Lieutenant Lena Stillman has been left, nearly alone, on her code-breaking mission in remote Alaska. World War II has been over for a month, but due to crimes committed a lifetime ago, Lena is still under the control of the powerful Miss Maggie, her spymaster in Washington, DC.

Shaken by her role in the disappearance of Corporal Link Hughes, Lena ye …

A delightful collection of seventy miniature fictions and comics riffing on the theme of happiness, The Great Happiness offers a series of lively antidotes to the current climate of doom. Some of the book’s miniatures are narratives with a twist, others are imaginative flights, such as the recently dead experimental novelist “sitting in” on …

Mooncalves follows the bloody implosion of a cult in Sainte-Pétronille, Quebec, understood through the urgent voices of the living and a ring of ghostly, shape-shifting watchers. Sensing the impending dissolution of society by technological progress, the charismatic, utterly unhinged Joseph Reiser forms “Walden”, a collective of Luddite devote …

Although Emily Carr is now considered a Canadian legend, the most enduring image is that of her pushing a beat-up old pram into downtown Victoria, loaded with dogs, cats, birds—and a monkey. Woo, a Javanese macaque whom Carr adopted in 1923, has become inextricably linked with Carr in the popular imagination. But more than that, in her short life …

The short story form is unambiguously un-dead in this new album of thirty fictions from writer Tim Conley, coming at the reader in a variety of shapes and guises running the gamut from elliptical micro-fictions to tales of the inexplicable.

Steeped in Beckett, Borges and Nabokov, Conley's multiple universes allow for werewolves that excite ridicule …

'Kogawa is a beautiful and elegant writer.'' --THE KINGSTON WHIG-STANDARD

''What is for you the breath of life?'' Someday -- itsuka -- Naomi Nakane will answer this question. In OBASAN, Naomi's childhood was torn apart by Canada's betrayal of Japanese Canadian citizens during the 1940s. Now, years later, Naomi's scars have left her fragile and uncer …

Winner of the 40th Annual 3-Day Novel Writing Contest!

If faced with reincarnation, would you want to come back as a dog, an eagle, a plant? Most poison ivy is reincarnated ivy. You can see the complexity of second lives, the intrepid narrator-detective declares. For those yet reincarnated, devotion can become muddled. And as the characters in The S …

This biography of George Bowering, first Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate, reveals the intimate, intellectual, and artistic life of one of Canada’s most prolific authors, offering an inside look at the people and events at the centre of the country’s literary and artistic avant-garde from the 1960s to the present.

A distinguished novelist, p …

1940s Vancouver. The Japanese have just bombed Pearl Harbour and racial tension is building in Vancouver. The rcmp are rounding up “suspicious” young men, and fishing boats and property are soon seized from Steveston fishers; internment camps in BC’s interior are only months away.

Daniel Sugiura, a young reporter for the New Canadian, the only …

Among the strip malls, industrial parks and overpasses of Southwestern Ontario, Tim is a young misfit with an overactive imagination and a heavy-drinking father, surrounded by bullies at school and wondering if he’ll ever be normal. He experiences first love with another high school student, Sherrie, and at the same time he meets his first friend …

Manipulators, liars, egomaniacs, bullies, interrupters, condescenders, ice queens, backstabbers, hypocrites, withholders, belligerents, self-deceivers, whiners, know-it-alls, nitpickers: these are some of the characters you’ll encounter in the collection of stories, Difficult People.
As these characters fumble through their quests for freediving …

A provocative, beautiful and visionary novel of first contact by New York Times bestselling author Steven Erikson. Imagine a First Contact without contact, and an alien arrival where no aliens show up. Imagine the sudden appearance of exclusion zones all over the planet, into which no humans are allowed. Imagine an end to all violence, from the sch …

High in the Canadian Arctic, British art historian Jenny pursues her passions: Inuit art and a handsome geologist. But the sudden news that her mother has suffered a stroke reels Jenny back to her old life — the responsible youngest daughter of parents who gave up everything to join a religious cult. In Inverness, Jenny tries to put the jumbled p …

Sketchtasy takes place in that late-night moment when everything comes together, and everything falls apart: it's an urgent, glittering, devastating novel about the perils of queer world-making in the mid-'90s.

This is Boston in 1995, a city defined by a rabid fear of difference. Alexa, an incisive twenty-one-year-old queen, faces everyday brutality …

Ashley Drummond is an elite swimmer. Clayton Sandalford is a talented artist. From the  moment of their first meeting, they were destined to be together.

