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 7393–7408 of 9248 results
-
The Hidden Keys
$19.95SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2017 TRILLIUM BOOK AWARD
NATIONAL POST 99 BEST BOOKS OF 2016
Giller Prize winner André Alexis’s contemporary take on the quest narrative is an instant classic.
Parkdale’s Green Dolphin is a bar of ill repute, and it is there that Tancred Palmieri, a thief with elegant and erudite tastes, meets Willow Azarian, an aging heroin addict. She reveals to Tancred that her very wealthy father has recently passed away, leaving each of his five children a mysterious object that provides one clue to the whereabouts of a large inheritance. Willow enlists Tancred to steal these objects from her siblings and help her solve the puzzle.
A Japanese screen, a painting that plays music, a bottle of aquavit, a framed poem and a model of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater: Tancred is lured in to this beguiling quest, and even though Willow dies before the puzzle is solved, he presses on.
As he tracks down the treasure, he must enlist the help of Alexander von Würfel, conceptual artist and taxidermist to the wealthy, and fend off Willow’s heroin dealers, a young albino named ‘Nigger’ Colby and his sidekick, Sigismund ‘Freud’ Luxemburg, a clubfooted psychopath, both of whom are eager to get their hands on this supposed pot of gold. And he must mislead Detective Daniel Mandelshtam, his most adored friend.
Inspired by a reading of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, The Hidden Keys questions what it means to be honourable, what it means to be faithful and what it means to sin.
-
The High-Rise in Fort Fierce
$19.95Finalist, Ottawa Book Award for Fiction 2019
Long-Shortlisted, 2019 Relit Award (Short Story Category)Drugs. Violence. Racism. Despair. The tiny, northern town of Fort Fierce has issues in spades, and most of them fester in the high-rise by the lake.
In this visceral, emotionally raw, and completely absorbing collection, Carlucci takes his readers through the ravaged history of Franklin Place, from its construction during the Cold War to its demolition decades later. We meet the Franklins themselves, three generations of landlords, each more paranoid and alienated than the last. And we meet their tenants: a drug dealer, a lonely bigot, a political activist, a struggling father, a wandering sex offender, a woman who refuses to give into it all. They wander in and out of each other’s lives, with little in common but the building and the mould behind its walls.
In The High-Rise in Fort Fierce, Carlucci immerses us in a dim yet eerily familiar world. Love and death, conflict and compromise, fear, determination, and the tense relations between indigenous and settler populations thread the warp and weft of his dark and irrepressible tapestry. We cannot look away.
-
The Hippie Pirates
$15.99There are many things that Kent, Ryan, and Amy love about their somewhat eccentric hippie-pirate grandparents; best of all are their wonderful stories about travelling the world in search of hippie-pirate treasure. Central to all their stories is their beloved VW pirate ship bus, the SS Fiona. And now the three children are going to join in on a hippie-pirate adventure, and sail on the Fiona!
Where will they go? Liverpool? Norway? New York? No. Three disappointed children learn their destination is Nova Scotia, their home province. But very quickly Kent, Ryan, and Amy come to realize that there?s a lot more to ?their own backyard? than they?d realized, and that the Fiona knows a trick or two as well.
This time-travelling adventure, the first in a planned series, introduces young readers to some unique aspects of Canadian and Nova Scotian history, including the establishment of Birchtown and the plight of Black Loyalists.
-
The Hockey Scribbler
$19.95Canada’s former poet laureate looks back at a life lived in literature and hockey fandom
Hockey forms the backdrop of our lives. For many Canadians, the big moments — births, deaths, marriages, moves — are all mixed up with the wins and losses of our teams. The voices of Hockey Night in Canada sportscasters are our soundtrack, and visions of skates scraping across the ice lull us to sleep.
George Bowering, Canada’s former poet laureate, is no different. Growing up in Oliver, B.C., Bowering was entranced by the kids from Saskatchewan who skated and handled pucks as easily as breathing. His fascination with hockey followed him into adult life, from B.C. to Quebec and back again. Bowering followed his teams with a critical eye and a fan’s passion, and his stories bring us on a cross-country hockey-themed road trip, with occasional forays into boxing, poetry, and sports fashion.
Bowering has an encyclopedic knowledge of his subject. He has been an avid and attentive hockey fan since boyhood, and has an extensive catalogue of thoughts and opinions on the personalities and events that populate Canadian hockey history. In The Hockey Scribbler, Bowering brings us along on his richly detailed look back at hockey in Canada since the 1950s.
