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Teenagers accidentally discover the body of a university student at the bottom of the abandoned Wellington Tunnel. When the apparent suicide turns out to be a murder, Lieutenant Detective Toni Damiano, guilt-ridden from her last case, finds herself investigating a chilling trail of lies and deceit, daring love and betrayal. Taylor Sanderson is the only daughter of affluent Trevor Sanderson, a legal partner on the Corruption Commission and a member of the Montreal ‘clan of influence.’ ‘I want the bastard who shoved my daughter down a hole and left her there to die alone!’ That discovery will shatter Trevor Sanderson and Lieutenant Detective Damiano, cutting its way through both their lives.
Where Calling Birds Gather is a poetic journey spanning continents. From the Canadian Prairies we are wisked away to Australia and Ethiopia in search of exotic birds. Like the migrational patterns of the narrator’s quarry, the poems crisscross and overlap, they are pulled across the land as they search for new tastes, smells, lives and loves. And as the hyena’s cackle in the night and the Cassowary’s peck at the side of the road, the memory of the open prairie calls. When the reader finally “tacks” for home they only have to wait until the next migration.
Where I Fall, Where She Rises is a novel that follows two women on opposite ends of a terrorist kidnapping. While one woman suffers and falls at the hands of her captors, the other exploits the fame of such a publicized event to secure a future for her unborn child. Lea Ironstone is a Canadian freelance journalist who recalls her time spent in the very dangerous red zone of Baghdad, after the 2003 U.S. invasion. A self-destructive addict, she refuses to relegate herself to the safer green zone, where most mainstream news journalists like Paul Shell are protected. Desperately seeking a more controversial story to re-establish his fame as a television journalist for GNN, Paul Shell contacts Lea and agrees to meet her in the red zone for a recent finding. They are kidnapped by an insurgent terrorist sect and tortured repeatedly. Carol Shell, Paul Shell’s wife lives in New York. Eight months pregnant, Carol is approached by Timothy Abel, her husband’s agent. Timothy wishes to represent her “victimhood,” which he sees as a very marketable and exploitable asset. Her appetite for fame and celebrity eclipses her familial priorities and she is coerced into a lifestyle that hinges on personal promotion. Lea and Paul find themselves incarcerated in a basement dungeon expecting their next “artistic” torture, while Carol makes her next public appearance to further her star. Lea and Paul’s relationship evolves into a mutual understanding of their united fate, while Carol, on the other side of the world, rises in public stature. The novel evolves into an emotional satire, which depicts two strong women who attack the consequences of war on two different fronts.
Dispirited by his performance review, Will Gough sets out to redeem himself by updating his company’s quality control procedures, while casting a hopeful eye toward other career opportunities. Despite his best intentions, his work troubles follow him home–to his wife and two sons, where empty yogurt containers are half-sacred, technology a source of childhood wonder, and the business of the world bumps against the quiet walls that protect the rhythms of family life. It’s difficult to pull off a portrait of a nice guy in ordinary circumstances, going through the stress of daily living and tensions surrounding job and career opportunities, and he does it very well in simple, understated prose. No sensationalism or alien beings or suicidal desperation or academic angst or terrorist attacks or other assorted rampages and violations: just a life without earthshaking incident, but subtly humourous and convincing.
Finalist for the 2017 Governor General’s Literary Awards–Non-Fiction!
Finalist for the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize at the 2018 BC Book Prizes!
Where It Hurts is a highly charged collection of personal essays, haunted by loss, evoking turbulent physical and emotional Canadian landscapes. Sarah de Leeuw’s creative non-fiction captures strange inconsistencies and aberrations of human behaviour, urging us to be observant and aware. The essays are wide in scope and expose what–and who–goes missing.
With staggering insight, Sarah de Leeuw reflects on missing geographies and people, including missing women, both those she has known and those whom she will never get to know. The writing is courageously focused, juxtaposing places and things that can be touched and known–emotionally, physically, psychologically–with what has become intangible, unnoticed, or actively ignored. Throughout these essays, de Leeuw’s imagistic memories are layered with meaning, providing a survival guide for the present, including a survival that comes with the profound responsibility to bear witness.
