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Part modern fable, part detective novel, a journey through grief in the imaginary world of Metaphoria.
One cold winter night, Charlie shares a cab with a stranger in a purple hat. As they talk, a cloud of purple smoke overwhelms him and he wakes up to find himself behind the only desk in the Epiphany Detective Agency. Charlie, as it turns out, is trapped in Metaphoria, an otherworldly place that reality has forgotten, a place where everything means something else. His first client is Shirley Miller, who insists on hiring Charlie to find her husband’s missing heart. In fact, she’s so insistent that she replaces Charlie’s heart with a bomb. He has twenty-four hours to find Twiggy Miller’s heart – and its meaning – or his own will explode.
Tender and brutal, optimistic and despairing, this modern fable by the author of the cult hit All My Friends Are Superheroes takes a fresh look at what it means to fall into, and out of, love.
From Mary Meigs, the celebrated author of In the Company of Strangers, comes an autobiographical novel, The Time Being. An affair born of a correspondence with a distant admirer leads the lovers to an arranged meeting in Australia. With a lifetime of relationships already behind them, the two women approach each other cautiously, each filled with the rekindled fire of innocent passion, constrained by their gathered clouds of experience. In this isolated and primeval land, a performance of ancient aboriginal ritual and drama draws the lovers into the elemental world of “the dream time,” the still point around which their relationship begins to turn. This is an exquisite love story unlike any other, written in retrospect with a lovely, clear heart, and in the full light of day.
Edinburgh in 1902, a historic city on the precipice of modern progress, is not an easy place for an inquisitive orphan, and twelve-year-old Malcolm McKenzie knows he’s lucky to have an apprenticeship with the local clockmaker, Jack Alexander. When Jack is found dead inside a locked clocktower, Malcolm’s life begins to unravel. Even worse, Jack’s son and Malcolm’s best friend, Peter, is stricken with a mysterious and life-threatening illness.
Malcolm is sure that both the truth behind Jack’s untimely death and the map to a miracle cure for Peter lie inside a seemingly broken watch Jack had been unable to fix. As the clock ticks away on Peter’s life, Malcolm and fellow orphan and pickpocket Maddie must outrun and outsmart those who want the cure to remain hidden as they race through the streets and clocktowers of Edinburgh to solve the puzzle of the watch before it’s too late.
In The Time of Her Life, David Helwig draws us into the world of a woman of character. Indeed how Helwig tells the tale is as absorbing as the tale itself as we follow Jean from small-town Ontario to a privileged life as la contesse de Serviède in wartime France to genteel poverty in Montreal, adapting her actions and values to survive in the world around her.
At fifteen, Jean is ready to slip into the secret life of adults; already she enjoys the attention of a cross-border whiskey smuggler. When he is shot by other smugglers, she rows out to him. Close to shore, she admits to herself that he is dead. Setting the course of her life, she sidesteps explanation by rolling the body overboard and sneaking home. Soon, she accepts a movie cameraman’s impulsive proposition and heads for New York disguised as a boy. Being beautiful, being looked at becomes Jean’s métier. In New York, working as nude model, she learns the value of her youth and beauty and what sex can buy her if she uses it judiciously. In Hollywood, silent-film stardom is soon hers. Asked to make a movie in France, she says Yes, as always. She says Yes again to a much-older count, has a son, and lives as a Paris aristocrat until her life is devastated by World War II. Her husband dead and her apartment commandeered, she huddles at the family’s country home with her child until the war is over. Trading on her title, Jean opens a gallery, and, in the postwar confusion about ownership, she carefully sells a parcel of Picassos left with her by a missing Russian Jewish designer. But peace is transitory. She loses her son to the war in Indochina, her lover to family duties, her womb to a hysterectomy.
Stricken with restlessness, she sells the gallery, moves to Montreal, and starts a new career in films and commercials. In old age, she measures out her last days in her Montreal apartment, her resilience undimmed by history and human folly.
In The Time of Her Life David Helwig has created a highly entertaining and provocative work. This is an inspired exploration of time and memory skillfully crafted by a veteran Canadian writer.
A kinetic new poetry collection that sings our astonishment and our fear at how life makes and unmakes us through every love and every grief.
These poems are at once plangent and wise, fired by exacting observation of the changes that mark the natural world—the diminishing woods, the surging birdsong in spring–as well as each stage of human life. The poet struggles to understand what her experiences mean, even as a sudden turn—a mother’s illness, a father’s death—sweeps her in an entirely different direction.
Philips writes of “this borrowed ground,” our trespass on the earth none of us can own. In every movement of these poems as they flow over rough ground and smooth, there’s the thrill of discovery, and the echoing notes of what we can’t know, the mystery of changes yet to come.