Staying together, however, will test the limits of their love. A world-record swim, and the strange vision that accompanies it, raises questions about the couple's connection.

Then a life-alterin …

Ever since the accident, ex-cop Tom Parsons’s life has been crumbling around him: his marriage and career have fallen apart, his grown children barely speak to him, and he can’t escape the dark thoughts plaguing his mind. Leaving the urban misery of Winnipeg, he tries to remake himself in the small lakeside town of Valhalla, with its picturesqu …

Heartily sincere, human, and compassionate, Around Her is a multifaceted novel that explores, through the words and reflections of a large community of characters, the bonds that unite us, and love in all of its manifestations – the love that one finds, that one loses, destroys, desires, or recovers.

In the mid-1990s, a sixteen-year-old girl, secr …

Almost Islands is a powerfully introspective memoir of the author’s friendship with legendary Canadian poet Phyllis Webb – now in her nineties and long enveloped in silence – and his regular trips to see her. It is an extended meditation on literary ambition and failure, poetry and politics, choice and chance, location, colonization, and clim …

WINNER, Lambda Literary Award

In this visionary novel by Larissa Lai -- her first in sixteen years -- a community of parthenogenic women, sent into exile by patriarchal and corporate Salt Water City, go to war against disease, technology, and an economic system that threatens them with extinction.

Kirilow is a doctor apprentice whose lover, Peristrop …

This frank and authoritative biography explores the life and often controversial work of W.P. Kinsella, the author who penned iconic lines such as “If you build it, he will come.” Kinsella’s work was thrust into the limelight when, in the spring of 1989, his novel Shoeless Joe was turned into the international blockbuster Field of Dreams.

With …

Susan Crean’s memoir Finding Mr. Wong chronicles her effort to piece together the life of the man she knew as Mr. Wong, cook and housekeeper to her Irish Canadian family for two generations. Reminiscing, Crean writes, “I grew up in Mr. Wong’s kitchen …”

A Chinese Head Tax payer hired by Crean’s grandfather in 1928, Wong Dong Wong remaine …

Chrissie Crosby is young, split-second smart and completely pissed off at just about everything. Ginger Flynn is pushing eighty and still seeking answers the way wise people do. These two have much to show each other. Years earlier, a charismatic young professor, Nigel Childes, captivated Ginger while she was one of his students. Their furtive roma …

From the author of Into the Sun and Vandal Love, acclaimed for “prose that’s both lyrical and gritty, able to evoke big emotions with exquisite intimacy” (O, The Oprah Magazine), White is a riveting novel that explores whiteness, modern humanitarianism, and the lies of American exceptionalism and white supremacy.

Assigned to write an exposé o …

A genre-bending retelling of The Odyssey, Army of the Brave and Accidental is a modern fable: a story about relationships, parenthood, and trying to have an impact on the world told from the shifting perspectives of ten characters. A hundred years after James Joyce stitched together a version of the epic tale, Canadian writer and essayist Alex Boyd …

In 1808, the Russian Ship St. Nikolai ran aground off the Olympic Peninsula; this novel is based on this astounding historical event and the lives of the people affected.

In 1808, eighteen-year-old Anna Petrovna Bulygina is aboard the Russian ship St. Nikolai when it runs aground off on the west coast of Washington State on the Olympic Peninsula. Th …

Twenty-five years after his father Gord died in a car accident, Richard gets a call from his cousin Tony, who is working on a theory that Gord's death was orchestrated by Al Forzante, Gord's former boss and a powerful union leader. With his own career and marriage sputtering, Richard is reluctant to believe Tony, inclined instead to cling to the on …

What happens when the narrator is removed from a story? When the author's real life is fictionalized instead, so that creator and creation relate on the same existential ground with no middleman? Chameleon (Days) is such an experiment in storytelling, a literary novel that explores an author's psychotic break as he prepares to write an idea he has …

Alarmed that Canada Post keeps losing money, Ariadne Jensen, a woman in her fifties, pitches the CEO with a scheme to save the corporation: she will get people to start writing and mailing letters again. As an inspiration to others, Ariadne writes bundles of letters for all to see; some are historical fiction, while others are drawn from her own co …

Winner, the CAA Fred Kerner Book Award. Del Hanks is on the verge of academic tenure, but at forty she's also perched on the precipice of either the beginning or the end of the rest of her life.

