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All Books in this Collection
Showing 6721–6736 of 9311 results
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Svoboda
$18.95“Toil and Peaceful Life” is the axiom that lies at the heart of Doukobor spiritual, personal, and community values. These values have always been, and continue to be, integral to the people who belong to this historically rich and vibrant community. During particular periods of their history, certain groups of Doukobors seemed to have carved a path that allowed them to embody and live these ideals in their daily lives and interactions. However, as the history of the Doukobor people demonstrates, putting this into practice was more difficult than envisioned and, paradoxically, has generated a great deal of conflict within the various spheres of the community itself – most certainly it has created conflicts with those from outside their self-contained community. It is at this juncture of conflict in the decades of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s that the name Doukobor was to etch itself into the Canadian consciousness. It is during this time that Stenson sets his novel’s action against the backdrop of the Kootenay Region in and around Nelson, BC. To say Svoboda is a “Doukobor” novel is misleading, for it is much more than that. While Doukobor culture plays a central role in creating conflict, from the first few pages right to the end, it is also a novel of coming of age, a novel of accepting fate, and a great entertaining story.
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Swallow
$19.95You wake up, and your sister is dead.
With an absent father and their mother constantly ill, sisters Darcy and Carly Nolan were forced to rely on each other growing up. While unpredictable Carly bounced around, her life’s direction uncertain, Darcy fell in love, went to University, and moved to another province. When nineteen-year-old Carly unexpectedly kills herself, Darcy is left to carry the burden of their childhood memories forward alone. The pain of these memories overwhelms Darcy as she struggles to unravel her own feelings of guilt, and to make sense of her sister’s death–as an act of destruction, of misery, but also of love.
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Swallowed
$22.95In 1966, Réjean Ducharme, then a 24-year-old unknown, published L’Avalée des avalés, this debut novel that would go on to serve as a zeitgeist for several generations of French-Canadian readers. Over the last fifty years, it has become a cornerstone for a culture, taught in high schools and universities as the foundation of the modern Québécois literature. Astoundingly, an English-language edition of the book hasn’t been in print since 1968, and has never before been available in Canada.
At nine years old, Berenice feels trapped by home, family, and dogmas both real and invented. Precocious and over-intelligent, she despises her dysfunctional parents too viciously, loves her brother Christian too passionately, and follows the logical pirouettes of her imagination to conclusions too dangerous. She lives on a secluded island, where she hatches plans to run away with Christian and escape her mother’s needy overtures for affection. When on the cusp of puberty Berenice becomes too wild for even her parents to control, she’s sent to live in New York with her father’s ultra-religious relatives where, pushed to confine her impulses, she instead forces herself forward to new extremes.
Gripping and hallucinatory, Swallowed is every bit as shocking and relevant today as it was upon first publication in 1966.
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Swan Song
$29.99Swan Song is a massive anthology of comics about music and life and changing the world. This award nominated book features art from over 20 cartoonists from British Columbia and beyond, with each story being inspired by a song close to the artists heart. Get ready to smile, cry, and get up and dance, because this is our swan song.
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Swans
$19.95Michelle Browns second book of poetry, Swans, begins as a night out between three best friends at an eponymous watering hole before becoming a phantasmagorical coming-of-age fable by closing time. In between, memory shifts and poems shuffle like songs on a jukebox, detailing fraught female friendship, sexual awakening, alcohol abuse and abandon in the dying days of a decade of decadence. Swans is a whip-smart collection from one of Canada’s catchiest lyric poets.
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Swap
$24.95“Canada’s answer to Elmore Leonard is going places” — Toronto Star
Detectives Price and McKeon are called to the scene — a husband and wife found slumped in their car, parked sideways on a busy downtown on-ramp, a bullet in each of their heads. That’s what’s in the papers, and that’s all the public sees. Toronto the Good, with occasional specks of random badness.
But behind that disposable headline, Toronto’s shadow city sprawls outwards, a grasping and vicious economy of drugs, guns, sex, and gold bullion. And that shadow city feels just like home for Get — a Detroit boy, project-raised, ex-army, Iraq and Afghanistan, only signed up for the business opportunities, plenty of them over there. Now he’s back, and he’s been sent up here by his family to sell guns to Toronto’s fast-rising biker gangs, maybe even see about a partnership.
The man Get needs to talk to is Nugs, leader of the Saints of Hell. Nugs is overseeing unprecedented progress, taking the club national, uniting bikers coast-to-coast (by force if necessary), pushing back against the Italians, and introducing a veneer of respectability. Beards trimmed to goatees, golf shirts instead of leather jackets, and SUVs replacing the bikes. And now the cops can’t tell the difference between bikers and bankers.
