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Showing 8065–8080 of 9266 results
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The Undertaking of Billy Buffone
$22.95The Undertaking of Billy Buffone is a story about the trauma – immediate and ongoing, personal and collateral – inflicted by Rupert Churley, who preyed on boys in Twenty-Six Mile House, an isolated town in northern Ontario. The suicides, the conspiracy of silence, the secrets and the damage done to the boys, their friends and families, persist long after the murder of Scouter Churley.
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The Underwood
$11.95Winner, 20th annual 3-Day Novel-Writing Contest
The Underwood is a poignant tale of a parentless twenty-one-year-old pianist who lands the job of lounge entertainer in a once glorious and elegant establishment. Enter the young Foster Lutz, and the hotel – including the lives of its inhabitants – is set for a spell of splendour and rejuvenation.
A loss-of-innocence novel set in an atmosphere pervaded with nostalgia and a yearning for a bygone era. Holden Caulfield meets Barton Fink.
Praise for The Underwood:
“… another sort of immigrant story … funny and, at the risk of sounding Hollywood, heartwarming. And it’s easy to read more than once.” (Geist)
“this short book is better than many books ten times as long-or that took three years, not three days, to write.” (Books in Canada: The Canadian Review of Books)
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The Unfinished Child
$19.95Finalist for a 2014 Alberta Literary Award
Shortlisted for the 2014Edmonton Public Library Alberta Readers’ Choice AwardWhen Marie MacPherson, a mother of two, finds herself unexpectedly pregnant at thirty-nine, she feels guilty. Her best friend, Elizabeth, has never been able to conceive, despite years of fertility treatments. Marie’s dilemma is further complicated when she becomes convinced something is wrong with her baby. She then enters the world of genetic testing and is entirely unprepared for the decision that lies ahead.
Intertwined throughout the novel is the story of Margaret, who gave birth to a daughter with Down syndrome in 1947, when such infants were defined as “unfinished” children. As the novel shifts back and forth through the decades, the lives of the three women converge, and the story speeds to an unexpected conclusion.
With skill and poise, debut novelist Theresa Shea dramatically explores society’s changing views of Down syndrome over the past sixty years. The story offers an unflinching and compassionate history of the treatment of people with Down syndrome and their struggle for basic human rights. Ultimately, The Unfinished Child is an unforgettable and inspiring tale about the mysterious and complex bonds of family, friendship, and motherhood.
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The Unfinished Dollhouse
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The Unfinished World
$26.95Distraught after her grandmother Nora’s death, Pearl scatters her ashes in the places Nora loved. As she retraces her grandmother’s last journey, she recovers a series of handmade dolls that have been handed down in the family for generations. Hidden within each is a tiny note from grandmother to granddaughter. Together, these dolls and the messages they carry lead Pearl to recall and recount tales given to her as a child. It is these stories, ranging from the semi-mythic past to the present, that enable Pearl to see her life and her struggles against the larger scale of human survival, dislocation, war, and immigration as well as love and responsibility to the future. Pearl’s mysterious gift of communication ultimately allies her with the survival of another species and also provides the key to unlocking love and happiness for herself.
The Unfinished World is a timely reminder that second chances are possible, as are deep and fundamental connections with the natural world.
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The Uniform
$25.00The year is 1950. A brutal racist attack drives Alfie Bagliato’s family from their small town to New York City, where, at sixteen, Alfie dreams of escaping his Italian American enclave through a career in music and a romance with his distant cousin, Adeline. Soon enough, disappointment and frustration lead Alfie to join the military, to follow Adeline to San Francisco, and then to become a New York City cop, whose clash with protestors during the 1968 Columbia University student uprising nearly kills him, forcing him to confront his inherited bigotry and fear, as he wrestles with his lingering love for Adeline and need to find a new life.
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The Union of Synchronized Swimmers
$20.00Winner of the 2020 Toisinkoinen Literary Prize
It’s summer behind the Iron Curtain, and six girls begin a journey to the Olympics. But will they return?
In a stateless place, on the wrong side of a river separating East from West, six girls meet each day to swim. At first, they play, splashing each other and floating languidly on the water’s surface. But as summer draws to an end, the game becomes something more.
They hone their bodies relentlessly. Their skin shades into bruises. They barter cigarettes stolen from the factory where they work for swimsuits to stretch over their sunburnt skin. They tear their legs into splits, flick them back and forth, like herons. They master holding their breath underwater.
