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John Alexander MacNeil is back with another astonishing adventure. The ninety-year-old still lives alone on the blessed isle of Cape Breton. He still sometimes makes tea for his wife, who died decades ago. He accepts his lonely life, ignoring the world changing around him. But one night, he feels his heart stop. After willing himself back to life with sheer stubbornness, John Alex finds Death himself sitting at his kitchen table, perplexed and intrigued by his victim’s recovery. What follows is a tale on the edge of reality, full of love, doubt and the inexplicable details of an extraordinary life. Keeping what wits he has about him, John Alex needs to muster all the wisdom and courage he has to protect those around him from the dangers of an ever-changing world and the grim reaper he has come to know.
In his 103rd book, acclaimed author of The Unlikely Redemption of John Alexander MacNeil takes the reader through another beautiful adventure about time and love. Lesley Choyce tackles topics like dementia, elder sexuality and assisted dying with humour and grace.
A young man of privileged upbringing leaves his home in the prosperous north of his island nation to teach in the devastated south, where a civil war festers. Over the course of several months, in which he befriends many of the town’s people and becomes teacher not only to the town’s children but to the enlisted men of the local army station, he loses his faith in and hope for the future. The Unyielding Clamour of the Night is a sympathetic novel that enters the mind and soul of a character to reveal the brutal and lasting affects of acts of violence, and how violence only begets violence.
City cycling made simple
North America’s cities have long been the domain of the car, but thanks to the undeniable benefits of active transport, bicycles have an increasing presence in the urban landscape. Yet our cities weren’t designed for bicycles, making for intimidating, and sometimes dangerous, environments for cyclists.
The Urban Cycling Survival Guide is an accessible, straight-forward pocket guide that helps cyclists new to the urban environment negotiate all the challenges, obstacles, and rules — spoken and unspoken — that come with sharing the roads. From picking the bike that’s right for you to smart riding strategies, tips for drivers, and bike maintenance, Cycle Toronto founding executive director Yvonne Bambrick is your trusted guide.
With illustrations to help clarify even the trickiest bike situation, The Urban Cycling Survival Guide is an indispensible, attractive set of training wheels that can make anyone a confident, joyful city rider.
Spitball literary essays on the off-kilter joys, sorrows and wonder of North America’s national pastime.
A collection of essays for ardent seamheads and casual baseball fans alike, The Utility of Boredom is a book about finding respite and comfort in the order, traditions, and rituals of baseball. It’s a sport that shows us what a human being might be capable of, with extreme dedication—whether we’re eating hot dogs in the stands, waiting out a rain delay in our living rooms, or practising the lost art of catching a stray radio signal from an out-of-market broadcast.
From learning about America through ball-diamond visits to the most famous triple play that never happened on Canadian soil, Forbes invites us to witness the adult conversing with the O-Pee-Chee baseball cards of his youth. Tender, insightful, and with the slow heartbreak familiar to anyone who’s cheered on a losing team, The Utility of Boredom tells us a thing or two about the sport, and how a seemingly trivial game might help us make sense of our messy lives.
Eighteen-year-old Connor, an aspiring author whose fantastical stories foretell his growing struggle with depression, can’t wait to be free of his adverb-wielding, solve-it-all mother, Sharon. But six weeks after leaving for university, he drops out and returns home.
Dan Mulano is an infatuated new dad and well-meaning police officer whose selfishness is veiled by the outward display of “principle” and the lofty aspirations he holds for his family. His wife, Janie, a former addict and exhausted new mom, struggles to cope with the challenges of recovery in the midst of her battle with postpartum depression, which Dan dismisses as “just hormones.”
A precipitous incident brings the two families together. When Connor’s erratic behaviour at an underground train station requires police intervention, Dan responds to the call and makes the arrest, but the teen’s jaw is broken during the incident. Is it police brutality or self-harm? For Sharon, there is no question; she portrays Dan as a reckless cop in the media, while he remains silent, refusing to break protocol and tell his story.
Inspired by an event in British Columbia that shattered the public’s confidence in the police – the 2007 Tasering death of Robert Dziekanski during his arrest at the Vancouver airport – The Valley dramatizes the volatile relationship between law enforcement and people in the grip of mental illness. In addressing this fraught relationship, award-winning playwright Joan MacLeod empathizes with both parties, each of whom is guided by good intentions but equally challenged by their own cultural biases and flawed humanity.
