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All Books
All Books in this Collection
Showing 6673–6688 of 9311 results
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Succession
$19.95Succession is a story cycle about a rural community in transition. It follows Al, a musician burned out from too many nights playing the same classic rock songs, as he returns from Vancouver to the farm where he grew up in the Bearspaw district near Calgary.
Al’s story is intertwined with those of his family, friends, and neighbours, as they struggle to come to terms with the choices they make, and those that are forced upon them by the suburbanization of their agricultural community. Succession explores themes of place and belonging, the place of art in working life, and urban and rural identity. Most of all it’s a meditation on what is lost when the beautiful places of the earth are discovered and changed by outsiders—and what remains.
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Successions
$18.95After the unexpected death of their parents, two second-generation Italian Canadian brothers must come together to decide whether to hold on to the family home, which is full of secrets and hoarded junk, or save what’s left of their strained relationship.
When Anthony, an uptight lawyer running for office, arrives with his former actor-turned-campaign-manager wife Cristina, they’re set on signing away the house and everything that comes with it. But Enzo, a disorganized plumber, and his pregnant girlfriend Nat have other plans. The pleasantries quickly turn to tense deliberations that unearth dramatically differing views of the group’s past experiences and present values.
This clever family dramedy takes a close look at issues that affect modern second-generation immigrant families in Canada—class differences, antiquated old-world beliefs, and a crumbling Canadian dream.
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Such a Lovely Afternoon
$22.95Such a Lovely Afternoon is a poignant, unflinching debut collection. Characters confront urgent questions about gender, identity, family, community, what reconciliation in Canada might look like and where it falls painfully short.
A refugee single dad caring for a man with fetal alcohol effects becomes a scapegoat. A useless toilet, a derelict landlord and wacky neighbours turn an unemployed woman’s cabin life upside down. In the linked section, we first meet Tracy, a feisty tomboy grappling with gender roles. As a cub reporter, she finds herself caught in a typhoon in China, then covering an inquest for a Yukon teen who froze to death. With her boyfriend Rick, she struggles to care for both their baby and Rick’s mother who lives with dementia and residential school trauma. In the final and title story, Tracy attends the preliminary hearing into her father’s murder by a mentally ill former patient, and she, her brothers and grandmother each try in their own ways to make sense of the unfathomable and move on with their lives.
Brimming with compassion, humour and wisps of hope, the stories are set against vivid landscapes from Canada’s West Coast to Hong Kong to the Yukon.
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Such a Lovely Little War
$28.95This riveting, beautifully produced graphic memoir tells the story of the early years of the Vietnam War as seen through the eyes of a young boy named Marco, the son of a Vietnamese diplomat and his French wife. The book opens in America, where the boy’s father works for the South Vietnamese embassy; there the boy is made to feel self-conscious about his otherness thanks to schoolmates who play war games against the so-called “Commies.” The family is called back to Saigon in 1961, where the father becomes President Ngo Dinh Diem’s personal interpreter; as the growing conflict between North and South intensifies, so does turmoil within Marco’s family, as his mother struggles to grapple with bipolar disorder.
Visually powerful and emotionally potent, Such a Lovely Little War is both a large-scale and intimate study of the Vietnam War as seen through the eyes of the Vietnamese: a turbulent national history intertwined with an equally traumatic familial one.
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Such Miracles and Mischiefs
$21.95Colonists come face to face with Indigenous Americans, enslaved Africans, and pirates as they struggle to build a life in North America.
Such Miracles and Mischiefs, the second book in the Cupids trilogy, adventures across the first three English colonies in the Americas—Newfoundland, Virginia, and Bermuda—and highlights women’s colonial experience. After pirates attack the Guy family’s plantation near Cupids, Nancy Ellis needs all her ingenuity to survive in the hands of lawless men. Ned Perry crosses the ocean to find her, while Nancy’s employer and friend, Kathryn Guy, must rebuild a home on the harsh shores of the New Found Land.
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Suddenly Light
$24.95A stunning new work of intimate, nuanced, and quietly profound realism.
From the award-winning author Nina Dunic, stories in this collection have twice won the Toronto Star Short Story Contest, been long-listed for the CBC Short Story Prize four times, nominated for The Journey Prize, and pre-date her critically acclaimed novel The Clarion .
