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All Books

All Books in this Collection

  • Sea Over Bow

    Sea Over Bow

    $19.95

    After her marriage of 25 years ended badly, Linda Kenyon was determined to never put herself in the way of a broken heart again. But then she met an extraordinary man, and in an act of great courage — or foolishness — decided to sell everything she owned and sail across the ocean with him. Sea Over Bow: Crossing the North Atlantic is the account of that journey. It takes readers to the middle of the ocean, a place most people have only imagined. It describes the trail of sparkling blue-green light that traces their path across the water at night. Curious dolphins who frolic around the boat. The rising sun that shines through the yellow and green stripes of the spinnaker and bathes the cockpit in soft warm light. Throwing up in a pail. Dinty Moore stew straight from the can when the sea is too rough to even attempt a meal on the gimbal stove. Hurricane force winds and safe harbours. Along with the challenges of nature is also the time to think, and dream, and make sense of life. Sea Over Bow is ultimately a love story, the story of falling in love with a man, and of falling in love with the simple life on board a small craft in a large ocean, surrounded by the beauties of the natural world.

  • Sea Trial

    Sea Trial

    $21.95

    Shortlisted for the 2019 Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-FictionAn adventure story set against the backdrop of a son trying to understand his fatherAfter a 25-year break from boating, Brian Harvey circumnavigates Vancouver Island with his wife, his dog, and a box of documents that surfaced after his father’s death. John Harvey was a neurosurgeon, violinist, and photographer who answered his door a decade into retirement to find a sheriff with a summons. It was a malpractice suit, and it did not go well. Dr. Harvey never got over it. The box contained every nurse’s record, doctor’s report, trial transcript, and expert testimony related to the case. Only Brian’s father had read it all — until now.In this beautifully written memoir, Brian Harvey shares how after two months of voyaging with his father’s ghost, he finally finds out what happened in the O.R. that crucial night and why Dr. Harvey felt compelled to fight the excruciating accusations.

  • Sea Winter Salmon

    Sea Winter Salmon

    $29.95

    Sea Winter Salmon is about a great salmon river, the St. John River on the Lower North Shore of Quebec, and its most important visitor, the illustrious Atlantic salmon. It was the Canadian and American railroad magnate James J. Hill who travelled the Gulf of the St. Lawrence and in 1889 established the log camp that has now been in the family for five generations. A family memoir and a guide to a river’s ecology and the life cycle of the Salmo salar, the book is also about what it takes to be a good conservationist in a remote and delicate region. Author and photographer Mari Hill Harpur tracks the special relationship between the salmon and the people of the river through diaries, legal documents, scientific data, rare archival photographs and her own photographic collection. Dramatic, tragic, amusing, and authoritative, Sea Winter Salmon addresses itself to readers of history, biography, and conservation biology – and to fisher women and men everywhere.

  • Seal Intestine Raincoat

    Seal Intestine Raincoat

    $19.95

    After a severe winter storm and extended power failure, thousands become trapped in their homes during one of the coldest weeks of the year. For one small group of people, thrown together by catastrophe, a state of anxiety and claustrophobia follows as they discover no precautions have been made for a disaster of this magnitude. When the dark and cold continues, endurance turns to despair and plans for survival begin to emerge as Fred, a fifteen-year-old boy from England, is forced to take charge in unpredictable ways. Alongside its bleak portrayal of social instability during economic collapse, Seal Intestine Raincoat unearths the powerful human instincts that convert helpless fear into the desire to adapt.

  • Search Box Bed

    Search Box Bed

    $18.95

    There is no history of poetry without love poetry, and there is no history of media without pornography. After his first collection of poems received a starred review from Quill & Quire, Darryl Whetter turned his attention from evolution in the natural world to the co-evolution of love, sex and media. Urging readers to ?fill the tiny / unmade bed of the search box,? these alluring poems build on radically changing communication technologies to explore a new sexuality that does (and does not) dare to tweet its name. Here, finally, is the language of digital love.

  • Search for the Blue Goose

    Search for the Blue Goose

    $24.95

    Search for the Blue Goose

  • Searching for Petronius Totem

    Searching for Petronius Totem

    $21.95

    A quirky, comical and provocative novel… complete with robotic flying chickens.

    Following a dramatic break-up with his long-suffering wife, Jack Vesoovian retreats to a Hamilton rooming house, where he impulsively decides to take to the road to track down his life-long colleague, Petronius Totem.

    Petronius Totem has disappeared following the unlikely success of his memoir, Ten Thousand Busted Chunks, praised for its searing honesty. But when it is discovered to be a pack of lies, Petronius Totem becomes universally despised.

