A note to US-based customers: All Lit Up is pausing print orders to the USA until further notice. Read more

All Books

All Books in this Collection

Showing 7361–7376 of 9492 results

  • The Dowager Empress

    The Dowager Empress

    $18.95

    Adele Wiseman, lifelong writing friend of Margaret Laurence, is best know for her novels, The Sacrifice, winner of the Governor-General’s Award in 1956, and Crackpot, Winner of the Canadian Booksellers Association Award in 1974. She also wrote essays, plays, and children’s books. Her poetry, the work of the last ten years of her life, and mostly unpublished, ranges in form from haiku to sonnets to subversive feminist epic; in content from poems about poetry (“Instructions for Poems in Progress”), to love poems (“In Our Play”), to nature poems (“Mysteries of Flight”), to family poems, and to political poems, including “The Dowager Empress Suite.” This is Adele Wiseman writing in her most personal voice. The Dowager Empress: Selected Poems by Adele Wiseman rounds out our knowledge of a major Canadian writer.

  • The Downloaded

    The Downloaded

    $19.95

    The new novel by Canada’s top Science Fiction writer

    In 2059 two very different groups have their minds uploaded into a quantum computer in Waterloo, Ontario.

    One group consists of astronauts preparing for Earth’s first interstellar voyage. The other? Convicted murderers, serving their sentences in a virtual-reality prison.

    But when disaster strikes, the astronauts and the prisoners must download back into physical reality and find a way to work together to save Earth from destruction.

    The Downloaded debuted in a six-month exclusive window as an Audible Original narrated by Academy Award-winner Brendan Fraser promoted by national TV and radio ad campaigns. This print edition is coming out immediately after Audible’s exclusivity ends and is being supported by a six-city cross-Canada author book tour.

  • The Drawer Boy

    The Drawer Boy

    $15.95

    A young actor from the big city lives with two aging bachelor farmers to gather stories about rural life. The farmers’ lives are irrevocably altered when art attempts to imitate life and the line between truth and fiction is crossed.

  • The Dreamlife of Bridges

    The Dreamlife of Bridges

    $13.00

    ‘The Dreamlife of Bridges’ is the debut novel from Vancouver writer Robert Strandquist. Leo is a middle-aged, divorced handyman capable of mending almost anything outside of himself. The denial of his son’s death, and his inability to deal with his own pain, has rendered his life fractured and untenable. June is a single mom struggling in the bottleneck of poverty, fighting to retain custody of her son. From their precarious vantage points they behold a world of human frailty and tenuous beauty, a place where the damaged victims of a cruel epoch might be made whole again.

    ” ‘The Dreamlife of Bridges’ is a hard-edged, impressionistic odyssey through a Vancouver that doesn’t appear on tourist flyers. The novel is suffused with pain and loss, yet offers a fleeting glance at redemption. Strandquist’s characters, though often unlikable, reveal themselves gradually and convincingly.”- Quill & Quire

    ” ‘ The Dreamlife of Bridges’ appeals as a ghostly, sociological nightmare.” – Vancouver Review

  • The Dreams of Ancient People

    The Dreams of Ancient People

    $12.00

    In this collection of poetry, Fetherling investigates the mysterious frontier between pretext and subtext, where language and politics are mutually corrosive and individuals wander through the culture as though suffering amnesia — unsure whether they’ve lost the meaning of a past they cannot always remember.

  • The Driving Force

    The Driving Force

    $15.95

    In Act 1, Claude, 55, visits his father Alex, 77, in an Alzheimer’s ward, intimately tending to his bodily functions and needs while hopelessly trying to reach his silent, vacant father with a series of monologues—to settle old scores and misunderstandings between them.

    In an astonishing and eerie reversal of roles, in Act 2 it is Alex who visits his son Claude in the same Alzheimer’s ward and it is Alex’s turn to rant and rail at what he perceives to be his mute son’s contempt for his own working class life.

    With a cruel and disconsolate irony, we come to see that his father’s lifelong attempt to mock and censure Claude’s work as consisting of nothing but mediocre, misrepresentative lies, has been the very driving force behind Claude’s compulsion to continue to reveal the “truth” of human relationships as he so desperately wants his father to understand it.

  • The Drowned Man

    The Drowned Man

    $14.95

    “Tightly plotted and featuring a lead character who keeps us glued to the page, the book should definitely suit readers looking for an intriguing lead character and a solid mystery.” — Booklist

    A retired Scotland Yard detective is lured back to work in “a series to follow, particularly for Louise Penny fans and the Masterpiece Mystery set.” (Library Journal)

    Chief Inspector Peter Cammon is supposed to be retired, but he’s reluctantly agreed to travel to Canada to retrieve the body of a murdered colleague. And once he’s involved, he can’t resist delving into the oddities of the crime.

