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Showing 7473–7488 of 9248 results
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The Knife Sharpener’s Bell
$21.00Winner of the J.I. Segal 2010 Awards, Prize in English Fiction and Poetry on a Jewish Theme
Shortlisted for the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Awards, Fiction
Annette Gershon and her family try to escape the economic chaos of the Great Depression in 1930s Winnipeg by returning “home” to the Soviet Union. But there they find themselves on a runaway train of tumultuous events as Stalinist Russia plunges into the horrors of World War II. This story of remarkable breadth and extraordinary prose is the seldom-told tale of those who undertook that odyssey, of loyalty and betrayal, heroism and fear.
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The Knockoff Eclipse
$18.00Melissa Bull’s debut short story collection The Knockoff Eclipse and Other Stories hums with the immediacy of distant and future worlds. Firmly rooted in the streets of Montreal and its many neighbourhoods and subcultures, Bull zooms in on the female experience while playing with societal expectation and literary convention. Spattered with bits of French, many of the stories pull back the covers on the intersection between French and English Canada.
In the titular story “The Knockoff Eclipse,” we’re transported to a future world where women’s clothing quite literally advertises their supposed wants and desires. Wanda and Henry meet in an old divebar turned trendy futurist café. “I used to be a model. But I got tired of people looking at me,” she tells Henry. The theme of looking or being looked at runs through the entire collection, female bodies and the women who inhabit them must constantly contend with the masculine gaze, which is often internalized in such a way that it seems inescapable.
The Knockoff Eclipse is dark like Duras, flippant comme Sagan, with elements of the surreal running through. These stories are modern feminist fables for the reader who is decidedly uninterested in upholding the moral of the story as it’s been traditionally told.
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The Knotted Rope
$12.95Broken Trail, a white boy adopted by the Oneida First Nation and brought up to be a warrior, has seen much injustice done to his adoptive people and even more suffered by the Black slaves who spend their lives in bondage. The year is 1793, the year in which a new law is passed to gradually end slavery in Upper Canada. The new law is not perfect; it will leave hundreds still in slavery for the rest of their lives. But it is enough to make many slave owners afraid that their investment in slaves will soon be worth nothing. No wanting to lose money, they sell their slaves to dealers to take to slave markets in the United States. When a twelve-year-old girl, Rosa, and her father are sold to a slave dealer, Broken Trail has a plan that will not only rescue them from the slave dealer but also make them free for life. But where has the slave dealer taken Rosa and her father? Broken Trail embarks a dangerous search for the place where slaves are confined until they can be shipped across the border. The danger is great, and Broken Trail finds more than he expected.
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The Lachine Canal Chronicles: Murphy’s Law
$22.95Murphy’s Law, the second book in the “Lachine Canal Chronicles” series, follows Tom Murphy who is trying to cope with the tragic events of his life and his newfound fame as a writer. Tom is trying to get rid of his self-destructive habits and is asked to speak at one of his A.A. meetings. The story revolves around him detailing his life: from his upbringing in LaSalle to his friendship with Eamon, his time in the army and his unhinged sex life – all while losing, in the process, everyone who is dear to him. Murphy’s Law states that anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. This is exactly what this novel is all about.
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The Lachine Canal Chronicles: The Luck of the Irish
$22.95The Luck of the Irish is the first instalment of “The Lachine Canal Chronicles” series. It follows the misadventures of Eamon Jovanovski, a wannabe artist of Irish descent, who befriends the infamous Tom Murphy, another Irish Montrealer, at the age of sixteen. From then on, Eamon’s life will be turned upside down due to of his friendship with Tom who is infatuated by sex, drugs and punk rock. Tom’s downward spiral will eventually have a dark influence on Eamon who keeps helping him get back on his feet. Eamon and Tom will exile themselves from Montreal, both looking for their place in society and both trying to give their life some meaning. But, a couple of years later, they will be drawn back to their “hood”: Montreal’s South-West area, between the Lachine Canal and the Aqueduct. Throughout the novel, Eamon also keeps getting his heart broken by different women, due to series of events beyond his control but that all originate from his friendship with Tom.
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The Lady Smith
$14.95What happens when the “other woman” becomes your roommate? What happens when she starts to confide in you about her affair?
From the playwright of “A Common Man’s Guide to Loving Women,” comes a claustrophobic drama, set in the Black community of Toronto’s Bloor and Bathurst neighbourhood, which challenges the distance between deception and redemption.
