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Pakistan, 2083 AD.
For Avaan, a gun in his hand feels as natural as breathing. As a Pakistani without citizenship, living under martial law and religious bigotry, violence has become a way of life. What respite he had from the world — his brother, his family, and Doua, the love of his life — was snatched away in a military raid.
Now broken, Avaan finds himself involved in a civil war that poisons everything he’s ever touched. The army shadows his every move, a mob boss wants him dead, and a legendary resistance leader has taken a keen interest in him. But there is a ray of hope: Avaan discovers that Doua is alive. Obsessed with finding her, he takes a stand against the army, the mob, and Pakistan itself with the only thing he could ever count on: the gun in his hand.
WINNER OF THE 2020/2021 ALCUIN SOCIETY BOOK DESIGN AWARD FOR POETRY
WINNER OF THE ROBERT KROETSCH CITY OF EDMONTON BOOK PRIZE
WINNER OF THE 2023 STEPHAN G. STEPHANSSON AWARD FOR POETRY
WINNER OF THE GERALD LAMPERT MEMORIAL AWARD
WINNER OF THE INDIGENOUS VOICES AWARD FOR PUBLISHED POETRY IN ENGLISH
SHORTLISTED FOR THE DAYNE OGILVIE PRIZE FOR LGBTQ2S+ EMERGING WRITERS
LONGLISTED FOR THE RAYMOND SOUSTER AWARD
An Indigenous resistance historiography, poetry that interrogates the colonial violence of the archive
Whitemud Walking is about the land Matthew Weigel was born on and the institutions that occupy that land. It is about the interrelatedness of his own story with that of the colonial history of Canada, which considers the numbered treaties of the North-West to be historical and completed events. But they are eternal agreements that entail complex reciprocity and obligations. The state and archival institutions work together to sequester documents and knowledge in ways that resonate violently in people’s lives, including the dispossession and extinguishment of Indigenous title to land.
Using photos, documents, and recordings that are about or involve his ancestors, but are kept in archives, Weigel examines the consequences of this erasure and sequestration. Memories cling to documents and sometimes this palimpsest can be read, other times the margins must be centered to gain a fuller picture. Whitemud Walking is a genre-bending work of visual and lyric poetry, non-fiction prose, photography, and digital art and design.
In Whiteout: How Canada Cancels Blackness, his new and essential collection of essays, George Elliott Clarke exposes the various ways in which the Canadian imagination demonizes, excludes, and oppresses Blackness. Clarke’s range is extraordinary: he canvasses African-Canadian writers who have tracked Black invisibility, highlights the racist bias of our true crime writing, reveals the whitewashing of African-Canadian perspectives in universities, and excoriates the political failure to reckon with the tragedy of Africville, the once-thriving, “Africadian” community whose last home was razed in 1970. For Clarke, Canada’s relentless celebration of itself as a site of “multicultural humanitarianism” has blinded White leaders and citizens to the country’s many crimes, at home and abroad, thus blacking out the historical record. These essays yield an alternate history of Canada, a corrective revision that Clarke describes as “inking words on snow, evanescent and ephemeral.”
Poetry that explores how accidental voyeurism can force reconsideration and reconciliation
White·out: n. a surface condition … in which no object casts a shadow, the horizon cannot be seen, and only dark objects are discernible …
Whiteout: when the heavy weather of daily life establishes the measure of the measureless; when the predatory nature of the accidental conjures cowboys and the comatose; when the sickly sweet pop of life underfoot contrasts the televised image, shrinking to a pinprick.
Whiteout: calques and towers, twin polar storms, falling, burning.
Whiteout: “a book of white nothing.”
George Murray’s sixth collection has been a decade in the making. At once taut, tender and terrifying, haunted and haunting, Whiteout shatters convention in the collision of order and rage, formlessness and hard-won serenity.
“Rhyno delivers a wholly intriguing mystery unlike any other.” — The Miramichi Reader
Haunted by a childhood of picking locks and tailing suspects with her private-eye dad, Dame Polara desperately wants to leave the mysteries behind and lead an average life with average ambitions: to preserve heritage buildings through her job at City Hall, to care for her father’s mounting health complications, and to one day raise a family of her own.
