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Showing 7281–7296 of 9248 results
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The Flesh of Ice
$20.00The Secwépemc term le estcwicwéy̓ (the missing) was given by Secwépemc elders who dedicated their knowledge and time to guide the community through the hell they were forced to endure in May 2021. Garry Gottfriedson’s The Flesh of Ice picks up the thread of his 2021 collection, Bent Back Tongue, describing the history and relationship of Indigenous people in Canada with the Canadian government and the Catholic church. Here is the story of those who survived Kamloops Indian Residential School (KIRS), and stories of descendants of KIRS who remembered “the missing” in the wake of the discovery of unmarked graves at the KIRS. Here, in hauntingly visceral poems, are the living conditions, policies and practices of the school itself, the stories of those who lived there, and the names of practitioners of the school, called out and cursed. Lastly, personal stories are given space to reclaim the narrative, taking readers on a journey of resilience, survival, pain and joy.
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The Flicker Tree
$15.95How do we learn to be where we live? How can a 21st-century mind, saturated with the culture and metaphors of contemporary life, connect to the natural world that surrounds us? In Nancy Holmes’ new book of poetry, these questions are asked of her home, the Okanagan valley in the southern interior of British Columbia. In these poems, as Holmes comes to terms with personal grief, she tries to find consolation in the place she shares with other beings. Holmes’ poetry looks for relationships with the prickly pear cacti, bluebunch wheatgrass, the black bears, the coyotes, and the northern flickers. She seeks to embed herself in the geography and consciousness of this arid Western landscape, one of the most endangered ecosystems in Canada, a landscape of great beauty and spiritual power with its volcanic glaciated mountains and fragile long lakes. The result is poetry that is both elegiac and humorous, with a vision often skewed by the lenses of mass media, anxiety, and the obsessions of the contemporary world. Sometimes disturbed and questioning, sometimes delighted and awed, sometimes troubled by the history of settlers and indigenous peoples, the poems explore our complicity in the destruction of, and our love for, the wild animals, plants, and places around us.
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The Flickering Light
$24.95Being an only child with eccentric parents in the 1950s makes life a challenge for Will Cassidy, but it is nothing compared to how difficult life gets when Penny, his two-year-old cousin, comes to live with his family. Then, just when life returns to normal again, his relatives appear out of thin air to reclaim Penny and her father turns up dead in the trunk of his flashy new car. It is many years before Will discovers the truth about the murder and who had a hand to play in it, but not before he can make amends and understand the past for what it was. “The Flickering Light” reveals the story about the strengths and the weaknesses of families, about how relationships ride parallel tracks for years then one day merge, how lost time can be recaptured, and how the truth can make up for what once was lost.
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The Flood
$17.95“I bore him fourteen children and he had me down here faster than lightning.”
In 1887, women were property and could be imprisoned for any reason. Jail was considered a place for the criminal, the disabled, the mentally ill, and the marginalized.
In the basement prison below Toronto’s largest market, two women named Mary—one a shunned, pregnant Irish immigrant, the other a vilified Mississauga woman—become an unlikely pair as they form a friendship within their cold, shared cell. Their bond threatens fellow inmate Sophia—who calls herself the first Black woman in Canada and the leader of the prisoners—and she plots to use the women to gain better treatment for herself. But as melting ice water pours into the prison from Lake Ontario, the forgotten women of Toronto must come together to survive.
Inspired by true accounts and the history of Toronto’s St. Lawrence Market, The Flood gives voice to the little-known stories of early female prisoners in Canada.
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The Flower can Always be Changing
$15.95Finalist: 2019 Wildrid Eggleston Award for Nonfiction at the 2019 Alberta Literary Awards
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The Flower of Youth
$18.95The poems in The Flower of Youth depict the coming of age and into sexual difference of the great writer and film director, Pier Paolo Pasolini. The time of this story is World War II; the place is German-occupied northern Italy. Unlike his younger brother, Guido, who took up arms to fight in the resistance, Pasolini chose to help his mother set up a school for the boys, mostly sons of farmers, too young to fight or be conscripted. The situation ignited an internal war that nearly eclipsed the historical moment for the young Pasolini, a battle within between his desire for boys and his Catholic faith and culture.
