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 5265–5280 of 9481 results
-
Open Arms
$23.95Bessie Smith Connolly has lived with her Nova Scotia grandparents since she was small. But at seventeen—grieving the death of her steadfast grandfather, smarting from a split with the boy she loves—she escapes to Saskatoon to be with her mother, Isabel.
Bittersweet, clear-eyed, and deeply affecting, this marvellous debut novel charts Bessie’s course as she makes her way through her exploded family and out into the world.
-
Open Pit
$19.95El Salvador, 2005: a group of Canadian human-rights activists are taken hostage by a former revolutionary fighter who demands that a new gold mine stops production. For Danielle Byrd, the situation is all too familiar, as she was there twenty years previously as an embedded journalist with a guerrilla faction during the country’s civil war. Now, her daughter Aida must herself travel to the scarred landscape and choose her allies carefully if she wants to see her mother alive once more.
With character-driven action and imagery reminiscent of Georges Arnaud’s The Wages of Fear and a complex plot that recalls John Le Carré’s The Constant Gardener, Open Pit explores the legacy of violent conflict in a complex, shifting present.
-
Open Season
$16.95A Guatemalan journalist is kidnapped, and the only message from her kidnappers is the murder of her lawyer. In a race against time, Luc Vanier sets about reconstructing her life, through the sordid world of human trafficking, the secretive underbelly of a multinational mining corporation, and the hiding places of desperate refugees. When Vanier is brutally warned off the investigation, he throws away the rule book and goes after the villains with a vengeance.
-
Open Your Heart
$19.95A much-celebrated auto-fictional feminist memoir, finally available in English.
In this frank and unforgettable book, celebrated Québécois writer Alexie Morin becomes the subject of her own story as she places a childhood friendship under a microscope. An autobiographical novel set in a small industrial town in Quebec during the 1990s, Open Your Heart recounts the story of a difficult friendship between two girls brought together by illness and operations suffered at a young age. One girl suffers from severe strabismus, while the other was born blue. The first, defiant, feels that something is wrong with her, while the second is an angelic child loved by all. One becomes a writer, and the other dies at eighteen, during an operation that should have saved her life.
In this debut novel, Morin stakes out an exceptional pursuit for truth in these old memories as she grapples with death, love, bonding and solitude.
-
Operating Room Confidential
$18.95Go behind the scenes of the OR in this “fact-filled, poignant, and funny” account by an anesthesiologist (Booklist)
What really happens in the operating room of a hospital? Is real life just like ER, Grey’s Anatomy, or House?
Even patients who’ve spent time in the operating room don’t really know much about them — thanks to the important work of anesthesiologists like Dr. Paul Whang. But here, he takes readers into the hospital and past the OR doors — fully alert.
Combining personal stories with staff experiences, he reveals hidden truths about what goes on during surgery and recounts both the humdrum and the quirky, strange, and bizarre occurrences that shape a regular hospital day. He answers questions such as:
- What do doctors talk about during your surgery?
- If a surgical instrument falls to the floor, is the five-second rule observed?
- What characters do doctors encounter on a typical twenty-four-hour on-call shift?
- What are the personality quirks of doctors who practise different specialties?
Operating Room Confidential is based on real people and actual incidents and takes the reader on a journey that unveils the way the hospital works in an accessible, conversational style, without intimidating medical jargon. Insightful and funny, this is a must-read for the curiosity seeker and anyone who has been or will be on the operating room table.
-
Operation Stealth Seed
$18.95NYPD Detective Nicola Cortese, veteran of three tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, is leading a routine drug bust at a warehouse in the Bronx, but the SWAT team Commander pulls rank and starts a firefight that gets Cortese?s partner killed. The tragedy triggers combat flashbacks, sleepless nights with cold sweats, nightmares, and violent outbursts during which he assaults fellow officers. He is demoted and transferred to a desk job in Operations. For months, all his appeals are denied. But when a new Precinct Commander returns him to active duty, he is elated — until he?s told Captain Chase expects him to act out again and get kicked off the Force. His first case, a B & E homicide, leads him to uncover an international conspiracy that is using a genetically engineered seed to take control of the world?s wheat. This draws him into deadly conflict with Corporate power backed by US Intelligence. Haunted by issues from his military past, he must survive attacks by contract mercenaries, neutralize threats to loved ones, prove his innocence when framed for a Capital Crime and unravel the Stealth Seed Agenda. He has an ally, a therapist who is also a Marine, but can they clear up his symptoms before it?s too late?
