A note to US-based customers: All Lit Up is pausing print orders to the USA until further notice. Read more
Showing 7297–7312 of 9248 results
Daniel Brooks’s The Full Light of Day is a modern epic tragedy, a timely exploration of crumbling privilege and power, beautifully told and innovative in form. Mary’s family finds itself in serious difficulty, and some bad decisions lead to disaster. Mary soon falls ill, and as she is dying wrestles with what her family is, what she has done with her life, and how she wants to die. The Full Light of Day is a provocative film/theatre experiment which looks at crucial choices facing Canadians today – how to live, love, and die in a world in transition. Bold characters, bracing text, wit, and suspense all mix together in this new play by award-winning artist Daniel Brooks.
Nominated for 2024 Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association’s Elgin Award • One of the Globe 100’s Best Books of 2023
The follow-up to Guriel’s NYT New & Noteworthy Forgotten Work is a mashup of Moby-Dick, The Lord of the Rings, Byron, cyberpunk, Swamp Thing, Teen Wolf … and more.
It’s 2070. Newfoundland has vanished, Tokyo is a new Venice, and many people have retreated to “bonsai housing”: hives that compress matter in a world that’s losing ground to rising tides. Enter Kaye, an English literature student searching for the reclusive author of a YA classic—a beloved novel about teenage werewolves sailing to a fabled sea monster’s nest. Kaye’s quest will intersect with obsessive fan subcultures, corporate conspiracies, flying gondolas, an anthropomorphic stove, and the molecular limits of reality itself. Set in the same world as Guriel’s acclaimed Forgotten Work, which the New York Times called “unlikely, audacious, and ingenious,” and written in rhyming couplets, The Full-Moon Whaling Chronicles cuts between Kaye’s quest, chapters from the YA novel, and guerilla works of fanfic in a visionary verse novel destined to draw its own cult following.
A stunningly original work of speculative fiction,The Fungus Garden follows the plight of a man who becomes transformed into a termite. Impeccably researched, this story brings the reader effortlessly into a fascinating world of conflict and desire, ultimately becoming an investigation into what it means to be human.
Winner of Canada Reads 2024 • Longlisted for the 2025 Dublin Literary Award • Longlisted for the 2024 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction • One of Tor.com‘s Can’t Miss Speculative Fiction for Fall 2023 • Listed in CBC Books Fiction to Read in Fall 2023 • One of 20 Books You Heard about on CBC Last Week • One of Kirkus Reviews‘ Fall 2023 Big Books By Small Presses • A Kirkus Review Work of Translated Fiction To Read Now • One of CBC Books Best Books of 2023 • A CBC Books Bestselling Canadian Book of the Week
In an alternate history in which the French never surrendered Detroit, children protect their own kingdom in the trees.
In an alternate history of Detroit, the Motor City was never surrendered to the US. Its residents deal with pollution, poverty, and the legacy of racism—and strange and magical things are happening: children rule over their own kingdom in the trees and burned houses regenerate themselves. When Gloria arrives looking for answers and her missing granddaughters, at first she finds only a hungry mouse in the derelict home where her daughter was murdered. But the neighbours take pity on her and she turns to their resilience and impressive gardens for sustenance.
When a strange intuition sends Gloria into the woods of Parc Rouge, where the city’s orphaned and abandoned children are rumored to have created their own society, she can’t imagine the strength she will find. A richly imagined story of community and a plea for persistence in the face of our uncertain future, The Future is a lyrical testament to the power we hold to protect the people and places we love—together.
Michael Harris’s first poetry collection since his Governor General’s Award-nominated Circus (2010), The Gamekeeper assembles a thoughtful selection of the Montreal poet’s accomplished verse. With evocative imagery and a natural sense of rhythm, Harris writes of illness, pain, marriage, death, imaginary fairy-tale monsters, and much else. The result, according to one reviewer, “straddles a position between the carnivalesque and the sensual.”
The Gathering Tree is a beautifully illustrated children’s book about HIV/AIDS. Written by award-winning First Nations author Larry Loyie and co-author Constance Brissenden, it is a gentle, positive story of a First Nations family facing HIV. After eleven-year-old Tyler and his younger sister Shay-Lyn learn their favorite cousin Robert has HIV, they discover that knowledge brings understanding and self-awareness. Aspects of physical, spiritual, mental and emotional health are addressed.
With his signature caustic wit, bestselling author Dr. Joe Schwarcz presents the fun side of science in this dynamic collection
The Genie in the Bottle makes science downright fun. Dr. Joe Schwarcz blends quirky anecdotes about everyday chemistry with engaging tales from the history of science. Get a different twist on licorice and travel to the dark side of the sun. Control stinky feet and bend spoons and minds. Learn about the latest on chocolate research, flax, ginkgo biloba, magnesium, and blueberries. Dr. Joe also solves the mystery of the exploding shrimp and, finally, he lets us in on the secret of the genie in the bottle. As in all his work, Dr. Joe brings humor, showbiz savvy, and magic to this exciting collection.
In The Geography of Arrival, George Sipos revisits the city of London, Ontario, where his family settled after immigrating to Canada from Hungary in 1957. Divided into short chapters, each related to a different local landmark, the book depicts the world through the eyes of a boy getting the hang of North American culture, and of an adolescent finding his way in the larger world.
