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All Books

All Books in this Collection

  • Bidding, The

    Bidding, The

    $18.95

    In 1972 a young girl is abducted and murdered. Montreal news reporter Ty Davis is drawn into a bizarre sequence of events when the body of the ten-year-old girl and the bodies of her kidnappers are found in a 19th century farmhouse in the Laurentian community of Saint Sauveur. Strange symbols on the floor, ancient words in a journal, and additional discoveries hint of something more than a child abduction gone wrong. Davis and his colleagues find themselves embroiled in a complex web of international conspiracy as their careers and lives are put in jeopardy.

  • Big Breath of a Wish

    Big Breath of a Wish

    $15.00

    Richard Harrison’s fourth book, Big Breath of a Wish, delves deeply into the linguistic discoveries children make in their first two years of life. It uniquely opens up these discoveries to readers, who identify both with the child and the parents and, through Harrison’s clear, suggestive language, rediscover themselves.

  • Big Dream, The

    Big Dream, The

    $19.95

    Big Dream, The

  • Big Mall

    Big Mall

    $23.95

    A phenomenology of the mall: If the mall makes us feel bad, why do we keep going back? In a world poisoned by capitalism, is shopping what makes life worth living?

    Kate Black grew up in West Edmonton Mall – a mall on steroids, notorious for its indoor waterpark, deadly roller coaster, and controversial dolphin shows. But everyone has a favourite mall, or a mall that is their own personal memory palace. It’s a place people love to hate and hate to love – a site of pleasure and pain, of death and violence, of (sub)urban legend.

    Blending a history of shopping with a story of coming of age in North America’s largest and strangest mall, Big Mall investigates how these structures have become the ultimate symbol of late-capitalist dread – and, surprisingly, a subversive site of hope.

    “Speaking as a child of PacSun and Hot Topic myself, Big Mall is like a madeleine dipped in Orange Julius. Like a mall, the book itself has a lot of everything, a sublime mix of memoir, history, and cultural criticism. Kate Black is a learned Virgil in the consumerist Inferno, always avoiding the obvious and leading us to surprising connections—oil, suicide, Reddit, squatters, dolphins. Whether malls fill you with nostalgia or horror, this book will change your relationship to the world we’ve constructed around us.” – Tony Tulathimutte, author of Private Citizens

    “Before there was Instagram, there was the mall. But what happens when a seasonless, tacky, fantasyland is all you knew growing up? How does one embrace a genuinely fake experience? Or to be more precise, a fake but genuine experience? Kate Black’s Big Mall is a smart, sentimental, and perspective-shifting look at the outsized role that big malls play in modern life. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, one thing’s for sure: after reading this book, you’ll never look at a mall in the same way again.” – Ziya Tong, Science broadcaster & author of The Reality Bubble

  • Big Men Fear Me

    Big Men Fear Me

    $24.95

    Nominated for the 2023 Heritage Toronto Book Award • Finalist for the 2023 Ottawa Book Award in English Nonfiction • Longlisted for the 2023 National Business Book Award

    The remarkable true story of the rise and fall of one of North America’s most influential media moguls.

    When George McCullagh bought The Globe and The Mail and Empire and merged them into the Globe and Mail, the charismatic 31-year-old high school dropout had already made millions on the stock market. It was just the beginning of the meteoric rise of a man widely expected to one day be prime minister of Canada. But the charismatic McCullagh had a dark side. Dogged by the bipolar disorder that destroyed his political ambitions and eventually killed him, he was all but written out of history. It was a loss so significant that journalist Robert Fulford has called McCullagh’s biography “one of the great unwritten books in Canadian history”—until now.

    In Big Men Fear Me, award-winning historian Mark Bourrie tells the remarkable story of McCullagh’s inspirational rise and devastating fall, and with it sheds new light on the resurgence of populist politics, challenges to collective action, and attacks on the free press that characterize our own tumultuous era.

  • Big of You

    Big of You

    $24.95

    In these nine stories, Elise Levine illuminates the aspirations of women and men (and one sassy millennia-old being) as they sift through the midden of their regrets, friendships, and marriages, and seek fresher ways of inhabiting older selves.

