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Showing 7313–7328 of 9492 results
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The Death and Life of Strother Purcell
$22.95The man, the myth, the one-eyed legend: a frontier epic for fans of Ron Rash and Cormac McCarthy.
In 1876, the fabled lawman Strother Purcell disappears into a winter storm in the mountains of British Columbia, while hunting down his outlawed half-brother. Sixteen years later, the wreck of Purcell resurfaces – derelict, homeless and one-eyed – in a San Francisco jail cell. And a failed journalist named Barrington Weaver conceives a grand redemptive plan. He will write Purcell’s true-life story. All it requires is a final act…
What unfolds is an archetypal saga of obsession, lost love, treachery, and revenge, told in Ian Weir’s trademark funny, fast, wickedly intelligent style. A deadpan revisionist Western, refracted through a Southern Gothic revenge tragedy, The Death and Life of Strother Purcell is a novel about two cursed brothers, a pair of eldritch orphans, the vexed nature of truth, and the yearnings of that treacherous sonofabitch the human heart.
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The Death of René Lévesque
$15.95In taking on “The Matter of Québec,” David Fennario provides audiences and readers with an abiding critique of the notion that history is created around “great causes” by “great men.” Given the recent reversal of fortune delivered to the tempestuous sound and fury of the Québec separatist movement, The Death of René Lévesque is, in retrospect, more than an astonishingly profound and prophetic political document.
Showcasing the surprising theatrical range and virtuosity of the author of Canada’s first bilingual—though definitely not bicultural—working-class hit, Balconville, The Death of René Lévesque dramatizes the rise and fall of Canada’s most tragic public figure of the 20th century. Fennario’s deft and subtle characterization of the father of the Parti Québecois, his re-telling of the compromising political realities which formed both the movement and the party as Lévesque created it, and the gradual revelation of the fatal flaw which began to undermine both the man and his dream of a new republic, proceed here with a stately, devastating inevitability which recall the masterful tragedies of Euripides and Shakespeare.
The Death of René Lévesque presents its audience with the powerful and cathartic stillbirth of a nation, stripped of both pity and fear, as only an Anglophone Québec separatist could possibly imagine it.
Cast of two women and four men.
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The Death of Small Creatures
$22.95In her lyrical memoir The Death of Small Creatures, Trisha Cull lays bare her struggles with bulimia, bipolar disorder and substance abuse. Interspersing snatches of conversations, letters, blog entries and clinical notes with intimate poetic narrative, Cull evokes an accessible experience of mental illness. In The Death of Small Creatures, Cull strives to cope with her hopelessness. She finds comfort in the company of her two pet rabbits until one of them dies as a result of her lethargy. She numbs herself with alcohol. She validates her self-worth by seeking the love of men–any and all men–and three relationships significantly impact her life: her marriage to Leigh, a much older man; her unrequited love for Dr. P, her therapist; and her healthier relationship with Richard, an American she meets through her blog. She tries drugs–Neo Citran, Ativan, Wellbutrin, crack, crystal meth–and after two hospitalizations, she undergoes electroconvulsive therapy. Haunting and expressive, this immersive memoir explores love in all its facets–needy, obsessive, healthy, self-directed–and plunges the reader headlong into the intense and immediate experience of mental illness.
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The Death of Tony
$25.95A delightful and evocative memoir by Leacock Medal nominee Antanas Sileika.
The acclaimed novelist who wrote this book wasn’t always Antanas. Growing up in the immigrant hub of Weston, Ontario-with a childhood of Lithuanian summer camp, folk dancing, and booze-soaked Christmases-Sileika was known to friends and teachers as Tony. It wasn’t until he entered university and began to understand his deep attachment to his heritage that he shed the anglicized name and became Antanas Sileika, the writer who straddles two worlds.
In animated, entertaining prose, Sileika recounts his time as a young writer in Paris, the dramatic events surrounding Lithuanian independence and the fall of the Soviet Union, and his growing involvement in Lithuania’s political and cultural spheres. Proud of his heritage but unafraid to explore its darker chapters, he touches in this book on the Holocaust and the gulag, as well as the new threats facing Eastern Europe today. Laced with humour and wry observations, The Death of Tony is a tribute to the immigrant experience, a primer for Canadian readers on the history and culture of an underrepresented nation, and above all a sensitive exploration of this author’s bifurcated identity.
