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Cannon
The highly anticipated follow-up to the Stella-shortlisted Stone Fruit, Cannon, by acclaimed Australian cartoonist Lee Lai, is a mordantly funny and emotionally turbulent slice of friendship strife.
This graphic novel, featuring black-and-white and colour panels over 300 pages, is available in hardback.
We arrive to wreckage – a restaurant smashed to rubble, with tables and chairs upended riotously. Under the swampy nighttime cover of a Montreal heatwave, we meet our protagonist, Cannon, dripping in beads of regret sweat. She was supposed to be closing the restaurant for the night, but instead, she destroyed it. The horror-scape left in her wake is not unlike the films Cannon and her best friend, Trish, watch together. Cooking dinner and digging into deep cuts of Australian horror movies on their scheduled weekly hangs has become the glue in their 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 out.
In Cannon, Lee Lai’s follow-up to the critically acclaimed and award-winning Stone Fruit, the full palette of a nervous breakdown is just a part of what is on offer. Lai’s sharp sense of humour and sensitive eye produce a story that explores the intimacy of queer friendship and weight of family responsibility, and breaks open the question of what we owe both to each other and to ourselves.
In Cannon, Lee Lai has performed a rare and powerful act of alchemy – the images, narrative, and writing not only capture a life, but combine so that the book itself feels alive.
Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby
Beguilingly drawn, Cannon depicts a wide spectrum of adulthood with nuance and complexity. From one story unravels many stories, about friendships, situationships, work, familial obligations. I was struck by its attention and care.
Ling Ma, author of Bliss Montage
A beautifully drawn slice of life, filled with the kind of intimate, specific details that make the best fiction seem autobiographical.
Adrian Tomine, author of Shortcomings
It’s rare, and precious, when a moment in a movie, in a poem, in a comic surges up at you as being True. And in Cannon, Lee Lai does it again and again.
Eleanor Davis, author of The Hard Tomorrow
Praise for Stone Fruit:
[An] elegantly illustrated and introspective marvel, a deeply moving story about the push and pull between family and selfhood… [A] book that will change the literary landscape.
O, Oprah Magazine
Bittersweet and filled with authentic dialogue and realistic situations, including a lack of tidy resolutions.
New York Times
Stone Fruit beautifully reflects a tender domesticity that is affecting and atmospheric. This is a deceptively simple depiction of the many various and complicated versions of familial love and care we can experience in our lives. Stone Fruit is a work that is honest, unassuming, and powerfully told.
Judges’ comments, The Stella Prize