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The Land on Which We Live
$24.95Legendary tales of pioneers and adventurers cultivating BC’s Cariboo Plateau in between the 19th and 20th century. The romantic backwoods landscape known as the North Bonaparte, stretches east from 70 Mile House to Bridge Lake and is full of small remote ranches, hidden abandoned homesteads, and rutted roads leading to graves in forgotten meadows. High on the Cariboo Plateau, the land was once the domain of the Secwepemc people who hunted and fished throughout the region. White settlers began to arrive in 1891 and discovered the land they chose was tough and challenging. Winters were long with frost in July and September, the soil was inhospitable, the location remote from any amenities. Those who made it their home had to be tough, resourceful and resilient in order to thrive. This is the story of those people: colourful, hard-working, hard-playing individualists. Tales of well-known pioneers such as Bill and Mary Boyd and the Saul brothers of the 70 Mile House, the McDonald family of The Rainbow Chasers, and Jack Dubois, the famous rustler and horse breeder of Outlaws of Western Canada are among those included in the book. Barbara MacPherson’s The Land on Which We Live fully captures a life that depended on tenacity, skillfulness, and on the kindness and help of neighbours and friends.
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The Land’s Long Reach
$22.95It is The War to End All Wars, and Ena Connelly, a keenly sensory and extraordinary woman, is newly married and living on an Ontario farm. The shock of violence in far-off battlefields is echoed in a terror much closer to hand. With bold perception and remarkable self-reliance, Ena faces a dramatically altered world. Ena is self-contained, and careful not to reach too far into the turbulent emotional lives of others. As the war progresses, Ena forms a fierce bond of loyalty for Blain, the delightful but (necessarily) duplicitous boy who comes to work for her. Through Blain, she learns to extend herself in unexpected ways– to reach outside of herself, and to risk. Ena also grows closer to her sister-in-law, Sarah, a gifted painter. Sarah is unafraid of confronting emotional turmoil and passion but she doesn’t have Ena’s absolute clarity of purpose and aim. Ena helps Sarah move closer to the life she wants, while Sarah opens Ena to a terrible and essential kind of beauty. When studying Sarah’s paintings, Ena comments that it is not the surface that matters, but rather what is underneath. The same is true of this novel — underneath the meticulous detail of daily life is the emotional landscape of persistent, courageous women, watching the violence of war in Europe (World War I) and domestic violence closer to home.
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The Landscape of Ernest Lamarque
$24.95At the age of sixteen, Ernest Lamarque travelled from England to North America, to begin a life as a Victorian adventurer. Born in 1879 and orphaned at age twelve, he would go on to become an artist, a writer and a surveyor, creating some of the earliest visual records of the people of remote regions of Canada. At seventeen, Lamarque started working as a clerk at Hudson’s Bay Company posts in Saskatchewan, Alberta, British Columbia and the Northwest Territories. He recorded his adventuresthrough paintings, sketches and photographs, which would later become invaluable historical resources – the artwork and photography he created during his three years at the Ile-a-la-Crosse district, for example, are among the earliest visual records of the Metis of the area. As one of British Columbia’s best-known surveyors, he located a route across northern BC during the Bedaux Expedition. He also travelled along and photographed the historic First Nations Davie Trail as part of his work on the location of the initial Alaska Highway. In 1914, Lamarque participated in the important D.A. Thomas coal transportation survey in northern Alberta that was halted by the start of World War I. The Landscape of Ernest Lamarque reveals remote regions of western Canada and its people and places through the eyes of a self-taught man. Utilizing unpublished artwork, photographs and written accounts, author Jay Sherwood tells the story of Lamarque’s varied, unusual and interesting life.
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The Language of the Stars
$24.95From the author of the bestselling science guide Cosmic Wonder comes a second collection of ways to have an existential crisis. Nathan Hellner-Mestelman takes us right back to the Big Bang, then hurls us through cosmic history as we discover how to swirl up galaxies, solar systems, and eventually life. From molecules to modern society, this book will take you through every reason we’re alive in this universe coupled with every cosmic force trying to kill us. In this quirky medley of science and speculation, we’ll cover every common thread weaving across our cosmos. Ever wondered what atoms, cells, people, refrigerators, the universe, and beer have in common? Come along for a maddening adventure of science in The Language of the Stars!
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The Last Act
$22.95Many people of all ages procrastinate when it comes to writing their wills, and organizing things, complicating the process of settling their estate for their children, loved ones, and beneficiaries.
The Last Act is the book that addresses this situation, as it provides easy-to-follow steps to make the process as easy and as seamless as possible.
Trust and Estate Planner Kimberley Short and Accountant Larry Short combine their years of knowledge and experience to explain how to write a will, settle an estate, create a trust, and more while helping to cut costs and unforeseen expenses along the way. Their experience working with families allows them to provide wisdom on diffusing potential conflicts.
Grieving a parent or loved one is difficult enough without the additional burden of complications that result from a lack of pre-planning.
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The Last Band on Earth
$24.99A dystopian horror story about music and mental illness.
