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Cannon
Drawn & Quarterly, Fall 2025
https://drawnandquarterly.com/books/cannon/
A LAMBDA Award winner and breakout fiction sensation returns with a darkly funny slice of friendship strife
We arrive to wreckage—a restaurant smashed to rubble, with tables and chairs upended riotously. Under the swampy nighttime cover of a Montreal heat-wave, this is where we meet our protagonist, Cannon, dripping in little beads of regret sweat. She was supposed to be closing the restaurant for the night, but instead, well, she destroyed it. The mess feels a bit like a horror-scape—not unlike the horror films Cannon and her best friend, Trish, watch together. Cooking dinner and digging into deep cuts of Australian horror films on their scheduled weekly hangs has become the glue in their rote relationship. In high school, they were each other’s lifeline—two queer second-generation Chinese nerds trapped in the suburbs. Now, on the uncool side of their twenties, the essentialness of one another feels harder to pin down.
Yet, when our stoic and unbendingly well-behaved Cannon finds herself—very uncharacteristically—surrounded by smashed plates, it is Trish who shows up to pull her the hell outta there.
In Cannon, Lee Lai’s much anticipated follow-up to the critically-acclaimed and award-winning Stone Fruit, the full palette of a nervous breakdown is just a slice of what Lai has on offer. As Cannon’s shoulders bend under the weight of an aging Gung-gung and an avoidant mother, Lai’s sharp sense of humor and sensitive eye produce a story that will hit readers with a smash.
Stone Fruit
Fantagraphics, Spring 2021
https://www.fantagraphics.com/products/stone-fruit
An exhilarating and tender debut graphic novel that is an ode to the love and connection shared among three women and the child they all adore.
2022 Cartoonist Studio Prize WINNER 2022 Lynd Ward Graphic Novel Prize WINNER 2022 ALA Stonewall Award Honor Book 2022 Lambda Literary Award WINNER, LGBTQ Comics 2021 National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" Honoree
Bron and Ray are a queer couple who enjoy their role as the fun weirdo aunties to Ray's niece, six-year-old Nessie. Their playdates are little oases of wildness, joy, and ease in all three of their lives, which ping-pong between familial tensions and deep-seeded personal stumbling blocks. As their emotional intimacy erodes, Ray and Bron isolate from each other and attempt to repair their broken family ties — Ray with her overworked, resentful single-mother sister and Bron with her religious teenage sister who doesn't fully grasp the complexities of gender identity. Taking a leap of faith, each opens up and learns they have more in common with their siblings than they ever knew.
At turns joyful and heartbreaking, Stone Fruit reveals through intimately naturalistic dialog and blue-hued watercolor how painful it can be to truly become vulnerable to your loved ones — and how fulfilling it is to be finally understood for who you are.
Lee Lai is one of the most exciting new voices to break into the comics medium and she has created one of the truly sophisticated graphic novel debuts in recent memory.