Cannon by Lee Lai | Review

The much-anticipated follow-up to acclaimed graphic novelist Lee Lai's Stella-shortlisted Stone Fruit, a funny, dark, emotionally turbulent 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 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

'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

'A beautifully drawn slice of life, filled with the kind of intimate, specific details that make the best fiction seem autobiographical.' Adrian Tomine

'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