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Showing 8049–8064 of 9492 results
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The River
$24.95A breathtaking mix of observation, prose, natural history, and art
We tend to look at landscape in relation to what it can do for us. Does it move us with its beauty? Can we make a living from it? But what if we examined a landscape on its own terms, freed from our expectations and assumptions?
This is what celebrated writer Helen Humphreys sets out to do in this beautiful, groundbreaking examination of place. For more than a decade Humphreys has owned a small waterside property on a section of the Napanee River in Ontario. In the watchful way of writers, she has studied her little piece of the river through the seasons and the years, cataloguing its ebb and flows, the plants and creatures that live in and round it, the signs of human usage at its banks and on its bottom.
The result is The River, a gorgeous and moving meditation that uses fiction, non-fiction, natural history, archival maps and images, and full-colour original photographs to get at the truth. In doing this, Humphreys has created a work of startling originality that is sure to become a new Canadian classic.
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The River of Dead Trees
$21.95Middle-aged and short on prospects, Charles Wilson returns to Trempes, the village of his childhood, and discovers the body of his childhood friend, Paul Faber, hanging from a tree in the clearing where they played as boys. Thus begins Wilson’s obsessive quest to exhume the secrets of his past and to understand the reasons for his friend’s death. But memories shift, people change and things are never as they seem. Soon Wilson finds himself caught up in a delusory spiral that threatens his very existence.
This is at once a neo-Gothic metaphysical thriller and a meticulous meditation on the unapologetic betrayal of memory and imagination. Wilson’s story bubbles up from the faults between mystery and fairy tale, brimming with characters haunted and tortured by the past, where truth and deception are wound up in time like the gnarled branches of old, grizzled trees.
Reviews of the French edition, Le Pendu de Trempes:
‘This book will make readers experience moments of anxiety bordering on insanity.’
– Radio-Canada
‘This is a fascinating book, and the experience of reading it is absolutely entrancing.’
– Le Devoir
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The River Twice
$24.95The River Twice, by Giller-nominated author of the bestselling The Island Walkers, is a gripping new World War I novel set in the same factory town familiar to his many readers, where residents are reeling as the wounded return and the list of local young men who have been killed continues to grow.
Wounded in body and spirit, Ted Whitfield returns home from the trenches to his wife, Miriam, who finds him deeply altered and virtually unreachable. Her sister, Grace, afflicted by her own secret trauma, falls into an immediate and electric affinity with Ted, and soon he is telling her—and only her—a story from the front lines that’s as shocking as it is extraordinary. As the novel moves back and forth between the lush, rolling landscape of southern Ontario and the devastated French countryside where exhausted Canadian troops are entrenched, the three characters at the centre of the narrative become entwined in almost unbearable conflict.
Miriam and Grace’s nine-year-old brother Will, a thoughtful, quiet boy who often sees the adults more clearly than they see themselves, is at the moral centre of the story. Each of Bemrose’s finely constructed characters strives to be as true and as honest as they can with one another, and yet are caught up in the evasions and deceptions that so complicate human life, especially during a war and its aftermath.
The River Twice does for Canada what Pat Barker’s The Regeneration Trilogy did for England—focuses our collective memory on the moral injustices that attend any war, contemporary or historic. John Bemrose draws readers in and won’t let them go until the last page of this astonishingly lyrical and deeply humane novel. -
The Road to Canada
$16.95Since the last Ice Age, the only safe route into Canada’s interior during the winter started at the Bay of Fundy and followed the main rivers north to the St. Lawrence River through what is now New Brunswick. Aboriginal people used this route as a major highway in all seasons and the great imperial powers followed their lead.
The Grand Communications Route, as it was then called, was the only conduit for people, information and goods passing back and forth between the interior settlements and the wider world and became the backbone of empire for both England and France in their centuries of warfare over this territory. It was Joseph Robineau de Villebon, a commandant in Acadie, who first made strategic use of the route in time of war because he understood its importance in the struggle for North America. A strategic link between the Atlantic colonies and Quebec, the French made extensive use of the route to communicate and move troops between the northern settlements and Fort Beauséjour, Louisbourg, and Port-Royal. The British put great effort into maintaining and fortifying the route, building major coastal forts at Saint John to guard its entrance and erecting garrisons and blockhouses all along the way to the St Lawrence, first as a defence against the French and then to ward off the Americans.
The route also played a key role in the American Revolution as well as the Aroostook War of 1839 that saw bodies of troops lining each side of the border extending from St. Andrews (NB) and Calais (ME) to Madawaska. In 1842, the Grand Communications Route and the Webster-Ashburton Treaty determined the location of the Canada—US border.
