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In The Fifth Season, award-winning journalist, essayist and poet Cori Howard explores the seasons of a woman’s life, bravely writing about everything from marriage and motherhood to divorce. With humour and insight, Howard explores what she aptly names “disaster dating,” and reinvention. Through the arc of midlife, these poems offer a map back to the self and a return to longing and new freedoms.
In poetry that is raw, honest and personal, Howard carries the reader through the thresholds of her life. Vivid, propulsive and brave, her poems vibrate with an intimacy normally reserved for conversations between old friends. The Fifth Season illuminates the experiences of womanhood and the questions we ask ourselves during times of transition and reimagination.
Distinguished by its lyricism, depth of emotion, its metaphysical bent and the colour and wide range of reference in its imagery, The Fifth Window, opens up new vistas of language and experience. The landscape and climate of Vancouver and the BC coast imbue this collection with a spiritual and physical immediacy and energy. The area’s trees, mountains, rivers, creeks and rain inform an ecstatic vision in which the psyche and natural world meet and become one.
Meet the Figgs. June, the family’s matriarch, looks forward to a quiet retirement – if only she can get her three adult children to finally, finally, move out of the house. But her dreams are shattered when her son Derek unexpectedly becomes a single father. Now there’s a newborn baby at home, and Derek’s older siblings are showing no sign of going anywhere either. In the midst of the chaos, June’s husband, Randy, has a shocking revelation.
With family life flying fast and furious around her, June finds herself thinking about her parents – adoptive and biological. Where did she come from? Will her new grandson be traumatized without his mother? And why in the world are all the kids still at home, anyway?
The Figgs combines the quirkiness of Miriam Toews, the startling humour and fierce energy of Heather O’Neill, the heart of Little Miss Sunshine, and the unruly family dynamics of Jonathan Tropper’s This Is Where I Leave You into one hilarious, immensely fun novel.
The Fighting Days is set in Winnipeg during 1910-1917. The play focuses on the life and work of Francis Marion Beynon, a Manitoba journalist and political activist. When the play opens, Francis is on her way to Winnipeg, leaving behind a sheltered and religious rural childhood. Soon after she arrives she meets Nellie McClung and becomes involved in the Votes-for-Women movement. She also begins work as the women’s page editor for The Rural Review, airing her controversial political views on the editorial page. Suddenly, Canada is involved in World War I, and the conscription crisis divides the suffragists: should all women have the vote or just Dominion-born women who are sending their husbands and sons off to battle? Should women use their votes to push for conscription or to lobby for a swift end to the war?
A play about the polarities of public and private lives, and about issues of racism and pacifism within the women’s movement, The Fighting Days deals with timeless moral concerns. Francis Beynon, says the playwright, “gave up everything for her beliefs and one can only hope the world’s a better place for it.
A cinematic, fast-paced, and thrilling crime caper
Whether cops or gang bangers, every organization has its filthy few, the people willing and able to do anything to forward their cause. Rookie police officers David Morrison and Jake Radix are determined to advance their careers in the drug squad by any means necessary.
No longer on the force, Karen Grant is now working as a journalist and one of her two sources has just been murdered in what police have written off as a drug deal gone bad. When Grant and witness Ann Falconer become hunted themselves, Grant can think of only one person to turn to: ex-partner and disgraced detective Steve Nastos and his lawyer friend Kevin Carscadden. When the rookie cops, outlaw bikers, and Nastos meet in an inevitable confrontation, only those willing to cross any line are going to survive.
In 1934, four mountaineers from Manitoba piled into their Plymouth and pointed its headlights west to Tatlayoko Lake in British Columbia. Their goal? To conquer B.C.’s tallest mountain.
These young adventurers were following in the footsteps of the courageous, sometimes tragic, attempts made by other climbers to summit “Mystery Mountain.” But one tantalizing challenge remained: the main tower. This central spire was a nightmarish image for any climber; a sheer column of barren rock encased in ice. But the irresistible allure of “Mystery Mountain” electrified the public and the race was on.
From Canada’s foremost graveyard historian comes the first-ever collection of Canadian epitaphs.
Strange as it is to say, graveyards are historical documents; they have a lot to say about who we were—and who we are.
From the strange and humorous to the majestic and moving, the baldly factual (Horses ran away) to the possibly fantastical (Milicent Milroy, A. M. M. M. / Wife of Edward VIII / Duke of Windsor / 1894–1972), the wildly famous to the completely anonymous, The Final Word chronicles the little-travelled terrain of Canadian grave words with wit, grace, humour, and a fine sense of what a bittersweet thing it is to be mortal.
It is June 20, 1952, a decade after the events described in The Fat Woman Next Door Is Pregnant, the first volume of Michel Tremblay’s series of autobiographical fiction. The mystic, yet palpable instant of summer’s arrival is experienced simultaneously by the fat woman’s son (who is never named) and Marcel. These moving, profoundly different epiphanies of a transforming world, seen through the memories of the characters, set the stage for the action of the novel which takes place in the space of this single, evocative day. The fat woman’s son experiences this moment as an episode of profound personal objectification—he sees himself as in a photo of that larger, inclusive moment. Marcel, on the other hand, literally seizes the moment, and stores it in his school bag as a physical thing.
It is also the day of final exams at the École Saint-Stanislas where the fat woman’s son, a boy who lives inside the books he loves, is in the “gifted” class, and his cousin Marcel, the “mad” family terror, is in the class for “slow learners.” Racked by envy at what he sees as Marcel’s genius—his ability to create and function in another dimension of reality—the gifted child blanks out during the French exam.
