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Showing 7617–7632 of 9481 results
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The Hunter and the Wild Girl
$32.95Winner, City of Victoria Butler Book Prize
Shortlisted, Ethel Wilson Fiction PrizeA feral girl roams the dense forests of nineteenth-century France, stealing food from remote farmyards and avoiding human contact. Seen on one of her thieving missions in the village of Freyzus, she is chased by suspicious townspeople to the edge of a deep gorge, where she jumps and disappears, vanishing into village legend.
On the other side of the gorge, in an abandoned estate, Peyre Rouff lives out his self-imposed exile. Following a horrific hunting accident, he now focuses all of his attention on intricate taxidermic dioramas, keeping his thoughts from wandering too close to the day he lost everything.
When Peyre encounters the wild girl, they find a link in their mutual estrangement from conventional society. He provides her with her material needs, while she brings light to places Peyre had thought dark forever. The two achieve an easy coexistence. But the careful patterns of the life Peyre has made for himself begin to unravel, and when the wider world learns of the girl’s presence at the estate, Peyre is forced to confront not only his choices and their consequences, but society itself.
In The Hunter and the Wild Girl, award-winning author Pauline Holdstock spins a haunting tale affirming the persistence of life, the power of human connection, and the fundamental urge to be free.
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The Hunter and the Wild Girl
$22.95Winner, City of Victoria Butler Book Prize
Shortlisted, Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize
A National Post Best Book of 2015“The Hunter and the Wild Girl is powerful, almost elemental storytelling, an achievement not only of craft but of raw emotion. It pulses with vitality, building to a stunning, shattering conclusion.” — Robert Weirsema, Vancouver Sun
“A rich, immersive experience. Pauline Holdstock’s is the kind of prose you get lost in.” — National Post
The story begins with the crack of splintered boards and bones as a feral girl crashes out of the hut where she’s been held against her will and into the scrubland of southern France. Townsfolk chase her to the edge of a deep gorge. She leaps and vanishes into legend — and into the territory of Peyre Rouff, a once-renowned hunter who spends his days fending off his own demons in an abandoned château.
Pauline Holdstock sets this absorbing novel in the blurry territory between myth and reality. The girl and the hunter inhabit radically different worlds. The wild girl’s is rooted in the physical, a source of food and danger, Rouff’s in the cerebral, an existence patterned to prevent him from the destruction of despair.
When their two worlds unexpectedly collide, this odd pair of outsiders forms an unlikely bond. The girl’s untamed spirit and volatility shakes the hunter from his solitude. The hunter’s unexpected kindness provides the girl with a sense of connection. But when the wider world learns of the girl’s presence, Rouff is forced to confront both his choices and their consequences.
Wild and unpredictable, lush and sensually evocative, The Hunter and the Wild Girl courses with mythical life blood, resonant, disquieting, and fathoms deep.
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The Hunting Ground
$15.95A northern Canadian village, one of many remote settlements dotting the Quebec landscape, is in transition. Originally dependent on subsistence farming and logging, supplemented by winter hunting, its economy has gradually changed over the years: first increasingly dependent on guiding southern urbanites on hunting trips; then on providing a habitat for birdwatchers, nature tourists and collectors of antiques and local crafts; now primarily dependent on income flows from cottagers and retirees.
Each of these remarkably engaging stories is recounted by different narrators from the village’s diverse genders, social classes and employment and economic circumstances. This is a book of parentheses, which, like the spokes of a wheel or the sweep of the lines on a radar screen, gradually and collectively begin to delineate and define the eerie contemporary landscape of The Hunting Ground. Now devoid of any sense of a cohesive community or shared culture, each of these uncanny fragments of alienated and fragmented civilization and imagination is bracketed on the one hand by the passive and vacuous sentimentality of Reader’s Digest and television, and on the other by the senseless primal fury of killing and destruction. It is a clever and unsettling mockery of the many privately printed “local histories” of small towns, feeding only the yearning nostalgia of the few surviving original inhabitants; the tourist trade vainly promoted by the local town council; and the ethnographic interest of urban professionals researching and catalogueuing endangered species.
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The Hunting of the Snark
$16.95In this illustrated edition of Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, master wood engraver George A. Walker provides an uproarious reinterpretation of the classic poem as seen through the convex lens of contemporary American politics.