A book that is an open door, a current, an open window, a breeze over uncut grass, a dance of morning light on an old ruined sundial, a set of waves flowing up on a strange shore. This is a book that asks why do we give in to the psychotic and invasive Structure (and its many names)? A book that mingles witticisms and provocations so that the reader may settle into his or her soul and reflect. A book that works in associations, echoes, pulses, images, returns, vibrations, thought-experiments, dreams, visions and revisions. This is a book that should have an ellipse on the front page with an image of a shock of light
Award-winning author Catherine Hunter serves up a haunting thriller that will keep you enthralled. Kelly, a young costume designer, is struggling to put her life together after the recent suicide of her husband. After a series of disturbing phone calls, as well as more earthly dangers, she finds herself on the lam with her young nephew, looking over her shoulder wondering if the danger she faces comes from the living . . . or the dead.”A fine addition to the genre of the darkmystery. Hunter writes as if Mary Higgins Clark were sitting at one shoulder, Joy Fielding at the other–but adds a unique touch of creepiness that is all her own. Her characters live and breathe, and her prose marches withoutmisstep toward a riveting climax.”–Stephen R. George, author of Seeing Eye and Nightlife (as Jack Ellis)
A gripping political thriller that mixes suspense and moral seriousness in ways reminiscent of both Michael Ondaatje and Graham Greene, Where She Was Standing is a moving and exquisitely crafted debut novel from one of Canada’s finest poets. With an international scope of compassion and escalating tension, Maggie Helwig uses the voices and stories of a strong and varied cast of characters to shape a world in which it’s far too “easy to lose people.” A book about disappearance and surveillance, Where She Was Standing contrasts involuntary and overtly political tragedies with the dirty little secrets of our big cities, the deliberate invisibility of society’s dangerous fringe and the emotional unavailability of scarred and scared individuals.
The murder of Lisa James, a young black Canadian photographer, in Indonesian-occupied East Timor, unifies everyone; the presence of her absence, her life, memory, and principles guide both her mother and boyfriend, as well as a journalist, a doctor, and a human rights activist she has never met, through fragile and subterranean explorations of the heart and soul. Their quest is simple, their quest is impossible: their quest is the truth.
With both its poetry and its treacherous political landscape, Where She Was Standing is as suspenseful as it is breath-taking. This rare combination has led Helwig to produce something rarer still: an utterly essential page-turner.
Honourable Mention, African Literature Association, Book of the Year Award–Creative Writing, 2023
Where the Baedeker Leads uncovers the many delicate layers that lie in the spaces between departures and arrivals, offering memories and stories. Whether it’s about journeys, personal transition, or changes in the seasons, the aim in these poems is to draw attention to the personal experiences and social conditions that push people away from home to the new landscapes, sights, and encounters that remind them of the times and place they have so painfully left behind.
Where the Blood Mixes is meant to expose the shadows below the surface of the author’s First Nations heritage, and to celebrate its survivors. Though torn down years ago, the memories of their Residential School still live deep inside the hearts of those who spent their childhoods there. For some, like Floyd, the legacy of that trauma has been passed down through families for generations. But what is the greater story, what lies untold beneath Floyd’s alcoholism, under the pain and isolation of the play’s main character?
Loring’s title was inspired by the mistranslation of the N’lakap’mux (Thompson) place name Kumsheen. For years, it was believed to mean “the place where the rivers meet”—the confluence of the muddy Fraser and the brilliant blue Thompson Rivers. A more accurate translation is: “the place inside the heart where the blood mixes.” But Kumsheen also refers to a story: Coyote was disemboweled there, along a great cliff in an epic battle with a giant shape-shifting being that could transform the world with its powers—to this day his intestines can still be seen strewn along the granite walls. In his rage the transformer tore Coyote apart and scattered his body across the nation, his heart landing in the place where the rivers meet.
Can a person survive their past; can a people survive their history? Irreverently funny and brutally honest, Where the Blood Mixes is a story about loss and redemption. Caught in a shadowy pool of alcoholic pain and guilt, Floyd is a man who has lost everyone he holds most dear. Now after more than two decades, his daughter Christine returns home to confront her father. Set during the salmon run, Where the Blood Mixes takes us to the bottom of the river, to the heart of a People.
“Sins don’t destroy people here. Dreams do.”In a small city somewhere in an oil-rich Canadian province just east of the Rockies, a political scandal has erupted: an aging cabinet minister has struck and killed a member of his local constituency executive with his half-ton truck, in broad daylight. But the premier suspects that there is more to this “accident” than meets the eye—and he wants to know the real reasons behind it before the media or his political rivals do.Enter the premier’s old friend Harry Asher—lawyer, former hockey star, self-styled intellectual, and recent divorcé—who is hired to dig into the incident. And it isn’t long before Asher’s investigation threatens to expose a chain of corruption that implicates many of the province’s most powerful citizens—including the province’s legendary now-senile premier—as well as its most cherished founding myths.In Where the Bodies Lie, Mark Lisac (author of Alberta Politics Uncovered and The Klein Revolution) draws upon his decades of experience as a reporter at Alberta’s provincial legislature to craft an absorbing debut novel—part political thriller, part fable—that opens up timeless themes of friendship, love, the inescapability of grief, the weight of history, and the nature of truth.
Where the Eff is My Red Tent is a visceral, unflinching memoir-in-essays about what happens when a person grows up believing their suffering is just part of life.
For decades, Heather Hendrie lived in a body and mind she couldn’t quite trust. Each month, like clockwork, a storm rolled in—of rage, despair, self-doubt, and disconnection. Doctors dismissed it. Culture normalized it. She believed it was her fault. It wasn’t.
