Styled as Canada’s “great book debate” Canada Reads is an annual, nationally broadcast literary battle that seeks to find a single book that can bring Canada together – a mission that feels more urgent than ever in our current national climate. Broadcast on CBC Radio One, the competition asks five Canadian personalities to each champion a different Canadian book, whittling a shortlist of five books down to a single publication. By selecting books that challenge perspectives and spark meaningful conversations, the competition reminds us of storytelling’s power to foster empathy and connection. In 2025, as Canadians navigate complex national issues, Dandelion’s success stands as a testament to resilience and the need to listen to one another’s stories.
Professor Liew’s book was championed by pastry chef Saïd M’Dahoma, a former neuroscientist who now shares his creations on social media as The Pastry Nerd. He praised the book for giving voice to immigrants who have struggled to adapt and who yearn to be accepted for who they are. “We live in a time where immigrants in so many countries are detained even if they have a valid status and have not committed any crimes,” he said. “If Dandelion wins, it’s a strong message that we value immigrants lives and complex experiences in Canada. Dandelion should win because of its craft: it puts you in the shoes of characters whose lives and experiences may be very different from yours. And yet you can feel the longing, the sadness, the joys that these imaginary characters go through.”
In Dandelion, Lily, a new mother, becomes obsessed with uncovering the mystery of her own mother’s disappearance. In a quest for answers, she journeys from a small British Columbia mining town to Southeast Asia, following in her mother’s footsteps, all the while re-examining her sense of belonging. The novel is informed by Professor Liew’s own life, as well as her research on the issue of statelessness. A stateless person is someone who doesn’t have citizenship anywhere, in any form. Like Lily, Professor Liew’s own parents immigrated to Canada from Brunei, and, like Lily, her own father was not granted citizenship when he was born in Brunei, leaving him stateless. While there are shared details between the author and the protagonist, the novel is not autobiographical, but is rather inspired by Professor Liew’s deep consideration of the effects of statelessness, the experiences of immigrants, and the elusiveness of a sense of belonging.
In 2018, the novel, then an unpublished manuscript, was awarded the Jim Wong-Chu Emerging Writers Award for fiction by the Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop, which praised Professor Liew’s elegant prose and storytelling for evoking a “literary reflection of Canadian migration, identity, and statelessness”.
In addition to its central place in the novel, the topic of statelessness is also front and centre in Professor Liew’s cutting-edge research. In 2024, she published Ghost Citizens: Decolonial Apparitions of Stateless, Foreign and Wayward Figures in Law (Fernwood Publishing), which defines statelessness as an important area of immigration, refugee and citizenship law. While statelessness affects millions of people around the world, marginalizing and oppressing them in numerous ways, previous academic treatments of the topic have been focused on legal reform. Past legal scholarship has been able to identify gaps in citizenship law, but the problem of statelessness persists. Solutions on paper have not translated into action in the real world. With Ghost Citizens, Professor Liew explores why it is that stateless people are still unable to resolve their citizenship problems.
The Common Law Section enthusiastically congratulates Professor Liew on her amazing success in Canada Reads 2025! This year’s edition of the debates proved, once and for all, that books have the power to bring people together. We are thrilled to be able to count Jamie Chai Yun Liew as a member of our community, and we encourage everyone to read Dandelion – a novel that sparks important conversations about identity, belonging, and what it truly means to be Canadian.
To quote Canada Reads host, Ali Hassan, “Read on, Canada!”