Tsar Publications imprint: 19 books

Born in Lahore in present-day Pakistan, Balwant Bhaneja grew up in the exiled Sindhi Hindu community of Delhi, before emigrating to Canada. Troubled Pilgrimage is his account of a journey to his ancestral Sindh in Pakistan. Struggling against the preconceptions nurtured in post-1947 India,...

In these thoughtful essays, Sheema Khan—Canadian hockey mom and Harvard PhD—gives us her pointed insights on being a modern and liberal, yet practising, Muslim, especially in Canada. Tackling a host of issues, such as terrorism and fanaticism, human rights post 9/11, Islamic law, women’s rights,...

Born in the Year of the Tiger, Hu Nu, unwanted female child, is nearly given away as a one-year-old bride in a Chinese village. She grows up during the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution, when traditional values are challenged by the politicized young, and nonconformity is repressed with brutal humiliation,...

These haunting stories beautifully evoke the oppressive lives of modern women in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Anis, a computer programmer, is at the end of her rope, putting up with the bullying criticism of a no-good, unemployed lout of a husband; Azar is a young divorcee, and the only person she...

Meet Mary Fellows, a sex-worker organizing a demonstration on St Catherine Street; how can she make the Anglican dean support it? . . . Disappointment follows disappointment as Margaret tries to find a suitable man; her latest folly is the suave younger man she brought over from Jamaica; . . . Greta,...

These poignant stories finely depict the lives of immigrants, through the themes of family adjustment, loss, and starting afresh in a new place. Set in suburban Toronto, New Jersey, Texas, and India, they draw out the conflicts in three generations of Indians whose lives interconnect even as...

Bleeding Light is a collection of poems in ghazal form that traces the steps of a woman’s journey through night. She knows that in order to witness dawn, she has to travel through dusk first. Throughout her journey, she is caught between West and East, religion and heresy, love and anti-love, darkness...

Hera at last is a definitive edition that brings together the best from the published and new poetry of Rienzi Crusz, who has been called "arguably the best living Sri Lankan poet in English."* But Crusz is also very much a poet of exile, who speaks about ice in the northern outdors and...

It is the turbulent 1980s in apartheid South Africa, when even the ordinary life is full of danger and uncertainty. What will tomorrow bring? Tihelo, a thirteen-year-old girl, lives with her older sister Keitumetse and their mother Kgomotso. Kgomotso works as a maid for a white household in the city...

Riveting stories from the heart of the Vancouver Sikh experience. Set among people who emigrated in the late twentieth century, facing racial animosity and economic insecurity, and moving forward as their lives became more settled, Fauji Banta Singh gives us rare glimpses into the private...

The landscape of 1970s South Africa lives and breathes in these stories. This debut collection is populated by a wide and surprising range of unforgettable characters: an artist who finds his power in the dusty earth; a mother who waits for a letter; a collector of cacti who seeks her own kind of freedom; a shopkeeper in trouble in an outpost country town . . .

Passionate, committed, and deeply humane, these poems bear witness with unflinching honesty to the horrific violence of the Sri Lankan civil war.

Aya Katerina, a neighbourhood in Ottoman Smyrna at the end of World War I. Through the eyes of Niko "the Orphan"—his Armenian father was taken away by the soldiers—we see this close world going about its traditional ways. But dark clouds loom in the near distance. We meet Elena, Niko’s aunt...