Grace River is a smelter town in the interior of B.C. where most people who live there are born and bred, and everyone is either employed by AXIS or knows someone who is. Not much ever changes in Grace River. The days begin at Nick’s Diner and end at the Steelworkers bar. When a young environmentalist arrives in town to investigate toxin levels i …

In this lyrical memoir, Lily Hoy Price writes with moving detail about her childhood and adolescence in a large Chinese Canadian family in the Cariboo country of northern British Columbia. The ninth daughter in a family of 12 children, Lily is an observant child who tucks away every image of life in rugged Quesnel during the 1930s for one unforgett …

Jamey Popilowski dreams of becoming a rock star and Lilah Cellini dreams of Jamey. Together the young couple leave their childhood home of Terrabain Street and hit the open asphalt, kicking up a musical storm along the way. Entering their raw mix of carelessness and longing is Zeke, destiny in black leather. Zeke is the soundman, producer, preacher …

Trevor Wallace, a tractor salesman with a lost childhood and a stalled relationship, is en route to Africa on business. In the Frankfurt airport he stumbles over the bag of Constance Ebenezer, a gregarious old lady who is travelling the world with extraordinary contraband in her luggage. Marooned briefly in Cairo together, these two unlikely compan …

Thousands of newcomers are pouring into Alberta from around the globe, bringing unexpected gifts. Many are writers and storytellers.

What pulls them to Canada? What happens to them on the journey? What experiences have they deliberately left behind? What treasures do they bring? How do they describe their emerging sense of place and their creative …

It's the mid-1920s and New York is shimmering with the hope and vigour of a younger generation in headlong pursuit of greater freedoms and pleasures. Watching from the sidelines, nineteen-year-old Savanna Mason struggles with the gravity of her perceived failures, finding release and security in the water. Savi believes that her swimming has the po …

With careful research and imagination, author Linda Goyette has created a collection of 25 stories based on the true stories of named children of the past and present.

Too often the youngest Canadians are erased from our historical memory. Rocky Mountain Kids provides firstperson creative non-fiction narratives from the region's children, many of wh …

Lisa Martin-DeMoor's debut collection of poetry, One Crow Sorrow, is both fearless and vulnerable-an exploration of grief and loss that is rooted in life affirmation, in deep attention to the natural world.

From a tangle of snowflakes in Saskatchewan to cell masses like dislodged icebergs, the earth and body inform one another, their cycles of life …

Received an honourable mention on the Globe and Mail's top first fiction for 2008

Shari Lapena takes the wit of David Sedaris and the outrageousness of Douglas Coupland to create a dark, hilarious and wildly inventive contemporary comedy about how the past can come back to haunt you. Literally.

In Things Go Flying, Harold Walker is desperately av …

Longlisted for the 2007 Scotiabank Giller Prize
Finalist for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize at the 2008 BC Book Prizes

The colony of British Columbia, 1863. Boston Jim Milroy, a lone trapper and trader with an eidetic memory and a tragic unreckoned past, has become obsessed with reciprocating a seemingly minor kindness from the loquacious Dora Hume, …

The Canadian media were the first to bring Master Corporal Paul Franklin's story to the public, and it is only fitting that award-winning journalist Liane Faulder brings the full account of his return from a war zone. The Long Walk Home: Paul Franklin's Journey from Afghanistan documents the recovery of a soldier injured in a 2006 suicide bombing t …

The poems in A Ghost in Waterloo Station take the everyday world as their point of departure, but the place of arrival is never the shore you started from. Vivid invocations and meditations on childhood, art, and travel bring together places and people as likeable and unexpected as the wry poetic sensibility recommending them to our attention. Gree …

Traversing the historic trails of the Rockies today is done in much the same manner as it was two centuries ago—primarily on foot with heavy packs, with little better defence against mosquitoes or the elements. Although accurate maps are available, and modern technology such as global positioning systems stand as a bulwark to a complete wildernes …

Paul Munk is a socially conscious idealist, leaning left in his political convictions. In Crown Shyness, his skills as a writer for a current affairs magazine have garnered him an assignment that will challenge his relationships, present and future: to follow and profile Daniel Code, a member of the religious right who believes he has been called u …

A Drag Dynasty is about to be divined from the high life decade of decadence. It is destined, pre-ordained — and perfectly coiffed. Darrin Hagen, under the mentorship of his drag mother, Lulu LaRude, rose to the height of glamour as Gloria Hole, performer extraordinaire at the legendary Flashback nightclub. Beneath the layers of nightlife, stage …

From pink flamingos to plaid furniture, the ins and outs of life on wheels are illuminated by Dotty Parsons, Supermom. In her battle to fight mobile home-ophobia, no souvenir cushion is left unturned: rituals, diet, furnishings, collections, family, and the most mysterious: The Trailer Court Man. In Tornado Magnet, a mac-and-cheese tribute to the m …

Dancing Nightly in the Tavern, Mark Anthony Jarman's impressive debut collection of nine short stories, presents characters assembled from the depths of the local bars, under the influence, on the run, out of work. They are infused with a dark smoke drawn from the raw side of life—stained, imperfect, energetic and earthy—and fueled by a desire …

Each of the six stories in Dave Bidini's playful, irreverent new book takes a headlong run at the hockey dressing room, and knocks the door down.

In one story, a chronic minor-leaguer discovers the wonders—and the pitfalls—of the game in Europe, both on and off the ice. In another, an NHLer is tight with his teammate, the league's leading goals …

At once a memoir, a work of philosophy, a story of European immigration to Canada's dark places of the earth, and an exploration of the roots and effects of colonialism, The Wolves At Evelyn: Journeys Through a Dark Century is a stylistic and rhetorical tour de force from one of Canada's master prose stylists.

