It's 1965. Twenty-two-year-old Linda Wise despairs of escaping her overprotective parents and her hometown, where far too many know she was sexually assaulted as a teenager. Deliverance arrives in the form of marriage to the charismatic, twenty-six-year-old Ronald Brunson, a newly ordained Methodist minister who ignites her passion for social justi …

Internationally praised and the subject of a critically acclaimed film, Richard Van Camp’s bestselling novel about coming of age in Canada’s North has achieved the status of an Indigenous classic and it was included in CBC’s list of 100 novels that make you proud to be Canadian. This special 20th anniversary edition features a new introductio …

Mend the Living is the story of a heart transplant, centred around Simon Limbeau, the boy whose heart is given, and his family.

Taking place within exactly twenty-four hours, the novel traces the thrill of an early-morning winter surf session, the terrible accident that follows, and all the urgency and compassion of the hospital workers, and shock …

Rose Dubois and Julie O’Brien find themselves on the roof of a Montreal apartment building on a scorching summer’s day, and from that moment on their fates are intertwined. Worldwide climate change and dramatic shifts in weather patterns foreshadow their predestined suffering.

As is soon revealed, the two women share a submissive love for the sa …

In 1922 a lone woman arrives in a filthy frontier mining town in the Pacific Northwest. Her goal: to resurrect her dead uncle’s newspaper. Within two days a naked man is shot dead, a famous man is rumoured to be heading their way and the only man capable of fixing her broken-down press so that she might spread this news is a Chinese printer from …

The power of water is the power of blood, flood and drought. Water keeps it real, keeps us real. Forgetting this, we turn the earth into a toxic dump. Remembering this, we unfurl the future as perpetual possibility.

Water is also the strength of subtlety, quietly making its way through your body. perpetual is both a gift and a warning from water. T …

Raise the windsock. Read the compass. Ride where the wind wills it.

Late 2010. From the end of fall to the beginning of winter, Daniel Canty becomes a wind seeker. Aboard the Blue Rider, a venerable midnight-blue Ford Ranger crested with a weathervane and a retractable windsock, he surrenders himself to the fluidity of air currents. The adventure …

Robin Kent doesn't understand how everyone around her, including her husband, is so certain of everything. The only explanation is that they're all following the same Guidebook--a copy of which Robin has yet to receive. When a co-worker at her call centre reveals his secret, Robin is sure he's offering more than just a way out of a depressing job, …

This is the manuscript of Xavier Bernard, an average, mundane and altogether unexceptional author who has attempted to claw back his lackluster life story by writing it himself. Free to invent the facts and improve on truth, he will stop at nothing to get the ending he desires. But when his closest friend begins to separate truth from fiction, spot …

Christian McPherson's exciting new novel is a portrait of a woman coming unglued after devastating events send her spiraling out of control. Between popping pills and drinking vodka, Julie Cooper tries her best to do what she has always done: carry on. But when the line between what is real and what is imaginary becomes blurred, a psychotic breakdo …

A Globe 100 Best Book of the Year

Lambda Literary Award winner

The debut book by Hasan Namir is a revelatory novel about being queer and Muslim, set in war-torn Iraq in 2003. Ramy is a closeted university student whose parents have died, and who lives under the close scrutiny of his strict brother and sister-in-law. They exert pressure on him to fin …

Darkly off-kilter stories about the moving parts to being human.

A blind date blooms in a grocery store parking lot. Lake Erie forms the backdrop to a botched assisted suicide. A neurotic, dog-loving caretaker writes a complaint letter after an unfortunate leg-waxing incident. While his uncle lies in a coma, a young man befriends a dead homeless guy …

A stirring graphic novel based on the extraordinary book by Irene Nemirovsky.

Suite Francaise, an extraordinary novel about village life in France just as it was plunged into chaos with the German invasion of 1940, was a publishing sensation ten years ago; Irene Nemirovsky completed the two-volume book, part of a planned larger series, in the early …

Originally published in 1975, Badlands has been heralded as a comic triumph for decades. The story starts in 1916, when scientist William Dawe leads a paleontological expedition into the badlands of Alberta, obsessed with achieving world renown by discovering dinosaur fossils. Fifty years later, his daughter, Anna, enters these same badlands. In he …

Raise the windsock. Read the compass. Ride where the wind wills it.

