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Longlisted for the 2023 Scotiabank Giller Prize September 2023 selection for Great Group Reads by the Women’s National Book Association“Unsparing and compassionate … A novel of harrowing eloquence, We Meant Well explores compelling cultural contrasts and the ambiguity of charitable outreach.” — Foreword ReviewsA propulsive debut that grapples with timely questions about what it means to be charitable, who deserves what, and who gets the power to decideIt’s the middle of the night in Los Angeles when Maya, a married mother of one, receives the phone call. Her colleague Marc has been accused of assaulting a local girl in Likanni, where they operate a charitable orphanage. Can she get on the next flight?When Maya arrives, protesters surround the compound. The accuser is Lele, her former protégé and the chief’s daughter. There are no witnesses, no proof of any crime.What happened that night? And what will happen to the orphanage if this becomes a scandal? Caught between Marc and Lele, the charity and the villagers, her marriage and new temptations, and between worlds, Maya lives the secret contradictions of the aid worker: there to serve the most deprived, but ultimately there to govern.As Maya feels the pleasures, freedoms, and humanity of life in Likanni, she recognizes that her American life is inextricably woven into this violent reality — and that dishonesty in one place affects the realities in another.
A lively collection of essays that re-examines the extraordinary legacies of the four Canadian women who dominated ’90s music and changed the industry foreverFully revised and updated, with a foreword by Vivek Shraya In this of-the-moment essay collection, celebrated music journalist Andrea Warner explores the ways in which Céline Dion, Shania Twain, Alanis Morissette, and Sarah McLachlan became legit global superstars and revolutionized ’90s music. In an era when male-fronted musical acts were given magazine covers, Grammys and Junos, and serious critical consideration, these four women were reduced, mocked, and disparaged by the media and became pop culture jokes even as their recordings were demolishing sales records. The world is now reconsidering the treatment and reputations of key women in ’90s entertainment, and We Oughta Know is a crucial part of that conversation.With empathy, humor, and reflections on her own teenaged perceptions of Céline, Shania, Alanis, and Sarah, Warner offers us a new perspective on the music and legacies of the four Canadian women who dominated the ’90s airwaves and influenced an entire generation of current-day popstars with their voices, fashion, and advocacy.
Winner of the 2021 Ottawa Book Award for English Fiction
In her debut collection of poetry, Conyer Clayton hovers in the ether, grasping wildly for a fleeting sense of certitude. Through experiences with addiction and co-dependence, sex and art, nature and death, she grapples for transcendence while exploring what it means to disengage. What is revealed when you allow yourself to truly feel? What do you ask for to carry you into life, and where do you land when this fails? And when you are finally, beautifully, emptied out, who are you? The poems in We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite wonder aloud amidst tangled revelations, and yearn to be lifted away.
Traversing the world from the Garden of Eden to a grandmother asking what’s a tweet, We Were Like Everyone Else explores the daily humanity of family, the folly of our politics, and a natural world that seems to offer the promise of consolation but never quite does. In poems both lyrical and narrative, the possibility of violence is never far off, but the same can be said of love, our capacity to endure, our hunger for healing and redemption. And yet these poems offer no prescription, no bulwark to keep menace from our children or despair from encroaching on our few vestiges of hope. Ken Victor’s first collection of poems takes us back to children ducking under desks in the nuclear fear of the 50’s, to the collapse of innocence in the face of the Vietnam War, to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the depravity of the siege of Sarejevo. Always the question of whether or not we can survive our own missteps lingers in the background of our 21st century lives as we go about raising our children, dining in restaurants, walking in woods, working from a home office. As one poem puts it, you’ve got to live your life like you’re in control of it, pray like you aren’t.
Nominated for a 2025 National Magazine Award in Poetry
In her first collection of new poetry in a decade, Robyn Sarah chronicles the pandemic years with quiet wisdom and her flair for meshing the familiar with the numinous.
In We’re Somewhere Else Now, Robyn Sarah moves with ease from the particular to the abstract. These are poems of grief and unexpected change, of quiet awe at the human experience. Each poem is a window for the reader to look into, “lit room to lit room,” tracking empty, desultory days of isolation and uncertainty, while also highlighting reasons to pay attention: playing with a grandchild, the rarity of a leap year, the call of the birds.
The generation to which Joe and Josephine Crowshoe belonged spanned more than the length of their lifetimes. That generation fought heroically in world wars and at the same time raised children under a paternalistic federal regime that denied both a culture and a heritage. The Crowshoes regained their heritage and shared it with the larger community, gaining respect from all the people with whom they were in contact and becoming articulate representatives and the holders of stories, legends, and customs. The interviews in Weasel Tail track not just their personal stories but the stories of a people who insisted on being recognized and a culture born out of the land of southern Alberta. Paralleling the interviews, Mike Ross has included historical photographs and documentation of a world and people who are a rich part of Alberta’s history.
Set in a tragic, transformative year in an extraordinary place with larger-than-life characters, The Weather Diviner is a story of self-discovery—not just for one young woman, but for Newfoundland itself.
It’s 1942. With polished boots and bulging wallets, the Americans have come to defend a highly strategic location—Newfoundland: the Allies’ new transatlantic transportation hub. Like thousands of others chasing new opportunities, Violet Morgen abandons her remote outport home and heads to St. John’s. An amateur forecaster with a powerful sixth sense for the island’s tempestuous winds and weather, Violet is determined to help the Americans fight the enemy. But determination, it turns out, is not enough.
