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- contemporary women (11)
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- essays (7)
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- short stories (single author) (5)
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Walking in the Woods
An updated edition of Herb Belcourt’s remarkable life story with a brand-new foreword by the author.
The eldest of ten children, Belcourt grew up in a small log home near the Métis settlement of Lac Ste. Anne during the Depression. His father purchased furs from local First Nations and Métis trappers and, with arduous work, began a family fur tr …
The Whole Beautiful World
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 …
A Thousand Consolations
Moving, entertaining, and witty, A Thousand Consolations is a literary romantic comedy for fans of David Nicholls’s Us and Emma Straub’s Modern Lovers.
Paula doesn’t put much faith in the candles she designs for her customers, which promise to cure everything from unrequited love to ingrown toenails; it’s just a business she started after he …
Your Heart Is the Size of Your Fist
An absorbing and touching read, this collection of true stories is the first book by a Canadian doctor on the topic of refugee health.
Your Heart Is the Size of Your Fist draws readers into the complicated, poignant, and often-overlooked daily happenings of a busy urban medical clinic for refugees.
An Iraqi journalist whose son has been been murdered …
Hidden Lives
A revised and updated edition of a collection of personal essays that illuminate what life is like for those who live with mental illness, and how it impacts their family members.
More than 4 million Canadians and 57 million Americans suffer from a diagnosable mental illness, and yet there are still considerable stigmas and a great deal of misunders …
Sonja & Carl
Sonja Danychuk, a serious and introverted student with dirt-poor immigrant parents, takes pride in her intellectual and academic achievements—essential skills to help her survive and eventually leave small-town Davenport in Northern Ontario. When her father is cut down by a fatal heart attack, Sonja must find a way to pay for university, so she a …
An Extraordinary Destiny
It’s 1947 in Lahore, and the Sharma family is forced to flee their home during the violence of the Partition of India. As the train tracks measure the ever-growing distance between Varoon and his mother, who vanished during the panic to escape, the boy is thrust towards an uncertain future.
Forty years later, Varoon’s grown son, Anush, desperat …
Waiting for the Cyclone
A Trillium Book Award Finalist
Women are too often cast in literature as inherently good and dependable—but this is not the case in the audacious stories of Waiting for the Cyclone.
Mary, a closet drinker, leaves her children with Debbie, a seemingly perfect housewife who shoots pharmaceuticals at night. Alison vacations with her husband, but wakes …
In This Together
What is real reconciliation? This collection of essays from both Indigenous and non-Indigenous contributors from across Canada welcomes readers into a timely, healing conversation—one we've longed for but, before now, have had a hard time approaching.
These reflective and personal pieces come from journalists, writers, academics, visual artists, f …
It's Only the Himalayas
A laugh-out-loud travel memoir that reveals backpacking’s awkward side.
Sue, a disenchanted waitress, embarks upon a year-long quest around the world with her friend, Sara—who’s exasperatingly perfect. Expecting a whimsical jaunt of self-discovery, Sue instead encounters an absurd series of misadventures that render her embarrassed, terrified, …
This Godforsaken Place
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 …
The Pull of the Moon
Winner of the 2015 City of Victoria Butler Book Prize
A Globe and Mail top 100 pick for 2014
Winner of a 2015 Independent Publisher Book Award Bronze Medal
Twelve short stories that examine what happens in the lives of characters who discover shocking truths about the people they thought they knew best.
Whether set in a cottage or a Montreal market, …
When is a Man
Paul Rasmussen is a young ethnographer and academic recovering from prostate cancer. Broken, he retreats to the remote forests and towns of the Immitoin Valley. As an outsider, he discovers how difficult it is to know a place, let alone become a part of it. Then, a drowned man and a series of encounters with the locals force him to confront the val …
Flying Time
Winner of the 2015 Saskatchewan Book Awards University of Regina Book of the Year Award
In 1939, Kay Jeynes, a lively, ambitious young working-class woman, goes to work for the only Japanese businessman in town, the elderly, wealthy, Oxford-educated Mr. Miyashita. Despite differences in their age, race, and class, a friendship develops between them …
The Cuckoo's Child
In her forties, Livvy Alvarsson hopes to be a bone marrow donor for her much-loved younger brother, Stephen. Instead, she discovers she has no idea who she is. This is the second great loss she has suffered, for eleven years earlier her four-year-old son, Daniel, disappeared. Armed with a few clues from wartime England, she embarks on a search for …
Pilgrimage
Pilgrimage opens in the deep winter of 1891 on the Métis settlement of Lac St. Anne. Known as Manito Sakahigan in Cree, “Spirit Lake” has been renamed for the patron saint of childbirth. It is here that people journey in search of tradition, redemption, and miracles.
