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 …

The boy sleeps and dreams and wakes and feels the same. Different, but the same. The core of his body burns bright, hazy but strong. He's never felt so strong as he does now, on the verge of something he's not sure about, and terribly excited.
-from "The Boy Who Stopped"

In these raw, uncompromising stories, author George K. Ilsley explores the thi …

A stunning drama of love and intrigue set against the backdrop of war in Yugoslavia, where power is used to manipulate and break people.

I saw what the mural was all about. The entire war was portrayed on it from the asylum's point of view. The tanks with predatory smiles, the civilians naked with zippers up their middles so the soldiers could open …

Meet Finnigan Heller, drifter: reclusive, abrasive, and clairvoyant. He's also been struck by lightning more times than you've had hot dinners. It happens in every town he passes through. But is he following the weather or is the weather following him? Heller's bizarre "gift" has him on the run from a scientist, a Canadian Intelligence agent, and a …

Monique Proulx's last novel, Invisible Man at the Window, was first published in English in 1994. Following that is this brilliant, complex, witty, moving book about writing and writers. It was nominated for a 2002 Governor General's award when it was first published in French.

Florence doesn't like writers -- they're so full of hang-ups -- and she …

Step into a world of dream, of fantasy, of erotic tales spiked with poetic imagery. Step into Quixotic Erotic, the new collection of lesbian erotica from Tamai Kobayashi.

Like being awakened from a dream by a soft, sensuous caress, the stories in Quixotic Erotic stimulate the senses. From a birthday surprise to a torrid office dalliance, these tales …

"In Japan, a person's blood type is as important as their horoscope. My type, like my grandmother's, is ab. This makes us universal recipients, able to receive blood from anyone, but give only to each other. A person with ab blood has no immunity to other types. No matter what blood they're given, it becomes a part of them, and they never resist."

U …

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 …

These new, off-side stories continue M.A.C. Farrant’s exploration of the relation of fiction to the evolving corporate construction of reality in the media and information age. Objective reality (what’s out there) in our culture has become a performance of make-believe (fiction), and the disassociation and confusion this causes in our private …

From Montreal to Bar Harbour, Louisiana via New York and Florida, former bush pilot and photographer Jack leads us on a quest to conquer the shadows of a past life and into the heart of an ultimately warm and heady universe.

Peace comes at a price and sometimes that price means burning bridges. Jack and Monica broke up a long time ago, but there is …

When X Equals Marylou collects stories about photographers, balding men, ghost chasers, doppelgangers, bibliophiles, and dystopian subversives, to name but a few. It's a mix not only of characters, but of time, and of worlds--moving from Russia to Hungary to Canada, from small towns to big cities to the interior of dreams, from suburbia to welfare …

'Socket' tells the gripping tale of Ronald Percy, an international aid worker who travels to Ethiopia to assist with an irrigation project for the African Development Organization. Upon arrival, he is unable to locate his agents or company representatives, and soon finds himself enmeshed in a web of bureaucracy and state corruption. 'Socket' was se …

We are mesmerized, enthralled. A young, armless girl, tangled in the brutal arrowhead wire of glistening ivy, stares with dead eyes. If I had arms, I would embrace my shaking body. I would lift my hands to my face, cover my eyes, hold the aching scream in my mouth.

Combining Wiccan ritual magic, Gnosticism, alchemy and of course Madeline Sonik's daz …

The narrator of this Governor General’s Award-winning novel does not have a name. She is simply a grotesque “fat woman,” getting larger every day—a clown, a monster, in her own words, with no self, no identity save her enormous mound of flesh, its blubber, its perceived deformity. She is used by men who find her a convenience—for their ca …

Alongside his dozens of fascinating and award-winning plays, and in addition to this great Chronicles of the Plateau Mont-Royal series of six epic novels, his translations, adaptations, librettos, and acute portrayals of human emotions in a state of both crisis and redemption, Michel Tremblay has left his readers with three magical keys to the secr …

'The Beautiful Dead End' is a visceral crime thriller that takes the reader on an existential journey to the "other side" and almost back again. In a bizarre, shadowy interzone populated by disturbing characters, our anti-hero confronts the dark secrets of his past, and comes face to face with the consequences of having lived an unexamined life.

