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All Books

All Books in this Collection

  • Horsefly

    Horsefly

    $24.95

    

    A chilling tale about what happens when we mess with nature.

    In 1942, a young entomologist, Thomas, is sent on a secret mission to a remote island to work on biological weapons for the Allied military. The scientists live like prisoners while they look for the perfect carrier for anthrax among the island’s many insects, trying at the same time to keep the local population in the dark. Until one of the islanders becomes ill.

    Eight decades later, in 2025, in the same region of Quebec, a heat wave unleashes horrendous swarms of horseflies, while humans fall prey to strange flights of rage and violence. Theodore is living a simple life, working double shifts at the factory and drinking to forget, when a horsefly bite stirs him from his apathy and he impulsively kidnaps from the nursing home his grandfather Émeril, whose dementia has him living in the past during the Grosse Ile biological weapons experiments. The two men end up on that same remote island, digging into the past.

    The horsefly, meanwhile, knows a few secrets…

    Loosely based on historical fact, Horsefly is a terrifying tale about the ways in which we try to dominate nature, and how nature will, inevitably, wreak retribution upon us.

  • Horseplay

    Horseplay

    $21.95

    Shortlisted for the Brass Knuckles Award for Best Nonfiction Crime Book at the Crime Writers of Canada Awards of Excellence!
    Finalist for Book Cover Design at the 2021 Alberta Book Publishing Awards!

    In his first true crime memoir, undercover operator Norm Boucher recounts eight months spent infiltrating Vancouver’s heroin scene, a world of paranoia, ripoffs, and violence. It is 1983 and the War on Drugs is intensifying. From his barroom observer’s seat, Boucher candidly reveals the lives of heroin addicts who spend each day looking for their next hit. Their dangerous subculture, centred around three gritty hotels on the Granville Strip, becomes Boucher’s domain as he attempts both to gain acceptance in a world far removed from his own and to keep himself safe.

    With Horseplay, decorated RCMP officer Norm Boucher takes readers back to the assignment that shaped his outlook on the role of criminal law enforcement and the human side of addiction as it collides with the ruthlessness of the drug business.

  • Horses in the Sand

    Horses in the Sand

    $22.95

    Horses in the Sand, the author’s sequel to her first book, First Gear: A Motorcycle Memoir, is a collection of stories that document a queer woman’s journey from her sparse beginnings as a child to becoming a tradeswoman, teacher, and artist. With courage, humour, and frank honesty, the stories describe what it was like to grow up as a girl who was starkly different from “normal” and how “coming out” became a lifelong process of self-acceptance and changing identities. The stories also speak to the difficulties in participating in and maintaining healthy adult relationships when childhood beginnings are rooted in violence and trauma, and end with a triumphant account of fulfilling a long-time dream of buying land and building a home with her own hands. Ultimately, the memoir is a celebration of making art, telling stories, and of finding her birth father, a family of half siblings, and an Indigenous community whose presence she had always felt, but never knew she belonged to.

  • Horton Point

    Horton Point

    $19.95

    In this history, Gordon M. Haliburton traces the rise and ebb of the Annapolis Valley community of Avonport from its earliest settlement through to today. From discussions of the formidable influences of industrialist L. E. Shaw and the Dominion Atlantic Railway to genealogical information and anecdotes, Haliburton gathers a mix of historical documentation and community oral history into an account that is as personal and entertaining as it is informative.

  • Hosanna

    Hosanna

    $16.95

    In Michel Tremblay’s classic play about identity in crisis, Claude leaves the conformity of small-town Quebec to realize a new life and a new persona among the drag queens and prostitutes of Montreal’s seedy “Main” – the boulevard that marks the division of the city’s anglophone and francophone neighbourhoods. Claude’s illusions about himself are shattered when, painstakingly remade as his idol Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra, he arrives at a costume party themed on “great women of history” and is mocked for his glamorous aspirations. Written during the social and political tumult of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, Tremblay’s political allegory about the authenticity of self resonates ever more so today.

    Cast of 2 men.

  • Hot Freeze

    Hot Freeze

    $13.95

    It was cold; bitterly paralysingly cold. There was a dampness in the air that bit into the marrow of your bones and stayed there. The red in the thermometer was below zero and still dropping steadily, and the weather forecasts offered no immediate hope of a let up. The city lay rigid under the stiffening blanket of snow. The air as you breathed it felt solid.

