A note to US-based customers: All Lit Up is pausing print orders to the USA until further notice. Read more
Showing 8337–8352 of 9492 results
Full of gory conflict, these three whodunits offer nonstop action, savage violence, and an unforgettable cast of characters
The Wilson Mystery Omnibus brings together Mike Knowles’s first three critically acclaimed novels just as the fourth gritty Wilson mystery, Never Play Another Man’s Game (May 2012), hits shelves.
In Darwin’s Nightmare, we meet the reluctant mob enforcer Wilson who has spent his life under the radar. A simple job — steal a bag from the airport and hand it off — sets into motion a violent chain of events from which no one will escape untouched.
In Grinder, a dangerous mobster’s nephews are missing and the only suspects are his lieutenants. Wilson is pulled back in to quietly find out who is responsible and settle the score with screams.
The third installment, In Plain Sight, finds Wilson in the crosshairs again — but this time the gun is in the hands of a cop. Justice isn’t blind in the city; it’s as bent as the tip of a bullet. The only way for him to stay out of cuffs is to help put someone worse in them.
In her highly anticipated second novel, Rachael Preston tells a vibrant, compelling story of 20th century piracy. Exploring the complex struggle for freedom against a backdrop of passion and repression, The Wind Seller is the story of two vulnerable, shellshocked people and the “wind seller” who captivates them both.
Life in 1924 Kenomee, Nova Scotia, seems simple enough. Until, that is, a mysterious schooner blows into town under the cover of darkness, in desperate need of repair. Waking up to the giant black ship moored near their wharf, the villagers gather to take a gander at the Esmeralda and her crew. To everyone’s surprise, there’s a woman on board, and she shares the schooner’s name. Claiming to be the captain’s daughter, she wears men’s clothing — young and beautiful, she is as fit and as strong as the men. She is also an enigma and starts a chain of events that will change everyone’s life, except perhaps her own.
The Wind Seller is a moving story about choices and consequences, but it is also about imprisonment by, and release from, the personal demons unleashed by terrible experience.
In the town of Lake Wachannabee, Ontario, lies the Winter Garden, home to matron Giggy Andrewes and her brood: her strung-out nephew Jem Waferly, his friend Cora, Chappy the whippet, two peacocks, and Jem’s lover Rob, who lies convalescing after having had most of his flesh stripped away.
A mystery? Well, yes, it would be if only the characters weren’t so easily distracted by the noir-ishly handsome chief inspector, the seductive female veterinarian and the dashing anthropology professor studying the Winter Garden’s gorge.
The Winter Gardeners spend a summer of sultry afternoons nursing Rob, languidly drinking cocktails and trying to picture Nude Descending Staircase in their supposedly Cubist garden. Soon, however, they find themselves in a court room, where their family’s values are on trial in a case reminiscent of that of Oscar Wilde.
‘Throught the novel, Denisoff uses imagerylike a daredevil trapeze artist … The Winter Gardeners is a surreal soap opera, a sexual satire, an Impressionist painting. And it should not be missed.’
– Quill and Quire, starred review
The Winter-Blooming Tree draws us into the lives of Ursula Koehl-Niederhauser, a school teacher suffering from lapses of memory who is convinced that she has dementia; Andreas, her charming, well-intentioned but somewhat self-absorbed husband; and their grown daughter, Mia, who is about to move home after bouncing all over the country, trying to find herself as a journalist. Distracted by thoughts and memories of the winter-blooming apple tree in her laundry room, Ursula misses the neurologist?s diagnosis and becomes convinced she is falling ill. Andreas, certain that she is fine, refuses to worry her with his own work and health problems. Mia, caught up with her own situation, has no idea that her parents are struggling and can?t understand why her mother, especially, is behaving so badly. The Winter-Blooming Tree delves into the dissonance between family members and how sometimes pride is the only thing standing between those we love and the stories we tell ourselves.
The Wintermen is a near-future western, with snow machines riding into town and a showdown in the snow. Johnny Slaught and his Algonquin buddy Chumboy Commando didn’t set out to lead one of the most notorious bands of rebels in recent history. But after the world descended into climate change chaos, the government did some serious triage, forcing wide-scale evacuations and abandoning rural areas to the non-stop snow. Soon enough, Slaught is forced by circumstance to stand up the the muscle of TALOS Security Corporation, setting in motion a rebellion of average folks fighting to rebuild their lives in the abandoned snowscape of the northland. Can a mixture of scrap snow-machines, gasoline and the military wisdom of subcommander Marcos be enough to let them rebuild their lives?
