Joined by a live audience in Kobo's intimate event space, Michael Tamblyn spoke with novelist Leanne Toshiko Simpson, author of Never Been Better and winner of the 2025 Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize. Never Been Better is the story of a group of three friends who met in a psych ward, but time has passed and now two of whom are about to get married while the third tries to figure out whether to swallow her feelings or let it all out.

Leanne Toshiko Simpson on self-care and writing a prize-winning rom-com

Hosts Michael Tamblyn and Nathan Maharaj caught up on the latest private equity-fueled mergers & acquisitions, what we're not talking about when we're talking about the money made from books, plus a whole lot more.

This episode covers:

• Rosetta Books acquired by Open Road Media
• Why private equity is (still) interested in the book business, most recently in German companies Bookwire and Zebralution
• Independent Publishing Group's move to add more direct-to-consumer services for their publisher clients (and why becoming a bookseller is harder than it looks)
• The "dark matter"* that's not being reported when we talk about the health of the book business
• Publishers and librarians duking it out over digital book pricing
  • Sidebar on Heated Rivalry and the NYPL
• And a remembrance of Porter Anderson

Beloved backlist books cited in this episode include Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, The Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis, The Rise and Fall fo the Third Reich by William L. Shirer, the works of Octavia E. Butler and William Styron.

More author interviews at kobo.com/conversation

Find past Booktalking episodes here

*Nathan said "grey matter" in the episode because his was failing him at the time.

Host Nathan Maharaj spoke with Dan Rubinstein, author of Water Borne: A 1,200-Mile Paddleboarding Pilgrimage. In it he tells the story of his journey via stand-up paddleboard through waterways around Montreal, New York City, Toronto, and his home in Ottawa. But it's also the story of all of us, and how we benefit from spending time near bodies of water.

Dan Rubinstein on finding community on waterfronts

Host Nathan Maharaj spoke with poet and novelist Souvankham Thammavongsa. Her first poetry collection Small Arguments was published in 2003, and in 2020 her first short story collection How to Pronounce Knife won Canada's Giller Prize. Her latest book is a novel called Pick a Colour. It's a story set in a nail salon run by a retired boxer, and it won the Giller Prize in 2025.

Souvankham Thammavongsa on writing a woman at the centre of her own story

Host Nathan Maharaj spoke with sports broadcaster Eric Smith and writer Andrew Bricker, who together are the authors of We the Raptors: 30 Players – 30 Stories – 30 Years. It is a snackable feast of a book about Canada's only NBA team, the Toronto Raptors, who celebrate their 30th anniversary this season.

Eric Smith and Andrew Bricker on 30 years of the Toronto Raptors

Following our last episode all about the best books we read in 2025, host and producer Nathan Maharaj connected over Zoom with even more Kobo staffers—as well as Kobo in Conversation co-host Michael Tamblyn—to talk about the books that have stuck with them over the past 12 months.

So welcome back once more, to our year in books.

The best books we read in 2025

We'll be back in your feed soon with more amazing author interviews.

It's no spoiler to say that Kobo is full of avid readers. So every year we get together to share the best books we read in the past year. Some of the books are new. Some are very old. All were beloved to a Kobo staffer.

So across 2 whole episodes (follow to make sure you don't miss the second one!), join us as we hear from the staff of Kobo about the best books they read in 2025.

The best books we read in 2025

Michael Tamblyn spoke with Miriam Toews, author of many novels including A Complicated Kindness, All My Puny Sorrows, and Women Talking, to name just a few. Her latest book is a memoir called, A Truce That Is Not Peace. Spurred by the question "why do you write?", posed by a distressingly persistent literary festival organizer, it's a work of nonfiction that delves into the author's feelings around the deaths by suicide of both her father and her sister.

Miriam Toews on her new memoir, and the surprising truth of good comedy

Nathan Maharaj spoke with the novelist Charlotte McConaghy. Her latest book is Wild Dark Shore. It's the story of the Salt family, the stewards of a vast seed bank on a remote island that's in danger of being washed over by rising sea levels. As they're making the hard decisions about what can be saved in the course of their evacuation, a vicious storm tears across the island and leaves a woman washed up on the shore—and she's alive.

Charlotte McConaghy found fear on the Wild Dark Shore

Nathan Maharaj spoke with the Oscar-nominated filmmaker and journalist Julian Brave NoiseCat. He co-directed the 2024 documentary Sugarcane which investigated abuses at a residential school in western Canada. He is also the author of a new book called We Survived the Night: An Indigenous Reckoning. It's about his dad, and also his upbringing, and a mythical character named Coyote.

Julian Brave Noisecat set out to tell a story in the trickster tradition