Bookville 2024 Lists

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Showing 17–32 of 101 results

  • City Rising

    City Rising

    By: David Rotenberg
    $24.95

    The first book in the Shanghai Quartet – City Rising – starts on the Hua Shan (the Holy Mountain) 250 years before Christ where the FIRST EMPEROR the most powerful man the world to that time had ever known bequeaths a talisman to his three trusted followers: the BodyGuard, his favorite Courtesan and his Head Confucian – a narwhal tusk with carvings depicting the growth for the next 2500 years of a city at the Bend in the River – Shanghai. The warning from the First Emperor before he commits suicide is to watch for the White Ships on Water – and so the progeny of the three who are entrusted with the Tusk do – and then – in 1841 – they arrive. British Men of War ships – and Opium.

    City Rising tells the story of two destitute Baghdadi boys who become opium lords – and the battles against the powerful British Opium companies – and the boys’ eventual love of the City at the Bend in the River – Shanghai.

  • Crisis and Contagion

    Crisis and Contagion

    $26.95

    Crisis and Contagion is a selection of fourteen interviews conducted by Ian McKay of the Wilson Institute at McMaster University. Interviews with Nancy Fraser, Mike Davis, Mack Penner, Andreas Malm, and Merrill Singer explore capitalism’s organic crisis and the ways it has made this and future pandemics inevitable. Nora Loreto, Tithi Bhattacharya, Chandrima Chakraborty, Merlin Chowkwanyun, and Sanjay Nepal discuss the experiences of ordinary people in the pandemic. J. Michael Ryan, Laura Spinney, Naomi Klein, and Noam Chomsky explore the long-term effects and likely historical legacy of a pandemic that has changed millions of lives–and, maybe, the trajectory of human civilization.

    These scholars propose that to understand the impact of Covid-19, we have to understand the conflictual history of capitalism–and to ward off future pandemics, we need to start building a post-capitalist alternative to the disease-generating and highly unequal global neoliberal order. As capitalist forces work to shove what we have learned from the Covid-19 pandemic down the memory hole, Crisis and Contagion offers a must-read for those wanting to seize this moment of change and revolution.

  • Crushed Wild Mint

    Crushed Wild Mint

    By: Jess Housty
    $19.95

    Crushed Wild Mint is a collection of poems embodying land love and ancestral wisdom, deeply rooted to the poet’s motherland and their experience as a parent, herbalist and careful observer of the patterns and power of their territory. Jess Housty grapples with the natural and the supernatural, transformation and the hard work of living that our bodies are doing—held by mountains, by oceans, by ancestors and by the grief and love that come with communing.

    Housty’s poems are textural—blossoms, feathers, stubborn blots of snow—and reading them is a sensory offering that invites the reader’s whole body to be transported in the experience. Their writing converses with mountains, animals and all our kin beyond the human realm as they sit beside their ancestors’ bones and move throughout the geography of their homeland. Housty’s exploration of history and futurity, ceremony and sexuality, grieving and thriving invites us to look both inward and outward to redefine our sense of community…

    Through these poems we can explore living and loving as a practice, and placemaking as an essential part of exploring our humanity and relationality.

  • Decolonize Drag

    Decolonize Drag

    $24.95

    Although imagined as a queer subcultural practice, drag seems to be everywhere we look: from AI filters on TikTok to brunchtime entertainment, from state legislations to political rallies. Yet as drag enters the mainstream—largely due to the intense, global popularity of reality TV competition RuPaul’s Drag Race—some kinds of gender-based performance fall out of the purview of what we (could) call drag.

    Decolonize Drag details the ways that gender is used as a form of colonial governance to eliminate various types of expression, and tracks how contemporary drag, including that on Drag Race, both replicates and disrupts these institutional hierarchies. This book focuses on several gender performers that resist and laugh at colonial projects through their aesthetic practices. It also features the voice of Khubchandani’s drag alter ego, judgmental South Asian aunty LaWhore Vagistan. From the firsthand perspective of a drag artist, LaWhore describes encounters with depoliticized versions of drag that leave her disappointed and perplexed, and prompts Khubchandani for context and analysis.

    Their dynamic sets the tone for the book, investigating how drag—and gender more broadly—has been privatized and delimited so that it’s only available to certain people. Decolonize Drag argues for more abundance in and access to fashioning gender, and considers how drag changes meaning and efficacy as it shifts across geographies.

  • Deep Sea Feline

    Deep Sea Feline

    By: Dave Hurlow
    $23.95

    When the time comes for humanity to be its own salvation, will we rise to the occasion? Or let greed and selfishness stand in our way?

