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All Books

All Books in this Collection

  • Wild Years

    Wild Years

    $24.95

    Legend. Bum. Genius. Con Man. Devoted husband and father. Myth. Storyteller. Inspiration. Drunk. Visionary. Tom Waits is all of these things.

    Waits is the lifeline between the great Beat poets and today’s rock & roll heroes. He’s old enough to be your dad and cool enough to be your hero. One of the few truly original musicians recording today, he’s also the rare singer who can actually act, and he has put together a respectable body of work in movies.

    Wild Years: The Music and Myth of Tom Waits retraces the long road that Waits has traveled and explores the music that made him a legend. Jay S. Jacobs looks at the towering myth that Waits has created for himself.

    Jay S. Jacobs follows the fate of one of America’s pre-eminent artists, a very private man whose career embodies a quirky array of fulfillment and loss, beauty and strangeness.

    This revised and updated edition includes a new chapter, with insight on Waits’ career in the 21st century thus far, as well as the most complete discography available in print. Tom’s Wild Years — a poignant, revealing celebration of the man and all his myths.

  • Wilderness Mother

    Wilderness Mother

    $24.95

    Revised and updated 30th anniversary edition of the wilderness classic of raising a young family in the remote wilds of northern Canada.
    In 1978 Deanna met her hermit husband in Northern BC while she was working as a forestry lookout attendant. For the next thirteen years she led the life of a pioneering mother in the wilderness. Over a hundred miles from the nearest paved road and cut off from most contact with the outside world, Deanna and her husband Jay built a life and raised their children in the stunning beauty and staggering isolation of the Ningunsaw Valley.
    She describes the family’s remarkable self-sufficiency in constructing their home, growing and harvesting their own food and eventually building a small dam to generate electricity. But the unrelenting work of a pioneer life is balanced with her deep love and connection to the natural world that surrounds them. Deanna has been a naturalist her whole life and nature breathes as a character in each of her books.
    This new edition includes chapters that expand on her relationship with Jay, his mental health challenges and the break-up of their marriage. Thirty years ago, these subjects were less discussed but in this new edition Deanna candidly addresses the personal challenges they faced in their marriage.

  • Wildfire & The Shoe

    Wildfire & The Shoe

    $21.95

    With spark and spunk, these two dark yet absurdly charming comedies offer a kaleidoscopic perspective of those who are destined to go down a lonely path and those who choose to share the weight of others’ journeys.

    In Wildfire, three odd triplets, two misfits, and one misunderstood woman are all burning with solitude and desire. Through an exploration of heredity and fate, these seemingly ordinary characters choose to struggle against their isolation in extraordinary yet relatable ways.

    In The Shoe, a weary mother, her perplexing son, their shy dentist, and his cocktail-sipping receptionist find themselves drawn together to face problems too daunting to deal with alone. From meltdowns to moments of tenderness, each of them are called on to find reserves of strength and empathy they never knew they had.

  • WILDWOMAN

    WILDWOMAN

    $18.95

    As the young newlywed of King Henry II of France, Catherine de Medici thought her life at court would be a fascinating forum of political discourse. Instead, the palace is a cruel and disturbing place where her singular function is to be a baby-making machine for male heirs. Even the other women at her side, a scheming lady-in-waiting and the king’s power-hungry mistress, seem to mostly fend for themselves. The only kinship she finds is with the paperback-romance hot, head-to-toe hairy wildman kept in the dungeon as one of the king’s collection of caged oddities. His friendly and feral presence gradually awakens Catherine’s own wild side, and once she unleashes it, no one is safe from her vengeful wrath.

    Based on the shocking true story that inspired Beauty and the Beast, Kat Sandler brings her trademark rapid-fire wit to this salacious saga of an infamous bad girl who could not be tamed. A viciously funny and sexy thrill ride, WILDWOMAN is about what happens when we let the monster out. Being bad never felt so good.

  • Will Starling

    Will Starling

    $22.95

    From the acclaimed author of Daniel O’Thunder comes a rollicking, bawdy, and haunting novel about love and redemption, death and resurrection.

