Cannon

by Lee Lai

We arrive to wreckage―a restaurant smashed to rubble, with tables and chairs upended riotously. Under the swampy nighttime cover of a Montreal heat-wave, this is where we meet our protagonist, Cannon, dripping in little beads of regret sweat. She was supposed to be closing the restaurant for the night, but instead, well, she destroyed it. The mess feels a bit like a horror-scape―not unlike the horror films Cannon and her best friend, Trish, watch together. Cooking dinner and digging into deep cuts of Australian horror films on their scheduled weekly hangs has become the glue in their rote 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 the hell outta there.

Genres: Graphic Novels, Comics, Fiction, LGBT, Queer, Friendship, Graphic Novels Comics

304 pages, Hardcover

First published September 9, 2025

About the author

Lee Lai is an Australian cartoonist living in Tio’tia:ke (known as Montreal, Quebec).
She has been featured in The New Yorker, McSweeneys and The New York Times, and was recently named one of the 5 under 35 honorees by the National Book Foundation. Her first graphic novel, Stone Fruit, was released last year with Fantagraphics, Sarbacane, Coconino and other publishers. Mostly, she writes about people eating, talking, and making questionable decisions.

Reviews

[CaseyTheCanadianLesbrarian · Rating 5 out of 5]

WOW WOW WOW. Lee Lai knocks it out of the park with this beautifully drawn and deftly realized story about queer friendship set in a hot humid Montreal summer. Two queer Anglophone Chinese Canadian kids who met in high school are still friends in their late 20s, but are growing apart. Is Lucy aka "Luce Cannon" finally going to live up to her nickname and stop taking shit from the girl leading her on, her friend talking over her, her shifty restaurant boss, and her ailing abusive grandpa? Well, YES and it's beautiful to watch.

[Méli · Rating 5 out of 5]

more like Can-oui

[Javier RC · Rating 5 out of 5]

Masterpiece!! Probably the best comic I’ve read this year 🙌🙌🙌

[Sole]

Brilliant. Probably the comic of the year. I wish I could write like this.

(And I can totally imagine this as a movie)

[Cat · Rating 4 out of 5]

set in mtl <3 and packs an emotional punch 🥊

[Book Riot Community]

This is one of Book Riot’s Best Books of 2025:

After Stone Fruit, I longed for Lai’s second graphic novel about Cannon, a cook, and Trish, a writer, from Lennoxville. Every week, the best friends—“on the uncool side of [their] twenties”—watch a scary film until distance threatens their bond of 14 years. Opening in a trashed Montreal restaurant with a regretful Cannon, the story returns to three months prior. Featuring mostly black-and-white art, I devoured this, obsessed with the use of color, horror influences, and complex relationships. As I reread this stunning meditation on breath, intimacy, and care, I observed what appears in red, which frames birds populate, and how they converge.

- Connie Pan

[Meggie Ramm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cannon’s grandpa is ill, her mom isn’t helping, her best friend is secretly using her life as writing fodder, and her job sucks. Cannon is just a ticking bomb.
Lai is the new champ on quiet memoir comics, this rocked. Cannon is dealing with so many pressures, and Lai uses imagery and overlapping speech balloons to racket up the tension between her and her circumstances. Also, if you’ve ever worked a shitty job in the service industry, you will wonder if Lai was there taking notes, because the restaurant scenes are spot on. This novel is lazy and introspective when it’s not shrieking with anger and ratcheting up the tension. Another 10/10.

[jp arsenault · Rating 5 out of 5]

i feel like i just lived this.

the characters felt like friends and i was so emotionally invested in their lives. i can't believe .... well.

i really enjoyed the dialogue, felt real af, the dynamic between the two main characters was also real. i can see myself, my friends, i don't know. it just felt like reading a memory, from my journal, somewhere between 2010 and 2017.

it was like a documentary.

speaking of memories. as i worked in a restaurant for like almost 10 years, i don't know what i felt reading all those scenes that happened in a restaurant. sometimes i missed it, other times it was just triggering ? i guess it was also very real. sketchy boss, yelling at each other during rush, waiters messing around with kitchen staff, after a shift, over a beer... i know people like that, i've been someone like that.

good old memories. stay memories.

but it good sometimes to read about it and realise how much you've grown.

anyway. this isn't the topic.

lee lai.

i really liked stone fruit. but i absolutely loved cannon.

