To mark Canadian Independent Bookstore Day on April 25, we asked Star readers to share their favourite haunts. These are the five bookshops that keep Toronto staying up late to read just one more chapter.

It’s a juxtaposition that would feel almost too pat in a book. In the shadow of yet another condo crane towering over a neighbourhood in rapid transformation, Ben McNally’s mahogany-hued shelves, wallpaper that resembles the end papers of a rare 19th-century tome, and an overall genteel calm read like the sort of intellectual haven patronized by Torontonians back when the city was known as York.

In fact, the bookstore only moved into this location at Queen and Jarvis three years ago after a period of peripatetic upheaval. The shop resided on Bay Street for more than a decade after veteran bookseller Ben McNally decided to pursue his lifelong dream on the eve of the financial crisis. A landlord who didn’t renew the lease in 2019 turned out to be an unintentional benefactor when this made the shop move to temporary locations to weather the pandemic.

Some things have stayed the same — the distinctive shelves, for instance, were brought over from Bay Street — but the new location does have “more of a lived-in atmosphere, more of a neighbourhood feel. Something novel mixed with something familiar, just like the perfect book,” said Rupert McNally, who with his sister Danielle, took over the store last summer from their father. “Luckily for all of us, he’s still available as a sounding board and a wealth of insight and experience.”

Saba Lightfoot, a regular over the past couple years, told the Star it’s the first bookstore he recommends. “The selection is incredible; there’s a perfect balance of casualness and sophistication that makes it approachable,” he said. “Rupert has recommended books genuinely tailored to my liking while also pushing me toward authors I wouldn’t have found on my own. It’s not an algorithm or BookTok telling you what to read. It’s a very human experience, and that keeps drawing me back.”

Thanks to their signature “Book a Month” program — where Rupert and Danielle pick a book in line with your tastes; some entire families are signed up — Lightfoot is in at least one a month, if not more often. “In an age of instant checkouts and contactless delivery, there’s an enduring charm to this place that I feel compelled to support,” he said. “In five or 10 years, I want my kids to be the ones asking if we can go to Ben McNally’s. Until then I will keep visiting and reading as much as I can.”

“We’ve been lucky enough to sell at some of the biggest events in the city, to be on the jury for one of the biggest literary prizes, and to give book presentations to hundreds of people at a time,” Rupert said, “but absolutely nothing compares with talking to other readers about good books.”

Spring pick: “On the Calculation of Volume (Book IV)” by Solvej Balle, translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell. “What I love about it,” McNally said, “apart from having a good book to talk to Danielle about, is Balle’s use of a science-fiction trope (a day endlessly repeating for the protagonist and only a few others). But where you might expect adventure and plot twists, here you get introspection, meditation and even mundanity. Life is full of your world changing without any other aspect of the world being changed, and somehow that side of this book really strikes home for me.”

From floor to ceiling, piled high on flat surfaces and double-stacked on shelves, books “new, old and older” cover nearly every spare inch of this beloved east end stalwart. The remaining free space is filled with trinkets and knick-knacks, equally eclectic. Out back, there’s a garden where, in the warmer months, customers can relax with their latest finds. “‘Cosy’ is a word that often gets used to describe our store,” says owner Katya Nosko, who runs it with her son Caleb Mitchell.

There’s been a bookstore at this storefront on Kingston Road since 1976 — Budget Book Store, then Ed’s — but it only became The Great Escape in 1996, when retired Toronto schoolteachers Bruce and Marg Ewing took over, renaming it after the 1963 film about Allied prisoners breaking out of a German PoW camp. “For the Ewings, reading was a perfect way to escape the trials and tribulations of our daily lives,” said Nosko. Unbeknownst to them, one of the heroes of the true story that inspired the film, Wally “The Tunnel King” Floody, lived two blocks from the store.

Fifty years in, the store — which hosts an annual Book & Film Club series with the Fox Theatre — remains a proudly analog paradise. “We don’t have a computer and we don’t sell online. We still write things down on paper and the only catalogue we have is in our heads,” said Nosko, who added that Caleb creates all their posters, window displays and branding himself. “Our customers come because they love the nostalgic experience of a used book shop like ours, and because they see their support for us as part of the fight for sustainability and humanistic ideals.”

