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Years after the death of her mother, Mareika Doerksen moves through her adolescence with feelings of loss, confusion, and isolation as she seems somewhere between not being a child and not being a complete woman. Her father, a Mennonite only ethnically and socially, and a long-time atheist, has always been distant but pragmatic as he prepared her for the day he expects her to abandon their homestead on the Canadian Prairies for an education once impossible for women of their time. They move day to day avoiding the tragedies, traumas, and social expectations they rebel against in their Mennonite community during the infancy of Canada. But with the looming arrival of the 1910 Halley’s Comet, so too comes a handsome, charismatic Doomsday preacher. He captivates Mareika as he offers her solace and his ear. Meanwhile the local Bishop with a troubling and violent past sewn to the Doerksens, too, becomes obsessed with the maturing Mareika and sets out with the goal of saving her from the chiliast stranger and her atheist father.
A story made all the more shocking because it’s true.
In 1880, an organized mob of the Donnellys’ enemies murder four family members and burn their house to the ground. Another sibling is shot to death in a house a short distance away. William Donnelly and a teenage boy are the only witnesses to the murders.
The surviving family members seek justice through the local courts but quickly learn that their enemies control the jury and the press. Two sensational trials follow that make national and international headlines as the Donnellys continue to pursue justice for their murdered parents, siblings and cousin.
Behind the scenes, political factors are at play, as Oliver Mowat, the Premier/Attorney General of the province of Ontario, fearing the backlash a conviction would render, gradually withdraws support from the prosecution of the killers. After the trials, the Donnelly’s enemies continue their crusade against the family, paying off potential witnesses to the murders and fabricating one last set of charges that they hope will put the remaining Donnellys away forever.
A violent family living in violent times.
In the 1840s, the Donnelly family immigrates from Ireland to the British province of Canada. Almost immediately problems develop as the patriarch of the family is sent to the Kingston Penitentiary for manslaughter, leaving his wife to raise their eight children on her own.
The children are raised in an incredibly violent community and cultivate a devoted loyalty to their mother and siblings, which often leads to problems with the law and those outside of the family.
The tensions between the family and their community escalate as the family’s enemies begin to multiply. The brothers go into business running a stagecoach line and repay all acts of violence perpetrated against them, which only worsens the situation.
Refusing to take a backwards step, the Donnellys stand alone against a growing power base that includes wealthy business interests in the town of Lucan, the local diocese of the Roman Catholic Church, law authorities and a number of their neighbours.
Longing for a life bigger than the one she inhabits, Lizzie Donoghue thinks she’s found a simple escape route in Michael Power, but soon discovers that she might have been mistaken.
The Donoghue Girl is the story of Lizzie Donoghue, the spirited daughter of Irish immigrants who desperately wants to not only escape Creighton-the Northern Ontario mining town where her family runs a general store-but also the oppressive confines of twentieth century patriarchy. She believes her escape can be found in Michael Power, the handsome young mine manager recently arrived in Creighton from the Ottawa Valley. Caught up in a complex familial love triangle, Michael first courts Lizzie’s older sister, Ann, but
then finds himself more and more drawn to Lizzie. Their lives twist and turn as they are all forced to face the harsh reality of the broken expectations of marriage and family just before the onset of WWII in Europe.
This is Lizzie’s story, from beginning to end, and readers will fall in love with her bright spirit as she comes to realize her true strength.
Written while Lynda Monahan was hospital writer-in-residence at the Victoria Hospital in Prince Albert, working often on the adult and youth mental health wards, the tight, pared poems in The Door at the End of Everything give voice to and honour those living with mental illness, speaking to not only the suffering but also the courage and hope that is so clearly there as well.
Several of the poems and poetry sequences have seen publication in various literary journals, including Grain, The Society, The New Quarterly, Transition, Bareback, and Dalhousie Review, and in the poetry anthologies Writing Menopause (Inanna Publications), Lummox Anthology of Canadian Poetry, Worth More Standing (Caitlin Press), the Apart pandemic anthology (Saskatchewan Writers Guild), and Line Dance (Burton House Books), and in various tanka publications such as Atlas Poetica, A Hundred Gourds, and Gusts. A series of online readings from this collection, created with the help of a Canada Council grant, are available on YouTube.
Francisco will forever be haunted by the sight of his best friend Juan lying on the floor of a train station, pierced by five bullets. He’ll remember that sight as he flees the political uprising in Uruguay that night. He’ll remember when he’s holding a dying homeless man in Windsor Station in Montreal eight months later. He’ll remember when he’s a successful architect. He’ll remember when he’s having an affair with a Québécoise pianist named Claire. He’ll remember when he’s much older, a vagrant sleeping in a café that was once part of Windsor Station, where he meets his son, an activist in the student strikes in Quebec.
As he tries for a better life, Francisco’s past keeps finding him, until it blurs with the present in a series of hallucinations, challenging him to reclaim his identity and his rights.
An Amazon.ca Best Book of 2013
Romain was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. At 18, he leaves his family for a home in the forest, learning to live off the land rather than his family’s wealth. Éléna flees a house of blood and mayhem, taking refuge in a monastery and later in the rustic village of Rivière-aux-Oies. One day, while walking in the woods, Éléna hears the melody of a clarinet and comes across Romain, who calls himself Starling and whom Éléna later renames Douglas, for the strongest and most spectacular of trees. Later a child named Rose is born. Fade to black. When the story takes up again, Douglas has returned to the forest, Rose is in the village under the care of others, and Éléna is gone.
