In honour of Black History Month, we're bringing you three great and diverse Black Canadian texts to borrow from your local library.

Rather than suggesting works by some of the big names like Dionne Brand, Austin Clarke and Lawrence Hill, we thought it would be cool to suggest some still readily available but slightly lesser known writers to celebrate the multiplicity of Black Canadian voices.

Lorena Gale's Angélique

Gale's play is a beautifully rendered piece of theatre that takes up one of the most mysterious and intriguing figures of Black Canadian history: Marie-Joseph Angélique, an enslaved woman in 18th century New France hanged for the crime of burning down the city of Montreal. Angélique gives a voice and flesh to a woman silenced by history, and in so doing tells a story with profoundly contemporary implications for how we think about Canadian history, interracial relationships both consensual and exploitative, and the meaning of innocence and guilt. Seeing it performed would be amazing, but reading it is a worthwhile experience in its own right.

H Nigel Thomas' Behind the Face of Winter

Thomas' novel offers a powerful portrayal of an immigrant boy coming of age in the literal and metaphorical cold on 1970s Montreal. After the death of his mother, Pedro, our narrator, plunges into his past in order to face his future. His story begins on the fictional Isabella Island, a place modelled on the islands of the Eastern Caribbean. Raised by his grandmother, he leaves the island at the age of fourteen to join his mother in Montreal, where she works as a domestic. The novel fearlessly takes on systemic racism in the Canadian education and legal systems, Caribbean religious hypocrisy, and the complicated nature of teenage sexuality through the eyes of a smart but conflicted young man.

Rozena Maart Rosa's District Six

Set in Apartheid-era South Africa, Maart's collection contains five brilliant short stories set in the rebelliously vibrant District 6 neighbourhood of Cape Town. The interconnected tales are held together by Rosa, an inquisitive and excitable child who keeps a close eye on her neighbours' complicated and compelling lives. This text might seem like a bit of an outlier on this list as it's not set in Canada but some of our most brilliant immigrant authors set their texts in the lands from which they emigrated and as far as I'm concerned, this just adds to the richness of our literary scene.

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Asha Jeffers is a grad student and skilled doer of the robot. She was born and raised in Toronto but spent the last eight years traipsing around the province and then the world before before making her triumphant return home last spring.