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There Is No Blue
$23.95THE GLOBE AND MAIL: BOOKS TO READ IN FALL 2023
THE GLOBE AND MAIL BEST 100 BOOKS OF 2023
CBC BOOKS BEST CANADIAN NONFICTION OF 2023
Martha Baillie’s richly layered response to her mother’s passing, her father’s life, and her sister’s suicide is an exploration of how the body, the rooms we inhabit, and our languages offer the psyche a home, if only for a time.
Three essays, three deaths. The first is the death of the author’s mother, a protracted disappearance, leaving space for thoughtfulness and ritual: the washing of her body, the making of a death mask. The second considers the author’s father, his remoteness, his charm, a lacuna at the centre of the family even before his death, earlier than her mother’s. And then, the shocking death of the author’s sister, a visual artist and writer living with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, who writes three reasons to die on her bedroom wall and then takes her life.
“Martha Baillie’s novels are thrillingly, joyously singular, that rare combination of sui generis and just plain generous. That There Is No Blue, her memoir, is all of those things too, is no surprise; still, she has gone somewhere extraordinary. This triptych of essays, which exquisitely unfolds the “disobedient tale” of the lives and deaths of her mother, her father, and her sister, is a meditation on the mystery and wonder of grief and art making and home and memory itself. It made me think of kintsugi, the Japanese art of repair, in which the mending is not hidden but featured and beautifully illuminated. Baillie’s variety of attention, carved out of language, is tenderness, is love.” – Maud Casey, author of City of Incurable Women
“This is a stunning memoir, intense and meticulous in its observations of family life. Baillie subtly interrogates and conveys the devastating mistranslations that take place in childhood, the antagonism and porousness of siblings, and the tragedy of schizophrenia as it unfolds. I couldn’t put it down.” – Dr. Lisa Appignanesi, author of Mad, Bad and Sad and Everyday Madness
“Exquisite.” – Souvankham Thammavongsa, author of How to Pronounce Knife
“I am grateful for this profound meditation on family and loss.” – Charlie Kaufman, filmmaker
“This strange, unsettling memoir of outer life and inner life and their bizarre twining captures the author’s identity by way of her mother’s death, her sister’s failing battle with mental illness, and the mysterious figure of her father. It combines anguished guilt, deep tenderness, and bemused affection in highly evocative, often disturbing prose. Its brave honesty is amplified by a persistent lyricism; its undercurrent of fear is uplifted by a surprising, resilient hopefulness. It is both a plea for exoneration and an act of exoneration, an authentic meditation on the terrible difficulty of being human.” – Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon
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There Is No Falling
$12.00A member of the Tish group of poets in the 1960s, There Is No Falling is Hogg’s first published work since 1986. Written in his usual spare style, Hogg’s poetry deals with the intricate details of everyday life.
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There is Violence and There is Righteous Violence and There is Death or, The Born-Again Crow
$18.95Grocery-store clerk Beth has had a hell of a week. A hell of a life, actually, full of people squashing her soul. And after pushing back at life—stabbing a steak to her boss’s desk and lighting a magazine rack on fire, for instance—freshly unemployed Beth regroups at her mom’s suburban home. Just when Beth starts to think she’s to blame for systemic limits, the gift of a bird feeder sparks a relationship with a talking Crow who reconnects her with her true power.
This sly chamber piece from new voice Caleigh Crow turns post-capitalism ennui on its head with a righteous fury. It unearths the subtle (and not so subtle) ways we gaslight the marginalized, especially Indigenous women, people living with mental-health afflictions, and anyone struggling to make ends meet in low-income service jobs. There Is Violence captures the vivacity and humour of one truly remarkable woman not meant for this earth, and brings her to her own glorious transcendence.
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There’ll Be Another
$16.95There’ll Be Another delivers on the promise of the title: It is actually three books of poems in one, each offering the reader the unique new opening of an entirely different language.
The first, Heavy-Hearted in Havana, is made up of a series of poems written during McFadden’s sojourn in Cuba in the spring of 1994. His observations on the decaying realities of the populist revolution launched by Fidel Castro are coloured by one of the key poems in this section, “The Death of Greg Curnoe,” a lament for the author’s friend and collaborator who died in a cycling accident in 1992.
The second, Sex With a Sixteen Year Old, is a series of chiefly narrative poems dealing with the experience of being a reclusive, solitary poet living in Toronto where the solitary exercise of the poetic imagination leads inevitably to thought crimes.
The third, Anonymity Suite Part II, is an unexpected extension of the highly formalist series of poems that appeared in the book Anonymity Suite in 1992. These poems tend toward the impersonal and are more inspired by cultural history than by immediate experience or solitary reflection.
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There’s Always More to Say
$26.95In the title story of Natalie Southworth’s debut collection, sisters sneak out of their unstable mother’s apartment to find “reality,” an experience with lasting repercussions. Southworth concentrates on moments like this—moments of disconnection, family fragility and unexpected expressions of love.