    Two young women hitchhike around Europe, a lurid secret between them. A team in space is left reeling after a colleague’s unexpected death. Ambitious brothers take to the skies in an aerostat in 19th-century Paris. Big of You contains stories of real and fantastical life, each with its own distinctive voice and wild vocabulary.

    At turns playful, blistering, unabashed, these stories examine the nuanced, kaleidoscopic dimensions of character, of people driven by ambition yet contending with the hauntings of the past. Spanning various settings and time periods, Big of You captures the everyday and the extraordinary in collisions soaring and earthy, exuberant and visceral.

  • Big Reader

    Big Reader

    $22.95

    A book about memory, loss, and a love of books from one of Canada’s finest essayists

    Ever since childhood, Susan Olding has been a big reader, never without a book on the go. Not surprising, then, that she turns to the library to read her own life. From the dissolution of her marriage to the forging of a tentative relationship with her new partner’s daughter, from discovering Toronto as a young undergrad to, years later, watching her mother slowly go blind: through every experience, Olding crafts exquisite, searingly honest essays about what it means to be human, to be a woman–and to be a reader.

    Big Reader is a brilliant, achingly beautiful collection about the slipperiness of memory and identity, the enduring legacy of loss, and the nuanced disappointments and joys of a reading life.

  • Big Rig

    Big Rig

    $12.95

    Come along for a ride with big rig truckers as they…
    – experience life on the road as a rookie behind the big wheel.
    – meet colorful dudes like Lonesome Len, The Pistol Packin’ Partner, Zorro, Chrome Stack, Yabba Dabba, and “Little” John.
    – battle wild weather and treacherous terrain, face soft roads, bone-shattering pot holes, and unknown destinations.
    – find themselves in goofy situations — from practical jokes gone awry to “Tiny” getting stuck in the back of his cab.
    – heroically rescue wayward travelers, including two determined old ladies who refuse to leave their ancient Ford in a snow storm.

  • Big Rig 2

    Big Rig 2

    $14.95

    Join McTavish and his fellow haulers as they…
    – hunt down and retrieve a stolen rig.
    – sweat bullets hauling burning boxcars and molten steel.
    – park a bulldozer in a living room to keep it warm.
    – slip, slide, and spin up and down icy inclines and muddy trails.
    – reveal the secrets of real trucking life in a step-by-step haul.
    – pass on wisdom and warnings about the ins and outs of life on the highway.

  • Big Shadow

    Big Shadow

    $23.00

    In an unnamed town in the summer of 1998, Judy is an isolated and inexperienced teenager on the cusp of adulthood struggling to craft an identity for herself—especially as the artist she wants to be.

    There is little help around her. Her only friends are increasingly obsessed with a cultish belief in a coming “Big Shadow.” Her mother is afraid of life and finds solace in TV shows. At her lowest point, Judy meets Maurice Blunt, a visiting summer poetry class professor who is a “has-been” fixture of the 1970s NYC punk music scene. Judy believes Maurice—a man more than twice her age desperately seeking lost adoration—is the ticket out of her current life. Soon, she begins taking secret weekend trips to visit him.

    Judy’s visits to his apartment in New York bring hopes of belonging to the city’s cultural world and making a living as a video artist. With each trip and frustrated promise, however, she feels the creeping realization that there is a price to pay for her golden ticket entry into this insular and moribund scene. Judy must navigate the shifting power dynamics with her aging gatekeeper and the possibility of building an early adult identity alone.

    An affecting novel of psychological nuance and dark humour, Big Shadow explores the costs of self-deceit, fandom, and tenuous ambitions, exposing the lies we’ll tell ourselves and the promises we’ll make to edge closer to what we want… or what we think we want.