Nat and her bandmates in The Dead Layaways want to go on tour, but the demonic entities who run their city have other idea, not to mention the dark cloud that hangs over everything stifles their creativity. This ruined place is not their home, and they have no idea how they ended up here, or where “home” even is. Is there really nothing but endless wasteland beyond the city limits, as the demons claim?
Much like the author’s previous work, The Last Band On Earth draws on themes of mental illness and attempted recovery. It is about being in your 20s and still not feeling like a Real Adult, and the fear that time is running out.
‘A ripping post-apocalyptic road trip horror adventure that’s both dreadfully creepy and triumphantly defiant. Like all great punk tunes it’s all killer, no filler. I loved this comic so much.’ -Ryan Dunlavey (Action Philosophers, The Comic Book History Of Comics)
‘Captures the authentic experience of playing in a band, the quest for authenticity, touring in a crappy van, playing for small, unappreciative audiences, and building a monstrous horror/fantasy world that is a wonderful metaphor for facing your demons to make vital, challenging art.’ -Dave Chisholm (Miles Davis & the Search for the Sound, Spectrum)
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The Last Caravan
$26.00Author Anna Byrne’s close friend Mary Morgan spent her life looking for community. As a youth, the pain of Mary’s mother’s death is made more difficult by her family’s silent grief, financial problems and disapproval of her identity as a lesbian. At 17, Mary leaves her troubled home in Toronto to live among the Guna peoples of Panama—an adventure that ignites four decades of social justice work in war-torn countries around the globe. Flying kites with Bedouin children, smoking with Bosnian men, and resisting the Guatemalan Civil War alongside Maya women offers Mary a powerful salve for her yearning to belong: Chosen family—communities based on mutual values and support.
When faced with a terminal diagnosis while living in a remote British Columbian town with few resources, Mary brings the heart of her life’s work—the power of ordinary people to effect change—to bear on her dying. In addition to Anna, she asks two other friends—Jules, and Laurie—to be her “dying team” and help her to die at home. Over 16 months, until her death with Medical Assistance In Dying (MAID), the team embarks on a profound experiment to curate Mary’s vision of a death steeped in beauty, ceremony, and practical support through building a casket, hosting a home vigil, and transporting her body for a green burial. The journey to bring tenderness and creativity to one person’s suffering emerges as an antidote to the urgency, scarcity, and loneliness that seek to define our lives—and deaths. Anna Byrne’s The Last Caravan offers a new paradigm for deathcare by returning it to the hands of the community.
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The Last Chance Ladies’ Book Club
$16.95Eleanor Sawchuck believes she deserves to spend her last years in peace, perhaps even in the happiness of pursuing a December romance. But then Donald Eston, a man whose abusive past only she and her book club know about, moves into her seniors’ complex. Not only are Eleanor and her friends uncertain what to do about him, they can’t be sure they know the truth. After one of her friends dies and her lover becomes ill, Eleanor decides it’s time to learn some facts from Eston’s son, and to finally confront Eston himself.
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The Last Gang in Town
$24.95Bill Duthie Booksellers’ Choice Prize finalist; Canadian Historical Association’s Clio Prize for BC winner
Decades before organized crime syndicates brought sensational drug wars to Vancouver, street gangs held sway over its unruly east side. None was considered tougher or more feared than the Clark Park gang, a wild, two-fisted crew of characters from Vancouver’s post-1960s counterculture.
In 1972, after a number of headline-making riots and clashes with police–including an infamous altercation outside a Rolling Stones concert–the Clark Parkers became the target of a secret undercover police squad. Their hostile interactions culminated in a notorious police shooting, resulting in the death of a Clark Park gang member.
Combining meticulous research with a keen flair for storytelling, The Last Gang in Town features previously unpublished photos and police documents, as well as testimonials by surviving gang members and police officers who speak for the first time on the subject. The book is a compelling portrait of early-1970s Vancouver and an intriguing and sensational history that puts the spotlight on the after-dark underbelly of the city’s not-so-distant criminal past.
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The Last Green Light
$22.95The Great Gatsby is known for the glitz and glamour of Gilded Age plutocrats; in The Last Green Light, the working people of Fitzgerald’s novel get to tell their own, beautifully textured tale. Meet Jon Laine, a Midwesterner who captains one of the rumrunning boats that are the source of Gatsby’s great wealth; enter a colorful netherworld of diner cooks, dump scavengers, secretaries, deckhands and car mechanics caught in the increasingly deadly conflict between organized crime syndicates, amid the murderous passions of caste-busting love. From movie stars to dark freighters, Wobblies to Harlem nightclubs The Last Green Light, like a jazz improvisation, riffs on a great American novel, creating its own, unique world in the process.