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Winner of a 2011 Independent Publisher Book Award Silver Medal
Sometimes it’s the little things in life that make all the difference, like chromosomes, sperm, bugs or an endangered seabird that nests in old-growth forests. But, what’s big or what’s little depends entirely on your perspective. Faye Pearson is a three-and-a-half-foot tall female scientist doing entomological research in the tallest trees on Vancouver Island, who is pit with a ragtag group of protesters against the might of a multinational logging corporation.
The story of Faye and her struggle to function in a world not made for people her size is poignant and heart-warming. Whether she is lusting after her climbing partner, standing up to a conflicted logging boss, dressing down an insulting interviewee, nurturing a wayward child in the midst of an environmental standoff, or being carted off under the arm of a Mountie, you’ll be unable to resist this amazing woman. There is a fall in Eriksson’s novel, but also incredible moments of grace. Falling from Grace is a novel of no small achievement.
Two voices, two families, two interweaving narratives with thirty years dividing them. In 1972 Birdie Cormack enters a highly controversial experiment in Toronto. Her story unfolds piece by fascinating piece, mostly by way of a compelling series of letters written to her parents. And in 2002 Jeremy Jacks returns to the West Coast after a failed bid to become a writer back east. As he grudgingly reassumes his role at home, his brother Robert, fuelled by fear and rage and a recent suspension from his teaching position at the local high school, reels off on a dangerous and destructive path, exposing in the process the family’s long-hidden secrets and leading to the novel’s powerful climax. Meanwhile, as they struggle in their respective experiments, Jeremy and Birdie confront their demons–both private and public–and begin to see the possibility of love without understanding, and forgiveness without forgetting, by scraping away the lies that over the years have transformed themselves into facts. A penetrating portrait of a place and time unique in Canadian history, Falling from Heights explores the blood ties that bind us one generation to the next, while at the same time revealing the strange, oftentimes unrecognized power in us all to shape one another’s destinies.
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ETHEL WILSON FICTION PRIZE
THE GLOBE AND MAIL TOP 30 CANADIAN BOOKS TO READ IN 2023
CBC BOOKS WORKS OF CANADIAN FICTION TO READ IN THE FIRST HALF OF 2023
All talk, no action: The Mezzanine meets Ducks, Newburyport in this meandering and captivating debut
It’s a hot summer night, and Hugh Dalgarno, a 31-year-old clerical worker, thinks his brain is broken. Over the course of a day and night in an uncannily depopulated public park, he will sift through the pieces and traverse the baroque landscape of his own thoughts: the theology of nosiness, the beauty of the arbutus tree, the pathos of Gene Hackman, the theory of quantum immortality, Louis Riel’s letter to an Irish newspaper, the baleful influence of Calvinism on the Scottish working class, the sea, the CIA, and, ultimately, thinking itself and how it may be represented in writing. The result is a strange, meandering sojourn, as if the history-haunted landscapes of W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn were shrunk down to a mere 85 acres.
These digressions are anchored by remarks from the letters of Keats, by snatches of lyrics from Irish rebel songs and Scottish folk ballads, and, above all else, by the world-shattering call of the red-winged blackbird.
“From the first page to the last I felt wholly captivated by Falling Hour and Hugh’s sensitive and far-ranging digressions. Morrison has captured the magic of Sebald and made it entirely his own, a curiously anti-capitalist exploration of what it means to live in a “fake” country. ” – André Babyn, author of Evie of the Deepthorn
“Falling Hour is a profound incantatory exhalation – a quiet triumph; to read it is to engage in a smart, humane and at times very funny conversation that you will never want to end.” – Simon Okotie, author of After Absalon
“A stellar debut novel by a stellar new talent. Falling Hour is written in a prose style that enlivens every page.” – Mauro Javier Cárdenas, author of Aphasia: A Novel
“In Falling Hour, an immensity is condensed into a single day, a single park, a single empty frame. To themes of loss and dispossession that recall in scope and sensitivity the work of Teju Cole and W.G. Sebald, Morrison brings the attentive eye of a poet and a truly impish sense of the absurd.” – Jen Craig, author of Panthers and the Museum of Fire
“Falling Hour deserves mention as a notable debut along the estuary of modern fiction.” – D. W. White, Atticus Books, Phoenix, AZ
Patrick O’Connell’s second poetry collection resonates with the possibilities of dual perception, of the choices we can maked to define our relationship to the world. The poems speak of deliberation and intent, and chronicle the struggle in laying aside anger and hopelessness. Moving out from the darkest of corners, Falling in Place insists on the grace and elusive beauty of birdsong, the scent of rain, silence and the “pure white silk of the sky.”
One of the most controversial and uncompromising Canadian plays in recent memory, C. E. GatchalianÕs Falling In Time is an epic exploration of armed conflict, masculinity, sexuality, love, and forgiveness.ÊSet in Vancouver in 1994, the year of the death of North Korean leader Kim Il-Sung, the play criss-crosses two hemispheres and spans more than forty years. Through all this, four distinctly different lives intertwine. Steve is an aging, outrageous, bisexual Korean War vet who embodies the sadistic tendencies of Western imperialism that polite society has too often tried to sweep from view. Jamie is an aloof, repressed ESL teacher haunted by a troubled childhood. Chang Hyun is a young Korean student brimming with anti-Western sentiment and still reeling from a traumatic experience in the military. In the middle of it all is Eun Ha, a woman who lives through the Korean War and, against all odds, finds the will to survive.ÊA brutally honest depiction of war, rape, racism and animal sexuality, Falling In Time asks the question ÒHow do we let go?Ó
This book is what happens when one person becomes completely enamoured of the landscape in the city where he livesespecially if this person, like John Terpstra, engages the world with the imagination and curiosity of a poet. Terpstra’s investigations centre around the Iroquois Bar, a giant glacial sandbar which lies beneath one of Hamilton’s busiest transportation corridors. Combining history and geology with gumshoe work and poetic intuition, Terpstra puzzles out just how much the physical and social geography of the area has changed since the sandbar was formed. This close study is nested inside a broader consideration of modern society’s constant and often ill-considered alteration of landscape. Terpstra’s acute focus on his neighbourhood offers insights of global value in a book that is both provocative and entertaining.