On this harsh and beautiful land, four interconnected people try to make a lif …
The Dove in Bathurst Station
Marta Elzinga has been searching for a sign. When she spots an elusive mink on the shoreline of the Toronto Island Airport, she thinks it is a message. The pigeon that boards the subway at Bathurst Station is the second sign. But how to read these dispatches?
Plagued with indecision and prone to magical thinking, Marta needs direction. A floundering …
Swarm
In the not-too-distant future, thirty-seven-year-old Sandy lives a challenging and unfamiliar life. She survives by fishing, farming, and beekeeping on an isolated island with her partner, Marvin, and friend, Thomson. When the footprints of a thieving child start appearing in their garden, the family must come together to protect both the child and …
The Unfinished Child
Finalist for a 2014 Alberta Literary Award
Shortlisted for the 2014Edmonton Public Library Alberta Readers' Choice Award
When Marie MacPherson, a mother of two, finds herself unexpectedly pregnant at thirty-nine, she feels guilty. Her best friend, Elizabeth, has never been able to conceive, despite years of fertility treatments. Marie's dilemma is f …
Rosina, the Midwife
Finalist for a 2014 Alberta Literary Award
Between 1870 and 1970, 26 million Italians left their homeland and travelled to places like Canada, Australia and the United States, in search of work. Many of them never returned to Italy. Against this historic backdrop comes the story of Rosina, a Calabrian matriarch, who worked as a midwife in an area wh …
Eat Your Heart Out
With unsentimental prose and ironic dialogue, Katie Boland brings to life a variety of characters who all have one thing in common—a need for something more. A literary debut by a refreshing new voice in fiction, the stories in Eat Your Heart Out are about the haunted and heartbroken, about dreamers, losers and love-lost souls. From a sixteen-yea …
South of Elfrida
The nature of relationships is skilfully illuminated in this collection of stories by award-winning author Holley Rubinsky. South of Elfrida delves into the lives of those coming face to face with personal truths that require resilience, humour and the ability to change.
With a clear eye for the complexities of the human heart, Rubinsky’s stories …
Her Voice, Her Century
An original collection of four plays about unsung women from the history of the Canadian west. With theatrical twists and turns, Her Voice, Her Century takes us from an English doctor stationed in the middle of Alberta's unsettled north country, to the lives and work of two influential early Canadian photographers, to a Canadian journalist covering …
Cadillac Couches
Winner of a 2012 Independent Publisher Book Award Gold Medal
Cadillac Couches is a picaresque road trip novel that journeys from prairie to big city and back again. A quixotic tale set in the late nineties and framed by the popular Edmonton Folk Music Festival, it follows two music-smitten twentysomething women as they search for love and purpose. A …
The Apple House
Anglophone Imogene Jackson grew up in an English suburb on the uneasy edge of a francophone world. At the age of nineteen she quit college to marry a shoemaker from the close-knit French village of Saint-Ange-du-Lac. For ten years she has lived with her husband, Thomas, above his family's historic shoe shop, immersed in village life. When Thomas di …
A Cowherd in Paradise
In 2006, the Prime Minister apologized to the Chinese people for the legislated discrimination created by Canada’s head tax laws in the first half of the twentieth century, acknowledging the far-reaching and long-term consequences it has had on their families. A Cowherd in Paradise is the story of one such family.
The book chronicles the remarkab …
In the Flesh
Living is a process of continuous transformation: we have been embryos, children, adolescents, thin, fat, sick, better again. And as humans, we are always at odds with at least one part of our bodies. Have we inherited the family nose? Is there nothing to be done for our finicky stomach or our limp hair?
In the Flesh is an intelligent, witty, and p …
The Tinsmith
During the bloodiest single-day battle in American history, Anson Baird, a surgeon for the Union Army, is on the front line tending to the wounded. As the number of casualties rises, a mysterious soldier named John comes to Anson's aid. Deeply affected by the man's selfless actions, Anson soon realizes that John is no ordinary soldier, and that he …
The Woman She Was
Celia Cantú, a pediatrician in Havana, is trying to live a regular life in today's Cuba. She is engaged to her childhood friend Luis and lives with her 16-year-old niece, Liliana. Celia's life is disrupted when Luis's brother, Joe, returns from Miami flaunting his American ways. Joe's arrival and Liliana's adolescent restlessness force Celia to ex …
The Power of Ignorance
Join certified Ig-master Vaguen on the road to bliss. You might think that ignorance comes naturally, but on the contrary, the world conspires to cram our heads full of useless and dangerous know-ledge every day. Fall off this know-ledge into the safe and comforting world of oblivio(n/ousness) by discovering The Power of Ignorance. In his seminars, …
Eye Opener Bob
Forty-six years later those words still ring true: there has since been no book that has brought to life early Calgary the way that Eye Opener Bob does. Perhaps more importantly, it's the closest we'll ever get to Robert Chambers Edwards—Eye Opener Bob —the irrepressible editor of Calgary's most singular newspaper, and the city's most singular …
One Crow Sorrow
Lisa Martin-DeMoor's debut collection of poetry, One Crow Sorrow, is both fearless and vulnerable-an exploration of grief and loss that is rooted in life affirmation, in deep attention to the natural world.
