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Nominated for the 2017 White Pine Award
Nominated for the 2017 International Dublin Literary Award
In an unnamed and war-torn country, twin brothers Amed and Aziz live in the sanctuary of the family’s orange grove. But when a bomb comes from “the other side of the mountain” and kills their grandparents, their father must choose how to best avenge his parents’ death, with tragic and unforseen consequences.
Morally complex and completely unforgettable, Larry Tremblay’s best-selling The Orange Grove offers up a tragic fable about the absurd logic of terrorism, the power of brotherly love, and the hope for peace in a broken world.
Told through a mother’s journals written while interned in a French psychiatric ward, this is a novel about love, and the lost language and rituals of mourning.
The siesta hour, France. Bees fly in lavender bushes. Anna has just come home, but something is wrong. She fears nothing will ever be right again.
Following her son Lou’s death, Anna has a breakdown. Once hospitalized, Anna becomes determined to undo death by writing everything down in a set of orange notebooks: fragments and tales about her London childhood, the story of her relationship with Lou’s Basque father, Antton, their meeting on a ferry on the day Princess Diana died, Anna’s consequent obsession with the English Channel, a cursed trench coat, the duplicity of beige, Lou’s Jewish and Basque heritage, death rituals, and the role of bees—because their wax makes the candles that light the path of the dead.
In the psychiatric ward, Anna meets Yann, a Breton sea captain. Together, they go on a surreal Orphic journey to the underworld, sailing from Finistère to the middle of the English Channel, to try and find Lou at the exact point where his destiny began. Myth and reality collide, allowing Anna to journey through grief to radical hope.
The Origin of Feces takes an important subject out of locker-rooms, potty-training manuals, and bio-solids management boardrooms into the fresh air of everyone’s lives. With insight and wit, David Waltner-Toews explores what has been too often ignored and makes a compelling argument for a deeper understanding of human and animal waste. Approaching the subject from a variety of perspectives — evolutionary, ecological, and cultural — The Origin of Feces shows us how integral excrement is to biodiversity, agriculture, public health, food production and distribution, and global ecosystems. From the primordial ooze to dung beetles, from bug frass, cat scats, and flush toilets to global trade, pandemics, and energy, this is the awesome, troubled, unexpurgated story of feces.
A novel about the gig economy.
Twenty-nine-year-old Daniel is an under-employed internet artist who’s struggling as much with money and inspiration as he is in his relationship with Grace. Against a backdrop of a digital economy that rewards online platforms instead of content creators, with climate-change anxiety hanging in the air, the resolutely contemporary Morissette immerses readers into a year of modern love, as Daniel and Grace navigate their aspirations, insecurities and ambitions amidst a culture obsessed with selfies and identity.
A fresh and imaginative critical examination of work and life in the 21st century by the author of the “cultishly popular” New Tab.
The Originals
“An astonishing feat of compelling, economical storytelling.” —Toronto Star
The Kingdom of Jin, 612 BCE. The ruthless court minister Tu-An Ku orchestrates the annihilation of his rival, Chao Tun, and nine generations of his family. Only one survives: Chao Tun’s newborn grandson, smuggled to safety by the doctor Cheng Ying. When the state decrees the execution of every infant until the orphan of Chao is found, Cheng Ying makes an unthinkable sacrifice to save the sole descendant and deceive Tu-An Ku into raising the boy as his own. Years later, the orphan must confront the truth of his lineage to avenge his family’s bloodline.
Based on the thirteenth-century Chinese opera The Great Revenge of the Zhao Orphan by Ji Junxiang 紀君祥, Michael Man boldly adapts this legendary five-act revenge tale into a gripping, action-packed one-act with urgent contemporary resonance. Often called the “Chinese Hamlet,” The Orphan of Chao is a timeless story of survival, sacrifice, and the cost of preserving one’s values in the face of eradication.
The story of a public personality—the possible future mayor of Montreal—this memoir recounts how Richard Bergeron and his four brothers lived in an orphanage for five years in the 1960s. Set in a small city in Northern Quebec, surrounded by bush and industry, this account describes the five floors of dormitories with 50 children on each floor, the daily routine, and the nuns who ran the orphanage. This short and moving story of how Richard began the rest of his life will take the reader to another time and place.
This novel traces the life experiences of a once highly successful woman who falls prey to electroshock and subsequently struggles to piece back together her life. Naomi suffers enormous memory loss; additionally, an estrangement from her family of origin that she has no way to wrap her mind around. The novel begins with her wandering the corridor of St. Patricks-St Andrews Mental Health Centre (St. Pukes) faced with the seemingly impossible challenge of coming to terms with the damage done her, as well uncovering the hidden details of her life. It moves back and forth between a relatively happy childhood in the legendary north-end Winnipeg of the mid-1900s and post-ECT adulthood in Toronto. An exceptionally kind man named Ger who befriends Naomi comes to suspect that important pieces of the puzzle of what befell her lurk beneath the surface of writing in a binder of hers, which comes to be known as Black Binder Number Three. What Naomi progressively comes to do, often with Ger’s help and just as often with the help of a very different and eerily similar sister named Rose, is find ways to do justice to her life and to the various people in it. Filled with a vast array of colourful and insightful characters from a variety of communities–Toronto¹s Kensington Market of the 1970s, the 1970’s trans community, north-end Winnipeg Jewry, and the ingenious and frequently hilarious mad community–this novel sensitizes us to the horror of electroshock, takes us to new levels in our understanding of what it means to be human, and, in the process, leads us to question the very concept of normalcy.