With crisp and penetrating prose that recalls the work of Mavis Gallant and Alice Munro, the stories in Suddenly Light are bracing, buoyant, and test the delicate threads that tie us together. -
Suddenly the Minotaur
$18.95 -
Sufferance
$22.95From the author of the international bestseller The Quincunx
Set in Eastern Europe during the Second World War. When his nation is invaded and occupied by a brutal enemy, a well-intentioned man persuades his wife that they should give temporary shelter to a young girl who is at school with their daughter. He has no idea that the girl belongs to a community against whom the invader intends to commit genocide. Days stretch into weeks and then months while the enemy’s pitiless hatred of the girl’s community puts all of the family in danger. Nobody outside the family can be trusted with the dangerous secret and the threat from outside unlocks a darkness that threatens to derail them all. From the bestselling author of The Quincunx (over one million copies sold worldwide), comes a deeply unsettling psychological novel about the hideous decisions that people are forced to make when living under tyrannical regimes.
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Sugar Bush & Other Stories
$15.00Longlisted for a ReLit Award (2007)
Alcuin Society Citation for Excellence in Design
The stories in Sugar Bush & Other Stories deal with gender relations, love, and sex in a frank way. Most of the pieces feature female protagonists who navigate their young adult years in some questionable ways. They make some ill-advised choices, which are driven by their naïve quests for “individuality” while at the same time having an almost pathological need to be loved by everyone – especially men. While the stories in Sugar Bush are intended for an adult audience, they employ some of the conventions of the young adult genre. They are simple, straight-ahead narratives. Part breathless teenaged confessional and part wistful and wiser looks back, Sugar Bush is the first collection of short fiction by award-winning author, Jenn Farrell.
Praise for Sugar Bush & Other Stories:
“Jenn Farrell smashes neat ideas – of childhood and adulthood, love and lust, home and away – to find their more interesting edges. Her stories are bright, sharp shards, winking and glittering and drawing blood.” (Annabel Lyon, author of The Best Thing for You and Oxygen)
“Farrell’s stories surprise with sophisticated twists and unexpected turns. In story after story, Farrell successfully rescues her characters from sinking into cliché, raising them above their very ordinary lives into the realm of the extraordinary. … Farrell’s writing style throughout is both whimsical and unpretentious, making Sugar Bush enjoyable and highly readable.” (Christine Walde, author of The Candy Darlings, in a review in Quill & Quire)
“There’s an old saying, ‘Good things come in small packages,’ and it was never more applicable than to this first collection of short stories by Vancouver’s Jenn Farrell. Where the typical trade paperback measures 14 cm by 22 cm, this one is a miniscule 12 x 16.
“Little in size, but huge in every other way.
“Sugar Bush & Other Stories offers 10 full-fledged short stories and two others that are no more than fragments, but each is impressive for directness of language, perfect-pitch dialogue and laugh-out-loud comedy. …
“It’s exciting to discover a fresh new talent … Once you’ve got it, you’ll love it.” (Prairie Fire)
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Sugar Kids
$24.00Baby’s a skater girl trying to get through high school like everyone else. Except she loves Victorian gothic fiction, experiences violent tremors, and gets visits from the ghost of her twin. Ravi never really died for her, not like her mom did last year. When Baby gets kicked out of the house for not conforming with her Indo-Canadian family’s gender expectations, everything changes. Her new, glamorous friend Delilah introduces her to all-night parties held in exclusive clubs, abandoned warehouses, and magical cornfields — the underground rave scene in 1990s Vancouver.
But how will Baby fit into this new world?
Join Baby on her wild search for belonging through the landscape of acid house, complete with extraordinary music, retro fashion, and copious substance use. Alongside eccentric DJs, misanthropic skaters, and denim-clad ghosts, Baby explores her sexual and cultural identity. A coming-of-age tale, Sugar Kids is an homage to the subcultures animating the nineties.
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Sugar Ride
$19.95Blomer takes you into Southeast Asia by bicycle with her husband Rupert, their two companion-like bikes and her experiences cycling over 4000km through 4 countries over three months with the little devil she takes everywhere, her type 1 diabetes. A travel memoir, Sugar Ride explores the love of cycling and the roads it can pull you up, down and along while detailing the experience of having type 1 diabetes and the literal ride of sugar that daily injections of insulin, food and exercise create. Part loves story, part true cycling adventure and part dance with the body?s strengths and weaknesses, Sugar Ride is an exploration of past adventures and how to feel about those experiences in the present.
