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Sabaheta is a literature student at the University of Sarajevo when war breaks out in Bosnia-Herzegovina. After her brother is taken from the family by armed thugs and her mother descends into madness, she goes into the forest with her father to join the guerrillas, where she dresses like a boy and fights side-by-side with the men.
When her father is killed in combat, Sabaheta gives him a makeshift funeral and vows one day to leave her homeland and seek a country where she can pursue her studies and live in peace. Although she is not an observant Muslim, she decides once again to wear the traditional headscarf, and changes her name to Bosnia, making her way alone to Sarajevo to reunite with her friends. After many months, having burned every available piece of furniture to keep warm, they are forced to burn their books, their most precious possessions. Chapter by chapter, they consign each book to memory before setting it alight, and then recite it by heart in front of the fire.
Finally escaping their genocidal homeland, they rise from its ashes of violence and hatred, remaking themselves in the images kept in their hearts of a fabled new life in a foreign land. My Name Is Bosnia is Madeleine Gagnon’s celebration of the power of the imagination to heal and remake our lives.
My Planet of Kites is a rich poetic suite that documents an intimate universe, mixing personal and cultural references in language that is both colourful and humorous. The narrator’s reflections on the thrilling, but usually, mundane aspects of everyday life will resonate with anyone that seeks shared dreams of travel, music, books and the presence, real or virtual, of men and women who weave a web of friendships in a world that seems to have no romantic attachments.
Finalist, Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award for Non-Fiction
Finalist, Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best First Book
In September 2015, Sheila North was declared the Grand Chief of Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak (MKO), the first woman elected to the position. Known as a “bridge builder”, North is a member of Bunibonibee Cree Nation. North’s work in advocacy journalism, communications, and economic development harnessed her passion for drawing focus to systemic racism faced by Indigenous women and girls. She is the creator of the widely used hashtag #MMIW. In her memoir, Sheila North shares the stories of the events that shaped her, and the violence that nearly stood in the way of her achieving her dreams. Through perseverance and resilience, she not only survived, she flourished.
“A lyrical, extremely rich narrative of loss, memory, and trauma.” — STARRED review, Kirkus ReviewsAn extraordinary account of survival in Syria’s most notorious military prisons that is written with “brutal clarity — and yet, there is a poetic quality to the telling.” — Frances Itani, award-winning author of Deafening and Remembering the BonesJamal Saeed arrived as a refugee in Canada in 2016. In his native Syria, as a young man, his writing pushed both social and political norms. For this reason, as well as his opposition to the regimes of the al-Assads, he was imprisoned on three occasions for a total of 12 years. In each instance, he was held without formal charge and without judicial process. My Road from Damascus not only tells the story of Saeed’s severe years in Syria’s most notorious military prisons but also his life during the country’s dramatic changes. Saeed chronicles modern Syria from the 1950s right up to his escape to Canada in 2016, recounting its descent from a country of potential to a pawn of cynical and corrupt powers. He paints a picture of village life, his youthful love affairs, his rebellion as a young Marxist, and his evolution into a free thinker, living in hiding as a teenager for 30 months while being hunted by the secret police. He recalls his brutal prison years, his final release, and his family’s harrowing escape to Canada.While many prison memoirs focus on the cruelty of incarceration, My Road from Damascus offers a tapestry of Saeed’s whole life. It looks squarely at brutality but also at beauty and poetry, hope and love.
Winner of the 2015 Governor General?s Award for Poetry
Winner of the 2015 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry
In My Shoes are Killing Me, poet Robyn Sarah reflects on the passing of time, the fleetingness of dreams, and the bittersweet pleasure of thinking on the ?hazardous ? treasurehouse? that is the past. Natural, musical, meditative, warm, and unexpectedly funny, this is a restorative and moving collection from one of Canada?s most well-regarded poets.
A child survivor, a child of survivors and a grandchild of a survivor, Sidney Zoltak is all these things. His story about a family that struggled and endured, the generosity of those who saved them against all odds, and a vow never to forget is a remarkable journey through the Holocaust into a rich and full life. At eight, Sidney loses a middle class home and goes from the slow death of the ghetto into the terror of hiding in forests, barns and finally, a hole in the ground provided by a Polish family farm. But when war ends, there is no going back. We follow the Zoltak family as they make their way to Italy where young Sidney encounters a generosity of spirit that helps to heal war’s wounds and prepares him for life in Canada. Sidney Zoltak’s chronicle is a lesson in the importance of honouring your story for the generations to come.
My Sister Esther is a compelling portrayal of the relationships which bind together the Maclaren family and the secret events in the lives of two sisters.
Fifth grader Talia Cohen-Sullivan isn’t sure how she feels about boys, crushes, and the love thing even though her best friend, Carmen, is already dreaming about kissing–and it’s only September. Losing her mom to cancer a few years ago made Talia afraid of change, though she still has her big sister, Jade, to help her through hard times. But when she sees Jade kissing a girl, Talia is suddenly thrust into a world she doesn’t understand and faces important decisions. With the help of her therapist, and Carmen, and Jade herself, Talia learns that love has many faces; love might even be something she’s interested in soon . . . for herself.
Teacher resources available on publisher website:https://www.rebelmountainpress.com/my-sisters-girlfriend–teacher-resources.html
“Ondjaki is experimentally bold, and his prose shifts through a kaleidoscope of registers, from the poetic to the political, the erotic to the absurd.”—Times Literary Supplement
This anthology brings together 42 short stories by the critically acclaimed and award-winning Angolan author Ondjaki, translated from Portuguese by Stephen Henighan. Ondjaki has established himself as a key writer of Angola with writing that is formally experimental and emotionally engaging, and this collection showcases stories from across his career.