-
The Hollow Beast
$28.95A Globe and Mail Most Anticipated Spring Title
Don Quixote meets Who Framed Roger Rabbit in this slapstick epic about destiny, family demons, and revenge.
1911. A hockey game in Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula. With the score tied two-two in overtime, local tough guy Billy Joe Pictou fires the puck directly into Monti Bouge’s mouth. When Pictou’s momentum carries them both across the goal line in a spray of shattered teeth, Victor Bradley, erstwhile referee and local mailman, rules that the goal counts—and Monti’s ensuing revenge for this injustice sprawls across three generations, one hundred years, and dozens of dastardly deeds. Fuelled by a bottomless supply of Yukon, the high-proof hooch that may or may not cause the hallucinatory sightings of a technicolor beast that haunts not just Monti but his descendants, it’s up to Monti’s grandson François—and his floundering doctoral dissertation—to make sense of the vendetta that’s shaped the destiny of their town and everyone in it. Brilliantly translated into slapstick English by Lazer Lederhendler, The Hollow Beast introduces Christophe Bernard as a master of epic comedy.
-
The Home for Wayward Parrots
$19.95Accustomed to being an only child, adoptee Brian “Gumbo” Guillemot’s teenage hobby was searching for his birth parents. After years without a lead, when he finally finds his birth mother, Kim, he’s unprepared for the boisterous instant family that comes with her.
No one, besides Kim, knows anything about Gumbo’s birth father. With Kim refusing to answer any questions, Gumbo must choose whether to continue the search, even if it means alienating his few friends and both his families. And the more he learns, the more he wonders whether some things are better left unknown.
Captivating and playful, The Home For Wayward Parrots explores friendship, romance, modern families and geek pop culture with wit, compassion and extremely foul-mouthed birds.
-
The Homes We Build on Ashes
$22.95God-fearing Nara Lee carries a painful secret and a corrosive guilt. Set against an historical backdrop when Korea was a colony and citizenry was rendered impotent, Nara’s life is forged in the 1919 March First Movement. Her journey takes her from her ancestral home to an insidious orphanage to a forced-labour factory during the Japanese Occupation. When colonialism has outlived its usefulness, she is emancipated only to live through an era of high suspicion and treason. After surviving the grand tragedy of the Busan Fire that leaves 28,000 people homeless, Nara leaves the squalid tent city that had become her home and is thrown headlong into a new life in Vancouver, Canada, where she elucidates the poetry of home. Amidst violence and abject injustice, Nara finds a way to rise up from the ashes again and again to rejoice in small triumphs in the homes she has lived, in the homes she has lost.
-
The Hooves Belonged to the Deer
$20.95When the impressionable young Izzy immigrates with his Arab family to rural Alberta, he becomes the salvation pet project for Pastor Isaac, a local Christian youth leader eager to mould him. Torn between his sexual desires for his friend Will and Isaac’s persuasive indoctrination, Izzy must find a way to reconcile his internalized shame and deep spiritual faith before it consumes him. Meanwhile, in a surreal reimagining of Eden/A’den, Aadam and Hawa—the first couple of the Qur’an—find their relationship turned upside down when Aadam is tempted by the proverbial white-skinned man, Steve, from the north.
With the gravitas of a Greek tragedy, The Hooves Belonged to the Deer is a bold and blistering indictment of white Christian imperialism. Makram Ayache’s daring play confronts the painful intersections of homophobia, Islamophobia, and colonialism, refusing to offer easy resolutions. Erotically charged and panoramic in scope, this cautionary tale illuminates the lingering scars of religious trauma while offering a profound reckoning and prayer for rebirth.
-
The Hope Slide / Little Sister
$16.95Two plays by award-winning playwright Joan MacLeod. Little Sister was first performed at Theatre Direct in Toronto in 1994 and won the Chalmers Canadian Play Award, Theatre for Young Audiences in 1995. The Hope Slide was first performed at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto in 1992 and won the Floyd S. Chalmers Canadian Play Award in 1993.
-
The Hottest Summer in Recorded History
$18.95With her signature eye for irony and sensuality, Elizabeth Bachinsky’s latest book of poetry, The Hottest Summer in Recorded History, balances a youthful playfulness with observational maturity. Bachinsky strings together seemingly non-sequitur images, capturing in these poems the commonality of raw intimacy, dark humour and a sense of immediacy. Her vision is unapologetically bold, finding the erotic in everyday moments and keenly capturing the complicated truths of life in a powerfully candid style.
