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Showing 7121–7136 of 9248 results
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The Deer Yard
$17.95In the winter of 2009, Harry Thurston travelled to Campbell River on Vancouver Island to serve a term as writer-in-
residence in the former home of the renowned fisherman and environmentalist Roderick Haig-Brown. While there, he and his
longtime friend Allan Cooper embarked on a poetic correspondence; Thurston would send his Campbell River poems east and
Cooper would reply. In this, they were consciously following the model of the Wang River Sequence, a poetic correspondence
written by the Chinese poets Wang Wei and P’ei Ti over 1200 years ago. “Our poetryseparatelyhas always been rooted
deeply in the natural world,” writes Thurston. “Like many other Western poets, we have looked to the East, to classical
Chinese poetry, as one model to best express our relationship with what we now call the environment, a no less reverential
term than Nature.” The resulting twenty-one poems are reflective and richly imagistic, chronicling a single winter season
as experienced by two writers on opposite Canadian coasts.
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The Defiant Mind
$22.95“What is a stroke?” This is the question that plagues Ron Smith as he emerges from the carpet bombing of his brain. The Defiant Mind: Living Inside a Stroke is a first-person account of a massive Ischemic stroke to the brain stem. Smith takes the reader inside the experience and shows how recuperation happens ? the challenges of communication, the barriers to treatment, the frustrations of being misunderstood and written-off, the role of memory in recovering identity, the power of continuing therapy, and the passionate will to live.
Full of arresting anecdotes, enlivened by a vivid and vigorous style, the book tells of successes and failures and draws on the newest research in stroke treatment.
This is a necessary book for stroke survivors still dealing with the effects of their trauma and for care-givers, vital to the process of recuperation, who feel hampered and harried by concern and confusion. The book is a caring companion, offering support to people navigating the fear and bewilderment that accompanies a stroke. For medical professionals, the book offers insights into the workings of the brain, the power of the brain to heal, critiques of conventional limits imposed on therapy, and suggestions for ways to improve care.
More than an evocative memoir, more than an incomplete history, more than a breathtaking journey out of stroke and back to a literary life, The Defiant Mind is a beautifully written love story; it is a glimpse inside the tender and fulfilling relationship between the author and his wife. Smith makes clear that defiance (with unconditional support) is the first step to making hope a reality.
This is a story about time which affirms life in the face of terror and death. A book for everyone. -
The Definition of Beautiful
$21.95Shortlisted for the 2024 Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize
A stunning memoir of coming of age and recovering from anorexia in the 2020s
Charlotte Bellows wrote The Definition of Beautiful between the ages of fifteen and seventeen, in the wake of lockdown and in recovery from anorexia. In the tradition of Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar and Françoise Sagan in Bonjour Tristesse, Bellows writes with deceptively straightforward urgency, pushing through society’s constraints on the bodies and minds of girls and women to offer a story both achingly familiar and devastatingly new.
In 2020, fourteen-year-old Charlotte’s lifelong drive to achieve ‘perfection’ distorts into an all-encompassing obsession. Living between the suffocating world of lockdown and an uncanny dreamscape inhabited by competing avatars, Charlotte faces a parade of masked faces in hospital rooms, the aftermath of first love, the erosion of lifelong friendship, and the agony of seeing her illness devastate her family as it threatens to destroy her; as the world reopens, she finds new connections and mentors, new joy, new ways of thinking, new ways to be.
Charlotte Bellows offers a potent fusion of insight and innocence — a story for those who suffer or have suffered from eating disorders, but, more, a vital coming of age story of a young gay and artistic woman, tugged and throttled by a myriad of pressures, not least from the dark gravity that is the underside of her own creative drive.
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The Degrees of Barley Lick
$10.99Life has been hard for sixteen-year-old Barley Lick lately: he split with his girlfriend, his father died, and now his mother has a boyfriend, a cop named Fred Newton. Not even Barley?s new Great Dane, Stanley, can make things right.
Then Newton wants Barley to use his geocaching skills to help him solve a mystery; helping would mean losing a huge geocaching competition and, even worse, letting his ex-girlfriend Phyllis win. But Barley soon realizes that a young boy?s life may be in danger and time to rescue him is running out.
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The Delusionist
$20.00Art, love, and history furnish the setting in this tale of fate and destiny. Set in Vancouver in 1962, we follow Cyril Andrachuk, son of immigrant parents from the former Ukraine, as he makes his way from high school to menial labour jobs, from first love to first heartbreak, from sibling rivalry to malicious family betrayal.
Cyril is the only Canadian-born member of the Andrachuk family, his parents and older brother having survived the Holodomor, Stalin’s systematic starving of the Ukraine in the 1930s during which two million people died. Cyril’s mother carries the scars and memories of a past she can’t let go of; she mourns the early death of her husband and feels responsible for the malnourished, brittle bones of her eldest son, Paul. Cyril is a mystery to her: he wants to be an artist he draws incessantly and talks about going to art school. He draws his late-father’s tools saws, drills, hammers, wrenches, everything. When Cyril produces a series of large commemorative “Stalin stamps” his mother questions her son’s insensitivity; when an act of impassioned violence erupts in the house, it is Cyril’s sanity that is called into question.