The nightmare of an endless winter is the least of the problems for Johnny Slaught and his rag tag group of climate chaos refugees. They’ve been surviving in a frontier town abandoned by a government that has lost control — but their world is about to be rocked by the greatest menace of all — human greed. Into the Deep Dark is the second in Brit Griffin’s eco-catastrophic adventure series the Wintermen. The north is full of ancient legends of violence, fear and madness that descended on isolated communities in the darkness of winter. For Johnny Slaught and the Wintermen, the legend is knocking at their door, and he has slicked back hair, a sheep-skin coat and a pump action.
Winner, New Brunswick Book Award for Poetry
A Quill & Quire Best Book of the Year
Like the novella in fiction, the long poem is an oft-neglected form. Too long for publication in most literary journals and anthologies, too short to merit book-length publication, the long poem occupies a lonely space in literature. M. Travis Lane is a master of the form, in which her considerable poetic skills reach their apex. There are few that match her brilliance. This volume collects all of her long works — most of them now out of print — from a five-decade commitment to the art.
M. Travis Lane has long flown under the radar of Can Lit, crafting luminous poems and sharp literary criticism — much of it published in the Fiddlehead, one of Canada’s premier literary journals — but in recent years her work has been drawing the attention it deserves. Evidence of this recognition is her 2015 Governor General’s Award nomination for Crossover, a collection the still-vital poet published at the age of 81. Her poetry is modernist, dense, and highly allusive, drawing adeptly on classical and biblical sources, imbued with a feminist and ecocritical perspective. Her musical lines, vivid metaphors, and phenomenological acumen launch her into the company of such poetic luminaries as Don McKay, Jan Zwicky, and Tim Lilburn. In the long poetic form, these qualities reach their highest expression. This volume, an exquisite collection that brings together her long poems for the first time, constitutes an important addition to the canon of Canadian literature and to the canon of feminist literature in North America.
The Witness Ghost is Tim Bowling’s most unified collection of poems since his widely praised debut, Low Water Slack (Nightwood, 1995). Here, in an extended sequence of powerful elegies, he traces his feelings of loss, bewilderment and anger at the death of his father, a man who spent his working life as a salmon fisherman on British Columbia’s majestic Fraser River. Borne back into a past of old wharves, boats, nets and ripening blackberries, the poet enters into the lush west coast riverscape in an attempt to recapture Heck Bowling’s lingering spirit in all the complex human tangles of sorrow, joy, weariness and reverence. In his characteristic style of direct emotional statement mixed with startling imagery and metaphor, Bowling has written one of the most intense and loving statements to fatherhood in Canadian poetry, while at the same time extending his rapt immersion in the west coast’s mythic history and beauty.
Immortalized in words and song, the symbol of the great, untreaded Wilderness, the shores surrounding Lake Superior rustle with stories of gregarious legend, unlikely heroes, quiet sorrow, and unmatched feats of bravery and adventure. From the earliest European records of the world’s largest body of fresh, open water, to the ghostly anecdotes of the men lost in her freezing waters, Peter Unwin records the stories of the great Superior and the people who, over centuries, have determined to make it their home. In short, cultivating chapters, Unwin lays out the history of the lake and its lands, illuminating the stories of the copper stained greed of men who sought the Ontonagon Boulder, the strangling dread of Mishipizheu, the maddening determination of voyageurs as they packed 400 pounds across rugged earth and choppy water, and the hollow ache of loss on the greatest of inland seas. All the ferociousness of the Wolf’s Head the lake embodies is laid out here, filled with extraordinary facts, humorous anecdotes, and an understanding of the people who have chosen to live along its shores. In simple, witty language that endears and engages, Peter Unwin brings Lake Superior to life like no other writer can, delivering in breathless vibrancy, the history of the Wolf’s Head.
As Second World War bombs terrorize a small Austrian city near the Italian border, a man wants desperately to save a 600?year?old astronomical clock found there. The clock has been constructed and refurbished by a series of gifted individuals dedicated to producing the finest timepiece of their age. The man learns of the remarkable engineers who furtively added details that reflected their own private stories.
At the cusp of the fourteenth century, Wildrik Kiening was inspired to build the sophisticated clock for the newly consecrated cathedral in Wolsenburg. This magical device that keeps time, charts celestial motion, and even entertains parishioners with a show of automated figures is, however, not built without personal costs.
