Bookville 2024 Lists

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Showing 81–96 of 101 results

The Legacy of Louis Riel

By: John Andrew Morrow

$29.95

The Legacy of Louis Riel provides an overview of the ideas that guided the leader of the Metis people. Louis Riel was a prolific writer. Based on a comprehensive review of Riel’s writing, the author examines his views on a variety of vital subjects, including the definition of the term Metis; matters of Metis identity; the condition, characteristics, and future of the First Nations; Jewish people his belief in their need for statehood; Islam, as an ally of liberalism and a threat to Christianity and Western civilization; Quebec, as a nation state and protector of the Metis people; French Canadians, as part of the Metis family; the exceptionalism of the United States; the place and role of women; liberalism as the most evil of ideologies; and the imperative need of Metis unity. These relevant and timely topics, some of which have been sidelined or entirely ignored, are sure to stoke considerable controversy in our current social context. In so doing, it is hoped that this study will increase our understanding of Louis Riel, his thought, and his writings, and help create greater cohesion among Metis communities throughout North America at a time when attempts are being made to divide them into Western and Eastern Metis to further weaken and dispossess them. Most importantly, The Legacy of Louis Riel helps answer the critical question: “Why does Louis Riel matter?”
The Loxleys and Confederation

By: Mark Zuehlke, Niigaanwewidam Sinclair

$19.99

Double Award Winning Graphic Novel. 2016 Alberta Book Awards Children’s/YA Book of the Year and Illustrated Book Award Winner. The follow up to the award winning The Loxleys and the War of 1812, this full colour hardcover graphic novel catches up with the Loxley family in 1864 as new economic and military threats from America once again place the Canadas in grave danger.

The story is told as a travelogue, as reporter George Loxley follows attempts to bring the provinces together, joined by his daughter Ruth, and granddaughter Lilian. It is Lilian’s diary entries and her developing love story that threads the history together.

Claude St. Aubin once again brings his artistic mastery to the subject and Pierre Berton Award Winner Mark Zuehlke takes primary writing duties with both the graphic novel script and historical summary. The book contains 65 comic book pages and an illustrated historical summary written in the style of Lilian’s diary entries.

Free study guide available.
The Mantle of Struggle

By: Irving Andre

$34.95

Rosie Douglas, former prime minister of Dominica, had a life unlike any other modern politician. After leaving home to study agriculture in Canada, he became a member of the young Conservatives, under the Canadian prime minister’s guidance. However, after he moved to Montreal to study political science his politics started to shift. By the late sixties he was an active civil rights supporter and when Black students in Montreal began to protest racism in 1969, he helped lead the sit-in. He was identified as a protest ringleader after the peaceful protest turned into a police riot, and served 18 months in prison.

After his deportation from Canada in 1976, having been named a danger to national security, Douglas participated in political movements around the world building global solidarity. He became a leader of the Libyan-based revolutionary group World Mathaba and supported Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress. Once back home in Dominica, he led the movement for Dominica’s full political independence from Great Britain, then served as a senator in the post-independence government, an MP, party leader, and finally prime minister.

Relying on family sources, interviews, newspaper articles, government documents, and Douglas’ own articles, letters, and speeches, Irving Andre has drawn a rich and riveting record of this important Black revolutionary.
The Possible Lives of W.H., Sailor

By: Bushra Junaid

$15.99

?What truths would you utter from your mouth
If you could tell us your story? ? The Possible Lives of W.H., Sailor

In this powerful and deeply moving poetic narrative, author/artist Bushra Junaid gives presence to W.H., a mysterious nineteenth-century sailor whose remains were discovered in Labrador in the late 1980s. What little can be deduced about W.H. archaeologically is that he was of African heritage, and buried alone on the coast of a forbidding landscape. Junaid?s poem embraces the mystery of W.H., ponders his life?who he might have been, how he might have lived? and in so doing not only offers a daring look at the history of the African experience in North America, but claims as kin a man isolated, alone, and until now, forgotten.

The Possible Lives of W.H., Sailor was inspired by ?What Carries Us: Newfoundland and Labrador in the Black Atlantic?, an exhibition that Junaid curated at The Rooms (St. John?s, NL) in 2020. The book includes a timeline about the Black experience in North America, as well as helpful material for further discussion.
The Rock Box

By: Don McKay

$15.99

Petra loves rocks, and collects them with a passion. She keeps them in her bedroom, in the kitchen cupboards, between the cushions of the living-room sofa, even in the bathroom medicine cabinet. Petra?s parents do not love rocks. At least, not as much as Petra does. To convince her to winnow down her collection, her parents offer her a wonderful treasure?a rock box, with a selection of the rocks and minerals found in her home province of Newfoundland and Labrador. But, wait, is one of those rocks winking at her? Acclaimed Canadian poet Don McKay creates a charming tale of geology and deep time and connection in his first children?s book.
The Rooftop Garden

