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All Books in this Collection
Showing 561–576 of 9481 results
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Almost Summer 1
$22.95“Worth a binge read.”
— Anisa Rawhani, Broken PencilAnthony’s in love with Emily who’s got a crush on Raph and Matthew has a thing for Jennifer while Michelle’s head over heels for… Well, you get the picture. Almost Summer is high school at its finest, which means it’s high school at its worst: Awkward romances, boring jobs, nosy parents, gym class, exams, and endless homework. No heavy-handed, forced drama here–but rather an honest and funny account of what high school life really feels like when you’re in the middle of it. An engaging, entertaining portrait of friendship, love, and everything in-between that will have readers young and old cracking up in recognition.
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Almost Summer 2
$22.95“Worth a binge read.”
— Anisa Rawhani, Broken PencilThe school year is almost over, which means summer is right around the corner. Michelle wants to get a job at a day camp so she can hang out with some guy she has a crush on, Matthew is spending more and more time with Mary, and Emily just wants Anthony to leave her alone. But before they can lounge around the pool and eat watermelon all day, our heroes still have to deal with the pressing matter of those pesky final exams standing in the way of absolute freedom. Volume 2 of the Almost Summer saga brings back all the characters from the previous book for another slice of authentic teenage everyday life in all it’s pain and glory!
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Almost Summer 3
$22.95“Worth a binge read.”
— Anisa Rawhani, Broken PencilThe whole Almost Summer gang is back to take on the biggest challenge it has ever faced : the final year of high school. The third chapter in this four parts series features such dramatic events as Matthew refusing to take off his hat for the graduation picture, washing his hair for the first time in forever and finally asking Naomi out! Otherwise, it’s business as usual for Emily, Anthony and Michelle – which means they are bored, don’t really know what they want out of life and don’t really care either. They’re still typical teenagers and nothing, not even the fact that their lives are about to change forever, is ever going to change that.
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Almost Summer 4
$22.95“Worth a binge read.”
— Anisa Rawhani, Broken PencilThe final chapter of the Almost Summer saga features Emily and Anthony looking for an apartment, and Michelle desperately trying to find the perfect dress for prom night. And then the next thing you know school’s out for summer, high school is over and the gang celebrates by going to a cabin in the woods: Barbecues, campfire singalongs, occult rituals… Wait, what?! Things do get a little weird after everyone eats the “special brownies” prepared by Michelle’s mother. This fourth and final volume of Sophie Bédard’s coming-of-age tale is the most sincere, poignant one yet… But also the funniest.
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Almost True
$22.95Almost True is the story of an extraordinary friendship among four women living in a small village in Burgundy during World War II. Madeleine, the eccentric village beauty, is a spinner of stories and dreams. Léa, the doctor’s daughter, is brave and resourceful. Simone, the outsider from Paris, has a secret of her own to hide, and the hardworking and practical Eugénie struggles to keep her vineyard alive. When Eugénie’s younger brother, the reckless and handsome Gaston, is suddenly missing, the village buzzes with rumour. All four women think they know the true story of Gaston’s fate, and each of them is wrong. But the truth will bind them together forever.
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Almost Visible
$24.95Tess has just moved to Montreal from Nova Scotia, and seeks to lose herself by involving herself in the lives of others. She befriends an older man while delivering meals to the elderly. Her interest in his past veers into obsession after furtively going through his photos and letters and “borrowing” his journal.
Though fact and fiction are blurred, they reveal a man shaken by political polarization and repression in his Latin-American homeland.
Tess learns about a young, passionate man in the 1970s forced to reconcile his love for a militant young woman and his dedication to his best friend whose family is on the other side of the political divide. As she delves deeper into Mr. the man?s story, she questions her own life choices, emotions and obsessions.
Exploring cultural and personal memory, Almost Visible reflects on what can happen when a lonely person intervenes in another person’s life.
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Aloha Wanderwell
$24.95In 1922, a 15-year-old girl, fed up with life in a French convent school, answered an ad for a travelling secretary. Tall, blonde, and swaggering with confidence, she might have passed for twenty. She also knew what she wanted: to become the first female to drive around the world. Her name was Aloha Wanderwell.