Dissident communists fleeing 1920s Germ …

In One Chrysanthemum, it is 1964 and Misako Imai is a young Tokyo housewife with a secret. When she was a child living in her grandfather’s dark, wartime Buddhist temple in the northern prefecture of Niigata, she became aware of a special sensitivity that allowed her to see visions of things that were currently happening—but in another place—o …

A Globe and Mail Top 100 Pick of 2006

It is the summer of 1965. The assassination of JFK has left John Dupre—and all of America— with Lyndon Baines Johnson, that Southern asshole with a public persona cut from an old rock and roll song: I RIDE FROM TEXAS TO ENFORCE THE LAW.

It's oppressively hot, the kind of heat that makes it practically impos …

In British Columbia's remote and exotic Cariboo Plateau, "Everything is slow. Everything is happening at the same speed, which is no speed at all." Harold Rhenisch has spent eleven years watching birds every day from his house on the shore of 108 Lake—at this speed, but you wouldn’t know it from reading Winging Home. Known as "one of Canada's m …

Join certified Ig-master Vaguen on the road to bliss. You might think that ignorance comes naturally, but on the contrary, the world conspires to cram our heads full of useless and dangerous know-ledge every day. Fall off this know-ledge into the safe and comforting world of oblivio(n/ousness) by discovering The Power of Ignorance. In his seminars, …

Your brain cells are prison cells! Break free with The Power of Ignorance, the smash Fringe play! Join certified Ig-master Vaguen on the road to bliss. You might think that ignorance comes naturally, but on the contrary, the world conspires to cram our heads full of useless and dangerous know-ledge every day. Fall off this knowledge into the safe a …

Standing Together is a powerful expression of women's collective and individual strength. It is a collection of personal stories from women who have suffered the horrors of violence and abuse and have made the hardest decision: to stand up, choose life, take control and walk away from the darkness.

The disturbing, compelling, and inspiring stories i …

Bob Edwards, the Great White North's equivalent to H. L. Mencken, remains a singular figure in Canadian journalism. His newspapers, published in Wetaskiwin, Leduc, High River, Strathcona, Winnipeg, Port Arthur, and most famously Calgary, skewered politics, society, and business leaders with a fearlessness and outrageousness rarely seen then, now, o …

Between the Fourth Meridian and the Continental Divide is a vast land with some of the most varied landscapes, difficult terrain, and treacherous climates in Canada. The challenge of exploring, surveying and mapping the territory now known as Alberta holds some of the most fascinating stories in the 100-year-old province's history.

From the first ex …

Rome, 1221. On the death of Dominic Guzman, founder of the Order of Dominican Friars, a list of three names is locked away with the depositions attesting to Dominic's beatification, and a copy is sealed in an icon of the Virgin Mary that is eventually carried to New France.

This list is the thread that binds the fates of ordinary people caught up in …

Meet Tyrone Lock: born of farmers' stock; overeducated, underemployed. An inveterate pick-nose and clandestine squeezer of Revels in the supermarket. Disaffected in a way that Adrian Mole would recognize (though as Tyrone takes pains to point out, he's hardly a tortured artist; his BA was in Economics). Inexplicably involved with the lovely, pamper …

At a dinner party, Beth — thirty-six, single, and working as much overtime as she can get her hands on — impulsively announces that she's going to spend a night on Vancouver's mean streets in commiseration of the homeless. Unexpectedly, her hosts' son Mason — nine years old, small for his age, intense, intellectual and so shy he can't speak i …

Chronicling the explosive career of a twentieth-century genius, Brilliant! is a story about the beginning of our technological age embodied in a man whose ideas, dreams and passions were too big for his own time. Visually stunning, the play has many comic, surreal and dramatic moments told in the inimitable style that has made the Electric Company …

An original look at a city's development through the eyes and words of real children who have lived there.

Kidmonton: True Stories of River City Kids is a lively illustrated book for young readers that relates the city's history entirely from the point of view of real children over time.

Using the techniques of fiction to bring true stories to life, …

Forty-six years later those words still ring true: there has since been no book that has brought to life early Calgary the way that Eye Opener Bob does. Perhaps more importantly, it's the closest we'll ever get to Robert Chambers Edwards—Eye Opener Bob —the irrepressible editor of Calgary's most singular newspaper, and the city's most singular …

South of Lethbridge, Alberta, Highway 62 climbs from the floor of an ancient glacial lake to the crest of a low ridge, crosses a continental divide and drops to meet the Milk River arching up from Montana.

The austere, dry land within this great three-hundred-mile ellipse is home to the continents last vestiges of shortgrass plains and holds a histo …

Labrador is about a part of the world that practically no one knows anything about — Canada's own Siberia. And because your tour guide is the lovely and talented TJ Dawe, it's also about the cycle of generations, how the hell bread got invented, the blurry line between fact and fiction, why schedule needs to be pronounced with a k sound, and how …

Succession is a story cycle about a rural community in transition. It follows Al, a musician burned out from too many nights playing the same classic rock songs, as he returns from Vancouver to the farm where he grew up in the Bearspaw district near Calgary.

Al's story is intertwined with those of his family, friends, and neighbours, as they struggl …

August 12, 2002 would have marked the 100th birthday of one of Western Canada's most beloved, exemplary, idiosyncratic and admired citizens, the Hon. J.W. Grant MacEwan. A Century of Grant MacEwan: Selected Writings is published to mark the centenary of the author's birth, and showcases the writing achievements of this remarkable man. From his firs …