Fin …

In this darkly comic monologue by one of the masters of contemporary German theatre, a German tourist visiting Banff is forced to wait out a thunderstorm in the cabin of an old shaman. By the time the night is over he has been humiliated, mocked, and enlightened, has undergone a nightmare voyage through the worlds of the living and the dead, and ha …

In 1895, the arctic explorer Captain Ian Ryder has let his house in Blackpool on the Nova Scotia coast to the recently married Clara Weiss, who is about to become the compass of a social circle far too intimate for its own good. Lost in a maze of obsessive Victorian pseudo-science and its ignorant fascinations with violence, spiritualism, the rean …

With introductions, commentary and five new poems derived from Donne's elegies by Doug Beardsley and Al Purdy. In 1998, the poets Al Purdy and Doug Beardsley spent many hours in Victoria's Waddling Dog Pub discussing the often-neglected poetry of D.H. Lawrence. The result was No One Else is Lawrence!, acclaimed by readers across the country.

This ti …

This hard-hitting novel explores the gritty underbelly of contemporary urban life revealing the shocking chasm between demonized media images and the everyday life of the uneducated poor. At the centre is thirty-seven-year-old Maggie MacKinnan, a star reporter at the Montreal Tribune who is wrenched from her life of respectability when she meets Ni …

Édouard, whom we met in The Duchess and the Commoner, a common shoe salesman at the feet of the well-heeled by day; but the “Duchess of Langeais,” star of the transvestite shows on the Main by night, has been left an inheritance by his mother, Victoire. With this money, he sails on the ocean-liner Liberté to Paris, an idealized, glorious fore …

Winner, 3-Day Novel-Writing Contest (1999)

Winner, Inaugural ReLit Award (2001)

Salacious, funny, and painfully emotive, Skin is a provocative and ruminative parable about our deep-rooted urge to ostracize the freakish and shun the disfigured among us. An unconventional love story, Bowman probes the surface to reveal deeper, more lingering impulses c …

In the middle of a March night nearly thirty years ago, a heavy fog rolls in off the Gulf of Georgia to smother a small fishing town at the mouth of the Fraser River. Ominous and unsettling, the fog sets the scene for a compelling series of events that will forever alter the town and the people who live there - especially the Mawsons, one of the ma …

As an innovative chronicler of the "little people" of Quebec, Michel Tremblay has no peer. Yet few Anglophone readers realize that Tremblay began as a writer of works of fantasy. Now, however, Michael Bullock, who won the Canada Council translation award for his translation of Tremblay's first collection of stories - Contes pour buveurs attardés ( …

(This third volume in the Chronicles of the Plateau Mont-Royal—an epic series of novels which imagines the lives of the characters of Tremblay’s plays—deals with an explicitly gay thematic: Tremblay’s metaphor for the Québécois desire for a more glamorous identity on the world stage.)

This is the third volume in Michel Tremblay’s six-vol …

Finalist, City of Vancouver Book Prize

A blackly comic new novel from Vancouver author Grant Buday, based on his eight glorious years working in a mass production bakery. Dickensian in magnitude, White Lung is a sardonic portrait of B.C.’s racial conflicts and chaotic economy.

Praise for White Lung:

"a rollicking black comedy of errors with a host o …

'Touched' renders the emotional and intellectual implosion experienced by Jade King, a young university student. This debut novel challenges the social stigma attached to such altered states and traces the effects of physical violation and psychic trauma. Lundgren encourages a critical examination of current psychiatric labels and treatments throug …

Meet Jack Minyard, a nice, liberal, milk-drinking, hockey-playing white-bread Canuck from Saskatoon who's stuck down in Memphis, Tennessee workin' for a security company and moonlighting as a private dick. 'Ruby, Ruby' is a soft-boiled murder mystery that follows the trail of our expatriate Canuck as he tries to sleuth out the answers to a puzzling …

What would happen if the Messiah was a woman, and not the man people have always taken her to be? What if she showed up in rural America, instead of riding triumphantly into Jerusalem? If she preached moral license, not repentance?
All of that does happen, and more, in this startlingly original, mischievous and penetrating novel by David Homel.
In …

'The Underwood' is a poignant tale of a parentless twenty-one-year-old pianist who lands the job of lounge entertainer in a once glorious and elegant establishment. Enter the young Foster Lutz, and the hotel-including the lives of its inhabitants-is set for a spell of splendour and rejuvenation. A loss-of-innocence novel set in an atmosphere pervad …