    Meanwhile, Jack faces another grim truth: the world is being taken over by a sinister multi-national Fibre-Optic Catering business that has created a chicken-like food matter than can actually fly. Can he and Petronius Totem escape into a virtual future that is free of ChickLit and flying fibre-optic chickens? Or will Jack return home to his wife Elaine whom it seems, with good reason, will shoot him on sight?

    Searching for Petronius Totem is a love story for the age: a wild, imaginative, and utterly original novel.

  • Searching for Sam

    Searching for Sam

    $16.95

    Mathieu lives in the street by choice, eschewing drugs, cigarettes, and alcohol. His main companion is his dog Sam, a pitbull, who he says has helped keep him alive. When Sam disappears, Mathieu’s frantic search to find her brings him into confrontation with the secrets of his own past and the pain and grief that drove him onto the street. The novel is a monologue from Mathieu’s point of view, a sort of confessional in which Mathieu opens up to the reader. In flashbacks to his past, we discover the tragedies of his life and the people he has lost. In this book about survivors, Bienvenu takes a tender look at the underside of our cities, and the people that get left behind.

  • Searching for Serafim

    Searching for Serafim

    $21.95

    Finalist, Governor General’s Literary Award

    The life and legacy of Serafim “Joe” Fortes, a trailblazing Black lifeguard, who became a cultural icon in a racist society

    Searching for Serafim is a layered exploration of the life of Vancouver’s first lifeguard, Serafim “Joe” Fortes. A Trinidad native who arrived on the shores of Canada in 1885, Fortes was heralded as a hero in Vancouver for saving dozens of people from drowning, and his funeral drew the largest crowd ever recorded in the city’s history. Since his passing, Fortes has been commemorated with a Canada Post-issued stamp and local buildings named in his honour. Yet, little has been discussed about how he navigated an openly white supremacist society as an Afro Latino man.

    In Searching for Serafim, author Ruby Smith Diaz seeks to unravel the complicated legacy of a local legend to learn more about who Fortes was as a person. She draws from historical documents to form an insightful critique of the role that settler colonialism and anti-Black racism played in Fortes’s publicized story and reconstructs his life, from over a century later, through a contemporary Black perspective, weaving poetry and personal reflections alongside archival research.

    The result is a moving and thought-provoking book about displacement, identity, and dignity. Searching for Serafim conjures a new side to one of Vancouver’s most beloved – and misunderstood – public figures.

    With black-and-white photos.

  • Searching for Signal

    Searching for Signal

    $17.95

    Searching for Signal is a long poem that bears witness to the quotidian, disorienting shifts of grief as a father makes his way toward his death over 3 seasons. This is mourning conducted in situ, the gift of observing one man quietly taking his leave and the impacted hole it leaves behind. The language is mix of narrative lyric and fragmentary breath-spaced verse; the silences are his private silences, alluding to memory, family trauma and shame. The hunter, the gatherer who never stopped trying for epiphanies, a daughter engaged in the same effort, frankly facing the span of a swift human lifetime that may pass without revelation or resolution. If there is redemption it is in the daughter bringing clarity to the physical condition of living and dying and the emotional intricacies of existence.

  • Searching for Terry Punchout

    Searching for Terry Punchout

    $19.95

    Shortlisted for the Amazon Canada First Novel Award

    Shortlisted for the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize

    Garden State meets King Leary in this slapshot debut novel.

    Adam Macallister’s sportswriting career is about to end before it begins, but he’s got one last shot: a Sports Illustrated profile about hockey’s most notorious goon, the reclusive Terry Punchout-who also happens to be Adam’s estranged father. Adam returns to Pennington, Nova Scotia, where Terry now lives in the local rink and drives the Zamboni. Going home means drinking with old friends, revisiting neglected relationships, and dealing with lingering feelings about his father and dead mother-and discovering that his friends and family are kinder and more complicated than he ever gave them credit for. Searching for Terry Punchout is a charming and funny tale of hockey, small-town Maritime life, and how, despite our best efforts, we just can’t avoid turning into our parents.

    “An assured debut, wryly funny.”Literary Review of Canada

    “A story of a father, a son and hockey that set[s] heart and mind reeling.”—Chris Benjamin, Atlantic Books Today

  • seas move away

    seas move away

    $18.00

    Meditating on exile, loss, diaspora, authoritarian law, and altered ecologies, Joanne Leow’s debut collection spans from the would-be Eden of hyper-planned and surveilled Singapore to an uneasy settling in the Canadian Prairies, seeking answers to the question of what is lost in intensive urban development and the journey across continents. Reflecting on relationships between lovers, parents and children, state and citizen, land and body, seas move away asks what we owe each other across borders and what endures in times of great flux and irreversible ecological change.

