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Bookville 2024 Lists
Browse the books that make up Bookville.
Browse by Category
Bookville – Art, Culture & Opinions
Browse gorgeous art books, dive deep into cultural criticism, or agree – or disagree – with Canada's top thinkers.
Bookville – Drama & Plays
Handpicked, award-winning Canadian plays and, for the DIY dramaturge, how-to books on theatre from the best in the business.
Bookville – Fiction
Browse a selection of groundbreaking, notable fiction from Canadian independent literary publishers.
Bookville – Graphic Novels & Comics
Whether you're new to graphic novels – or read so many that you practically think in thought bubbles – this Bookville-approved selection of graphic novels and comics are perfect for any reader looking for engaging illustrations to accompany their reading.
Bookville – Indigenous Literature
Explore a variety of Indigenous-authored books from Bookville.
Bookville – Kids' Literature
This is for the littles in your life: kids and YA picks sure to delight younger readers.
Bookville – Memoirs
Get the inside story with these memoirs and biographies.
Bookville – Mystery & Crime Fiction
Ready for some armchair sleuthing? From thrilling crime to cozy whodunits, here's Bookville's top picks for the mystery reader.
Bookville – Poetry
Get lyrical (or concrete, or freeform, and so on…) with Bookville's poetry selection.
Bookville – Social Science
Better understand the world with this selection of Bookville social science picks.
All Books in this Collection
Showing 65–80 of 101 results
Stages
$24.95Stages is packed with drama exercises and ideas that work, tested on the harshest of criticsÑhigh school students. Laid out in a clear, concise manner, they are categorized according to their purpose.
Swim / into the North’s Blue Eye
$18.00Annette Lapointe’s poetry collection swim / into the north’s blue eye explores the gothic anxieties and bodily discomforts of constant travel. Some of its journeys are global, but many are more regionally oriented: from one prairie city to another, between small towns, from city to cottage-country, from prairie to coast.
The collection also follows Lapointe’s family migrations around western Canada, particularly into fly-in communities of northern Saskatchewan in the 1960s and 70s. Those settlements, which make every trip monumental, provide a frame for years of restlessness and desire, and for meditations on the still world and its swarming occupants.
Take Your Baby And Run
$25.95“Part memoir, part medical malfeasance whistle-blowing, and essential reading for medical reform activists, “Take Your Baby And Run” is especially and unreservedly recommended.” – Midwest Book Review
Foreword by Lanette Siragusa, RN NM
Take Your Baby and Run is Carol Youngson’s first-hand account of the shocking ineptitude and misogynistic behaviour that led to the death of twelve children, primarily infants, under the care of Dr. Jonah Odim at Winnipeg’s largest hospital in 1994. Youngson was the nurse in charge of the cardiac unit and in her book she details the dysfunctional hospital hierarchy that allowed this tragedy to unfold, leading to the longest running inquiry in Canadian history. Sadly, the themes of this book are just as relevant today during our current health crisis.
Tales for Late Night Bonfires
$22.95Curious, uncanny tales blending Indigenous oral storytelling and meticulous style, from an electric voice in Canadian fiction
These are stories that are a little bit larger than life, or maybe they really happened. Tales that could be told ’round the campfire, each one-upping the next. Tales about a car that drives herself, ever loyal to her owner. Tales about an impossible moose hunt. Tales about the Real Santa(TM) mashed up with the book of Genesis, alongside SPAM stew and bedroom sets from IKEA.
G.A. Grisenthwaite’s writing is electric and inimitable, blending meticulous literary style with oral storytelling and coming away with a voice that is entirely his own. Tales for Late Night Bonfires is truly one of a kind, and not to be missed.
Text and Context
$22.95A handbook for script work and directing in the theatre, Text and Context: The Operative Word is essential reading for post-secondary students and young directors in the theatre, as well as an effective resource for other disciplines, including actors, designers, and production personnel. Part 1: Text describes the method of text investigation that Greenblatt has developed and employed over his four-and-a- half decade career, including a variety of exercises. It is a highly pragmatic and non-academic approach to discovering the essence of a script in order to reveal its potential for interesting and unique interpretations. Part 2: Context explores the various ideas, philosophies and precepts Greenblatt uses when directing for the stage, following the order and rhythm of most rehearsal processes. It challenges misconceptions about the position of the director, and debunks traditional assumptions that are harmful to a truly creative and inclusive process. Part 3: New Text examines three genres of theatrical works: Theatre for Young Audiences, New Play Development, and Devised Work, which utilize the principles of text analysis and directing found in the first two parts.
Sprinkled with personal anecdotes, Text and Context: The Operative Word offers theatre practitioners techniques for communication and artistic collaboration, reimagines traditional hierarchical structures, and provides tools to create healthy, truly creative, highly productive, and more equitable processes of theatrical practice.
The Adventures of Sgoobidoo
$19.95Follow Sgoobidoo, famed canine detective, to the corner store, bingo hall and amusement park in a series of feeble intrigues with disappointing endings. Listen to the deafening silence of the broken television set as the wretched Sammy sits waiting for the professor, the prospector or his mother to call with a mission. Accompany the pitiful pooch and his humble human through a series of sad adventures in this collection of stories gathered in the familiar format of an Archie digest, interspersed with ketchup-flavoured games and advertisements.
