A vivid, contemporary travelogue, Salonica Terminus explores a current landscape thronged with figures bent beneath the weight of history. It peers beneath the rotting logs of ideology, and prods the decomposing hulks of historical corpses that litter this region of dark mountains and misty valleys. Through its pages lurch extremists, confidence me …

“[Brett’s] writing is so vivid, the observations so telling, that a reader can virtually feel the smooth heft of a collected egg in the palm of a hand or hear the goofy, honking dawn call of the peacock.” —Globe & Mail on Trauma Farm

A raucous biography of a remarkable parrot and an incisive exploration of how we relate to those who are dif …

It's Memorial Day, 1990, and Margaret Ryan has returned from Vermont to the Ontario cottage country where, thirty-two years before, she had vacationed with her disintegrating family at a lakeside resort. For herself and her sister Daisy, it was a time of awakening, a time of discovery.

Both of the girls fall in love with two of the local boys. Daisy …

What I Want to Tell Goes Like This is an intensely original first short story collection from acclaimed poet Matt Rader. The last story, "All This Was a Long Time Ago," is the 2014 winner of the Jack Hodgins Founders' Award for fiction from The Malahat Review, and other offerings from the collection have appeared in Event, The New Quarterly, Grain, …

Art, love, and history furnish the setting in this tale of fate and destiny. Set in Vancouver in 1962, we follow Cyril Andrachuk, son of immigrant parents from the former Ukraine, as he makes his way from high school to menial labour jobs, from first love to first heartbreak, from sibling rivalry to malicious family betrayal.

Cyril is the only Canad …

City of Victoria Butler Book Prize: M.A.C. Farrant, The World Afloat (Winner)

In The World Afloat, a series of seventy-five “miniatures” that melds narrative with elements of prose poem and farce, master of the absurd and expert observer M.A.C. Farrant peers into the complexities of human experience – through the rear window.
Inside the lin …

Join beloved storyteller Anny Scoones as she sets out to discover the quaint and quirky charms of Victoria, BC. Not just a book of facts, Hometown is a gentle stroll through a diverse region with a fascinating and layered history. Observe, pause, ponder, and have what Anny likes to call “a little think” on the various characteristics and person …

NDN word warrior Marie Annharte Baker's fourth book of poems, Indigena Awry, is her largest and wildest yet. It collects a decade's worth of verse — fifty-nine poems. Set noticeably in Winnipeg and Vancouver, but in many other places on either side of the Medicine Line as well, the poems are a laser-eyed meander through contested streets filled w …

The author wrote fragments of fiction every day for 2500 days between 1995 and 2002. The result is The Archive Carpet, a wild and wonderful ride over lands that are sad, funny, absurd, and scary.

He has selected, revised, and arranged approximately 600 in The Archive Carpet, a weaving together of strands from his personal imaginative archive. The b …

From the author of Dead Man in the Orchestra Pit and Foozlers comes another tale of madcap human folly.

Louella Debra Poule is doing an eighteen-month stint on a weapons charge at a minimum-security institution up the Fraser Valley. Her drug-dealing, sometime-boyfriend Jimmy Flood and his sidekick, Blacky Harbottle, should have taken the rap, but th …

Holly Boardman is a young woman learning that life in the real world isn't always as easy as it seemed in Bible College. Determined not to hide away in a sheltered existence, she tries her best to live amongst the world without succumbing to its temptations.But Holly's life gets turned upside-down when she meets Eric Larsen, a handsome Naval office …

"A startling critique that should rouse us from our pipe dream of endless plenty." -- Ronald Wright, author of A Short History of Progress

A radical analysis of our master-and-slave relationship to energy and a call for change.

