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All Books in this Collection
Showing 6369–6384 of 9311 results
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Smoked
$18.95Detective Lane returns for a fourth time in Smoked, Garry Ryan’s darkest mystery to date.When Jennifer Towers is found dead in a graffiti-tagged dumpster, Detectives Lane and Harper must decipher the art to find its artist–and possibly the victim’s killer. What begins as an unconventional murder investigation leads to the disturbing discovery of two abused children, whose father becomes a prime suspect in the case. In true Detective Lane form, Lane must protect the damaged youths while keeping his own family in tact. With a surprising shift in tone, Smoked highlights the Detective Lane mystery series as one that reminds us of this generation’s obligation to the children in its care.
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Smoking Mirror
$12.00Smoking Mirror is a selection of new prose poems based on the imagery of Aztec mythology and folklore. Illustrated with reproductions of Aztec paintings and stone cuttings, Smoking Mirror is a compelling work by the author of The Viridical Book of the Silent Planet, Migration of Light, The Expanding Room, and Paracelcus.
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Smouldering Incense, Hammered Brass
$14.95Heather Burles describes her experiences travelling in the countryside, renting a small house in Damascus, learning to speak Arabic, meeting people, and avoiding trouble. As a woman travelling alone, she has access to women’s lives and is often invited into their homes. Smouldering Incense, Hammered Brass is written with clarity and grace.
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Smuggler’s Blues
$22.95Mobsters, murder, betrayal, and revenge are the raw components of this candid look into the day-to-day life of a modern-day marijuana smuggler. Told from the viewpoint of an impressionable young entrepreneur named Jay Carter Brown, the book quickly draws the reader into the gritty underbelly of the international drug trade.
The story begins with minor-league smuggling scams between Canada and the Caribbean that soon escalate to multi-ton shipments of grass and hash from the Caribbean and the Middle East. All goes well for a time, but as the stakes grow higher, the inevitable setbacks occur.
When Jay teams up with a crusty old bank robber named Irving, he also inherits a host of other felons who come out of jail to visit his new partner, ex-cons such as: Randy the hit man who liked to practise his fast draw in front of a mirror; Simon, the drug-running pilot; and Chico Perry, who smoked reefer in his pipe while robbing banks and shooting it out with the cops.
Drug-runners, police, jealous friends, and rival gangs all contribute to this extraordinary story told by a young man who became involved at the highest levels of the drug trade, and lived to tell about it. Smuggler’s Blues is a rare opportunity to experience life in another world — a world where survival relies on brains, brawn, and a generous measure of good luck.
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Snake in Fridge
$14.95Snake in Fridge examines the everyday lives of not so everyday characters. A group of eight misfits living in a misfit house go about their daily business in true Fraser style: Corbett works in porno and owns a pet snake; Caddie is a stripper; Travis is a busboy who aspires to be a waiter; and one of the people living in their house is a murderer. After Corbett’s "dead" snake escapes, bizarre things begin to happen in the house. The darkness in this play may not be the result of the lives led by the characters, but the house they live in.
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Snatch
$9.95‘Snatch’ is a hilarious and creepy collection of poems that may not even be poetry at all. Like a comic novel from an alternate universe, or a fragmented hoax of an autobiography, ‘Snatch’ picks at the vacuous horror of suburbia and exposes a world of small beauty and perfect moments amid TV-induced nostalgia and impending violence. In her mysterious and funny debut, everybody’s favourite Surrey grrrl, Judy MacInnes Jr. makes the complex seem simple, the simple complex, and she has anunearthly talent for making the reader laugh out loud while doing it.
“Even if you hate poetry, ‘Snatch’ goes down kind of like a root beer float, all frothy and fizzy and real smooth.” – The Coast
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Snow Bodies
$24.95From her own harrowing experience Hudson graphically renders the deadly underbelly of society and her descent into the abyss of drug addiction and prostitution. In direct prose, without fear, shame or explanation, and without imposing hindsight or societal values onto her narrative, Hudson takes the reader with her on a terrifying journey to the bottom. Snow Bodies is a heartbreaking reminder of the horrors occurring daily on Canada’s city streets.
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Snow Formations
$14.95Weary of her humdrum existence, a woman packs up and heads for Arctic Quebec, where she hopes to find a new lease on life teaching native children. She quickly discovers, however, that the Inuit have far more to teach her than she, them, as she slowly learns that each day on this earth is a rich sensory experience, not merely to be lived, but savoured. Loosely based on the author?s own three-year experience in settlements along the Hudson-Ungava coast, Snow Formations takes a realistic look at the modern Inuit world through post-industrial eyes, always walking the fine line between idealism and cynicism, hope and despair. Steeped in contradiction, this is Canada?s North with all its trappings: igloos and pool halls, raw meat and radio, dogsleds and diapers. The North may be great and white, but it is not always pretty. Snow Formations began as a thirteen-minute commission for the CBC Radio series “Home and Away,” featuring new work by five Canadian poets writing from a cross-cultural perspective.
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Snow Job
$26.95“Smart, beautifully written, and really, really, funny satire featuring Arthur Beauchamp.” –– The Globe and Mail
Finalist for the Stephen Leacock Humour Award
In this zany political thriller, the leader of the despotic Asian nation of Bhashyistan declares war on Canada after a limo bearing its visiting delegation is blown sky-high in snowy Ottawa. The suspected assassin, Abzal Erzhan, a Bhashyistani revolutionary, disappears. Was he kidnapped, was he murdered, or did he get away scot-free? Enter famed trial lawyer Arthur Beauchamp, dragged from retirement on his idyllic Gulf Island farm. As he prepares to represent Erzhan, he must ponder a hard, ethical question: is the alleged terrorist guilty, or has he been set up to take the fall? Arthur soon finds himself tangled up with wily civil servants, scheming cabinet members, an abrasive Bhashyistani propagandist, and a government spy who stumbles about like a bull in a china shop. Meanwhile, the international pressure mounts as Canadian oil executives are taken hostage while three Canadian female tourists, fearing terrorism, hide out in Bhashyistani’s wintry wilds.