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The December Man (L’homme de décembre)
$16.95In the aftermath of the 1989 Montreal Massacre, Benoît and Kathleen do everything they can to help their beloved son cope with his guilt and rage… but Jean’s young life becomes unglued.
Using humour and the humdrum of everyday life, Murphy intuitively moves backwards in time to the fateful day when Jean, the only ray of hope in this working-class family, escaped the massacre… or thought he did. This searing drama on courage, heroism, and despair explores the long private shadow that public violence casts. Winner of the 2007 Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama and the 2008 CAA Carol Bolt Award.
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The Decline of the Hollywood Empire
$17.95The Hollywood empire was built over the course of a century through hard-nosed business practices such as block booking, dumping and buying up the competition, turning the silver screen into a goldmine in the process. The business logic that has driven the industry since its beginnings has gone into hyperdrive in recent years, with astronomical sums invested in productions and promotion. Ironically that massive outlay has gone toward churning out a flat, made-in-Hollywood universalism that can be exported planet-wide, but which is simultaneously losing audiences, primarily to the digital world, at an accelerating pace. The apparently insurmountable barriers of finance and distribution to entry into the world of entertainment have served, so far, to keep smaller players out of the frame and, Fischer contends, have destroyed the industry’s creative potential. It turns out too much money can kill cinema just as certainly as not enough.
In The Decline of the Hollywood Empire, artist and philosopher Hervé Fischer heralds an inevitable move from 35 mm to digital distribution, which will take what has until now existed only on the margins of the “entertainment industry”—independent film, amateur film, documentary and other genres—from bit players to starring roles: how the Trojan horse of digital technology and distribution, in the hands of independent producers, could well toll the bell for Hollywood’s hegemony in the business of film.
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The Deepest Map
$24.95Finalist, Hamilton Literary Award (Non-Fiction)
Longlisted, SWCC Book Award (General Category)
A Globe and Mail Best BookFive oceans cover approximately seventy per cent of the earth, yet we know little of what lies beneath them. Now, the race is on to completely map the oceans’ floor. Scientists, investors, militaries, and private explorers are competing in this epic venture to obtain an accurate reading of this vast terrain and understand its contours and environment.
In The Deepest Map, Laura Trethewey chronicles this race to the bottom. Following global efforts around the world, she documents Inuit-led crowdsourced mapping in the Arctic as climate change alters the landscape, a Texas millionaire’s efforts to become the first man to dive to the deepest point in each ocean, and the increasingly fraught question of whether and how to mine the deep sea.
A true tale of science, nature, technology, and extreme outdoor adventure, The Deepest Map both illuminates why we love — and fear — the earth’s final frontier and contributes to increasingly urgent conversations about climate change.
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The Defiant Mind
$22.95“What is a stroke?” This is the question that plagues Ron Smith as he emerges from the carpet bombing of his brain. The Defiant Mind: Living Inside a Stroke is a first-person account of a massive Ischemic stroke to the brain stem. Smith takes the reader inside the experience and shows how recuperation happens ? the challenges of communication, the barriers to treatment, the frustrations of being misunderstood and written-off, the role of memory in recovering identity, the power of continuing therapy, and the passionate will to live.
Full of arresting anecdotes, enlivened by a vivid and vigorous style, the book tells of successes and failures and draws on the newest research in stroke treatment.
This is a necessary book for stroke survivors still dealing with the effects of their trauma and for care-givers, vital to the process of recuperation, who feel hampered and harried by concern and confusion. The book is a caring companion, offering support to people navigating the fear and bewilderment that accompanies a stroke. For medical professionals, the book offers insights into the workings of the brain, the power of the brain to heal, critiques of conventional limits imposed on therapy, and suggestions for ways to improve care.
More than an evocative memoir, more than an incomplete history, more than a breathtaking journey out of stroke and back to a literary life, The Defiant Mind is a beautifully written love story; it is a glimpse inside the tender and fulfilling relationship between the author and his wife. Smith makes clear that defiance (with unconditional support) is the first step to making hope a reality.