The Delusionist is a darkly comic novel about love, loss, creativity, and coming to terms with the horrors of history.
Praise for Grant Buday:
“Buday’s genius is that of the storyteller.” The Vancouver Sun
“mordantly funny” The National Post
“a rollicking black comedy of errors with a host of unforgettable characters” Quill & Quire (on White Lung)
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The Dependent
$20.00The Dependent is a true story written by a military wife married to a paratrooper who served in the Canadian Armed Forces for fourteen years before his army career came to a crashing halt–a freak accident near Armed Forces Base Trenton left him paraplegic and their future in shards. Danielle, a fiercely independent university student, meets Steve, an ambitious infantry private. Much of the first years of their marriage are spent apart, as Steve’s infantry unit is sent overseas for duty in Croatia, Bosnia, and Afghanistan. With each tour of duty, the emotional distance between them intensifies. After four tours, Steve finally comes home to stay, but little changes: their marriage remains a difficult ménage-à-trois made up of a man, a woman, and the military. In this deeply candid depiction of their marriage before and after a life-altering trauma, each chapter unveils an intimate portrait of marriage–one in which Danielle and Steve must navigate shifting roles and learn to co-exist in a space where the collateral damage of military service is absolute. The Dependent is a brave and modern love story revealing immeasurable loss and grief and the journey to lasting hope and forgiveness.
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The Descendants
$24.95Chursinoff’s remarkable debut is a distinctively structured, sublimely written and moving tale of love, loss, intergenerational trauma and ultimately redemption, set in one of Canada’s most enigmatic and misunderstood ethno-religious communities.Seven years after a brutal encounter with the Hells Angels, two ex-lovers, Jonah Seeger and Ruby Samarodin, return to their Doukhobor religious community in the mountains of British Columbia to heal and start new lives. Jonah is a twenty-five-year-old from a disgraced family, and now injured and battling PTSD from his time as a Marine. Ruby, practically Doukhobor royalty, is a rock star with a substance use disorder.Jonah finds his mother, Sharon, still struggling with an eating disorder stemming from her terrorist upbringing in the Doukhobor splinter sect known as the Sons of Freedom. Ruby returns to Sasha, the young son she abandoned, and to her overbearing mother, Virginia, a pious pillar of the community raised to loathe the Sons of Freedom.After a heartfelt reunion between Jonah, Ruby, and Sasha, they learn that a murderous Hells Angel, Clinton Pritchard, is still obsessed with revenge for the damage Jonah caused years earlier. But when Ruby confronts Clinton about their terrible past, Clinton’s brother Swanny Pritchard must choose whether to side with his brother or turn against him. Jonah and Ruby unwittingly draw their family into a final confrontation with the Hells Angels that will test longheld, pacifist Doukhobor beliefs.
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The Desert Lake
$19.95Barbara Crossie, a 31-year-old relationships columnist, has been invited by her friend Harry to join a Canadian delegation to China. Also in the delegation is the formidable Elizabeth Pearl Murray, head of the Writers’ Guild, who used to live in China. Barbara’s not sure what she has to contribute, as she’s only just published her first book— Mad About Men —-but Harry, a publisher of worthy political books, assures her she will be great, the trip will be great. Barbara agrees on the condition that they meet up with her agent, Josh, who also happens to be her long-distance lover. Barbara and Josh are at a crossroads, and she needs to find out if they are going to take the next step in their relationship. Although Harry is a little in love with Barbara himself, he reluctantly agrees to include Josh.
But things go awry from the moment of their arrival, when Josh simply doesn’t appear. When Barbara manages to reach his office and finds out he has not only not taken the flight to China, but is at his mountain cabin and unreachable, she is at a loss what to do, and so she carries on with her companions, traveling the Silk Road to the ends of the earth, and eventually finding herself in the deadliest desert on earth. And that is where she learns how to fit the keys words in her personal lexicon together and tell her story.
Love, loss, and discovery are only part of The Desert Lake. This is a smart and subtle literary novel that also manages to be a page turner.
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The Deserters
$19.95Shifting across three continents, The Deserters explores themes of trust, isolation, abandonment, and emotional disconnection in a world dramatically altered by the experience of war.
Eugenie is trying–and mostly failing–to restore an inherited old farm in New Brunswick while her husband, a master carpenter, is away in Spain. The work involved overwhelms her, so she hires Dean to help bring the farm back to working order. The only problem is that Dean is a deserter from the US Army suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, and he happens to be living deep in the backwoods of her property, where he’s hiding out from immigration officials. To complicate matters further, Eugenie and Dean fall into a relationship, even as he is tormented by flashbacks, nightmares, and flickering memories of his wartime experiences in Iraq.
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The Desirable Sister
$22.00Gia and Serena Pirji are sisters, but as the first-generation born in Canada to immigrant parents, their lives play out in different ways because of their skin tone. Gia’s fair skin grants her membership to cliques of white kids as a teen, while Serena’s dark skin means she is labelled as Indian and treated as inferior. This superficial difference, imposed by a society obsessed with skin colour and hierarchy, sets the sisters into a dynamic that plays out throughout their lives. In a world where white skin is preferable, the sisters are pitted against each other through acts of revenge and competition as they experience adultery, ruined friendships, domestic abuse, infertility and motherhood.
