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Annelie Geissler
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WONDERLAND ROAD

Carrianne Leung

A Novel

An apocalyptic fairy tale about what remains when everything we know comes to an end, told in part by a raccoon and a crow.
In the near future, the collapse of social and political order turns a city upside down. Those who can afford it are leaving in droves for fortress communities to the north while those left behind are either migrating to the "Farms" to fill the gaps in the global supply chain or figuring out how to survive under the new conditions set out by a mega corporation, Bayson Inc. For the poor and marginalized, it's a story of ingenuity, resilience, and hope.

Just because things are teetering towards disaster doesn't mean that life has stopped. Some, like Pauline, are alone and mourning for lost loved ones; young adults such as Julian, who is gay, are trying to find purpose when the certainty of a known future is gone; and small, lonely girls like Jing find companionship by befriending crows. In a small neighbourhood in the suburbs of the city, community members of both the human and animal variety work side-byside in order to find new ways to live.

Wonderland Road is a novel replete with hope for a new beginning even in the face of despair. Carrianne Leung brings deft insight to humanity's reaction to an approaching finale and shows what really matters.

CARRIANNE LEUNG is a fiction writer and educator. Her first novel, The Wondrous Woo (Inanna Publications), was a finalist for the 2014 City of Toronto Book Award, and in 2018 That Time I Loved You, a collection of linked stories, won the Danuta Gleed Award for the best first story collection, and was also a finalist for the City of Toronto Book Award. She holds a PhD in Sociology and Equity Studies from OISE/University of Toronto. She lives in Toronto with her son.
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Published 2026-04-01 by HarperCollins

Comments

Extraordinary and deeply felt, Wonderland Road is a modern classic. Leung's writing carries the immense weight of our troubled times, but where there is deep sorrow and permeating loss, there is also an abundance of unabashed beauty and hope in this stunning tale of radical kinship, community building, and chosen family.

Meditative, dreamy, melancholic, and sweet, Wonderland Road narrates emergencies that unfurl to a slow, inexorable beat. Ones no less devastating for their creeping, this novel speaks sonorously to our current moment. And it's comforting and profound and perfectly Carrianne Leung to show how, even in the apocalypse, our lives are still organized by family grudges, inarticulate longing, and the painfully everlasting hope for forgiveness and repair.

Wonderland Road is a slow-burning, cautionary tale - foreboding and unforgettable. It's about lost connections, regret, hope, betrayal. About finding light in the dark. About coming of age in an apocalypse. About collusion and resistance. It's about holding space for what hurts, and choosing to keep going anyway.

Wonderland Road is eerie and gorgeous, full of ache and full of grace. Carrianne Leung writes with wild tenderness, showing how love, memory, and even an unexpected interspecies friendship can hold us together in a collapsing world. Pauline, Jing, and Julian aren't just charactersthey're kin. They teach us that chosen family isn't a consolation prize; it's the whole damn point. This book is a map.

How do we love each other while the world is on fire? This is the question Carrianne Leung grapples with in her latest, much-anticipated book: A speculative fiction that isn't made of endings, but rather beginnings; of doing, of believing, of continuing in the twilight of our existence.

Wonderland Road is a slow-burning, cautionary taleforeboding and unforgettable. [...] It's about lost connections, regret, hope, betrayal. About finding light in the dark. About coming of age in an apocalypse. About collusion and resistance. About surviving, enduring, anddespite it allthriving. It's about holding space for what hurts, and choosing to keep going anyway.