    Deep Sea Feline follows Charlie Potichny, a failing musical artist living in Toronto, when a mysterious creature from another world visits him in his deceased mother’s painting, gifting him with a song that will turn his life and musical career upside down. Charlie, not understanding the power and implications of the other world, upsets the delicate balance between ancient forces. Slowly, Toronto falls into chaos: the seasons go through drastic change, people are disappearing, and birds threaten to overtake the city.

    To restore equilibrium and save their city, Charlie and a colourful cast of artists and musicians must uncover the mystery of Charlie’s mothers mysterious suicide at her Cabin in Algonquin park, face their darkest fears, stage an epic opera, and navigate the strange and wondrous realms of the ancient gods.

  • Driving in Palestine التحرّك في فلسطين

    Driving in Palestine التحرّك في فلسطين

    By: Rehab Nazzal رحاب نزال
    $34.00

    During the past seven decades, Palestine has been sealed from the Arab world and shattered into fragmented and coded areas: 1948 area, 1967 area, Jerusalem, West Bank, Gaza and A, B and C areas within the West Bank. Each area is ruled by different laws, including different roads and permits that control the mobility of Palestinians and privilege Jewish settlers.

    Driving in Palestine is a research-creation project by acclaimed artist Rehab Nazzal, who explores the visible indices of the politics of mobility that she encountered firsthand while traversing the occupied West Bank between 2010 and 2020. This photography book consists of 160 black and white photographs, hand-drawn maps and critical essays in Arabic and English by Palestinian and Canadian scholars and artists.

    The photographs were all captured from moving vehicles on the roads of the West Bank. They focus on Israel’s architecture of movement restrictions and surveillance structures that proliferate in the West Bank, including the Apartheid Wall, segregation walls surrounding illegal colonies, gates, fences, watchtowers, roadblocks and military checkpoints among other obstacles to freedom of movement.

  • Dwelling

    Dwelling

    By: Laurie Freedman
    $24.95

    Nora flees her small town after the sudden death of her lawyer husband. In Toronto, an ad lures her to rent a cheap apartment, where the landlord Henry lives in the next unit. Initially helpful to Nora, his charm hides a desire to manipulate women, leaving Nora vulnerable to his predations. The propulsive plot reveals that Nora hides secrets of her own – secrets that may save or undo her. This terrifying and essential debut novel brings forth a confident new literary voice to the trade.

  • Echo Lane

    Echo Lane

    By: Sandra Kelly
    $22.00

    Patsy Keane survived her childhood, and some days that’s all that matters. As the child of an alcoholic mother, Patsy is not prone to nostalgia. She lives in a world of her own creation, where Beverly Keane’s maternal shortcomings are just a bad memory. It would be a perfect world if Patsy wasn’t eternally haunted by the memory of what really happened on the day her sister Kathleen went missing-and by the foolish lie she told that day. She’s lived with it for forty-two years.

    Since that terrible time, Patsy has distanced herself from everyone and everything in her past. She is now a well-respected teacher in Calgary, the proud owner of a vintage home, and the occasional companion of a lovely man who seems content to keep their relationship casual. It’s a stable life-until a mysterious woman shows up at her door claiming to be Nora Stone, a childhood friend of Kathleen’s. Nora further claims to have information about Kathleen’s fate, facts she acquired in a manner that defies belief. As Patsy tries to figure out whether Nora is real, real but crazy, or something even more sinister, the rest of her carefully compartmentalized life begins to come apart, one well built piece at a time.

  • End Times

    End Times

    By: Michelle Syba
    $22.95

    End Times is an astounding debut collection of stories about evangelical culture, ideological polarization, and the messiness and mysteries of humanity.

    A Vancouver mother convinces her opioid-addicted son to attend church, and sparks her own personal emergency. A jet-setting consultant tries to help a rural fundamentalist teen, while her own secular life unravels in Toronto, Davos, and beyond. An atheist doctor attempts to expose a hipster megachurch pastor as a closeted hypocrite.

    At a time when the end feels nigh for many, End Times brings together an expansive cast of the devout and the dissenting, the elderly and the young, immigrants, elites, the burned-out, and the lonely, exploring our hidden anxieties and longings.

  • Enough

    Enough

    By: Kimia Eslah
    $24.00

    You can’t win a race you’re kept from running.

    Set amid the cubicles and courtyards of Toronto City Hall, Kimia Eslah’s third novel centres on three women of colour navigating labyrinths at work, in love and in life. Faiza Hosseini is a cutthroat executive with a proven record — she knows she’s enough, but can she circumvent the old boys’ club? Sameera Jahani is passionate about equity but her girlfriend isn’t — can she bridge this gap, or has she had enough? Goldie Sheer has triumphantly landed her first job, but unexpected work drama makes her question — is she really enough? With grace and insight, Eslah bares three women’s experiences of structural discrimination, from microagressions to corruption.

