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All Books

All Books in this Collection

  • Strange Heaven

    Strange Heaven

    $19.99

    Winner, Atlantic Independent Booksellers Choice Award, Canadian Authors Association Air Canada Award, Dartmouth Book Award, and Thomas Head Raddall Award
    Shortlisted, Governor General’s Award for Fiction

    She’s depressed, they say. Apathetic. Bridget Murphy, almost eighteen, has had it with her zany family. When she is transferred to the psych ward after giving birth and putting her baby up for adoption, it is a welcome relief — even with the manic ranting of a teen stripper and come-ons of another delusional inmate.

    But this oasis of relative calm is short-lived. Christmas is coming, and Uncle Albert arrives to whisk her back to the bedlam of home and the booze-soaked social life that got her into trouble in the first place. Her grandmother raves from her bed, banging the wall with a bedpan through a litany of profanities. Her father curses while her mother tries to keep the lid on developmentally delayed Uncle Rollie. The baby’s father wants to sue her, and her friends don’t get that she’s changed.

  • Strange Labour

    Strange Labour

    $22.00

    “With this brilliant debut, Penner thoughtfully upends the tropes of postapocalyptic fiction” — Publishers Weekly

    Strange Labour is a powerful meditation on the meaning of humanity in a universe that is indifferent to our extinction, and a provocative re-imagining of many of the tropes and clichés that have shaped the post-apocalyptic novel. Most people have deserted the cities and towns to work themselves to death in the construction of monumental earthworks. The only adults unaffected by this mysterious obsession are a dwindling population that live in the margins of a new society they cannot understand. Isolated, in an increasingly deserted landscape, living off the material remnants of the old order, trapped in antiquated habits and assumptions, they struggle to construct a meaningful life for themselves. Miranda, a young woman who travels across what had once been the West, meets Dave, who has peculiar theories about the apocalypse.

  • Strange September of Levi Pepperfield, The

    Strange September of Levi Pepperfield, The

    $19.95

    This is the story of Levi Pepperfield, who tries to navigate his future as a retired English professor while indulging in the sorrow of lost possibilities that define his past. It’s about the intersection of parallel worlds, of age and youth, of teacher and student, of man and woman, of real and fictional characters. Levi needs to discover his guide, and with the help of a female rabbi who explains to him the concepts of a klipah that has imprisoned his spirit, and tikkun ha’nafesh–the repairing of the soul; of a former student who challenges him to apply his teaching of truth and beauty to his own life; of Esther Greenwood, who steps out of Sylvia Plath’s novel to help him revision his life; and of the ghosts of Walt Whitman and Richard Brautigan, Levi finds his guide and gets a second chance at his own life. Perhaps.

  • Stranger in the Shadows

    Stranger in the Shadows

    $19.95

    Now that Owen has successfully defeated the dragon Kalureth and rid the village of his terror, Owen and Uthgar face an even greater challenge. The Dwarves are reunited with their home in the mountains, but not everyone is open to sharing life with the Humans inhabiting the land. The evil King seeks to rule them all and knows he must get to Owen in order to gain complete dominance and control. When a mysterious figure is sent to capture Owen, he must fight for his life and form an alliance to vanquish the King. With the help of his new friend Kaia, can Owen abolish racial indifference and create peace or will the evil King destroy all that Owen and Uthgar have fought so hard to build?

  • Strangest Dream, The

    Strangest Dream, The

    $22.95

    Lauded as the most eloquent book about Canadian communists and written like drama, The Strangest Dream animates the history and life of militants from the 1930’s to the 1956 Khruschev revelations about Stalin.

    Published originally in 1983, this Third Edition contains a new preface by the author, additional photographs, and previously unpublished letters.

    An antidote to recurrent anti-communist vitriol, The Strangest Dream evokes not only the struggle “to make a better world,” but the warmth, generosity, songs, theatre, art, and exhilaration of party members for whom comradeship meant a way of life. Merrily Weisbord‘s research and contacts unearth historical documents and rare testimonies, including that of Canada’s only communist MP, and of the accused in the Cold War spy trials.

    The Strangest Dream is witness to the heyday and legacy of Canadian communists’ courage and social conscience, and to the forces that destroyed their dreams.

  • Stratford For All Seasons: Secrets & Surprises

    Stratford For All Seasons: Secrets & Surprises

    $19.99

    Stratford For All Seasons, Secrets & Surprises , is loaded with magical and little-known stories about Stratford, Ontario. This quiet, scenic city in a rural setting has managed to stay true to its roots even though thousands of people visit each year from around the world. Many of the 500,000 annual visitors to this city of approximately 32,000 are not aware of the fun facts and history that make this corner of the universe unlike all the others. Stratford is not your pop-up tourist town.

    This book is about the things you can do, see, and discover in Stratford that will make you say, “Really?”

  • Stratford For All Seasons: Theatre & The Arts

    Stratford For All Seasons: Theatre & The Arts

    $19.99

    Stratford for All Seasons, Theatre & Arts, shares the immensity and diversity of the theatre and arts scene in Stratford, Ontario. It is extraordinary to have culture of this magnitude in a city with a population of approximately 32,000. Many of the 500,000 annual visitors to the city who attend the Stratford Festival, as well as many busy Stratfordites, are not aware of the countless cultural events available to them year-round. Stratford is not your pop-up tourist town. This quiet, scenic city in a rural setting has remained true to its roots even though thousands of people visit each year from around the world. Ever since the days of early settlement in the 1830s, Stratford has been a place where forward-thinking citizens seized opportunities to benefit their community.

