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The Emir’s Falcon
$18.99“She was raised to be free, not some rich man’s pet . . . It’s just not right!”
Bernie Cholach’s dad wants him to take over the family’s rural Alberta feedlot, but Bernie has other ideas: he wants to be a biologist, an interest sparked by his experiences as a volunteer bird handler at a Canadian Wildlife Service facility that breeds and rears peregrine falcons for release into the wild.
Sheik Nasur bin Mukhta, son of a Persian Gulf emir studying petroleum engineering at the University of Alberta, dutifully accepts his life’s course, laid out for him by his traditionalist culture.
Rosie Leboucan, daughter of a Metis trapper, running her injured dad’s trap line in the Swan Hills is focused on keeping a roof over their heads and food on the table.
Then, the Government of Canada decides to give the emir one of the peregrines as a diplomatic gift. It’s more than Bernie can stand. Impulsively, he takes the bird he has been tending–he’s named it Skyrider–and flees to a remote cabin in the Swan Hills wilderness.
The RCMP mount a search. Nasur, sent by his father to collect the bird, insists on being on the scene–which turns out to be both Rosie’s trapping territory and the territory of a hungry and dangerous mama grizzly bear with cubs.
The paths of the young people and the bear converge–and their coming together will send each in a new direction.
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The Emperor’s Sofa
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The Empire
$24.95Explore a world on the edge of change through three epic stories spanning five hundred years of imagined history, unpacking systems of power and what we are capable of in the pursuit of freedom.
The story starts in The Philosopher’s Wife. Deep in the North, a philosopher exiled for promoting his atheist work amidst a bloody religious war yearns to ignite a revolution, but his personal life has collapsed into chaos. What begins as a desperate attempt to cure his wife’s animalistic behaviour erupts into a power struggle between the sexes, unleashing violent reckonings while the world outside hurtles towards an epoch-changing revolution.
Over twenty years later, The Scavenger’s Daughter examines the true face of empire as Northern forces continue to march against the South, “liberating” all who stand in their way. In a landscape blown apart by war, we follow Jack and Ash, orphan soldiers belonging to the Black Swan army, trying to survive the camp, toxic masculinity, and each other until they can be free. When Jack returns to camp, his freedom having been bought for him by a mysterious philosopher, he believes his new life is just around the corner. But as rations wear thin and the king seizes the opium trails, the camp is thrown into chaos, putting everything Jack and Ash have known—including Jack’s first love, Sarah—at risk.
Centuries later, in Four Sisters, we meet Sarah again as a woman and former Madam who has survived death, the toppling of regimes, and centuries of war. When a mysterious plague breaks out, she is forced to relocate to a quarantined zone called “The Skirts” with four young girls who were orphaned by the women she once employed. But when a strange doctor arrives and discovers the girls are plague-positive, Sarah must decide whether to go ahead with an experimental treatment or none at all. As time itself begins to erode, this found family of women must face loss, love, and their individual struggles for power in a violent world.
For fans of Game of Thrones, The Handmaid’s Tale, and The Mists of Avalon, The Empire is both foreign and shockingly familiar, leaving you asking, how did we get here, and where are we going?
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The Employees
$20.00Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction, The Employees reshuffles a sci-fi voyage into a riotously original existential nightmare.
Funny and doom-drenched, The Employees chronicles the fate of the Six-Thousand Ship. The human and humanoid crew members alike complain about their daily tasks in a series of staff reports and memos. When the ship takes on a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery, the crew become strangely and deeply attached to them, and start aching for the same things—warmth and intimacy, loved ones who have passed, shopping and child-rearing, and faraway Earth, which now only persists in memory—even as tensions boil toward mutiny, especially among the humanoids.
Olga Ravn’s prose is chilling, crackling, exhilarating, and foreboding. The Employees probes into what makes us human, while delivering a hilariously stinging critique of life governed by the logic of productivity.
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The Empress Has No Closure
$16.95The Empress Has No Closure contains, as a centre-piece, the “Alefbet Transfers,” a meditative, spacial explication of the 22 figures of the Hebrew alphabet.