Catch Canucks fever and celebrate over 40 years of Vancouver Canucks hockey! This must-have collection—jam-packed with 80 pages of puzzles, crosswords, games, trivia, facts and fun for towel-waving fans of all ages—will have you Luu-ing and riding your stick like Tiger Williams in no time. From Harold and the Steamer to Gino and the Russian Rocket, from Trevor Linden to the record setting Sedins, from the high-scoring West Coast Express to back-to-back Presidents’ Trophies, it’s all here in this exciting trivia book that will bring hours of fun and memories to every loyal Canucks fan.
Catch Canucks fever and celebrate over 40 years of Vancouver Canucks hockey! This must-have collection—jam-packed with 80 pages of puzzles, crosswords, games, trivia, facts and fun for towel-waving fans of all ages—will have you Luu-ing and riding your stick like Tiger Williams in no time. From Harold and the Steamer to Gino and the Russian Rocket, from Trevor Linden to the record setting Sedins, from the high-scoring West Coast Express to back-to-back Presidents’ Trophies, it’s all here in this exciting trivia book that will bring hours of fun and memories to every loyal Canucks fan.
The Vanishing Act (& The Miracle After) is an existential meditation on grief—the kind of grief which pins you down and minimizes you. The first half of the collection, The Vanishing Act, captures the ruminations of a mind which feels trapped physically and spiritually. The imagery in this section blends magic and violence as the speaker confronts systemic issues as a middle-class woman, a person of colour, and a survivor of abuse. The second section, (& The Miracle After), offers a fresh perspective on recovery. As the speaker revisits images of bodily harm, objects previously used for violence are brought back to a state of benign normalcy. With the arrival of spring, the speaker contemplates renewal and the paradoxical nature of taking agency of her life, while knowing the act of survival is made possible only because of miraculous intervention.
In The Ventriloquist, Larry Tremblay directs his celebrated mastery of the dramatic monologue to an interrogation of the process of characterization itself. Alone on the stage with his puppet, the ventriloquist introduces his “self ” as a construct of characters, along with his “other” imagined characters, to an audience which bears witness to the enormous psychological risks an author must take in the creative process. Constantly walking the dangerously thin edge separating the creation of voice from its appropriation, the ventriloquist struggles to control and shape an imaginary dialogue that we know originates from a single source, but successfully creates the illusion of personal conflict and resolution, success and failure, triumph and despair.
Part of the extended metaphor of interaction between an authoritative adult psychoanalyst and a deeply disturbed adolescent patient, each of the characters in The Ventriloquist is stripped of their clothes of convention, encouraged to reveal both their “real” and “imagined” transgressions of mind and body, to break free of the constraints and taboos against incest, abuse, dominance and submission which are at one and the same time both the foundations and the limitations of the most fundamental of human interactions. As fractured as the process of writing itself, with all of its false starts, pauses, blockages and revisions, both the ventriloquist and his puppet in this play become a series of unresolved vocalized texts and erasures of self and other, locked in the struggle of the constructed self to imagine an other that is, in the end, more than merely an elaborated fragment of whom any given character represents from one moment of successful illusion to the next in both the “real” and the “imaginary” world.
“A delight to read.” — Ottawa Review of Books
Peter Cammon is now retired from New Scotland Yard. Nevertheless, the former chief inspector has found himself in the suburbs of Salt Lake City, Utah, after agreeing to help a colleague with a difficult case. A resident on tranquil Hollis Street has been beheaded, her husband has disappeared, and there is no obvious perpetrator. Yet the neighbors seem apathetic — silent to the point of complicity.
Peter joins the manhunt and is shocked to discover a link leading from the killer to the Unabomber and Oklahoma City bombing cases, files Peter himself worked on during the 1990s. To untangle the evidence, Peter and his acquaintance in local law enforcement must strike unholy alliances with corrupt cops, Mexican drug lords, and perhaps one of the world’s most notorious terrorists . . .
The fast-paced third volume in the series
Peter Cammon, now retired from New Scotland Yard, is drawn into a confrontation with evil in a most unlikely setting. The former chief inspector finds himself in the suburbs of Salt Lake City, Utah, chasing a depraved man who may have deep terrorist connections.
When a killer attacks on tranquil Hollis Street, the neighbours seem apathetic — silent to the point of complicity. A resident has been beheaded, her husband has disappeared, and there is no obvious perpetrator. A drug dealer? A terrorist? An angry neighbour?