Detectives Price and McKeon? All they can do is watch and grimace and drink, and sweep up the detritus left in crime’s wake — dead hookers, cops corrupted and discarded, anyone else too slow and weak to keep up, or too stupid not to get out of the way. This is Toronto’s shadow city, and you won’t recognize it.
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Swarm
$19.95In the not-too-distant future, thirty-seven-year-old Sandy lives a challenging and unfamiliar life. She survives by fishing, farming, and beekeeping on an isolated island with her partner, Marvin, and friend, Thomson. When the footprints of a thieving child start appearing in their garden, the family must come together to protect both the child and their fragile community.
In the face of scarcity, Sandy still dreams of being a mother. The thought of a child compels her to revisit her earlier life in a city plagued by power outages, unemployment, and protests. There she met Marvin and joined his violent cause, initiating a chain of events that led to tragic and life-altering consequences.
A powerful debut novel, Swarm is about persevering in a time of shrinking options, and coming to terms with regrettable choices.
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Swayne’s Advanced Degree in Hold’em
$29.95Texas Hold’em is the most popular poker game across North America and Europe. Hold’em’s popularity surged in the early 2000s due to its exposure on television and on the internet. The no-limit betting form is used on the now widely televised World Series of Poker and the World Poker Tour.
Because each player only starts with two cards and the remaining cards are shared, Hold’em is highly opportune for strategic and mathematical analysis.
Swayne’s Advanced Degree in Holde’em contains the results of years of study and application of the psychological and mathematical aspects of Texas Hold’em.
Much of what is presented has never been published before. It is more of a university textbook than the traditional poker book. This is a book for the serious poker player or for one who wants to become world class.
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Swearing Jar, The
$15.95Meet Carey and Simon, an otherwise-perfect married couple with a bit of a swearing problem. TheyÕre determined to kick the habit by the time their baby is born. Too bad thatÕs not their only problem. Simon has a secret. And Carey has a new friendÑa musician named Owen that she met at a bookstore. With quirky characters, music and gentle humour, this lovely and intricately-constructed story is about meeting challenges head-on and finding hope.Ê
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Sweet Affliction
$19.95One of the CBC’s Best Books of the Year.
A pregnancy test is taken at a wedding, a bad diagnosis leads a patient to a surprising outlook, and a civic holiday becomes a dystopian nightmare. By turns caustic, tender, and creepily hilarious, Sweet Affliction reveals the frailties, perversions, and resilience of Anna Leventhal’s cast of city-dwellers. Shiftless youths, a compulsive collector of cigarette butts, and a dying pet rat populate fifteen sharply-observed and darkly funny stories that suck at the marrow of modern life.
“It’s a joy to read.”—The Globe & Mail
“Anna Leventhal [is] one of Montreal’s quietly beloved literary personalities.”—Cult MTL
“A subtle yet powerful debut.”—Inaudible
“Sweet Affliction’s reviews have been positive across the board, and rightly so. It’s a collection that reads more like a mid-career statement than a tentative debut.”—Montreal Gazette
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Sweet Assorted
$20.00Half-finished notes, scrawled snippets of conversation, observations made on the run, photographs of people known and unknown, scraps of paper with puzzling sketches on them, receipts, match packs, postcards, and other assorted paraphernalia . . . have all ended up in a Peek Frean’s tin biscuit box.
For nearly forty years, Jim Christy has thrown – willynilly, and with neither rhyme nor reason – such seemingly random items into the box. There has been absolutely no system to it; maybe, the author says, “I thought I’ll pay more attention to this later’ or, perhaps, I’ve got to check that one out some day… give it the attention it deserves.’” Being a restless traveller, investigative journalist and raconteur, many of these items have rich and alluring stories attached to them. The Peek Frean’s biscuit box has provided the essential ingredients for a fascinating assortment of highly entertaining anecdotal tales called Sweet Assorted.
