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It 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.
At 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.
From 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!
Many 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.
A 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)
Author 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.
Eleanor 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.
Bill 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.
The 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.
“A strange and surprisingly touching novel about how people find good and evil where they look for them.” — Booklist
“A beautifully written novel, part folk tale, part parable.” — Will Ferguson, author of the Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning 419
Winner of the Canadian Authors Association Award for Fiction
In 1930s Russia, an eight-year-old boy named Vladimir is suddenly stricken with a chronic case of the hiccups. He soon finds himself spirited away to a Moscow hospital by the famous physician Sergei Namestikov, who puts him through a series of extraordinary — and often bizarre — treatments in an effort to find a cure.
Then Sergei’s chief medical rival, the brilliant Alexander Afiniganov, determines that beneath Vladimir’s blank eyes lurks a pure, unbridled evil — and takes steps to remove the child from polite society. Abandoned by everyone but his hiccups, Vladimir is about to embark on a journey that is funny, poignant, and surreal — and that takes a close look at the nature of good and evil.
Shortlisted, Toronto Book Awards
On May 2, 1967, Montreal and Toronto faced each other in a battle for hockey supremacy. This was only the fifth time the teams had ever played each other in the Stanley Cup finals. Toronto led the series 3-2.
But this wasn’t simply a game. From the moment Foster Hewitt announced “Hello Canada and hockey fans in the United States,” the game became a turning point in sports history. That night, the Leafs would win the Cup. The next season, the National Hockey League would expand to twelve teams. Players would form an association to begin collective bargaining. Hockey would become big business. The NHL of the “Original Six” would be a thing of the past.
It was The Last Hockey Game.
Placing us in the announcers’ booth, in the seats of excited fans, and in the skates of the players, Bruce McDougall scores with a spectacular account of every facet of that final fateful match. As we meet players such as Gump Worsley, Tim Horton, Terry Sawchuk, and Eddie Shack, as well as coaches, owners, and fans, The Last Hockey Game becomes more than a story of a game. It also becomes an elegy, a lament for an age when, for all its many problems, the game was played for the love of it.
Poems of disturbing beauty, examining personal and collective loss.
This is Michael Kenyon’s third full-length collection of poems. His poetry and fiction have always been alert to the underside, the angularity of the outcast, those forced by temperament or predilection or circumstance to the fringes of middle class life. Here, it is insight itself that pushes the speakers closer to the edge. The world of these poems is dark: Kenyon names and owns our clear cuts, our overpopulation, our fossil-fueled rush to oblivion, the violence embedded in sexuality. This is a book of expanded elegy, clear-eyed, unflinching, amid the wreckage of its loves.
… It is useless to
choose a direction: current must find us.
At last we swim away from each other
to make the storm less jealous, old stars freeze
the water, earthquakes calve an island, and
another me adores another you
inland.
— from “The Stars”
Fiercely elegiac, jaggedly sexual, The Last House
stands on the brink of devastation–personal, ancestral, cultural. There is transcendence here, but no redemption: it is too late. But this is also a book about love — protean, violent, perduring — love as the key to reality, even as it mystifies us or tears us apart. These are poems of deep and disturbing vision, sustained by electrifying honesty.In 1835, Gus, a young zoologist, is sent to Iceland by The Natural History Museum of Lille to study North Atlantic fauna. It is there he witnesses the bloody massacre of a colony of great auks. Amidst the violence, the curious researcher pulls a single wounded bird from the water, unaware that he has recovered what will eventually be the last of its kind. Gus brings the initially suspicious animal home with him to study it. Instead of a research specimen, he discovers the beauty and majesty of his new companion, who he names Prosp, and the pair eventually develop an endearing mutual affection.
Over the next fifteen years, Gus comes to realize that he is the close observer of something inconceivable: the extinction of a species. From there, a singular preoccupation is born, and the inevitable fate of his feathered friend eclipses everything else around him. Gus’s burgeoning understanding, wonder, and obsession around the disappearance of a species and humankind’s role in its erasure mirror some of our questions today about the future of the natural world and our place within it.
