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Showing 8321–8336 of 9492 results
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The Wax Child
$24.95Longlisted for the 2026 International Booker Prize
From the internationally celebrated author of The Employees and My Work comes an extraordinary, haunting tale of witchcraft and persecution.
In seventeenth-century Denmark, unmarried noblewoman Christenze Kruckow and several other women are accused of witchcraft. They are rumoured to be possessed by the Devil, who comes to them in the form of a tall, headless man and gives them dark powers. It is said they perform unchristian acts and can steal people’s happiness, cause pestilence, illness, or even death. And once the rumour of witchcraft takes hold, they are all in danger of the stake.
Narrated by a wax doll created by Christenze one dark night in 1620, The Wax Child is an unsettling, dizzying horror story about brutality and power, nature and witchcraft, set in the fragile communities of pre-modern Europe.
Deeply researched and steeped in visceral, atmospheric detail, The Wax Child is based on a series of infamous witchcraft trials that took place in Northern Jutland. Full of lush, vivid storytelling and alarmingly rich imagination, Olga Ravn weaves in quotes from original sources, such as letters, court documents, magic spells, and Scandinavian grimoires.
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The Way Between Things
$35.00A stunning full-colour art book and the first to explore the career of award-winning visual artist Sandra Meigs
Part philosopher, part filmmaker, performer, writer, tinkerer, prankster, conjurer, naturalist, upholsterer, and teacher, Sandra Meigs has typically been referred to as a painter. But she engages whatever media or form she chooses to probe to the limits of the ideas circulating in her work.
Meigs’s work has been presented across Canada, the U.S., and Europe; it is represented in major public and corporate collections; and, among many accolades, she received the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2015 and the prestigious Gershon Iskowitz Prize in 2015.
The book tracks how Meigs herself understands her art and her career, a story told through 17 major projects that best demonstrate her preoccupations; four essays written by Meigs and accompanied by sketches original to the book; as well as long-term research and investigations. The Way Between Things: The Art of Sandra Meigs samples a prolific and extraordinary artistic oeuvre.
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The Weather Inside
$21.95It’s summer in Toronto, and the snow and ice are relentless. Too bad no one but Avery can see it.
Avery Gauthier can’t get far enough away from her past: the death of her beloved father, the abuse she suffered as a teen, and the religion that tore her parents apart. A reality-refugee, she’s managed to keep the chaos of her former life at bay… until now.
When her husband returns to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, her estranged mother wants back in, and the snow (invisible to everyone but Avery) piles up and up and up, Avery is forced to face her greatest fears. She looks to the outside for help, to her mysterious superintendent and the comforts of a local weatherman, only to realize that the solutions lie where the problem does: within.
A twisted, darkly funny and redemptive tale, The Weather Inside will leave you wondering where the line is drawn between what’s real and what’s imagined, and why Armageddon isn’t always the end of the world.
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The Wedding House
$12.95Ranging from eloquent insights into rural family life reminiscent of David Adams Richards, to a devil-may-care independence and impish wit, Smith’s first book of poetry is a fresh, energetic look at love, family, and the places where they intersect.
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The Weekend Healer
$16.95On a Friday morning in a “frighteningly well-groomed living room” in Scarborough, Lindalou, 31, is packing up to return to Cape Breton after visiting her mother, Betina, for the first time in five years. Mother and daughter have a turbulent relationship, exchanging refrains of put-downs as a way of avoiding speaking and listening to each other. Lindalou’s 16-year-old son, Curtis, is as much a brother to her: “We grew up together,” she says. When Curtis steps out for a pack of cigarettes and does not return, the young mother fears the worst.
Curtis’ disappearance is the catalyst for a harrowing weekend of hysteria and emotional upheaval. Lindalou’s blistering, smart-mouthed anger wears down to a paralytic terror, while Betina’s blinkered sense of reality, like the plastic cover on her sofa, is ripped away.
The Weekend Healer asks us to question the nature of family, of that much-proffered placebo— “traditional family values”, and of what mothering and fathering are all about.
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The Weeping Chair
$18.95Donald Ward’s stories in The Weeping Chair are confidently layered with unexpected situations and characters whose faith in themselves provides the strength to confront whatever weird or challenging experience befalls them.
