Winner of the Lambda Literary Award

Nominated for The Otherwise Award and The Sunburst Award

“Blending the surreal and the entirely possible, The Tiger Flu is majestically compelling. A must-read.” – Eden Robinson, author of Son of a Trickster

In this visionary novel by Larissa Lai – her first in sixteen years – a community of parthenogenic women, sent into exile by patriarchal and corporate Salt Water City, go to war against disease, technology, and an economic system that threatens them with extinction.

Kirilow is a doctor apprentice whose lover, Peristrophe, is a “starfish,” a woman who can regenerate her own limbs and organs, which she uses to help her clone sisters whose organs are failing. When a denizen from Salt Water City suffering from a mysterious flu comes into their midst, Peristrophe becomes infected and dies, prompting Kirilow to travel to the city, where the flu is now a pandemic, to find a new starfish who will help save her sisters. There, Kirilow meets Kora, a girl-woman desperate to save her family from the epidemic. Kora has everything Kirilow is looking for, except the will to abandon her own family. But before Kirilow can convince her, both are kidnapped by a mysterious group of men to serve as test subjects for a new technology that can cure the mind of the body.

Bold, beautiful, and wildly imaginative, The Tiger Flu is at once a saga of two women heroes, a cyberpunk thriller, and a convention-breaking cautionary tale – a striking metaphor for our complicated times.

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Larissa Lai is the author of two novels, When Fox is a Thousand, shortlisted for the Books in Canada First Novel Award, and Salt Fish Girl, shortlisted for the Tiptree Award, the Sunburst Award and the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Award; one book of poetry Automaton Biographies, shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Award; and a chapbook, Eggs in the Basement, shortlisted for the bp Nichol Chapbook Award.

Through the 90s, she was a cultural organizer in feminist, GLBTQ and anti-racist communities in Vancouver. Now, as an English professor at the University of British Columbia, she teaches courses on race, memory, and citizenship, as well as on biopower and the poetics of relation.

Rita Wong teaches in Critical + Cultural Studies at the Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Vancouver, BC, Canada, where she has developed a humanities course focused on water, with the support of a fellowship from the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society. She is currently researching the poetics of water, supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada: http://downstream.ecuad.ca/ .

Her poems have appeared in anthologies such as Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women's Poetry and Poetics, Regreen: New Canadian Ecological Poetry, Visions of British Columbia (published for an exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery), and Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural Literature. She has a passion for daylighting buried urban streams and for watershed literacy. Wong can be found on twitter at https://twitter.com/rrrwong.

Larissa Lai's profile page

Lisa Truong's profile page

Grace Lynn Kung's profile page

• Long-listed, The Sunburst Award
• Winner, Lambda Literary Award
• Short-listed, The Otherwise Award

“A compelling cyberpunk thriller … Lai draws inspiration from the feminist science fiction of Marge Piercy and Joanna Russ, exploring questions of reproduction, lesbian separatism, and biopolitics in the often absurdist and even surrealist world of Saltwater City.” — Booklist

“Lush and detailed …The novel's genre itself revels in the technology of hybridity. The Tiger Flu is unnerving and epic in its scope as Lai entwines an intersectional eco-feminist critique with exhilarating action.” — Room

“This is an ambitious work and Lai is wonderfully successful in her effort to mash up cinematic science fiction, magical realism elements and fascinating characters with a fierce concern for gender and racial justice to produce an impressive text.” — Vancouver Sun

“A compelling read about ostracization, disease, technology, tolerance, and survival in a society facing extinction from a horrific pandemic.” — The Advocate, “Best Books of the Year”

“Starting with an atmospheric opening page, in The Tiger Flu, Larissa Lai goes wholly maximalist in her world-building … A surprisingly enchanting vision of post-Peak Oil dystopia.” — Toronto Star