Late 2010. From the end of fall to the beginning of winter, Daniel Canty becomes a wind seeker. Aboard the Blue Rider, a venerable midnight-blue Ford Ranger crested with a weathervane and a retractable windsock, he surrenders himself to the fluidity of air currents. The adventure …

Growing up in the 1930s, Adeline Beale knows little of the outside world or the looming shadows of a second world war. Addie-as her grandfather Chauncey Beynon Beale affectionately calls her- believes that everything she could ever want or need is to be found on his cattle ranch, the place her family calls home, or in the little town twelve bush mi …

In 1922 a lone woman arrives in a filthy frontier mining town in the Pacific Northwest. Her goal: to resurrect her dead uncle's newspaper. Within two days a naked man is shot dead, a famous man is rumoured to be heading their way and the only man capable of fixing her broken-down press so that she might spread this news is a Chinese printer from th …

Dwight Eliot was born on a baseball diamond in the small town of Seep during a dugout-clearing brawl between his hometown team, The Seep Selects, and a visiting team of barnstorming Cuban All-Stars.

Decades later, Dwight returns to town only to witness his childhood home being moved down the highway on the back of a huge flatbed truck. Seep is being …

Bambi and Me consists of 12 autobiographical pieces about how movies shaped the young life of Michel Tremblay, one of their biggest fans. Among others, he talks about Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Cinderella, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Parade of the Wooden Soldiers, Orphée and the Night Visitors and about how each led to his disco …

A novel about a boy with a stutter, and the tangled barbs of repressed memory.

Montreal, 1979. A boy's speech starts to fracture along with the cement of le Stade olympique. Do they share a fault line? Daniel Allen Cox's unconventional fourth novel tells the story of a boy with a stutter who grows up and uses sound to remember the past. A coming-of- …

November's Radio, Steve Noyes' second novel, tells the story of recently separated Wendy and Gary. Wendy takes off to China, where she falls in with two performance artists. The three navigate questions of art, cultural difference, mental health and what it means to be free. Gary remains in Victoria, BC, stuck in a cubicle at the Ministry of Wellne …

One of Canada’s greatest literary figures reflects on life at the centre of Quebec literary arts. Re-examining the influences of her early life in a large, rural Catholic family, Madeleine Gagnon not only explores her rejection of unexamined values as part of her intellectual development but also her refusal to be categorized by her gender.

Karl M …

The box closet was a real closet in the attic of the family house in Washington, D.C. in which Mary Meigs grew up. Bags and boxes of letters and diaries were found there after her mother’s death in 1958, and when Meigs read them she decided that they were the material for a book. In the course of reading her family’s letters and her mother’s …

The year is 1885 and Abigail Peacock is resisting what seems to be an inevitable future—a sensible career as a teacher and marriage to the earnestly attentive local storeowner.

But then she buys a rifle, and everything changes.

This Godforsaken Place is the absorbing tale of one tenacious woman’s journey set against dramatic myths of the Canadi …

Shortlisted for the Cover Design Award at the 2016 Alberta Book Publishing Awards!

Everyone deals with grief in their own personal way. Take Carrie, for example. To get over her mother's death from ovarian cancer, she launches a passive-aggressive war with her fellow office workers, embarks on a campaign designed to let her ex-husband know she's ove …

Tim Conley's prose whipsaws between carefully observed realism and fantastic absurdity to create surreal, compact worlds. Whether they're sketching the familial fallout of a stentorian patriarch or teaching the eponymous dance moves to survivors of the apocalypse ("With the rise of the invertebrates, spinelessness has never been so hip"), these sto …

As a way to draw visitors to their isolated fishing village on Quebec’s North Shore, the tourist bureau commissions a documentary film recreating life as it was lived there in the 1940s and 50s. To gather material for the project, the filmmaker is sent in search of Rose Brouillard, now an old woman but raised on an island just offshore by Onile, …

As a way to draw visitors to their isolated fishing village on Quebec’s North Shore, the tourist bureau commissions a documentary film recreating life as it was lived there in the 1940s and 50s. To gather material for the project, the filmmaker is sent in search of Rose Brouillard, now an old woman but raised on an island just offshore by Onile, …

In these quirkily imaginative short stories about writing and writers, the scrivener Quartermain (our “Bartleby”) goes her stubborn way haunted by Pauline Johnson, Malcolm Lowry, Robin Blaser, Daphne Marlatt, and a host of other literary forebears. Who is writing whom, these stories ask in their musing reflections – the writer or the written? …

Shortlisted for the 2016 Amazon.ca First Novel Award
Longlisted for the 2016 Leacock Medal for Humour Writing
Winner of an Independent Publishers Book Award (IPPY)

Freddy has problems. Some of them are because he's autistic. Most of them are because he's a teenager.