From these disparate threads, Christine Eddie tenderly weaves a fable for our time and for all times. As the years pass, the story broadens to capture others in its elegant web — a doctor with a bruised heart, a pharmacist who may be a witch, and a teacher with dark secrets. Together they raise this child with the mysterious heritage, transforming this story into an ode to friendship and family, a sonnet on our relationship with nature, and an elegy to love and passion. The Douglas Notebooks was originally published in French as Les carnets de Douglas. This edition was translated by Sheila Fischman.
Marta Elzinga has been searching for a sign. When she spots an elusive mink on the shoreline of the Toronto Island Airport, she thinks it is a message. The pigeon that boards the subway at Bathurst Station is the second sign. But how to read these dispatches?
Plagued with indecision and prone to magical thinking, Marta needs direction. A floundering guidance counsellor, she struggles to meet the needs of her students, as well as those of her charming but unstable husband. During a tour of historical buildings in Toronto, Marta visits an abandoned subway station and runs into a former student. He invites her to join him in some urban exploration. And so, in the late evenings, Marta comes to traverse the dangerous geography beneath the city’s streets. Through these journeys, Marta confronts the coils in her own thinking about providence, chance, and personal responsibility.
A complex and stirring novel, The Dove in Bathurst Station is about finding hope and reconciliation.
The new novel by Canada’s top Science Fiction writer
In 2059 two very different groups have their minds uploaded into a quantum computer in Waterloo, Ontario.
One group consists of astronauts preparing for Earth’s first interstellar voyage. The other? Convicted murderers, serving their sentences in a virtual-reality prison.
But when disaster strikes, the astronauts and the prisoners must download back into physical reality and find a way to work together to save Earth from destruction.
The Downloaded debuted in a six-month exclusive window as an Audible Original narrated by Academy Award-winner Brendan Fraser promoted by national TV and radio ad campaigns. This print edition is coming out immediately after Audible’s exclusivity ends and is being supported by a six-city cross-Canada author book tour.
A young actor from the big city lives with two aging bachelor farmers to gather stories about rural life. The farmers’ lives are irrevocably altered when art attempts to imitate life and the line between truth and fiction is crossed.
‘The Dreamlife of Bridges’ is the debut novel from Vancouver writer Robert Strandquist. Leo is a middle-aged, divorced handyman capable of mending almost anything outside of himself. The denial of his son’s death, and his inability to deal with his own pain, has rendered his life fractured and untenable. June is a single mom struggling in the bottleneck of poverty, fighting to retain custody of her son. From their precarious vantage points they behold a world of human frailty and tenuous beauty, a place where the damaged victims of a cruel epoch might be made whole again.
” ‘The Dreamlife of Bridges’ is a hard-edged, impressionistic odyssey through a Vancouver that doesn’t appear on tourist flyers. The novel is suffused with pain and loss, yet offers a fleeting glance at redemption. Strandquist’s characters, though often unlikable, reveal themselves gradually and convincingly.”- Quill & Quire
” ‘ The Dreamlife of Bridges’ appeals as a ghostly, sociological nightmare.” – Vancouver Review
In this collection of poetry, Fetherling investigates the mysterious frontier between pretext and subtext, where language and politics are mutually corrosive and individuals wander through the culture as though suffering amnesia — unsure whether they’ve lost the meaning of a past they cannot always remember.
In Act 1, Claude, 55, visits his father Alex, 77, in an Alzheimer’s ward, intimately tending to his bodily functions and needs while hopelessly trying to reach his silent, vacant father with a series of monologues—to settle old scores and misunderstandings between them.
In an astonishing and eerie reversal of roles, in Act 2 it is Alex who visits his son Claude in the same Alzheimer’s ward and it is Alex’s turn to rant and rail at what he perceives to be his mute son’s contempt for his own working class life.
With a cruel and disconsolate irony, we come to see that his father’s lifelong attempt to mock and censure Claude’s work as consisting of nothing but mediocre, misrepresentative lies, has been the very driving force behind Claude’s compulsion to continue to reveal the “truth” of human relationships as he so desperately wants his father to understand it.
“Tightly plotted and featuring a lead character who keeps us glued to the page, the book should definitely suit readers looking for an intriguing lead character and a solid mystery.” — Booklist
A retired Scotland Yard detective is lured back to work in “a series to follow, particularly for Louise Penny fans and the Masterpiece Mystery set.” (Library Journal)
Chief Inspector Peter Cammon is supposed to be retired, but he’s reluctantly agreed to travel to Canada to retrieve the body of a murdered colleague. And once he’s involved, he can’t resist delving into the oddities of the crime.
His fellow cop was brutally attacked, run over by a car, and then dumped into a canal — all seemingly linked to the theft of three letters from the American Civil War era, one of which may have been signed by John Wilkes Booth . . .
In this second mystery featuring Chief Inspector Peter Cammon, the veteran detective is called out of retirement once again. His assignment appears simple: travel to Canada to retrieve the body of a murdered Scotland Yard colleague. But Peter cannot resist delving into the oddities of the crime. His colleague was brutally attacked, run down by a car, and then dumped in a canal, yet the probable motive for the murder is bizarre: the theft of three letters from the U.S. Civil War era, one of them signed by the assassin John Wilkes Booth. Haunting the investigation is the beautiful Alice Nahri, girlfriend of the dead man.
The Drowned Man reacquaints readers with characters from Walking into the Ocean as well as introduces Maddy, Peter’s daughter-in-law, whose amateur sleuthing back in England proves pivotal in cracking the case.