Jackie Khalilieh is a Palestinian-Canadian writer of YA, contemporary and women’s fiction. Khalilieh earned both a B.A. and a B.Ed. She now lives outside of Toronto.
Fiction (Young adult)
Everything Comes Back to You
Toronto: Tundra Books, 2026.
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
Lennon is excited and apprehensive about starting high school, where her older sister is going to be a senior. Then her sister drops a bombshell: she is pregnant. Her Palestinian Canadian parents are devastated, and Lennon finds herself under even more pressure to be a “good girl” – a role autistic Lennon has always played well. But after a chance encounter with John, a white boy in the grade above, Lennon finds herself nursing a crush on someone her parents would definitely not approve of—which only seems to intrigue her more.
As Lennon and John are drawn together and pulled apart throughout her four years of high school, Lennon wrestles with feelings of shame and yearning, obedience and rebellion through the lens of her autism, trying to both please her parents and herself. When a relationship with a different boy challenges her notions of family and happiness, her way forward becomes clear, even if it might mean losing everything and everyone she loves.
Fiction (Young adult)
Something More
Toronto: Tundra Books, 2023.
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
Fifteen-year-old Jessie, a quirky loner obsessed with the nineties, is diagnosed as autistic just weeks before starting high school. Determined to make a fresh start and keep her diagnosis a secret, Jessie creates a list of goals that range from acquiring two distinct eyebrows to getting a magical first kiss and landing a spot in the school play. Within the halls of Holy Trinity High, she finds a world where things are no longer black and white and quickly learns that living in color is much more fun. But Jessie gets more than she bargained for when two very different boys steal her heart, forcing her to go off-script.
Awards and Honours
2024 Amy Mathers Teen Book Award (Finalist)
Fiction
You Started It
Toronto: Tundra Books, 2025.
PS8621.H3365 Y68 2025
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
Seventeen-year-old Jamie Taher-Foster has big plans for senior year. She’s made a list of things and places in Toronto she and her boyfriend of three years, Ben Cameron, need to check off before graduating. And the biggest plan of all: a very special night for the two of them at the upcoming Winter Formal. But then Ben arrives back home after a summer away with an unthinkable announcement: he wants to break up. And when Jamie discovers him with Olivia Chen the next day, she is determined to get him back. Even if that means fake dating the younger, curly-haired, TikTok dancer Axel Dahini, whose bicycle she accidentally ran over. Though she and Axel have nothing in common aside from their shared Arab heritage – she’s a messy, type A with anxiety; he’s carefree but meticulous – their forced time together brings them to better understand one another. And for Jamie, it just might mean learning that not all experiences or people need to be crossed off a list.
Awards and Honours
2026 Amy Mathers Teen Book Award (Finalist)
Links
Jackie Khalilieh personal website
Publisher Tundra Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House Canada