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All Books

All Books in this Collection

  • The Famished Lover

    The Famished Lover

    $32.95

    In this much anticipated follow-up to The Sojourn, Alan Cumyn continues the story of Ramsay Crome, an artist who never quite came home from the First World War. The horrors of his years in a German prisoner of war camp continue to haunt him, as does the idealized memory of his long-lost sweetheart, his beautiful Margaret. It is those memories that literally save his life and keep him from a cold grave in a foreign land. Upon his return home to Montreal, Crome seeks the nourishment of body and soul, sometimes impulsively, after years of torture and deprivation. He meets Lillian, a farm girl from the Eastern Townships and is drawn to her youthful vigour, her innocence, and yes, her beauty. These prove to be a potent elixir and they marry quickly. By the time she is pregnant with their son, she wants nothing more than to escape the dreary poverty of their Depression-era existence and flee back to the farm with her husband and child. She wants him to love only her, to open up about his war experiences, explain the paintings she found of a nude Margaret. To her they are obscenities and provoke the bitter taste of jealousy.

    The Famished Lover is Alan Cumyn’s most mature and accomplished novel to date. It explores one man’s hunger for love and meaning in a harsh, unforgiving world and the beautiful, yet corrosive, nature of longing.

  • The Far Himalaya

    The Far Himalaya

    $21.95

    Young and homeless on the streets of Toronto, Benjamin Doheney is sustained by an unusual source of strength: his devotion to Sanskrit, the ancient literary language of India. Together with Aditi, a student of Sanskrit at the University of Toronto, he dreams of a future with her in India, a land in which she has her own troubled history. Before they can move on, they must extricate her from the clutches of her twisted and malevolent PhD supervisor. When a murder on campus threatens to draw the police’s attention to Ben and his friends, events spiral out of control, drawing them all towards a possibly bloody culmination in which the couple’s hopes for a distant future peace may not survive.

  • The Far Shore

    The Far Shore

    $21.95

    The genius and artistry behind Superbrothers and the making of an indie video game, from inception to its highly anticipated launch.

    Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery was released in 2011 at the forefront of an exciting era of “indie games” – with the aesthetic of punk rock and the edge of modernist fiction, indie games pushed gaming into the realm of the avant-garde. Superbrothers (Craig D. Adams) was hailed as a visionary in the video game world.

    Now, his long-awaited follow-up, JETT: The Far Shore, has been released for Sony PlayStation and Epic Games Store. In the decade from inception to launch, Adams brought author Adam Hammond along for the ride, allowing unprecedented insight into the complicated genesis of Jett.

    The Far Shore offers a portrait of the enigmatic Adams and his team, the genius and artistry, the successes and setbacks, that went into building the world of JETT, in which you’re tasked with scouting a new home for a humanoid people after they’ve decimated their planet. To provide context, Hammond recounts the history of indie games and how their trajectory has followed that of independent art and literature. A riveting insider’s look at one of our most popular art forms.

  • The Faraway Nearby

    The Faraway Nearby

    $10.95

    The enigmatic American artist Georgia O’Keeffe flourished in the desert solitude where her creativity and vision thrived and was challenged by its dangerous energies, its desolate and hard beauty. In John Murrell’s The Faraway Nearby, Georgia O’Keeffe resigns herself to an old age spent in the auburn and tawny light of her beloved Faraway mountains without the company of others until a stranger enters her life. Juan Hamilton, a young artist and handyman, befriends the elderly O’Keeffe, becoming the eyes for the almost-blind artist, and the cushion between her and the outside world. Hamilton remained O’Keeffe’s companion for over a decade, and it is in the complexities of this friendship that John Murrell explores the uncompromising nature of the artist in this elegant and moving portrayal.