March, 1963. Winter has launched its final assault on Montreal. The Fat Woman, Thérèse, Édouard, Pierrette, Marcel, all the star-crossed characters of Tremblay’s Chronicles of Plateau Mont-Royal are here again, 20 years later. Marcel, now 23, learns that his Auntie Nana—The Fat Woman who is here finally named—is gravely ill and her days a …

For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again is Tremblay’s homage to his mother, who nurtured his imagination, his reclusive reading habits and his love for the theatre and the arts, yet who did not live to witness the performance of Les Belles Soeurs—the first successful play written in joual with which Tremblay legitimized the Quebecois vernacular in …

Guillermo Verdecchia is primarily known for his award-winning plays; Citizen Suárez is his first book of short stories, and it is a remarkable debut.
These stories take on the quintessential issues forced upon a generation betrayed by their citizenship—a betrayal the more profound because it subsists primarily in the global death of the nation-s …

A unique and powerful portrait of referendum and post-referendum Montreal. Published in Quebec in 1996, Aurora Montrealis shot to the top of the best-seller lists and confirmed Monique Proulx's position as one of the top Quebec fiction writers of her generation.

In all of these stories -- about disintegrating relationships, yearning housewives, sur …

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 …

From Mary Meigs, the celebrated author of In the Company of Strangers, comes an autobiographical novel, The Time Being. An affair born of a correspondence with a distant admirer leads the lovers to an arranged meeting in Australia. With a lifetime of relationships already behind them, the two women approach each other cautiously, each filled with t …

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 …

Out of this World is a lively biography of Canada's "People's Poet," Milton Acorn, exploring – and exposing – his larger-than-life myths, and tracing his tragic rise and fall: from his youth in Charlottetown, to Montréal in the late '50s, to Toronto and Vancouver in the '60s. His poetry was at once political and personal, informed by both Marx …

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 …

A powerful coming-of-age story -- edgy, stark, and at times, darkly funny that centers around Larry, a Native teenager trying to cope with a painful past and find his place in a confusing and stressful modern world.

Larry is a Dogrib Indian growing up in the small northern town of Fort Simmer. His tongue, his hallucinations and his fantasies are ho …

Camille Deslauriers is an eleven-year-old girl whose coming of age is complicated by a very particular problem: not only are her parents separated, but her father has, through a series of operations, become a woman.

Also an award-winning film, Sex of the Stars is very contemporary, very urban fiction, in which loneliness, sexual identity and the ne …

'Body Speaking Words' is a novel about-what else-writing a novel in three days, at the same time offering insights into family, friendship, growing up female, and delighting in strange foods; a poignant, funny and sexy account of one woman's attempt to understand what drives us to document the essential stories of our lives.

Winner of the 1995 3-Day …

This is the second of five novels in Michel Tremblay’s Plateau Mont-Royal series, an evocative, magical retelling of the author’s own birth, childhood, and adolescence in a working-class Montreal neighbourhood populated by eccentrics, dreamers and imaginary characters of mythic proportions.

Three schoolgirls, “Thérèse ’n’ Pierrette” an …

Chinatown, Vancouver, in the late 1930s and �40s provides the setting for this poignant first novel, told through the vivid and intense reminiscences of the three younger children of an immigrant family. They each experience a very different childhood, depending on age and sex, as they encounter the complexities of birth and death, love and ha …

The theme of the individual's sense of alienation and search for meaning in life is once again the main concern of acclaimed novelist and poet Goh Poh Seng. The chief protagonist Ong Kian Teck, a gifted, hard-working creative designer in an advertising firm, epitomizes the successful Singaporean. Yet as Kian Teck's daily life unfolds we see an inte …

Winner of the Prix Québec-Paris, the Québec Bookstores' Prize and the Prix Littéraire Desjardins, Invisible Man at the Window is the bizarre and compelling tale of a group of artists and hangers-on whose lives cross in the attic apartment of a painter called Max. Through a series of chapters in the form of "portraits," Max, a paraplegic, lays ba …

These disarming, dark-humoured stories are populated by men and women who are strangers to each other as well as to themselves, grappling with rules of conduct in order to find reasonable ways to live their lives. In these strange, intensely personal worlds, the lines between bliss and heartache, between landscape and dreamscape, are increasingly b …

Extending the form of autobiography, Rhenisch explores the immigrant experience in the orchard gardens of the Okanagan. The search for paradise in the new land, its discovery and loss, are portrayed through the experiences of a young boy struggling against the authoritarianism of patriarchy. This is a book that helps to fill a gap in the history of …