Taslim Burkowicz’s vivid, sensory-rich writing style brings readers to the party scene in Goa, suburban supermarkets in Vancouver and a safari in Africa, where Gia and Serena navigate through the highs and lows of a tumultuous, loving relationship. The Desirable Sister reveals the bitter games of treachery women are forced to play to achieve the ranks of beauty and success, and ultimately shows the strength of love between sisters.
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The Desmond Road Book of the Dead
$20.95In Clare Latremouille’s debut novel The Desmond Road Book of the Dead, she writes a story through the lives of multiple generations of women in a family line. Moving seamless through a lyric of decades, blood and voices, Latremouille works her story through a collage of prose and poetry to their compounded end, and her authorial voice is fierce, lyrical and impassioned. Once you step inside the doors of her house, it becomes impossible to leave.
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The Desperates
$21.95Edmund was dying, but now he isn’t. Granted a reprieve from the HIV that took everyone he loved away from him, Edmund decides-after a period of holing up in his Rosedale home-to jump-start his new lease on life by diving hard into the sex and drugs of the party scene.
Teresa is dying, and she’s livid. Determined not to let her illness slow her down, she uses the year she has remaining to avenge past grievances and correct certain “mistakes” she feels she made-both in connection to her estranged son.
Joel isn’t dying, and probably won’t be for a while. Coddled to a state of perpetual naivety by his mother, he moves to the big city of Toronto with dreams of becoming an artist and finding true love. What he finds is somewhat less than he bargained for-though he won’t admit it.
In telling the intersecting stories of Edmund, Teresa, and Joel-all of whom leave trails of hopeful chaos in their wake-ReLit Award-winning author Greg Kearney has painted a blackly comic, yet surprisingly earnest, portrait of modern loneliness. The Desperates is one of the rare novels that leaves you laughing even as it breaks your heart.
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The Detective and the Spy
$22.95 -
The Devil and the Detective
$18.95Robert James, a private detective more interested in chronicling his cases than solving them, gets a midnight call from a young woman whose older husband has been found with a knife in his chest. Murder, corruption, and betrayal ensue as he’s drawn into the dark underworld of his client, but hapless Robert and his sidekick, a flower-delivery guy, can’t stop drinking, smoking, and philosophizing long enough to keep up. Imagine The Big Sleep via Fernando Pessoa, with a side of Buster Keaton.
‘Goldbach’s touch is light and his narrative momentum is fierce.’
– Globe and Mail
‘Told in a sort of punchÂ?drunk, slapstick stream that melds dreams, misperception and dialogue, the story has undeniable momentum, even as it veers persistently and amusingly off course. [Four stars]’
– Timeout Chicago
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The Devil You Know
$16.00The Devil You Know is the follow-up volume to Farrell’s critically acclaimed debut collection, Sugar Bush & Other Stories.
These stories deal with sex, love, work, birth, and death in alternately moving, shocking, funny, and at times devastating ways. Whether these characters are facing the death of a parent, bad love choices, the possibility of unwanted pregnancy, the rupture of friendships, teen violence, or the exploration of sado-masochistic sex, Farrell exposes their ticking cores and pulls the reader along every step of the way.
Praise for The Devil You Know:
“Farrell excels at very short, sharply realized tales that display a startling repertoire of styles and structural innovations.” (The Vancouver Review)
“Farrell effectively forges her image as a bad-ass version of Alice Munro. Like Munro, she’s a short story writer who focuses on the lives of girls and women in small-town Canada, but Farrell’s characters get high on mushrooms and dabble in BDSM.” (The Georgia Straight)
“Make no mistake; The Devil You Know belongs on the shelf alongside Nights Below Station Street. In this confident, insightful, often horrifyingly funny collection, Jenn Farrell distinguishes herself as one of Canada’s finest contemporary writers of short fiction. Here are working class family dramas boiled down to the bone. Quick and mean as a Virginia Slim and bright and harsh as a Rexall at midnight, Farrell never fails to bring us down to earth to meet those beautiful, flawed, undeniably human devils we know so well. Refreshingly honest, impeccably written. A very, very good book.” (Elizabeth Bachinsky)
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The Devil’s Breath
$24.95On a warm spring day in June of 1914, two hundred and thirty-five men went down into the depths of the Hillcrest mine found in Alberta’s Crowsnest Pass. Only forty-six would make it out alive. The largest coal-mining disaster in Canadian history, the fateful tale of the Hillcrest Mine is finally captured in startling detail by Stephen Hanon.
A deft examination of the coal mining industry in an Alberta just on the cusp of the Great War, The Devil’s Breath is a startling recollection of heroism and human courage in the face of overwhelming calamity. Hanon examines the history of the mine itself, its owners and workers, possible causes for the disaster and the lasting effects that it had on those who lived, while educating readers on the techniques used to wrench coal from the bowels of the earth.