    Enough is an empathetic missive to anyone working on equity, diversity and inclusion — in cubicles, courtyards and countless other spaces.

  • Fearnoch

    Fearnoch

    By: Jim McEwen
    $22.95

    ***2023 IPPY AWARDS: CANADA EAST FICTION – BRONZE MEDAL***

    ***2022 FOREWORD INDIES BOOK AWARD – FINALIST***

    Steinbeck meets Miriam Toews in this insightful and illuminating debut about the decline of rural Canada and the meaning of community.   

    Welcome to Fearnoch, an undistinguished Ottawa Valley farming hamlet in its twilight. The deterioration of the once fruitful way of life in this small town is explored through the lives and trajectories of its inhabitants. The narration winds into and over the characters to sow differing viewpoints on the death of the family farm, incarcerated youths, falling in love at the town dump, and the coming storm. The novel is a plea for its characters to remember humility, honesty, and to see themselves in their neighbour, before it’s all gone.

  • Fire Monster

    Fire Monster

    By: Anita Lahey, Pauline Conley
    $29.95

    Would you return to the landscape you watched burn as a child, especially if you and everyone else believed that the manic, wind-fuelled, merciless fire was your fault?

    Set in a fictional version of the real Main-à-Dieu, Nova Scotia, where a 1976 wildfire caused catastrophic devastation, The Fire Monster, tells the tale of a skilled oil sands worker who returns to the Cape Breton fishing village where, as a child, he was blamed for causing the fire that tore through the local community, consuming bush, trees, houses, boats, cars, animals and the century-old gothic church. At once a poetry collection, a story inspired by true events, and a visually stunning comic-book adventure, The Fire Monster is a mixed genre story for the ages that explores the aftermath of tragedy, the frayed bonds of friendship and family, and ’s redemptive power.

  • First Few Feet in a World of Wolves, The

    First Few Feet in a World of Wolves, The

    By: Scott Mainprize
    $24.95

    The First Few Feet in a World of Wolves chronicles the fictionalization of the year the author spent teaching in Aupaluk (a remote Inuit community on the Ungava Coast of Nunavik). The second outlines, and explores, the history of oppression experienced by the more than five hundred Indigenous nations across northern Turtle Island at the hands of the Canadian government since the Royal Proclamation.

    Told through the voice of Nomad, who finds himself very much at odds with the land itself. Nomad slowly learns how to reconnect with his fractured history as he embraces and is embraced by the Elders and his own students. Told is crisp, spare prose, this debut novel brings forward a powerful new indigenous voice to the literary landscape.

  • Five for Forteau

    Five for Forteau

    By: Kevin Major
    $22.95

    Award recognition for Two for the Tablelands:

    ***THE HOWARD ENGEL AWARD FOR BEST CRIME NOVEL SET IN CANADA 2021 – SHORTLIST***

    ***ATLANTIC BOOKS TODAY STAFF PICK 2021 – SHORTLIST***

    Award Recognition for Three for Trinity:

    ***THE HOWARD ENGEL AWARD FOR BEST CRIME NOVEL SET IN CANADA 2022 – SHORTLIST***

    The fifth book in the Sebastian Synard mystery series takes our intrepid tour guide/private detective on a jaunt across Newfoundland and into Labrador, in pursuit of those towers of intrigue—lighthouses!

    The final stop on Synard’s lighthouse tour is the one at L’Anse Amour, Labrador, the highest in all Atlantic Canada. It’s a long climb into the lantern room, and a long fall from its catwalk to the ground below. Dead is photographer Amanda Thomson. Who is the scoundrel that nudged her past the railing? The RCMP in Forteau are pointing to one of the tour groups, but Sebastian and his partner Mae have other ideas. They retrace the excursions of Amanda and her vagabond boyfriend back to a section of northern Newfoundland called the French Shore. Could the recent bizarre vandalism at its historic sites hold a clue? What is it about the French Shore that leads them back to murder at L’Anse Amour?

  • Frequently Asked White Questions

    Frequently Asked White Questions

    By: Ajay Parasram, Alex Khasnabish
    $18.00

    Are you a white person with questions about how race affects different situations, but you feel awkward, shy, or afraid to ask the people of colour in your life? Are you a racialized person who is tired of answering the same questions over and over? This book is for you: a basic guide for people learning about racial privilege. In Frequently Asked White Questions, Alex Khasnabish and Ajay Parasram answer ten of the most common questions asked of them by people seeking to understand how race structures our every day. Drawing from their lived experiences as well as live sessions of their monthly YouTube series Safe Space for White Questions, the authors offer concise, accessible answers to questions such as, “Is it possible to be racist against white people?” or “Shouldn’t everyone be treated equally?” With humour and compassion, this book offers relatable advice and a practical entry point into conversations about race.