But when her landlord serves her an eviction notice, and Dame agrees to investigate his wife’s infidelity in exchange for keeping the apartment. A simple domestic case, or so Dame believes, until her investigation uncovers a serial arsonist targeting the very buildings she’s fighting to preserve.
When this new mystery reopens old wounds, Dame must use every trick her father taught her to discover the truth and protect those she loves — lest the dangers of the job catch up to her and burn her whole life to the ground.
Single mother and reluctant detective Dame Polara just wants to keep her family safe. When her two-year-old daughter is kidnapped by her old nemesis, she is forced to draw on her unusual talents to rescue Rosie. To make matters worse, Dame’s dad — retired private eye Dodge Polara — is hospitalized after suffering a second stroke, and Dame uncovers a strange connection between her mother’s murder and the apparent suicide of a former city counsellor.
Scouring the Greater Toronto Area in search of Rosie, Dame relies on her friends, her father’s shady connections, and even her former adversaries for aid. Her investigation leads her to a federal prison in Gravenhurst, an abandoned Queensway motel, and to a Toronto Argonauts home game.
But when Dame learns that Rosie’s abduction is part of a larger criminal conspiracy, she may be forced to betray her own ideals to save her family.
In his first collection since the GG-nominated Prologue for the Age of Consequence, Martens adds an autobiographical lens to his concerns about class and labour, sharpening the landscape of 80s and 90s northern Alberta with a controlled, imagist eye.
In Who Else in the Dark Headed There, we meet someone right up against the loss of his mother in a place where the feeling of the darkheaded there and the person who is moving toward it, or who is in it, can be set. As in a scene in a play. As in a dream. There is, from the difficulty of childhood, which can’t be changed, an understanding that time is not fixed and that distance is fluctuating. Here, in many registers, the language of memory is disturbed, syntax and point of view are disturbed. It is a self looking back at an earlier self as if it is possible to be objective, when we know it’s not possible, and therein is the grief and the searching and the resonance of the machinery of time.
Grappling with familial inheritances, and charged with undercurrents of violence, alcoholism, and isolation, Garth Martens writes with a language that is both clear-cut and surreal, evoking a rural, unstable portrait of childhood.
This book is a biography of artist, film maker, and photographer, Kim Ondaatje, née Betty Jane Kimbark. Born into a wealthy family, Kim’s story is a reverse of the rags to riches narrative. She married two highly successful writers, Douglas Jones and Michael Ondaatje, had six children, and managed to carve a career as a respected artist whose works are in all major galleries/museums in Canada. Kim Ondaatje’s life is fascinating on many fronts. She is undoubtedly talented, and has contributed significantly to the Canadian art scene. One of her paintings from the Factory series hangs in the newly opened Canadian gallery at the Art Gallery of Ontario. She continues to be creative as she approaches her nineties.
The essential companion for everyone from casual viewer to avid fan
Doctor Who was already the world’s longest-running science fiction series when it returned in 2005 to huge success. An enormously popular series among genre fans in North America, Doctor Who encompasses horror, science fiction, comedy, action, and historical adventure and is loved for its uniquely British wit and clever scripting. It’s no wonder the series’ hero, monsters, and even its theme song are pop culture icons.
In Who Is The Doctor, experts Graeme Burk and Robert Smith? bring insights into all facets of Doctor Who’s triumphant return to television from the history of Daleks, Cybermen, and the eight classic series Doctors, to a guide to every episode of the new series. Covering the six seasons of the new series, this is the essential companion for the most avid fan as well as the more casual viewer. Allons-y!
Travel with the Doctor in this essential companion for the modern Doctor Who era
Since its return to British television in 2005, through its 50th anniversary in 2013, to its historic casting of actress Jodie Whittaker in the title role, Doctor Who continues to be one of the most popular series in Britain and all over the world.
Who Is The Doctor 2 is a guide to the new series of Doctor Who starring Matt Smith, Peter Capaldi, and Jodie Whittaker. Every episode in series 7 to 11, as well as the 50th anniversary specials, is examined, analyzed, and discussed in thoughtful detail, highlighting the exhilarating moments, the connections to Doctor Who lore, the story arcs, the relationships, the goofs, the accumulated trivia and much, much more. Designed for die-hard Whovians and Who newbies alike, Who Is The Doctor 2 explores time and space with the Doctor and chronicles the imagination that has made Doctor Who an iconic part of culture for over 50 years.