Aloha’s mission was foolhardy in the extreme. Drivable roads were scarce and cars were alien to much of the world. The Wanderwell Expedition created a specially modified Model T Ford for the journey that featured gun scabbards and a sloped back that could fold out to become a darkroom. All that remained was for Aloha to learn how to drive.
Aloha became known around the globe. She was photographed in front of the Eiffel Tower, parked on the back of the Sphinx, firing mortars in China, and smiling at a tickertape parade in Detroit. By the age of 25, she had become a pilot, a film star, an ambassador for world peace, and the centrepiece of one of the biggest unsolved murder mysteries in California history. Her story defied belief, but it was true. Every bit of it. Except for her name. The American Aloha Wanderwell was, in reality, the Canadian Idris Hall.
Drawing upon Aloha’s diaries and travel logs, as well as films, photographs, newspaper accounts, and previously classified government documents, Aloha Wanderwell reveals the astonishing story of one of the greatest — and most outrageous — explorers of the 1920s.
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Along the 46th
$15.00An interstellar event occurs in your backyard. Time served in a Sudbury jail cell turns unexpected. A mudcat is caught. A prostitute pokes out underneath a hotel bed. A ghostly figure visits a painter. A bag of rotten carrots ruins a friendship. These are just some of the eclectic tales in this newest addition to the mythos of Northern Ontario. Along the 46th features 13 authors, 13 unique perspectives on the space beneath the 46th parallel. Prepare to confront and re-imagine the places we call home, the homes we promised ourselves we’d never revisit, and the promises we thought we could keep.
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Along the Shore
$32.95Along the Shore examines the Toronto waterfront, past and present, through the lens of four lakefront communities and districts — the Scarborough shore (including the Bluffs), the Beach, the Island, and the Lakeshore (New Toronto, Mimico, Humber Bay, and Long Branch). Each retains a direct and immediate connection with Lake Ontario and the natural world. Exploring the history, landscape, geography, and people of each of these waterfront areas reveals a rich heritage that has gone largely unrecognized and is for the most part forgotten.
The book brings to life the stories, many of which have never been told, of the lakefront and the people who have inhabited these special places. It features original interviews with wellknown Canadians like director Norman Jewison, who was raised in the Beach, and swimmer Marilyn Bell. Attention is also paid to the early First Nations presence in each of the featured areas. Historical, anecdotal, descriptive, and at the same time deeply personal, Along the Shoreis more than a local history, it is a layered journey that focuses on the connection between Toronto’s natural waterfront heritage and its people.
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Alphabet
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Alphabet of Desire
$12.00Alphabet of Desire, Ken Norris’s sixteenth book of poetry, brings together two remarkable poetic sequences. ‘The Ascent of Spring’ is a haunting meditation on creativity and renewal. The title sequence, consisting of thirty-nine prose poems, covers everything from Aspects of the Natural to Zen Mondays. An exciting new collection from a writer who has been called “one of the best poets of his generation.”
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Alphabet of the Traveler, The
$16.95In The Alphabet of the Traveler, Corrado Paina has crafted an alphabetical meditation on the motives and concerns of an anonymous traveler who seeks to escape the bonds of time and determination. It is a book for anyone who has ever gone to a foreign country and experienced the delicious freedom of anonymity. Through prose poems that try to carry as little baggage as possible, Paina’s traveler reluctantly finds himself transporting the inevitable souvenirs of the past that collect on every journey, even as he marvels at their ability to mark the way over borders and across time.
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Alphonso Davies
$24.95Built on years of interviews with friends, family, teachers, coaches, and teammates, the first biography of Alphonso Davies, the new face of Canadian men’s soccer
Arguably the most famous Canadian athlete on the planet, Alphonso Davies has been the subject of global attention after bursting onto the scene as a 15-year-old soccer sensation. Since then, he’s won every trophy imaginable with German giant FC Bayern Munich and helped Canada reach the men’s World Cup for the first time in 36 years.
Based on years of original reporting and extensive interviews with his friends, family members, teachers, coaches, teammates, and others from his inner circle, Alphonso Davies: A New Hope paints a complete portrait of the soccer star. The first biography about “Phonzie” covers every angle of his life and career — from the harsh realities of growing up in a refugee camp amidst the Liberian Civil War, to the unique challenges of starting a new life in a foreign country, twice, to his trailblazing path as a Canadian megastar in the world’s most popular sport. Bringing together intimate details and never-before-told stories, author Farhan Devji pulls back the curtain on a person and player who has captured the hearts of a nation and become a shining light for refugees everywhere.
