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Award Winners
These award-winning titles are now available in accessible ePub format.
All Books in this Collection
Showing 33–48 of 80 results
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Fishing for Birds
$22.95Winner of the 2019 American Book Fest Best Book Award for Women’s Fiction; Finalist for Literary Fiction
Kate, a somewhat clumsy widow of thirty-two, flees her stifling hometown on Vancouver Island to live alone on an even smaller island in the Salish Sea. In so doing, she has vague expectations of solace and sanctuary, despite past experience. Instead she meets Ivy, a woman who through their conversations transports her to the intoxicating world of 1926 Cuba. Within the context of their friendship, Ivy’s past begins to unravel from a long-held silence, just as Kate finds herself confronting her relationship with the colourful community she’s known all her life, along with an unexpected visitor who threatens to remove all peace from her chosen refuge. Told from the perspectives of three narrators: Ivy, Kate, and Kate’s mother Nora, Fishing for Birds is a novel that juxtaposes the expectations we cling to so fiercely and the unexpected and sometimes unconventional things that turn up. The novel challenges traditional constructs of time, ethnicity, and relationship. Set against the tropical beauty of 1920s Cuba and the Northwest Coast of contemporary time, both the landscape and unique character of island life underscore the experiences of three very different women.
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Great Village
Retired schoolteacher Flossy O’Reilly has spent almost all of her eight decades in the seaside community of Great Village, Nova Scotia. It is now a quiet Maritime village: where relationships between friends and family move at the pace of the tides; where there is no rush because, sooner or later, everyone finds out what they need to know with a trip to the general store.
When Ruth, the teenaged granddaughter of an old friend, arrives from Ontario for a three-week stay, time suddenly catches up with Great Village. As Flossy watches the sometimes tactless young woman grow into her own, she begins to question whether maintaining the calm surface of her life was worth keeping secrets from and about those closest to her — or if everyone could benefit from a little more candour.
With grace, patience, and wisdom, Mary Rose Donnelly paints a rich portrait of life in small-town Nova Scotia, and of relationships as charming as they are complex. -
Hard Light
$20.00New light on Michael Crummey’s classic depiction of Newfoundland and Labrador’s past.
On the occasion of the press’s 40th anniversary, Brick Books is proud to present the fifth of six new editions of classic books from our back catalogue. This edition of Hard Light features a new Introduction by Lisa Moore, a new Afterword by the author and a new cover and design by the renowned typographer Robert Bringhurst.
In Hard Light, first published in 1998, Crummey retells and reimagines his father’s and others’ stories of outport Newfoundland and the Labrador fishery. These deeply felt poems are rooted in the places where “human desire comes up against rock” (John Steffler).
I have a fair trial on the fishing line now,
being three summers out from home, two summers on
the French Shore, four down on the Labrador,
and three trips this year to the Banks of Newfoundland,
and this is what I have learned to be the price of fish
–“‘The price of fish.’ (September, 1887)”“In these stories and poems, an intimate, bright world flares up, glowing in the darkness of recent history, full-blown and vivid.” –Lisa Moore, from the Introduction
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Home Truths
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Ice Diaries
$26.95What do we stand to lose in a world without ice?
A decade ago, novelist and short story writer Jean McNeil spent a year as writer-in-residence with the British Antarctic Survey, and four months on the world’s most enigmatic continent — Antarctica. Access to the Antarctic remains largely reserved for scientists, and it is the only piece of earth that is nobody’s country. Ice Diaries is the story of McNeil’s years spent in ice, not only in the Antarctic but her subsequent travels to Greenland, Iceland, and Svalbard, culminating in a strange event in Cape Town, South Africa, where she journeyed to make what was to be her final trip to the southernmost continent.
In the spirit of the diaries of Antarctic explorers Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton, McNeil mixes travelogue, popular science, and memoir to examine the history of our fascination with ice. In entering this world, McNeil unexpectedly finds herself confronting her own upbringing in the Maritimes, the lifelong effects of growing up in a cold place, and how the climates of childhood frame our emotional thermodynamics for life. Ice Diaries is a haunting story of the relationship between beauty and terror, loss and abandonment, transformation and triumph.
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If Sylvie Had Nine Lives
$22.95Winner of the High Plains Book Award and the Saskatchewan Fiction Award.
An innovative, gorgeously written story about the small decisions that shape our lives.
Meet Sylvie—funny, sly, sensual and flawed. She can’t always count on herself to make good choices. She may or may not recognize a life-or-death moment, may or may not cancel her own wedding with a day to spare, might just try to walk past store security with a little something in her pocket. Like all of us, Sylvie must make decisions that have reverberations for years to come. Unlike the rest of us, Sylvie gets to live more than one life.
In airy prose imbued with humour, this novel asks the big questions: is there a right path and a wrong path, or does each possibility hold its share of pleasure and pain? Does a person have an immutable self, or is her essence dependent on circumstances? In this energetic and innovative book, Leona Theis creates a world without the usual limits and a protaganist who is conflicted, charismatic, brave, and full of curiosity. If Sylvie Had Nine Lives is for everyone who has ever asked, What if…?
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If We Were Birds
$16.95If We Were Birds is a shocking, uncompromising examination of the horrors of war, giving voice to a woman long ago forced into silence, and placing a spotlight on millions of female victims who have been silenced through violence. A deeply affecting and thought-provoking re-imagining of Ovid’s masterpiece “Tereus, Procne, and Philomela,” Erin Shields’s award-winning play is an unflinching commentary on contemporary war and its aftermath delivered through the lens of Greek tragedy.