[Megan Kirby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really loved this! I think it's rare to find a comic that is so grounded in modern reality while also telling a compelling story. This book would have been successful in any narrative format--movie, novel, tv show, etc--because the story at its core is so good. I read it in two sit-downs on a Saturday afternoon.

The book follows Cannon, a cook at an upscale restaurant who staunchly keeps her cool while her life starts crumbling around her. There are several relationships explored--all with surprising depth given the length of the book--but the core is her friendship with her best friend Trish. Lai gives characters room to breath--and contradict and overlap and evolve. Plus, the beautifully inked panels are always easy to follow. Lai also has a knack for snippets of dialogue, often with text bubbles overlapping or running off the page.

Anyway! Really enjoyed this one--still thinking about it a few days later.

[kate j · Rating 4 out of 5]

everyone sees everyone in this book and there is still story leftover. what a gift lai gives us: a demonstration of how to handle rage and forgiveness and the nuance in between.

i love, love the way she draws bodies and bikes. read for that, too.

[Callie Lirakis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Words fail

[Hannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

i read this together with blu in his bed while he recovers from his herniated disc. it was so beautiful, we both laughed, we (almost) cried, and talked about which pages we want prints of. cannon is a complex character who is relatable and the relationships are beautifully portrayed.

[Lisa Chetteau · Rating 5 out of 5]

La qualité de l'écriture est assez impressionnante. J'aime lire ce genre de personnages complexes, attachants et très réels.

[Maybel Moore · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this. I feel like I lived parts of this myself. Find yourself. Take no shit.

[Sophia Curtis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just a literal perfect read!

[Anna Meyer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely perfect.

[Juan Ferrer · Rating 4 out of 5]

i really liked this bd. so difficult to have so many emotions sometimes.

[Morgan · Rating 5 out of 5]

this really made me feeeeel!! attentive, emotionally layered storytelling, what we know and love Lee Lai for !

[Stephane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lee Lai poses immediately a challenge to my classification system where I include the nationality of the writer/creator. As per Wikipedia, Lee Lai is an Australian cartoonist and illustrator, born in Melbourne, who now lives and works in Montreal, Canada, with Chinese (Hong Kong) ancestry. Because the story is set in Montréal, where Lee Lai is living (and apparently trying to learn French- good for you, my friend! don't give up!) I choose Canada.

I borrowed this from my public library after reading about it in the Guardian, as featured in a best-of-year list. I had no expectation. Didn't look it up or knew anything about it. Read the aforementioned article, went to the library to pick up an unrelated book and... bam, it was there on the shelf, staring at me. So, I picked it up.

Honestly, though, I became totally engrossed. Love the characters and while the minimalist art somewhat left me cold at first, it gained momentum. This was, to me, absolutely character driven and I was 100% along for the ride. Loves that characters (did I mentioned that...) they felt real, coherent.

The blurb from Adrian Tomine says something akin to this story being fiction reading like a memoir. Honestly, I had to look all this up because I figured it was indeed a memoir (I don't read blurbs...I only read them after I am done with the book...) Gave vibes of Le Plongeur and of Micheal Douglas`s Falling Down. Very few people are going to get those references. I raced to borrow Stone Fruit as soon as I could. Nice work on book 100 for the year.

[Dave Schaafsma · Rating 5 out of 5]

This review might tell more than you really want to know, spoiler alert, I guess, but none of it is earthshakingly revelatory.

After her 2021 Stone Fruit, Australian-Canadian Lee Lai creates one of the most quietly affecting graphic novels of the year, Cannon (2025), a big but relatively quick slice-of-life book I thought was initially just okay, though it feels real, and then it grew on me more and more as the quiet intensity of Lucy's (Cannon's) life deepens. Cannon--a nickname--works in a restaurant as a very good cook in a hot Montreal summer. She has a rep for being calm; she's taking care of her ailing grandfather ("gung gung") without her mother's help, there's friction with her roommate of 14 years, who is bisexual, sleeping with a nice guy who is trying to be emotionally available to her even as Cannon is emotionally unavailable to her.

A new woman comes to work in the restaurant, she and Cannon develop a relationship, though the woman also seems to be attached to the male boss?

Then Cannon is dealing with all these birds around her. Good birds? Bad birds? Metaphorical birds! Things all come to a head over gung gung and buried friend anger, and none of this seems remarkable, like it is a 3-star book/review, but the artwork lends itself to the quiet engagement in the story, and it feels very real to me in a way the best books do. Even better than Stone Fruit. If you like domestic drama, where you like the mcs, you might go for this.

