The Thrill Begins and The Crime Hub.

“I wanted to look at what happens when we’re hiding our true selves,” said Bailey in an interview with CBC Books. “I think only children are innocent. How can you be totally innocent if you’re human? Because if you’re human, that means you’re flawed.”

I also wanted to explore the idea that we can’t watch who watches our children when we’re not there.– Samantha M. Bailey

“And if you’re human, that means you’ve been hurt and you’ve been traumatized and you’ve gone through difficult situations and you’ve hurt other people and you’ve made mistakes.

“I also wanted to explore the idea that we can’t watch who watches our children when we’re not there.”

Maggie Mac Neil is a Canadian swimmer who competed in two Olympic Games and won three medals at Tokyo 2020: Gold, Silver and Bronze. She is an eight-time World Champion, three-time NCAA champion and holds three world records. She is also the first person to simultaneously hold titles in 100m butterfly in the NCAA, Olympics, world short course metres and world long course metres.

She was raised in London, Ont. and attended the University of Michigan for her undergrad and Louisiana State University for her Master of Science in Sport Management. In 2024, after the Paris Olympics, she retired from swimming to focus on applying to law school.

A passionate book lover who enjoys reading both for pleasure and academic study, Mac Neil credits reading as a key part of her success in the pool, in school and for her personal growth.

In A Two-Spirit Journey, Ma-Nee Chacaby, an Objibwe-Cree lesbian who grew up in a remote northern Ontario community, tells the story of how she overcame experiences with abuse and alcohol addiction to become a counsellor and lead Thunder Bay’s first gay pride parade. 

Ma-Nee Chacaby is a two-spirit Ojibwe-Cree writer, artist, storyteller and activist. She lives in Thunder Bay, Ont., and was raised by her grandmother near Lake Nipigon, Ont. Chacaby won the Ontario Historical Society’s Alison Prentice Award and the Oral History Association’s Book Award for A Two-Spirit Journey.

In 2021, Chacaby won the Community Hero Award from the mayor of Thunder Bay.

Mary Louisa Plummer is a social scientist whose work focuses on public health and children’s rights.

“I want to leave something for my kids. My great-granddaughter and my great-grandsons,” said Chacaby in an interview on The Next Chapter. “I want them to know what I was about, what I was made of, what I stood for. Because there is so much violence in the communities up north and around us.”

We are storytellers. That is our gift.– Ma-Nee Chacaby

“I wish more Native women and older women, even the ones that are older than me, could write their story about their life to share it with other people so their kids can grow to understand them and learn from them.

“We are storytellers. That is our gift. And if they share their real stuff, what really happened in the past, the kids will learn from it.”

Shayla Stonechild is a Red River Métis and Nehiyaw iskwew (Plains Cree woman) from Muscowpetung First Nations. She founded the Matriarch Movement, an online platform, podcast and nonprofit that amplifies Indigenous voices and provides wellness opportunities for Indigenous women and two-spirit individuals.

She is also a global yoga ambassador for Lululemon and is the first Indigenous person featured on Yoga Journal’s cover. Stonechild has hosted APTN’s Red Earth Uncovered, appeared on Season 9 of Amazing Race Canada and co-hosted ET Canada’s Artists & Icons: Indigenous Entertainers in Canada for which she won two Canadian Screen Awards.

She has collaborated with over 50 brands, including Adobe and Peloton, and is a strong voice fighting for language revitalization and Indigenous rights. She won the 2022 Indspire Award for First Nations Youth and the 2024 Dreamcatcher Charitable Foundation’s Health and Wellness Award for her continued advocacy. 

To further her reach, she’s currently writing her first book.

In the novel Etta and Otto and Russell and James, 82-year-old Etta decides to walk 3,232 kilometres to Halifax from her farm in Saskatchewan with little more than a rusty rifle and a talking coyote named James for company. Her early life with her husband Otto and their friend Russell are revealed in flashbacks to the Great Depression and the Second World War.

Emma Hooper is a Canadian musician and writer. Her other novels include Our Homesick Songs, which was on the longlist for the 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize, and We Should Not Be Afraid of the Sky. She also holds a PhD in music-literary studies and has published her research on many related topics. Raised in Alberta, she currently lives in England.

Michelle Morgan is a Vancouver actor and filmmaker of Chilean descent. She is best known for playing Lou in Heartland, the longest-running one-hour drama in Canadian television history, and has directed multiple episodes as well. 

