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A lushly imagined novel that asks, “When do we ever really know ourselves?”
When Rebecca Laurelson is forced to leave her post as a trauma surgeon in an east African field hospital, she arrives at her aunt’s house on the Indian Ocean and is taken into the heart of a family she has never met before. It’s a world of all-night beach parties and constant cocktail receptions, and within its languorous embrace her attraction for her much younger cousin grows.
But the gilded lives of her aunt Julia’s family and their fellow white Africans on the coast are under threat — Islamist terror attacks are on the rise and Rebecca knows more about this violence than she is prepared to reveal. Will she be able to save her newfound family from the violence that encroaches on their seductive lives? Or, amidst growing unrest, will the true reason for her hasty exit from her posting be unmasked? Rebecca finds herself torn between the family she hardly knows and a past she dares not divulge.
In The Dialogues: The Song of Francis Pegahmagabow, award-winning author Armand Garnet Ruffo brings to life not only the story of the famed WWI Indigenous sniper, but also the complexities of telling Indigenous stories. From Manitoulin Island to the trenches of WWI to the stage, Ruffo moves seamlessly through time in these poems, taking the reader on a captivating journey through Pegahmagabow’s story and onto the creation of Sounding Thunder, the opera based on his life. Throughout, Ruffo uses the Ojibwe concept of two-eyed seeing, which combines the strengths of western and Indigenous ways of knowing, and invites the reader to do the same, particularly through the inclusion of the Anishinaabemowin language within the collection. These are poems that challenge western conventions of thinking, that celebrate hope and that show us a new way to see the world.
The Dialysis Project is the first-person story of agency and resilience.
The Dialysis Project is a one-woman play about the experience of a home dialysis patient administering her own medical treatments every other day. The play explores what it’s like to live with a lifelong chronic condition requiring regular medical procedures for survival, and touches on themes of identity and resilience.
George Bowering is fond of baseball, and he likes the alphabet. Having written a few baseball books and a few alphabet books over the years, he decided to write a baseball alphabet book. Diamond Alphabet is made up of 130 between-innings takes, five for each letter. You probably expected “Mays,” but were you ready for “Uzbekistan”? Tall tales, memories, facts and opinions are interwoven in this delightful collection of short takes on the gentleman’s game, written only as a poet can.
When ten-year-old Gabriel and his parents retire to his late grandfather’s disused cabin to wait out a pandemic, the big, dangerous world seems very far away, and Gabriel enjoys the freest summer of his young life. But tensions begin to surface, testing the family unit, and resulting in consequences that he will spend his life attempting to unravel.
Spanning nearly a half-century, The Diapause is a literary-speculative-fiction novel about the near future, family, isolation, heartbreak, climate change, how we keep each other safe, and all the things we don’t know about the people we know best. Part White Fang, part Station Eleven, The Diapause is a novel about how the things we seek are often the things we didn’t know we’d lost.
Shortlisted, John W. Dafoe Book Prize
Saturday, November 3, 1956
The United Nations, New York City
about 10 p.m.
Lester Pearson, Canada’s foreign minister (and future prime minister) stands before the United Nations General Assembly. He is about to speak, reading from a proposal composed of seventy-eight painstakingly chosen words. These words, shaped by caution and hope, are a last-ditch attempt to prevent a conflict in Egypt from igniting a conflagration throughout the Middle East. Pearson, in perhaps his finest hour, is about to carve out a razor’s edge of common ground to bring together angry allies and bitter enemies by suggesting and making possible the creation of the first UN peacekeeping force.
Pearson’s diplomacy throughout the Suez Crisis launched a bold experiment in international security and cemented Canada’s reputation as “a moderate, mediatory, middle power.” And yet, until now, no one has told the full story of how this Canadian diplomat led the world back from the brink of war. In a unique blending of biography and political history, Antony Anderson’s The Diplomat draws from diplomatic cables, memoirs, diaries, anecdotes, official memoranda, and exclusive author interviews to create not only a compelling portrait of Pearson, the man at the centre of the negotiations, but also a nuanced analysis of the political maze navigated by Pearson to avert a bloody war.
