A note to US-based customers: All Lit Up is pausing print orders to the USA until further notice. Read more
All Books
All Books in this Collection
Showing 305–320 of 9481 results
-
A Small Dog Barking
$15.00Longlisted for a ReLit Award (2006)
Best Fiction of the Year, OttawaXpress
A Small Dog Barking is a startling array of stories, diverse in theme and far-reaching in their breadth of subject matter. Ranging in setting from teenage drinking parties to the apocalyptic landscape of a near-future Western civilization, this collection is both intensely personal and universal. Despite the sometimes extreme and alien landscapes these characters inhabit, there is always the motif of adults navigating the riparian paths of longing, desire, love, and redemption. This new collection represents Strandquist at his most daring to date.
Praise for A Small Dog Barking & Other Stories:
“The writing is so beautiful, the language shining, enlightening a sacramental universe … It is not the smallness, nor the dog, but the barking that is important, the raging against the coming of the night.” (Prairie Fire)
“Strandquist’s prose is spare and precise, studded with startling, evocative images. … Strandquist has a wild imagination and an awe-inspiring mastery of language and form … A Small Dog Barking is an excellent collection, well worth reading and rereading.” (Books in Canada)
“Strandquist once again proves he’s incapable of writing a dull sentence.” (The Vancouver Sun)
-
A Snake and a Feathered Bird
$24.95This atmospheric coming-of-age tale follows Ben, a sensitive boy struggling to unravel his family history while caught in the vortex of other people’s lives.
Vancouver Island, 1875. Three-year-old Ben comes to live with Agda and her volatile husband James in their small wilderness cabin. Entranced by the lushly overarching rainforest, he helps his loving adoptive mere in the garden, learns his letters at the kitchen table and wonders what it would be like to go to school. When James takes Ben, age nine, on a whisky run, the boy is plunged into the rough world of a ramshackle coastal city. Left alone in a canoe he can barely paddle, he is saved from drowning by a man who is later found dead in the same sea. The frightened boy waits for James to reappear while in the care of James’s sweet but listless niece Lily. When James and Ben return to the cabin, they find Agda injured and limping badly. In a few days, Agda is dead. And grieving Ben suspects James of being involved in both sudden deaths.
The nearby Stenhouse farm becomes Ben’s refuge, where he helps with chores and grows up alongside their lively children, including spiky, truth-telling Effie. When James dies, seventeen-year-old Ben is offered a home there as the hired man. First, though, he makes the wilderness trek to the city, to give Lily a bequest from James. With the encroaching rainforest and the sea always ready to reclaim the poor streets and crude dwellings of the tumultuous city, Ben gets hopelessly entangled with Lily and other new friends.
The longer Ben stays, the more he learns about his birth mother — and the farther he is from the Stenhouse farm. Only when he knows who he really is, and frees himself from everyone else’s plans for him, can he act on his own desires and claim his place in the world.
-
A Snake in the Raspberry Patch
$22.00Winner of the Crime Writers of Canada Best Crime Novel Set in Canada 2023–It is the summer of 1971 and Liz takes care of her four sisters while waiting to meet the fifth Murphy child: a boy. And yet, something is not right. Adults tensely whisper in small groups, heads shaking. Her younger sister, Rose seems more annoying, always flashing her camera and jotting notes in her her notepad. The truth is worse than anyone could imagine: an entire family slaughtered in their home nearby, even the children. The small rural community reels in the aftermath. No one seems to know who did it or why. For Liz, these events complicate her already tiring life. Keeping Rose in line already feels like a full time job, and if Rose gets it in her head that she can solve a murder… The killer must be someone just passing through, a random horror. It almost begs the question: where do murderers live?
-
A Song from Faraway
$22.95A time warp into the strange and painful life of men past, present, and future.
The second time Andrew sees his half-brother, Hugh, is at their father’s funeral. Andrew has little interest in the father with whom he grew up, but Hugh, who looks like a country-rock star, is fascinated by the life and writings of the reclusive man he hardly knew. When Hugh finds a book in his father’s study, a mysterious work by Rafael Estrada, he is certain that it holds the key to his identity.
A Song from Faraway takes readers from 19th-century Prince Edward Island to modern-day Iraq. An Irish-Acadian soldier carries his fiddle and folksong across the battlefields of the First World War. An orphan-turned-assassin pursues his target across the deserts of Mexico and Texas, using a novel as evidence for his location. Relationships are forged and broken, wars are fought, and trauma is handed down from father to son.