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Sugar Thieves
$21.00Eric, a three-year-old from Gaspésie, is a being who lives only for pleasure. Drinking from his bottle, he tastes sugar for the first time, and is immediately hooked. From that point on, Eric and his sister go to greater and more desperate lengths to satisfy their sweet tooth, all the while contending with the annoyances of the police, medical authorities, and boiled vegetables. Sugar Thieves is a fun, intelligent fable of greed and hedonism, as well as a tribute to glucose and its wonderful derivatives.
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Sugar-Puss on Dorchester Street
$15.95One of the earliest Canadian noir novels, Sugar-Puss on Dorchester Street tells the story of Gisele Lepine, beautiful farmer’s daughter who leaves her sleepy faming community for the neon lights of Montreal. In the fast-paced city, dreams quickly turn to nightmares as the young ‘farmette’ finds herself surrounded by drug-dealers, newspapermen, nightclub owners, chorus girls and a fatherly boxer who is well past his prime. It’s all a bit too much for innocent Gisele, who hasn’t yet had to deal with the violence that is to come. All becomes a whirlwind set in the post-war ‘open city’ in which burlesque houses were plentiful, Dorchester Street was lined with nightclubs and Decarie Boulevard served as Canada’s Sunset Strip.
Newspaperman Al Palmer covered Montreal’s nightlife and criminal world–so very often intertwined–beginning in the 1940s. Published in 1949, Sugar-Puss on Dorchester Street, Palmer’s only novel, appeared the year before Montreal Confidential, his infamous ‘low down on the big town’.
Will Straw is Professor of Communications at McGill University and Director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada. He is the author of Cyanide and Sin: Visualizing Crime in 1950s America and over a hundred articles on media and urban life.
The consulting editor for the Ricochet series is Brian Busby.Newspaperman Al Palmer covered Montreal’s nightlife and criminal world–so very often intertwined–beginning in the 1940s. Published in 1949, Sugar-Puss on Dorchester Street, Palmer’s only novel, appeared the year before Montreal Confidential, his infamous ‘low down on the big town’.
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Sugaring Off
$24.95Winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for French-Language Fiction, Sugaring Off probes intimacy, denial, and how we are tied to others—whether those we love or those we exploit.
On the surface, Adam and Marion are the embodiment of success: wealthy, attractive, in love. While holidaying in Martha’s Vineyard, Adam surfs into a local young woman, Celia. The accident leaves her injured and financially at risk; for Adam and Marion, it opens a fault of loneliness, rage, and desires that have too long been ignored.
Like a modern Virginia Woolf, Britt abrades the surface layer of our outward personas, delving into the complexity and contradictions of relationships. In this eviscerating critique of privilege, she asks what happens when one can no longer play a role—whether in a couple, family, or social structure—and exposes the resulting friction between pleasure and consequence.
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Suicide Psalms
$15.00‘Suicide Psalms’ is both hymn and visceral scream-of loss, despair, hope and ultimately redemption. These poems are drawn out with quick precision, as if they were indeed written in haste, or delirium, before tightening the noose or firing the pistol or jumping off of the ledge. Even though the media has recognized suicide as an epidemic, it is still not “talked” about outside of grief management and support groups. The subject remains taboo, and those left behind face a legacy of silence, shame and guilt. The poems in the first section of the book “Suicide Notes” attempt to answer the question “why”? Their density of language, slippage of syntax, sound play, repetition, and visceral imagery engender both empathy and relief, as each poem bears witness and pays homage. The work also addresses a larger collective malaise: the disintegration of society and “self,” the loss of innocence and exploitation of youth, and the hopelessness and despair that smoulders under the veneer ofcorporate greed, rabid consumerism, and the resultant addictions, aberrations and violence.
“And so it is that those friends who have lived close to suicide become the prophets who might lead us through the gathering darkness of our despairing ecocidal age-into more honourable, tender, sustainable ways of living together on this groaning, delicate, crying earth. ‘That something better rises out of the ashes.’ This is Rowley at her heart stammering, howling, apocalyptic, playful, musical best.”- Di Brandt
“The poems of Mari-Lou Rowley’s ‘Suicide Psalms’ are deft, double-edged, ‘kill sites bedded with violets,’ songs of violent beauty. Scalene: the constantly shifting, sharpening edges and angles (no two sides ever the same) of ‘Suicide Psalms” three movements balance, ultimately, in a perfect complex structure. Dissonant; harmonic. Rowley’s poetry, as always, a snapping, synaptical singing, stinging electric. In the necessary, unpredictable climate of ‘Suicide Psalms’, ‘the windfingers/all possible points of entry/conclusions/ways out.’”- Sylvia Legris
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Suitable Precautions
$19.95Suitable Precautions