-
The Hours That Remain
$16.95Denise has spent the last five years dedicated to uncovering the truth behind her sister Michelle’s disappearance. Haunted by loose ends, she begins seeing visions of Michelle, who gradually guides her in the right direction. As Denise’s marriage and sanity crumble around her, she remains committed to unearthing an unfathomable truth, and coming to terms with a painfully crucial realization—one she has been desperately avoiding.
-
The House by the Poppy Field
$9.95World-renowned cartoonist Seth returns with three new ghost stories for 2023.
Maitland returns to his ancestral estate after having lived a largely solitary life. He soon finds himself increasingly obsessed with the magnificent field of poppies surrounding his home, as well as the man harvesting them.
-
The House Filler
$22.95A family saga set in China during the most tumultuous time of the twentieth century including the Japanese invasion, the civil war, and the Communist takeover.
The House Filler is told through the experiences of Golden Phoenix, a woman who faces war, poverty, and political oppression as she fights for survival, freedom and happiness. After the untimely death of her husband, Golden Phoenix is determined to keep her family together. However, poverty forces her to make the heart-wrenching decision to give her teenage twins to the Red Army. During the upheaval of the Japanese invasion of her hometown, she is separated from her two young girls, and her remaining son leaves to fight with the Nationalist army. Golden Phoenix, along with her adopted son, remains to endure the horror and hardship of war. When the civil war ends with the Communists in power in 1949, one of her twins, who had joined the Communist Party, is wrongly accused of being a traitor and is sentenced to death. Golden Phoenix and her family must find a way to save her son’s life.
The House Filler is a moving and powerful portrayal of one family’s struggle to survive in the face of an historical upheaval and political oppression. -
The house is still standing
$19.95The house is still standing is peopled with charlatans, gingerbread men, children, and savants — the thousands and the particular. Adrienne Bartlett builds this nimble first collection with a supple craft. The poems deke and swerve, from the wry to the theatrical to the intimate.
Whether riffing on the secret identities of public intellectuals and pop icons or penning elegiac verse, Barrett’s voice is strong, anchored, inviting. Although she takes her readers through both “substance / and its downfall,” in the end, the structure is sound, she is holding up.
-
The House of Izieu
$22.95The House of Izieu is a novel inspired by the life and experiences of Sabine Zlatin who, as a Jew using a fake identity, managed to find families to care for Jewish children who were in French refugee camps. She created a safe home for a number of other children called “The House of Izieu” which is now a museum. Unfortunately, she was not able to save the 44 children in her care. After one wonderful year of freedom in that house they were discovered, and Klaus Barbie ordered their deportation to Auschwitz where they were killed. Sabine’s husband was also caught with two teenage boys he was helping escape and was also eventually killed. Sabine, suffering from loss and the guilt of not having saved the children, manages to continue contributing to the underground efforts as well as efforts to reunite people after the war’s end.
-
The House of Seven Murders
$21.95Two murders bookend the pitiable life of cobbler, Oreste Solimeno. The latter he merely witnesses from his cell, but brazenly, flagrantly ideological, the first renders him wrongly accused, convicted, and imprisoned. Two Giuseppes, hatchet-bearing farmworkers, perpetrate it, the instigator “Calabrese,” motivated entirely by class hatred. “‘Look at them stuffing themselves,’ Calabrese would say, gesturing to the De Nicola family gathered for lunch. ‘We toil from dawn to dusk for a pittance, and Rosario gets rich on our labour.’” They proceed to hatchet to death both women and children in the house of seven murders, then search for a non-existent 30,000 lira, the illusory blood money of communist ideology.
The second murder is committed by black-shirted fascist prison guards, carried out against a young socialist agitator. Oreste Solimeno sees the beating administered by a lead pipe; the guards see him and report it, but the authorities decide to treat him as a long-term lunatic. Two sets of brutal murders in the 1920s that symbolize the ideological horror of that inter-war period, communism, fascism, with Italy itself, like Oreste Solimeno, caught inexorably in the middle, distrusted, smeared by accusations of mafia affiliations, a true WOP – person “without papers” – consigned, as many Italian Canadian immigrants would know and understand, to a perpetual internment camp.