Then, one day, it finally happens: their visas arrive. But can what’s waiting on the other side of the river satisfy their longing for a different kind of life?
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The United States of Wind
$16.95Raise the windsock. Read the compass. Ride where the wind wills it.
Late 2010. From the end of fall to the beginning of winter, Daniel Canty becomes a wind seeker. Aboard the Blue Rider, a venerable midnight-blue Ford Ranger crested with a weathervane and a retractable windsock, he surrenders himself to the fluidity of air currents. The adventure leads him and artist driver Patrick Beaulieu from the plains of the Midwest up to Chicago, the Windy City, into the wind tunnel linking the Great Lakes, through the cities of lost industry of the Rust Belt, only to veer off into Amish pastoralia, and to the forests of Pennsylvania, Civil War land, where fracking is stirring up the ghosts of the first oil rush.
Canty creates a gentle road book, a melancholy blue guide written in an airy, associative prose, where images coalesce and dissipate, carried away through the outer and inner American landscape. The book, mixing the tropes of road narrative, poetic fabulation, and philosophical memoir, reaches towards images on the horizon of memory, to find out where they come from, while coming to the foreordained realization that, wherever memory may lead us, its images will be long gone when we get there and most probably were never even there at all. The book’s through-line is about this emotional reality of images, the ways in which they take hold upon us and carry us back to the deep narrative of self. Clocking in at 160 pages, most readers don’t realize that the adventure spans only ten days, and that The United States of Wind is, in a very real way, a journey through a fold in time.
“I read this book as an essay, a method of thought. Canty doesn’t propose as much a theory of wind as a map of reflections on what emptiness holds, on what the imperceptible space between us occupies … The true object of this book’s love, or quest, is not a weather phenomenon, but rather something more akin to the American soul.”
– Valérie Lefbvre-Faucher, Revue Liberté -
The Unknown Huntsman
$19.95A strange and anonymous narrator, an unnamed village, an unsolved murder, a mysterious huntsman, and a wisdom tooth extraction gone terribly wrong. There’s no shortage of intrigue in this offbeat debut novel by Jean-Michel Fortier. A bewitching story full of dark humor and laugh-out-loud absurdity, The Unknown Huntsman is full of gossipy run-on sentences and snide remarks from the narrator. It reads like an allegory or dark adult fairy tale, and its motto could be: “If you don’t want answers, don’t ask questions.” -
The Unknown Masterpiece
$18.95Inspector Aliette Nouvelle’s romantic relationship with Commissaire Claude Néon is faltering. This sad fact becomes a heavy distraction as she goes back and forth from France to Switzerland trying to determine who killed Martin Bettelman, a Basel art gallery security guard, found at a gay gathering spot on the banks of the Rhine. A damaged painting of a shoemaker found near the body motivates the inspector more than the fact of murder. Aliette identifies with the image of a dedicated artisan working in solitude. With love dissolving, work is all that’s left.
Aliette doesn’t know it as she starts out on the case, but her investigation is concurrent with an investigation into the murder of Justin Aebischer, a well-known Basel art restorer, in a small Swiss town outside of Basel. She sees an art fraud conspiracy at the source. But territorially minded Swiss police who ought to be allies are ineffectual and/or antagonistic to her ideas and moves.
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The Unlikely Redemption of John Alexander MacNeil
$21.00Shortlisted for the 2017 Jim Connors Dartmouth Book Award!
John Alexander MacNeil is eighty years old. Sharp-tongued and quick-witted, he lives alone in rural Cape Breton, but he still cooks breakfast for his wife, who’s been dead for thirty years. He silently starts to question his own mind after stopping to pick up a hitchhiker — a hitchhiker who turns out to be his neighbour’s mailbox.
Everything shifts, though, when Emily, a pregnant teenager, shows up at his house with no place else to go. Determined to help Emily as best as he can, John must also keep the wolves from his door and maintain some semblance of sanity.
The Unlikely Redemption of John Alexander MacNeil is a compelling, witty and heartwarming novel by renowned Nova Scotia author Lesley Choyce.
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The Unlocking Season
$32.95Arthur Ellis Award-winning author
Grand Master Award of Crime Writers of Canada (2018)
The “queen of Canadian crime fiction” (Winnipeg Free Press) returns with the 19th installment in the Joanne Kilbourn series that is perfect for readers of Louise Penny, Ruth Rendell, and Peter Robinson.