The first quarter of the moon—which rises over the final scenes of the novel in which the fat woman’s son recognizes and acknowledges his cousin Marcel’s genius—is an exquisitely crafted and resonant metaphor for the symbiotic relation between the imaginary and the real, the privileged “educated elite” and the “great unwashed,” innocence and experience, sanity and madness.
2017-18 marks the hundredth anniversary of the birth of the National Hockey League. But the league almost didn’t survive its first year. Bob Duff chronicles the trials and tribulations of that first season, and tells the story of that first generation of hockey heroes who lent their names to the game they loved, and helped to make it great.
Nominated for the 2006 OLA White Pine Young Readers Choice Award
Set against the backdrop of the inescapable horror of the fourteenth-century plague and medieval heroism and chivalry, The First Vial details the morbid reality of a time when the Black Death forced people to take the law into their own hands to survive the wave of chaos that was ushered in.
Katherine, Lady of Crenfeld Castle, pits her wits against the enemies trying to take over her castle. After surviving two attempts on her life by a land-hungry priest, she is forced to leave her castle just as the plague engulfs her village. The villainous priest seizes her lands, convicts the innocent, and burns them at the stake. As the plague rages on, the tension intensifies. Balanced with intrigue and action, The First Vial builds to a feverish pitch as death saturates the country and Katherine must battle not only for her lands and castle but for her life.
Heinrichs’s categorical research into medieval town life, castles, and the Black Death, make the this novel a noteworthy companion to Connie Willis’ Hugo-winning Doomsday Book and clearly mark Heinrichs as a new talent in this genre.
In 2003, a mild-mannered historian named Moses Lapinsky jots down notes for a biography. It is to tell the tale of his father Sonny, a famous Jewish- Canadian boxer. As Moses buries himself in his research, he is transported back in time to the pivotal events of his father’s life. So begins the first of the five sections of the novel, each narrated by a different third person. Crammed with humour, sorrow, folly, bravery and the richness of the everyday, Tulchinsky traces the remarkable fortunes of generations of the Lapinsky family, bringing life to the character of an entire community.
August 1933: a sweltering Toronto night. At Christie Pits Park, during the ninth inning of an amateur-league softball game, four youths unfurl a white sheet emblazoned with a large black Swastika, lift their arms and shout, “Heil Hitler!” Within seconds, a group of Jewish youths charge in a struggle to capture the flag, setting off a four-hour race riot (the largest ever to occur, before or since, in Toronto), involving fifteen thousand people and injuring hundreds.
The riot at Christie Pits Park was the culmination of weeks of political and racial tension. Tulchinsky has re-created this and other defining historical moments in vivid detail, taking us inside the life of one immigrant Jewish family. We trace the fortunes of the Lapinskys—in particular the four sons—from the pivotal moment of the riots, through the years of the Great Depression, the rise of fascism and all its attendant social tensions, World War II, into the post-war era that began to emerge in the early 1950s. A stunning, engaging and moving fictional treatment of a defining moment for a family, a city, a nation and a continent struggling with ideas of freedom, tolerance and identity in a world broken by war.
Each of the six stories in Dave Bidini’s playful, irreverent new book takes a headlong run at the hockey dressing room, and knocks the door down.
In one story, a chronic minor-leaguer discovers the wonders—and the pitfalls—of the game in Europe, both on and off the ice. In another, an NHLer is tight with his teammate, the league’s leading goalscorer, but dreams of getting MUCH tighter. A star on a losing streak turns to a magical salve to turn his game around. A conversation between two friends yields surprising facts about Joan, everyone’s favourite female goalie. A hundred bucks is all that stands between a hockey groupie and eternal happiness in 1950s Detroit. And finally, the eponymous ‘Five Hole’ itself speaks—though it never reveals all of its secrets.
Full of sex, drugs and high-sticking, each of The Five Hole Stories runs its proverbial tongue down hockey’s seamy, steamy underbelly and then finds language to tell us what it tastes like. A scintillating look at hockey with its clothes off, in six ambitious poses.
Move back through time into the alluring worlds of the Alchemists’ Council
The anticipated second book in Cynthea Masson’s series takes readers to Flaw Dimension, centuries before the events of book one. Rebel scribe Genevre, exploring secreted libraries with Dragonsblood pulsing through her young veins, accidentally discovers a 5th-Council manuscript with a long-forgotten alchemical formula whose implications could permanently transform both the Alchemists’ Council and the Rebel Branch.
A revolution looms as High Azoth Dracaen strengthens the power of the Rebel Branch, Cedar and Saule take treacherous steps against fellow alchemists, and the unprecedented mutual conjunction of Ilex and Melia changes the fate of all dimensions. With insurgents gathering, Ilex and Melia’s attempt to open a forbidden breach through time could bring salvation — or total destruction — to the elemental balance of the world.
The battle over free will for all of humanity continues in The Flaw in the Stone, the remarkable second instalment of this epic fantasy trilogy.
For Bluma Goldberg, the teenaged daughter of a Jewish bootlegger, Prohibition-era Chicago is the furthest place one can get from law and temperance. Her first steps into womanhood are made all the more uncertain by the dangers of her father’s shadowy world.
Decades later, her loving son, Joey Krueger — a man coming off his own share of emotional turmoil — remains mystified by the person he’s known all his life. Who is she really? Fighting through Bluma’s stubborn refusals to cooperate, Joey pieces together her memories in order to understand the story of the most interesting woman he has ever known.
In The Fledglings, David Homel summons complex personalities and weaves them into a vividly-reconstructed historical landscape, taking readers on a fascinating journey into the inner thoughts and intricate relationships of a remarkable character.