    This book is about the cultural happenings in Stratford that will make you say, “Wow.”

  • Stratford Perth Museum

    Stratford Perth Museum

    $1.00

    Stratford Perth Museum’s permanent collection and new and innovative exhibits honour the past, celebrate the diverse communities of Perth County and embrace the dynamic future of this artistic and agricultural heartland. From Bard to Bieber catalogues, in photos and descriptions, some of the museums’s best exhibits: Justin Bieber: Steps to Stardom, Such Stuff as Dreams, Railway Century, and Perth Regiment. This informative and visually appealing book goes beyond the simple workings of a catalogue; it takes readers through a visual and written journey of the artistic and historical events that make Stratford a Canadian hub of art, culture, and diversity.

  • Stray

    Stray

    $19.95

    Allison LaSorda’s Stray shows the formation of a considerable poetic talent. These poems are sun-bleached, at once gritty, raw, and playful. LaSorda can conjure childhood memories of beaches and ice cream, ponder the elemental force of the ocean, and plumb the depth of loss in a coal mine disaster. Bringing to mind the poetry of Robert Hass and Louise Glück, LaSorda presents the messiness of daily life with emotional honesty and humour.

    Stray examines intimacy, memory, and decay, often betraying existential bewilderment. Deft word play and musical sense underscore the absurdity these poems explore, while surprising rhymes and unexpected images resound in deeply personal narratives. In this dazzling debut, LaSorda both disarms her readers and breathes fresh life into Canadian poetry.

  • Stray Dog Embassy

    Stray Dog Embassy

    $16.95

    In these deeply humanistic poems of witness and questioning, Croatian-born poet natasha nuhanovic finds beauty and hope amid brutality and the smouldering debris of landscapes both personal and geographical. In these simply stated, sometimes surreal lullabies in reverse, it is the moment of awareness that is paramount, that difficult achievement of presence in the physical world. The poems in Stray Dog Embassy are about seeing what is in front of us: ‘Everybody talked about clouds but nobody mentioned / the old forgotten sky that shakes like a beggar.’ This collection marks the debut of a unique voice on the Canadian literary landscape.

  • Strays

    Strays

    $18.95

    Strays, Ed Kavanagh’s first work of fiction since the award-winning novel The Confessions of Nipper Mooney, features ten memorable stories that explore the lives of those who somehow find themselves adrift. In “The Strayaway Child” a ninety-year-old woman recalls her girlhood during the Great Depression when she was a “sad, silent little nobody”; in “The Red Merc” a boy learns deep truths about his often absent father; and in “The Wind” a Newfoundlander in a big Canadian city struggles with issues of identity. Affecting, finely crafted, and often humorous, Strays speaks, ultimately, to our desire to belong.

    What one critic said about The Confessions of Nipper Mooney applies equally to Strays: “Kavanagh writes beautifully . . . poignantly illustrating how experience shapes character . . . . The lyrical cadence of the writing is reminiscent of Alistair MacLeod, making it a book that begs to be read aloud.”

  • Streams

    Streams

    $16.00

    Streams

  • Streams that Lead Somewhere

    Streams that Lead Somewhere

    $20.95

    Winner of the RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award, 2022
    Winner of the Hamilton Literary Award, Poetry, 2023
    Longlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, 2023

    Fareh Malik’s debut collection aims to explore the intersection between mental illness and social racialization. The poet dives deep into his long history with Islamophobia, racism, and other forms of discrimination. The book focuses on perseverance and the silver lining that is ever on the horizon with the expectation that you can make it out of any trial or tribulation, if you just follow your dream to wherever it leads.

  • Street Legal

    Street Legal

    $19.95

    A Toronto lawyer defends a hit man as the Midnight Strangler stalks the city in a legal thriller based on the author’s popular CBC drama Street Legal

    From the two-time Arthur Ellis Award winner and Dashiell Hammett Prize recipient

    Toronto, 1980. Three ambitious young lawyers are out to make a name for themselves with their own practice. Chuck Tchobanian and Leon Robinovitch are testing the boundaries of free speech with a pair of controversial cases. Carrie Barr, fresh from her success defending a drifter charged as the notorious Midnight Strangler, takes the most dangerous case of all: a suave hit man who proves to be far more dangerous — and alluring — than she imagined.

    Soon Carrie finds herself drawn into a web of terror as a rogue police operation, a ruthless drug lord, and a series of brutal murders threaten to tear the fledgling firm apart. Meanwhile, the Midnight Strangler is still at large . . . and may have chosen Carrie as his next victim.

  • Street Stories

    Street Stories

    $20.00

    Homelessness is not new to Vancouver. There have been homeless people in Vancouver since it was founded in 1886. As in other major North American cities, until the late ?70s and early ?80s homelessness in Vancouver followed the economic logic of boom and bust capitalism.

    However, since the run-up to the World Exposition of 1986, that logic has no longer been the determining factor influencing the growing number of homeless in the city. The “new poverty” that emerged in the 1980s is a product of the transition from an industrial-based capitalist economy to a post-industrial, global economy and a culture of consumerism, and the images of the homeless continue to haunt our social imagination.

  • Streets of Attitude

    Streets of Attitude

    $14.95

    Each of the stories in this book reflects something about the city — what it means to be born here, to escape here, to live and die here. In exploring life in Toronto through the stories of some of the country’s finest writers — including Neil Bissoondath, Matt Cohen, Timothy Findley, Katherine Govier, Norman Levine, Rohintin Mistry and more — the city’s complex personality emerges, takes shape and, for a moment, makes sense.