Black Star is a dark comedy, both bitingly funny and transgressive, an unflinching and unsentimental exploration of the female experience, academia, and the …

A novel set in Yellowknife's historic Old Town in the 70s that explores both abandonment and belonging in the life of a young woman.

In the spring of 1977, Annie, a flighty artist, and her twelve-year-old daughter, Delilah, trade the cherry blossom trees and beaches of Vancouver for rugged and remote Old Town in Yellowknife, surprising Delilah’s f …

Set between 1913 and 1963 in one of Montreal’s well-known, upper-middle-class suburban neighbourhoods, Martine Desjardins’s The Green Chamber is a fast-paced, highly atmospheric, riveting novel that chronicles the decline of a wealthy French-Canadian family over the course of three generations.
Every house has its secrets, but none hides them …

As Hitler's Third Reich crumbles and Stalin's army advances, German civilians in the Eastern territories are forced to flee for their lives. Leaving her dying mother, Liesel and her four young children hope they can make it from their home in Poland across the Oder River to safety. But all that awaits them is terror and uncertainty in a brutal new …

Twenty-five years after his father Gord died in a car accident, Richard gets a call from his cousin Tony, who is working on a theory that Gord’s death was orchestrated by Al Forzante, Gord's former boss and a powerful union leader. With his own career and marriage sputtering, Richard is reluctant to believe Tony, inclined instead to cling to the …

American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book

A moving and intimate LGBTQ graphic novel about two women, both of whom are trying to put the pieces of their lives back together.

Still smarting years after a horrible breakup, Rayanne diligently buries herself in her work. Aside from work, she has her cat. And other than her cat, she has her crushes …

The worlds of urban gentrification, overpriced real estate, and gang violence collide in this wry and sardonic crime novel by author and comedian Charles Demers (Vancouver Special, The Horrors).

As a shaky truce between suburban gangsters starts to unravel, schlubby civilian Scott Clark has other things on his mind: if he can't afford to buy out his …

2021 CANADA READS WINNER

WINNER, Lambda Literary Award; Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction

Finalist, Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction; Amazon Canada First Novel Award; Indigenous Voices Award; Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award; Firecracker Award for Fiction

Longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize

A Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year

A to …

WINNER, Amazon Canada First Novel Award; Lambda Literary Award; Firecracker Award for Fiction

Finalist, Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award

A Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year

It's the dead of winter in Winnipeg and Wendy Reimer, a thirty-year-old trans woman, feels like her life is frozen in place. When her Oma passes away Wendy receives an unexpect …

Saul Indian Horse has hit bottom. His last binge almost killed him, and now he’s a reluctant resident in a treatment centre for alcoholics, surrounded by people he’s sure will never understand him. But Saul wants peace, and he grudgingly comes to see that he’ll find it only through telling his story. With him, readers embark on a journey back …

Art critic Clement Greenberg, champion of abstract expressionism, is more interested in silencing his rival Harold Rosenberg than with the threat of nuclear destruction.

Greenberg is driving from New York to the Emma Lake artist colony in Saskatchewan, where he intends to silence Rosenberg once and for all. With him is infamous Marxist Louis Althuss …

A modern retelling of the Camus classic that posits its story of infectious disease and quarantine in our contemporary age of social justice and rising inequity.

At first it's the dead rats; they start dying in cataclysmic numbers, followed by other city creatures. Then people begin experiencing flu-like symptoms as well as swellings in their lymph …

Norval Morrisseau (1932–2007), Ojibway shaman-artist, drew his first sketches at age six in the sand on the shores of Lake Nipigon, and his first paintings were in cheap watercolour on birch bark and moose hide. By the end of his tumultuous life, the prolific self-taught artist was sought by collectors, imitated by forgers and received the Order …

Water inundates the lives of the characters in these Vancouver Island stories. A tree cutter, from atop a giant fir overlooking a sweeping ocean view, urinates into his wealthy customer's flowerbed. A foster child is haunted by the image of a dying seal. A woman in a kayak, troubled by a falling out she's had with her brother, negotiates ubiquitous …

Cop House is a short story collection about people desperately trying to recapture--or replace--the things they've lost. There are secret vacations, library book fetishes, women who participate in "fully-clothed, free-form touching and explorative play experiences" in exchange for protection from teenage vandals, and a doomsday cult operating out o …

Original, witty, and subtle, these stories feature characters who must navigate life in a small town, and will appeal to fans of Miriam Toews and Kathleen Winter.

This collection of beautifully crafted short stories features complex characters whose internal struggles manifest in their most intimate relationships, told by a writer with a compassiona …