The Last of Its Kind is a story of friendship, trust, and respect, but also about the desire to endure and survive. With unparalleled mastery, Sibylle Grimbert illuminates the deep intelligence and emotion of our animal counterparts and asks the urgent question of what it means to love what will never be again.
“Tim Hornbaker further establishes himself as possibly the finest wrestling historian writing today.” — SLAM! Wrestling on Death of the TerritoriesFrom the author of Death of the Territories and Capitol Revolution comes the definitive biography of “Nature Boy” Ric FlairFor more than a century, professional wrestling has cultivated some of the most eccentric and compelling personalities. As the embodiment of flamboyance and intensity, the “Nature Boy” Ric Flair stood at wrestling’s apex for decades, cementing his place as a once-in-a-lifetime athlete and performer. When he was in the ring, fans knew they were witnessing the very best, and he not only became a multi-time world heavyweight champion in the NWA, WCW, and the WWE, but his status as a generational great has been confirmed with inductions into numerous Halls of Fame.The Last Real World Champion: The Legacy of “Nature Boy” Ric Flair is a gripping portrait of a wrestling legend. This unflinching biography explores the successes, struggles, and controversy of Flair’s life in wrestling, pulling no punches in sharing the truth behind his in-ring achievements and out-of-the-ring hardships. Today, Flair is celebrated for his pioneering career and as an iconic figure in the realm of mainstream sports entertainment. Celebrated wrestling historian Tim Hornbaker tells Flair’s complete story, with meticulous attention to detail and exhaustive research, creating a must-read for fans of wrestling, sports, and popular culture.
Winner, Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award
Shortlisted, Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, Canada and the Caribbean
The Last Tasmanian has reaped more national and international recognition than any other novel by Herb Curtis. First published in 1991, it has remained in print continuously in its original edition and later in The Brennen Siding Trilogy. Now it’s available again as a separate volume in the GLE Library Series.
Brennen Siding, a hamlet on a small tributary of the famous Miramichi River, is home to an unforgettable crew — Shadrack Nash and his friend Dryfly Ramsey; Dry’s mother, the homely, destitute Shirley, and Nutbeam, the big-eared hermit she marries; the American sports who come to the Cabbage Island Salmon Club to fish; and, above all, Hilda Porter, the elderly schoolteacher who treasures the story of Trucanini, the last Tasmanian on earth. Hilda herself is the last of the Porters, and, amid the invasion of TV, Elvis, and rich Americans, Shad and Dry may be the last true natives of Brennen Siding.
Nine-fingered Fyodor “Bone” Sliva is the last Thief, legendary for his murderous adherence to the Zakone, a brutal code of honour that once ruled the Moscow underworld. But as the Soviet Union disintegrates and a new cadre of gangsters, businessmen, and politicians takes over, Bone finds himself a hunted man. He flees eastward, across the crumbling Union, through the opium fields of China and Burma, through the brothels of Bangkok, and begins a journey to North America in order to finally leave his blood-soaked past behind.
But trailing him is the hook-nosed sniper, Alexandr Solonik, whose mission is to kill Wild Thieves as they’re found. And ahead, in Canada, is the depraved master criminal Dmitri Razinkin, who has taken firm control of the northern underworld. Most of the Wild Thieves have been assassinated by Razinkin’s brigade of cut-throats. Torn between the Code that bids him to protect the downtrodden Thieves, and his own desire to “walk alone,” the charismatic Bone gathers together his own brigade of bandits, torpedoes, and apprentices.
With the gangsters in Moscow awaiting delivery of his decapitated head, Bone leads a resistance against the corrupt new order. But can he trust his brigade not to betray him for Razinkin’s riches? Will Solonik catch up with him before he can redeem the Code? The Last Thief is the story of an underworld caught between profit and tradition, an epic testament to the struggle for honour in the midstof violence.