Photo credit: riel Sturchio
CANON
COMING MAY 19, 2026
“I promise that you have never read a book like Canon. It’s a scorchingly brilliant, wildly funny, and deeply moving epic. I loved it so much that upon finishing Canon, I immediately began rereading it.”
“I did not know how badly I needed a funny epic in my life, didn’t know how both funny and epic a novel could be. This book is why I love novels, why I love reading. It is not only structurally pristine and brilliant, but a page turner, and a profound meditation on the meaning of this human journey we are on alone, together. It is truly and thoroughly hilarious, and tender, and beautiful.”
“One of my favorite poets and now one of my favorite novelists. The funniest, most immersive book I have read in such a long time, Canon is a book only Paige Lewis could write. With a voice that is whole their own they have crafted something that is truly original, brimming with humor, beauty, heartbreak, magic, and sharp language that will strike you deep down in your soul. Lewis has taken the hero’s journey and breathed new life, new wit, and new possibility into the genre and just like the best epics, you will make away bewildered by the prose but maybe have learned something necessary about living. In my house this is an instant classic.”
“Like the brilliant and defiantly uncategorizable work of Anne Carson and Joy Williams, Paige Lewis has written a sui generis masterpiece that only they could imagine and sing into being. I wish I could spend a thousand more pages with the narrator of Canon, whose keenness, kindness, associative brilliance, storytelling authority, and crow-black humor make every line of this utterly singular novel a surprise and a delight. Lewis excels at translating the unspeakable dimensions of our living into language. Every sentence feels so alive, in tune with a vast universe. From the sublime and comic whale song of HOWBIG! to Yara and Adrena’s parallel quests that bend into one Mobius strip of discovery and memory, death and (re)creation, Lewis distills so much comedy, cruelty, and wonder into their unprecedented page turner. Even at its most painful moments, Canon filled me with overwhelming joy, joy that such an extraordinary story exists in its fresh-born form. I have never read a novel like Canon—no one has. We are all so lucky that we can join Yara on their quest.”
UK VERSION COMING
JULY 2, 2026
“I keep staring at the words I’ve written to try and describe this novel; words like warm and hilarious and earnest and gorgeous and deeply weird. But none of them really capture its unique brand of magic or Lewis’ singular voice. Perhaps it’s hard to find the language because that’s what Canon does: gives us new language.”