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All Books

All Books in this Collection

  • Babies

    Babies

    $19.95

    You’ve taken the pregnancy tests, made the big announcement and you’ve probably caught a glimpse of your baby on a sonogram. Congratulations! You’ve got a bundle of joy on the way and the one thing you’re probably not prepared for is the bundle of money it’s going to cost to raise that little one.

    In Babies: How to Afford Your Bundle of Joy, writer Lisa van de Geyn leans on financial experts to help parents save a few dollars and get the most bang for their bucks before and after their new additions arrive. While there doesn’t seem to be one specific amount of money experts agree on, raising kids costs a pretty penny. The good news is that there are trade-offs expectant and new parents can make to their lifestyles to make having a baby — and the price tag attached to it — more manageable.

    This guide will ensure you’re well-versed in everything from the benefits of seeing up a registered education savings plan and what maternity and parental leave means when it’s tax time, to the payments you’re entitled to from the government after you deliver your baby and advice on getting on employment insurance. We’ll walk you through budgeting and offer plenty of tips and tricks from parents like you who are so wrapped up in the sheer excitement of pregnancy they forget to research what a baby will mean to their bank accounts.

  • Baby Book

    Baby Book

    $22.95

    2023 Governor General’s Award for Poetry Finalist* Longlisted 2024 Gerald Lampert Award* Longlist 2025 Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry*

    “God is personal,” the astrologer said. Terrifying and also personal, like a baby.

    Direct and humorous, Baby Book stacks story upon story to explore how beliefs are first formed. From a family vacation on a discount bus tour to a cosmogony based on cheese, these poems accumulate around principles of contingency and revelation. Amy Ching-Yan Lam describes the vivid tactility of growth and death — how everything is constantly, painfully remade — offering a vision against the stuck narratives of property and inheritance. Power is located in the senses, in wind: multiple and restless.

  • Baby Cerberus

    Baby Cerberus

    $20.00

    The poems in Baby Cerberus are ethereal, soul-stirring and suffused with a playful intelligence.

    Natasha Ramoutar’s second collection traces joy and kinship across a multitude of lives and lived experiences. Shifting deftly from classical mythology and folklore to video games to speculative futures, each poem asks us to consider how we care for one another. As we move through sentient galleries, swashbuckling adventures and the doors of Atlantis, the collection reorients us in each section with a riddle, always inviting the reader to play along, tugging on the invisible threads between us all, trying to find what tethers us together and, in turn, what keeps us here. Joyous and multilayered, this is a book that’s fast enough for the speed of information and powerful enough to stop you in your tracks.

  • Back Off Assassin!

    Back Off Assassin!

    $16.95

    Back Off, Assassin! New and Selected Poems by Jim Smith brings together brand-new work and selections from poetry published between 1979 and 1998. Smith, as always, writes from the front, where the personal and the political face off. His new work adds Nibbles the dog, Canadian poetry icon bpNichol and the Chilean leader Salvador Allende to the large cast of characters who populate his earlier work Ñ Vladimir Mayakovsky, Alexander Graham Bell, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Chris Dewdney, Leonel Rugama, the baby Jim, his dog Arnie, Williams Blake and Burroughs, John Wayne and Robert Heinlein. Smith’s project to personalize the political, and to politicize the intensely personal, has carried on over thirty years and is as vital and surprising as ever. While the name and location of the war may have changed (from Vietnam to a second war on Iraq), and while more friends, family and heroes have died, Smith refuses to forget Ñ or to stop reminding us of the delicate humanity we are in constant danger of losing.

  • Back Roads

    Back Roads

    $22.95

    After collapsing from stress in a posh Vancouver restaurant, Ted Ferguson decides to abandon his workaholic lifestyle and move his family to the secluded back roads of Northern Alberta, where electricity and indoor plumbing are a luxury and surviving another winter is a blessing. With his wife and young son in tow, Ted rebuilds his life surrounded by a close-knit community while encountering, among other unique characters, a vengeful dentist, a barefoot farmer living in a hillside dugout, and a store clerk who could very well be Canada’s most dedicated gossip. Humorous and insightful, this fish-out-of-water tale captures a radically different lifestyle that many urbanites dream about but will never gather the courage to attempt themselves. Back Roads speaks to the survivalist in all of us while displaying one man’s resolve to reconnect with his family, the essence of life, and himself.

