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As the dance floor of life tilts beneath our feet, do we keep dancing? In this inspired collection of Susan Alexander’s poems, we sway to the rhythms of passion, death, grief, and how we are connected in our lives. The individual moments making up the tune of this poet’s life offer the possibility of finding the beauty within the everyday resonance of our own existence.
Twenty members of a cult are found massacred on an isolated island on Canada’s West Coast. Their leader, Shiva Ram Acharya, is brought to trial, and the great Arthur Beauchamp defends him, assisted by his junior counsel Max Macarthur. Shiva claims to have amnesia and refuses to participate in his own defence. But Macarthur gradually becomes convinced of his innocence, embarking on the greatest challenge of his career — a dangerous quest for the true murderer — and falling under the sway of the brilliant, enigmatic Shiva. Is Shiva a madman or a messiah?
While isolated and friendless in World War II Cornwall, Nora, a precocious American adolescent, loses her younger half-brother in a car crash. Overwhelmed by grief, Nora’s mother becomes involved with Olaf Winter, the self-professed necromancer Nora believes is responsible for the accident. Desperate to win back her mother’s love from the nefarious Mr. Winter, Nora embarks on an epic journey and is plunged into a world of faeries, giants, and homunculi. Eventually she reaches the land of the dead where she confronts the dark king who rules that realm, attempts to retrieve her half-brother, and heal her mother’s broken heart.
Libraries are magical places. But what if they’re even more magical than we know?
In Cyrille Martinez’s library, the books are alive: not just their ideas or their stories, but the books themselves. Meet the Angry Young Book, who has strong opinions about who reads what and why. He’s tired of people reading bestsellers, so he places himself on the desks of those who might appreciate him. Meet the Old Historian who mysteriously vanished from the stacks. Meet the Blue Librarian, the Mauve Librarian, the Yellow Librarian, and spend a day with the Red Librarian trying to banish coffee cups and laptops.
Then one day there are no empty desks anywhere in the Great Library. A great horde of student workers has descended, and they will scan every single book in the library: the much-borrowed, the neglected, the popular, the obscure. What will happen to the library then? Will it still be necessary?
The Dark Library is a theoretical fiction, a meditation on what libraries mean in our digital world. Has the act of reading changed? What is a reader? A book? Martinez, a librarian himself, has written a love letter to the urban forest of the dark, wild library, where ideas and stories roam free.
An affair. A marriage. Accidental encounters. A secret spying mission masquerading as research for a short story on desire. This is the rich ground from which The Darren Effect springs, carrying us through the complexities, tragedies, and unanticipated triumphs of love and loss.
The Darren Effect is a miraculous novel, in which the characters coalesce and crisscross in awkward, surprising, and hilarious ways. Damaged by grief and circumstance, Heather, Isabella, Darren, and Benny offer each other heartbreak, love, and redemption at a time when all previous points of reference have vanished.
Estranged from her abusive parents as a teenager, Taraneh Pourani overcame poverty, isolation and self-hatred to build a happy home with her loving husband and children. Triggered by her young sons’ annual visit with their grandparents, Taraneh becomes psychologically distressed. She begins to doubt her memories and question her decision to remain distanced from her aging parents.
A journey into Taraneh’s family history reveals three generations of unaddressed mental illness and unresolved childhood trauma. Due to poverty in early twentieth-century Iran, Taraneh’s grandmother, Batoul, is married at the age of nine and sent to live with her husband’s family. Ashamed and traumatized, Batoul raises her children to expect hardships and to endure them in secret. The seeds of dysfunction are planted in Mojegan, Taraneh’s mother. Mojegan is a nurse in Tehran in the 1960s when she marries the charming, but alcoholic and impulsive, Reza. She stands by Reza throughout their marriage, even after he abruptly kicks out their teenage daughter, Taraneh.
A powerful and beautiful debut novel by Kimia Eslah, The Daughter Who Walked Away explores the lives of three Iranian women, across three generations, as they struggle to love and be loved unconditionally.
Longlisted for the 2023 OCM Bocas Prize • Longlisted for the 2023 Raymond Souster Poetry Prize • A CBC Best Poetry Book of 2022 • Nominated for the 2023 ReLit Award for Poetry
Saturated with locutions lifted from the late 19th century, The Day-Breakers deeply conceives of what African Canadian soldiers experienced before, during, and in the immediate aftermath of the American Civil War.