Another huge draw? Scout, the six-year-old store dog. “Customers young and old come in regularly just to visit with her, and we often hear a ‘Hi, Scout!’ before they’ve even gotten past the threshold,” Nosko said. “The store wouldn’t be the same without her.”

Sean Clement, a regular customer, is one such fan. “If there was ever a better store dog, I’ve yet to meet them,” he said. “Though she’s still young, she has the wizened eyebrows of a philosopher and the disposition of a retiree.”

The atmosphere at Great Escape is unique in the city, Clement added. “It feels like a bookstore should: an open secret, mysterious but welcoming, a place where you’ll find what you were looking for and a few things you weren’t. I’ve seen modern novels side by side with an 1880s edition of Mark Twain. I once came in for a quick look and ended up learning that Katya once traded a few books for a stuffed caiman.”

Spring pick: “North Woods” by Daniel Mason. “It’s a gorgeous telling of the history and life of a cabin, its inhabitants, and the little forest in which it is nestled,” said Nosko. “The vignettes are beautiful, sometimes scary, sometimes magical, but clear-eyed in showing who we are and how we treat our earthly paradise.”

Patrick Hempelmann describes his customers at BMV as a “community of hunters.” Their quarry? Every single day, more than 1,000 new items are added to the shelves at BMV on Bloor, which has been selling books, magazines and videos since 1997.

“(They’re) people that do not just want to find that obvious bestseller,” said the owner, “but people that enjoy the hunt for those hidden treasures you will not find in a generic bookstore.”

The flagship Bloor Street superstore occupies what was once Annex landmark Hungarian Castle restaurant and is suitably majestic in scale: 15,000 square feet over four floors — but priced along the lines of another legendary Toronto retailer, Honest Ed’s.

“We always loved books and found that the bookstores in Toronto at the time were too expensive, so we wanted to create a store that was affordable and fun to browse,” said Hempelmann of BMV’s start as a used bookstore at 10 Edward St., cannily located next to the World’s Biggest Bookstore. (Unlike its record-setting neighbour, the BMV is still there; there’s also a BMV Uptown at Yonge and Eglinton and a pop-up on Queen Street West where many items are three for $10.)

In time, the store’s inventory has expanded to include new releases, board games, action figures and collectibles, plus vinyl LPs and singles, CDs and more.

Hempelmann described the Bloor flagship as “stores within a store. Each floor is different. Our basement feels like a music store, our first and second floor are a proper bookstore, and our third floor is a fully functioning comics store.”

For all of BMV’s endless novelty, its customers form deep, long-lasting attachments. A postcard sent by a customer of 25 years, writing after a year of tumult in their own life, says visiting was the one constant, “my place of solitude for a moment’s peace.”

Spring pick: “Crime and Punishment” by Fyodor Dostoevsky. “Why? Life is too short not to read Dostoevsky,” Hempelmann said. “In the current state of the world, it is hard to believe that no one can escape their own conscience, but it is a nice ideal.”

The first clue that Another Story is a bookstore that cares deeply about social justice? As soon as you walk in, you’re standing in the politics section.

When Sheila Koffman first opened the store in a basement on the Danforth in 1987, she wanted to champion books by and for diverse communities. After nearly two decades at a bigger location across from the Danforth Music Hall, the store moved to its current home in Roncesvalles. Koffman ran the store until her death in 2017, when her brother Joel and two long-time employees, Laura Ash and Eric McCall, took up the charge.

“We have a lot of books, a lot of colour, notes from 39 years of booksellers taped on the walls. We’re definitely not minimalist. We have something for everyone, and we try to be a space for the community,” said bookseller and events co-ordinator Saul Freedman-Lawson. “You will meet dogs and babies, people who are a lot like you and people who are nothing like you.”