  • Big Sky Falling

    Big Sky Falling

    $17.95

    In her first book, Kelsey Andrews moves from the big skies of Grande Prairie, Alberta and her family home, to the smaller skies hemmed in by mountains and skyscrapers of Vancouver. As she tries to adjust from a thirsty countryside filled with little wonders, to a lush cityscape with fewer miracles, the sky falls in as depression comes on. The weight of loneliness and past secrets that remain unsayable are a driving force, yet these poems fill the lonely places for the reader. She finds a way to befriend rather than beat depression with the help of a natural world populated by winged things, animals, trees, water, and sky. Her poems contain earthy whimsy and playfulness, though they are not without gristle and little violences – the moon’s ancient bruises, gargoyles that shriek and moan, and the thunk when you split a chicken. Themes of girl blending with nature, bodies the right (and wrong) shape, looking for new family through new relationships, and the question of what is wildness are explored. From snails to suicide and picking blackberries to killing flies, through it all, Kelsey finds beauty and the light that persists.

  • Biking to Blissville

    Biking to Blissville

    $14.95

    Over highways and byways and converted railway roadbeds, Biking to Blissville gives maps and precise directions for about forty bicycle rides through the most scenic areas of Maritime Canada. Most of the trips are loops. Each leads from a country inn, motel, or campground through uncrowded countryside, and author Kent Thompson has tested them all for fun, safety, and degree of difficulty. Thompson also suggests accomodations that fit cyclists tastes and purses, and the vagaries of the weather, from rustic campgrounds to opulent country inns, from old-time sporting camps to cozy bed-and-breakfasts.

  • bill bissett and His Works

    bill bissett and His Works

    $9.95

    An examination of the anti-conventional Canadian poet Bill Bissett and his body of work.

  • Billion Dollar Start-Up

    Billion Dollar Start-Up

    $29.95

    It only took five years for two brothers-in-law to create a billion-dollar, award-winning, take-no-prisoners cannabis company called HEXO. How did they do it? That’s the story.

    From early roadblocks and devastating personal and financial setbacks to explosive growth and some of the biggest cannabis deals in global history, Billion Dollar Start-Up not only recounts the HEXO story but the history of Canada’s momentous road to legalization.

    In this part fast-paced memoir, part high-octane business book, writer and journalist Julie Beun gives us an intimate look at the life of a start-up and the ferocious entrepreneurial drive it takes to succeed — written in real-time, as the story unfolded.

    Throughout history, there have been fewer than 100 Canadians who have started a company and lived to see it become worth one billion dollars. Adam Miron and Sébastien St-Louis are two of them. This is their story.

  • Billy Bishop Goes to War 2nd Edition

    Billy Bishop Goes to War 2nd Edition

    $17.95

    One of Canada’s most successful and enduring musical plays, Billy Bishop Goes to War was first published in 1982 and went on to win the Los Angeles Drama Critics’ Award and the Governor General’s Award for Drama. In 2010, the celebrated story of the World War One flying ace – credited with seventy-two victories and billed as the top pilot in the British Empire – was revised to frame the original play as a retrospective. It is the same play it always was – the difference is in the telling. Billy Bishop now appears in his later years, reflecting on his wartime exploits, and on the business of war and hero making. Bishop’s reminiscence is not so much about the horror and death of war as it is about being young and intensely alive. “The prime of life / The best of men,” Bishop sings, “It will never be / Like this again.”

    A memory play about war, Billy Bishop has been going into battle onstage for more than thirty years. The Canadian classic is revisited in this second edition, where war is still a terrible thing, but some men say it was the greatest time of their lives. It’s about the ironies and the price of survival.

    The play format is deceptively simple with a solo narrator who assumes multiple roles while his piano-playing sidekick offers sardonic musical comments.

    Cast of 2 men.

  • Billy Crawford’s Double Play

    Billy Crawford’s Double Play

    $24.00

    Everything is legal – if you can get away with it.

    Billy Crawford is a hero. The star of the Rose City Rounders, the baseball player has been thrilling fans of the city for years. But Billy’s not as young as he used to be and his tendency to play hard is catching up with him. A string of losses for the Rounders puts his position at risk as the team’s owner, local developer Carroll Miller, doesn’t like being associated with anything that loses. Miller’s thinking of making changes, and not just at the team. When he decides to enter politics Billy suddenly finds himself facing an offer he can’t refuse.

    In this wise-cracking, fast-paced novel, Brad Smith lampoons today’s scandal-ridden politics and politicians. But among the laughter, Smith also shows us there can be hope, and even integrity, where we least expect it.