“It is not wise to waste the life / Against a stubborn will. / Yet would we die as some have done. / Beating a way for the rising sun wrote Arna Bontemps. In The Day-Breakers, poet Michael Fraser imagines the selflessness of Black soldiers who fought for the Union during the American Civil War, of whom hundreds were African-Canadian, fighting for the freedom of their brethren and the dawning of a new day. Brilliantly capturing the rhythms of their voices and the era in which they lived and fought, Fraser’s The Day-Breakers is an homage to their sacrifice and an unforgettable act of reclamation: the restoration of a language, and a powerful new perspective on Black history and experience.
It’s hard to worry about the future when you’re laughing at the hilarious absurdity of daily life. The days we live go by like slugs eating their way through leaves; everything changes, yet nothing changes, and the years soon accumulate. Who doesn’t read their daily horoscope, searching for guidance about what’s to come, how to live? What is life, but ordinary and special days, time passing, humour, sex, death, and love (making it all bearable)? All these are repeated gestures that run through The Days, a kind of absurdist guidebook made up of ninety unconventional, very short stories collected in three tight sections. This is fiction that thinks, fiction that cuts to the chase, told with Farrant’s trademark humour and acerbic wit. Her miniatures gracefully articulate the contemporary zeitgeist: anxiety about the future coupled with absurd mundanity. Somehow, always, Farrant captures the moments that buoy us up, crystallizing the experiences keeping us from being overwhelmed while calling our attention to overwhelming truths.
Let yourself be excited and delighted. Farrant’s artfully spare stories – averaging a couple of paragraphs each – offer enough food for thought (and mood) to keep you going for months. Dip in occasionally to be reminded of the strangeness of us, or read from beginning to end and immerse yourself in a slightly skewed version of reality – one in which people are frank and the world is unforgiving as it shimmers like light on water, sometimes blinding, always dazzling.
World-renowned cartoonist Seth returns with three new ghost stories for 2022.
The dead sleep peacefully—until a railway is built near their cemetery. While the old priest works to keep them at rest, the count’s dying wife begs to be buried near the railway. But when her last wish is granted, the priest finds that the sound of the train leaves the countess far from at peace.
The Witches never failed to extract a price somehow.
When Cross stumbles drunkenly into a darkened Berlin theatre that is staging Hamlet, he does not expect to see Morgana le Fay on stage as Queen Gertrude or witness a real murder. But a deadly ghost is haunting the faerie queen’s plays and Morgana expects Cross to solve the mystery or risk his daughter, Amelia, becoming the next victim. With the fate of Amelia in the balance Cross tries to unravel a mystery that takes him to libraries outside of time, into battles alongside an undead Christopher Marlowe and to bargaining with the real Witches of Macbeth. But is the play the thing, or is there something far older haunting Shakespeare’s famous work?
Inheriting the Skipper’s House from her late aunt Deirdre MacPhail, a famed Scottish writer, looks like the solution to all Elspeth Laird’s financial problems — but this inheritance comes with a dark legacy.
New to Sulla Island’s wild beauty and fierce weather, Elspeth soon discovers a community divided by her aunt’s memory. Some cherish the tourism Deirdre brought, while others blame her for ruining their traditional way of life. Practical jokes escalate to sinister threats, and a murder confirms Elspeth’s worst fears: a killer is among them. With tensions rising and allies scarce, Elspeth must navigate a web of secrets and old grudges.
As legend says, the Skipper’s House brings doom to its owners. Elspeth must unravel the truth before she becomes the next victim of Sulla Island’s deadly legacy.
This darkly humorous crime novel set in a Canadian ski town is a “fast-paced thrill ride.” (Publishers Weekly)
“The dialogue is some of the sharpest and funniest I’ve seen in any book this year.” — National Post
Grey Stevens took over the family business after his uncle passed away, and now grows the best pot in Whistler, British Columbia. It’s called Eight Miles High and the word on the street is it rivals anything on the planet.
Happy to fly under the radar in this mountain playground, Grey just wants to take life easy, snowboarding in the cold months and biking in the hot ones. But demand for his pot among the locals and tourists keeps growing. Everybody wants to get their hands on it — including two rival gangs who come to town to take over the dope trade.
When Grey steps in and rescues a girl from a beating at the hands of one of the gang members, he finds himself in the middle of a turf war and a new relationship at the same time. After one of his roommates gets attacked and another goes missing, Grey has to decide whether he’s going to take off with the girl and start over someplace new — or stay and fight for what’s his . . .
The Deaf House