Basket
Cannon
Winner of the Stella Prize 2026
Winner of the Stella Prize, 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 the weight of family responsibility, and breaks open the question of what we owe both to each other and to ourselves.
WINNER: The Stella Prize 2026
WINNER: Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist 2026
WINNER: Ping Award – Best International Comic / Graphic Novel 2026
WINNER: Doug Wright Award – Best Comic Book 2026
SHORTLISTED: Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards – Fiction 2026
SHORTLISTED: Carol Shields Prize for Fiction 2026
SHORTLISTED: QWF Literary Awards – Fiction 2025
SHORTLISTED: GLAAD Media Awards – Outstanding Original Graphic Novel/Anthology 2025
SHORTLISTED: Los Angeles Times Book Prize – Graphic Novel/Comics 2025
SHORTLISTED: Eisner Awards – Best New Graphic Album 2026
SHORTLISTED: Harvey Awards – Book of the Year 2026
Lai’s elegant artistry evokes horror and poignancy, shock and delight, and Cannon is an incontestable reminder that – in the hands of a masterful artist and storyteller – the very best graphic novels can do what prose alone cannot. And Cannon is absolutely one of the best.
Judges’ comments, The Stella Prize
Lee Lai’s masterful graphic novel considers the small, universal and intersecting catastrophes of everyday life. A charming book about a nervous breakdown, it’s also a salve… Intimate questions dance across the page. And what beautiful pages they are; to read Cannon is to take tactile pleasure in its extraordinary design.
Judges’ comments, Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards
Cannon offers a blend of sharp wit and raw emotion… With black-and-white and colour panels alive with detail, Lai maps the wreckage of growing up, and the fragile glue that holds us together.
Sydney Morning Herald (Best Books of 2025)
Questions of ethics in art, filial responsibility and the shifting tides of friendship weave their way through this thoughtful, sensitive story, with flashes of red-hot anger piercing through.
Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen, The Guardian (Best Australian Books)
[An] utterly glorious sophomore graphic novel… audiences won’t ever want to look away.
Terry Hong, Booklist
[Lai’s characters have no answers, only questions that can never be fully resolved. Instead, these questions are the defining puzzles, defeats and triumphs of their lives. It’s a magnificent, sensitive and innovative work of storytelling.
Cory Doctorow
Subtle yet searing… Lai’s embrace of their characters’ vulnerability makes for a satisfying emotional feast.
Publishers Weekly
Lai’s artwork is evocative and vivid. Throughout the novel, Lai delicately explores different forms of care and caregiving, often to devastating effect. Affecting and laugh-out-loud funny, Cannon is a triumph.
ABC Arts
Gorgeous with astonishing story complexity… Lai is a master of the graphic novel form… The drawings are beautifully rendered, eliciting depth and texture to this rich story, full of tension and truth, pain and poignancy.
Rachel León, Chicago Review of Books
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
The economy of Lai’s dialogue, and of her mostly black-and-white illustrations, belies the breadth and complexity in her storytelling… The book feels lifelike precisely because of its depiction of the characters’ unsatisfying, difficult choices. And in its multiple possibilities, Cannon offers hope for futures completely unforeseen.
Sam Thielman, The New York Times
Cannon offers a deeper, tougher portrait – of an accidental caregiver in need of care,’ writes E. Tammy Kim. ‘It isn’t a political novel, though it raises political questions: how to metabolize different forms of fury and grief; how to feel private pain (and pleasure) against a backdrop of larger suffering.
E. Tammy Kim, The New Yorker
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
Cannon is a truly great Australian graphic novel. It’s complex and fluid, perceptive and nuanced, epic and human. Each of the relationships Lai explores are gorgeously observed, with expectations built over the course of the story, just so it can elegantly subvert them.
Folio, The Conversation
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
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
Despite its knotty subject, Cannon is a joy to read. Its art manages to be both spare and full of emotion; its dialogue feels lived-in. And it’s a cathartic, unexpectedly gleeful story about anxiety.
Emma Sarappo, The Atlantic
Surpasses expectations… With Cannon, Lai has seemingly crossed a threshold, stepping into the confident space occupied only by artists and writers who have learned how to successfully marry two divergent artforms.
Broken Frontier
An even-paced, character-focused work that showcases heavy, hard emotions with perfect nuance… Like its predecessor, Cannon is a genuine masterpiece from the inimitable Lee Lai.
Comics Beat
Cannon stands out not only as a work of literary and artistic excellence but also as a story that feels deeply familiar to many in the LGBTQ+ community… The specificity of Cannon and Trish’s identities – as queer, second-generation Chinese Canadians – offers a nuanced perspective on intersectionality that broadens the cultural conversation around what it means to be queer today.
Edge Media
A thoughtful, deliberative work, and one of the best graphic novels I have read this year.
Declan Fry, The Age
Lee Lai uses clean and precise linework to communicate big and messy feelings.
Andrew Limbong, NPR (Best Books of 2025)
Lai’s razor-sharp lines and beautiful minimalism merge into a masterful comic. The heavy themes – about race, sexuality, generational gaps, working conditions and mental health – are handled with impressive ease. The characters feel real, the story human.Cannon makes a difficult art look like the easiest thing in the world.
Judges’ comments, Ping Awards
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
About the Author
Reviews
[An] utterly glorious sophomore graphic novel… audiences won’t ever want to look away.
Booklist