Jay Williams, a frequent customer since he moved to Toronto from the Bahamas in 2022, says Another Story is a place where he feels special, welcome — and safe. He remembers a time when he was struggling, and a sensitive recommendation by bookseller Anjula Gogia made him feel seen in a powerful way.

“For someone who is Black, queer and an international student, navigating a city that could easily render me invisible, I am most visible in the bookstore,” Williams said. And yet, along with the solidarity of community, he also appreciates the ways the store spurs him to personal growth.

“That’s what keeps me coming back — that curiosity to understand a world that is gripped with so many problems, as there is light to be found in it,” he said. “Another Story gives me the space to explore and challenge my thinking, and more importantly, to learn how to be a better human in so many ways.”

Williams was in the audience when the store (which hosted or co-hosted 123 workshops, parties or book launches in 2025) put on its biggest event yet: a 1,700-strong launch for Arundhati Roy’s memoir, “Mother Mary Comes to Me.” In March, the store also hosted a bilingual launch for French sexual assault survivor Gisele Pelicot’s book. These events are helping to keep Koffman’s vision alive.

“Sheila’s values around social justice, education and community work are in everything we do,” Freedman-Lawson said. “Customers, authors and teachers come to us from far outside of our neighbourhood because we carry diverse and political books that are hard to find elsewhere. Our politics are what make us who we are, and our relationship to our local and global community comes first.”

Spring pick: “Syncopation” by Whitney French. “It’s a gorgeous science-fiction novel in verse, bringing us postapocalyptic hope,” said Freedman-Lawson. 

When there was an explosion near Souvankham Thammavongsa’s home in Queen West in March, one of the people to reach out to her was Martha Sharpe, founder of Flying Books, both a retailer and a publishing house, offering her a safe haven until the dust had settled.

“The staff are really friendly, and they remember you,” Thammavongsa said. “That kind of care, where somebody randomly thinks of you and knows that detail about you, is really incredible and kind. It’s not just a bookstore. They care about me as a person.”

There’s something else that endears Flying Books to this Giller Prize-winning author and poet who lives around the corner and drops in often: It’s one of the few stores in the city to display all of their books with covers facing out.

“As a writer, I spend so much time talking to my editors and publishers about the front cover of my books, because it’s the first thing readers see. If they don’t know you, that’s the first impression they get,” she said. “I hate when I go to a bookstore and all they see is the spine.”

The store has two locations; this one at Neverland is a mash-up of a cafe, wine bar and bookstore. Sharpe — who started a decade ago with a single shelf of books in a friend’s vintage store because she thought downtown Toronto needed more places to buy books — has never wanted to limit Flying Books to just one thing.

“Launching the writing school and mentorship program early on changed everything,” Sharpe said. “It shifted Flying Books from just a retail bookstore into something more like a creative ecosystem.”

It wasn’t long before Sharpe began publishing titles of their own. “The whole collection is ‘choosily chosen,’ meaning we bring in books we genuinely love and want to talk about. From the beginning, intention has shaped everything we do at Flying Books.”

If the first location on College Street in Little Italy is cheerfully minimalist, Sharpe said that the Neverland location is designed to be cosier, “a bookstore meets café and wine bar, where people often linger longer than they planned to.” It’s also home to their Author Socials, held around the store’s long bar.

“Conversations feel very personal and unforced, and it’s a chance for people to come and have a real conversation with authors,” says Sharpe. “Last year at an Author Social with Katherine Ashenburg, an old friend she hadn’t seen in decades showed up and it was lovely to witness their reunion.” The shop also hosts what she calls “jam-packed” and “lively, thoughtful, and very community-driven” monthly fiction and non-fiction book clubs.

“Our readers are curious, open and incredibly engaged,” Sharpe said. “They trust our recommendations and often recommend books to us and come back for conversations. Plus, they’re often willing to try something new since it’s always suggested with care.”

Spring pick: “We sincerely recommend our very own Flying Books titles: ‘Happy Hour’ by Marlowe Granados, ‘Good Girl’ by Anna Fitzpatrick and ‘City in Flames’ by Tomas Hachard — all highly acclaimed and beloved by readers across Canada.”