    His fellow cop was brutally attacked, run over by a car, and then dumped into a canal — all seemingly linked to the theft of three letters from the American Civil War era, one of which may have been signed by John Wilkes Booth . . .

  • The Drowned Man

    The Drowned Man

    $24.95

    In this second mystery featuring Chief Inspector Peter Cammon, the veteran detective is called out of retirement once again. His assignment appears simple: travel to Canada to retrieve the body of a murdered Scotland Yard colleague. But Peter cannot resist delving into the oddities of the crime. His colleague was brutally attacked, run down by a car, and then dumped in a canal, yet the probable motive for the murder is bizarre: the theft of three letters from the U.S. Civil War era, one of them signed by the assassin John Wilkes Booth. Haunting the investigation is the beautiful Alice Nahri, girlfriend of the dead man.

    The Drowned Man reacquaints readers with characters from Walking into the Ocean as well as introduces Maddy, Peter’s daughter-in-law, whose amateur sleuthing back in England proves pivotal in cracking the case.

  • The Drowned Man’s Daughter

    The Drowned Man’s Daughter

    $23.95

    Award-winning novelist C.J. Lavigne returns with a strange and startling new vision of the future… The last vestiges of humanity live at the Colony, trapped between the myriad dangers of the protean sea and the poisonous moss-lands, which have blanketed the earth in the wake of an ecological calamity. The noxious moss affects the mind and the body; while it drives its users mad, it is also the only way people can have children.

    When a baby arrives on the shore, the young caretakers of the Colony name her Naia, convinced that she is the daughter of the sea and a mysterious Drowned Man who heralded her passage months earlier. Naia grows up at the Colony, and learns the myriad dangers of a world turned feral, not the least of which being the moss-parents, who have surrendered their sanity in order to keep the human species alive.

    Now, fully grown, Naia appears to hold the sea’s power through her remarkable heritage. When the Colony starts to look to her for leadership, she knows she is unable to provide what they need…

  • The Drowning Girls and Comrades

    The Drowning Girls and Comrades

    $17.95

    The Drowning Girls

    Bessie, Alice, and Margaret have two things in common: they are married to George Joseph Smith, and they are dead. Surfacing from the bathtubs they were drowned in, the three breathless brides gather evidence against their womanizing, murderous husband by reliving the shocking events leading up to their deaths. Reflecting on the misconceptions of love, married life, and the not-so-happily ever after, The Drowning Girls is both a breathtaking fantasia and a social critique, full of rich images, a myriad of characters, and lyrical language.

    Comrades

    Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco dreamt of the land of the free. Leaving their small Italian villages, they embarked on a long voyage to the United States, only to encounter a world they never could have imagined. Controversially imprisoned for murder, both men must fight for their lives amidst discrimination and public humiliation. Based on actual events, Comrades bring to life Sacco and Vanzetti’s seven-year imprisonment and explores the struggles and agonies of two men, tried not for what they did, but for who they were.

  • The Drunken, Lovely Bird

    The Drunken, Lovely Bird

    $17.95

    Winner, American Independent Publishers Poetry Prize

    Sue Sinclair writes in a lyrical tradition that subverts the stereotype of “Canadian women’s” poetry while still playing with some, if not all, of the same poetic vocabulary. The Drunken Lovely Bird, her accomplished third book of poetry, confirms her reputation as one of Canada’s most original young poets.

    A keen observer of the material world, from the Newfoundland coast to the streets of Toronto, she has a rare gift for epiphany, for exposing the numinous in the commonplace. Her poems speak from that precise place where our perception of the world and our capacity for language meet and embrace, where our sense of experience goes to get sharpened and refreshed. That experience might involve the inner lives of clouds, the flourishing and passing of a tulip, the evocative scent of wolf willow, or the intricate arts of Bach and Virginia Woolf.

    Sinclair’s poems are deft, musical, and quick in the moment, alive to the sensuous surface and the meditative depth, their antennae fully extended. They focus brilliantly on lively physical details, yet they resonate with the subtle emotions that whisper at the edges of the everyday world. Meditative and beautifully crafted, Sinclair’s poems are simultaneously surprising and inevitable, inviting readers to gaze more deeply into their surroundings and to rejoice in both the light and the dark.