The story of the incident that forged Canada’s reputation as a broker of peace and a player with outsized influence in world affairs. In a world on the edge of crisis, a nation forged its identity.
Shortlisted for the John W. Dafoe Book Prize
“Anderson delivers a brisk, gripping yarn making excellent use of his research, including multiple interviews with surviving actors in the drama. Pearson … is front and centre throughout. That Anderson captures him so well is a tribute to his métier as a storyteller.”— Literary Review of Canada
Lester Pearson, Canada’s foreign minister (and future prime minister) stands before the United Nations General Assembly. His speech, shaped by caution and hope, is a last-ditch attempt to prevent a conflict in Egypt from igniting a conflagration throughout the Middle East. He is about to carve out a razor’s edge of common ground to bring together angry allies and bitter enemies by suggesting the creation of the first UN peacekeeping force.
Pearson’s diplomacy throughout the Suez Crisis launched a bold experiment in international security and cemented Canada’s reputation as “a moderate, mediatory, middle power.” In this timely biography, available now in a trade paper edition, Antony Anderson has created not only a compelling portrait of a future prime minister, but also a nuanced analysis of the political maze navigated by Pearson to avert a bloody war.
After spending ten years in international Directors Lab programs—first in New York and Chicago, then co-founding Directors Lab North in Toronto—Evan Tsitsias has amassed an extensive amount of advice, examples, and notes that prove essential reading for theatre creators and artists across disciplines. Combined with master classes and interviews with established, emerging, and mid-career directors, this manual is an artistic, logistic, and pedagogical exploration into the mechanics of theatre creation through the lens of a director. With so much useful material, readers become honorary “labbies,” ready to leave their own mark on the theatrical landscape. The book includes a foreword by Anne Cattaneo and writing and interviews from Peter Hinton, Akram Khan, Daniel MacIvor, Morris Panych, Andrea Romaldi, Kat Sandler, Judith Thompson, Vincent de Tourdonnet, and many more.
The poems in The Dirty Knees of Prayer are hot and dark as night rain. The new Honeywell fan blows whips of simmered air against Shay’s glistening back. He suspects a dystopian future and apparently it has arrived. These poems shrug at death. A tide of smoke rises and hovers over the city. Shay’s picture is taken for his collection of grief and apocalyptic love. These poems speak of sadness and self-fated things, how the heat blurs everything, the clouds send shrouds of water down. Here a thin gruel of hope is celebrated and dark elegies are showcased against the former truculence and lying promises of history, the placebo of mythology. The wry humour of mourning in an age of grief. Here is a picture of Shay against a green hedge. The poems do a rain dance. A five-step tango is executed with the ghost of Kubler-Ross. Songs of ruined breakfast are sung. Rags of pressed roses rise up from an old brittle Bible, its ochre pages ashen by exposure to the sudden light, become the dust on the roads of many summers.
A thrilling novel of self-discovery that is part adventure, part mystery, and part Celtic myth, set in Dublin in 1913.
Fifteen-year-old Finnegan Wilde steals to survive. Always on the run from gangs and police, Finn is also fleeing her own mysterious past, glimpsed only through nightmares and an unusual Celtic mark on her arm. When, in a chance encounter outside the museum, she scores a journal filled with strange diagrams, maps, and a drawing identical to her mark, Finn hungers for more than the next meal. She wants answers, and more than anything, she wants to find her family.
Eddie Moore, a young apprentice archaeologist, has spent months trying to decipher an ancient manuscript he and his father excavated from a bog. The Moores believe it was written by Tomas, a 9th century monk, and that it holds the clue to finding the legendary Cauldron of Plenty, one of four Treasures of Ireland. But when Eddie’s father is seriously injured by a gang in an attempted robbery, Eddie alone must find the Cauldron.
When their search brings them together, Finn and Eddie realize the mark on her arm and his ancient manuscript are connected. Finn doesn’t trust this awkward scholar from the rich side of town. Eddie is just as suspicious of this wild girl with no home, no past, and no rules. But if they can work together, perhaps — as Tomas hoped — they will make the greatest discovery of all.