  • Back Talk

    Back Talk

    $23.00

    “To read Delisle’s plays is to be sat right sown on the front stoop or round the kitchen table of Africadian fact. She puts us there, centre stage, right in the midst of the country-and-town reality of The People philosophizin, drinkin. singin, prayin, quiltin,laughin, gamblin, churchgoin, runnin, braidin hair, lovin, workin, fightin, talkin back to cops an such, and just keepin on keepin on. Delisle’s sociology is exactly who we be, so doncha get upset; her vision of our history is what we need to know, so pay attention. Ya gonna forget the Town of Shelburne passed a law “forbidding negro dances and frolics” in 1789? Naw, I say, naw…” –George Elliott Clarke, Poet & E.J. Pratt Professor of Canadian Literature, University of Toronto

  • Back to the Garden

    Back to the Garden

    $24.95

    Set in Toronto in the blistering summer of 1971, Back to the Garden is about four strangers who take a chance on a new psychological treatment: group therapy. What seems, at first, like a good idea, quickly spirals out of control as the participants connect outside of the sessions in unforeseen and catastrophic ways, each character locked into an escalating crisis. Funny and heart-breaking, Back to the Garden is a love letter to Toronto at a pivotal point in the City’s coming of age – when the folk scene was in full throttle, disenchantment over Vietnam was gathering momentum, the authority of the psychiatric establishment was called into question and social forces were pressing for a more inclusive society. The novel’s themes of human rights, bullying and mental illness make it increasingly relevant.

  • Back to the Red Road

    Back to the Red Road

    $24.95

    In June 1967, Norway House Indian Residential School of Manitoba closed its doors after a somewhat questionable past. In 1954, when Florence Kaefer was just nineteen, she accepted a job as a teacher at Norway House. Unaware of the difficult conditions the students were enduring, Florence and her fellow teachers nurtured a school full of lonely and homesick young children.

    After a few years, Florence moved to Vancouver Island with her new husband where she continued to teach, thinking often of the children of Norway House. Many years later, after the death of her husband, Florence unexpectedly reconnected with one of her Norway House students, Edward Gamblin. Edward had been only five when he was brought to Norway House and Florence remembered him as a shy and polite young boy. Leaving the school at sixteen, Edward faced some challenges in a world that was both hostile and unfamiliar to him. But Edward found success and solace in his career as a musician, writing songs about the many political issues facing Aboriginal people in Canada. On a trip to Manitoba, Florence discovered Edward’s music. She was captivated by his voice, but shocked to hear him singing about the abuse he and the other children had been subjected to at Norway House. Motivated to apologize on behalf of the school and her colleagues, Florence contacted Edward. “Yes, I remember you and I accept your apology,” Edward told her. “Reconciliation will not be one grand, finite act. It will be a multitude of small acts and gestures played out between individuals.”

    The story of their personal reconciliation is both heartfelt and heartbreaking as Edward begins to share his painful truths with his family, Florence and the media. Three years after Edward’s death in in 2010, Florence has continued to advocate for truth and reconciliation. Back to the Red Road is more than one man’s story: it is the story of our nation and how healing can begin, one friendship, one apology at a time.

  • Back to the War

    Back to the War

    $16.95

    More than 30 years in the making, Frank Davey’s careful archaeology of the catalogue of innocence his youthful imagination assembled growing up in and immediately after World War II is a work of astonishment.

    This is no lyrical work of sentimental nostalgia, no attempt to return to a romanticized “simpler past,” no rediscovery of “the child within,” but rather a careful reconstruction of “the child without.” The reader moves through these poems, neither sanitized nor updated by their passage through experience, as one would through a gallery installation of intensely personal epiphanies, both frightening and ecstatic, lucid and obscure. They are stripped of any cultural preconception, a Blakean vision of the good and evil men and women do as they engage the other in a world at war—a world where the war is always somewhere else, but where the enemy, unseen, is everywhere present in the invented surrogates of combat.

  • Back to the Well

    Back to the Well

    $32.95

    Shortlisted for the Donner Prize and the Evelyn Richardson Non-Fiction Award

    Droughts, floods, and contamination of fresh water in the American Southwest, in the Great Lakes region, in Australia, in northern China, in the Middle East, and in India have broguht the critical issue of water supply to the forefront of public consciousness. In dozens of countries, ordinary citizens have cause to worry about what (or how much) will come out of their taps — if they even have taps — and who will make sure it is available, affordable, and safe.

    In this refreshing examination of the fate and future of water, Marq de Villiers takes on some of the biggest questions and shibboleths of the century. Who owns water? Is access to water a human right? Who is responsible for keeping water clean and ensuring it gets to the people who need it most? Is privatization of ownership and supply networks evil or an extension of the public trust?

    Fifteen years after the publication of Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource, his influential Governor General’s Award-winning book on the water crisis, de Villiers returns with a clear-eyed assessment of the politics of water — from the personal and commercial uses of water to the impact of climate change and global conflicts. Examining how political ideologies often obscure the underlying issues, de Villiers makes the controversial suggestion that there is no global water crisis, but that water problems are fundamentally local and regional and can most effectively be addressed through local, rather than global, action.

