Longlisted for the 2025 Giller Prize • Shortlisted for the 2025 Toronto Book Award • A Globe and Mail Best Book of 2025
The award-winning author of Fifteen Dogs conjures up worlds – real, invented, uncanny – in this ingenious, electrifying collection.
A Trinidadian Obeah man finds himself reborn, a hundred years after his death, in the body of a Canadian child. A writer takes up a seasonal job as the caretaker of a set of mysterious large sacks hanging from the rafters of the houses in a small town. A woman starts a relationship with the famous artist who painted portraits of her mother. The contents of a sealed envelope upend a woman’s understanding about a tragic crime she committed at the age of six.
In this dazzling collection of stories, André Alexis draws fresh connections between worlds: the ones we occupy, the ones we imagine, and the ones that preceded our own. He introduces us to characters during moments of profound puzzlement, and transports us from 19th century Trinidad and Tobago to small-town Ontario, from Amherst, Massachusetts to contemporary Toronto.
These captivating stories reveal flashes of reckoning, defeat, despair, alienation, and understanding, all the while playfully using a multitude of literary genres, including gothic horror and isekai, and referencing works from greats like Jane Austen, Jonathan Swift, Yasunari Kawabata, Witold Gombrowicz, and Tomasso Landolfi.
Masterfully crafted, blending poignant philosophical inquiry and wry humour tinged with the absurd, here are worlds refracted and reflected back to us with pristine clarity and stunning emotional resonance as only André Alexis can.
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Longlisted for the 2025 Giller Prize • Shortlisted for the 2025 Toronto Book Award • A Globe and Mail Best Book of 2025 • A Finalist for The Story Prize
"André Alexis’s speculative fiction Other Worlds is a feat of imagination and connection across time and place. Alexis travels the tributaries that connect Toronto to the Caribbean and Southern Ontario while collapsing the past and future into a present imbued with the wisdom of loss, love and the earth. Even though a horse speaks and a medicine man is reincarnated, the 'otherworldly' in his stories feels ordinary and thus revelatory. A balm for a grieving and seeking soul, Alexis’s latest collection of short stories is by turns philosophical and emotional with the grace of humour about the human condition." —Toronto Book Award, Jury Citation
"I just finished André Alexis’ new collection, Other Worlds, and true to the title I was transported. It’s incredible." —Susan Choi, New York Times
"André Alexis’ new collection, Other Worlds, is a standout . . . How strange this book is, how insightful, and how generous . . . Alexis is a first-rate stylist. . ." —Matthew Keeley, Reactor
“Author/writer/librettist Alexis, who has won every major Canadian literary prize, presents a stupendously vivid, astonishingly original nine-story collection... Each story is a compact revelation about human contradictions, unreliable history, and the stories we tell when understanding is not an option.” —Booklist (starred review)
“Windham-Campbell winner Alexis (Fifteen Dogs) dazzles with these stark and enchanting stories, many of which feature Trinidadian immigrants in small-town Ontario. Taken as a whole, the collection offers striking connections and layers of meaning. This deserves to be the author’s U.S. breakout.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Alexis’ Other Worlds is full of keyholes into the uncanny. The title itself alludes to the off-kilter realities that lurk beneath all that seems normal and benign. Together, these stories can be read as sketches of that which has left an indelible mark on Alexis’s emotional landscape: salient variables and scenes that constitute the author’s interior sense of what makes life strange." —Literary Review of Canada
“Understanding courses through the stories whose characters hover with the reader on edges of understanding their otherness in other words and worlds.” —The Seaboard Review of Books
“Pure storytelling magic. André Alexis is alchemically, necromantically, spell-castingly talented, and yet he never uses his powers for ill: in all his playfulness, there is never any trace of gamesmanship. He's a writer who makes the world feel so much bigger than it really is—even bigger than he himself has imagined it—by always allowing for the possibility of transformation. His stories fuse perception and discovery, exploring the many forms of secrets and inheritance, and the many ways knowledge can pass between the living and the dead. In Other Worlds, impossible things are treated with so much gentleness and respect that they become possible; we are reminded that we are, in every sense, conceived.” —Eleanor Catton, Booker Prize winner, author of Birnam Wood
Overall rating: 4.0 / 5 from 1 reviews.
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Weird but wonderful!
"3 1/2 stars. Weird but enjoyable. Glad I read it and love that it's written by a Canadian author."
— Jo A. (4/5)
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Published date: May 06, 2025
Language: English
No. of Pages: 288
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
ISBN: 9780771006241
Dimensions:
5.69" W x
0.82" L x
8.24" H
ANDRÉ ALEXIS is an author of novels, short stories, and plays. His 2015 novel, Fifteen Dogs, won the Giller Prize, Canada Reads, and the Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. In 2017, he was awarded the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for fiction. His internationally acclaimed debut, Childhood, won the Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Trillium Book Award, and was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and the Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. He is also the author of Days by Moonlight, which won the Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and was longlisted for the Giller Prize, The Hidden Keys, Pastoral, Asylum, and Despair and Other Stories of Ottawa. Alexis lives in Toronto.
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