-
Opium_37
$16.95On the eve of World War II in a Parisian café, Anaïs Nin and June Miller meet again after years and an ocean apart. There, they share the space with some of Paris’s notorious and eccentric artists who are an orchestra of contrasting voices, reflecting on art and misery; creativity and identity; female sexuality and power. They battle with words and wills, a lingering violence in the air. Inspired by the real life, Anais Nin, June Miller and Antonin Artaud, Catherine Leger explores the language of power and the role of art for its creator and the world around them.
-
Optic Nerve
$22.95*Shortlist 2024 JM Abraham Poetry Award*
Poems using fervent whimsy and wordplay to examine photography and seeing.
Peering inside eyeballs, pondering the paradox of absent stars, and meditating on street scenes by André Kertész, these poems squint sidelong at our ways of seeing the world. Through playful poems about photography and visual perception, Hollett dissects auroras and quarks, atmospheric phenomena, potatoes, bomb craters and peat bog cadavers. This darkly comic collection is shadowed by entoptic paparazzi, haunted by peripheral visions. Born of attentive walking and looking, of footsteps and snapshots, it bears witness to art history and alluvial light, portable keyholes, the pandemic, climate change, and the sheer strangeness of seeing everyday things with ecstatic eyes.
-
Oracle Bone
$19.95A magic-realist novel set in seventh-century China featuring ghosts, martial arts, and the transformative oracle bone.
Life in seventh-century China teems with magic, fox spirits, and demons; there is a fervent belief that the extraordinary resides within the lives of both commoners and royalty. During the years when the empress Wu Zhao gains ascendancy in the Tang court, her evil-minded lover Xie becomes obsessed with finding and possessing the oracle bone, a magical object that will bestow immortal powers on him. Standing in his way is Qilan, an eccentric Daoist nun who rescues an orphaned girl named Ling from being sold into slavery; Qilan takes her under her wing, promising to train her so she may avenge her parents’ murders. In another part of the city, a young monk named Harelip questions his faith and his attraction to other men as he helps the elder monk Xuanzang to complete his translation of the Heart Sutra, the sacred Buddhist scripture. Meanwhile, as the mysteries and powers of the missing oracle bone are revealed, it remains to be seen whether Qilan will be able to stop Xie from gaining possession of the magical bone, and at what cost.
This extraordinary magic-realist novel by Singapore-born author Lydia Kwa employs and subverts traditional tropes of Chinese mythology to tell a tale of greed, faith, and female empowerment with a wickedly modern sensibility.
-
ORACULE
$16.95ORACULE occurs at the intersection of poetry and theatre. Its characters inhabit a classical and cosmological world where psychic phenomena constantly threaten to impinge upon the arc of combat occurring between the women trapped within. Influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, the writings of Plato, the films of Pier Paolo Pasolini, and The Odyssey, ORACULE approaches self and identity through a fractal, performative lens, subverting Socratic dialogue. Through lyric expressions of dream, theatrical dialogue, the engagements of chorus, anti-chorus, and song, readers may pause to enter ORACULE before the inevitable exile: the result of such engagement is to be cast permanently from the world of reason.
-
Orchard Keepers, The
$22.95Finalist for the Book Design Award at the 2018 Alberta Book Publishing Awards!
Robert Pepper-Smith’s trilogy of novels chronicling the lives of those with deep roots in the orchard lands of British Columbia comes full circle with this volume, collecting newly revised editions of The Wheel Keeper and House of Spells with Sanctuary.