It is still in use today: the Trans-Canada Highway and Route 7 follow its path. As well as telling the story of the Grand Communications Route from the earliest human habitation of the area, The Road to Canada describes the historic sites, forts, blockhouses and other historic remains that can still be visited today, including Martello Tower (Saint John), the Fort Hughes blockhouse (Oromocto), the Fort Fairfield blockhouse (Fort Fairfield, ME), Le Fortin du Petit-Sault (Edmundston), the Fort Kent blockhouse (Fort Kent, ME) and Fort Ingall (Cabano, QC).
The Road to Canada is volume 5 in the New Brunswick Military Heritage Series.
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The Road Well Kept
$34.95Extensively researched by journalist Heather Robertson, The Road Well Kept examines and celebrates the first 100 years of this Toronto private girls’ school. Set against the backdrop of a changing Toronto, the book explores the strong personalities, unforeseen events, and the steadfast staff and students that make up Branksome Hall. From its humble beginnings in 1903 to its rise as an outstanding educational institution that has presence on the global stage, Branksome Hall is proud of its history: one that provided education and a home to English girls during World War II, that gave singer Portia White a platform to develop her musical career, and that entertained important foreign dignitaries, such as former U.S. President Jimmy Carter. Well-written, fast-paced, and blending historical fact with interviews and notes from diaries and letters, The Road Well Kept is an entertaining and informative read about the fascinating history of Branksome Hall. Complemented with a century’s worth of archival photographs, this book is a must- have for Branksome alumnae, parents considering sending their children to private school, people in education, and those who enjoy social histories.
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The Rock Box
$15.99Petra loves rocks, and collects them with a passion. She keeps them in her bedroom, in the kitchen cupboards, between the cushions of the living-room sofa, even in the bathroom medicine cabinet. Petra?s parents do not love rocks. At least, not as much as Petra does. To convince her to winnow down her collection, her parents offer her a wonderful treasure?a rock box, with a selection of the rocks and minerals found in her home province of Newfoundland and Labrador. But, wait, is one of those rocks winking at her? Acclaimed Canadian poet Don McKay creates a charming tale of geology and deep time and connection in his first children?s book.
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The Role I Played
$34.95“Glimpses of her childhood and life outside of hockey come into view, but the main focus is the roller-coaster ride of striving to compete at the sport’s top level.” — Library Journal
“Sami Jo has an energetic personality that shines through with every story in this book.” — Jennifer Botterill, four-time Olympian
Two-time Olympic gold medalist offers insider access, writing with unflinching honesty about the triumphs of her greatest games and the anguish of difficult times with the Canadian National Women’s Hockey Team
Men’s hockey in Canada may hog the limelight, but interest in women’s hockey has never been higher. The Role I Played is a memoir of Sami Jo Small’s ten years with Canada’s National Women’s Hockey Team. Beginning with her experience as a rookie at the first-ever women’s Olympic hockey tournament in Nagano in 1998 and culminating with Canada’s third straight Olympic gold medal in Vancouver in 2010, the veteran goaltender gives the reader behind-the-scenes insight into one of the most successful teams in sports history.
This book honours the individuals who sacrificed so much of their lives to represent Canada on a world stage and celebrates their individual contributions to the team’s glory. While bringing the personalities of her teammates to life, Small takes the reader into the dressing rooms and onto the ice for an up-close glimpse into the ups and downs of athletes pursuing a sport’s highest achievement.
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The Romeo Initiative
$16.95Single men are hard to come by in 1970s West Germany. So when Karin Maynard, a government secretary, meets the handsome Markus Richter, a single man who pursues her, she can hardly believe her luck. But with Markus continually away on business, thoughts of infidelity begin to consume Karin. Is her insecurity unwarranted, or is she onto something? Based on a real program in East Germany in which men were trained and sent to develop long-term relationships with West German secretaries to determine their “perfect man,” The Romeo Initiative is half romantic comedy and half spy thriller with a tantalizing twist.