When at year’s end a schoolteacher asks her pupils to write an essay about their vacations over the summer, 12-year-old Zeenat turns the routine exercise into a daily exploration of her innermost thoughts. It is the dawn of a new millennium, and she’s coming of age in a politically unstable Mumbai that is still resolutely Bombay to her Muslim community. Though the world beyond her window is full of change, Zeenat spends long hours bored inside her family apartment, preoccupied with the cockroaches under the fridge, the pigeon’s nest above the cupboard, and the shared bathroom in the hall. At night, she reads English books in the kitchen as she questions where she fits between languages in this post-colonial society. Beyond the boredom of her daily routine, her anxiety spikes as she must start following the religious dress codes for a girl her age. And her fear is palpable when a neighbour is kidnapped.
My Sweet Curiosity tells the story of Natalya, a young medical student, too smart for her own good, who twists an already complicated genetic background rooted in the Romanov family into an impossible fantasy of reproductive technology which ultimately reveals its own strange truth. Talya falls in love with Dai Ling, a cello student of extraordinary talent, and daughter of Jia Song Xiang, doctor of traditional Chinese medicine.
Set in modern day Toronto, the story ventures into Renaissance Europe, looking over the shoulder of Andreas Vesalius as he opens the body and maps it accurately for the first time; to Beijing where Dai Ling’s parents meet and emigrate before the Tianenmen Square massacre; to Palestine, following Vesalius on his pilgrimage; to the deathbed of Talya’s mother in a Geneva cancer clinic.
My Sweet Curiosity explores the border between fact and fiction, the relation between medical science and music, and the enduring mysteries of the human body.
The memoir My Theatre of Memory: A Life in Words traces Adriana Davies’s life in Canada from her arrival in Edmonton as a a child immigrant with her mother, older sister and younger brother in the early 1950s, to the present as she deals with the challenges of Covid. Successive chapters tell not only the family’s immigration story including accounts of her school days, university in Canada and then the UK, but also the beginning of her life as a young married woman and mother in London, England. Destined for a job in academe, cutbacks in the university sector in the UK meant that she began work as a freelance researcher and writer in the area of museums and galleries. This set the tone for a rich and varied career in museums and as a historian.
My Town
Winner of the Cover Design Award at the 2018 Alberta Book Publishing Awards!
In Phyllis Rudin’s coming-of-age story, Benjie Gabai is convinced he’s been the victim of a terrible cosmic hoax. Instead of being born in the 18th century as a French-Canadian voyageur, God has plunked him down in present-day Montreal, into a family that views his fur trade obsession as proof that their Benjie, once so bursting with promise, has well and truly lost it. Benjie serves out his days as caretaker of the Bay’s poky in-store fur trade museum, dusting and polishing the artifacts that fuel his imagination. When he learns his museum is about to be closed down, scattering his precious collection to the four winds, he hatches a plan that risks bringing his voyageur illusions lapping dangerously up against reality.
My True and Complete Adventures as a Wannabe Voyageur melds Canadian frontier history with the madcap adventures of a young man who is not yet ready to meet adulthood head on.</p
The decline and fall of the Montreal Expos. In 1969, the Montreal Expos played their first game. Thirty-two years later, the team that once boasted baseball’s best farm system is nearly dead. In this book, former Expos president Claude Brochu gets to the bottom of the Expos’ story. From his successful marketing career at Seagram’s, Claude Brochu was thrust into the role of Expos president in 1986. Back then, the Expos were a team with terrific potential. But as the years went by, attendance began to slide. Whenever owner Charles Bronfman attended a game he would shake his head, discouraged: “Why don’t they come? What do we have to do?” The answer — field a winning team — seemed so simple, yet so elusive.
And then, after 21 years, Bronfman decided to sell the team. He entrusted the sale to Brochu, who took up the gauntlet: “I made it a personal challenge. Businessmen are often portrayed as cold, emotionless people, who make decisions only on the eventual possibility of making a lot of money.… But that’s not it at all. What fascinated me, what motivated me, was keeping the Expos in Montreal, in the hands of Quebecers. One of them being me.…”
My TWP Plays presents five important plays written by Jack Winter while he was resident playwright at Toronto Workshop Productions, one of the first great troupes of the experimental and alternative theatre movement. The carnivalesque style of the selected works in this anthology reflects the turbulence, contradictions, and subversion of the social revolution during which they were written and first produced, as well as the cultural politics at a time when Canadian artists were investigating new, non-colonial, and distinctly Canadian forms of expression that would define the nation and challenge received artistic styles and practices. Extensive notes by the playwright and a foreword by the director and dramaturge Bruce Barton (University of Toronto) illuminate an important two-decade period in the evolution of contemporary Canadian theatre, while providing glimpses of the artistic conditions, the cultural environment, and the personal circumstances within which the works were created.
Before Compiègne (1963) wildly imagines Joan of Arc’s final days.
The Mechanic (1964) and its experiments in form and staging offer a contemporary take on Molière and the commedia dell’arte.
The Death of Woyzeck (1965) dismantles, reconstructs, and rewrites Georg Büchner’s famous fragmentary original of 1837.
Ten Lost Years (1974) presents a highly theatricalized full-length dramatization of Barry Broadfoot’s collected interviews with Canadian survivors of the Great Depression.
You Can’t Get Here from There (1975) examines Canada’s involvement in the 1973 death of ousted Chilean president Salvador Allende.