    The great metropolis of London swaggers with Regency abandon as nineteen-year-old Will Starling returns from the Napoleonic Wars having spent five years assisting a military surgeon. Charming, brash, and damaged, Will is helping his mentor build a medical practice — and a life — in the rough Cripplegate area. To do so requires an alliance with the Doomsday Men: body snatchers that supply surgeons and anatomists with human cadavers.

    After a grave robbing goes terribly awry and a prostitute is accused of murder, Will becomes convinced of an unholy conspiracy that traces its way back to Dionysus Atherton, the brightest of London’s rising surgical stars. Wild rumours begin to spread of experiments upon the living and of uncanny sightings in London’s dark streets.

    Will’s obsessive search for the truth twists through alleyways, brothels, and charnel houses, towards a shattering discovery — about Dionysus Atherton and about Will, himself.

    Steeped in scientific lore, laced with dark humour, Will Starling is historical fiction like none other.

  • Will Starling

    Will Starling

    $32.95

    Shortlisted, Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic
    Longlisted, IMPAC Dublin Literary Award

    From the acclaimed author of Daniel O’Thunder comes a rollicking, bawdy, and haunting novel about love and redemption, death and resurrection.

    The great metropolis of London swaggers with Regency abandon as nineteen-year-old Will Starling returns from the Napoleonic Wars having spent five years assisting a military surgeon. Charming, brash, and damaged, Will is helping his mentor build a medical practice — and a life — in the rough Cripplegate area. To do so requires an alliance with the Doomsday Men: body snatchers that supply surgeons and anatomists with human cadavers.

    After a grave robbing goes terribly awry and a prostitute is accused of murder, Will becomes convinced of an unholy conspiracy that traces its way back to Dionysus Atherton, the brightest of London’s rising surgical stars. Wild rumours begin to spread of experiments upon the living and of uncanny sightings in London’s dark streets.

    Will’s obsessive search for the truth twists through alleyways, brothels, and charnel houses, towards a shattering discovery — about Dionysus Atherton and about Will, himself.

    Steeped in scientific lore, laced with dark humour, Will Starling is historical fiction like none other.

  • Willful Acts

    Willful Acts

    $19.95

    Willful Acts is an expanded and updated collection of Margaret Hollingsworth’s best-known and most popular plays, including The Apple in the Eye, Everloving, Diving, Islands, and War Babies (nominated for a Governor General’s Award); along with her latest play, Commonwealth Games. Hollingsworth’s earlier work showcases recurring women’s issues and themes (Islands was among the first plays to put lesbian characters front and centre on the Canadian stage). In her new play, Commonwealth Games, Hollingsworth wrestles with the question of what it means to be an English immigrant to Canada at a time when post-colonial thinking and political correctness dominate our lives.

  • William Shakespeare’s As You Like It, A Radical Retelling

    William Shakespeare’s As You Like It, A Radical Retelling

    $18.95

    The title of William Shakespeare’s As You Like It holds a double meaning that teasingly suggests the play can please all tastes. But is that possible? With his subversive updating of the Bard’s classic, Indigenous creator and cultural provocateur Cliff Cardinal seeks to find out. The show exults in bawdy humour, difficult subject matter, and raw emotion; Cardinal is not one to hold back when it comes to challenging delicate sensibilities.

  • Willow Quartet

    Willow Quartet

    $16.95

    In the aftermath of a tragedy that ends Kim and Ben’s marriage, Kim finds herself back in her childhood home, a quiet farm away from the city. Here, she invites Jim, a visiting musician, to stay with her in a bed-and-breakfast arrangement. It’s not long before Kim becomes infatuated with Jim’s sophistication and charm, and with his ability to make her forget her grief temporarily—until it inevitably boils to the surface. With Jim at her side, Kim struggles to navigate through her unresolved grief and begins to explore her buried feelings.

