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All Books

All Books in this Collection

  • Waiting for the Cyclone

    Waiting for the Cyclone

    $19.95

    A Trillium Book Award Finalist

    Women are too often cast in literature as inherently good and dependable—but this is not the case in the audacious stories of Waiting for the Cyclone.

    Mary, a closet drinker, leaves her children with Debbie, a seemingly perfect housewife who shoots pharmaceuticals at night. Alison vacations with her husband, but wakes up in the tattooed arms of another man. Donna lies to her family about volunteering in Afghanistan so she can parasail with a lover in Turkey.

    With authenticity and intensity, Dean challenges traditional literary archetypes by revealing female characters that are nuanced, contradictory, and boldly unapologetic.

    “In Waiting for the Cyclone, Leesa Dean gives us an original, honest voice. Far from shelter, readers will find themselves pulled closer and closer to the eye of this storm. Brace yourself: These women are unflinchingly real. You will not be able to look away.” —Elisabeth de Mariaffi, author of How to Get Away with Women, nominated for the Giller Prize

  • Waiting for the Man

    Waiting for the Man

    $24.95

    A surreal journey of a man who is searching for purpose and for happiness

    Joe, a 36-year-old advertising copywriter for a slick New York agency, feels disillusioned with his life. He starts dreaming of a mysterious man, seeing him on the street, and hearing his voice. Joe decides to listen to the Man and so he waits on his stoop, day and night, for instructions. A local reporter takes notice, and soon Joe has become a story, a media sensation, the centre of a storm. When the Man tells Joe to “go west,” he does, in search of meaning.

    Waiting for the Man is a compelling and visceral story about the struggle to find something more in life, told in two interwoven threads — Joe at the beginning of his journey in Manhattan, and at the end of it as he finds new purpose on a ranch in Montana under the endless sky

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  • Waiting for the Man

    Waiting for the Man

    $16.95

    Giller-longlisted fiction — now in trade paper

    Joe, a 36-year-old advertising copywriter for a slick New York agency, feels disillusioned with his life. He starts dreaming of a mysterious man, seeing him on the street, and hearing his voice. Joe decides to listen to the Man and so he waits on his stoop, day and night, for instructions. A local reporter takes notice, and soon Joe has become a media sensation, the centre of a storm. When the Man tells Joe to “go west,” he does, in search of meaning.

    A surreal journey of a man who is searching for purpose and for happiness, Waiting for the Man is about the struggle to find something more in life. The paperback edition includes a bonus BackLit section with a reader’s guide, Q&A with the author, and more.

  • Waiting for the Parade

    Waiting for the Parade

    $17.95

    Waiting for the Parade is John Murrell’s play, set in Calgary during World War II, in which five women gather to work for the war effort while their men are away. Waiting for the Parade was first performed by Alberta Theatre Projects, Calgary. Subsequently, it has been performed by Northern Light Theatre, Edmonton; Bastion Theatre, Victoria; Tarragon Theatre, Toronto; the National Art Centre, Ottawa; Centaur Theatre, Montreal; and at the Lyric Hammersmith Theatre in London, England.

  • Waiting for the Piano Tuner to Die

    Waiting for the Piano Tuner to Die

    $24.99

    The men and women in these stories, and perhaps most of all the children, make their own sense of a world where “There are forces at play so simple, natural, and accidental that nobody can figure them out and see them coming.” It is a world, too, in which “there’s lots more sorrow flying around people’s heads than there is joy.” That sorrow may be heartbreaking, occasionally it is horrific; but the reader is constantly reminded, with the quiet, clear-eyed and sometimes mischievous irony of Harriet Richards’ voice, that in this world and – in the least likely places – we may entertain angels unawares.

  • Waiting for the Rain

    Waiting for the Rain

    $24.95

    In this memoir, Lamees Al Ethari traces her transition from an idyllic childhood in a large extended Iraqi family to the relative stability of an exilic family life in Canada. Through memory fragments, flights of poetry, diary entries, and her own art, the author reveals the trauma suffered by Iraqis, caused by three senseless wars, dehumanizing sanctions, a brutal dictatorship, and a foreign occupation. Finely observed, highly personal, and intensely moving, this account also gives testimony to the Iraqi people’s resilience and the humanity they manage to preserve in the face of adversity. It is the other voice, behind the news flashes.

  • Waiting for Time

    Waiting for Time

    $19.95

    The award-winning sequel to Random Passage. Waiting for Time, the sequel to the best-selling Random Passage, completes the epic saga of the inhabitants of Cape Random. Here, Bernice Morgan tells the story of the strong-willed and enigmatic Mary Bundle, one of the most beloved characters in Newfoundland fiction, and introduces us to Lav Andrews, a descendant of the Andrews family living in contemporary Newfoundland—a place where the past shapes the future. In this beautifully imagined historical narrative, Morgan weaves a story of loss and of courage—a story of how we discover where we are by understanding where we’ve been.

  • Waiting Place, The

    Waiting Place, The

    $19.00

    Duty, desire, love, and purpose. Who we want to be and whom we want in our lives. As Susan prepares for the birth of her first child, she contemplates her role as a mother, wife, and partner on the family farm through the lives of the women closest to her. In a world of wanting and waiting, is fulfillment always beyond reach?

    Praise for The Waiting Place

    Lust and despair rival hard work and family in Sharron Arksey’s exploration of women in a modern rural landscape, simultaneously shattering old-fashioned ideas of farm life and detailing the very real challenges and rewards of cattle ranching.