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The Roof Walkers
$21.95Christmas, 1864, in the last years of the civil war, a twenty-year-old Irish Canadian, Eoin O’Donoghue, is newly hired as the personal secretary to the prospective head of the embryonic Irish Republican Army in New York, William R. Roberts. Appalled that the mayhem he sees around him is also being planned for his own country, Eoin offers his services to Gilbert McMicken, head of Canada’s secret police. So begins the trajectory of what Eoin himself calls, self-disparagingly, his ‘Judas informantcy.’… Against a backdrop of fusion and collapse, 600,000 Americans dead, one nation, Canada, about to be created, another to its south in disarray, Irish militants plan northward raids to win a ‘New Ireland’ on the continent (its capital, Sherbrooke, QC), to split Ireland itself off from Great Britain, and to avenge reverse, cross-border Southern terror hatched in Montreal and approved by Jefferson Davis – murder and bank robberies in St. Albans, Vermont, a form of germ warfare (yellow fever spread by trunks of black vomit encrusted clothing), Confederate Robert Kennedy’s almost successful plan to fire-bomb New York City, and the shooting of Abraham Lincoln. Under assumed names, safely housed in the Moffat Mansion on Union Square (with a sunburst flag on the roof, lavishly furnished in mahogany and green, center of the Irish Republic in exile), live the secret, illegitimate twin daughters of James Stephens, Fenian leader in Europe. Who will capture Eoin O’Donoghue’s allegiance – his employer, radical New York businessman and Fenian William R. Roberts (later US ambassador to Chile), Deirdre Hopper (Stephens), accomplished painter and musician and daughter of the leader in Dublin, or Canadian spy-master Gilbert McMicken, who regularly insists his protege provide ‘less poetry and more police work.’ …Two spirits also stalk the book, one Edmund Spencer, author of the Faerie Queene and the Sheriff of Cork, who celebrated the flowers of Ireland and contemplated mass starvation of the Irish as an instrument of Elizabethan power. The other is Thomas D’Arcy McGee, Irish revolutionary, poet, journalist, Father of Confederation, the only federal politician in Canada ever to have been assassinated (by Fenian separatists in 1868), almost three years to the day after Lincoln’s death at the hands of John Wilkes Booth. Art or authority, union or secession, integrity or ‘informantcy’, rapine and war or love and the peaceable kingdom – Eoin O’Donoghue, reluctant patriot and spy, is torn by these choices.
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The Roof Walkers
$34.95Christmas, 1864, in the last years of the civil war, a twenty-year-old Irish Canadian, Eoin O’Donoghue, is newly hired as the personal secretary to the prospective head of the embryonic Irish Republican Army in New York, William R. Roberts. Appalled that the mayhem he sees around him is also being planned for his own country, Eoin offers his services to Gilbert McMicken, head of Canada’s secret police. So begins the trajectory of what Eoin himself calls, self-disparagingly, his ‘Judas informantcy.’
Against a backdrop of fusion and collapse, 600,000 Americans dead, one nation, Canada, about to be created, another to its south in disarray, Irish militants plan northward raids to win a ‘New Ireland’ on the continent (its capital, Sherbrooke, QC), to split Ireland itself off from Great Britain, and to avenge reverse, cross-border Southern terror hatched in Montreal and approved by Jefferson Davis – murder and bank robberies in St. Albans, Vermont, a form of germ warfare (yellow fever spread by trunks of black vomit encrusted clothing), Confederate Robert Kennedy’s almost successful plan to fire-bomb New York City, and the shooting of Abraham Lincoln.
Under assumed names, safely housed in the Moffat Mansion on Union Square (with a sunburst flag on the roof, lavishly furnished in mahogany and green, center of the Irish Republic in exile), live the secret, illegitimate twin daughters of James Stephens, Fenian leader in Europe. Who will capture Eoin O’Donoghue’s allegiance – his employer, radical New York businessman and Fenian William R. Roberts (later US ambassador to Chile), Deirdre Hopper (Stephens), accomplished painter and musician and daughter of the leader in Dublin, or Canadian spy-master Gilbert McMicken, who regularly insists his protégé provide ‘less poetry and more police work.’
Two spirits also stalk the book, one Edmund Spencer, author of the Faerie Queene and the Sheriff of Cork, who celebrated the flowers of Ireland and contemplated mass starvation of the Irish as an instrument of Elizabethan power. The other is Thomas D’Arcy McGee, Irish revolutionary, poet, journalist, Father of Confederation, the only federal politician in Canada ever to have been assassinated (by Fenian separatists in 1868), almost three years to the day after Lincoln’s death at the hands of John Wilkes Booth.
Art or authority, union or secession, integrity or ‘informantcy’, rapine and war or love and the peaceable kingdom – Eoin O’Donoghue, reluctant patriot and spy, is torn by these choices.