  • Back to the Well

    Back to the Well

    $22.95

    Shortlisted for the Donner Prize and the Evelyn Richardson Non-Fiction Award

    “This book will ruffle some feathers as well as open some minds, but for anyone who cares about the earth’s most precious resource, it is worth the read.” — Publishers Weekly

    Droughts. Floods. Contamination. Climate change. The perils to the global fresh-water supply have never been so clear or so numerous, as the crisis in Cape Town’s water supply in early 2018 can attest. In dozens of countries, not just ordinary citizens but whole cities have cause to worry about their water, and who will ensure that it is available, affordable, and safe.

    In this refreshing examination of the fate and future of water, now available for the first time in trade paperback edition, Marq de Villiers takes on some of the biggest questions of the water world. Who owns water? Is access to water a human right? Who is responsible for keeping water clean and ensuring that it gets to the people who need it most? Is privatization of ownership really so bad?

    De Villiers’s inspiring book offers a clear-eyed assessment of the politics of water and proposes innovative, real-life solutions. Writes Elizabeth May, “Back to the Well is a forceful prescription for a sustainable water future.”

  • Back Track

    Back Track

    $16.95

    Against a backdrop of traditional Cree mythology, Johnson’s novel creates a tangled murder chronicle and harrowing tale of four Cree brothers, bound to each other through family and tradition, separated from each other by their chosen life paths. As one brother kills, another reinforces the principle of a circle of life, as one capitulates to weakness, another conquers his demons. Driving the action is a manhunt for the killer of conservation officers; but at the heart of the story there is reparation through cultural wisdom and the restoration of traditional beliefs.

    Authentic and well-paced, Back Track crosscuts through the cultural ruts, economic conventions, and stereotypes of Cree families living in northern Saskatchewan.

  • Back Where I Came From

    Back Where I Came From

    $29.95

    In this collection of personal essays, twenty-six writers from across North America share journeys back to their motherlands as visitors. Set against mountainous terrain, tropical beaches, bustling cities, and remote villages, these narratives weave socio-political commentary with writers’ reflections on who they are, where they belong, and what “home” means to them.

    The result is a vulnerable, humorous, and insightful exploration of meanings and contradictions, beginning a conversation waiting to be had by the growing population of first- and second-generation Canadians and Americans, who will find themselves within these pages. Navigating the intricacies of hyphenated identities with nuanced stories of heritage and a redefined sense of home, the essays in Back Where I Came From: On Culture, Identity, and Home open a door to places around the globe—and within ourselves.

    With contributions by Omar El Akkad, Nadine Araksi, Ofelia Brooks, Esmeralda Cabral, June Chua, Seema Dhawan, Krista Eide, Eufemia Fantetti, Ayesha Habib, Christina Hoag, Mariam Ibrahim, Taslim Jaffer, Vesna Jaksic Lowe, Kathryn Gwun-Yeen Lennon, Omar Mouallem, Dimitri Nasrallah, Lishai Peel, Omar Reyes, Mahta Riazi, Steven Sandor, Angelo Santos, Alison Tedford Seaweed, Makda Teshome, Nhung N. Tran-Davies, Alexandra C. Yeboah, and Hannah Zalaa-Uul.

  • Backhand Through the Mother

    Backhand Through the Mother

    $19.95

    In this second collection of poetry, Backhand Through The Mother, poet Renee Norman, picks up several thematic threads from her first book, True Confessions (Inanna Publications, 2005), and weaves them into poems about mothering, aging and loss set amongst the cultural traditions of family and Judaism. Relationships between mothers and daughters are celebrated, deconstructed, and mourned, as the poems resonate with the slippage of time and the emptiness of hands once full and busy. From babyhood to adolescence to young adulthood, Norman writes about the poignancy of motherhood, set against her own aging and the illness, death, and widowhood of aging parents. She also writes hopefully and with some humour as she navigates her daughters’ growing pains, middle-age, her Jewish background, and the legacies our parents leave us.

  • Backing Into Heaven

    Backing Into Heaven

    $7.95

    “He flows, he dances, he’s alive, and accomplishes all three at once. And humor? Sure. But not slight snickers from academe: Catullus and Edward Lear laughter. None of us know what time is: but it makes hair grey and hurricanes enjoyment into memory which is often the same thing. We remember, all of us, the moment of happening; in these poems it’s happening now.” Al Purdy

  • Backspring

    Backspring

    $19.95

    Nominated for the 2016 Amazon.ca First Novel Award

    Eduardo, an architect from Lisbon, has come to Montreal to be with his wife Geneviève. Geneviève researches fungi and likes to catalogue her orgasms. But when Eduardo is caught in an explosion and rumors of arson begin to circulate, both his marriage and his fledgling architecture firm verge on collapse. Gorgeous, colourful, and richly described, Backspring is a sensual taxonomy of desire.