The Wheel Keeper introduced readers to Michael Guzzo, raised in one of the many immigrant families who flocked to the vineyards and orchards of the Kootenays. When the government plans to flood his village for a hydroelectric project, young Michael seeks escape with his rebellious cousin Maren, who is experiencing her own story of displacement.
In House of Spells, Rose and Lacey are two teenagers from the region who share a vital connection to Michael. When Rose becomes pregnant, the wealthy Mr Giacomo offers to raise the child, but can this mysterious benefactor be trusted? Or is there something sinister going on behind the local entrepreneur’s offer?
Finally, in the never-before-published Sanctuary, the stories of Michael, Rose and Lacey merge after Lacey goes in search of Michael in Central America. These two seekers, estranged from their homeland, must face down the forces of industry and politics that threaten their life-sustaining connections to land, identity and memory.
-
Orchard, The
$15.95Sarena Parmar’s The Orchard (After Chekhov) is an adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, told through the eyes of a Sikh farming family in the Okanagan Valley, Canada. Set in 1967, the play offers a fresh perspective on our history, and a subversive look at ethnicity within the classical western canon.
Still grieving the loss of her youngest son, the matriarch of the Basran family returns home after five years abroad in India. But all is not well; the family she left behind is unravelling and their orchard has fallen into foreclosure. With the bank calling and relations strained, will the Basrans be able to save their beloved orchard in time?
Inspired by the playwright’s own childhood, The Orchard (After Chekhov) is a bold new adaptation that confronts life, loss, and the immigrant experience with bravery and beauty.
-
Orchidelirium
$14.95Orchidelirium is a hothouse hybrid of fact and fiction, research and hypothesis, scent and sex. The name of the flower itself is derived from the Greek word â “òorchisâ” meaning testis. Through their resemblance to human and animal sexual organs, orchids were thought to stimulate lust. In fact, it was long believed that the flowers sprang from the spilled semen of mating animals. For the Victorian Alice O’Keefe, who established one of America’s great collections of orchids (before venturing into flora introduction), the delirium leads to environmental disaster. For Frances O’Keefe, the hothouse her ancestry built and which she fiercely protects, will once again fill with the flower of legend—and orchidelirium.
-
Ordinary Decent Criminal, An
$16.00Ordinary Decent Criminal, An
-
Ordinary Hours
$20.00Sophomore collection of exquisite precision and musicality from a classically trained pianist
In Ordinary Hours, the follow-up to Karen Enns’ Gerald Lampert Award-nominated first collection, That Other Beauty, we revisit Enns’ rural Mennonite childhood, replete with the sensuousness of “diesel fuel” and “hot peaches.” Enns also explores the Mennonite exodus from Russia, tracking its faint but unmistakable reverberations in the daily lives of its survivors and revealing the redemptive character of that dailiness. Reading an Enns poem feels effortless: her rhythms and phrasing are so minutely calibrated that the poem unfolds as if of its own accord:
It was the ashtray on the arm of the chair,
books lining the stairs, tapping rain,
the smell of soup in the kitchen
and black bread and nothing more.
What exists, existed there.
The spirit floundering and being saved
again and again in the ordinary hours.
The fountain in the garden like a simple well,
the poplars, past the hedge,
the sommerhaus with its green roof.
~from “William Street Elegies” -
Ordinary Magic
$9.95Award-winning writer Meeka Walsh kept these journals while travelling – in Israel, Rome and Russia – and when she was home again. They share magic found in unexpected places – from a waiting room in a Moscow airport where the author enjoys a picnic with friends, to a yard in Winnipeg where an elderly gardener has fashioned himself a lover from a hedge. The journals also share the author’s private journey from a bitter divorce to a renewed sense of herself and life’s possibilities. “An intimate and intelligent journey through countries both foreign and familiar, real and imagined. I like the woman who wrote this book, who allowed me to see the daily unfolding of her ordinary and magical life.”-Lorna Crozier.