There’s something genuinely strange about walking into a skincare store and leaving with a book. Not a branded tote. Not a discount code. A book, free, yours to keep, chosen from a curated shelf where the serums used to be.
That’s what Aesop has been doing every Pride season since 2021, and six years in, the Aesop Queer Library has become one of the more quietly radical corporate literary gestures out there. More than 115,000 books by LGBTQIA2S+ authors have been distributed globally through the initiative. No purchase required, ever. Select stores are transformed into welcoming community library spaces, some clearing their shelves entirely to make way for books, others housing a dedicated Reading Room. You browse, you choose and you leave with something worth reading.
Each year revolves around a different theme, and 2026’s is “Body of Work,” celebrating queer literary voices that use the body as a site of power, pleasure, resistance, and renewal. It’s a theme with teeth, particularly right now. In the US, Aesop has partnered with the ACLU Foundation, an indispensable advocate for freedom of speech and expression. In the UK, the sixth edition extends beyond Aesop’s flagship Soho store for the first time, with new Reading Rooms in Spitalfields and Brighton. The initiative is global, it’s growing, and it keeps getting better at understanding what it actually is: a distribution mechanism for queer literature dressed in very good packaging.
2026 marks the first time the Queer Library has expanded to three Canadian cities at once, with a debut in Montreal alongside launches in Vancouver and a return to Toronto. All three run June 26 to 28.
In Toronto, the library activates at Aesop Queen Street West (880 Queen St. W.), one of the brand’s flagship Canadian locations and, not coincidentally, right in the heart of the city’s queer-west neighbourhood. For Vancouver, the event lands at the Robson Street store. Lastly in Montreal, it’s making its debut at Aesop Mile End, which feels exactly right for a neighbourhood that has long been a centre of the city’s queer arts community.
If you’re in any of these cities this weekend, go early in the run rather than late. Books go while supplies last, no purchase required.
The Canadian reading list, curated for this year’s initiative, is where things get interesting for us. It’s 21 titles deep, skews literary and personal, and has a distinctly Canadian sensibility: Indigenous voices, diaspora memoirs, debut fiction, poetry collections. It doesn’t read like a list assembled to check boxes. It reads like someone sat down with a stack of books they’d actually loved and made decisions. Here’s every title on it.
Algonquin Books | Queer coming-of-age fiction, sapphic, debut novel
Fischer’s debut announced her as one of the sharpest voices in Canadian literary fiction. A novel about a young woman drawn into a consuming relationship with an older woman during her first year at university in Toronto, it’s psychologically precise in ways that feel uncomfortable in exactly the right direction. Quiet, controlled, and unsettling long after you’ve finished it.
Knopf Canada | Queer memoir, Iranian-Canadian, coming-of-age
Winner of the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers, Nozari’s debut memoir traces her life as a queer Muslim woman navigating between Canada and Iran, between her mother’s story and her own. Warm and searingly honest, it’s one of the strongest queer memoirs to come out of Canada in recent years.
McClelland & Stewart | Queer poetry, disability, feminist, Latinx author
A follow-up to Salazar’s Governor General’s Award-shortlisted debut, antibody is a collection that mobilizes body horror as resistance, refusing to sanitize the realities of sexual violence or silence its survivors. Fearless, formally inventive, and the kind of book that reorders how you read everything after it.
Hamish Hamilton | Queer Indigenous short fiction, Driftpile Cree Nation
Belcourt’s debut story collection moves through queer Cree lives with the compression and crystalline sentences that have defined his work from the start. Colonialism, desire, grief, and the radical persistence of love are all present, none resolved into easy meaning. Shortlisted for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize.
Viking | Queer memoir, Syrian-Canadian, refugee narrative
Ramadan writes about displacement, desire, and survival with a directness that never collapses into sentimentality. The Syria he left and the Canada he arrived in are both rendered with full complexity, refusing the oversimplified refugee narrative at every turn. A finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction.
Knopf | Queer historical fiction, 17th century, cross-dressing protagonist
A researcher stumbles on 17th-century manuscripts chronicling the lives of two girls who first met as child survivors of the Plague and who later reunite as adult lovers, one having transformed into the cross-dressing Tom. Fleming is a quietly significant presence in Canadian queer fiction, and this is among her most formally inventive work.
Strange Light | Experimental queer fiction, gay, reimagining of Christ
One of the most talked-about Canadian queer novels of 2024. Oliveira’s massive debut is one part experimental gay fiction, one part smut, all gospel: a queer reimagining of the story of Christ that defies easy description. Named one of the best books of 2024 by the Globe and Mail. If you haven’t encountered his writing yet, this is where to start.
Knopf Canada | Queer essays, transracial adoptee, pansexual, Korean-Canadian
A collection of essays about transracial adoption, Korean identity, queerness, polyamory, and the long work of understanding who you are when the people who raised you don’t share your history. Wills writes with precision and without easy resolution. A finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction.