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Snow Melts First in the Middle of the Slough
$12.95These poems recall and reimagine a family’s life in Spillimacheen, British Columbia – no plumbing, no central heating — and a childhood spent outdoors, framed by the Rockies and Purcell Mountains.
Wound through this collection are the tensions and hostilities that go back generations, to the great-great grandparents who immigrated from urban centres and settled in isolation. Women forced to relinquish their children to the lure of the rivers and men who trudged the trapline and worked in mines.
The voice in these poems, never sentimental and rarely tender, winds through birch leaves, birdsong and snake skins. Circumspect, it attempts to gather the gnawing secrets of a family’s history as they negotiated the hardships of rural life. The language is visceral — mud and blood and dust — and juxtaposed by the psychological agonies of waiting. Throughout, landscape bears down and uplifts, in unequal measure. “Bats flicker over the sloughs, the last reflected daylight. Ahead, the house lights are on.” At its heart, a little girl rides a dust horse in the parking lot outside the bar, where her father drinks; years later, she waits in the truck for hours, to drive him home.
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Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew
$19.95
“Consistently minimalist and nostalgic but also variously touching, hilarious, and sad.” — Booklist
Ben is a performance artist about to enter his forties. His father and mother are both dead, and his brother, Jake, is a lousy source of information. So when he begins to struggle with a particularly nagging memory, he doesn’t know where to turn. The memory: the assassination — by his mother — of a prominent neo-Nazi.
In a non-chronological montage of memories, Ben travels back and forth through the events of his life, some of which seemed trivial at the time but are important now: his childhood summers at a cottage in central Ontario, his teenage years in a Toronto suburb, his disastrous university career, the calamity that precipitated his brother’s institutionalization.
Stuart Ross’s first novel is a blend of suburban realism and out-of-body surrealism.
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So It Won’t Go Away
$16.95Lent continues to explore the spatial viewpoints of the unique, often funny, dysfunctional Connelly family, to whom readers were first introduced in his previous experimental fiction, Monet’s Garden. Then, as now, we get to hear and see Neil, Rick and Jane dissect their own thinking, second-guess their destinies, and generally revel in and reinvent their relationships with each other as they confront their addictions, dreams, and failures. Throughout the ride, Lent’s humour and Lent himself transcends the page to join us through the read. While sharing such intimacy, he engages us in another dialogue, one that has a lot to do with fiction’s relationship to reality, one that rearranges our fixed perception of the writer’s place in the written work.
“I can think of no Canadian writer who so thoroughly positions us in front of the mirror that might offer us at once both reality and the imagined…”
– Robert Kroetsch“I think what I most love in Lent’s writing is the way it lifts ordinary speech toward lyric without sacrificing its ordinariness.”
– Don McKay -
So Long
$21.00It is Katie MacLeod’s fifty-fifth birthday. While her daughters throw her a celebratory brunch, Katie takes stock of her life and her loves. Will she take a chance on her internet penpal, Francois, and embrace this virtual romance?
In gentle prose, Louise Desjardins continues her observations of human relationships. In the small town of Arntfield, where the narrator spent her childhood, we join her as she recalls the mythical Look-Out Country Club, the site of past sins where her father played the violin, and the MacLeod Music Store.
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So Long, Marianne (tp)
$22.95The story of the enigmatic woman who captured the hearts of two extraordinary artists — now in trade paper
At 22, Marianne Ihlen travelled to the Greek island of Hydra with writer Axel Jensen. While Axel wrote, Marianne kept house, until Axel abandoned her and their newborn son for another woman. One day while Marianne was shopping in a little grocery store, in walked a man who asked her to join him and some friends outside at their table. He introduced himself as Leonard Cohen, then a little-known Canadian poet.
Complemented by previously unpublished poems, letters, and photographs, So Long, Marianne is an intimate, honest account of Marianne’s life story — from her youth in Oslo, her romance with Axel, to her life in an international artists colony on Hydra in the 1960s, and beyond. The subject of one of the most beautiful love songs of all time, Marianne Ihlen proves to be more than a muse to Axel and Leonard; her journey of self-discovery, romance, and heartache is lovingly recounted in So Long, Marianne.
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So Many Doors
$16.95In a support group for bereaved parents, Shayla, Lyle, Linee, and Jed each fight their personal demons in the search for life after the death of one’s child. Set in the vast and remote landscape of Whitehorse, Yukon, playwright Celia McBride plunges into these characters’ painful struggle to find a voice for their grief.
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So Many Windings
$28.95Reluctant amateur detective, Reverend Charles Lauchlan, departs the prairie city of Winnipeg and travels abroad to Scotland with his fiancé Maggie on a bicycle tour of the highlands. Two near fatal accidents put members of the tour on edge and, to make matters worse, a shadowy figure seems to be observing their every move. Stuck in the remote highland countryside, the group is thrown back on their own resources. While Charles and Maggie are trying to decipher what these strange events mean, they make another grisly discovery. It’s murder most foul and we’re not just talking about Scottish weather. So Many Windings is the second in a three book series that began with Put on an Armour of Light (winner of the Michael Van Rooy Award for Genre Fiction). Deftly wrought, meticulously researched, and scintillating with charm and period prose, Macdonald weaves a winding, cross-country tale that will require all of the detective’s ingenuity and test the measure of his resolve.