In The Adventures of Sgoobidoo, Cathon pays homage once again to the B-series movies and detective novels that inspiredi The Pineapples of Wrath, her popular tiki murder mystery set in the Hawaiian quarter of Trois-Rivières, Quebec.
The Calf with Two Heads
$29.95These beautifully illustrated stories of natural history in nineteenth-century Canada are about the curious men and women who crossed the oceans from Europe to explore, map, draw, puzzle about, collect and exhibit nature in Canada. Informed by French, British and Indigenous naturalists, they tried to understand what they saw. What did it all mean about the origins of the world?
Louisa Blair, an amateur naturalist in Quebec and a transatlantic species herself, tells tales on Darwin, Russell Wallace and James Cook, and lingers on the strange and colourful details of Canada’s stubborn resistance to evolutionism and its first natural history museums with their penchant for deformities.
These stories feature Indigenous mapmakers, botanical artists, bug-bitten rock fanatics, arctic explorers, and a trio of Quebec women who managed to get plants named after themselves. In short, muddy boots, cold hands, a pocket full of fossils, a mind full of existential questions. To make her case, Louisa Blair has gathered a vast collection of vintage illustrations.
Blair also salutes their successors, the citizen scientists who are now frantically mapping Canada’s biodiversity before it fades to bio-monotony. What does it all mean for the end of the world?
The Clarion
$22.95
The Cobra and the Key
$22.00“A relentlessly witty work of satire, the mastery of which is veiled behind Shelstad’s deceptively clean and cool prose.” —Fawn Parker, Giller Prize–longlisted author of What We Both Know
“The Canadian literary landscape is all the richer for Sam Shelstad and his brilliant twisted books.” —Anna Fitzpatrick, author of Good Girl
Sam Shelstad’s brilliantly funny, slightly unhinged creative writing guide is How Fiction Works by James Wood meets Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov.
To the untrained eye, Sam Shelstad may look a lot like a Value Village cashier who shares an apartment with his Uncle Herman and has just emerged from a failed relationship with a woman forty years his senior whom he met at his mother’s book club. But Sam is a successful novelist—or will be soon, he’s certain. The manuscript of his debut novel, The Emerald, is currently on the desk of a celebrated indie publisher. While he waits to hear back, he’s hard at work on two ambitious writing projects. The first is the Molly novel, a fictional rendering of Sam’s newly defunct relationship. The second is a guide for aspiring fiction writers like yourself. The two have much to teach one another, and much to teach you.
Drawing on examples from the work of greats like George Orwell, Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Alice Munro, Kazuo Ishiguro, Clarise Lispector, and Sam Shelstad, The Cobra and the Key takes the novice through aspects of character, detail, plot, style, point of view, dialogue, and meaning. Before long, you’ll be ready to print off your first draft and embark on revisions. Then it’s time to learn some of the tricks of the publishing biz. Having just been threatened with legal action by his soon-to-be publisher for stalking said publisher’s son via Instagram, Sam knows a thing or two about that too. Are you ready to get serious about your writing?
The Definition of Beautiful
$21.95Shortlisted for the 2024 Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize
A stunning memoir of coming of age and recovering from anorexia in the 2020s
Charlotte Bellows wrote The Definition of Beautiful between the ages of fifteen and seventeen, in the wake of lockdown and in recovery from anorexia. In the tradition of Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar and Françoise Sagan in Bonjour Tristesse, Bellows writes with deceptively straightforward urgency, pushing through society’s constraints on the bodies and minds of girls and women to offer a story both achingly familiar and devastatingly new.
In 2020, fourteen-year-old Charlotte’s lifelong drive to achieve ‘perfection’ distorts into an all-encompassing obsession. Living between the suffocating world of lockdown and an uncanny dreamscape inhabited by competing avatars, Charlotte faces a parade of masked faces in hospital rooms, the aftermath of first love, the erosion of lifelong friendship, and the agony of seeing her illness devastate her family as it threatens to destroy her; as the world reopens, she finds new connections and mentors, new joy, new ways of thinking, new ways to be.
Charlotte Bellows offers a potent fusion of insight and innocence — a story for those who suffer or have suffered from eating disorders, but, more, a vital coming of age story of a young gay and artistic woman, tugged and throttled by a myriad of pressures, not least from the dark gravity that is the underside of her own creative drive.
The Economy of Sparrows
$24.95A debut novel about the heartbreak of habitat loss and family trauma by one of Canada’s most beloved writer-naturalists.
This debut novel by Trevor Herriot is the richly observed story of Nell Rowan, who has inherited her family’s prairie farmstead and returned there to live after many decades away. Nell is increasingly obsessed by a 19th-century bird collector while haunted by memories of her mother’s disappearance.