From a tangle of snowflakes in Saskatchewan to cell masses like dislodged icebergs, the earth and body inform one another, their cycles of life …
Irresponsible Freaks
Bob Edwards, the Great White North's equivalent to H. L. Mencken, remains a singular figure in Canadian journalism. His newspapers, published in Wetaskiwin, Leduc, High River, Strathcona, Winnipeg, Port Arthur, and most famously Calgary, skewered politics, society, and business leaders with a fearlessness and outrageousness rarely seen then, now, o …
Labrador
Labrador is about a part of the world that practically no one knows anything about — Canada's own Siberia. And because your tour guide is the lovely and talented TJ Dawe, it's also about the cycle of generations, how the hell bread got invented, the blurry line between fact and fiction, why schedule needs to be pronounced with a k sound, and how …
The Final Word
From Canada's foremost graveyard historian comes the first-ever collection of Canadian epitaphs.
Strange as it is to say, graveyards are historical documents; they have a lot to say about who we were—and who we are.
From the strange and humorous to the majestic and moving, the baldly factual (Horses ran away) to the possibly fantastical (Milicent M …
A Ghost in Waterloo Station
The poems in A Ghost in Waterloo Station take the everyday world as their point of departure, but the place of arrival is never the shore you started from. Vivid invocations and meditations on childhood, art, and travel bring together places and people as likeable and unexpected as the wry poetic sensibility recommending them to our attention. Gree …
The Slip-Knot
In turns hysterical and heartbreaking, frantic and thoughtful, The Slip-Knot is a spellbinding comic monologue unlike any other. Journey with the incomparable TJ Dawe as he mans a giant truck, becomes the unhelpful voice on the other end of the phone line, and compiles euphemisms while he stocks the shelves in a drugstore. In between are rumination …
Brilliant!
Chronicling the explosive career of a twentieth-century genius, Brilliant! is a story about the beginning of our technological age embodied in a man whose ideas, dreams and passions were too big for his own time. Visually stunning, the play has many comic, surreal and dramatic moments told in the inimitable style that has made the Electric Company …
Queering the Way
Edmonton’s Loud & Queer Cabaret has been blazing trails and shining a light on Queer arts and culture for twenty years. The showcase has debuted more than three hundred pieces of stunning performance and art from both established and emerging talent alike.
From the Loud & Queer Cabaret archives, here are some of the most memorable pieces, from mon …
Believing Cedric
“Believing Cedric is a marvelously strange novel that explores a marvelously normal phenomenon: everyone in our lives has a story. Mark Lavorato writes with great humanity, compassion and curiosity.” —Todd Babiak, author of Toby: A Man
Cedric Johnson is a middle-aged insurance broker with an unusual problem. He seems to be physically flashing …
Freddy's War
In 1941, a young man imagines thrilling battles and heroic acts when he lies about his age and joins the army. “Assigned to the Winnipeg Grenadiers, part of the Canadian army in Hong Kong, Freddy McKee becomes a prisoner of war six weeks after arriving in Hong Kong.
Five years pass and Freddy finally returns home from the war, but three women—J …
Happiness Economics
Will Thorne is a stalled poet, married to Judy, a wildly successful celebrity economist. Pressured by a starving fellow poet, Will establishes The Poets’ Preservation Society, a genteel organization to help poets in need. But when Will meets his muse, the enigmatic and athletic Lily White, he becomes inspired not only to write poetry, but to take …
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 …
Vancouver Kids
Children and teenagers stroll between the skyscrapers in Vancouver and experience the city in a different way than adults do. They have helped Vancouver transform from humble trading post to towering metropolis, yet how often are they asked to tell their side of the story? Vancouver Kids is a collection of tales about the unforgettable young people …
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 …
Blue Duets
Lila, a talented pianist and wife to Rob, has decided she cannot passively follow a score someone else has written—in her musical career and her marriage. As she struggles in her role as daughter to a mother who is dying of cancer, Lila finds that Kevin, a violinist and Lila’s musical partner, helps to keep her love of music in tune through try …
Afterall
At a dinner party, Beth — thirty-six, single, and working as much overtime as she can get her hands on — impulsively announces that she's going to spend a night on Vancouver's mean streets in commiseration of the homeless. Unexpectedly, her hosts' son Mason — nine years old, small for his age, intense, intellectual and so shy he can't speak i …