Carefully-researched and -crafted, entertaining, and informative, The Weather Diviner is a heart-felt tale in which friends make a difference, weather makes for interesting conversation, and opportunity comes to those who dare to dream.
The stories in this collection centre around new immigrants ? spirited people who are prepared to leave their home and hearth to travel to distant lands to pursue their dreams of a better life. But often times there?s a reality check , and they are left to grapple with unexpected challenges of cultural shock, paucity of jobs, lack of Canadian work experience, absence of affordable daycare, and non-recognition of their educational credentials. Though the accounts are fictional they show the determination of new immigrants to survive on alien soil.
Douglas Lochhead is one of Canada’s finest poets. In celebration of his eightieth birthday, Goose Lane Editions is releasing Weathers: Poems New and Selected, a collection of the best of Lochhead’s work from the last fifteen years.
Douglas Lochhead’s poetic imagination receives its greatest stimulus from what his senses tell him about nature and other people, and his poetry overflows with energy. Sharp observation of detail anchors his passionate sense of place; subtle irony and masterful form barely contain his uncompromising honesty and strong emotions; and his command of the poet’s craft guides his attacks on the boundaries of meaning. The contrast he achieves between tightly controlled form and constantly moving, dynamic imagery yields the clean, precise poetry that his readers have valued so highly over his more than 50-year career.
Lochhead began his career in the 1940s, publishing his poems in literary journals. His first book, The Heart is on Fire was published in 1959, and in the next two decades he published eight more books of poetry. In 1980, his landmark collection High Marsh Road was nominated for a Governor General’s Award. In 1986, Goose Lane Editions published Tiger in the Skull: New and Selected Poems, 1959-1986, Since that time, Douglas Lochhead has published four major collections: Upper Cape Poems, a testament to his fascination with the Tantramar Marsh; Homage to Henry Alline, a tribute to an 18th-century evangelist; Breakfast at Mel’s, superbly crafted poems about the magic of place, and the rewards of observation; and Cape Enragé, poems written on the wild shore of the Bay of Fundy.
In the award-winning art book Dykelands, his austere nature poems accompany Thaddeus Holownia’s large-format photographs. He has also published All Things Do Continue, Yes, Yes, Yes!, and Black Festival, a beautiful memorial to his wife.
For Weathers, Douglas Lochhead has collaborated with editor David Creelman, who teaches Atlantic literature at the University of New Brunswick, Saint John. Together, they have gathered the strongest works from Lochhead’s books, new poems published in literary journals, and previously unpublished poems to create the quintessential collection of Lochhead’s writing.
Weaving Water is a novel about otters, healing the human heart, and finding hope for an imperilled Earth.Ecologist Beth Meyer has lost hope for the future of the Earth. Still she yearns to do something that matters. Just days after she ventures into the Newfoundland wilderness to study river otters, she meets her contrary neighbour, Mattie MacKenzie, who has lived there for eighty years. Living in a world filled with secrets and magic, Mattie confounds Beth’s scientific understanding at every turn. Ungrounded, Beth finds herself pulled inexorably toward an affair with Mattie’s nephew, Dan.Beth soon discovers that there is far more to the world than meets the Western scientific eye. There is mystery – unknowing. Hope, both for the Earth and for herself, lives in the heart of the mystery that is wilderness.
An otherworldly uncanniness haunts the margins of Darren Bifford’s debut collection, Wedding in Fire Country. Bifford is exceptionally adept at capturing the beauty of the mundane, and his poetry offers an insightful meditation on the meaning of the individual journey within larger political and geographical spheres. However, these familiar scenes are shot through with darker moments of raw violence and fear, as wolves wander the landscape of young adulthood and disaster taps at the windows of domestic spaces.
Bifford makes use of folkloric motifs and the juxtaposition of wilderness and urban environments to emphasize radical gaps in human understanding. Throughout the collection, the unknowable is embodied not in monstrous creatures, but in common experiences such as nostalgia, illness and accidents. Many of the poems are related in a voice whose serenity belies its sinister undertones–in one poem, the narrator’s tone hardly registers a change when a father-son bonding experience suddenly takes a gruesome turn. Touching moments of intimacy can be found throughout this collection, but menace continues to lurk in the shadows.
After barely surviving the events of The Killer Trail, Vancouver psychiatric social worker Chris Ryder once again finds himself at the centre of a high-profile murder case: Marvin Goodwin, a young man who falls on the extreme end of the autism spectrum, is found covered with blood at the murder scene of a local ice cream truck driver. When Chris is called in to learn what he can about Marvin, he finds that the weight of blood might just be too much for him to bear.
Complicating matters are Chris’ strained relationship with his father; the vicious actions of his half-brother, Ray; the blinding spotlight of the media; and the aftereffects of trauma. In The Weight of Blood, D.B. Carew has given us a protagonist who is trying to hold everything together while staunching blood that both spills and connects.
World-renowned cartoonist Seth returns with three new ghost stories for 2026.
Reading a ghost story on Christmas Eve was once as much a part of traditional Christmas celebrations as turkey, eggnog, and Santa Claus. World-famous cartoonist Seth selects and beautifully illustrates each book for this beloved series in his own inimitable way, bringing back these classic Christmas ghost stories for readers across North America.
Refusing to fall victim to a macabre family tradition, Humphrey Walford destroys a bed in which generations of his ancestors saw out their last days, and locks up the room it used to lie in. But when his new wife takes an interest in the locked room, Walford discovers the dire consequences of trying to avoid fate.