New Edition as part City of Vancouver’s Legacy Book Project, with a foreword by historian Daniel Francis
Who Killed Janet Smith? examines one of the most infamous and still unsolved murder cases in Canadian history: the 1924 murder of twenty-two-year-old Scottish nursemaid Janet Smith. Originally published in 1984, and out of print for over a decade, this tale of intrigue, racism, privilege, and corruption in high places is a true-crime recreation that reads like a complex thriller.
We are pleased to be reissuing this title as part of the City of Vancouver’s Legacy Book Project. This new edition features a Foreword by historian Daniel Francis.
Praise for Who Killed Janet Smith?:
“… drug traffic, Roaring Twenties hedonism, official corruption, cutthroat competition among newspapers, a public taste for occultism, etc. – and entrust the whole works to a good storyteller, and you have one terrific political history of Vancouver.” (Geist Magazine)
“Starkins has written an engaging and well-crafted popular social history of Vancouver in the ostensibly hopeful, materially buoyant flapper era’ between the end of the slaughter of the Great War and the onset of the Depression. He reveals the serious fault-lines and profound anxieties of a community emerging in this decade from both its recent frontier past and a costly war into becoming a settled North American city. … this is a very worthwhile and informative case study, one that is likely to keep the conundrum in the title alive and encourage further research on the topic. … And who did kill Janet Smith and why? Despite the author’s attempt to follow up as many leads as he could find, the answer remains elusive. Despite the presence of a smoking gun, whose hand pressed the trigger is still a mystery, although in an updated afterword Starkins warms to one explanation. As with all mysteries, that should remain for now a mystery.” (BC Studies)
“Mr. Starkins excavates each layer of the story like an archaeologist with a trowel and camel-hair brush. He misses nothing. The result is one of those unputdownable reads that stays in your memory.” (Howard Engel)
Who Killed Ty Conn is the brilliant investigative work of Linden MacIntyre and Theresa Burke, the current host and producer respectively of the CBC’s the fifth estate. It tells the tragic story of Ty Conn’s life of crime and misfortune. Originally published by Viking Canada in 2000, the book has been updated and reissued with a new afterword from the author and a new foreword by author and criminologist Elliott Leyton.
A classic in the literature of true crime, Who Killed Ty Conn portrays a man coming to terms with a life of rejection – and the social system that failed to save him.
In this eclectic collection, Who Shot Estevan Light?: Tales from the Salish Sea and Beyond, author Douglas Hamilton shares stories of maritime history and local folklore: The Flying Dutchman, a notorious BC pirate reputed to have been part of Butch Cassidy’s gang and who eluded the police only to resurface on Lasqueti Island; a BC lighthouse that was shelled by a Japanese submarine in 1942; an undeservedly little-known French explorer who rivalled Captain Cook in the extent of his travels in the Pacific, and more.
Hamilton introduces us to a band of rumrunners who narrowly escaped police while using speed boats outfitted with WWI aircraft engines, and to the tragic history of the steamship Grappler. He takes us inside a horrendous maritime disaster event exacerbated by racism and greed, and he shares the tale of a Spanish map of “California Island” that looked suspiciously like Vancouver Island at a time when maps were state secrets or deliberate deceptions. As in his previous publication Accidental Eden, Hamilton treats the reader to tales of local west coast folklore, including the perils of moonshine, a mysterious disappearance, and a titillating intergenerational tale. Who Shot Estevan Light? offers an enthralling escape into the world of adventure, intrigue and timeless west coast maritime stories.
In this second poetry collection by Michael Lithgow, intimations of something numinous and larger than life jostle with the material demands of the everyday, sparking an uncertainty about what lurks at the edges of things, if anything at all. The poems drift in the tension between a pleasing suburban life simply lived and unsettling moments that pull against it, intrusions of the surreal.
Civic uncertainty in the wilderness gives way to more intimate modes of circumspection, a working-through of different kinds of grieving – for a parent who withers from cancer, for family members murdered in war, for the platforms of death on which common conveniences like grocery stores depend.
The poems weigh harsh realities against promises of life and renewal, struggling to put into words something that would rather not be named. They are a thought-provoking meditation on being haunted by darker and more beautiful shadows than are apparent on a life’s face level.