Listed as one of the Hamilton Spectator’s “Best books of the year” in 2002 for its appeal to “aficionados of history, geography, geology, poetic language, fine prose and the landscape around us.”
One starry night the body of young man, still strapped into his airplane seat, falls from the sky into the yard of Harold and ElsieÕs chicken farm. As the night unfolds, their mysterious guest effects a profound transformation in his hosts.ÊFalling: A Wake is a haunting and surprisingly funny play about love, loss, and the redemptive power of letting go.
False Friends is the first full-length poetry collection from Stephen Cain in more than ten years. In it, he takes inspiration from the linguistic term “false friends”–two words from different languages that appear to be related, but have fundamentally different meanings. In this book are poems both humourous and unforgiving that Cain uses to explore errors, misapprehensions, and mistranslations and offer insights into the “secret operations” hiding within everyday language.
These poems spin punk with pastoral, comic book with lyric, the misunderstood with the obvious. And at its core, False Friends is a thought-provoking investigation of the power of poetry as political dicourse.
“[U]ndeniably fruitious and wild.”- Kemeny Babineau, The Danforth ReviewFalse Maps for Other Creatures expands the taxonomy of insects, mushrooms and trees to inventive meditations on life and language. A fascinating and multi-layered journey across the geography of the imagination, False Maps for Other Creatures is the perfect book for those of us with no interest in the obvious.
False Starts presents a series of determining moments between two people stuck reliving the same moment over and over, but in unexpected ways and in different genres (from diary to dramatic dialogue, film script to sound installation). Their interdependence and fundamental inability to say how they feel for one another over twenty years – in spite of their eloquence, in spite of their creativity – constitutes the background of the ongoing spectacle of their relationship.
Made up of a series of short pieces originally published in French as Dialogues fantasques pour causeurs éperdus, this translation by the author and Alexandre St-Laurent with Katia Grubisic, also offers previously unpublished texts. Originally staged for the stage, screen, and elevator at Montreal’s matralab.
On June 17, 1958, Vancouver’s Second Narrows Bridge collapsed while under construction, Eighteen men plunged to their deaths. On the cusp of the 50th anniversary of the disaster, critically acclaimed poet Gary Geddes provides an intimate portrait of the many lives affected by the toppling of that seemingly indomitable structure. Pairing his polyphonal narrative with grainy archival photos, Geddes displays a sure-footed authority while balancing the line between documentary and fiction. The Second Narrows collapse was real, and Geddes has a real connection to it: his father, a former navy diver, was called to the bridge to search for bodies in the wreckage. The voices that speak from the page are fiction; at times raw, occasionally profane, they ring with awful truth.
?What was there to do but to play music?? Thus begins the first and title poem of Matthew Gwathmey’s Family Band. What follows describes becoming a family of seven (?It Seemed That We Had Hardly Begun And We Were Already There?), complete with made-up bedtime stories (?Bear The Bear?), the learning of language (?A High Frequency Words List?), road trips (?Stargazing?), pastimes like gardening (?Different Kinds Of Blight?) and fishing (?Salmon Fishing?), games (?Hide & Seek?), TV shows (?Closed Captions Of Sweet Tooth, Season 1, Episode 6?), more games (?The Impossible Game?), and the joys of home ownership (?This House?). These poems catalogue family life up until the moment that the band decides to break apart, and everyone chooses to pursue their respective solo careers.
Mandel’s essays scrutinize the leap from modern to postmodern writing. Mandel also examines individual writers such as Gary Geddes, Leonard Cohen, P.K. Page, Frank Davey, Margaret Atwood and John Glassco.”The quality of Mandel’s criticism is uniformly high. He grinds no particular literary axe, speaks for no school but the school of intelligent inquiry.”–Books in Canada
Shortlisted for the 2017 Brage Prize
Fanny, a 17-year-old high school senior, has lost both her parents in a car accident. Granted permission to live independently in the family home located on the outskirts of a small Norwegian town, the days pass by as she performs her daily routine: going to school, maintaining the house, chopping and stacking wood, and keeping the weeds at bay. As Fanny grieves and attempts to come to terms with the sad circumstances of her life, a fairy tale-like world full of new possibilities begins to emerge around her.
Written by Rune Christiansen, one of Norway’s most exciting literary talents, and masterfully translated by Kari Dickson, Fanny and the Mystery in the Grieving Forest is a beautiful, poetic portrait of grief, friendship, independence and transgression.
Earth and sky are devoid of colour. There are no beginnings or endings.
Then the snow melts.
Maybe it’s the dead cars. It could be the escaped bison roaming the downtown core. Mosquitoes? Sure. Dragonflies? Absolutely.
And it’s also entirely possible it’s the pomegranate tree at the corner of Portage and Main. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s the people, like Dickie Reimer. Any way you slice it, something’s going on in Winnipeg.
That’s really true.
At some point, every Peg will ask so why’d you move here? Jack hopes the city will be the one place no one will look for him. An infamous guerilla street artist, Jack is on the run. Again. Under scrutiny from international authorities, anonymity is his only protection. He promises himself he’ll quit, but blackmail is powerful persuasion.
Tracked by a relentless special agent, Jack navigates the absurdity of the city while befriending (and avoiding) the eccentric characters that proudly claim it as their home.