Penguin Random House Canada | Trans author, epistolary poetry, transformative justice
A Canadian bestseller hailed by the New York Times as an intimate expression of self-acceptance and forgiveness. Written as a series of letters to the living, the dead, trans women, sex workers, transphobes, and the people she couldn’t forgive, this is among Thom’s most openly tender work. Essential.
Random House Canada | Queer historical fiction, 1920s BC, sapphic
Set in 1922 at a cannery on the northwest coast of British Columbia, York’s novel is a story of hidden desires, chosen family, and the confessions people make at the end of their lives. It asks what we owe to duty, to family, to love and gives us the language to hold the complexity of the answers.
Doubleday Canada | Queer fiction, sapphic, multiverse novel-in-stories, debut
A multiverse novel in which each chapter offers an alternate outcome to the same queer relationship. Formally bold, emotionally specific, and stranger the further it goes, Lacroix’s debut is one of the most inventive queer novels to come out of Canada in recent years.
Viking | Queer memoir, religious trauma, essay collection
Cox spent two decades writing about queerness before he felt ready to process his upbringing as a Jehovah’s Witness in writing. The result is precise, often darkly funny, and never lets the story become a simple escape narrative, which makes it much more interesting than most religious trauma memoirs tend to be.
McClelland & Stewart | Queer Indigenous poetry, Driftpile Cree Nation, lyric essays
Belcourt’s second entry on this list and a different register from Coexistence: more ruminative, more essayistic, weaving lyric verse, sonnets, field notes, and fragments into an examination of 21st-century anguish, love, and political possibility for Indigenous life. Named one of Time’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2025.
Pantheon | Queer graphic memoir, gay, 1970s Toronto, AIDS era
The only graphic memoir on the list, and a genuine standout. Vellekoop’s nearly 500-page illustrated memoir about growing up queer in a Dutch Reformed Christian home in 1970s Toronto is visually stunning and emotionally gutting, a reminder that the form can do things prose simply can’t. Compared to Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home for good reason.
Penguin Random House Canada | Two-Spirit, Oji-nêhiyaw, essays, memoir, Indigiqueer
Whitehead’s essay collection is among the most important queer Indigenous books published in Canada in the last decade. He writes about the land, the body, and Two-Spirit identity with a ferocity and lyricism that are inseparable from each other. A number one national bestseller and finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction. If you read one book from this list, make it this one.
Doubleday Canada | Queer literary fiction, lesbian characters, family
From one of Canada’s most acclaimed literary novelists, a slim novel that reads fast but lands hard: three interconnected stories about family, fertility, and the unexpected ties that bind strangers together. A lesbian couple fighting over frozen embryos after a breakup is one of the threads, and the novel treats it with the same moral seriousness as everything else.
Penguin Canada | Queer debut fiction, Palestinian-Canadian, gay, Mrs. Dalloway retelling
Saadi’s debut follows a Palestinian refugee who plans to come out at his 23rd birthday party. Structured as a loose retelling of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, it explores sexuality, happiness, and time, and hopes Palestinians feel seen in a literary landscape that too often ignores them. A Dayne Ogilvie Prize finalist.
Penguin Canada | Queer literary fiction, gay, family secrets, BC setting
Boudel Tan writes literary fiction with a propulsive quality that doesn’t sacrifice depth for momentum. When Casper Han returns to his remote BC hometown after his father disappears, long-buried family secrets begin to surface. A novel about love, inheritance, and the immigrant histories that shape us. Shortlisted for the Giller Prize.
Ballantine Books | Sapphic historical fiction, Nova Scotia, selkie folklore, debut
A sapphic retelling of the selkie wife folk tale, set in 1830s Nova Scotia. Village midwife Jean discovers a mysterious woman in labour in a salt marsh during a midnight storm, and the relationship that unfolds between them is atmospheric, romantic, and far more emotionally complex than the premise suggests. One of the best sapphic debuts in Canadian literary fiction in years.
Random House Canada | Gay memoir, music, mid-life sexual awakening, Toronto
A memoir built around a massive vinyl collection. Crighton uses his records as a way into memory, desire, and the particular texture of what it meant to be gay in Toronto during the AIDS era, and what it meant to finally stop being afraid of his own life in his 40s. Big-hearted, explicit, and unexpectedly moving.
Doubleday | Queer debut fiction, bisexual, Sri Lankan-Canadian, social satire
The most propulsive novel on the list and probably the most immediately fun to read. A darkly comic debut about a queer woman of colour working as a ride-share driver in a city that keeps failing her, loosely inspired by Taxi Driver. Guns writes with real wit and a political edge that never becomes a lecture.
The Aesop Queer Library runs June 26 to 28 at all three Canadian locations. Toronto is at 880 Queen Street West, Vancouver at Robson Street, and Montreal at Mile End. Show up during store hours, browse what’s available, and take one home. No purchase needed, no email required.
If you’re outside these cities or can’t make it in person, every title above is available through Bookshop.org, and this list works just as well as an independent summer reading guide, which is really what it is.
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