When he’s seven years old, Freddy's mother walks him to the train station, sits hi …

ReLit Long Shortlist, 2015

Winner, Type Books Award

In this daring act of self-examination and confession, the late novelist Nelly Arcan explores the tortured end of a love affair. All the wrong signals were there from the start, but still, she could not help falling. More than a portrait of an affair gone wrong, Hysteric is a chronicle of life among …

In Birth of a Bookworm, Michel Tremblay takes the reader on a tour of the books that have had a formative influence on the birth and early development of his creative imagination. Included are his readings of and reactions to some of the great classics of world literature by such writers as the Comtesse de Segur, Jules Verne, Robert Louis Stevenson …

"No one should ever work at a gas station long enough to get good at it," observes Brendan, the narrator of the debut novel from Sean Trinder.

Brendan is 20. He's been pumping gas for three years, working the evening shift at the CountryGas station in Winnipeg. He's gotten good at it. Which is sad. And Brendan knows that unless something happens fas …

It is the spring of 1963. The young Quebec author Marie-Claire Blais, bursting with energy and talent, has just won a coveted Guggenheim fellowship. She chooses Cambridge, Massachusetts, as the place where she will begin her writer’s apprenticeship with her mentor, Edmund Wilson.
American Notebooks is much more than a fascinating autobiographical …

When widowed father and substitute teacher Peter Giller leads an eleventh-grade class on a field trip to a plastics factory, he thinks the worst that could happen is that the parent volunteers won�t show up (they don�t), the kids will be rude (they are) or the free lunch will be terrible (it is).

Then a leaking pipe sprays Peter and the st …

Sun Belt's collaborative work of fiction is a genre-defying chronicle of a tar sands company town. Drawing from an array of invented sources such as journals, film transcripts, environmental studies and police reports, Cabalcor charts the rise and fall of a mythical boomtown that, within the span of a century, becomes a desert wasteland.

The multi-l …

Specially edited, updated, revised and rewritten by the author, and for the first time complete in one volume, Great Lakes Suite includes A Trip Around Lake Ontario, first published in 1988, as well as A Trip Around Lake Erie and A Trip Around Lake Huron, both of which were first published in 1980. These books have come alive in a remarkable way an …

Julia Hoop, a twenty-five-year-old counselling psych student, is working on her thesis, exploring an idea which makes her graduate supervisor squirm. She is conducting interview after interview with a group of women she affectionately calls the Molestas - women whose experience of childhood sexual abuse did not cause physical trauma. Julia is the e …

The story continues … The second in Michel Tremblay’s new series of novels presents two very different lives. We meet Maria as she leaves the city of Providence, Rhode Island, pregnant and alone. Two years later, we also meet Maria’s older daughter, Rhéauna, as she disembarks the train at Windsor Station, having crossed the continent from he …

In this prequel within a sequel, Diminuenda discovers that she stands to win a vast inheritance from her estranged father, the inimitable Minor, if she travels into the past and "collects" a number of objets d’art.

The cheeky diva travels to classical Greece, becoming the subject of the very painting she must steal as well as the focus of a Platon …

Shelf Unbound Notable 100 for 2015

Late one night when Adrian is nineteen, he risks climbing up into the green tower that operates the railway bridge spanning Vancouver’s Burrard Inlet. There, he encounters a mysterious naked woman who will haunt him for years to come.

A decade later, he catches his wrist on a fish hook while swimming at a Vancouve …

Ethan Reid is a 24-year-old alcoholic who spends his nights drifting between bars, drinking excessively to the point where he can no longer remember. In Toronto he meets a beautiful girl named Natalie, who forces him to question his solitary lifestyle. But when their relationship turns sour, Ethan retreats into the city's underground drug world, sp …