Peter joins the manhunt and is shocked to discover a link from the killer to the Unabomber and Oklahoma City bombing cases, files Peter himself worked on during the 1990s. In order to trap the killer-terrorist, Peter and his acquaintance in local law enforcement, Henry Pastern, must strike unholy alliances with corrupt cops, Mexican drug lords, and the Unabomber himself. Will Peter have to bend the law and embrace the rules of the Old West to stop this psychopath?
Mary Dalton’s 2020 Pratt Lecture engages with the vernacular voice in Newfoundland poetry, illustrating the move from uncertainty to acceptance and welcoming of the beauty and variety of the language of Newfoundland.
The Vernacular Strain in Newfoundland Poetry explores some of the tensions between the oral and the written in the poetry of Newfoundland, with particular emphasis on the struggle towards a confident incorporation of vernacular speech in the poetry of the island in the latter part of the twentieth century. As the word “strain” suggests, there were reservations and hesitancies about drawing on what is a hugely rich linguistic and sonic resource for poetry, one of many vitiating results of a colonial legacy. This Pratt Lecture celebrates the vitality of poetry which lets in Newfoundland idioms and cadences. Among the poets considered are Percy Janes, Tom Dawe, Al Pittman, David Glover, John Steffler and Harold Paddock, and the generation who followed them: Agnes Walsh, Gordon Rodgers, Carmelita McGrath, Michael Crummey, Robin McGrath.
The PRATT LECTURES were established in 1968 to commemorate the legacy of E.J. Pratt. Over the years, the series has hosted a litany of world-renowned authors and scholars, including Northrop Frye, Seamus Heaney, Helen Vendler, and Dionne Brand.
Embarking on a quest to locate her best friend Rebecca, who abruptly left everything behind to join an enigmatic intentional community overseen by a wealthy magnate within the depths of an abandoned mall nestled in the countryside, Carolyn joins forces with a determined local journalist determined to unveil the truth behind the community’s enigmatic leader, a man who presents himself as a benevolent figure liberating those burdened by student loan debt and the shackles of capitalism. However, as Carolyn draws closer to the mall, she finds herself increasingly ensnared in the community’s eerie and bewildering atmosphere, with Rebecca slipping further from her grasp. Amidst the unsettling backdrop, Carolyn wrestles not only with the specters of her past-her twin sister’s baffling disappearance decades before-but with the unsettling notion that her sibling’s spirit may be manifesting within the confines of the mall, its sinister influence looming ever larger.
Defiance, faith, and triumph in a heartrending novel about daughters and mothers
On a miserable November day in 1967, two women disappear from a working-class town on the Fraser River. The community is thrown into panic, with talk of drifters and murderous husbands. But no one can find a trace of Bette Parsons or Alice McFee. Even the egg seller, Doris Tenpenny, a woman to whom everyone tells their secrets, hears nothing.
Ten-year-old Lulu Parsons discovers something, though: a milk-stained note her mother, Bette, left for her father on the kitchen table. Wally, it says, I will not live in a tarpaper shack for the rest of my life . . .
Lulu tells no one, and months later she buries the note in the woods. At the age of ten, she starts running — and forgetting — lurching through her unraveled life, using the safety of solitude and detachment until, at fifty, she learns that she is not the only one who carries a secret.
Hopeful, lyrical, comedic, and intriguingly and lovingly told, The Very Marrow of Our Bones explores the isolated landscapes and thorny attachments bred by childhood loss and buried secrets.
Based on the experience of city life, The Vestiges moves across the uneven geography of the present, linking historical moments when quarters of cities were squatted, when social change boiled and the future was up for grabs. In the context of our precarious present, the poem “The Vestiges,” around which the book is built, “sets out to explore / what happens / to humans when they are reduced / to things by other humans.” In asking this question, “The Vestiges” is a long poem engaged with modernist poems that move from the particularities of everyday life to enduring and unanswered political and cultural questions. Covering a wide terrain of research, the other serial poems in the book mine various texts, from the Craigslist “auto parts” section to Jane Jacobs, from Marx to Marcuse, and from historical accounts of cities to contemporary real-estate promotions, in order to build up an eclectic atlas of this unstable moment. In terms of contemporary poetics, The Vestiges enters into dialogue with modernism, conceptual writing, and post-conceptual art.