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The Rooftop Garden
$22.95The Rooftop Garden is a novel about Nabila, a researcher who studies seaweed in warming oceans, and her childhood friend Matthew. Now both in their twenties, Matthew has disappeared from his Toronto home, and Nabila travels to Berlin to find him and try to bring him back.The story is interspersed with scenes from their childhood, when Nabila, obsessed with how the climate crisis will cause oceans to rise, created an elaborate imaginary world where much of the land has flooded. She and Matthew would play their game on her rooftop garden, the only oasis in an abandoned city being claimed by water.Their childhood experiences reveal how their lives are on different trajectories, even at an early stage: Nabila comes from an educated, middle-class family, while Matthew had been abandoned by his father and was often left to deal with things on his own.As an adult, Matthew’s dissatisfaction with life leads him to join a group of young men who are angry at society. He eventually finds himself on a violent suicide mission, but Nabila isn’t aware of the extent of his radicalization until they finally meet on a street in Berlin.
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the rose concordance
$18.00In The Rose Concordance, Angela Carr sets up the rules for a game and then breaks them. The poems trace a constellation of fountains, whose waters lap from an erotic medieval poem. Luxury rushes headlong into Felony, Love hears Irony in Ecstasy. Like fountains, these poems resist any one enduring shape or reading. For in Carr’s voice, water is dappled, and wind catches the fountain and moves it sideways at night when no one is looking. In the mist of words, complicity is vilified and the precious is tenderly chided. The Rose Concordance is a fountain garden that invites the reader to tarry, and drink.
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The Rule of 30
$26.95With the cost of buying a home or renting an apartment soaring to previously unseen heights, how canGen Y even begin to think about saving for retirement? Are your knees knocking? Are you nervously biting your nails? Maybe you don’t need to be.
In The Rule of 30, personal finance expert Frederick Vettese provides a surprising — and hopeful — answer to balancing the costs of living with the costs of saving for retirement. Through conversations between a young couple and their neighbour, a retired actuary, the couple and the reader discover:
- How the future investment climate will differ from the recent past and why it requires a different approach to saving
- The problem with saving a constant percentage of pay
- The Rule of 30 and why it is a more rational and personalized way to save
- Whether investing in real estate is a viable alternative to investing in stocks
- The impact renting versus owning your home has on your retirement savings
The Rule of 30 changes the mindset from saving the same flat percentage of pay to saving when it is most convenient to your situation. In most cases, it means less saving early on while mortgage payments are high and children are costly, and more saving later when our earnings are at their highest and expenses at their lowest.
Saving for retirement is a high priority, but it is not the only priority in life. It is time to dispense with old and often unrealistic myths like “just save 10% of your take-home pay.” The truth is we should save differently throughout our pre-retirement years — and The Rule of 30 is a road map for doing so.
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The Rumour
$16.95The Rumour is a collection of poetry that exposes many important issues of Indigenous discrimination, poverty, drug abuse, brutal violence, love, family, and complex human relationships. As a skilled painter, Joseph A. Dandurand portrays the essence of strong connections with rich Indigenous history, culture, traditions, and family values with broad but precise strokes. The poems come from author’s lifetime experience living on the Kwantlen First Nation reserve and give a true picture of the resilience and the struggles Indigenous people experience in everyday life.
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The Running Trees
$19.95Finalist, New Brunswick Book Award (Fiction) and Alistair MacLeod Prize for Short Fiction
A striking original, deftly humorous collection of stories that considers the quest for truth: how we come to it or alternatively avoid it.A fervently comic debut, The Running Trees leads readers into a series of conversations — through phonelines, acts in a play, and a rewound recording of a police interrogation — to reveal characters in fumbling bouts of brutality, reflection, isolation, and love.
The relationship between two siblings disintegrates after one asks the other for the pen; a professor and his former student get drinks years after a “romantic” encounter; a book club meets only to find that they have wildly different opinions about a new memoir about their town; and a long-haired feline contemplates existence and consciousness while his cohabitant licks his own butthole.
Whimsical, unconventional, humorous, and always pitch-perfect, The Running Trees explores how we desperately try to communicate with each other amid the gaps in meaning we create.
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The Rush to Here
$16.95Shortlisted for the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia Atlantic Poetry PrizeGeorge Murray proves once again he is one of his generation’s most accomplished poets with The Rush to Here. Diverging from the excess and declamation of his highly praised previous collection, The Hunter, Murray breaks new poetic ground in poems that are dangerous, sharp and glistening in both language and style.Combining what the poet calls “thought-rhyme” with the structured sonnet form, Murray’s philosophical curiosity and hardnosed intelligence emerge to create an off-kilter eye that somehow manages to be dead on target. As though looking out a window by which the entire world is passing, The Rush to Here darts through the absurdity of daily life to organize the mess and contradictions of modern society.Relentlessly honest, elegant in form and language, The Rush to Here is an intimidating, eerie, but ultimately hopeful collection that sets George Murray apart as a voice for our time.