    A raw novel of sex and drugs in the years just before rock ‘n’ roll, Hot Freeze moves from the highest Westmount mansion to the lowest Montreal gambling joint and nightclubs. Its hero is Mike Garfin, a man who got kicked out of the RCMP for sleeping with the wife of a suspect. Recreating himself as an “inquiry agent”, Mike takes on what looks to be an easy job, shadowing a bisexual, teenaged son of privilege who is throwing around more money than his allowance allows. But the boy disappears. Others soon follow, and Garfin’s world becomes a lonelier place.

    First published in February 1954 as a Dodd, Mead Red Detective Mystery title, Hot Freeze enjoyed second and third lives as a Reinhardt hardcover and a Popular Library paperback. In 1955, a French translation, Mon cadavre au Canada, became part of Gallimard’s Serie noir. This Ricochet Books edition is the first in sixty years.

  • Hot Shots and High Spots

    Hot Shots and High Spots

    $25.95

    Bringing the best of professional wrestling into focus, from the glare of the spotlights to rare, behind-the-scenes candid photos, George Napolitano has created the most far-reaching and beautiful visual history of its kind. For five decades he has been ringside, documenting wrestling’s biggest main events, photographing its most famous — and infamous — stars. His images have captured the blood, sweat, and tears spilled in the squared circle. In the process, they have become as iconic as the men and women in them.

    Covering those who have made professional wrestling one of America’s great passions and pastimes — Bruno Sammartino and Claddy Freddie Blassie, Gorilla Monsoon battling Muhammad Ali, Andre the Giant and Mil Mascaras thrilling crowds all over North America, and Cyndi Lauper and Captain Lou Albano bringing wrestling to MTV — this chronicle shows it all.

    For the fans of the nWo or ECW’s hardcore revolution, those who love the attitudes of DX, The Rock, and Stone Cold Steve Austin, and those who still tune in every Monday night for Cena, Triple H, and Orton, this compilation is the ultimate pictorial of the glories and humiliations of the wrestling world.

  • Hot Town

    Hot Town

    $28.95

    The small town is a haven in an unruly world. There is much reassurance in the familiar. Shirley at the post office knows everybody’s name. Bingo is every Wednesday night at the Legion. The community pulls together unquestioningly for funerals, fires and parades. A small town sets the parameters for personal successes and takes the blame for failures.Hot Town and other stories is a book about people who exchange their high expectations for belonging. Small town people are loyal and resilient, with histories steeped in both tradition and subversion. They tolerate disappointment well, while a betrayal is never forgotten. Memory is the foundation of the small town, accurate or not. And memory runs deep, deeper than the abandoned gravel pit north of the tracks.

  • Hotel Montreal

    Hotel Montreal

    $17.95

    Since 1975, Ken Norris has produced some of Canada’s most intriguing poetry. Whether detailing the amorous lives of produce (Vegetables), documenting travels to the South Seas (The Better Part of Heaven and Islands), engaging contentious social and political issues (In the Spirit of the Times and In the House of No), or taking the measure of the successes and failures of contemporary love (The Music and Limbo Road), Norris has always given us quirky, edgy poetry that has continually revealed unanticipated possibilities and explored new horizons. His work has been widely anthologized in the English-speaking world, as well as in translation in France, Belgium and Israel. His latest book of poems, Limbo Road, is to be published this fall in translation in Quebec by Ecrits des Forges.

    Hotel Montreal offers the literary traveller a haven for clandestine encounters with the intimate and the exotic. It includes selections from nineteen ground-breaking books of poetry (a number of them now out of print or hard to find), as well as a healthy selection of accomplished new poems. It draws together the very best of Norris’s lyric poetry from a 25-year period, while offering the reader an indispensable panoramic view of the work of a poet at the height of his creative power.

  • Hotline

    Hotline

    $21.95

    A 2023 Canada Reads FinalistLonglisted for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller PrizeA vivid love letter to the 1980s and one woman’s struggle to overcome the challenges of immigration.It’s 1986, and Muna Heddad is in a bind. She and her son have moved to Montreal, leaving behind a civil war filled with bad memories in Lebanon. She had plans to find work as a French teacher, but no one in Quebec trusts her to teach the language. She needs to start making money, and fast. The only work Muna can find is at a weight-loss center as a hotline operator.All day, she takes calls from people responding to ads seen in magazines or on TV. On the phone, she’s Mona, and she’s quite good at listening. These strangers all have so much to say once someone shows interest in their lives–marriages gone bad, parents dying, isolation, personal inadequacies. Even as her daily life in Canada is filled with invisible barriers at every turn, at the office Muna is privy to her clients’ deepest secrets.Following international acclaim for Niko (2011) and The Bleeds (2018), Dimitri Nasrallah has written a vivid elegy to the 1980s, the years he first moved to Canada, bringing the era’s systemic challenges into the current moment through this deeply endearing portrait of struggle, perseverance, and bonding.