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The Enchanted Loom
$19.95The Sri Lankan civil war has left many scars on Thangan and his family, most noticeably the loss of his eldest son and the crippling epileptic seizures brought on by his torture. As the final days of the war play out, the family bears witness from their new home of Toronto. Thangan’s other son Kanan comes home from a protest, shaken that someone referred to him by his brother’s name. His young daughter Kavitha innocently dances around with a mysterious pair of anklets that she found. And Thangan’s wife Sevi is consumed with feeling responsible for her broken family. Amidst the ongoing trauma, the family is faced with the possibility of Thangan undergoing neurological surgery. Will the surgery give them a chance to heal, or will it cause even more pain?
Presented in both English and Tamil, this poetic play is both medical and mystical, drawing a connection between trauma and memory that creates a stark reminder of loss, hope, family, and freedom.
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The Encyclopedia of Lies
$20.00In these sixteen stories, Christopher Gudgeon, bestselling author of the critically acclaimed Song of Kosovo, takes a heartbreaking and hilarious look into the lives, loves, sexual obsessions and delusions that inform a grand cast of off-kilter characters.
Here is a gay couple who persevere with their marriage plans as the world, literally, crumbles around them, a woman who discovers the mysterious collection of letters that reveals a terrifying truth about her deceased fiancée, a dutiful son, locked in an life-or-death marathon race with his famous father, and a baby who becomes infested with fruit flies, sending his adoptive parents into a spiral of recrimination and self-doubt.
At once bitterly funny, provocative and poignant, this remarkable collection builds on Gudgeon’s growing literary reputation, offering up the work of a great storyteller at his very best.
“Gudgeon is . . . a major new talent in Canadian literature.” (The Quill and Quire on Greetings from the Vodka Sea)
“a remarkable first novel.” (The Victoria Times-Colonist on Song of Kosovo) -
The End Is in the Middle
$19.95Shortlisted, Nelson Ball Prize
Longlisted, Raymond Souster Award
Long-Shortlisted, ReLit Award (Poetry)Daring in form and unflinching in its gaze, Daniel Scott Tysdal’s latest poetry collection examines madness as lived experience and artistic method. Taking inspiration from Al Jaffee’s illustrated fold-ins in MAD magazine, Tysdal explores living with mental illness through a new kind of poetry: the fold-in poem.
In this innovative collection, each poem does not end at the bottom of the page; instead, the reader is invited to complete the poem by folding the page to reveal the final line. From the effects of being “smiled into an elephantine line” at Pearson International Airport to the rites of official memory and forgetting at a baseball game in the aftermath of tragedy, Tysdal probes both his own psyche and the myriad environments that work to enfold those who are deemed mad.
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The End of Me
$22.9556 very short stories about death from Giller Prize finalist John Gould
The End of Me is an astonishing set of sudden stories about the experience of mortality. With an ear attuned to the uncanny and the ironic, John Gould catches his characters at moments of illumination as they encounter the mystery of their finite being. A marooned astronaut bonds with a bereft cat; kids pelt a funeral procession with plums; a young girl ponders the brief brutality of her last life, and braces herself for the next one.
Rife with invention, with fresh ideas and arresting voices, this collection of flash fiction shimmers with compassion and vitality.
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The End of Music
$19.95***2018 RELIT AWARD: LONG SHORTLIST***
In The End of Music, Jamie Fitzpatrick’s two mesmerizing, interwoven narratives circle the lives of Joyce, a modern young woman navigating the fraught social mores of a small town in its post-war heyday, and her son, Carter, more than fifty years later, whose days as an aspiring rock star are over. As Joyce’s memories of the past begin to escape her, her son’s past returns to haunt him. Brilliantly and unflinchingly revealing the inner lives of his characters, Fitzpatrick offers an extraordinary novel, with two startling twists, about women, men, and reckoning with the past.
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The End of the River
$19.95When biologist Brian Harvey saw a thousand fish blundering into a Brazilian dam, he asked the obvious: What’s going to happen to them? The End of the River is the story of his long search for an answer.
The End of the River is about people and rivers and the misuse of science. Harvey takes readers from a fisheries patrol boat on the Fraser River to the great Tsukiji fish market in Japan, with stops in the Philippines, Thailand and assorted South American countries. Finally, in the arid outback of northeast Brazil, against a backdrop of a multi-billion dollar river project nobody seems to want, he finds a small-scale answer to his simple question.