While Ward’s style is steeped in the traditional storytelling structures of Flannery O’Connor and P.G. Wodehouse, his highly imaginative settings and eccentric character profiles push the stories’ energies into contemporary spheres of literary entertainment.
His thematic pursuits usually deal with the human willingness to carry on in the face of an often hostile and baffling universe, where nothing is as it first appears and that is clearly evident in this collection.The Weeping Chair employs ideas that are both impossible and unexpected to serve as platforms for the edgy humour always lurking in the human condition and beyond: a race of superior chickens investigate their earthly origins, a badger shares his fears with a monk, a nasty grandmother’s false teeth take on symbolic power, and a female dwarf from the 17th century pursues an octogenarian at Starbucks – all serve as prime examples.
With Ward’s stories you can always expect the unexpected and be assured that his intentions are not frivolous. -
The Weight of Ants
$17.95In this absurd and apocalyptic young-adult comedy filled with dazzling wit and wild imagination, two teenaged outsiders at “one of the worst schools in the country” seem to be the only ones who understand or care that the whole world is a mess. Joan responds by attacking everyone around her: Olivier retreats. But when they are forced to run against each other for student council, it unleashes their determination to change: the system, and themselves. Winner of the 2022 Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama in French.
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The Weight of Snow
$19.95A badly injured man. A nationwide power failure. A village buried in snow. A desperate struggle for survival. These are the ingredients of The Weight of Snow, Christian Guay-Poliquin’s riveting new novel. After surviving a major accident, the book’s protagonist is entrusted to Matthias, a taciturn old man who agrees to heal his wounds in exchange for supplies and a chance of escape. The two men become prisoners of the elements and of their own rough confrontation as the centimetres of snow accumulate relentlessly. Surrounded by a nature both hostile and sublime, their relationship oscillates between commiseration, mistrust, and mutual aid. Will they manage to hold out against external threats and intimate pitfalls?
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The Weight of Survival
$20.00Nestled in a small logging town near Lake Cowichan is an old elementary school. The child of immigrants from post-war Italy attends this school among the population of mostly white, anglo-saxon families. She does not speak English.
Her family is one of four who emigrated from southern Italy, to this small forested community. There are other families, from India, who share a kinship of ‘other’ with the Italian families. What happens when your voice, your food, your home is different? How do you know how to be queer when there is no language or place for it? How do you remember a time not spoken of, but passed on through the smell of walnut blossoms in the spring, grapes in the fall? In The Weight of Survival, Tina Biello chronicles this upbringing of otherness, of being shaped by two very different communities, of blending identities into one, and what is left behind in the process.
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The Western Light
$29.95The Western Light, the prequel to the international bestselling The Wives of Bath, is Susan Swan’s long-awaited return to the life of the beloved narrator Mary “Mouse” Bradford. Mouse’s world is constrained by a number of factors: her mother is dead, her father — the admired country doctor — is emotionally distant, her housekeeper Sal is prejudiced and narrow, and her grandmother and aunt, Big Louie and Little Louie, the only life-affirming presences in her life, live in another city.
Enter Gentleman John Pilkie, the former NHL star who’s transferred to the mental hospital in Midland, where he is to serve out his life-sentence for the murder of his wife and daughter. John becomes a point of fascination for young Mary, who looks to him for the attention she does not receive from her father. He, in turn, is kind to her — but the kindness is misunderstood. When Mary figures out that the attention she receives from the Hockey Killer is different in kind and intent from the attention her Aunt Little Louie receives, her world collapses. Set against the beautiful and dramatic shores of Georgian Bay, the climax will have readers turning pages with concern for characters they can’t help but love.
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The White Ribbon Man
$22.95The White Ribbon Man is a murder mystery set in Toronto. A woman’s body is found in the basement toilet of a downtown Toronto church. It is an Anglican church that welcomes homeless people for coffee and soup and has a congregation composed largely of social activists. The discovery challenges a community that sees itself as a compassionate one and causes people who once were comfortable with each other to become suspicious instead. During the investigation we get to know something about the minister whose sleepwalking makes him suspect, a librarian who answered the classified ad in the Globe and Mail placed by another suspect; one of the wardens who is an activist against violence against women, a member of the congregation who was the neighbour and friend of the murdered woman, and the detective in charge of the investigation. The gentle handling of all of these characters and their issues allows the reader to see humanity and vulnerability of each one and the way in which as a community they support one another.