Told with startling clarity and lyrical precision, Where the Eff is My Red Tent traces Hendrie’s journey through the unspoken, misunderstood world of PMDD—Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder. Part medical mystery, part feminist reckoning, and part love letter to the body she once believed was broken, this book unearths the systemic silencing of menstruating people and shines a light on a condition that affects 1 in 20 people with cycles—yet remains dangerously underdiagnosed.
From panic attacks in the backcountry to therapy sessions in snowstorms, Hendrie—a wilderness therapist and clinical counsellor—writes with deep compassion and sharp insight about what it means to heal in a culture that gaslights, glorifies self-sacrifice, and mistrusts women’s pain.<>/
For anyone who has ever felt hijacked by their hormones, misdiagnosed by the medical system, or alone in their suffering, this book is a lighthouse. Unapologetically honest and quietly revolutionary, Where the Eff is My Red Tent is not just a story of one woman’s diagnosis—it’s a call to listen to our bodies, name our truths, and reclaim space for stories we’ve been told to keep quiet.
Yasmine enters Lebanon escaping a messy divorce and seeking the family, culture, and connection that her Palestinian mother hid during their life in Toronto. It’s 2006, and she’s meeting her cousin Reem for the first time after connecting over social media. Reem teaches Arabic and lives in a refugee camp with her mother and sister. Her brother Ahmed lived there too until he went to Syria for work and then disappeared. When Yasmine receives a package of mysterious letters suggesting her father might still be alive, the cousins embark on a discovery of political secrets no one in the family wants them to know.
Complicating her questions about identity, belonging, and healing even further, Yasmine runs into Ziyad — an old flame who’s incidentally taking Reem’s class. Though the cousins’ lives could not be more different, Yasmine and Reem must learn from each other as they navigate abusive relationships, grief, displacement, and war.
Set amid the arid glamour of Lebanon’s beaches and urban landscapes, Where the Jasmine Blooms is at once a political historical thriller and a Muslim feminist love story. Turn-of-the-century Arab politics feature prominently, echoing loudly even twenty years later.
Under the covers of Where the Nights Are Twice as Long: Love Letters of Canadian Poets, David Eso and Jeanette Lynes collect letters and epistolary poems from more than 120 Canadian poets, including Pauline Johnson, Malcolm Lowry, Louis Riel, Alden Nowlan, Anne Szumigalski, Leonard Cohen, John Barton, and Di Brandt, and many others, encompassing the breadth of this country’s English literary history.
Presented in order not of the chronology of composition, but according to the poets’ ages at the time of writing, the poems in the book comprise a single lifeline. The reader follows an amalgam of the Poet from the passionate intensity of youth, through the regrets and satisfactions of adulthood and middle age, and into the reflective wisdom of old age.
All the writings are about love, but love in a dizzying array of colours, shapes, and sizes. Deep, enduring love, unrequited love, passionate love, violent love. Here are odes and lyric ecstasies, tirades and tantrums, pastoral comforts and abject horrors — all delivered with the vibrancy, wit, and erudition of our finest poets. Where the Nights Are Twice as Long is more than an anthology: it is an unforgettable journey into the long night of love.
Brenda Hasiuk’s debut novel details eight weeks in the lives of four teens in a hardcore mining town in northern Canada. Ally and Toby, life-long locals, Rina, a Sarajevo refugee, and Adam, the returning urban native warrior get lost in each others – individual and collective mythologies as they find love, friendship, violence and tragedy in one long, last summer. Unflinchingly honest, and disturbingly poignant, this story captures the displacement of “northerners”, the struggle for identity, and the restlessness of teens in isolated communities. In a place that makes them feel lonely, they try never to be alone; and in lives confounded by rituals and restraints, their search for meaning is illusive.
Lyrical realism meets family drama meets sparkling global folktale.
Joan, a half-Chinese English conversation teacher unmoored in Europe, flees Budapest for a fresh start. Stepping off the train in Bratislava, she meets Milan, a proud Roma teenager, and they strike up a friendship. Milan helps Joan settle into the city, and in turn, Joan introduces him to Adriana, who has travelled to lay the memory of her dead mother to rest. They form an unlikely trio, bound by love and luck into something like family.
At the crossroads of youthful hope and the startling magic of coincidence, Where the Silver River Ends delves deep into mixed-race identity, systemic oppression, family reconciliation, and what happens when we gather the courage to slip out of the current and make our own way in the world.
Praise for Where the Silver River Ends:
“A rich, engaging novel about the difficulties of being an outsider.”—Foreword Reviews
Praise for Anna Quon’s other novels:
“An empathetic coming-of-age story about the redemptive power of love.”–Globe and Mail on Low
“Quon writes with a great deal of humour, and she spins a good yarn.”—Quill & Quire on Migration Songs