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A 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.
Accustomed 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.
God-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.
When 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.
Two 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.
With 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.
Denise 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.
World-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.
A 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 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 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.
Two 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.
The House on 14th Avenue is about paired and shared lives, featuring two people whose connection sometimes seemed forced and uneven. That of master and slave. That of trembling and acceptance. Some of the poems detail each individually, a scraping together of momentary identities; others bring them together as they embark on journeys both physical and psychic. Journeys into the past through an underworld of ancestral ghosts and paths so well-trodden there is no possibility of creating new ones. Journeys in the present through detailed lists of the physical objects around them (with the mythic bleeding through on occasion leaving only stains behind). And journeys into a future where the realization of endings looms and where the two are left once more to cope each in his or her own way with that knowledge. In the midst of it all lurks the manipulator of words, phrases, images – the meta-text that tries so desperately to make sense of it all, that tries to bring order into what seems like simply a chaotic movement forward, and that wishes for…prays for…sacrifices for a dream state where a culmination of sorts exists, if only in the mind of the creator. In the end, it is left to the reader to decide whether the “two peasants” will be allowed to escape the gravitational pull that has weighed them down…to float away from the harsh realities that have defined them into the realm of words and infinite possibility.
It is autumn, 1997 and Kate Thuringer is back in her hometown to help her college-age daughter settle into her new life. A professional photographer, Kate has lived in Western Canada for nearly three decades. Before her marriage, however, she survived a turbulent year in which Québécois terrorists kidnapped a British diplomat and murdered an innocent politician. The middle-aged Kate is obsessed with the past, particularly with the memory of a poor francophone student with whom she had been involved during the historic October Crisis. Back in Montreal, she is plunged into a mid-life crisis, struggling to reconcile her romantic past and her melancholy present. The House on Selkirk Avenue is a complex novel about obsessive love, family bonds, aging, and the impact of political events on innocent people’s lives.
The House That Hijack Built explores the possibilities of meaning production when language is pushed to its limits of “logical” or normative semantic patterns. If “to hijack” is “to steal in transit,” this text focuses on how language, with its idioms and ideologies, is appropriated—hijacked and transported—to unknown destinations in the act of its transmission. In her fifth collection of poems / collages, Karasick explores the intersection between das Wahre (the true) and die Wahrheit (the truth), as a language at war with itself re-presents a “real world” reworded between narrations of “the real”—inscribed in ruptures, betrayals and unfulfilled promises—and speaks to a ‘real world’ that wreaks havoc with the very truth it seeks to inhabit.
Included in this collection is a homolinguistic “trans’elation” of the first chapter of the Sefer Yetzirah. Known as The Book of Creation or The Book of the Letters, it is the oldest and most mysterious of all Kabalistic texts, dating back to 100 BCE. Its focus is on the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet—how they were formed, how they inter-relate, how they make meaning—the text itself inscribed through slippage, elision, rupture and undecideability, foregrounding language as a continuum of letters, names, mathematical equations and gates of meaning. By a technique of slight displacement, slipping one word under another, Karasick mimics Nietzsche’s Geschichte Eines Irrtums History of an Error, announcing the narration of a fabrication: how the “true world” finally becomes a fable.
At the centre of the critically acclaimed Fox drama House, British actor Hugh Laurie has become the focus of fans across North America, Britain, and Australia. Winner of the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Dramatic Series, honoured by the Queen with an Order of the British Empire, and one of People’s Sexiest Men Alive, Laurie has become an icon.
But who is the man behind the cane and acerbic wit?
A musician? A motorcyclist? A comedian?
Laurie is all these things and more. This biography aims to shed light on his childhood struggles to live up to his mother’s high demands and emulate his father’s accomplishments as a doctor and an Olympic gold medalist; his education at the prestigious academies of Eton and Cambridge; his comedic career with Emma Thompson, Stephen Fry, and Rowan Atkinson; his own personal struggle with depression; and how he came to be the best-loved curmudgeon on television.
Interviews with creator and executive producer David Shore will reveal the Canadian connection to this truly global show and how a Canuck from London, Ontario, made the move to Hollywood stardom.
The House That Hugh Laurie Built will also serve as a magnifying glass, providing episode analysis, cast biographies, selections of Dr. House’s caustic wit, and production bloopers and medical mistakes that only a sleuth like Dr. House could expose.