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The Whole Animal
$19.95A refreshingly original debut collection of short stories that grapple with the self-alienation and self-discovery that make us human.
For fans of Souvankham Thammavongsa, Lynn Coady, and Lisa Moore comes a striking debut collection of short stories that explore bodies both human and animal: our fascination with their strange effluences, growths, and protrusions, and the dangerous ways we play with their power to inflict harm on ourselves and on others.
Throughout The Whole Animal, flawed characters wrestle with the complexities of relationships with partners, parents, children, and friends as they struggle to find identity, belonging, and autonomy. Bodies are divided, often elusive, even grotesque. In “Porcelain Legs,” a pre-teen fixes on the long, thick hair growing from her mother’s eyelid. In “Wolf-Boy Saturday,” a linguist grasps for connection with a young boy whose negligent upbringing has left him unable to speak. In “Butter Buns,” a college student sees his mother in a new light when she takes up bodybuilding.
With strange juxtapositions, beguiling dark humour, and lurid imagery, The Whole Animal illuminates the everyday experiences of loneliness and loss, of self-alienation and self-discovery, that make us human.
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The Whole Elephant
$9.95Marlene Cookshaw is a Cheshire cat of a poet whose naturally realized details illuminate a shifting wholeness on the “singing edge” between dream and waking. Hers is a quilted language at once covering and revealing our fascinating ordinariness. The long poem “In The Swim” subtly captures the desperate and humourous beauty of a seemingly plain life closely observed. Other poems leap with deftness and daring across the open plain of our lives, leaving images so strong, so strange, they verge on myth.
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The Whole Singing Ocean
$19.95Part long poem, part investigation, this true story begins with a whale encounter and then dives into the affair of the École en bateau, a French countercultural school aboard a boat. The École was based on the ideals of ’68, but also twisted ideas about child psychology, Foucault’s philosophy and an abolition of the separation between adults and children. As more troubling details are revealed, the text touches on memory, trauma and environmental grief, ultimately leading to buried echoes from the author’s own life and family history.At the dark heart of The Whole Singing Ocean is the question: How is it possible to hold two things—rapture and pain—at once?
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The Wildcraft Drones
$21.99Can machines rewild us?
An AI breakthrough connects a team of scientists with a wild dolphin, but progress is neck-and-neck with climate breakdown. Class differences are only the first challenge when romance blooms between college girls at a soil remediation site. A forlorn drone seeks reassignment after his human companion dies—but a reckless band of rebels has other plans.
T. K. Rex’s debut collection explores a turbulent timeline where the role of intelligent machines changes alongside nature and humanity, in fourteen tales from the climate crisis and beyond. This is the world of The Wildcraft Drones.
Welcome to the Grungle.
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The Willow Wren
$22.95The touching and nuanced portrait of the rise and fall of Nazi Germany through the eyes of a resourceful German boy.
Ludwig is an odd and introverted child, growing up in Hitler’s Germany. While Ludwig’s father, Wilhelm, is a senior Nazi and a true believer, Ludwig escapes the unfolding catastrophe by withdrawing into nature and books. Eventually, when the Allied bombing campaign intensifies, Ludwig is sent to a Hitler Youth camp, where his oddness makes him a target for bullying.
As the war turns against Germany, the Hitler Youth camp becomes ever more severe and militaristic, and the atmosphere spirals towards chaos. After the Nazis abandon the camp, Ludwig returns home, and his father is presumed dead. With Ludwig’s mother descending into depression, the 11-year-old bears increasing responsibility for the survival of the family as starvation sets in under Russian occupation. Soon, it will be impossible to leave the Russian zone, so Ludwig decides that he must rally his despondent mother and lead her and his three younger siblings in an escape attempt to the west.
Based on a true story, The Willow Wren is a unique, touching exploration of extremism, resilience, and the triumph of the small.