    With the pain of childbirth as backdrop, The Waiting Place gives voice to the nuanced and sometimes secret lives of individual women bound together by family duty, revealing their stories with humour, compassion, and an unflinching honesty.
    –Anne Lazurko, author of Dollybird

    The Waiting Place is a subtle blend of sly, disarming humour, heartbreak, and poignancy. In its farming world populated by animals, every moment is human. That’s the secret and triumph of this book.
    –Terry Jordan, author of It’s a Hard Cow and Beneath That Starry Place

  • Waiting Room

    Waiting Room

    $17.95

    Chrissie and Jeremy have spent a great deal of time in shock, waiting—for news of their baby daughter’s post-operation recovery, for weekly scans to show that her tumour is gone, for robotic forty-five-second updates from Dr. Andre Malloy, their brilliant but arrogant neuro-oncologist. The hospital waiting room has become a second home where they struggle separately as parents and as a couple, where they laugh inappropriately, lose tempers, and find resilience as they confront a roller coaster of hope and despair and a crisis of decision-making. And just beyond the waiting room, Dr. Malloy faces his own dark and risky medical dilemma. With sharp insight, Waiting Room examines medical ethics, compassion, gallows humour, and humanity in life-threatening situations.


  • Wake The Stone Man

    Wake The Stone Man

    $20.95

    Set in a small northern town, under the mythical shadow of the Sleeping Giant, Wake the Stone Man follows the complicated friendship of two girls coming of age in the 1960s. Molly meets Nakina, who is Ojibwe and a survivor of the residential school system, in high school, and they form a strong friendship. As the bond between them grows, Molly, who is not native, finds herself a silent witness to the racism and abuse her friend must face each day.

    In this time of political awakening, Molly turns to her camera to try to make sense of the intolerance she sees in the world around her. Her photos become a way to freeze time and observe the complex human politics of her hometown. Her search for understanding uncovers some hard truths about Nakina’s past and leaves Molly with a growing sense of guilt over her own silence.

    When personal tragedy tears them apart, Molly must travel a long hard road in search of forgiveness and friendship.

  • waking blood

    waking blood

    $12.95

    A series of long poems that offer a wry look at personal politics and passions. Keahey pays particular attention to soul- and body-shaping experiences common in life but marginalized in published literature: female desire, depression, divorce, pregnancy, birth and breastfeeding.

  • Waking in the Tree House

    Waking in the Tree House

    $18.00

    The poems in Michael Lithgow’s first collection carry us on a stream of sensory impressions towards some heightened awareness. In a voice characterized by curiosity, astonishment, and candour, the poet records what passes through him in settings as various as a derelict rooming house, a hospital room, a junk shop, a Cape Breton farmhouse, the old Jewish Quarter in Cracow, a Montreal bus during morning rush hour. Lithgow’s poems gravitate towards darker terrain – not at the expense of humour and irony, but with an energetic interest in the beauty of what time does to things, and a pleasure in language that searches for meaning a little beyond the bounds of the ordinary.

  • Walk With My Shadow

    Walk With My Shadow

    $19.95

    Meet George Gregoire, an Innu man who was born in the Labrador bush in the middle of the last century, yet mustered enough education to write his memoirs. In the authentic voice of a storyteller George invites the reader to see Innu society and culture from the inside. He shares stories from his earliest childhood memories and the wondrous life of a hunter. George also became a husband and father and the story of his adult life is a mirror through which the images of a once independent people, under siege from the encroachment of a powerful and indifferent Canadian society, are tragically reflected. This is also a story of resistance and resilience, of a personal life and death struggle with alcoholism, as well as the desperate, brazen and occasionally triumphant struggles of a people to reclaim their culture and regain control over their lives and their homeland

  • Walking and Stealing

    Walking and Stealing

    $22.95

    In this triptych of serial poems steeped in baseball and Toronto, Stephen Cain considers urban affairs and culture through playful, revelatory devices.

    “Walking & Stealing” was composed between innings of his son’s little league baseball games. The sport becomes a site for explorations of duration, association, and subjectivity. The ninety-nine poems of “Intentional Walks” follow mapped routes throughout the city to study the relationship between thinking and walking. The nine cantos in “Tag & Run” are constructed using baseball’s magic number nine, creating a literary puzzle in which the author “tags” a series of moments in time.

    Together, these works skewer traditional, masculinist, and often-solipsistic perspectives on where we live and inhabit, instead offering a new way to consider the relationship between culture and space. Walking and Stealing is where memes meet psychogeography in a collection from a brilliant poet at the top of their game.

  • Walking into the Ocean

    Walking into the Ocean

    $14.95

    In the debut mystery featuring veteran Scotland Yard Chief Inspector Peter Cammon, what seems like a simple domestic crime turns out to be a series of murders ravaging a peaceful English coastal community.

    The semi-retired Cammon is sent to the Jurassic Coast to investigate a case: a woman murdered and her mechanic husband, the likely suspect, drowned in the English Channel. But Cammon soon discovers that his investigation is a sideshow to a string of killings along the cliffs that has stymied local police. The only way to solve this one murder is to figure out the serial killings that terrorize the region. The detective travels from London, Dorset, and Devon to the island of Malta, relentlessly following the overlapping threads of the two cases to their shocking climax. The first installment in a series of three, this cliffhanger sets a chilling tone for the British sleuth’s forthcoming mysteries.

  • Walking Leonard

    Walking Leonard

    $20.00

    Walking Leonard and Other Stories, is a short story collection of roughly 30,000 words in the literary fiction genre. The stories depict unspoken pivot points in the lives of ordinary people. Themes include responsibility and violation between parent and child, nature as a protective force, and the shucking off of various selves in the process of a lifetime. The stories spring from the foothills of southern Alberta, specifically Calgary, and some even more specifically from the historic neighborhood of Bowness, once a small town in its own right.