  • Seas of South Africa

    Seas of South Africa

    $11.95

    In Seas of South Africa, the sixth volume in the best-selling Submarine Outlaw series, it has been over two years since the young explorer first set sail in his own submarine, with his dog and seagull crew. Now, almost seventeen, Alfred is on the cusp of switching from exploring the world to playing an active environmentalist role in protecting the sea that he loves so dearly. Brought into conflict with the pirate scourge that plagues Africa’s eastern shores, Alfred takes action against them, only to bring them into tireless pursuit of him. Escaping overland to Johannesburg, with a reckless young inventor from Soweto, Alfred discovers that the violence which taints the shores of the continent is deeply embedded in the life of South African society, so recently freed from Apartheid. Despairing at the cruelty inflicted upon his friend, Alfred learns that the antidote to violence is not more violence, but the strength of one’s heart and an indomitable determination to improve the world, as exemplified in the life of Nelson Mandela. Armed with new inspiration, Alfred is ready to become the eco-warrior he was destined to be.

  • Season of Apples

    Season of Apples

    $15.95

    Ann Copeland jumps over the convent wall with Season of Apples, a book of stories about ordinary people surprised by their own sudden growth. With their special brand of serious good humour, Copeland’s characters gently push readers towards their own self-knowledge. Men and women of all ages star in Season of Apples, and all find themselves at some kind of threshold or on the brink of a life change.

    In “Another Country,” a mother finally connects with her own mother when she recognizes, in the midst of her son’s dangerous illness, that “each generation is another country.” A woman playing the piano for an Easter service in a home for the aged knows the frailty of human individuality, her own included, in “On the Other Side.” In the title story, Leora May, colourless, habit-ridden, and chained to her small-town routine, rediscovers her capacity for joy when she’s chosen to act in a television commercial. And, in the hilarious, odd, yet moving “Why Eat Pot Roast When You Can Sing?” identical twins Flor and Chlor sing through their lives with pianist Learned and drummer Free, and Flor and Learned’s terrific tap-dancing son Robert.

  • Seasons Before the War

    Seasons Before the War

    $29.95

    Originally written for a Christmas concert given by internationally-renowned children’s choir Shallaway, Bernice Morgan’s Seasons Before the War is a delightful, unsentimental remembrance of growing up in St. John’s, Newfoundland just before the city, and the world, changed irrevocably with the advent of WWII.

    This slightly fictionalized telling explores the delights of every day and of each season: how Bernice and her siblings played and passed their time?watching the fire trucks put out fires at the dump, going for messages at the local shops, listening to stories by the kitchen stove?and the bigger moments of starting school, and anticipating Christmas. Charged with the bright wonder of a child’s view, the book nevertheless contains the shadow of change; although mentioned only in the book’s title, war and its implications for childhood hang quietly over all.

    Painted illustrations, by acclaimed UK-based illustrator Brita Granstr?m, beautifully capture the sweet nostalgia of Morgan’s words and the joys of childhood. Soft and playful, yet detailed and accurate, the illustrations add immeasurably to the book, making it as much an art book as a storybook.

    With beautiful paper, thoughtful design, and exceptional production values, this is a book to be shared between generations, and to be treasured.

  • Secession/Insecession

    Secession/Insecession

    $23.00

    Secession/Insecession is a homage to the acts of reading, writing and translating poetry. In it, Chus Pato’s Galician biopoetics of poet and nation, Secession – translated by Erín Moure – joins Moure’s Canadian translational biopoetics, Insecession. To Pato, the poem is an insurrection against normalized language; to Moure, translation itself disrupts and reforms poetics and the possibility of the poem. In solidarity with Pato, Moure echoes Barthes: “A readerly text is something I cannot re-produce (today I cannot write like Atwood); a writerly text is one I can read only if I utterly transform my reading regime. I now recognize a third text alongside the readerly and the writerly: let’s call it the intranslatable.”

    In Secession/Insecession, a major European poet and a known Canadian poet, born on opposite sides of the Atlantic in the mid twentieth century and with vastly different experiences of political life, forge a 21st century relationship of thinking and creation. The result is a major work of memoir, poetics, trans-ethics and history.

    Chus Pato’s Secession was chosen as 2009 Book of the Year by the Revista das Letras, literary supplement of Galicia Hoxe (Galicia Today).