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Sales of romance titles in Canada were up 82 per cent in 2024, according to BookNet Canada, the national sales-tracking service for the English-language trade market. Romance held the lead into the first half of 2025, when that category grew a further nine per cent. The rise has been steep enough that a global directory of romance-specialist bookstores logged just one such shop in Canada at the end of 2022, but within three years the count had reached eight with more announced in Victoria, Winnipeg, Grimsby and Halifax.
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“Probably in large part due to TikTok and BookTok, romance reading communities that were historically online are really embracing physical connection,” Calder said. “Opportunities to meet in person and get to know the people who like the same things they do.”
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The question hanging over the trend is whether it can last, above all in a challenging rental market. Westboro Books, a general-interest shop on Richmond Road, announced in February that it would close for good. The neighbourhood where Hakim opened Love Lyla had just lost a general-interest bookstore.
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Calder says rent is the single largest factor behind closures. “Bookstores have no choice if the rent increases beyond what they can reasonably maintain.”
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Hakim, for her part, is leaning into community and a customer base bigger than she first expected. All of the books in her shop were written in English by Muslim authors. Half of the books on the shelves are fiction, including Uzma Jalaluddin’s Detective Aunty, a Toronto-set murder mystery whose sequel, Moonlight Murder, Hakim hopes to launch in-store this spring, and Where the Jasmine Blooms by Zeina Sleiman, whose debut historical novel about Palestinian cousins reconnecting in Lebanon was a CBC Radio book of the month. Hakim hosted Sleiman’s Ottawa launch last year.
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The children’s section is held to a similar high standard, which in Hakim’s case is personal. If she would not read a book to her kids, she does not want it in the shop. A story about a family camping or a child cooking dinner with a parent may carry no overt lesson; the family happens to be Muslim.
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“For a lot of Muslim and multicultural families, we didn’t see ourselves in the books at the library or at our schools,” Hakim said. “Now all of these books are present, and it makes us feel very much included and celebrated.”
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Love Lyla began with a children’s book Hakim had been trying to find for her family. In late 2022, she reached the U.K.-based author of Connecting with Allah, a poetry collection for young readers, and was encouraged to order 10 copies instead of one and to share them with friends. Hakim went further, putting her savings toward 100 copies. They sold out within weeks. For a time, she said, she was the only source for the title in North America. Customers came back asking what else she could find.
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Her grand opening took place earlier in April, and her first book sold, to a customer Hakim had yet to meet, was a translation of the Qur’an, the only copy of the religious text she stocked.
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“As a Muslim, you’re supposed to start everything with the name of Allah,” she said. “It was the most beautiful way to begin without any intention put into it.”
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If anyone in Ottawa understands how fast a niche can rise, and how cyclical the bookstore business really is, it is Linda Wiken.
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She ran Prime Crime, a mystery bookstore on Bank Street, from 1995 to 2010. She and fellow author Mary Jane Maffini bought the shop from founder Jim Riker, who had opened it roughly a decade earlier.
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