The stories that make up There’s Always More to Say focus on characters struggling to achieve what they think they should want despite the demands and loneliness of modern life. A puppeteer attempts to reinvent himself as a realtor. Preteen girls strive to become like their absentee fathers. A nanny must decide between her future or that of the family dog. A high-achieving working mother is imprisoned by her antidepressants.
Infused with humour and verve, yet full of warmth, Southworth interrogates the quest for more and what it means when ambition clashes with private reality.
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Therefore Choose
$22.95On a summer visit to Germany, George, a young medical student at Cambridge, meets Anna von Kleist, whose intellectual force, beauty, and self-assurance smite him full in the heart. It is 1936. Hitler is already in power, and a shift has occurred in Germany that Anna, George, and their friend Werner have not fully grasped. Europe is on the cusp of war when the three find themselves in a painful love triangle that plays between England and Germany. Facing decisions that will forever alter the course of their lives, they must choose and live with the consequences of their choices.
Reviewers have compared Oatley’s pure, spare prose with that of A.S. Byatt and Umberto Eco. In Therefore Choose, his intimately rendered characters draw us irrevocably into their quest for meaning, hope, and understanding in a world diving headlong into chaos.
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Thérèse and Pierrette and the Little Hanging Angel
$19.95This is the second of five novels in Michel Tremblay’s Plateau Mont-Royal series, an evocative, magical retelling of the author’s own birth, childhood, and adolescence in a working-class Montreal neighbourhood populated by eccentrics, dreamers and imaginary characters of mythic proportions.
Three schoolgirls, “Thérèse ’n’ Pierrette” and their friend Simone, are caught up in the dark mysteries of their rites of passage: innocence moving into experience; life into birth. Circling around their uncertainties are cold, merciless predators, ready to strike at the slightest sign of weakness—the vicious hypocrisy of the Church, the cruel ignorance of the petty bourgeoisie, and the burning lust of the child molester.
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These are not the potatoes of my youth
$19.95Shortlisted, Trillium Book Award for Poetry and Gerald Lampert Memorial Award
In this confessional debut collection, Matthew Walsh meanders through their childhood in rural Nova Scotia, later roaming across the prairies and through the railway cafés of Alberta to the love letters and graffiti of Vancouver. In this nomadic journey, Walsh explores queer identity set against an ever-changing landscape of what we want, and who we are, were, and came to be.
Walsh is a storyteller in verse, his poems laced with catholic “sensibilities” and punctuated with Maritime vernacular. In These are not the potatoes of my youth, Walsh illuminates the complex choreography of family, the anxiety of individuality, and the ambiguous histories of stories erased, forgotten, or suppressed. Readers will find moments of humour, surprise, and a queer realization that all is not what it seems.
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These are the Stories
$22.00These are the Stories is a memoir presented in short chapters, comprising the life of a survivor of the Sixties Scoop. Christine Miskonoodinkwe Smith reveals her experiences in the child welfare system and her journey towards healing in various stages of her life. As an adult, she was able to reconnect with her birth mother. Though her mother passed shortly afterwards, that reconnection allowed the author to finally feel “complete, whole, and home.” The memoir details some of the author’s travels across Canada as she eventually made a connection with the Peguis First Nation in Manitoba.
A memoir in the vein of Colleen Hele Cardinal’s Raised Somewhere Else and Alicia Elliot’s A Mind Spread Out On the Ground, These are the Stories is an inspirational and courageous telling of a life story. -
These Fields Were Rivers
$19.95Brent MacLaine’s poems, like the poet himself, are rooted in the history and landscape of Prince Edward Island. Yet, MacLaine possesses a remarkable ability to graft rural values to contemporary culture, with its urban habits and popular entertainments, its scientific theories and technological mythologies.
MacLaine belongs to the first generation of Islanders not farming the land, and his poems explore his uneasy relationship with the patch of earth where he lives. He follows the island contours in an expansive sweep across the fields and into the woods; he also shares an islander’s sense of confinement, bound into a small place by the sea and the red cliffs. The island before human existence, the coming of European settlers, or the stubbled ground tilled by his father are as readily available to his fertile imagination as meteorological patterns, modern art, or The Odyssey.
Using his Maritime home as template for larger universal concerns, MacLaine offers clear-headed insight into the natural world — and into human nature — in an astonishing range of poems shaped by his nimble attention to his quotidian world.
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These Songs I Know By Heart
$23.00Finalist for the 2024 Big Other Book Award for Fiction
Married and divorced in her 20s, looking for friendship in her 30s, and contemplating pregnancy at 40, our narrator wonders if she’s going through life out of order. But Alice, The Turtle, The Kid, and other beloveds show her that motherhood is more than giving birth, art is never finished, and love is not linear.
Through a three-day canoe trip, chance encounters, fierce female friendship, step-parenting, IVF, pandemic isolation, and quiet moments between humans, These Songs I Know By Heart weaves vignettes of everyday mythology into an absorbing and honest meditation on the connections in our lives. With razor-sharp reflection, humour, and most of all love, we are reminded that there’s no formula to life and that instead, we must celebrate what makes the small moments of our lives extraordinary.