  • Hotter Than a Match Head

    Hotter Than a Match Head

    $22.95

    On October 15, 1967, bass player Steve Boone took the Ed Sullivan Show stage for the final time, with his band The Lovin’ Spoonful. Since forming in a Greenwich Village hotel in early 1965, Boone and his bandmates had released an astounding nine Top 20 singles, the first seven of which hit the Billboard Top 10, including the iconic Boone co-writes “Summer in the City” and “You Didn’t Have to Be So Nice.”

    Little did Steve Boone know that the path of his life and career would soon take a turn for the bizarre, one that would eventually find him looking at the world through the bars of a jail cell. From captaining a seaworthy enterprise to smuggle marijuana into the U.S. from Colombia, to a period of addiction, to the successful reformation of the band he’d helped made famous, Hotter Than a Match Head tells the story of Boone’s personal journey along with that of one of the most important and enduring groups of the 1960s.

  • Houdini’s Shadow

    Houdini’s Shadow

    $19.95

    Set amid the underworlds of Montreal and New Orleans in the 1920’s and 30’s, Houdini’s Shadow is a dark and poetic tale of desire and decadence, obsession and betrayal.

  • Hour of the Crab

    Hour of the Crab

    $22.95

    Co-Winner, Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction

    Patricia Robertson’s new collection of short fiction, Hour of the Crab, is a work of insight and mastery, each story demonstrating an original vision, intriguing characters, and sophisticated skill.

    Readers will travel with Robertson’s vivid characters, sharing their journeys, their challenges, their complicated choices. They will also discover other worlds — from an eleventh-century monastery in France to a near-future British Columbia where apocalyptic wildfires seem to be never-ending.

    A young woman discovers the corpse of a Moroccan teenager washed up on the beach in southern Spain and sets out to find his family in a gesture that destabilizes her own. An international aid worker shares her house with the very real ghost of a gardener’s boy. The last speaker of a dying Norse-like language carves the words he remembers into the stones of his house.

    Urgent and evocative, immersed in issues of our time, the stories of Hour of the Crab reveal Robertson’s ability to draw in her readers with the heightened realism of her imagined worlds.

  • House Divided

    House Divided

    $26.95

    A citizen’s guide to making the big city a place where we can afford to live.
    Housing is increasingly unattainable in successful global cities, and Toronto is no exception – in part because of zoning that protects “stable” residential neighborhoods with high property values. House Divided is a citizen’s guide for changing the way housing can work in big cities. Using Toronto as a case study, this anthology unpacks the affordability crisis and offers innovative ideas for creating housing for all ages and demographic groups. With charts, maps, data, and policy prescriptions, House Divided poses tough questions about the issue that will make or break the global city of the future.

  • House Dreams

    House Dreams

    $20.00

    A book of dark corners and shifting locations, full of switches that light up the unobvious places, elsewhere in the house.

    House Dreams, Deanna Young’s haunted and haunting third collection, is at once a core sample of the life we all live underground, and a view beneath the foundations of the various eras and places that make up one woman’s life story. These poems have the plainspoken power, surreal shifting, uncanny logic and transformed everyday imagery of our most numinous dreams. It’s as if Jung’s assertion that “[w]hen an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate,” is taken up here as a reading guide back through time.

    Thunder over the Minas Basin.

    For days it’s been wrestling with the mountain gods
    and still no rain. You walk the perimeter of the house,
    sniffing the air like an animal–the erotic fields.
    Around again, acknowledging each of its many doors
    with a nod. To you they’re human. Like you,
    the windows cannot believe
    this is happening.
    — from “The Path”

  • House Guests

    House Guests

    $30.00

    Built by the Boulton family between 1817 and 1820, the Grange is Toronto’s oldest remaining brick house. During the nineteenth century, the Grange was at the centre of the city’s social and political activity. Today, with its collection of furniture, artifacts, and art, it is an historic house museum and part of the Art Gallery of Ontario.

    In her fascinating essay, award-winning Canadian historian Charlotte Gray brings to life the saga of the Grange, the home of the Boultons and of Goldwin Smith in the 19th century. Devoting as much attention to the formidable women who ran the household as to the men who were key figures in the development of the city, she offers a fascinating portrait of a place and a time. Complementing Gray’s essay are shorter essays and reproductions of works commissioned from artists Rebecca Belmore, Luis Jacob, Elizabeth LeMoine, Josiah McElheny, Elaine Reichek, and Christy Thompson that offer inventive responses to a complicated past.