Ancient civilizations routinely relied on shackled human muscle. It took the energy of slaves to plant crops, clothe emperor …

In this contemplative novel-poem, Jean-François Beauchemin invites us to share in the inner world of the grieving Mr. Bartolomé, who, following the mysterious disappearance of his young son, wanders and wonders, seeking to transcend his pain by encountering something larger than himself. Continuously occupied by the memory of his lost son, Bartol …

The booming bedroom community outside a large Canadian city is blown apart when fifteen-year-old Blake challenges long-held views of spirituality and sexuality. A student at the local Catholic high school, Blake confides in her best friend, Tracy, that she feels sexually attracted to her. At first encouraged and then rebuffed, Blake is eventually b …

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A national bestseller hailed as ""a testimony of courage."" -- Maclean's

On a sunny fall day in 1983, Patricia Van Tighem and her husband, Trevor Janz, were brutally attacked by a bear while hiking in the Canadian Rockies. Janz was severely hurt, but Van Tighem suffered even more serious, disfiguring injuries, and that she survived was a miracle.

A …

In this taut, beautifully layered novel by Lambda Literary, ReLit, and Ferro-Grumley Award finalist Cox (Shuck, Krakow Melt), Michael-David is a paranoid actor who feels that fame has ruined him. When a film shoot with wolves for co-stars takes a troubling turn, he disappears shortly before the premiere and barricades himself in an L.A. hotel, conv …

Lors d'un tournoi à la ville de Québec, Tom Morgan joue un mauvais tour à son coéquipier Johnny Maverick. Celui-ci trouve alors normal de lui rendre la pareille, et le ton monte...

Pour le récompenser des buts incroyables qu'il a marqués, Johnny reèoit en cadeau un bâton de hockey signé de tous les joueurs des Canadiens de Montréal. Comme …

'Galaxy' is about a wounded family, a prairie place, love that is queer and conventional, longing and loss, and a light shone into dark corners. ' Galaxy' is "emotional biography", as Margaret Laurence called it, where the facts are fabricated, but the feelings are authentic.

"A truly wonderful collection of poems. Wonderful and clear imagery as wel …

"...a warm, wise, witty response to Nora Ephron's I Feel Bad About My Neck." -- Huffington Post

"I Feel Great About My Hands sends a strong and supportive message about the future." -- Winnipeg Free Press

With wisdom and humour, forty-one remarkable, mature women over 50 revel in the joys of aging.

Nora Ephron struck a chord with I Feel Bad about My …

Dead White Writer on the Floor uses two literary conventions—theatre of the absurd and mystery novels—to create one of the funniest and thought-provoking plays ever about identity politics. In Act One, six “savages”; noble, innocent, ignorant, fearless, wise and gay, respectively; find themselves in a locked room with the body of a white w …

In “The Axe” a literature professor arrives at the door of one of his students in the middle of the night. On his way he has stumbled (with a flask of whiskey) through the pouring rain, stopping in a city park to vandalize the statue of an angel, tormented by the image of his life’s work, ninety-seven poems he has left behind in flames in his …

"p class=""book_description"">""Whether it's the sign of a symbiotic marriage or of seasoned writers crafting a seamless travel collage, the narrative in this road trip through America flows as easily as a new car on an empty highway."" -- Globe & Mail

Part travelogue, part exploration-a road trip into the reality behind the cultural myth that is Am …

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""The two greatest things about Carpenter's sterling hunting memoir is how well-informed and precise it is -- positively erudite; but never show-offish or exclusive. The second involves how much this knowing-ness is the natural tropism of the author’s great and generous heart, his love for all creatures -- including the human one."" -- Richard F …

This is a book with a mission. On one level it is a celebration of the great Canadian poet Al Purdy by eminent writers who were his contemporaries. It is also part of a campaign to preserve the place that was the centre of Purdy's writing universe--his home, a lakeside A-frame cottage in Ameliasburgh, Ontario, where he and his wife Eurithe lived f …

Addison's mother wants to sell their comfortable old house and move into a townhouse in a new development across town#&8212;a shoe box near a shoe factory, Addison calls it. As usual, Addison's brain goes into overdrive as he tries to solve two problems: first he must get his mother to see their old house in a new light, and then he must figure out …

Noah Thorpe is spending the school term in Kangiqsualujjuaq, in Quebec's Far North, where his dad is an English teacher in the Inuit community.