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These Threads Become a Thinner Light
$14.95“This is a book of truth, difficult truth, real truth, beautiful truth.” ?Norma Dunning, Canadian Poetries?
In this collection of poetry, powerhouse author David Groulx uses his deft and forceful wordplay. These Threads Become a Thinner Light?takes readers into blisteringly honest reflections of survival and momentary redemptions of a hidden Indigenous world in the underbellies of Canada’s major metropolises and small towns.
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Theseus
$18.00The value of Theseus is as much about its pedigree as the writing itself. The collaboration for this new book began in the autumn of 1966. bpNichol and Wayne Clifford had worked together early in their literary careers; in fact, Clifford had been the editor of Nichol’s first trade book, published with The Coach House Press. To begin, Nichol had also wanted to include two West Coast poets in the writing process. This didn’t work out, so Nichol and Clifford rewrote a section to produce Part One of the present text. Part Two was composed over many years of revisiting and revising. These long gestation periods allowed the writers the space and time to re/consider, knowing the text would always be there to augment. After Nichol’s death, Clifford completed the work, adding Part Three – composed of elements of Nichol’s Martyrology – as a means of tribute, eulogy, acceptance and lie. Thematically, the text focuses on the Theseus-Ariadne-Minotaur cycle: in Part One, the authors were young enough to “re=verb=erate” when struck with the myth; Part Two allowed Nichol and Clifford the space to step back in order to devise a way to say “love” more acutely; finally, Part Three presents a stunning example of one man’s grief for a lost friend and collaborator. All told, Theseus is an important text that adds considerable gravitas to Nichol’s poetic legacy, and the unique partnership between the two authors allows Nichol’s words to be extended beyond the grave.
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They Call Me George
$24.95A CBC BOOKS MUST-READ NONFICTION BOOK FOR BLACK HISTORY MONTH
Nominated for the Toronto Book Award
Smartly dressed and smiling, Canada’s black train porters were a familiar sight to the average passenger—yet their minority status rendered them politically invisible, second-class in the social imagination that determined who was and who was not considered Canadian. Subjected to grueling shifts and unreasonable standards—a passenger missing his stop was a dismissible offense—the so-called Pullmen of the country’s rail lines were denied secure positions and prohibited from bringing their families to Canada, and it was their struggle against the racist Dominion that laid the groundwork for the multicultural nation we know today. Drawing on the experiences of these influential black Canadians, Cecil Foster’s They Call Me George demonstrates the power of individuals and minority groups in the fight for social justice and shows how a country can change for the better.
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They Called Him a Radical
$26.00Peter “Pete” Maloff was born in Saskatchewan in 1900, the year after the first Doukhobors, including his parents, immigrated to Canada. Living through the eras of WWI and WWII in a Doukhobor community strengthened his deep-rooted belief in pacifism and, at a young age, he dedicated himself completely to the idea that there must be another way to solve conflicts. This quest, as well as Maloff’s status as an ‘outsider,’ was not always welcomed—judges and wardens considered him a radical and his influence a threat, and his outspokenness and peaceful protests resulted in house arrest and years in Canadian jails. Maloff was not deterred, and his perseverance garnered him many followers, including some who had formerly worked against him or had helped to incarcerate him.
Today, his granddaughter Vera Maloff remembers Pete as a tall, strong, charismatic man. Growing up, she worked beside him in the family’s gardens, and at the local markets where they sold produce, she recalls that he would be regularly surrounded by people wanting to hear him speak. He was a kind, caring man, and the time spent incarcerated, forced away from his family, did not seem to have dulled his spirit. He was an avid reader, who taught his family to consider all aspects and perspectives, instilling an awareness of other people and cultures and an eagerness to learn.
In They Called Him a Radical: The Memoirs of Pete Maloff and The Making of a Doukhobor Pacifist, Vera revisits her grandfather’s memoirs, written while under house arrest and covering the formative years from his birth to his late twenties, during which Pete’s resolve to live as a pacifist was cemented. Here, Pete writes of growing up in the new Canadian Doukhobor community at the turn of the century, meeting influential figures in the pacifist movement in California, his time in a cooperative freedom colony in Oregon, and his turning to writing, as he truly believed that the pen could be mightier than the sword.
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They Came From Within
$24.95No horror film is truly mainstream, David Cronenberg has said, and it is for this reason that even the lowliest of them may be worth consideration. In this tenth anniversary revised and updated edition of They Came From Within, Caelum Vatnsdal adjusts the focus in Canadian horror films, and unwinds the history of this neglected genre to learn “why we fear what we fear and how it came to be that way.” From the early Canadian infiltration of Hollywood in the thirties, to the flowering of Canuck horror films in the sixties and seventies, to the surreal products of the “tax-shelter” eighties and beyond, Vatnsdal shows how the Canadian horror film industry has, unwittingly or not, created a complex social, economic, and political portrait of a nation. Engagingly written, extensively researched, and lavishly illustrated with rare stills and poster art, They Came From Within is an invaluable addition of Canadian film criticism.