This is a story about time which affirms life in the face of terror and death. A book for everyone. -
The Definition of Beautiful
$21.95Shortlisted for the 2024 Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize
A stunning memoir of coming of age and recovering from anorexia in the 2020s
Charlotte Bellows wrote The Definition of Beautiful between the ages of fifteen and seventeen, in the wake of lockdown and in recovery from anorexia. In the tradition of Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar and Françoise Sagan in Bonjour Tristesse, Bellows writes with deceptively straightforward urgency, pushing through society’s constraints on the bodies and minds of girls and women to offer a story both achingly familiar and devastatingly new.
In 2020, fourteen-year-old Charlotte’s lifelong drive to achieve ‘perfection’ distorts into an all-encompassing obsession. Living between the suffocating world of lockdown and an uncanny dreamscape inhabited by competing avatars, Charlotte faces a parade of masked faces in hospital rooms, the aftermath of first love, the erosion of lifelong friendship, and the agony of seeing her illness devastate her family as it threatens to destroy her; as the world reopens, she finds new connections and mentors, new joy, new ways of thinking, new ways to be.
Charlotte Bellows offers a potent fusion of insight and innocence — a story for those who suffer or have suffered from eating disorders, but, more, a vital coming of age story of a young gay and artistic woman, tugged and throttled by a myriad of pressures, not least from the dark gravity that is the underside of her own creative drive.
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The Degrees of Barley Lick
$10.99Life has been hard for sixteen-year-old Barley Lick lately: he split with his girlfriend, his father died, and now his mother has a boyfriend, a cop named Fred Newton. Not even Barley?s new Great Dane, Stanley, can make things right.
Then Newton wants Barley to use his geocaching skills to help him solve a mystery; helping would mean losing a huge geocaching competition and, even worse, letting his ex-girlfriend Phyllis win. But Barley soon realizes that a young boy?s life may be in danger and time to rescue him is running out.
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The Delusionist
$20.00Art, love, and history furnish the setting in this tale of fate and destiny. Set in Vancouver in 1962, we follow Cyril Andrachuk, son of immigrant parents from the former Ukraine, as he makes his way from high school to menial labour jobs, from first love to first heartbreak, from sibling rivalry to malicious family betrayal.
Cyril is the only Canadian-born member of the Andrachuk family, his parents and older brother having survived the Holodomor, Stalin’s systematic starving of the Ukraine in the 1930s during which two million people died. Cyril’s mother carries the scars and memories of a past she can’t let go of; she mourns the early death of her husband and feels responsible for the malnourished, brittle bones of her eldest son, Paul. Cyril is a mystery to her: he wants to be an artist he draws incessantly and talks about going to art school. He draws his late-father’s tools saws, drills, hammers, wrenches, everything. When Cyril produces a series of large commemorative “Stalin stamps” his mother questions her son’s insensitivity; when an act of impassioned violence erupts in the house, it is Cyril’s sanity that is called into question.
The Delusionist is a darkly comic novel about love, loss, creativity, and coming to terms with the horrors of history.
Praise for Grant Buday:
“Buday’s genius is that of the storyteller.” The Vancouver Sun
“mordantly funny” The National Post
“a rollicking black comedy of errors with a host of unforgettable characters” Quill & Quire (on White Lung)
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The Dependent
$20.00The Dependent is a true story written by a military wife married to a paratrooper who served in the Canadian Armed Forces for fourteen years before his army career came to a crashing halt–a freak accident near Armed Forces Base Trenton left him paraplegic and their future in shards. Danielle, a fiercely independent university student, meets Steve, an ambitious infantry private. Much of the first years of their marriage are spent apart, as Steve’s infantry unit is sent overseas for duty in Croatia, Bosnia, and Afghanistan. With each tour of duty, the emotional distance between them intensifies. After four tours, Steve finally comes home to stay, but little changes: their marriage remains a difficult ménage-à-trois made up of a man, a woman, and the military. In this deeply candid depiction of their marriage before and after a life-altering trauma, each chapter unveils an intimate portrait of marriage–one in which Danielle and Steve must navigate shifting roles and learn to co-exist in a space where the collateral damage of military service is absolute. The Dependent is a brave and modern love story revealing immeasurable loss and grief and the journey to lasting hope and forgiveness.