PS I was reminded of Mimi Pond's restaurant books, including Over Easy, though that is played for more laughs. There's a lot going on in a restaurant! A cool community! I recall the days when I worked in one, but this is a higher-end place, with more pressure.

[Declan Fry]

Meet Cannon: stoic, dependable, considered. The kind of person others turn to when they need help. Cannon spends nights watching horror films with Trish, a woman she bonded with in high school, one of the “only two gay Chinese Anglophone teens in all of Lennoxville”. In their late 20s, the pair finds that horror’s tales of possession and degradation speak to the terrifying reality of their own lives.

Cannon is surrounded by people she can barely talk to, forced to make decisions and care for her family while working exhausting restaurant shifts. She puts out fires between co-workers and suffers her smarmy boss, Guy, for fear of losing her job. What little free time she has is frequently spent tending to her grandfather.

While Cannon remains receptive and present for others, those around her are distant and emotionally numb: her grandfather, Chan Ying Fung, sits alone at home, abandoned by carers unable to tolerate his anger. Her mother, Jennifer, remains scarred by memories of Chan’s authoritarian parenting.

Cannon runs compulsively, all while being run down by those around her. As she checks in on friends and family, her primary companions are self-help recordings, therapeutic messages encouraging her to “breathe” and be mindful and ignore all that pesky existential doom, baby!

Her name is a play on her birth name, Lucy (“Luce Cannon”). It’s ironic, but perhaps not entirely: one day, a wound on her foot begins to blister. Cannon, a quiet soul, is seemingly on the verge of being pushed to the edge.

Read on: https://www.smh.com.au/culture/books/...

[bookcookery]

Cannon is barely keeping her head above water, juggling the demands of a relentless job, the slow unraveling of her friendship with Trish, and the weight of caring for her abusive, declining grandfather. Magpies stalk her in moments of acute stress, eerie manifestations of everything she can’t say.

This is a story about how easily we take people for granted, how difficult it is to form new connections, and how vital long-standing relationships are, especially the ones that fray slowly and quietly. Lai deftly examines the ways we use one another through a cascading chain of exploitation: Trish mining Cannon’s life for her art, her mentor hoping to piggyback on her ambition and success, the institutional pressures to conform to simplified, stereotypical narratives, Guy's harassment and abuse of his employees.

The novel carries a heavy message, and just as Trish’s mentor warns her against telling Cannon’s story in a way that feels sentimental or clichéd, Lai avoids those traps, framing the narrative with a hypnotic guided meditation that lets both Cannon and the story breathe while lacing the dialogue with Trish’s biting sarcasm and Cannon’s more reserved but bone-dry wit.

And in the tentative gestures between characters like Kam’s fish tacos and Benji’s awkwardly offered advice, the story offers the quiet hope that people may be capable of more than we think.

Thanks to Drawn & Quarterly and NetGalley for the advance reading copy.

[Brandon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely adored Lee Lai's Stone Fruit and, every few months, I'd search on Hoopla to see if she had published a new book yet. Nope, still nothing, oh well I can wait patiently. But then end of year 2025 best of lists came out and I saw Lee Lai DID have a new book just... not on Hoopla... and it turns out I could NOT wait patiently so I immediately requested it from my library.

Good decision on my part! This is one of my favourites of the year. Cannon's relationships with those around her are compelling, I love the bird imagery to show her 'anger' and anxiety building. I love the little bits of the book where the panel goes red to show rage. The constant reference to horror movies, the long walks/runs, getting to know Cannon and the complexity of emotions she shows or doesn't show. The anger being something to fear or hold back, but as it goes on and Cannon keeps getting treated like shit there's value in actually being angry and voicing yourself instead of letting yourself shrink. Her complicated relationship with her mother and grandfather! So many small moments that hang over my head and kept me thinking about this book even after I've put it down. It damn near ruined my work shift I kept thinking about it, wanting to pick it back up on my next break and rip through it as quickly as I can because I had to see how it developed.

[Izzy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I haven’t read many graphic novels, but Cannon is a brilliant introduction to the genre. It’s a poignant, layered story which explores themes of friendship, family and generational trauma, mental health, and loneliness, while also highlighting the importance of connection and communication in a thoughtful way.