With whispers of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, A Song from Faraway pieces together “the stories that we tell about ourselves” in a picaresque novel of uncommon beauty and ferocity.
-
A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent
$18.00Winner of the Kitty Lewis Hazel Millar Dennis Tourbin Poetry Prize
Always willing to take aesthetic and artistic risks, Stuart Ross is the author of some of Canada’s most daring, and also most rewarding, poetry. Long celebrated for his surreal narratives and humorous wordplay, here Ross focuses more intensely on intimate subject matter?investigating the often complex, often absurd, but always powerful connections between loved ones. The care and delicacy with which he renders these portraits of family members, friends, mentors?and even himself?is nothing short of arresting. And readers?both those familiar with his work and those new to it?will admire the dexterity with which he juxtaposes such pieces with more audacious inventions.
-
A Spectacular Influence
$18.00Because I have no voice anymore what I say has no air. Did I strangle you? I killed you to let the wind in.
Chantal Neveu’s A Spectacular Influence inclines bodies and worlds, registering their turn as atomized events. This semantic partition distributed into four parts that decline the body’s perplexity before the real, inscribes an intimate range of material probabilities and improbabilities.
Written in spare lines and minimalist language, A Spectacular Influence attends to the sensation of motional inertia and celebrates the relational in the human collective experience.
In a graceful, rich translation by acclaimed author and translator Nathanaïl, A Spectacular Influence confirms Neveu’s poetic range and extends the elegant musicality of her earlier choreographic poem, Coit.
-
A Spy in My House
$7.95This fast-paced spy novel featured Winston Spencer, a one-legged, ex-school teacher tricked by circumstances and the SIS into acting as “keeper” for a chess-crazed KGB defector. A Spy in My House is a cold-war spy novel set in Fredericton and Saint John, New Brunswick.
-
A Stab at Life
$22.95Former bookseller Richard King has created two memorable characters in his mystery novel, A Stab at Life.. Annie Linton, RN, is a nurse in the Emergency Department of the Gursky Memorial Hospital in Montreal and Gilles Bellechasse, a detective in the Major Crimes Division of the Montreal Police Force. Gilles is in charge of investigating a series of murders that have occurred in a park and the area surrounding the Gursky Memorial located in the Cote-des-Neiges area of the city. Suspects include members of a vigilante group devoted to getting drug dealers out of the park, a jealous husband, a mysterious woman of whom nude drawings turn up in one of the murder victim?s bedroom, and competing drug dealers. Annie?s excellent diagnostic skill play a critical role in solving the crime.
King?s mysteries are reminiscent of the originators of the mystery genre, writers such as Agatha Christie and Rex Stout and modern writers such as Robert Goldsborough and Louise Penny. Margaret Cannon said of King in the Globe & Mail: ??he has talent, wit and Montreal.? A Stab at Life. will delight fans of murder mysteries and have them waiting impatiently for the next novel in the series.
-
A Step in the Right Direction
$22.00In A Step in the Right Direction, Sondergaard continues a line of thought he first developed in Bees Die Sleeping and continued in Vinci, Later (which was published in English in 2005). This new collection is “about” walking. It contains four major cohesive songs or cantos, each of which explores the act of walking from a different point of view: as a social activity, as an act of love, as a condition for thought, and as inspiration for art.
-
A Still Life
$20.00His poems make you forget what poetry is. Bernlef’s secret is in the way he looks at things. His attention to the ordinary, to the marginal, the so-called extra literary has not only enlarged the realm of the poetic but challenges the hierarchies and preconceived notions about what is or is not considered literary. — Dutch critic Hans Kloos
-
A Stone In My Pocket
$19.95A Stone In My Pocket
-
A Story Can Be Told About Pain
$24.95When an accident upends their lives, fourteen-year-old Shiloh and her mother Ruth must leave their idyllic home to make a new life in the city. They find housing – through an evangelical church operating out of a strip mall – that backs onto the grounds of the abandoned Pacific Hospital for the Mind. Their lives begin to intersect with their new neighbours – Raymond, a handyman whose painful past is coming to a head; Dave, the disillusioned pastor looking for a new wife; and Madeleine, a 90-year-old former nurse who continues to make pilgrimages to the graves of the patients she once cared for. As Shiloh becomes involved with an undercurrent of teenagers who frequent the grounds of the ruined asylum, her rebellion and grief push her towards choices she can never take back.