Nell’s fascination with 19th-century bird collector William Spreadborough began during her janitorial night shifts at the National Museum of Nature. Now retired and back home on the same prairie where Spreadborough collected birds, her obsession with his life and death becomes more urgent. Though she finds consolation in the company of her border collie and horses, and the wild birds passing through each season, Nell feels increasingly isolated. Her neighbours seem indifferent to the ongoing devastation contemporary agriculture wreaks on prairie ecosystems and less than supportive of Nell’s attempts to track native bird populations. And now she is unable to escape the central mystery of her life: what happened to her mother in that long-ago snowstorm?
Things begin to shift for Nell when she provides temporary shelter to Carmelita, a fifteen-year-old foster child whose fresh view of the world around her just might rescue Nell from the hopelessness she fears is her inheritance.
Trevor Herriot’s The Economy of Sparrows connects today’s settler culture and natural science to their roots in colonial empire-building. As Nell Rowan finds the people who might help her come to some peaceful resolution of her life’s challenges, readers are faced with questions of how we engage with and value the natural world, how its truths illuminate both history and our present lives, and how we justify ourselves to the wild things of the earth.
The Emptiest Quarter
$22.95The three novellas in The Emptiest Quarter find their inspiration in the sands and streets of Abu Dhabi, where author Raymond Beauchemin lived for four years, a time that overlapped with the building of the Louvre and Guggenheim museums and the opening of Sorbonne and NYU campuses, the convulsions of the Arab Spring and the eruption of civil war in Syria. The characters who populate The Emptiest Quarter live at both the centre and the fringes of the conflict between preservation and progress, including sheikhs, western oil-and-gas men, burned-out journalists, pearl divers, and Filipina caregivers, all striving to find themselves, to find love, to find balance in ever-shifting sands.
The Father of Rain
$22.95Mysteriously, over night, a father disappears from his family home. A few months later, the mother vanishes too. As the police investigations go on and on and reporters descend on the home week after week – as well as visits by social workers, doctors, and concerned relatives – the abandoned seventeen-year-old Cirrus starts his own investigation into who his parents really were, or who they might have been.
The Golden Apples
$15.99Jack may be good at following recipes, but he’s not very good at following directions. When his two older brothers fail to find the golden bird that made off with their father’s prized golden apples, Jack steps up for the job.
But there are many challenges to be faced along the way; without the help of a fast and friendly fox, Jack just might not make it. With a smart princess who loves grunge rock, angry kings, magic animals, conniving siblings, and tempting casinos, this delightful re-mix of an old Cape Breton Jack tale seamlessly blends modern and ancient. Acclaimed Canadian storyteller Dan Yashinsky brings wit and whimsy to this wonder tale. Ekaterina Khlebnikova’s brilliant illustrations blend old and new creating a gorgeous visual world; a perfect complement to Yashinsky’s re-telling. Together they serve up a book that will delight readers and listeners of all ages.
The Heathens and the Dragon
$16.95A middle-grade medieval adventure starring two orphans, a troubadour with dancing feet, and an irascible pet chicken by an award-winning YA writer.
From award-winning author Kate A. Boorman comes her first middle grade historical novel, set in France in the Middle Ages at a time of great religious upheaval. The Heathens and the Dragon: A 13th-Century Adventure stars twelve-year-old Elodie, a resourceful guardian to her little brother Bertran. Together they perform for their very survival.
Elodie works hard to keep a clean house for her master, take care of her little brother, and guard the secret pagan beliefs she was taught by the mother they recently lost. But the world around her is growing suspicious of paganism and violent toward non-Christians. When Crusaders arrive to arrest her kindly master, a Cathar, for heresy, he flees, and the orphans Elodie and Bertran try to follow his trail.
Armed only with meagre supplies and a few good stories, they head into the forest, where they soon become lost. Luckily, they join forces with Joie, who has mysteriously left court life and appears eager to help them. To earn money and food, the trio improvises a spectacle involving storytelling, music, and a chicken-assisted magic trick. The crowd’s applause almost allows Elodie to forget that her dragon tale dishonours an origin story sacred to her mother.
When Joie’s own secrets emerge, Elodie is faced with a new dilemma. With Crusaders hovering and a voracious audience clamouring, Elodie realizes that, to save herself and Bertran, she?ll need to decide who to trust&mdashand who to betray.
The House Filler
$22.95A family saga set in China during the most tumultuous time of the twentieth century including the Japanese invasion, the civil war, and the Communist takeover.
The House Filler is told through the experiences of Golden Phoenix, a woman who faces war, poverty, and political oppression as she fights for survival, freedom and happiness. After the untimely death of her husband, Golden Phoenix is determined to keep her family together. However, poverty forces her to make the heart-wrenching decision to give her teenage twins to the Red Army. During the upheaval of the Japanese invasion of her hometown, she is separated from her two young girls, and her remaining son leaves to fight with the Nationalist army. Golden Phoenix, along with her adopted son, remains to endure the horror and hardship of war. When the civil war ends with the Communists in power in 1949, one of her twins, who had joined the Communist Party, is wrongly accused of being a traitor and is sentenced to death. Golden Phoenix and her family must find a way to save her son’s life.
The House Filler is a moving and powerful portrayal of one family’s struggle to survive in the face of an historical upheaval and political oppression.