Tegan and Sara’s Tegan Quin champions a period piece with a queer love triangle on Canada Reads
Canada Reads will air April 13-16 on CBC TV, CBC Radio and CBC Books
Musician and writer Tegan Quin is championing The Cure for Drowning by Loghan Paylor on Canada Reads 2026!
On Canada Reads, five Canadian celebrities each pick one book that the whole country should read. They debate their choices over the course of four days, voting to eliminate one every day. The last book standing is the winner.
This year's edition will take place on April 13-16. The show’s theme is one book to build bridges.
The Canada Reads 2026 contenders are:
- Filmmaker and actor Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers champions A Minor Chorus by Billy-Ray Belcourt
- Hockey YouTube personality and podcaster Steve “Dangle” Glynn champions Searching for Terry Punchout by Tyler Hellard
- Musician and writer Tegan Quin champions The Cure for Drowning by Loghan Paylor
- Broadway actor and kids TV host Josh Dela Cruz champions Foe by Iain Reid
- BookTok star Morgann Book champions It's Different This Time by Joss Richard
The Canada Reads 2026 debates will be hosted by Ali Hassan and will broadcast each day at 10 a.m. (11 a.m. AT, 1:30 p.m. NT) on CBC Radio, with a live audio stream and podcast recap on CBC Listen. Watch live at 10 a.m. ET/ 7 a.m. PT on CBC Gem, CBCbooks.ca and YouTube, or at 1 p.m. (2 p.m. AT, 2:30 p.m. NT) on CBC TV.
You can tune in live or catch a replay on the platform of your choice.
A storied music career
Tegan Quin and her twin sister Sara make up the pop-indie duo Tegan and Sara.
Over the course of their career, they have released 10 studio albums, featuring hit songs like Closer, Where Does The Good Go and Walking with A Ghost. They’ve sold more than a million records, receiving accolades including Juno and GLAAD awards, a Governor General's Performing Arts Award and nominations for the Polaris Music Prize and the Grammys.
The twins took their writing talents from songs to books in 2019 with their joint memoir, High School, and the middle-grade graphic novel duology Tegan & Sara: Junior High, illustrated by Tillie Walden.
They also started the Tegan and Sara Foundation to support and invest in 2SLGBTQ+ communities, which earned them the Humanitarian Award at the 2024 Junos.
Since the early days of Tegan and Sara, the twins have had a book blog to share their recommendations, first on their website and currently on Substack.
“We've always used social media to talk about books and what we're reading,” Quin told CBC Books in an interview.
“A lot of us aren't encouraged or are discouraged by reading because it's associated with school. I love the idea of being part of helping people discover this whole special place that they may not know about.”
Now, Quin is bringing her ultimate book recommendation to the Canada Reads audience — Loghan Paylor’s novel, The Cure for Drowning.
A novel about siblings
Vancouver-based Quin reads widely and often. She doesn’t stick to a particular genre and almost always makes time to read before bed.
That made choosing a Canada Reads book quite the task.
A lover of fiction, nonfiction and everything in between, Quin considered 15 books before landing on The Cure For Drowning, a historical fiction featuring romance, sibling relationships and untold queer stories.
Set in 1939, The Cure for Drowning follows Kit McNair, who was born Kathleen to an Irish farming family in southern Ontario. Ever since Kit fell through the river ice and drowned at 10 years old, they don’t fit in with the expectations set out for them.
When Rebekah, a German Canadian doctor's daughter comes to town, she, Kit and Kit's older brother, Landon, find themselves in a love triangle which tears their families apart. While all three of them separate to join different war efforts, they eventually return home. But to coexist, they'll have to move forward from their challenging and storied past.
Given her own close bond with her sister, Quin was initially drawn to The Cure for Drowning because of its strong portrayal of what it’s like to have siblings.
“The sibling relationship can be so tiresome and difficult and arduous, but in these moments of conflict or these moments of peril, like when Kit goes into the water, it's like you would do anything for your sibling,” she said.
“You'll carry them two miles home in a blizzard.”
Telling untold queer stories
For Quin, another strong point of The Cure for Drowning is that it tells a queer story in a time period where few, if any, of these stories were out in the open.
"The thing that I'm fixated on the most right now, as I'm thinking about defending the book, is just how little [queer] representation we have from that time period in history — and how poignant and moving and thrilling it is to imagine it like that," said Quin.
"It's so far and few between that you see that kind of representation.”
That was one of the reasons that Paylor, a queer trans author, decided to write the novel in the first place.
"I wrote this novel partly for my younger self, because it was a story I needed to read but didn’t yet exist," Paylor told CBC Books in an email.
"I also wrote this for my queer forebears, to show how they lived full, interesting and complex lives that amounted to so much more than a footnote in a history book.”
Paylor was also compelled to write The Cure for Drowning because they wanted to show stories in which queer trans people get to live and thrive.
"I was tired of consuming media in which transgender people were portrayed as a tragic curse of nature, or as half-formed things denied the fullest joys of family, love and connection,” they said.
"I wanted to read a story where being queer, being gender-non-conforming, and being trans was a source of supernatural strength and courage."
Paylor is an Ontario-born author currently based in B.C.
The Cure for Drowning is their debut novel and was longlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize. Paylor was also longlisted for the 2025 CBC Nonfiction Prize.
The power of setting
The Cure for Drowning is mostly set in a farming town in southern Ontario — an aspect of the novel which fascinated Quin.
Though she grew up in Calgary, she has fond memories of visiting her grandparents’ farm in rural Saskatchewan as a kid and hearing her mother’s stories of growing up there.
“There were a lot of parallels to understanding my family history and implanting them there,” she said. “But then I got to also throw in me, a queerness that I don't hear from my parents’ generation or my grandparents' generation.”
Quin also appreciated that while The Cure for Drowning is a period piece, it was deeply relatable and calls back to our current moment.
“You don't have to be from 1939 to relate to not being seen,” said Quin.
You don't have to be from 1939 to relate to not being seen.- Tegan Quin
While an intricate setting and historical time period could make for a dense book that’s challenging to read, Quin commends the novel for its rich descriptions that are accessible to all types of readers.
“I don't want to be so bold as to call it a classic yet, but I think that when we look at books that stand the test of time, one of the things we look for is that anyone [can pick up and] read it,” said Quin.
“This is a really beautiful book. It's a very visual book, but it's a really readable book.”
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