By: Menaka Raman-Wilms

$22.95

The Rooftop Garden is a novel about Nabila, a researcher who studies seaweed in warming oceans, and her childhood friend Matthew. Now both in their twenties, Matthew has disappeared from his Toronto home, and Nabila travels to Berlin to find him and try to bring him back.The story is interspersed with scenes from their childhood, when Nabila, obsessed with how the climate crisis will cause oceans to rise, created an elaborate imaginary world where much of the land has flooded. She and Matthew would play their game on her rooftop garden, the only oasis in an abandoned city being claimed by water.Their childhood experiences reveal how their lives are on different trajectories, even at an early stage: Nabila comes from an educated, middle-class family, while Matthew had been abandoned by his father and was often left to deal with things on his own.As an adult, Matthew’s dissatisfaction with life leads him to join a group of young men who are angry at society. He eventually finds himself on a violent suicide mission, but Nabila isn’t aware of the extent of his radicalization until they finally meet on a street in Berlin.
The Seven Nations of Canada 1660-1860

By: Jean-Pierre Sawaya

$27.95

Wendake, Odanak, Wôlinak, Pointe-du-Lac, Kahnawake, Kanesatake, and Akwesasne are communities located all along the St. Lawrence River valley and its tributaries. They have been home to descendants of the Huron-Wendat, Algonquin, Nipissing, and Iroquois nations. The one point these First Nations have in common is that their ancestors were allies of the French and had converted to Christianity.

Historians have generally ignored these nations that the French administrators described as “domiciled Indians” (“sauvages domiciliés”). Jean-Pierre Sawaya carefully studied how an alliance of such diverse “missions” was created, developed and conducted to become The Federation of Seven Fires or The Seven Nations of Canada.

How did this confederation come about? Who took part and what were their roles? The answers are mined in the massive colonial archives. The Seven Nations of Canada is original research at its best, combining detailed analysis and systematic investigation, that has enabled the author to dispel the tenacious colonial myth about irrational, submissive, and fatalistic Indigenous peoples. Readers will discover forward-looking peoples motivated by a deep desire for independence and solidarity.
The Singularity

By: Balsam Karam

$23.00

Lyrical and devastating, The Singularity is a breathtaking study of grief, migration, and motherhood from one of Sweden’s most exciting contemporary novelists.

In an unnamed coastal city filled with refugees, the mother of a displaced family calls out her daughter’s name as she wanders the cliffside road where the child once worked. The mother searches and searches until, spent from grief, she throws herself into the sea, leaving her other children behind. Bearing witness to the suicide is another woman—on a business trip, with a swollen belly that later gives birth to a stillborn baby. In the wake of her pain, the second woman remembers other losses—of a language, a country, an identity—when once, her family fled a distant war.

Balsam Karam weaves between both narratives in this formally ambitious novel and offers a fresh approach to language and aesthetic as she decenters a white European gaze. Her English-language debut, The Singularity is a powerful exploration of loss, history, and memory.
The Storm of Progress

By: Wade Rowland

$22.95

In a time of existential threats from climate change, computer-based superintelligences, AI-accelerated nuclear and biological warfare and more, we can no longer avoid some profound questions about what’s going on.

Why is it that what we’ve been taught to celebrate as progress, as modern history’s greatest social and technical achievements, are now threatening our very existence?

Author Wade Rowland writes that the worst of these global crises are the fruits of a basic error made by well-intentioned Enlightenment thinkers at the dawn of the scientific revolution: a misunderstanding of the essence of humanity. In assuming the worst about human nature and fashioning a civilization based on those false assumptions, some of early modern philosophy’s most revered thinkers set us on a dangerous path.

Rowland argues that by better understanding human nature in the light of current scientific and philosophical knowledge, we can better—and we can do better.

Because we have what it takes—because we are good.
The Untimely Resurrection of John Alexander MacNeil

By: Lesley Choyce

$24.00

John Alexander MacNeil is back with another astonishing adventure. The ninety-year-old still lives alone on the blessed isle of Cape Breton. He still sometimes makes tea for his wife, who died decades ago. He accepts his lonely life, ignoring the world changing around him. But one night, he feels his heart stop. After willing himself back to life with sheer stubbornness, John Alex finds Death himself sitting at his kitchen table, perplexed and intrigued by his victim’s recovery. What follows is a tale on the edge of reality, full of love, doubt and the inexplicable details of an extraordinary life. Keeping what wits he has about him, John Alex needs to muster all the wisdom and courage he has to protect those around him from the dangers of an ever-changing world and the grim reaper he has come to know.

In his 103rd book, acclaimed author of The Unlikely Redemption of John Alexander MacNeil takes the reader through another beautiful adventure about time and love. Lesley Choyce tackles topics like dementia, elder sexuality and assisted dying with humour and grace.
This Other Eden

By: Paul Harding

$25.00

Finalist, Booker Prize and National Book Award for Fiction
Longlisted, Dublin Literary Award
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Tinkers, a novel inspired by the true story of Malaga Island, an isolated island off the coast of Maine that became one of the first racially integrated communities.

In 1792, formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey and his Irish wife, Patience, discovered an island where they could make a life together. More than a century later, the Honeys’ descendants remain on Apple Island, with an eccentric, diverse band of neighbours: a pair of sisters raising three Penobscot orphans; Theophilus and Candace Lark and their nocturnal brood; and the prophetic Zachary Hand to God Proverbs, a Civil War veteran who lives in a hollow tree.

