Colson Whitehead presents Cool Machine

Join Ottawa Writers Festival for an evening with two-time Pulitzer winner COLSON WHITEHEAD for a conversation with Adrian Harewood on Cool Machine, an exuberantly entertaining novel that brings to life 1980s New York in the magnificent final volume of his Harlem Trilogy.

Ticket purchase includes a signed copy of the hardcover provided by Perfect Books. Additional books will be available for purchase

1981. New York City is beginning to emerge from financial ruin and decline, energized by rampant real estate development and a Wall Street unchained by Reagan-era predatory capitalism. Up in Harlem, successful business owner/master fence Ray Carney has just been named Sterling Furniture’s Dealer of the Month. When the banks won’t give his beloved wife Elizabeth a loan for her new travel agency, however, Carney gambles on one last heist, and finds himself entangled with a legendary criminal mastermind.

1983. To some, Carney’s friend and partner in crime, Pepper, is a stone-cold sociopath. To others, a top thief with questionable people skills. Either way, he’s feeling his age in his troubled gut and his aching bones. When he takes on a bodyguard gig as a favor to Elizabeth, he’s plunged into the alien territory of the East Village art and club scene. Luckily for him, whether you’re uptown or down, everyone speaks the same language of violence—Pepper is a native speaker.

1986. Carney has always been haunted by his inability to save his cousin Freddie. Now, twenty years after Freddie’s death, he has a chance to rescue Freddie’s son from the violent forces of the city. But coming out of retirement and teaming up with Pepper again will mean risking the safety and security he’s spent decades building for his family, with only one shot to get it right.

Colson Whitehead paints a portrait of a city in transition, where shimmering skyscrapers rise to the heavens as displaced people huddle in abandoned tunnels below. In a dazzling display of protean imagination, Cool Machine roves all over the city, from Windows on the World to the Meadowlands, to show that in New York, and in the lives of Whitehead’s vivid characters, it’s what’s below the surface that reveals the truth.

Ottawa Writers Festival presents Leilani Farha

Housing has become a crisis of humanity—one created by design and decades in the making. Join Ottawa Writers Festival for a conversation with Leilani Farha, whose CBC Massey Lecture is Housing Inc. A Global Takeover and Our Fight for Home.

LEILANI FARHA has been in more homes than most people will ever visit—a four-door sedan in San Diego, a lean-to by railway tracks in Lagos, a windowless motel room in Paris, a tent on a Toronto beach. What people tell her first is never that they need housing, it’s that they want to be treated like human beings. Housing Inc. explains why they have to ask.

Writing from the centre of global housing debates, Farha reckons with a crisis four decades in the making, engineered by dictators, presidents, and prime ministers, and perfected by the financial firms that turn homes into sites of extraction. The same logic that justifies dispossessing Indigenous Peoples of their lands and resources now prices out a generation, displaces tenants, destroys communities, and disappears homeless people.

This crisis of humanity plays out in every country in the world. With fierce clarity, Farha argues that the fight for home requires not just better policy, but a different ideology altogether—one rooted in law, humanity, and imagination—where every person counts.

With book sales by Perfect Books.

More details and tickets here.

Ottawa Writers Festival presents Robert Harris

Join Ottawa Writers Festival for a conversation with ROBERT HARRIS, the internationally bestselling author of Conclave, Precipice and the acclaimed Cicero trilogy, on his latest, Agrippa, a sweeping new political thriller about the general who built an empire—and paid the ultimate price. 

Agrippa is Robert Harris’s monumental return to the world of ancient Rome on the edge of dictatorship, a novel for our times. In the turbulent aftermath of Julius Caesar’s assassination, two young men seize the chance to shape the future of Rome: Octavius, Caesar’s cunning heir, and his brilliant common-born ally, Marcus Agrippa. Together, they fight for control of the empire, navigate shifting loyalties, vanquish their enemies at Philippi, and crush the fabled lovers Mark Antony and Cleopatra at Actium, securing a new empire that will change the world.

But power never comes without a price. Decades later Octavius rules supreme, now as Caesar Augustus, the first emperor of Rome, while Agrippa, soldier, statesman and builder of Rome, finds himself betrayed by those closest to him and exiled from the empire he helped create. Alone on the Bay of Naples, he turns to his memories, revisiting the wars, alliances and deceptions that forged his destiny.

Sweeping from the blood-soaked battlefields of the Republic to the marble corridors of imperial power, Agrippa is a masterful novel of ambition and statecraft, loyalty and betrayal, and how even the greatest empires are built on fragile bonds between men.

With book sales by Perfect Books.

More details and tickets here.

An Evening with David Sedaris

DAVID SEDARIS is one of America’s pre-eminent humour writers. He is a master of satire and one of today’s most observant writers.  