  • Wind Leaves Absence

    Wind Leaves Absence

    $17.95

    These poems are steeped in loss and lament as they concern the death of the poet’s family members, particularly her father and the premature death of two brothers two years apart. The collection’s tone is often elegiac, but rarely maudlin, and the clipped narrative is frequently imbued with lyrical strains. There is an abundance of quotes and hat-tip allusions that act as sign posts along the grieving journey.


    Maxwell’s poems are emotional counterpoints to life’s implacable realities. Sickness and old age come to her father, as eventually does death. Her brothers are taken before their time and once again death enters her life. In the resulting response she learns that self-recrimination, denial, or anger cannot change the course of events. She teaches us that grief is a singular and deeply emotional experience and the poems convey this intimacy.

  • Window Ledge

    Window Ledge

    $18.95

    Window Ledge is a raw, unadorned testament to what has been done and is being done human to human, and human to animal, plant, fowl and fish, feeling its way through life on feet, on paws, on wings and with fins. The poems carve deep intowhat we crave, what we cannot escape, and inevitably what we must make peace with. Throughout, the poems express a kind of fatality and awe at the mysterious power of compassion that transcends everything. These are not the poems of a young woman. Instead, they were written as the poet found shimmering, unexpected joy in themidst of indescribable pain. The result is a daring collection that challenges readers to find their way to the essence of everything..

  • Windstorm

    Windstorm

    $17.95

    Windstorm is a passport to the place where chaos and form meet; Denham’s timeless ethereal gaze is rooted in the mastery of poetic forms such as the sonnet and Dante’s terza rima. These quiet, forceful poems explore heaven, earth and sea with arresting images, ideas and words. Like the wind, Denham’s poetry has the power to move.in the windsong. This is no translation,this long-line tow trawling the abyssal silt, oceanic-soul, in the low opalinelight sifting down through fire’s alburnum.–excerpt, Windstorm

  • Winged Spirits

    Winged Spirits

    $24.95

    Winged Spirits

  • Winging Home

    Winging Home

    $24.95

    In British Columbia’s remote and exotic Cariboo Plateau, “Everything is slow. Everything is happening at the same speed, which is no speed at all.” Harold Rhenisch has spent eleven years watching birds every day from his house on the shore of 108 Lake—at this speed, but you wouldn’t know it from reading Winging Home. Known as “one of Canada’s master prose stylists,” Rhenisch dissects avian behaviour with the ear of a poet and the mouth of a stand-up comedian. His blackbirds are a jug band in full flight, his robins drunken bachelors on a jag, and his eagles decrepit, stumblebum scavengers.

    With lively illustrations by noted bird artist Tom Godin, Winging Home: A Palette of Birds is more than just writing about the natural world. It is a lyrical, evocative memoir of life in the Cariboo that crackles with humorous, often startling observations of birds and men set amidst the wild beauty of British Columbia.

  • Winging It

    Winging It

    $24.95

    A wedding and a summer camp that Tommy and Carter are never going to forget.

    Tommy discovers magic exists, his boyfriend is a rock giant, and his sister is marrying one of the leaders of a supernatural community called Aetherborn.

    Carter learns to navigate an in-person relationship, introducing Tommy to the magical world, and being involved in his Ariki’s wedding.

    Both boys need to build their confidence in each other, themselves, and their relationship. The Door Tech summer camp seems to be the perfect way to do that, until they get magically transported to the not-so-fictional world of Everdome. In this realm of Domed continents floating in space, winged beasts, and new cultures, the boys will have to overcome challenges beyond anything they’ve seen before.

    The only way they, and their relationship, can survive is if they start Winging It!

  • Wings Over the Sea

    Wings Over the Sea

    $15.95

    Allan Moses was a legendary figure, who was better known abroad than at home. A fisherman from Grand Manan, New Brunswick, Moses’s fame began when he identified an albatross captured in the Bay of Fundy, 7000 miles away from its Antarctic home. Thus began a career that led Moses to South America, west Africa, and back to the Bay of Fundy once again on scientific expeditions that changed the history of ornithology.