  • The Farm Show

    The Farm Show

    $13.95

    ‘This is a record of our version of grassroots theatre. The idea was to take a group of actors out to a farming community and build a play of what we could see and learn. There is no story or “plot” as such … Nevertheless, we hope that you can see many stories woven into the themes of this play and that out of it will emerge a picture of a complex and living community.’ –Â? Paul Thompson

  • The Fat Kid

    The Fat Kid

    $15.95

    Poetry kills the beautiful people. The Fat Kid, Paul Vermeersch’s second full-length collection of poetry, chronicles a childhood troubled by obesity, poor body image, and low self-esteem. The media’s perfect faces, societal expectations, family concerns, and primitive socialization rituals collide with the already horrendous physical and emotional tribulations of adolescence to drive Calvin Little over the edge. He’ll stop at nothing to become beautiful and weightless, but he must conceal his battle with what the world has come to know as a girl’s disease. Is there redemption in social acceptance, in romantic love, in escaping gravity? Is it enough to learn to love yourself? Calvin’s journey is told in a sequence of poems steeped in both the physical and psychological worlds, in voices that range from the bawdy to the elegiac. In The Fat Kid Calvin Little becomes the ideal antihero — for a shallow culture obsessed with thin.

  • The Fat Lady Dances

    The Fat Lady Dances

    $14.95

    A literary exploration of Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle.

  • The Fat Woman Next Door Is Pregnant

    The Fat Woman Next Door Is Pregnant

    $19.95

    It is the glorious second day of May, 1942. The sun is drawing the damp from earth still heavy with the end of a long Quebec winter, the budding branches of the trees along rue Fabre and in Parc Lafontaine of the Plateau Mont Royal ache to release their leaves into the warm, clear air heralding the approach of summer.

    Seven women in this raucous Francophone working-class Montreal neighbourhood are pregnant—only one of them, “the fat woman,” is bearing a child of true love and affection. Next door to the home that is by times refuge, asylum, circus-arena, confessional and battleground to her extended family, with ancient roots in both rural Quebec and the primordial land of the Saskatchewan Cree, stands an immaculately kept but seemingly empty house where the fates, Rose, Mauve, Violet and their mother Florence, only ever fleetingly and uncertainly glimpsed by those in a state of emotional extremis, are knitting the booties of what will become the children of a whole new nation.

    In this first of six novels that became his Chronicles of the Plateau Mont Royal, Tremblay allows his imagination free reign, fictionalizing the lives of his beloved characters, dramatized so brilliantly in his plays and remembered so poignantly in his memoirs.“The fat woman” both is and is not Michel Tremblay’s mother—her extended family and neighbours more than a symbol of a colonized people: abandoned and mocked by France; conquered and exploited by England; abused and terrorized by the Church; and forced into a war by Canada supporting the very powers that have crushed their spirit and twisted their souls since time immemorial. This is a “divine comedy” of the extraordinary triumphs and tragedies of ordinary people caught up by circumstances that span the range of the ridiculous to the sublime.

  • The Father of Rain

    The Father of Rain

    $22.95

    Mysteriously, over night, a father disappears from his family home. A few months later, the mother vanishes too. As the police investigations go on and on and reporters descend on the home week after week – as well as visits by social workers, doctors, and concerned relatives – the abandoned seventeen-year-old Cirrus starts his own investigation into who his parents really were, or who they might have been.

  • The Fed Anthology

    The Fed Anthology

    $13.00

    With a thousand members throughout the province, the Federation of BC Writers is one of the most active and vigorous writers’ organizations in the country. ‘The Fed Anthology’, edited by Susan Musgrave on the occasion of the group’s 25th anniversary, is a colourful bazaar of previously unpublished fiction and poetry by nearly 50 of those members. Like the Fed itself, the book includes both authors whose names are instantly familiar to all readers of Can Lit and others who are emergingonly now to take their place as the next generation. The country has learned to turn to British Columbia when taking the pulse of Canadian writing. ‘The Fed Anthology’ is a lively part of the process. The anthology features work by Tom Wayman, Sandy Shreve, Len Dufour, Steven Mills, Peggy Herring, Loranne Brown, Linda Rogers, Jim Christy, Kate Braid, Lorna Crozier, Caroline Woodward, Ursula Vaira, Patrick Lane, Luanne Armstrong and many others.

  • The Federov Legacy

    The Federov Legacy

    $21.95

    Surgei Galipova, a Russian immigrant and a rancher in the Cariboo region of British Columbia, owes his life to the Countess Catherine Stanislavovna Federov. When the Countess asks Surgei to send his eighteen-year-old daughter, Alice, to help her in a private hospital she is establishing in St. Petersburg, Alice adamantly refuses. But when her father threatens to disown her, she reluctantly agrees to help the Countess for six months. That same summer, in 1914, eleven-year-old Natalya Tcychowski, the youngest daughter of a Hutsul family in the Carpathian Mountains, is coping with a crisis of her own. Having run afoul of the local bailiff, her eighteen-year-old brother, Oleksi, is forced to flee from their home village of Zgardy, which is under the control of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. When he arrives in St. Petersburg, Oleksi seeks the help of the Countess Federov, who owes his father a debt of gratitude for saving her lifetwenty-two years earlier.