When a fire guts the cathedral and the clock is ruined, a child?alchemist named Geli Theurl, haunted by a bizarre aging condition, plots to build a second version with the help of her father and grandmother, just as time itself becomes understood in new ways. The second clock ages well, but its gears ultimately seize during the Enlightenment and it takes a final clockmaker ? an industrial mastermind and bastard son of a rich count ? to create the most impressive clock ever built.
The Wolsenburg Clock chronicles the development of a complex machine, and the risks, devotion, and love that went into its construction throughout the Medieval, Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Modern periods of history. Not only has Jay Ruzesky created an engaging fiction about a practical contraption and its engineers, he also alludes to the tensions between the Church and technologists in Western Europe as they battled to be at the forefront of social conscience.
At once a memoir, a work of philosophy, a story of European immigration to Canada’s dark places of the earth, and an exploration of the roots and effects of colonialism, The Wolves At Evelyn: Journeys Through a Dark Century is a stylistic and rhetorical tour de force from one of Canada’s master prose stylists.
Dissident communists fleeing 1920s Germany, Harold Rhenisch’s grandparents imagined that British Columbia’s Interior was the end of the earth—a new world where they could fulfil their dreams of the land, freed from tyrrany and from history itself. A generation later, in the wake of World War II, his father arrived, carrying many of the same ideas with him. What they found instead was a colonial culture as highly developed as Doris Lessing’s Rhodesia.
Rhenisch grew up at the nexus of these cultures: a Germany where Nazism simultaneously did and did not happen, a Canada in the process of shedding British colonialism for American, and a land—the Interior—that had no point of contact with any of them.
With remarkable range and vision, Rhenisch turns in a bravura performance, sifting through the ashes of personal experience, family anecdotes, literature, art, history, and the land itself for clues to a great untold story, Rhenisch assembles a collage of images and ideas that becomes a whole much greater than the sum of its parts. The hidden history of a forgotten outpost of the Empire is laid open, shattering dearly held myths and exposing buried skeletons.
How was the sunny, carefree Okanagan Valley fruit culture built on the back of King Leopold’s Congolese slave trade? How does Margaret Atwood’s garrison theory of literature reflect on Rhenisch family’s hidden Nazi past? How did the Hudson’s Bay Company Blanket act as both a cherished kitsch object for generations of Canadians and a tool of genocide? Alternating between light and darkness, great humour and sharp indignation, this is a disturbing, thought-provoking and important work from a masterful writer and cultural analyst.
In The Woman Downstairs, eloquence joins intimately with an attentive and hungry eye. Julie Bruck explores the accidents and acquaintances of life, its small coincidences and occurrences, its unexpected meetings. With a passionate distance, Bruck blends the outside observer’s cool embrace with a desire to know intensely life’s eccentric smallnesses, to gentle the beautiful out of the mundane. By turns witty and thoughtful, Bruck’s writing is always graceful, always a delight.
Celia Cantú, a pediatrician in Havana, is trying to live a regular life in today’s Cuba. She is engaged to her childhood friend Luis and lives with her 16-year-old niece, Liliana. Celia’s life is disrupted when Luis’s brother, Joe, returns from Miami flaunting his American ways. Joe’s arrival and Liliana’s adolescent restlessness force Celia to examine the discrepancy between her country’s revolutionary ideals and its reality.
As this family drama unfolds, Celia is unnerved by moments when her mind and body seem to be taken over by Celia Sánchez, a heroine of the Revolution and long-time intimate of Fidel Castro. The turbulent past and an undefined future collide when Liliana disappears and Celia sets out into the Cuban countryside in search of her.
The Woman She Was is a deeply moving novel that explores the aspirations, hopes, and fears of contemporary Cubans, as well as the challenges they still face.
Drawing from real medical journal cases, a doctor shares true stories about strange symptoms and perplexing patients
Those in the medical profession know that sometimes the cases that come into emergency rooms or doctor’s offices can be highly unusual — and depending on how things go, the results can be either tragic or comic. This collection of stories reveals some of the oddest and most memorable case histories, from the woman who claims she was brushing her teeth when she swallowed her toothbrush — but in fact was a bulimic using it to induce vomiting — to the man whose routine elective back surgery revealed he’d been carrying a bullet around in his body for years.
From the funny to the frightening, these documented memorable medical mysteries make for fascinating reading.