Three voices — those of Finnegan, Eddie, and Tomas — intertwine like a Celtic knot that readers will delight in unravelling to the very last page.
Hero, the hyper-precocious and nosily omniscient narrator of Terry Griggs’s riotous new book, The Discovery of Honey, is not one to hide her light under a bushel, nor to conceal significant, usually scandalous, happenings in her rural hometown, including her own conception, birth, and various other unruly incidents that occur throughout her young life.
Running wild even before she can walk, Hero goes on a dangerous road trip with an aunt, later takes up with her feral, bad-boy cousin, investigates a crime, kills a best friendship with a few aggressively-applied home truths, falls in conflicted love with the cousin, then determinedly, if unconvincingly, falls out.
A backwater bildungsroman—”dung” definitely included, as Hero is forthright dishing the dirt—The Discovery of Honey confirms Griggs as one of the most uproarious and confoundingly original writers at work today. It’s funny business all around.
Of all our contemporary urban myths none is more absurd than the fiction of the “classless society,” and Morris Panych’s latest comedy penetrates ruthlessly to the shock and horror of the residue of hardened pesto soiling its porcelain heart.
Haplessly determined to have his own miserable authority vindicated, chief dishwasher Dressler presides over the steam-choked basement of an up-scale restaurant, a place of seamless existential drudgery so utterly remote from the light of day that its wage-slaves have no contact with anyone outside. Spouting an indiscriminate cornucopia of working-class ethic, an interminable babble of pride of craft, Marxist rhetoric and the virtues of individual entrepreneurship as celebrated by Ayn Rand, Dressler tyrannizes his co-workers relentlessly.
Unfortunately, both the “old hand” Moss and the “new guy” Emmett fail utterly to see things his way as they stubbornly and inexplicably pursue both their rejection of and aspiration to join “the folks upstairs.”
Quebec City, 1908. Two priests-to-be are ordered to deliver a letter to a controversial visitor to their city: the legendary French actress, Sarah Bernhardt.
As part of her long career, Bernhardt – known to her loyal fans as “The Divine” – visited Canada several times between 1880 and 1917, most often visiting Montreal, but once – just once – alighting in Quebec City. It is this singular historic visit, about which little is known, that Bouchard takes as the backdrop for his play, exploring conservative and progressive veins in competition through turn-of-the-century North America, with a focus on Quebec, that province on the verge of great change.
Michaud, the son of the province’s minister of finance, is a theatre lover. Talbot, on the other hand has arrived at the seminary on the very day of Bernhardt’s arrival in town, he comes from a family struggling with poverty and clearly has more pressing concerns. The two are ordered to deliver a letter from the Archbishop forbidding Bernhardt to appear on stage at any point during her one and only visit to Quebec City, on the grounds that she has decided to perform a play in which Adrienne Lecovreur “sings the praises of adulterous love” and “ridicules a man of the cloth portrayed as a plotting habitué of Parisian salons.”
And so the stage is set for a battle for the hearts and minds of Quebeckers through these two seminarians: the powerful Catholic Church on one side, and the power of the divine Sarah Bernhardt – and the world of the theatre – on the other.
The Divine was commissioned for the 2015 Shaw Festival in honour of George Bernard Shaw and everyone who loves the theatre, and in memory of Sarah Bernhardt, “the woman who dares to say everything that should be left unsaid.”
Cast of five women and eight men.
Get acquainted with the eccentric alien known as the Doctor
From his beginnings as a crotchety, anti-heroic scientist in 1963 to his current place in British pop culture as the mad and dangerous monster-fighting savior of the universe, the titular character of Doctor Who has metamorphosed in his 50 years on television. And yet the questions about him remain the same: Who is he? Why does he act the way he does? What motivates him to fight evil across space and time?
Series experts, and authors of Who’s 50 and Who Is The Doctor,Graeme Burk and Robert Smith? answer all the questions in this guide to television’s most beloved time traveler. The Doctors Are In is also a guide to the Doctor himself — who he is in his myriad forms, how he came to be, how he has changed (within the program itself and behind the scenes)… and why he’s a hero to millions.