    The outbreak of war in 1914 puts both Natalya’s and Alice’s lives on a path they could not have foreseen and cannot avoid. Three years later Alice is still trapped in Russia and her position as a Canadian in Petrograd is becoming increasingly perilous. Natalya’s family is torn apart by their loyalty to the Tsar and countess. As Russia is sent into upheaval by the revolutions of 1917, both Natalya and Alice fight for their lives in a country that is rapidly unraveling.

  • The Fellowship

    The Fellowship

    $24.95

    The recipient of a prestigious Gunter Fellowship, Jessica leaves behind Jamaica, the only country she’s ever known, for Cambridge, Massachusetts, near the end of the twentieth century. In her fellowship year, she is to write a memoir about her father, a professor of mathematics at the University of the West Indies.Attuned to watching for meaning below the surface of things, Jessica learns about the women with whom she shares her year, twenty women, all in middle age, all accomplished — considerably more accomplished than her slim volumes of poetry and one memoir allow her to feel. Amidst the academic, artistic, and scholarly life of the Gunter Center, Jessica finds comfort and solace in a deepening friendship with her landlady, a retired economist whose life story she hears and records over the course of her fellowship year.

  • The Femme Playlist & I Cannot Lie to the Stars That Made Me

    The Femme Playlist & I Cannot Lie to the Stars That Made Me

    $18.95

    From masturbation to motherhood, body shaming to burlesque, Catherine Hernandez reveals the reality of living as a queer woman of colour. Set to the music of her life, The Femme Playlist shows what it’s like to be sexy and proud, slutty and loud, queer and brown. I Cannot Lie to the Stars That Made Me is an around-the-campfire guide to mourning and healing for women of colour. As a group of women share their stories around a campfire, they pray for each other and give as much strength as their bodies will allow.

    In these two emotionally unrestrained plays, the author of Singkil and Scarborough vividly paints a portrait of what it means to be a radical queer brown mother.

  • The Ferryboat Ride

    The Ferryboat Ride

    $16.95

    “Greta Guzek’s ‘child’s paint-box’ renderings … effortlessly convey some of the beauties and magic of this world of islands and boats and whales.”–Books in Canada”Do you believe / in ferry tales / of seeing pods / of flying whales?” Robert Perry’s simple four-line rhymes, paired with Greta Guzek’s vibrant illustrations, take readers on a ferry ride along the magical British Columbia coastline. On the trip, young children will enjoy spotting seagulls, lighthouses, kayaks, tugboats, sailboats, whales and other coastal sights before pulling up at the dock and waving goodbye to the ferryboat. The original hardcover edition of The Ferryboat Ride has sold over 15,000 copies, and this new sturdy board book edition is certain to be just as popular with a new generation of young readers.

  • The Ferryboat Ride Colouring Book

    The Ferryboat Ride Colouring Book

    $7.95

    A companion to the bestselling Ferryboat Ride, this book of evocative children’s poetry about the experience of taking a ride on one of BC’s ferries offers children the opportunity to colour Greta Guzek’s fabulous coastal landscapes. Ages 5 and up.

  • The Fetch

    The Fetch

    $19.00

    A book of voices arising out of the lives of people who populated outport Newfoundland.

    Drawing on family recollections, interviews with elders and extensive research in archives and regional museums, The Fetch, Nico Rogers’ first book, is a brilliant hybrid — neither a novel nor a collection of short stories. This compelling volume of tales and prose poems contains a broad range of characters. There is the slow-witted girl who has lost her mother and now has only the cow named Fatty for a friend; the hard-bitten captain of a schooner in recoil from the ways of his alcoholic father; the child born premature, swaddled in olive oil-soaked linen, placed in a pan and incubated in an oven. And so on, twenty-eight vignettes in all, all tightly written and highly evocative of outport Newfoundland before Confederation. Funny, tragic, and just.