Through the Portal: Tales from a Hopeful Dystopia recently made it to the number 2 position on the Edmonton Bestselling Books list ending February 2, 2025. The weekly list is compiled by Audreys Books and Magpie Books through the Book Publishers Association of Alberta.

Through the Portal anthology continues to garner attention and accolades by reviewers, booksellers, and readers throughout Canada. Released December 31, 2024 and launched in several locations in Canada, Portal is celebrated for its hopeful lens on an otherwise bleak future with thirty-five unique short stories, flash fiction, and poetry and an afterward.

There are many faces for hope; this anthology has thirty-six of them. Each story in the anthology features a unique hopeful lens that draws from a diversity of authors from around the world and throughout Canada. Stories that touch on nostalgia to respect, enlightenment to endurance. In these tales that range from compassion and healing to cautionary warnings of dark insight, hope may wear a human face or the face of a tree, black crow, or leaf.

Hopeful dystopias are so much more than an apparent oxymoron: they are in some fundamental way the spearhead of the future – and ironically often a celebration of human spirit by shining a light through the darkness of disaster. In Through the Portal: Tales from a Hopeful Dystopia, award-winning authors of speculative fiction Lynn Hutchinson Lee and Nina Munteanu present a collection that explores strange new terrains and startling social constructs, quiet morphing landscapes, dark and terrifying warnings, lush newly-told folk and fairy tales.—Exile Editions

  “A stunning collection of short stories and poetry that address our most existential concerns.”

Dragonfly.eco

“Will ingenuity, love, and respect for the earth help us work through whatever changes might lie ahead? Through the Portal offers hope that these qualities, if not enough in and of themselves, will help us find our way.”

The Seaboard Review

.

.