Then comes the intrusion of “civilization”: eugenics-minded state officials decide to “cleanse” the island, and a missionary-schoolteacher selects one light-skinned boy to save. The rest will be left to succumb to institutions or cast themselves on the waters in a new Noah’s Ark.

In prose of transcendent beauty and power, Paul Harding has written a mesmerizing story that explores the hopes, the dreams, and the resilience of those perceived not to fit in a world brutally intolerant of difference.
Two Ways About It

By: John Lazarus

$22.95

Like most Canadian playwrights of his generation, John Lazarus figured out the craft on his own. In doing that, he discovered a technique involving a dual approach: constructing plot on the one hand and improvising dialogue on the other. He’s been using that technique since 1977 and teaching it to others since 1990, and it works–for himself and for generations of Canada’s most successful theatre creators. In this book, John explains each of these “Two Ways” in detail, explaining why your characters won’t invent your story for you, how to construct a plot using cause-and-effect, and how to refine your dialogue for the actors by chewing on it yourself first. He also guides the reader through other aspects of the profession–from current issues around creativity, originality and cultural appropriation, to nuts-and-bolts concerns like script submissions, workshops, readings, rehearsals and opening nights. Informed by over 50 years of professional experience as an award-winning Canadian playwright, teacher and critic, and delivered with John’s breezy, informal style and sense of humour, Two Ways About It will give the beginner a dependable way into the profession and offer the more experienced playwright new and refreshing approaches to the art form.
Uncomfortability

By: Roxanna Bennett

$20.00

Uncomfortability, Roxanna Bennett’s third book with Gordon Hill Press, pandemic conditions are explored in their individuated awfulness but also their paradoxical solidarity, the unifying collective status of being somehow constrained, life radically changing due to social proscription. Continuing her development and renovation of the sonnet form established in her previous books, but building on the form by arranging the text into seasonal divisions like a Book of Hours, Uncomfortability is devoted to this question from “Life Without Weather”, “Could we begin to love each other?s pain?” The book answers, “No one needs to fight. We are all the same.”
Urbane

By: Anna Marie Sewell

$22.00

“I should have punched her in the face.” With these words, Hazel’s back. Having survived a stint as a werewolf’s accomplice on a mission of vengeance and redemption, Amiskwaciy’s notoriously unknown detective and self-professed asshole Hazel LeSage returns. The aftermath of violence has left Hazel with questions, wounds and unexpected friends including Shanaya Bhattacharya, a most unusual lawyer whose thirst for wrongs to right leads her and Hazel into the claws of a conspiracy. Hazel and Shanaya set out to find Hazel’s ex-husband and renegotiate the terms of their divorce, in which Hazel unjustly lost her land. They stumble into a deadly conspiracy entangling the rural lands surrounding their home city of Amiskwaciy. Taking it on will force Hazel to come to terms with her past; surviving will mean accepting some most unexpected allies.Meanwhile in Amiskwaciy, Hazel’s nephew Devin, shaken to the core by the violent death of his childhood friend, has gone to ground in an unlikely lair. To emerge whole, he must get to grips with the primal wildness of his soul and begin to become a man of worth on his own terms. Welcome back to Amiskwaciy, where the mythic has its feet up on your coffee table, and what you see might not be all you get. Urbane is the sequel to Humane, Anna Marie Sewell’s best-selling 2020 first novel from Stonehouse Publishing.
Wait Softly Brother

By: Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer

$24.00

From lost siblings to the horrors of war to tales of selkie wives, Wait Softly Brother is filled with questions about memory, reality and the truths hidden in family lore.

After twenty years of looping frustrations Kathryn walks out of her marriage and washes up in her childhood home determined to write her way to a new life. There she is put to work by her aging parents sorting generations of memories and mementos as biblical rains fall steadily and the house is slowly cut off from the rest of the world. Lured away from the story she is determined to write – that of her stillborn brother, Wulf – by her mother’s gift of crumbling letters, Kathryn instead begins to piece together the strange tale of an earlier ancestor, Russell Boyt, who fought as a substitute soldier in the American Civil War. As the water rises, and more truths come to the surface, the two stories begin to mingle in unexpected and beautiful ways. In this elegantly written novel Kuitenbrouwer deftly unravels the stories we are told to believe by society and shows the reader how to weave new tales of hope and possibility.
We, the Others

By: Toula Drimonis

$22.95

Ungrateful, opportunistic, moochers, dangerous, incompatible with our values and our way of life?
Every immigrant demographic has heard these descriptors at some point in their migration history. We, the Others takes a contemporary look at the xenophobia, ethno-nationalism, and fear of the other that leads to discrimination and the belief that immigration is a polluting force.

Rooted in the author’s personal family history as the second-generation daughter of Greek immigrants, and from her research as a journalist and columnist covering identity politics and social issues in Quebec and Canada for the past 20 years, Drimonis courageously tackles this country’s history and practices, divisive legislation like Bill 21, and various nationalist movements that have influenced policy. We, the Others is a poignant look at inter-generational struggles, conflicting loyalties and heartfelt questions of belonging.