Noah's not too keen about living in the middle of nowhere, but getting away from Montréal has one big advantage: he gets a break from the bully at his old school. But Noah learns that problems have a way of …

Empire of Desire, the second volume of Thierry Hentsch’s epic survey of the formative texts of the Western narrative tradition, completes the work he began in the first: Truth or Death. It traces western civilization’s quest for immortality across a further four centuries—from Molière to Proust, by way of Voltaire and Rousseau, Goethe and H …

Longlisted for the 2009 Relit Award for the novel

Jarod Palmer is a 32-year-old Toronto writer waiting for his big break--though a small one will do. Haunted by his story of tragic teenage sweethearts in smalltown Nova Scotia--featuring the unforgettable Lana Banana--Jarod is infected by the ancient mariner's curse on all young unpublished novelists …

The Heretic began with a rhetorical question the author posed to himself for a comedy show: “If there is a God, why would He create us? If He’s perfect, all knowing, there’s nothing he can gain from us. He must have been so incredibly bored and lonely, that He created us for his own entertainment.”

Not exactly a new idea, it works well as th …

Best Books of 2005, Ottawa Xpress

Writer's Trust of Canada's "Warm Weather Reads Recommended by Writers" list (recommended by Robert Hough)

Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer is equal parts literary memoir, advice for the emerging writer, and reckless tirade. Ross has been active in the Canadian literary underground for a quarter of a century: he …

Spirit of Powwow has evolved as we have talked with dancers and drummers until we feel we now have a powwow book that goes beyond the usual mere description of regalia and dances. The photography and text cover every component of the powwow, not just the dance competition. The Nahanee family and their friends make this book a very personal experien …

The three plays collected in this volume were the first of Max Frisch's dramatic works to reach the public. Now for the first time they appear in English, thanks to the translation skills of Michael Bullock. These three plays are of special interest both to students of modern drama and admirers of Frisch.

Santa Cruz (1944), Frisch's first dramatic e …

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 …

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 …

"Wuzz is a place not far from here. It's like here. Almost." Thus begins Willobe of Wuzz, the coming-of-age story of a dragon like no other-a dragon who uses his fire power to bake rather than burn, and who'd rather paint pictures than fight with knights. When Willobe wins the friendship of Princess Emily the Resourceful, a major flare-up with his …

A college student’s life is given meaning when he chooses to sponsor Elias, a Salvadoran refugee, as a class project. When Elias arrives, his hosts Sander and his family learn what it means and feels to be a refugee and how to relate to someone who has endured such intense personal grief. The warmth and humour of the characters invite us to embr …

" 'The Sound of Whales' is a lyric-comedy about language, our obsessive reliance upon it, and how linear thought can inhibit understanding. David MacLean's play has its roots in his personal experience in dealing with governmental, educational, and medical bureaucracies. The frustration the playwright expresses toward these institutions is balanced …

Founder/Editor Howard White predicts that Raincoast Chronicles 17 will come to be known as the "bad medicine" issue. From the queasy feeling that pioneer medicine inspires in Margaret McKirdy's "The Doctor Book" to Robin Ward's profile of Francis Rattenbury - British Columbia's favourite architect - whose chequered career ended in a classic "Agatha …

It has been some time since Luc, a 32-year-old actor and Jean-Marc, a 38-year-old French teacher, have seen each other, but the wounds from their seven year love affair are only partially healed. Each of them has current worries as well: Jean-Marc, apparently secure and well off, is tired of the endless procession of insensitive and seductive stude …

An in depth look at the more personal side of one of Canada's most prominent and memorable artist/writers. Who was this woman who is generally recognized as one of Canada's foremost painters and who also achieved an enviable reputation as a writer? She is thought of by some as a cranky oddball who wore outlandish clothes, had innumerable pets, and …