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In Search of Pure Lust
$22.95Winner, IPPY Bronze Medal for LGBT Non- Fiction; Finalist, 2019 International Book Awards for LGBTQ – Non-Fiction; Finalist, 2018 Foreword INDIES Award for LGBT Adult Nonfiction; Finalist, American Book Fest 2019 Best Book Awards for LGBTQ Non-Fiction)
In Search of Pure Lust documents an important chapter in lesbian history that is already being distorted and erased, a time when lesbians were reinventing everything from the ground up. Along with violence against women around the globe, lesbians of the 1970s and ’80s were motivated by growing militarism, rampant development, species loss, and living systems in decline. For many, this was the logical conclusion to a state of law/mind/rule that had prevailed for thousands of years — patriarchy.
This is a long overdue and unvarnished insider’s account of those times. The memoir, centered in the Northeast U.S. and then later in Quebec, combines a personal story with the story of a political movement. The book is full of celebration, but also depicts the shadow side of the lesbian movement, taking the reader into the bitter squabbles that divided women, both personally and politically. On a deeper level, the memoir charts a long and difficult quest for love. Over and over, the narrator dives headlong into rapturous passions that either fizzle out or come to brutal and ugly endings.
In the mid-’80s, when a friend invites her to a Zen retreat, she as desperate enough to say yes. A period of difficult self-examination ensues and, over a period of years, she begins to learn an altogether different approach to desire. The last section of the memoir traces the fallout from that collision between hot-blooded lesbian desire and spacious, temperate Zen mind. What the search for pure lust uncovers, in the end, is something that looks a lot like love.
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It Is Solved By Walking
$16.95When Margaret learns of the death of her former husband, she recalls their earliest days together as Ph.D. candidates, beginning a journey through her past. Told through the sensations of Wallace Stevens’s poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” the subject of her uncompleted thesis, Margaret evokes beautiful, ordinary and painful sexual memories from before, after and during their marriage. Stevens, a guiding voice in her head for twenty-five years, cajoles Margaret into unearthing the reasons she never became the poet, scholar, wife or mother she thought she would be. Bold and poetic, It is Solved by Walking is an intimate portrait of a writer making her way back to poetry one step at a time.
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Just Beneath My Skin
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Lake of Two Mountains
$20.00A hymn to a beloved lake, a praise poem in forty-five parts, a contemplation of landscape and memory
Lake of Two Mountains, Arleen Paré’s second poetry collection, is a portrait of a lake, of a relationship to a lake, of a network of relationships around a lake. It maps, probes and applauds the riparian region of central Canadian geography that lies between the Ottawa and the St. Lawrence Rivers. The poems portray this territory, its contested human presences and natural history: the 1990 Oka Crisis, Pleistocene shifts and dislocations, the feather-shaped Ile Cadieux, a Trappist monastery on the lake’s northern shore. As we are drawn into experience of the lake and its environs, we also enter an intricate interleaving of landscape and memory, a reflection on how a place comes to inhabit us even as we inhabit it.
flint-dark far-off
sky on the move across the lake
slant sheets closing insky collapsing from its bowl
shoreline waiting taut
stones dark as plums
~from “Distance Closing In” -
Legacy: Trauma, Story, and Indigenous Healing
$24.95Winner of the 2019–20 Huguenot Society of Canada Award
“Powerful … A deeply empathetic and inspiring work with insights of value to anyone struggling to overcome personal or communal trauma.” — Library Journal
“[A] beautifully written book about strategies for healing from intergenerational trauma … In crystal-clear prose, Methot has written a book that is both easy to follow and crucial to read.” — LitHub
Five hundred years of colonization have taken an incalculable toll on the Indigenous peoples of the Americas: substance use disorders and shockingly high rates of depression, diabetes, and other chronic health conditions brought on by genocide and colonial control. With passionate logic and chillingly clear prose, author and educator Suzanne Methot uses history, human development, and her own and others’ stories to trace the roots of Indigenous cultural dislocation and community breakdown in an original and provocative examination of the long-term effects of colonization.
But all is not lost. Methot also shows how we can come back from this with Indigenous ways of knowing lighting the way.
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Lightning Lou
$12.95 -
Magdaragat
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Mahmoud
$16.95Mahmoud is an exuberant, if overwhelmingly passionate, Iranian engineer-cum-taxi driver who relishes the chance to regale his passengers with his love of Persian culture. Emanuelos, a fabulously gay Spanish perfume salesman, can talk a mile-a-minute about his boyfriend, Behnam. And then there’s Tara, an awkwardly charming Iranian Canadian preteen who just wants to be “normal,” whatever that means. When the three strangers find themselves crossing paths in the busy streets of Toronto, their experiences with racism, sexism, homophobia, homesickness, and everything in between become intertwined in unexpected ways.
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Monkey Ranch
$19.00Comic and sober by turns, these poems ask us what is sufficient, what will suffice?
… a mandrill, a middle-aged woman, a shattered Baghdad neighbourhood, a long marriage, even a spoon, grapple with this unanswerable conundrum — sometimes with rage, or plain persistence, sometimes with the furious joy of a dog who gets to ride with his head through a truck’s passenger window. Julie Bruck’s third book of poetry is a brilliant and unusual blend of pathos and play, of deep seriousness and wildly veering humour. Though Bruck “does not stammer when it’s time to speak up,” and “will not blink when it’s time to stare directly at the uncomfortable,” as Cornelius Eady says in his blurb for the book, “in Monkey Ranch she celebrates more than she sighs, and she smartly avoids the shallow trap of mere indignation by infusing her lines with bright, nimble turns, the small, yet indelible detail. Bruck sees everything we do; she just seems to see it wiser. Her poems sing and roil with everything complicated and joyous we human monkeys are.”