Seduced by Slim’s stories of the privations of a cross-country trek that ended in the violence of an historic riot and tales of Depression-era work camps, Edie MacDonald has followed him from mine to mine, where he finds work and she cares for their son, Belly, in the thin shelter of canvas tents. Until now.
Edie has left Slim behind, passed out in an unheated apartment on the coldest day of the year. Boarding a train with Belly, she travels westward. When the train struggles through a snowstorm and possible calamity, the lens shifts between Belly’s perspective and Edie’s. Only then does Edie broach a crucial question. Should she leave Belly with his grandmother and strike off on her own? Or should she return to Slim, despite his boozy wanderings?
Vivid and evocative, with rich, convincing characters, The Time We All Went Marching is an episodic novel of storytelling, memory, and imagination — about a time in history rarely explored in fiction. Arley McNeney inhabits her characters with breathtaking conviction, reaching deep into the vulnerable solitude of individual perception while seamlessly holding her readers breathless. Mark her. Watch.
From acclaimed writer Jennifer LoveGrove comes an electric poetry collection exploring female sexual desire, contemporary dating, misogyny, and middle age that reflects and embodies our social media-saturated times.
Unabashedly confessional and radically vulnerable, The Tinder Sonnets rallies against the long-standing demand that “women of a certain age” politely accept being rendered non-sexual. Each poem is based on a date, relationship, or contemporary dating insight, and highlights how misogyny impacts the way we connect in the modern world–or don’t.
Juxtaposing folklore and the natural world against the digital sphere of texting and dating apps, this is poetry that defies invisibility and instead confronts and subverts it through a discerning feminist lens. While experimenting with the traditional form of the sonnet, these sonically textured poems are playful and wry, erotic and joyful, all while refusing to shy away from palpable anger, frustration, and disappointment.
Centring strength and resilience in the face of a resurgence of misogynistic chauvinism, The Tinder Sonnets is a staunch refusal to recede from view, to cede sexual space, or to be quiet and polite.
Back by popular demand, here is the encore edition of the ultimate guide to Canadian music, featuring the best albums that Canadian musicians ever produced and some new interviews not included in the original hardcover edition. An unprecedented book, The Top 100 Canadian Albums includes the finest albums in Canadian music history chosen by a blue-ribbon panel. The results from 1 to 100 have sparked passionate debate among Canada’s music aficionados.
This book is jam-packed with incredible behind-the-scenes stories about the making of the albums and the history of Canadian music, as told by the musicians themselves. Find out how Gordon Lightfoot helped get Blue Rodeo back to Canada. Learn about the song that connects The Guess Who to The Tragically Hip. Meet Simply Saucer, the band who waited 30 years for its album to become a hit. Connect the dots between Don Messer and Music from Big Pink.
Despite debate about what is and isn’t on the list (or perhaps because of it), The Top 100 Canadian Albums is the essential book on Canadian music — not to be missed!
Shortlisted, Independent Publishers Book Award, Performing Arts
A book that gets to the heart of the matter! Whether you’re a professional musician or an air guitarist, a collector or a true amateur, this book will shake things up!
The Top 100 Canadian Singles — brought to you by Bob Mersereau and Goose Lane Editions, the team that assembled the controversial, much discussed, best-selling volume, The Top 100 Canadian Albums. The Top 100 Canadian Singles will undoubtedly stir the souls, ears, and tongues of music lovers everywhere. And answer the question, for better or for worse.
Once again, Bob Mersereau has assembled a blue ribbon panel of musicians, broadcasters, reviewers, managers, promoters, record-label executives, retailers, roadies, and more to cast their votes in a major, nationwide poll. John Roberts, Canada’s original VJ; Joel Plaskett; Sarah Slean; the late Paul Quarrington; CBC’s Stuart McLean; Sam Roberts; Sophie Durocher; and Eric Trudel all contributed lists — along with hundreds more.
Whose single will make it to the top 10? The top 40? The top 100? Neil or Leonard? Feist or Alanis? k.d. lang or Stompin’ Tom? The Guess Who or Arcade Fire? Gilles Vigneault or k-os? This oversized, full colour book features in-depth interviews with musicians, fascinating facts, musician-penned sidebars, documentary photographs, cover art, and much, much more.
Twelve-year-old Halley’s life is falling apart faster than the farm’s leaky roof. Mom, Auntie Lynn and Spider are too busy working overtime and arguing over repairs. Her bat-crazy best friend, a volunteer at the bat sanctuary, forms the Bat Club at school with new student and child star Elektra Storm. Halley’s too ashamed to admit she’s terrified of bats, only to lose her temper and insult them all, leaving her feeling ostracized and alone.