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The Descendants
$24.95Chursinoff’s remarkable debut is a distinctively structured, sublimely written and moving tale of love, loss, intergenerational trauma and ultimately redemption, set in one of Canada’s most enigmatic and misunderstood ethno-religious communities.Seven years after a brutal encounter with the Hells Angels, two ex-lovers, Jonah Seeger and Ruby Samarodin, return to their Doukhobor religious community in the mountains of British Columbia to heal and start new lives. Jonah is a twenty-five-year-old from a disgraced family, and now injured and battling PTSD from his time as a Marine. Ruby, practically Doukhobor royalty, is a rock star with a substance use disorder.Jonah finds his mother, Sharon, still struggling with an eating disorder stemming from her terrorist upbringing in the Doukhobor splinter sect known as the Sons of Freedom. Ruby returns to Sasha, the young son she abandoned, and to her overbearing mother, Virginia, a pious pillar of the community raised to loathe the Sons of Freedom.After a heartfelt reunion between Jonah, Ruby, and Sasha, they learn that a murderous Hells Angel, Clinton Pritchard, is still obsessed with revenge for the damage Jonah caused years earlier. But when Ruby confronts Clinton about their terrible past, Clinton’s brother Swanny Pritchard must choose whether to side with his brother or turn against him. Jonah and Ruby unwittingly draw their family into a final confrontation with the Hells Angels that will test longheld, pacifist Doukhobor beliefs.
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The Desert Lake
$19.95Barbara Crossie, a 31-year-old relationships columnist, has been invited by her friend Harry to join a Canadian delegation to China. Also in the delegation is the formidable Elizabeth Pearl Murray, head of the Writers’ Guild, who used to live in China. Barbara’s not sure what she has to contribute, as she’s only just published her first book— Mad About Men —-but Harry, a publisher of worthy political books, assures her she will be great, the trip will be great. Barbara agrees on the condition that they meet up with her agent, Josh, who also happens to be her long-distance lover. Barbara and Josh are at a crossroads, and she needs to find out if they are going to take the next step in their relationship. Although Harry is a little in love with Barbara himself, he reluctantly agrees to include Josh.
But things go awry from the moment of their arrival, when Josh simply doesn’t appear. When Barbara manages to reach his office and finds out he has not only not taken the flight to China, but is at his mountain cabin and unreachable, she is at a loss what to do, and so she carries on with her companions, traveling the Silk Road to the ends of the earth, and eventually finding herself in the deadliest desert on earth. And that is where she learns how to fit the keys words in her personal lexicon together and tell her story.
Love, loss, and discovery are only part of The Desert Lake. This is a smart and subtle literary novel that also manages to be a page turner.
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The Deserters
$19.95Shifting across three continents, The Deserters explores themes of trust, isolation, abandonment, and emotional disconnection in a world dramatically altered by the experience of war.
Eugenie is trying–and mostly failing–to restore an inherited old farm in New Brunswick while her husband, a master carpenter, is away in Spain. The work involved overwhelms her, so she hires Dean to help bring the farm back to working order. The only problem is that Dean is a deserter from the US Army suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, and he happens to be living deep in the backwoods of her property, where he’s hiding out from immigration officials. To complicate matters further, Eugenie and Dean fall into a relationship, even as he is tormented by flashbacks, nightmares, and flickering memories of his wartime experiences in Iraq.
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The Desirable Sister
$22.00Gia and Serena Pirji are sisters, but as the first-generation born in Canada to immigrant parents, their lives play out in different ways because of their skin tone. Gia’s fair skin grants her membership to cliques of white kids as a teen, while Serena’s dark skin means she is labelled as Indian and treated as inferior. This superficial difference, imposed by a society obsessed with skin colour and hierarchy, sets the sisters into a dynamic that plays out throughout their lives. In a world where white skin is preferable, the sisters are pitted against each other through acts of revenge and competition as they experience adultery, ruined friendships, domestic abuse, infertility and motherhood.
Taslim Burkowicz’s vivid, sensory-rich writing style brings readers to the party scene in Goa, suburban supermarkets in Vancouver and a safari in Africa, where Gia and Serena navigate through the highs and lows of a tumultuous, loving relationship. The Desirable Sister reveals the bitter games of treachery women are forced to play to achieve the ranks of beauty and success, and ultimately shows the strength of love between sisters.