Praise for Sweet Assorted:
“Sweet Assorted, the latest book from former Gibsons resident Jim Christy, is like being at a cocktail party with strangers. You might hear something colourful – a shared anecdote, a travel tale or someone expounding on a thought du jour written in haste on a napkin.” (Coast Reporter)
“… There was a shine to this eccentric work that I appreciated. Christy is being himself. His tin alternately brings back memories and reveals what he has forgotten. He lays out his successes and his failures and leaves us to form our opinions. I closed the book hoping to meet Jim Christy one day. His curiosity, convictions and thirst for adventure have lasted decades, and they don’t seem to be fading with time. I admire that.” (Coastal Spectator)
“The richest moments in this book come when the objects become metonyms for events and people from Christy’s past, points of reference that he augments with assessments, reflections, and even occasional sales-pitches for his current work … the sheer range of experiences and the quirky (and at times famous) figures from Christy’s past intrigue and entertain. Simultaneously, Christy’s significant temporal distance from the many figures and events raises the crucial question of autobiography: how factual are these recollections? Christy regularly admits his inability to remember particular details or events surrounding the objects, but at other times is seemingly able to offer decade-old conversations in detail. Thus, the book presents an archive of questionable oft-dissociated anecdotes that blend objects, events, and memories.” (Canadian Literature)
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Sweet Water
$22.95Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds gathers the voices of poets from across Canada, the US and the UK who write of water. Bottled, clouded, held in rain, in river, estuary and lake, sweet water is the planet’s life force and the poets here examine it from every angle–the pitcher plant, the beaver and the American Bull Frog, rain, clouds, smog, the many ducks and the salmon and the last lake sturgeon. Poets take us to the rivers they live along–and grieve daily–the Peace River Canyon, Chilcotin, Taylor River, the Humber River, Millstone River, the Fraser River, and more. In Canada, the watershed runs into the Pacific, Arctic, Hudson Bay and the Atlantic. This water houses the aquatic ecosystems that feed and nurture not only the people, industries and animals on land but also drains into the world’s oceans. It is part of the hydrologic cycle that begins with water evaporation to become groundwater that seeps into rivers, streams, lakes and oceans. It is the water we bathe in, drink, and with which we grow our food. As it becomes more and more poisoned from industrial corporations, mining and the many, too many humans on our planet, it also becomes more and more endangered. We are paying attention. We are aware of the watershed moment that we inhabit in the twenty-first century. We know that change must come. Contributors include Kate Braid, Gary Barwin, Katherina Vermette, Arlene Pare, John Pass, Ariel Gordon, Brian Brett, Trevor Carolan, John Terpstra, Russell Thornton, Zoe Landale, Christine Lowther, Elena Johnson, Elee Kraljii Gardiner, Daniela Leza, Rhonda Ganz, Geoffrey Nilson, Pamela Porter, Barbara Pelman, Kelly Shepherd, Rob Taylor, Zachariah Wells, Bren Simmers, and more.
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Sweetness from Ashes
$19.95Set partially in Vancouver, partially on a farm in rural Ontario and partially in West Africa, Sweetness from Ashes is a novel about family in its various forms. When Sheila, Jenny and Chris decide to respect a deceased relative’s wishes, and return the ashes to the family farm, the three begin a journey that takes them from their present-day lives in Vancouver to a deeper discovery of their roots and the family’s past. In Ontario, they meet their cousins and start to reconcile with a buried history. Mixed into the story is a book that Jenny is editing, a memoir of an Englishman living in the colonial Gold Coast in the 1950s. The link goes beyond the manuscript and interweaves with the Ontario family farm, and the new generation of people who have come home.
Sweetness from Ashes is a vibrant novel with a voice and perspective that is contemporary but gives a nod to the past.
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Swept Away
$14.95Eleven-year-old Ruth’s friend and neighbor, Bea, has just died — an accidental drowning. Or so they say.
Ruth’s not so sure. Bea was sixty-four and knew the area better than anyone. She was much too careful to get swept away by the flooded Teeswater River. And now Bea’s godson, Saul, says his godmother had premonitions that she would be murdered. She even left behind a box of clues to help Ruth figure out what happened.
Accident or murder? That’s the case Ruth, Saul, and Ruth’s wayward pet chicken, Dorcas, have to crack.
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Swim
$18.00Breathe on four. Define your terms. What is this desire?
Attuned to a body in motion, Swim pulls the reader beneath the logic of prose, into the eroticism of language itself. The arcing rhythm of a body breathing—a woman marking her birth as she swims in a pool—sustains the unique and hypnotic language that becomes the medium through which this story moves.
Swim entwines the present with those past actions and consequences that have brought Kat to the Greek mountain village where her father was born. She swims laps while her fourteen-year-old daughter reclines on a chaise lounge, poolside, reading a book. Without ever leaving the pool we enter discrete scenes with Kat’s parents, daughter, husband and lover. On entering each point in this history, Kat reveals an undertow of sound, rhythm and words in their rippling meanings. Each new lap moves Kat closer to her impending decision: whether she will leave her husband. But the deeper tension within this innovative novel derives from the writing itself—its vital urgency that extends the possibilities of narrative beyond the fixed and into the fluid.
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Swim / into the North’s Blue Eye
$18.00Annette Lapointe’s poetry collection swim / into the north’s blue eye explores the gothic anxieties and bodily discomforts of constant travel. Some of its journeys are global, but many are more regionally oriented: from one prairie city to another, between small towns, from city to cottage-country, from prairie to coast.
The collection also follows Lapointe’s family migrations around western Canada, particularly into fly-in communities of northern Saskatchewan in the 1960s and 70s. Those settlements, which make every trip monumental, provide a frame for years of restlessness and desire, and for meditations on the still world and its swarming occupants.