Morgan’s other acting credits include Virgin River, Batwoman and The Good Doctor. She has also directed the award-winning short films Mi Madre-My Father and Save Yourself and the CBC digital series Hudson.

Morgan is an advocate for women’s rights and has partnered with women’s shelters across Canada, including The Brenda Strafford Women’s Shelter and Homefront Calgary, and teaches workshops for survivors of domestic violence.

A graduate of literature and theatre from the University of Toronto, Morgan is looking forward to showcasing her literary side on Canada Reads.

Jennie’s Boy is a memoir that recounts a six-month period in Wayne Johnston’s chaotic childhood, much of which was spent as a frail and sickly boy with a fiercely protective mother. While too sick to attend school, he spent his time with his funny and eccentric grandmother Lucy and picked up some important life lessons along the way. 

Wayne Johnston is a writer, born and raised in Goulds, N.L. His novels include The Divine Ryans, A World Elsewhere, The Custodian of Paradise, The Navigator of New York and The Colony of Unrequited Dreams. His 1999 memoir, Baltimore’s Mansion, won the RBC Taylor Prize. The Colony of Unrequited Dreams was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and was a 2003 Canada Reads finalist, when it was championed by now prime minister Justin Trudeau.

“I looked at all the years that I could remember and tried to pick out which one was most representative of what life was like, not just for me, but for my family of three brothers and my mom and dad — my mom, most people call Jennie,” Johnston told Shelagh Rogers on The Next Chapter.

It was kind of the funniest year in a lot of ways, a bit sad in some other ways.– Wayne Johnston

“It was kind of the funniest year in a lot of ways, a bit sad in some other ways. And even though the book is called  Jennie’s Boy, I kind of struggled with the notion of calling it Lucy’s Boy.

“That was my grandmother. I was her pet. And that’s why I talked about it.”

Jennie’s Boy won the 2023 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal.

Linwood Barclay is a New York Times bestselling author who has written over 20 books, including thrillers I Will Ruin You, Find You First, Broken Promise and Elevator Pitch and the middle-grade novels Escape and Chase. Before he turned to writing thrillers full time, he worked in newspapers, most notably as a columnist for the Toronto Star. 

Many of Barclay’s books have been optioned for film and television, and he wrote the screenplay for the movie Never Saw It Coming, adapted from his novel of the same name. His books The Accident and No Time for Goodbye were made into a television series in France.

Barclay was born in the U.S. but moved to Canada as a child. He now lives near Toronto.

Dandelion is a novel about family secrets, migration, isolation, motherhood and mental illness. When Lily was a child, her mother, Swee Hua, walked away from the family and was never heard from again. After becoming a new mother herself, Lily is obsessed with discovering what happened to Swee Hua.

She recalls growing up in a British Columbia mining town where there were only a handful of Asian families and how Swee Hua longed to return to Brunei. Eventually, a clue leads Lily to southeast Asia to find out the truth about her mother.

Jamie Chai Yun Liew is a lawyer, law professor and podcaster based in Ottawa. Dandelion is her first novel, which won her the Jim Wong-Chu Emerging Writers Award from the Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop. She also wrote the nonfiction book Ghost Citizens. Liew was named one of CBC Books writers to watch in 2022.

“I wanted to explore themes of belonging and place from an emotional place. I wrote about it academically in terms of how the law creates foreigners, but I wanted to explore how that feels — what that does to the psyche, how that affects someone’s mental health,” Liew told CBC Books.

I wanted to explore themes of belonging and place from an emotional place.– Jamie Chai Yun Liew

“There are a lot of assumptions about why people are stateless and the first one is that they are foreigners or migrants.

“And some stateless people are, but a lot of stateless people — millions around the world — are living within their home countries and overwhelmingly people told me, ‘I’m being treated like a foreigner in my own country.'” 

Saïd M’Dahoma, known on social media as The Pastry Nerd, is a French Comorian Canadian pastry chef based in Calgary. M’Dahoma was born in Paris, where he completed his PhD in neuroscience, and moved to Canada to work at the University of Alberta.

Living so far from home, he began to miss French Comorian dishes and pastries, so he started trying to make his own. Through trial and error and by sharing his journey online, he decided to give up his career as a neuroscientist and become a pastry chef full time. 

He shares his skills on television, including shows like The Good Stuff with Mary Berg, and with his online following of more than 200,000 accounts. M’Dahoma was named one of the Top 20 Compelling Calgarians of 2025.