  • The Dry Valley

    The Dry Valley

    $20.00

    The Dry Valley encapsulates one woman’s relationship with herself, her alcoholic spouse, and the world, in three different Saskatchewan landscapes. The poems offer a fascinating interplay between mindful explorations of self and immersions in the challenging complexities of interpersonal relationships, social issues and meaningful engagement with the environment. The quiet, meditative quality of the longer lyrics rub up against the edgier narrative poems, contributing a wonderful tension to the manuscript. With figurative language kept to a minimum, the poems rely on detail, giving a real-time felt presence and the speaker a heightened reliability.

  • The Duchess and the Commoner

    The Duchess and the Commoner

    $19.95

    (This third volume in the Chronicles of the Plateau Mont-Royal—an epic series of novels which imagines the lives of the characters of Tremblay’s plays—deals with an explicitly gay thematic: Tremblay’s metaphor for the Québécois desire for a more glamorous identity on the world stage.)

    This is the third volume in Michel Tremblay’s six-volume Chronicles of the Plateau Mont Royal, an epic series of novels which imagines, in prose, the lives of the characters of Tremblay’s plays, in which each of them acts out their own personal drama: their loves, their disappointments, their travails, their agony and their ecstasy. It is in the novels, however, that these characters are seen in their context of time and space: the neighbourhood in which Tremblay and his extended family lived and grew up.

    The Duchess and the Commoner focuses on Albertine’s brother, Édouard, brother-in-law to ‘the fat woman’ and uncle to Marcel, and to the ‘fat woman’s’ son. In ths volume, Édouard launches his forays into the 1940’s world of Montréal show-business and creates his own astonishing role within it. As with all the novels in this series, a certain sense of wonder, even magic, emanates from the grandmother, Victoire, which in this episode is seen flowing through Édouard to his nephew, the brilliant and disturbed Marcel.

  • The Duende of Tetherball

    The Duende of Tetherball

    $18.95

    The Duende of Tetherball fearlessly ransacks the scrutinizing role of the past on the present; the interactions and accountabilities of ourselves and other species; the challenges and pleasures of getting older and forever striving to balance our most cherished and often incomprehensible relationships both with the world and each other. Bowling strives to account for and address our human need to resolve the tension between personal freedom and a world burdened by increasing homogenization and centralized control by adopting an industry of personal fortitude and thoughtful redress. He seeks to remember and to remember again the lessons polished over a lifetime: “Fifteen, scared but still apt / to toss “damn thee black / thou cream-faced loon” / in PE class at the rippling back / of some hoop or net-bound jock, / I was learning – too soon – / the only lesson that counts: / how to be alone.”

  • The Duke of Kent

    The Duke of Kent

    $32.95

    A refreshingly honest memoir about politics and private life

    Few Canadians have served their nation as well and as widely as the Honourable Darcy McKeough. He was elected Member of Provincial Parliament for Chatham–Kent, Ontario, five times between 1963 and 1977. In 1967 he was mockingly dubbed the Duke of Kent by an opposition MPP, a title he has worn as a badge of honour ever since. As Treasurer of Ontario, Minister of Municipal Affairs, and Minister of Energy during his time in office, McKeough fought to achieve budget surpluses long before it was fashionable, created regional governments that brought more efficient services to citizens, and attempted to tame Ontario Hydro.

    In The Duke of Kent, McKeough takes readers behind the scenes and into the Cabinet rooms of government, putting on full display the thrust and parry of legislative sittings where he almost always gave better than he got. He brings to life the political and constitutional issues of the day as led, litigated, and legislated by an array of provincial and federal politicians, including Charles MacNaughton, John Robarts, William Davis, John Diefenbaker, Robert Stanfield, Lester B. Pearson, Pierre Trudeau, Joe Clark, Brian Mulroney, Jean Chrétien, Jacques Parizeau, and Peter Lougheed.

  • The Dunsmuirs: A Promise Kept

    The Dunsmuirs: A Promise Kept

    $16.95

    The Dunsmuirs: A Promise Kept is the second of three plays chronicling the saga of one of Canada’s wealthiest, most ruthless and ill fated families.

    While Robbie and Joan’s two sons, Alex and Robert, heirs apparent to the family fortune, are groomed to hold the reins of power, Robbie Dunsmuir cuts a deal with Sir John A. Macdonald to build a railway from Victoria to Nanaimo, to distract B.C. voters from the fact that the promise of a trans-continental railway which brought them into confederation has been delayed. The last spike of the E & N is driven and Robbie and Sir John descend to the lowest level of the Dunsmuir pits where they consummate their deal in a two day orgy of bonded whiskey, cold chicken and much quoting of the bard (Robbie Burns, that is).

    In a devastating final scene, the family secret emerges from the closet of the Dunsmuirs’ castle, Craigdarroch, on the eve of its inauguration. The scene is set for the furies to deliver the family up to the curse Robbie and Joan brought with them from their native Scotland.