With evocative, lyrical prose reminiscent of Emily Ruskovich and Marilynne Robinson, A Story Can Be Told About Pain is a profound meditation on loss and survival, a novel that reminds us why we tell each other stories-to revel in the beauty of language, to find solace, and to boldly confront the truth in order to heal .
-
A Study in Red
$24.95Two women tell the story of the shocking act of violence that transforms both their lives.
Carol and Amy haven’t seen each other for decades — not since they met one fateful summer in 1962 — but the death of a very old woman named Hattie reignites long smouldering emotions. What exactly happened to turn a summer idyll into a nightmare?
The first voice we hear in A Study in Red is Amy, talking as if she were the main character in a film noir. Then Carol picks up the narrative like a detective determined to use reason to examine the past. But the past beguiles her and she sinks into her memories of being thirteen, when she was Hattie’s guest at her summer place and the enigmatic romance writer held her in thrall.
Amy and Carol think they can understand the violence that took place beside Hattie’s swimming pool, but they both get crucial details wrong, and because of that, the mystery and their attempts to solve it have repercussions neither could have foreseen.
A literary mystery and an exploration of the nature of memory, this novel is also a study of the red emotions: lust, anger, jealousy, and not least, love.
-
A Sudden Sky
$14.00A Sudden Sky is a book of northern poems with crystalline images and lines, fragile graceful poems that speak of fragments, of the moment between open and closed eyes, of the human need for embrace. These poems note the spaces between things – always a gap, a failed connection, like radio waves caught in the sky.
I REFUSE to accept
the spine’s dictated script
which at the precise moment
lets itself dissolve, lets itself be inserted
as a footnote of terror in the great law
that has condemned us to carry
the quake’s loosening when the alibi doesn’t hold
and the body surrenders itself
when dawn cleans up
among the starsGernes has called poetry “a resistance movement”, explaining “A poem gives us the possibility of hearing our own voices. While the media offer us the world in small pieces, which are experienced as chaos, poetry seeks connections”.
-
A Suitable Companion for the End of Your Life
$21.952022 QUILL & QUIRE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 30TH ANNUAL HAMILTON LITERARY FICTION AWARD
A bold and absurd new take on the dystopian plague novel, where people are treated like IKEA furniture
Distraught and hopeless, an eighteen-year-old distance runner, Regan, decides to end her life. And she’ll do it through an unusual new method available only on the dark web. Enter Ülle, a woman with amnesia, who will, inadvertently, make Regan’s wish come true.
Soon Ülle begins to remember her past and the outrageous steps her government took to combat a deadly pandemic of parasitic infections, which have brought her to this new country and to Regan’s house. Meanwhile, Regan might be changing her mind, and she finds herself more and more concerned about keeping both Ülle and herself alive. But the shadowy organization that brought them together wants to keep them both quiet – permanently.
A Suitable Companion for the End of Your Life is a darkly comic dystopian tale that probes our anxieties around boundaries, whether territorial or bodily, and our fraught desire not to die alone.
“The guy knows what he’s doing, from missing children to silk parachutes, you are never lost and he will catch you.” – Zadie Smith, author of NW
“A storyteller who refuses to keep things straight, and for this produces freshly captivating effects.” – Andrew Pyper, author of The Demonologist
“Gripping from the first page, Robert McGill’s A Suitable Companion for the End of Your Life is a dark, speculative novel with echoes of The Handmaid’s Tale, set against the backdrop of a plague. Some of us would do anything to survive, down to flatpacking ourselves like IKEA furniture, while others would do anything to make our miserable lives end. This is timely, provocative, ethically challenging fiction that asks whether the drive to survive is stronger than the inevitability of death.” –Ian Williams, author of Reproduction
“Terrifying and tender, A Suitable Companion‘s sci-fi angle serves to frame a fascinating parable about the post-post-modern family. Unpredictable and completely original, this is a propulsive, rewarding, and thought-provoking read.” –Michael Redhill, author of Bellevue Square
“A writer of striking talent and originality.” – Daily Mail on The Mysteries
“McGill is a talented writer, adept at expressing the nuanced, unspoken truths that beg the lies by which we live.” – Observer on The Mysteries
-
A Tale of Sad Reality
$14.95Canadian Fiction Studies are an answer to every librarian’s, student’s, and teacher’s wishes. Each book contains clear information on a major Canadian novel. Attractively produced, they contain a chronology of the author’s life, information on the importance of the book and its critical reception, an in-depth reading of the text, and a selected list of works cited. This volume examines Wacousta by John Richardson.