Beauty Plus Pity
Beauty plus pity--that is the closest we can get to a definition of art." -Vladimir Nabokov
In this tragicomic modern immigrant's tale, Malcolm Kwan is a slacker twentysomething Asian-Canadian living in Vancouver who is about to embark on a modelling career when his life is suddenly derailed by two near-simultaneous events: the death of his filmmake …
Glass Boys
"[The Glass Boys] deftly walks the line between light and dark, hope and fear, rewarding the reader every step of the way with dazzling honesty and truth." -- Ami McKay, author of The Birth House
"Lundrigan writes about Newfoundland the way William Faulkner wrote about the American south." -- The Western Star
"Lundrigan fearlessly probes the depths …
Old Stones
At the end of the Second World War nearly 50,000 women emigrated to Canada from Britain and the continent, scarred from the bomb-rutted fields of Europe. For them that Atlantic crossing marked the beginning of a great adventure: a new country, a new life and a new husband. For many children of these unions came a dual heritage, a cultural divide th …
Leaving Dublin
Leaving Dublin: Writing My Way from Ireland to Canada is an engaging and entertaining exploration of a man’s life that begins in middle-class Dublin, includes stints as a travelling musician and broadcaster in Canada, and culminates in a career as an award-winning journalist and bestselling author. With passion, candour, humour and vivid stories, …
Exit
Somewhere in Montreal, in the not too distant future, an obscure company offers custom-designed suicides for its clients with one condition: their desire to die must be pure and absolute. Antoinette Beauchamp is a successful candidate but her suicide is not. Now a bedridden paraplegic, hooked up to machines that monitor all her bodily functions, sh …
Visions of Jude
"If it's possible to prejudge Jude on the merits of Obomsawin, the translation of the new novel is something to anticipate." -- Globe and Mail
Daniel Poliquin's third novel is a multifaceted portrait of one of the most complex characters in Canadian fiction: Jude the arctic explorer, Jude the great seducer, Jude the quintessential heroic figure. Pro …
Hard Hed
'Hard Hed' is a contemporary retelling of the Johnny Appleseed story. Hoosier Chapman, local historian and apple orchardist, has just been released from a Northwestern Ohio jail after serving two years for planting wild apple trees in a city park. Dropped at the State Line by a deputy sheriff, Hoosier treks west, overland and barefoot into Indiana …
Broken But Not Dead
Brendell Kisêpîsim Meshango is of Métis heritage and a PhD university professor in Prince George, British Columbia. When Brendell resigns from the university and retreats to her isolated cabin to repair her psyche, she is confronted by a masked intruder. His racial comments lead her to believe she is the solitary victim of a hate crime. Howe …
Nondescript Rambunctious
Nondescript Rambunctious is a genre-busting thriller with a beating, human heart. More than a simple story of a killer and his victims, the novel takes the reader into the life of a family, the days of a community, and the very real possibility that evil is everywhere—maybe even inside us. Woven through this dark tapestry are the glittering threa …
Man Who Killed, The
A rye-soaked neo-noir novel about a small-time crook on a crime spree through Prohibition era Montreal.
Montreal, 1926. Mick is down on his luck until an old pal offers him a loaded revolver and a job as a bootlegger riding shotgun in a truck running booze across the border. Stateside Prohibition has opened up a market for certain amusements, vicio …
The Year of Broken Glass
Joe Denham's debut novel The Year of Broken Glass follows struggling crab fisherman Francis "Ferris" Wichbaun's journey across the Pacific Ocean to deliver a legendary glass fishing float to an enigmatic, high-paying collector. Against a backdrop of worldwide seismic devastation, Ferris is forced to confront increasing concern for his two families- …
Johnny Kicker
Who is Johnny Kicker? A murderer, a prophet, a scapegoat, a puppet, a degenerate, a hero, and a counter-revolutionary. Since the invention of music, those who perform it have been accused of sedition. And while rock 'n' roll has forever aspired to become the anthem of revolution, its momentum has always petered out or collapsed upon itself. That is …
The Gate
The Gate is a love story and a tragedy centred on the search by Stephen Rochefort, a Canadian, for information about his past. Rochefort receives shattering information about his origins at his grandmother's deathbed-origins which lie in the dying days of World War Two Europe. These revelations set him off on a search for his past, against his bett …
Catch Me When I Fall
Welcome to Poplar Grove, a farming community with three generations of Dutch-Canadians. Life in the New World has not become less complicated as the decades have passed, and now, a set of dying customs is about to collide with the ways of a new generation.
The balance is shifting between people comfortable holding hymnals and cleaning cows’ teat …
Nuri Does Not Exist
Zanzibar, an island set like a jewel in the Indian Ocean off the coast of east Africa is rich in cultural heritage: inhabited since the last Ice Age; birthplace of Kiswahili, the purest form of the Swahili language group; its original hunter-gatherer culture overlaid with Indian, Arab, Persian, Portuguese and finally British colonial and mercantile …
The Boy
In 1959 Ray and Daisy Cook and their five children were brutally slain in their modest home in the central Alberta town of Stettler. Robert Raymond Cook, Ray Cook's son from his first marriage, was convicted of the crime, and had the infamy of becoming the last man hanged in Alberta. Forty-six years later, a troublesome character named Louise in a …
In the Fabled East
From one of Canada's best young voices comes a sweeping literary adventure set against the backdrop of French Indochina.