“A few years ago,” says Sipos, “someone I knew moved to London, Ontario, the place where I had grown up in the late 50s and early 60s. She was totally new to the city and I set out to write her a series of letters describing certain streets and buildings and neighbourhoods as I remembered them, knowing of course that this was bound to be a false guide to anything that might still be there. The wrecker’s ball (or memory, which is much the same thing) had probably assured that whatever I wrote would be more fictitious than not. As it turned out, our correspondence didn’t get very far, but by then the project of writing about certain landmarks was started in my mind. Over the next several years I came back to this unreliable geography and continued to write what ultimately became a nominal guide book. What it’s a guide to is not so clear. The London of the mid twentieth century? Maybe. A particular protagonist’s coming of age? Maybe. An album of snapshots of how a person grows into a mental and aesthetic and even scientific self? Perhaps.”
Moving chronologically, Sipos traces his interior, personal geography across the particular landscape of 1960s London. After his family settles in a downtown apartment, there is the baffling discovery of a plastic hockey-player figurine in the cereal box and the theories he and his father develop to explain it. Sipos shares his fear of opening his eyes underwater at swimming lessons, his first subway ride on a trip to Toronto, and his early love of public speaking, fencing and choral singing. He tries to live-trap a rabbit in the park, recalls the year the fall-out shelter stole the show from the All-Electric Dream Home at the exhibition, and savours the joy of public skating at the outdoor rink on Elliott Street. In one of the book’s most absorbing passages, a teenaged Sipos guides his stage-frightened priest through the first service after the changes to the Mass brought about by the Second Vatican Council.
This is a book that reminds us of the importance of reflection and of the positive impact that the culture and landscape of a place can have on the direction of our lives.
In the fictional village of Rocky Point, Cape Breton, just after WWII, the Briar family keeps a secret. Locked in his room, Joseph Briar, a child with visible and non-visible disabilities, is hidden from the community. And what Alfie Johns discovers through Joseph’s window will lead him to love and a future framing beauty in photographs. Harkening back to Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, Beatrice MacNeil reveals the destructive power of shame and the redemptive power of art.
“If you like your crime hard and fast, Kalteis is for you.” — Globe and Mail
A surefire plan that will end his marital and money problems in one swoop … what could go wrong?
Lenny Ovitz has plenty of secrets, and his wife, Paulina, has become a liability. His life would be so much better without her in it.
It’s the mid-’60s in Toronto, and Lenny works for a ruthless gangster whose travel agency is a front for a collections racket in the Kensington Market area. Lenny’s days are spent with his partner, Gabe, terrorizing the locals into paying protection on their shops and their lives. On the side, Lenny and Gabe co-own a tenement block that they bought with dirty money borrowed from shady individuals. Overextended, Lenny plans to pay them back with more borrowed money from other loans and by re-mortgaging his house, without the knowledge of his wife.
Tired of his lies and scheming, Paulina demands a divorce. Lenny is certain she’s going to take him for everything, leaving him unable to pay the debt on the tenement block. And that’s likely to get him pitched off one of his own rooftops. Lenny would rather get than be gotten, so he comes up with a surefire way to end both his marital and money problems — Paulina’s going to have to get whacked.
The Sumida River, the Tsukiji fish market, a stuffed bear head. A Montrealer in mourning returns to Tokyo, where he is haunted by the ghost of his dead lover. But when a turbulent new love enters his life will it be enough to put him on sure footing or will he forever be on shaky ground?
How important is truth? What is normal? These are the questions raised in The Gift Child, Elaine McCluskey’s fictional oeuvre — a funny, poignant, sure-shot novel, populated with a community of petty criminals, beloved broadcasters, undercover intelligence agents, and more.
The novel opens with the disappearance of a man in Pollock Passage, Nova Scotia, a man last seen driving away from a government wharf with a giant tuna head in the basket of his Schwinn delivery bicycle. The man’s name is Graham Swim; he’s good at playing the harmonica and making friends.
When Graham’s cousin Harriett decides to investigate his disappearance, she comes up against her own family history. A news photographer now jobless and adrift, Harriett has lived most of her life in the shadow of her larger-than-life father — a once-beloved TV news anchor and borderline narcissist.
When Harriett arrives in Pollock Passage, she meets a stranger who tells her he is researching the Shag Harbour UFO mystery. While this stranger helps Harriett reconnect with pieces of herself she thought long-dead, she also learns that what she knows about her father may not be true.
Vintage McCluskey, The Gift Child showcases McCluskey’s unique ability to capture the malleability of memory and the complex absurdity and nobility of humanity. It’s a novel that’s hard to put down; it’s even harder to forget.
Best known as the author of the satiric utopian novel A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder, James De Mille (1833-80) wrote many other works of fiction and poetry. Patricia Monk’s biographical-critical study investigates De Mille’s personal, educational, religious, social, and professional background in meticulous detail. She provides a comprehensive review of De Mille’s developing career. The Gilded Beaver throws new light on the literary world of nineteenth-century Canada, and is a valuable contribution to the growing list of biographies of Canadian writers.
This collection by the award-winning writer Goh Poh Seng is the first volume of his poetry published in North America. It spans more than thirty-five years of his work and traverses cultures as well as continents.Goh’s settings range from the wharfs at Singapore’s harbour to a backwater bar in Papeete, Tahiti, from a park in Halifax to the streets of Vancouver. His characters are unforgettable: Fely, a young woman from Ermita who sells her body to support her eight-year-old daughter; an old sailor who has solo-circumnavigated the globe; a Vietcong soldier who loses his family and finally his own life to the horror of the Vietnam war.Even more wide-ranging is the perceptual and emotional depth of the poems. Goh brings a lifetime of love, despair, passion and honesty to his work; with the skill of a master craftsman, he uses the most graceful and lyrical language to understand his world and to bring us closer to ourselves and each other.