In The Land and Its People, his first new collection since Happy-Go-Lucky, David Sedaris reflects on what it means to be a foreigner, a brother, a lifelong friend. He tries on the role of caretaker after his boyfriend Hugh’s hip replacement surgery, and both succeeds and fails. He buys his sister a cape and discusses his brother with a jaded Duolingo bot. He walks dozens of miles with his friend Dawn and challenges her to eat a truck tyre. Ever adding to his list of “Countries I Have Been To,” he rides a horse named Tequila in Guatemala, buys a bespoke priest’s cassock in Vatican City, and goes on safari in Kenya without taking a single photo. 

There is sadness here—scrolling through his address book, he realises how many dear friends are now deceased—but also delight: he revels in authors’ biographies, the malapropism that becomes a decades-long inside joke, and a pair of well-made cotton underpants. He is bitten by a dog. A train passenger vomits in his face. A woman on the street late at night either sexually harasses him or doesn’t. Look how hard it is to be alive! 

Throughout these essays—at once acerbic and tender, playful and profound—Sedaris shows how much there is to marvel at when you keep your head up and your eyes open, observing with warmth and curiosity this fascinating human species and the lands we inhabit.

With book sales by Perfect Books.

More details and tickets here. 

Ottawa Writers Festival presents R.F. Kuang

Ottawa Writers Festival is thrilled to welcome R.F. KUANG the acclaimed #1 New York Times bestselling author of Katabasis and Yellowface, back to Ottawa with her latest novel, Taipei Story, a wryly humorous and profoundly moving coming-of-age novel that grapples with grief, language, and culture shock—all set against the backdrop of an unforgettable summer in Taipei.

PLEASE NOTE: In Person tickets include a pre-signed, deluxe limited-edition copy of Tapei Story provided by Perfect Books.

College freshman Lily Chen is off to spend the summer in Taipei at an intensive language program like so many Chinese American students before her, hoping to connect with the culture she inherited but never fully understood. But a promising start quickly unravels. Her classes are grueling, her roommate is driving her insane, and a reckless trip to the hot springs with a guy she barely knows soon has her classmates viciously gossiping. She feels adrift, a foreigner in a country she thought would feel like home.

Then shocking news arrives: Lily’s grandfather has passed away. The loss forces her to grapple with now-unanswerable questions about her family history. As Lily grieves, she’s drawn into a journey of self-discovery—piecing together memories, stories, and silences over a series of hilarious and devastating attempts at connection.

Taipei Story asks: What if the diaspora fantasy of homecoming never comes true? What if learning a language can’t bring you any closer to the people you’re trying to reach? What if you search for your family’s history, but your family doesn’t want to share? What if you wait too long to ask the right questions? As Lily struggles for answers, her summer becomes a poignant search for understanding—of herself, her family, and the meaning of home.

More details and tickets here.

Ottawa Writers Festival presents Rachel Reid

Join Ottawa Writers Festival for a special evening with bestselling author RACHEL REID as we celebrate the deluxe hardcover release of Heated Rivalry!

This ticketed event will feature a 45-minute moderated conversation with Rachel, followed by an extended audience Q&A. Each ticket includes a copy of the new Heated Rivalry deluxe hardcover edition, complete with a signed custom bookplate, provided by Perfect Books.

The deluxe hardcover edition of Heated Rivalry features metallic sprayed edges, special cover effects, a stamped foil case, and full-color endpapers showcasing never-before-seen character art, making it the ultimate collector’s edition of Rachel Reid’s beloved enemies-to-lovers romance and global sensation.

Thanks to support from Carleton University’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, a limited number of free Carleton tickets are available to students. Free tickets DO NOT include the book.

Please note that there will be no signing line or meet and greet at this event. Additional books will be available for purchase on-site from our friends at Perfect Books.

We can’t wait to celebrate with you!

More details and tickets here.

An Evening with Zadie Smith

ZADIE SMITH, born in North London in 1975 to an English father and Jamaican mother, studied English at Cambridge and graduated in 1997. Her debut novel, White Teeth, became an international bestseller, winning major awards including the Guardian First Book Award, the Whitbread First Novel Award, and the Commonwealth Writers Prize. It has been translated into more than twenty languages, adapted for television and the stage, and recognised by the New York Public Library and the New York Times as one of the most important books of the century. 

Her second novel, The Autograph Man, won the 2003 Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize. Smith was twice named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. On Beauty won the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction and appears on several lists of the best books of the 21st century. NW was shortlisted for major prizes, named one of the New York Times 10 Best Books of 2012, and adapted by the BBC. Swing Time was a New York Times bestseller, and her most recent novel, The Fraud, was widely acclaimed as one of the best books of 2023. 

Smith’s story collection Grand Union received multiple shortlist honours, and her play The Wife of Willesden won the 2022 Critics’ Circle Theatre Award. She has published several essay collections, with Dead and Alive forthcoming in 2025. Her honours include the Langston Hughes Medal, the St. Louis Literary Award, and the Bodley Medal. She is a member of the Royal Society of Literature and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and lives in London. 

With book sales by Perfect Books.

More details and tickets here.