On a Saturday bright with harbingers of spring, Joanne Kilbourn-Shreve, her husband, Zack, and their family prepare to celebrate the season. Joanne’s life is full, and at 60, she has been given the chance to understand a part of her history that for years was shrouded in secrecy.
Living Skies is producing Sisters and Strangers, a six-part TV series about the tangled relationships between the families of Douglas Ellard, the father who raised Joanne, and Desmond Love, her biological father. Joanne is working on the script with Roy Brodnitz, a brilliant writer and friend. The project’s future seems assured, but before the script is completed, Brodnitz disappears while scouting locations in northern Saskatchewan. Hours later, he’s found — sweat-drenched, clawing at the ground, and muttering gibberish. He dies in a state of mortal terror.
Heartsick and perplexed, Joanne resolves to learn what happened in the last hours of Roy’s life. What Joanne discovers threatens Brodnitz’s legacy, and the decision about whether or not to reveal the truth is hers to make. The Unlocking Season is another deeply satisfying and thought-provoking novel from one of Canada’s finest crime writers.
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The Unlocking Season
$22.95Arthur Ellis Award-winning author
Grand Master Award of Crime Writers of Canada (2018)
The “queen of Canadian crime fiction” (Winnipeg Free Press) returns with the 19th installment in the Joanne Kilbourn series that is perfect for readers of Louise Penny, Ruth Rendell, and Peter Robinson.
On a Saturday bright with harbingers of spring, Joanne Kilbourn-Shreve, her husband, Zack, and their family prepare to celebrate the season. Joanne’s life is full, and at 60, she has been given the chance to understand a part of her history that for years was shrouded in secrecy.
Living Skies is producing Sisters and Strangers, a six-part TV series about the tangled relationships between the families of Douglas Ellard, the father who raised Joanne, and Desmond Love, her biological father. Joanne is working on the script with Roy Brodnitz, a brilliant writer and friend. The project’s future seems assured, but before the script is completed, Brodnitz disappears while scouting locations in northern Saskatchewan. Hours later, he’s found — sweat-drenched, clawing at the ground, and muttering gibberish. He dies in a state of mortal terror.
Heartsick and perplexed, Joanne resolves to learn what happened in the last hours of Roy’s life. What Joanne discovers threatens Brodnitz’s legacy, and the decision about whether or not to reveal the truth is hers to make. The Unlocking Season is another deeply satisfying and thought-provoking novel from one of Canada’s finest crime writers.
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The Unpleasantness at the Battle of Thornford
$15.95When a costumed, pike-spiked body turns up after a traditional historic reenactment of the 1645 Battle of Thornford, the Reverend Tom “Father” Christmas and the villagers of Thornford Regis find themselves in a battle of their own as they deal with events from the murky, more recent past. C.C. Benison’s latest intriguing and delightful Father Christmas mystery will leave cozy mystery readers puzzling over the outcome and, like a refreshing English cream tea, wishing there were more.
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The Unpublished City
$15.00Curated by Dionne Brand, this anthology features the work of 18 emerging Toronto talents writing about their city:
Diana Biacora
David Bradford
Nicole Chin
Simone Dalton
Dalton Derkson
Doyali Islam
Laboni Islam
Ian Kamau
Adnan Khan
Shoilee Khan
Canisia Lubrin
Sofia Mostaghimi
Nadia Ragbar
Rudrapriya Rathore
Sanchari Sur
Katheryn Wabegijig
Phoebe Wang
Chuqiao Yang -
The Unravelling of Ou
$21.95Moving on is hard. Even harder when it’s from a make-believe friend—someone, or in this instance, some thing—who’s been your strongest source of support. On what should be one of the happiest days ever, the day her granddaughter is born, Minoo is faced with a terrible choice: make a clean break from her constant companion, a sock puppet named Ecology Paul, or lose her daughter and granddaughter, and maybe all of the people she loves. On an emotional drive home from the hospital, Ecology Paul shares the story of how Minoo got to this point, recalling Minoo’s early teenage pregnancy in Iran, her exile to Canada, her questions about her sexuality, and how a ragtag sock puppet came to her when she desperately needed to be seen. Full of imagination, whimsy and heart, The Unravelling of Ou follows Minoo’s struggles to justify the puppet’s existence and eventually, untangle herself from her dependence on it and reconnect with the people she loves.