The published version of George Ryga’s hit play The Ecstasy of Rita Joe is widely available as a best-seller. Yet the work of one of Canada’s best known playwrights, canonized by critics and studied by students world-wide, remains largely absent from the Canadian stage; Ryga’s very reputation as a dramatist is an anomaly. This anthology, then, is a challenge, even a provocation, to examine Ryga in light of the other plays that constitute his substantial dramatic oeuvre. How was it that one of Canada’s pioneering playwrights became an outsider to the very theatre he had been instrumental in creating?
As a self-proclaimed figure of exile, as an “artist in resistance,” Ryga criticized issues of Canadian culture in numerous instances—particularly its colonized nature, even turning on the very theatre that had earlier nourished him. Employing disruptive elements such as flashbacks/forwards, poetic speeches, songs, sound motifs and changes of setting and weather, Ryga gives his plays a sense of restless movement, even a loss of control. His characters may be physically and spiritually trapped by their colonial uncertainties, but they have great capacity to envision a different tomorrow. It was a vision of tomorrow that, with the sole exception of The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, the theatre of Ryga’s day had no wish to share.
The first St. John’s taxi stand started up in the early-20th Century and greatly expanded prior to the Second World War. There are now almost four hundred taxis operating within the city limits. The Other Side of Midnight: Taxi Cab Stories is not a traditional history of taxi cabs in St. John’s. It describes the commonly shared experiences of an underwritten portion of Newfoundland’s working class while presenting St. John’s from the front seat of a taxi cab. It will explore the working lives of its subjects, as well as their thoughts and feelings about their choice of career and their clients. Every segment of our society utilizes their services, from the social elite to the social obsolete: businessmen, drug pushers, prostitutes and forlorn lovers. They are witnesses to the best and worst in all of us. They are trained listeners to troubled people, as well as cheerleaders and goodwill ambassadors. Individuals will emerge, as well as equally unique understandings of their working lives. Comical, absurd and often dramatic, many of their reminiscences will be of long hours and years on the job, their hopes and decayed dreams.
Working in the tradition of such previous poetry collections as Daphne Marlatt’s Vancouver Poems (1972), George Bowering’s Kerrisdale Elegies (1986), Joe Blades’ River Suite (1998) and, closer to home, William Hawkins’ own Ottawa Poems (1966), rob mclennan’s thirteenth trade poetry collection The Ottawa City Project reads like a love song to a city caught between competing identities of local and national. The poems in this collection work to not only reflect the more conservative, even bureaucratic aspects of the city, but the myths of the city, and work through references and concerns that go completely against those myths, into their own stories, and into the realities of the city itself.
Pat Jasper collects memories, peels off their labels, gives them a good wash, and transforms them into insights. She focuses on the “small close spaces” of the family — on domestic relationships, crises, and patterns, on coming to terms with time and its power to destroy and to heal. Whether inspired by incidents or by objects infused with emotion, Jasper demonstrates a remarkably strong narrative voice, excelling as a storyteller who carefully unravels the yarn of a woman’s life.
Suffering the aftermath of the war and foreseeing the dawning of new ones, the Oxford Roof Climbers, the Benevolent Order of, lay siege to a sleepy university town. A stand against stands, a dare to end all daring, a doing that protests doings; the two haunted men—armed with a talent for practical jokes—grasp at love and dare to imagine a new world. The Oxford Roof Climber’s Rebellion, despite its harmless beginnings, brings the Arab Revolt dangerously close to the heart of the Empire.
Winner of the 2007 CAA Carol Bolt Award
Gary Geddes’s new collection of lyrics and poem-sequences ranges from whimsical poems about the building of a greenhouse to the struggle of characters in classical legends to cope with the interference of close relatives and extended family, the gods. And poems about Yukon adventures and the wonders and plight of monarch butterflies in Mexican highlands. It’s also a diverse gathering of elegies for friends, literary luminaries, creatures and natural habitats in a world under siege, but also a series of hymns to art, beauty, human dignity and endurance.
In a place that’s ‘to die for’, no one expects to die for real.
So muses undercover detective Bradford Fairfax after an anonymous caller tells him that his ex-boyfriend, party boy Ross Pretty, has died from an accidental overdose of ecstasy in “the gayest place on earth”: Provincetown, Massachusetts. Brad becomes convinced that Ross’s death is no accident, and his intention to bury his former lover suddenly turns into a full-scale investigation.
Brad quickly pins the murder on Ross’s ex-employer, the malevolent Hayden Rosengarten, owner of a high-end sex resort catering to a rich and famous clientele for whom discretion is everything. But when Rosengarten also turns up dead, the list of suspects suddenly grows: could it be Cinder Lindquist, the flamboyant female-impersonator? Or Johnny K., one of Rosengarten’s merciless henchmen? What about Big Ruby, the lesbian café owner with a big heart, but an even bigger gun? And why does everyone in P-Town seem to be a Buddhist? On top of it all, Brad finds himself falling in love with Zach, a blue-haired twink from his past.
Within this colourful cast of characters, it seems everyone has a secret to hide. Jeffrey Round has created a deliciously camp, sexy thriller with an unforgettable new breed of hero — one who always gets his man.