The book is a kind of novel in verse including a prologue and epilogue that details di Michele’s search for Pasolini, her pilgrimage to the place and research into the time that shaped him as a man and as an artist.
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The Fly in the Ointment
$18.95Dr. Joe Schwarcz breaks down the fascinating chemistry all around us in this intriguing look at everyday science
From pesticides and environmental estrogens to lipsticks and garlic, the science that surrounds us can be mystifying. Why do some people drill holes in their heads for “enlightenment”? How did a small chemical error nearly convict the unfortunate Patricia Stallings for murdering her son? Where does the expression “take a bromide” come from? Dr. Joe Schwarcz investigates aphrodisiacs, DDT, bottled water, vitamins, barbiturates, plastic wrap, and smoked meat. He puts worries about acrylamide, preservatives, and waxed fruit into perspective and unravels the mysteries of bulletproof vests, weight loss diets, and “mad honey.” From the fanciful to the factual, Dr. Joe enlightens us all — no drills attached.
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The Fool
$19.95Finalist, A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry and Raymond Souster Award
In tarot, the Fool represents continual beginnings, not being able to see or think past the excitement and potential of a new start. The Fool is also associated with zero — a literal loop.
Like Anne Carson writing poetry in the style of the poet alchemist Arthur Rimbaud, Jessie Jones renders her reflections with acerbic brilliance. In her debut collection, she examines the sensual, cruel, pleasing, and depraved state of being human in the twenty-first century. All pro, she’s ready to stage a coup d’état.
Reflective with a kind of circular logic edging toward a darker surrealism, these poems are at times comically satirical, but always grounded in fresh ethos. A pleasure of language and circumstance, where passengers on a boat peer through “a thick, absorbent mist” and the poet moves “through/the city like a bundle of kindling./ All day I wait for a bit of friction/ to transform me,” The Fool sets its sights on a world riddled with panaceas designed to course-correct our lives.
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The Forbidden Purple City
$22.95Finalist, City of Vancouver Book Award 2019
A man returns to Hoi An in his retirement to compose a poem honouring his parents. Two teenagers, ostracized in a private school, forge an unlikely bond. A son discovers the truth about his father’s business ventures and his dreams of success. A young bride, isolated on a remote island with her new husband, finds community in a group of abalone divers.
Taking the title for his debut collection of short fiction from the walled palace of Vietnam’s Nguyen dynasty, Philip Huynh dives headfirst into the Vietnamese diaspora. In these beautifully crafted stories, crystalline in their clarity and immersive in their intensity, he creates a universe inhabited by the deprivations of war, the reinvention of self in a new and unfamiliar settings, and the tensions between old-world parents and new-world children. Rooted in history and tradition yet startlingly contemporary in their approach, Huynh’s stories are sensuously evocative, plunging us into worlds so all-encompassing that we can smell the scent of orange blossoms and hear the rumble of bass lines from suburban car stereos.
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The Forgotten
$26.95The Forgotten is the story of nineteen-year-old Charlie Black who, in 1950, desperate to prove himself to his father, joins the Canadian Army’s Special Force as part of the United Nations forces defending South Korea from an attack by the North. Leaving his family and girlfriend behind, Charlie trains hard, but is soon separated from his battalion, the 2nd Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry. He manages to catch up with the Patricias at the last minute as they prepare to ship out, but not before witnessing the aftermath of a fatal rail disaster. Onboard, Charlie is relegated to 13 Platoon, a group of misfits and adventure-seekers under the leadership of Frenchy, their menacing corporal. Charlie’s comrades are young, only partly trained, but eager to get into battle. When the battalion arrives in Korea, however, their role has changed significantly. China has entered the war on the other side, and allied forces are struggling to survive. What the Canadian government conceived as a semi-peacekeeping role for their troops has changed into an all-out war, and after a brief period of additional training, the Special Force-including Charlie’s battalion-goes on the offensive against terrible odds. A harrowing story of war and survival, The Forgotten helps shed a light on a brutal conflict in our nation’s history, and those brave souls willing to step into the breach.
