Little Fish

Staff Top Fives 2018

Our favorite books of the year.

Little Fish is a story centered around Wendy — a trans woman who, after a family death, begins to suspect her late Mennonite grandparent may have been trans too. While tackling the complexities of sex work, suicide, relationships, and harassment, author Casey Plett doesn't shy away from the fact that people and identity are messy, or that to be trans is to exist in conflicting modalities with the worlds we inhabit and the time that builds up to a life. Her writing is devastatingly good — the kind that can make a girl feel seen instead of distorted through a fun-house mirror. With more books like this one, we can start to believe that, despite any evidence to the contrary, we might be okay. Recommended By Cosima C., Powells.com

Little Fish is the stunning debut novel by the author of the Lambda Literary Award-winning story collection A Safe Girl to Love.

It’s the dead of winter in Winnipeg and Wendy Reimer, a thirty-year-old trans woman, feels like her life is frozen in place. When her Oma passes away Wendy receives an unexpected phone call from a distant family friend with a startling secret: Wendy’s Opa (grandfather) — volatile, she finds herself aching for the lost pieces of her Opa’s truth. Can Wendy unravel the mystery of her grandfather’s world and reckon with the culture that both shaped and rejected her? She’s determined to try.

Alternately warm-hearted and dark-spirited, desperate and mirthful, Little Fish explores the winter of discontent in the life of one transgender woman as her past and future become irrevocably entwined.

"For those of us outside this experience, we can only count ourselves lucky to have Plett’s novel, a book that invites us to witness something so important, so complex, and so tender." Quill and Quire (Starred Review)

"Little Fish is ultimately not about the past but about the present — and looking forward to trans futures." The Globe and Mail

"...a confident, moving work that reports unflinchingly on the lives of trans women in Winnipeg....Little Fish is a powerful and important debut. Plett has masterfully painted her characters as both deeply complex and relatable." National Post

Casey Plett is the author of the novel Little Fish (Arsenal Pulp Press) and the short story collection A Safe Girl to Love (Topside Press), and co-editor of the anthology Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy from Transgender Writers (Topside Press). She wrote a column on transitioning for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and her essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, Maclean’s, The Walrus, Plenitude, the Winnipeg Free Press, and other publications. She is the winner of a Lambda Literary Award for Best Transgender Fiction and received an Honour of Distinction from The Writers’ Trust of Canada’s Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Emerging Writers. She lives in Windsor, Ontario.

I thought I was lucky that I could be that visible and not be physically hurt. That was my benchmark: being allowed to exist. I look back and I think, I really was lucky, and I also look back and think, What a bummer. What standards trans people set themselves for lucky...

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