The End of the River is a journey with many companions. Some are literary, some are imaginary. But mostly they’re real characters, human and otherwise: a six-foot endangered catfish, a Canadian professor with a weakness for Thai bar girls, a chain-smoking Brazilian Brunnhilde with a passion for her river, a drug-addled stick-up artist. The End of the River is about fishermen and fish farmers and even fish cops; there are scientists and shysters as well as a few Colombian narcotraficos and some very drunk, very hairy Brazilian men in thongs.
Funny and sad, The End of the River is a new kind of writing about the environment, as far off the beaten track as you can get in a Land Rover driven by a female Colombian biologist whose favourite expression is “Oops — no road!”
“A wonderful and engaging read with a samba beat, on the plight of the planet’s living waters. The End of the River is the book Nemo would write if he could. A great way to open peoples’ eyes.” — Thomas E. Lovejoy, President, Heinz Center for Science, Economics and the Environment
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The End of the World Is Elsewhere
$20.00Autumnal equinox. The End of the World sails on the Aegean Sea. Aboard is Marjolaine, a cook who recently lost her job at a greasy spoon. She rubs shoulders with chess players, a bookseller, a retired professor, a romance novelist, a blue-haired singer … Meanwhile, elsewhere on the planet, people play cards, while others celebrate, read, dream or cry, and still others die. All these lives intersect, meet up again, disappear, and above all tell us that there is not only one truth. In The End of the World is Elsewhere, volume four of her Fragments of the World tetralogy, Hélène Rioux creates an intricate and complex novel filled with topical issues and references to history and literature.
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The End of Travel
$14.00With crisp, elegant language, sharp wit and resonant images, Julie Bruck’s new book gentles the largesse of life out of its many smallnesses. The way a straw buoys up in a can of pop, or a friend’s dress holds her shape, even on its hanger: Bruck textures her poetry with a life “you could close your hand around.” Bruck’s is the urban world so many of us walk through, eyes closed. But Bruck’s eyes are wide open, keen and collecting. With teeth and heart, she cracks open the ordinary to reveal life’s love and loss, joy and fragility, its extraordinary fullness.
“Like one of the characters in this book, you’ll be ‘new to such abundance’ if you haven’t read Julie Bruck’s work before. I’ve been a fan since her first publication.” – Lorna Crozier
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The Endless Battle
$18.95Shortlisted, 2018 Democracy 250 Atlantic Book Award for Historical Writing
Suggested Reading by the Hong Kong Veterans Commemorative AssociationNear the end of October 1941, a few hundred soldiers from New Brunswick were among the 1,975 Canadian troops who set sail from Vancouver to reinforce the British Colony of Hong Kong. Within two short months, after a hard-fought but disastrous battle against the Imperial Japanese Army, the island fell to the invaders on Christmas Day, and its defenders were ordered to surrender by the governor of Hong Kong. The survivors were taken captive.
Based on the first-hand accounts of the author’s father, Andrew “Ando” Flanagan, a rifleman from Jacquet River, NB, The Endless Battle explores the Battle of Hong Kong and its long aftermath, through the eyes of the soldiers. During their captivity, the POWs endured starvation, forced labour, and brutal beatings. They lived in deplorable conditions and many died from illness. But the soldiers stuck together, bound by their cameraderie, loyalty to King and Country, and collective desire to sabotage the Japanese war effort.
Writing intimately and sensitively about the lingering effects of the trauma of the soldiers held in captivity, Andy Flanagan shows both the heroism of individual soldiers and the terrible costs of war.
The Endless Battle is volume 24 in the New Brunswick Military Heritage Series.
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The Ends of the Earth
$17.95Frank, having dedicated his life to the unremarkable, and Walker, paranoid since being struck by lighting at age three, attempt to flee from each other and end up following each other instead. They find themselves in a run-down hotel operated by deaf and misdirected Willy and blind Alice, who has a murderous dislike for visitors. Morris Panych’s brilliant tale reminds us all that fear can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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The Ends of the Earth: Poems
$18.95The Ends of the Earth moves through technological disasters, environmental nightmares, and broken relationships to find love cast away at the end of days.
Its urban settings are counterbalanced with the idea of escape, deserted islands, and ocean solitudes. In this collection of playful, challenging, and beautiful poems, Jacqueline Turner uses the interrobang — a question mark combined with an exclamation point, the excited question — as a symbol of our times to move the work through a host of genres. Like notes washed ashore in bottles, this book seeks an exchange. Its scope is as vast as the question of how to survive modernity. In The Ends of the Earth, you can smell the salt air or revel in an alternate vision of the future.