A solution appears when her absentee-astronomer dad invites her on a camping trip. Halley hatches Operation Stargazer: She’ll study up on astronomy and convince Dad she should live with him!
But the operation begins to go awry when Dad changes their plans, inviting neurodivergent astronomy whiz kid Leo along. Next, Halley breaks out in hives. Then Dad gets injured. Trapped behind a growing forest fire, Halley and Leo must work together to get them all to safety.
W. B. Yeats meets Gregg Araki at a gay bar.
The Tower is a “translation” of W. B. Yeats’s The Tower—an homage and reinvention of the poet’s greatest work. Whereas Yeats’s book contended with his mortality as an aging spiritualist Irish Senator, this version contends with a new mortality: ours.
The poems in this collection crystallize the transition from Legault’s late twenties to his early thirties, situated in North America during a time of political upheaval. It takes each of Yeats’s poems as a starting point and queers them. It translates Yeats’s modernist urge, on the other side of a long century.
In her review of The Tower, Virginia Woolf says Yeats has “never written more exactly and more passionately.” One might imagine she’d conclude the same here. You can’t fault these poems for lacking passion.
Yeats used to talk to ghosts. His wife would let ghosts talk through her. They would talk to Yeats, and he would write down what they say. Another way you could put it is that Yeats talked to his wife. Ghosts are much closer than you think. They like to live in books. So Legault spent some time talking to Yeats’s ghost. Or, Yeats’s ghost talked to him. This is him talking back.
“Through Legault, the opening of Yeats’ words in the title poem shift and turn from absurdity to one of anxieties around ageing” —rob mclennan’s Blog
“If you’ve never cared about poetry, you will after reading these modern-day renderings…” —Maria-Claire
Winner, Commonwealth Book Prize, Canada and Europe, Frye Academy Award, and Margaret and John Savage First Book Award
Shortlisted, CLA Young Adult Book Award, Red Maple Award, and University of Canberra Book of the Year
Longlisted, IMPAC Dublin Award
Living with a weird brother in a small town can be tough enough. Having a spectacular fall through the ice at a skating party and nearly drowning are grounds for embarrassment. But having a vision and narrating it to the assembled crowd solidifies your status as an outcast.
What Ruby Carson saw during that fateful day was her entire town — buildings and people — floating underwater. Then an orange-tipped surveyor stake turns up in a farmer’s field. Another is found in the cemetery. A man with surveying equipment is spotted eating lunch near Pokiok Falls. The residents of Haverton soon discover that a massive dam is being constructed and that most of their homes will be swallowed by the rising water. Suspicions mount, tempers flare, and secrets are revealed. As the town prepares for its own demise, 14-year-old Ruby Carson sees it all from a front-row seat.
Set in the 1960s, The Town That Drowned evokes the awkwardness of childhood, the thrill of first love, and the importance of having a place to call home. Deftly written in a deceptively unassuming style, Nason’s keen insights into human nature and the depth of human attachment to place make this novel ripple in an amber tension of light and shadow.
A perennial favourite.
“Charming, wry, and believable.” — Quill & Quire
Riel Nason’s novel The Town That Drowned debuted in 2011 to glowing reviews and a flurry of awards, including a Commonwealth Book Prize. Nason’s evocation of the awkwardness of childhood, the thrill of first love, and the importance of having a place to call home made the novel an instant classic. Now in celebration of its 10th anniversary, The Town That Drowned will be released in a special anniversary edition, with an afterword, a fresh design, and an online book club guide.
In the town of Haventon, Ruby Carson’s embarrassing fall through the ice ruins a skating party and prompts an unfortunate vision: her entire town — buildings and people — floating underwater. As orange-tipped surveyor stakes begin to turn up, the residents of Haventon soon discover that a massive dam is being constructed and that most of their homes will be swallowed by the rising water. Suspicions mount, tempers flare, and secrets are revealed. As the town prepares for its own demise, 14-year-old Ruby Carson sees it all from a front-row seat.
The Trailer explores the subtle art of balancing life on the edge of a city–indeed, perched precariously, metaphorically on the fringe of society–not exactly following a script for keeping up with the Joneses. The experiences of love and loss while living on that (not exactly) sharp edge build the foundation in this collection. Stylistically, the poems vary as they dig through the detritus daily to reveal the joy, beauty, and humour within the world of thin tin-walled hope and melamine dreams of a mobile home, of a live lived lagging just a little behind.