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The Hush Sisters
$22.95***49TH SHELF UTTERLY FANTASTIC BOOK FOR FALL***
***NEXT GENERATION INDIE BOOK AWARDS WINNER, SUSPENSE***
***NEXT GENERATION INDIE BOOK AWARDS FINALIST, PARANORMAL***
Sissy and Ava Hush are estranged, middle-aged sisters with little in common beyond their upbringing in a peculiar manor in downtown St. John’s. With both parents now dead, the siblings must decide what to do with the old house they’ve inherited. Despite their individual loneliness, neither is willing to change or cede to the other’s intentions. As the sisters discover the house’s dark secrets, the spirits of the past awaken, and strange events envelop them. The Hush sisters must either face these sinister forces together or be forever ripped apart.
In The Hush Sisters, Gerard Collins weaves psychological suspense with elements of the fantastic to craft a contemporary urban gothic that will keep readers spellbound until the novel whispers its startling secrets.
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The Ice Cream Bucket Effect
$10.95Once again northern Canada’s best-known storyteller takes us on a tour of the town of New Totem on the “Vast Northern Prairie.” We meet again with the Trotter family and their friends in this second book of tall tales based on growing up in the Peace River country. A hilarious collection of nineteen short stories, The Ice Cream Bucket Effect makes you wish you were there to share in Ma Trotter’s good home cooking and in the misadventures of young Fudgie and his cohorts.
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The Ice Shack
$12.95***BEST BOOKS FOR KIDS AND TEENS 2021 CATALOGUE***
The most beautiful ice-fishing shack on the whole coast belongs to Alphonse. But he can’t seem to catch a thing—not even a sock, or an old pair of underwear! How will he ever win the Best Fisherman Contest?!
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The Iconoclast’s Journal
$19.95Spooked by some ball lightning on his wedding night, repressed young Catholic Griffith Smolders interprets this as a sign and abandons his conjugal responsibilities by escaping through the window, enduring a series of misadventures along the way involving, among others, con men, murderesses, shipwrecks, and autodidact biologist hermits. Giving chase, his betrothed, Avice Drinkwater, finally runs Grif aground in a tiny island community, and prepares to exact her revenge.
Set in the rough-and-tumble late nineteenth century backwoods, The Iconoclast’s Journal is wildly kinetic, a madcap picaresque and comic anti-romance by one of the most inventive writers at work today.
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The Ignis Psalter
$22.00The Ignis Psalter is a beautifully written novel that explores coming of age in a rural area of New Brunswick haunted by a prolific, almost artistic arsonist, who may just be one of the family. Danny Jacobs draws from a facility with words that has already won him awards as both a poet and an essayis, to fashion a novel that is moody and imagistic, drawing the reader into a world of small town characters illuminated in fire.
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The Illustrated ‘Ode to Labrador’
$16.95The Illustrated Ode to Labrador is a new treatment of Dr. Harry Paddon’s beloved anthem. Artist Geoff Butler has produced twenty-five vibrant original paintings that feature the various people and regions of The Big Land, executed in oil paint. The introduction by author Robin McGrath outlines the history of the Ode and the life of Dr. Paddon, and in a series of thumbnail vignettes, she puts Butler’s paintings into a cultural and geographic context that amounts to a mini-tour of the Eastern Ungava. The book includes sheet music for the two most familiar tunes to the Ode, with lyrics in English, Inuktitut and Innu-aimun. Paintings and vignettes together make a lively, informative work suitable for cross-generational enjoyment.
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The Illustrated Journals of Susanna Moodie
$44.95The Journals of Susanna Moodie, arguably Margaret Atwood’s finest work of poetry, was first published by Oxford University Press in 1970. In it, she adopts the voice of Susanna Strickland Moodie, an English woman who came to live in the rural area near Peterborough, Ontario in the mid-nineteenth century, and who wrote about her experiences for English readers in her classic account of Canadian pioneer life, Roughing it in the Bush. Atwood’s poetry, based on the Moodie prose, covers Moodie’s arrival in Canada in 1832 and ends with a prophetic commentary by a dead Susanna Moodie on twentieth-century Canada.
Charles Pachter began illustrating the poems in 1968, when Atwood sent him a first manuscript. Of his first reading, he has written: “It was a fateful moment. I was so stunned by its beauty and power that I realized that every early Atwood folio I had done up until now (there were five) must be a rehearsal for this.” The thirty images were completed within a year, but the original folio was not produced until 1980, when 120 copies were hand-printed in a boxed edition, which is now in public and private collections around the world. In 1997, Macfarlane Walter & Ross published a small-format edition in hard covers.