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The Fort George Murders
$26.00In 1823, a series of violent events in northern British Columbia shattered the fragile trading relationship between the local Indigenous community and the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC). In The Fort George Murders, best-selling author and historian Geoff Mynett delves deep into the HBC’s documentation about this exceptional period in BC history. Writers later in the century took the HBC stories and added invented details and imagined motivation like layers of paint and grime over an old painting. Unfortunately, there are few written records from the Indigenous point of view. With a keen and curious sensitivity, Mynett examines the records, always bearing in mind the likelihood of conscious or unconscious bias of the writers.
With the murder of two HBC workers following a situation rooted in personal relationships and complicated by tensions between the Indigenous and the settler communities, the future of New Caledonia’s trading district was thrown into crisis. Mynett wades through the imperfect historical record in search of what really happened, seeking to understand this period of dangerous tension: Was the HBC to blame? Would they withdraw from New Caledonia altogether? Would they capture the murderers? And if so, what then?
Bringing to life notable figures in British Columbia’s history such as Chief Kw’eh, James Murray Yale, John Tod, Sir George Simpson and Sir James Douglas, The Fort George Murders explores how simmering tensions between the HBC and Indigenous community upended a delicate trade alliance, in which many wanted to simply co-exist. In a startling account as gripping as it is uncomfortable, bestselling BC author Geoff Mynett brings us to a breaking point in Canada’s fur trade.
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The Foundations of Kindness
$25.00The Foundations of Kindness is a tale of love, politics, murder and assassination in Sixties Chicago told from the vantage point of the mountains of British Columbia in the Seventies. Plus contemporary commentary. Young revolutionaries take on the Chicago Democratic Party machine with disastrous consequences for them and their movement. Fifty years later some of them are older, wiser, weaker but uncowed.
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The Four Roads Hotel
$20.00This history of oppression and its effects, at the heart of a French-Canadian family in the 1950s and 1960s, depicts a combination of prohibitions and censures. While the father demands the children’s slavish obedience and labour, the mother promises some protection from his tyranny–until the family settles into a flea pit hotel at the cross-roads of a practically deserted village. Surrounded by an impenetrable forest, the hotel hosts regulars that resemble characters from Hugo and Gorki, and family life declines. In hopes of escape, the younger daughter marries while the elder, against her parents’ wishes, immerses herself in studies and asks questions whose answers are disturbing.
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The Frankenstein Murders
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The Freedom Convoy
$24.95In February 2022, the “Freedom Convoy” laid siege to Parliament Hill, bringing the nation’s capital to a standstill. The Freedom Convoy unpacks the larger project of extremism and social fear in the Canadian landscape, tracing the Convoy’s history to pinpoint the conditions that fomented the movement.This book unpacks the collapse of the policing system and the failure of intelligence services, and all levels of government under the occupation of Ottawa and the blockades at border crossings. What these security failures reveal is a system dominated by personalities and petty interests that had puttered along in ordinary times, but utterly seized through Canada’s first genuine national, political, and security crisis in a generation. Understanding the drivers of social polarization and political extremism — including the sins of the state — this book lays out a roadmap for bringing the disaffected back into the democratic fold.
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The Fruitful City
$22.95Winner of the 2019 Heritage Toronto Book Award
Shortlisted for the 2019 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize
“Moncrieff eloquently reminds readers of the bounty and beauty that surround them.” —Publishers Weekly
Our cities are places of food polarities — food deserts and farmers’ markets, hunger and food waste, fast food delivery and urban gardening. While locavores and preserving pros abound, many of us can’t identify the fruit trees in our yards or declare a berry safe to eat. Those plants — and the people who planted them — are often forgotten.
In The Fruitful City, Helena Moncrieff examines our relationship with food through the fruit trees that dot city streets and yards. She tracks the origins of these living heirlooms and questions how they went from being subsistence staples to raccoon fodder. But in some cities, previously forgotten fruit is now in high demand, and Moncrieff investigates the surge of non-profit urban harvest organizations that try to prevent that food from rotting on concrete and meets the people putting rescued fruit to good use.
As she travels across Canada, slipping into backyards, visiting community orchards, and taking in canning competitions, Moncrieff discovers that attitudinal changes are more important than agricultural ones. While the bounty of apples is great, reconnecting with nature and our community is the real prize.