Tickets: Loghan Paylor Author Visit
SQUAMISH: THIS IS A BIG DEAL!
Gather Bookshop is welcoming 2026 Canada Reads Winner Loghan Paylor for an evening of literary joy at the Eagle Eye Theatre.
ABOUT THE EVENT:
6:30-8:30 on FRIDAY OCTOBER 2
- Author talk hosted by Julie Wilkins (Owner, Gather Bookshop)
- Audience Q&A
- Book sales & Author signing
- Beverage partner TBD
- Bookish Joy
$1 of each $5 ticket goes to Gather Literary Society (the rest to our special guest) 🤍 📖
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Loghan Paylor is a queer, trans writer whose first novel The Cure for Drowning (Randomhouse Canada 2024) won Canada Reads 2026, was long-listed for the 2024 Giller Prize, named a Globe and Mail Best Book, and a finalist for the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize and the Jim Deva Prize for Writing That Provokes.
Their work has also appeared in Room, Prairiefire, CBC Arts and on the long-list for the CBC Nonfiction Prize.
A graduate of The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University, they have an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia and divide their time between teaching, writing, and co-owning a game company.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Evocative, magical and luminously written, The Cure for Drowning is not only a brilliant, boundary-pushing love story but a Canadian historical novel that boldly centres queer and non-binary characters in unprecedented ways.
Born Kathleen to an immigrant Irish farming family in southern Ontario, Kit McNair has been a troublesome changeling since, at ten, they fell through the river ice and drowned—only to be nursed back to life by their mother’s Celtic magic.
A daredevil in boy’s clothes, Kit chafes at every aspect of a farmgirl’s life, driving that same mother to distraction with worry about where Kit will ever fit in. When Rebekah Kromer, an elegant German-Canadian doctor’s daughter, moves to town with her parents in April 1939, Rebekah has no doubt as to who 19-year-old Kit is. Soon she and Kit, and Kit’s older brother, Landon, are drawn tight in a love triangle that will tear them and their families apart, and send each of them off on a separate path to war.
Landon signs up for the Navy. Kit, now known as Christopher, joins the Royal Air Force, becoming a bomber navigator relied on for his luck and courage. Rebekah serves with naval intelligence in Halifax, until one more collision with Landon changes the course of her life and draws her back to the McNair farm—a place where she’d once known love. Fallen on even harder times, the McNairs welcome all the help she is able to give, and she believes she has found peace at last. Until, with the war over, Kit and Landon return home.
Told in the vivid, unforgettable voices of Kit and Rebekah, The Cure for Drowning is a powerfully engrossing novel that imagines a history that is truer than true.