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The Imaginary Museum
$12.00Toronto poet Stan Rogal’s second book of poetry is based on Mallarmé’s idea that everyone has ‘un musée imaginaire’ in his head. Rogal’s collection of poems reflects his belief that not everyone’s imaginary museum would hold masterpieces, but could also house velvet paintings of Elvis.
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The Imago Stage
$22.95Longlisted for the 2022 DUBLIN Literary Award
A woman must emerge from the virtual world she’s created to confront her flesh-and-blood past and family.
Growing up with a menacing drunk for a father and a grief-stricken mother, a girl spends her 1980s childhood staring at the television to escape the tension, depression, and looming violence that fill her suburban home. After winning a modelling competition, she dedicates herself to becoming a placid image onto which anything can be projected, a blank slate with a blank stare. Earning enough in Paris to retire in her twenties, she buys a studio in Montreal and retreats from the world and its perceived threats, cultivating her existence as an image through her virtual reality avatar. But when her mother develops cancer and nears the end of her life, she is forced to leave her cocoon – surrounded by her posse of augmented reality superheroes – and interact with the world and her parents without the mask of her perfect, virtual self.
Georges offers up an alienated childhood with shifting pop culture obsessions, a woman’s awakening to the role of the image in culture, and her eventual isolation in her apartment and the world online. It is a catalogue of the anxieties of an age, from nuclear war to terrorism, climate change to biological warfare. Set in the past and not-too-distant future of Montreal, The Imago Stage is an ominous tale of oppression, suppression, and disembodiment.
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The Impromptu of Outremont
$15.95Each year, the Beaugrand sisters meet for their sister Yvette’s birthday party—and to have a little “impromptu”—at which they lash out at each other’s personal failures and at the failure of society to support them in their opinions about the world. The four sisters represent the French-Canadian intelligentsia of the fifties, whose interest in art, music, dance and literature is an adopted pose, not their life’s blood. Only one of the Beaugrand siters, Lorraine, has escaped her fate, running off with the Italian gardener to start a family in St. Leonard. The others remain in Outremont, trapped by time; by the choices they have not dared to make; by the position that society has foisted upon them—a position they have accepted, not fought for.
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The Inanimate World
$13.95‘The Inanimate World’ is an affecting suite of stories, with a novella-length piece at its core. The stories within ‘The Inanimate World’ traverse both rural and urban landscapes, exploring the terrain of the personal as much as the geographic. They span the time period of 1980 to the present, providing relevant insights into the private lives of people living through rapid social transformation and an unstable changing economy. Sincere, germane, and tender tales of longing-for love, understanding, acceptance, and peace.
“The stories have a narrative stability not often found in first collections, the writing is sure and mature, and there, and there’s a range of approaches on display, from experimental to intimate to epic.” – Malahat Review
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The Incomparables
$20.00The Incomparables is the debut novel from the Trillium-nominated author of Animal. Lydia Templar is obsessed with fabric, the texture and weight of cloth. Through fabrics, curtains, costumes, she expresses herself in a way she feels incapable of doing in words. For the past ten years she’s apprenticed in the wardrobe department of a small Shakespearean theatre company and has finally been given the opportunity to showcase her designs. When she discovers her husband is having an affair with his leading lady, she seeks revenge the only way she knows how: she weaves her panic, pain, and paranoia into the costumes. It costs her the job. She swears she’ll never sew again, packs her things and returns to her mother and the sprawling country estate she left years ago.
When a group of counsellors from the city book the family’s Bed and Breakfast for the summer to prepare for a special wedding ceremony, Lydia’s plans to never thread a needle again are challenged. Through the one thingshe cannot live without, the counsellors lure Lydia into a role she did not see coming – the true nature of her self.
Reviewers on Animal
“I’m tempted to say it’s a slim, distilled masterpiece.”
– Michael Bryson, Underground Book Club“these quickly unfolding stories are elliptically drawn, tense with action and dark humour. Leggat is a shape-shifting writer”
– The Globe and Mail“this immensely rewarding collection is worth picking up”
– eye weekly“Most short story collections are up anddown. Unlike most, however, Animal is more than the sum of its parts.”
– Herizons