Paris, 1909: Adelie Tremier, a young widow suffering the final stages of tuberculosis, flees for French-occupied Indochina, through the lush forests of Laos, to seek out a fabled spring of immortality that might allow her to retu …
The Canterbury Trail
Winner of a 2012 Independent Publisher Book Award Gold Medal
It’s the last ski weekend of the season and a mishmash of snow-enthusiasts is on its way to a remote backwoods cabin. In an odd pilgrimage through the mountains, the townsfolk of Coalton—from the ski bum to the urbanite—embark on a bizarre adventure that walks the line between comedy …
Sage Island
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 …
Dancing Nightly in the Tavern
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 …
The Reckoning of Boston Jim
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, a settler in the Cowichan Valley of Vancouver Island. Dora's kindness and her life story both haunt Boston Jim, and …
Sentimentalists, The
THE GILLER PRIZE-WINNING NOVEL BY JOHANNA SKIBSRUD.
Haunted by the vivid horrors of the Vietnam War, exhausted from years spent battling his memories, Napoleon Haskell leaves his North Dakota trailer and moves to Canada.
He retreats to a small Ontario town where Henry, the father of his fallen Vietnam comrade, has a home on the shore of a man-made …
Sweet England
Steve Weiner's harrowing portrayal of post-Thatcher England follows a man of no known origin and unstable personality and his efforts to re-enter society after a long and unexplained absence. The reader sees events through Jack's mostly uncomprehending eyes as he negotiates the margins of a London that resembles the city of memory and story only in …
Caprice
WITH A FOREWORD BY ARITHA VAN HERK.
It's the mid 1890s in Kamloops, British Columbia. Two men argue over a bottle of whisky and, in the struggle Frank Spencer, an American outlaw-turned-farmhand, kills Pete Foster, a French-Canadian and fellow farmhand. Enter Caprice: a vision and a brain. Almost six feet tall, with flaming red hair and long legs, …
Spaz
Best of 2010 Pick, Uptown Magazine
Meet Walter Finch, an ungainly kid who survives his cloying suburban childhood to make it only as far as the local mall, where he rises through the ranks to become manager of a shoe store. Unlike his other childhood friends who either flee suburbia or remain as resigned fixtures, Walter is content with his lot and …
Spat the Dummy
Spat Ryan has demons. They haunt him by day and share his drink at night. Raised in Montreal by a bagman for the Irish mob, Spat has fictionalized or ignored chunks of his life too painful to recall. A chance meeting with an old friend of his father’s in a bar on the Main exposes the dark secret they’ve both been harbouring, the secret that has …
Daniel O'Thunder
"A frightening, funny, moving, page-turning romp." -- Steven Galloway, author of The Cellist of Sarajevo
"Weir's unique retelling of the Gospels, set in mid-19th-century London, is Charles Dickens meets Thom Jones A knockout debut." -- National Post
Set in the 1850s in London, England, Daniel O'Thunder interweaves the voices of several narrators to t …
Ravenna Gets
Winner, 2011 ReLit Award
From the author of Pontypool Changes Everything, Ravenna Gets is a new collection of “wheeled” stories that continue the author’s exploration of “apocalypse “ction.”
In a single convulsion of homicide, the population of Ravenna tries to erase the population of Collingwood. The innocent, standing in their living ro …
Love on the Killing Floor
Often controversial, sometimes sexual, and not without black humour, Love on the Killing Floor opens in Toronto in 1992 with Gilchrist, a down-and-out portrait photographer, being searched on a bus in the middle of the night by police he suspects are looking for a local rapist. His town is changing. Life wasn't always like this. But now, with an es …
The Cube People
Christian McPherson's debut novel The Cube People pokes fun at government cubicle culture through the life and times of a struggling computer programmer/novelist wannabe. McPherson surrounds his protagonist, Colin MacDonald, with a cast of screwball characters while he toils away at his government job, struggles with fertility and dreams of becomin …
I am a Japanese Writer
"Laferriere...writes movingly and cleverly about race, nationality, and, ultimately, the multiple conflicting ways we form our identities. His prose...is deadpan and devious." -- This Magazine
"In his unique fashion, Laferriere captures the spirit of our culture, where cultural boundaries are erased and the real and the unreal intimately coexist." - …
How to Make Love to a Negro without Getting Tired
Racial and sexual politics collide in this cult classic that launched Laferrière as one of North America's finest literary provocateurs.
P align=left>Brilliant and tense, Dany Laferrière's first novel, How to Make Love to a Negro without Getting Tired, is as fresh and relevant today as when it was first published in 1985. With raunchy humor and a …
The Waterbird
Some waterbirds can live away from land for months at a time, taking all of their food and rest from the ocean. However, these birds are not true creatures of the sea, and their relationship to the water is a superficial one. It is only when the bird dives down to catch its prey that it breaks the surface, and even then, it penetrates only a fracti …
The Last Genet
During the last eighteen years of his life (1968-86), Jean Genet was preoccupied with the struggles of the disenfranchised and displaced: among them, the Black Panthers, the Baader-Meinhof, and the Palestinians. Hadrien Laroche's book is a careful philosophical and historical reading (though fascinating as a political thriller) of the acts and thou …
Obomsawin of Sioux Junction
One fine spring morning, a float plane lands on a lake near the northern Ontario town of Sioux Junction, and three men get out: a judge, a Crown prosecutor and a defence attorney. The trial of Thomas Obomsawin, a native painter who has been accused of setting fire to his mother's house, is scheduled to begin. It soon becomes clear that it is not on …