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Alterations
$14.95Alterations is a book of arrival at beginnings. When George Payerle finally escaped city life, he returned to the coast into which he had been born when Vancouver was a much smaller town — a coast where the mountains fall into the sea as waves of rainforest. This is a coast of “shadow weather” amongst cedars and fir where the light of everyday is a Turner painting, a land/seascape suffused with the spirit made visible.
In these poems the old coast of logging and fishing is all but extinct, inhabited by ghosts of men with peaveys in their hands and bulldozers in their eyes. Ghosts with the power to inform us, like the rusted logskidder’s arch standing by the highway as though it were a dinosaur’s hipbones.
These Alterations continue the musical meditations of Payerle’s Last Trip to Oregon, which memorialized the death of his friend, the poet Charles Lillard. The music has moved towards Bach’s cello suites and Jan Garbarek’s loon-like saxophone. The serenity achieved through mourning the death of a friend has moved into transcendent contemplation of the diurnal and the extraordinary — garbage day, George W’s baleful face, Vancouver Island rising like a tsunami in the west, the return of a prodigal daughter — transcendent but never without pain, or death — language many-jewelled as the fangs of “these wolves herding prey toward consummation, and tender yet as ewes with lamb.”
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alterNatives
$18.95A very liberal contemporary couple—Angel, an urban Native science fiction writer, and Colleen, a “non-practising” Jewish intellectual who teaches Native literature—hosts a dinner party. The guests at this little “sitcom” soirée are couples that represent what by now have become the clichéd extremes of both societies: Angel’s former radical Native activist buddies and Colleen’s environmentally concerned vegetarian / veterinarian friends. The menu is, of course, the hosts’ respectful attempt at shorthand for the irreconcilable cultural differences about to come to a head during the evening: moose roast and vegetarian lasagna.
Like all of Drew Hayden Taylor’s work, alterNatives manages to say things about “Whites and Indians” that one is not supposed to talk about—it digs up the carefully buried, raw and pulsing nerve-endings of the unspeakable and exposes them to the hot bright lights of the stage. That he does so with a humour that the politically correct among his audiences continue to miss entirely beneath the sound and fury of their own self-righteous indignation is a measure of his immense talent as a dramatist. In the end, the play is not about cultural differences at all, but instead constitutes a full frontal attack on the personal qualities the sitcom holds most dear and pushes hardest at its audiences: Taylor actually has the temerity to suggest that neither “attitude” nor “sincerity” are enough to address basic human issues, no matter which side of the cultural fence the characters are on. And that’s hard for the pushers of what is considered a globally enlightened culture to take.
Cast of 3 women and 3 men.
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Always Brave, Sometimes Kind
$22.00Winner of the 2021 Alberta Literary Awards’ George Bugnet Award for Fiction
Winner of the 2021 Indie Author Project Award for Alberta
Shortlisted for the 2021 ReLit Award for Fiction
A Casual Optimist Book Cover of NoteAn exciting debut novel told in connected short stories that captures the diverse and complicated networks of people who stretch our communities—sometimes farther than we know.
Set in the cities, reserves, and rural reaches of Alberta, Katie Bickell’s debut novel is told in a series of stories that span the years from 1990 to 2016, through cycles of boom and bust in the oil fields, government budget cuts and workers rights policies, the rising opioid crisis, and the intersecting lives of people whose communities sometimes stretch farther than they know.
We meet a teenage runaway who goes into labour at the West Edmonton Mall, a doctor managing hospital overflow in a time of healthcare cutbacks, a broke dad making extra pay through a phone sex line, a young musician who dreams of fame beyond the reserve, and a dedicated hockey mom grappling with sense of self when she’s no longer needed—or welcome—at the rink.
Always Brave, Sometimes Kind captures a network of friends, caregivers, in-laws, and near misses, with each character’s life coming into greater focus as we learn more about the people around them. Tracing alliances and betrayals from different perspectives over decades, Bickell writes an ode to home and community that is both warm and gritty, well-defined and utterly complicated.