The story opens with Cannon destroying a restaurant, then rewinds to show how she reached that point. Through beautifully drawn characterisation, Lai explores her relationships with her best friend Trish, her colleagues, her mother, and her role as caregiver to her grandfather, which are all developed with nuance and emotional depth.

The artwork is understated yet powerful. Lai does a great job of capturing movement and chaos (like the intensity of a restaurant kitchen) and the shifting moods and building pressure of Cannon’s world.

I’d recommend this to anyone, even if, like me, you’re new to graphic novels. It’s an affecting and immersive story that touches on so many relatable themes.

Thank you to NetGalley, Drawn & Quarterly, and Lee Lai for the ARC!

[Ben Leach · Rating 5 out of 5]

This features some of the deepest character work I've ever seen in a graphic novel. It reminded me of my favorite comic series of all time - Terry Moore's Strangers in Paradise - where it's two friends who are divergent in their lives and encounter some complex trust issues but ultimately have each other's back. An old friendship doesn't mean that a friendship is incapable of growing and maturing, and I think that's an important lesson right now. I see a lot of people around me who are either resistant to change or desperate to find comfort in things as they once were.

It's very real, down to earth, and the art style lends itself to something more tethered to reality. I just read Matt Emmons's Council of Frogs last night, and that is also great but for a completely different set of reasons. This is for anyone looking to understand the complexities of LGBTQ dating and relationships, identity, grief, frustration...it hits on a lot of themes rather seamlessly. Very much recommended.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

A graphic novel about Lucy, and Asian-Canadian queer woman who works as a cook in a restaurant and takes care of her aging grandpa. Basically, she is amazing to everyone and no one appreciates her for a long time. Her friend is even using Lucy's life to inspire a book about the Canadian-American experience. When Lucy finds out, she's super upset, and her friend decides not to write the book (although if her friend is a stand-in for the author, we have some recursion going on). Interesting to see the identity-focused narrative folding in on itself!

Eventually things come to a head, not just Lucy's friend being crappy, but also her boss and her mom. She loses it, but we've seen it building for a while. An interesting meditation on our duty to others and how it affects us when we put everyone's needs above our own.

[ashes ➷ · Rating 5 out of 5]

(I received an ARC from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.)

One of the most cathartic books I've ever read, and undoubtedly one of the best and most interesting art styles. I will absolutely have to go back and read Lai's debut. A beautifully surreal book featuring two gay Chinese women, one of whom-- Cannon, our protagonist-- is pretty clearly butch, and the conflicts between them feel real and interesting and exciting and (in a good, satisfying, literary way) frustrating; I just can't wait to get my hands on a physical copy to get to read this in higher quality; those big swoops and delicate lines were so satisfying even on a screen. What a unique book; the more I think about it the more satisfied I am with it.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cannon tells the story of Cannon, a 20 something chef working in a dysfunctional kitchen and caring for her ailing grandfather. Her best friend Trish is trying to write while recovering from a heartbreak. Cannon is someone trying to manages all of the stressors of life while slowly losing control. This is an interesting and realistic portrayal of trying to meet everyone’s expectations and holding it all together without having the support that you really need, and navigating changing friendships. I really liked the limited use of color and the inclusion of birds. I’m going to be thinking about this for a while.

[S.Matt Read · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cannon portrays the lives of two women, life-long friends, who moved away from a small Canadian town to live in Montreal. Both women contend with their work, personal relationships with others and between themselves, commitment to family, and generally navigating their 20s. The title character Cannon (from the evolution of Lucy to Luce to "Loose Cannon" and finally just Cannon) wrestles with her own mental health throughout the story.

Lai gives us super solid character development with touches of the metaphysical (birds only Cannon can see) and a grounded story. Not a feather seems out of place. It's extraordinary in its realism and the best of where graphic fiction is today.

[Ada See · Rating 5 out of 5]

I sometimes feel bad for people who never read graphic novels. They just don't know!!! They don't know that the world has a Lee Lai in it!!!!!! They're unaware of the special trapdoor underneath your heart that doesn't open until you inhale these books.

Look, is this comic a stress nightmare? Yes. Did I reread it immediately upon finishing it? You bet. Is it a shot of tender molten rage straight to the heart? Absolutely. Is it a exquisitely masterful mosaic of truthful gay pains and painful gay truths? Oh honey.

Answer the knocking on your trapdoor.