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Showing 81–96 of 107 results

The Crash Palace

By: Andrew Wedderburn

$22.95

SHORTLISTED FOR THE RELIT 2022 NOVEL AWARD

A joy ride set on a crash course with the past.

Audrey Cole has always loved to drive. Anytime, anywhere, any car: a questionable rustbucket, a family sedan, the SUV she was paid to drive around the oil fields. From the second she learned to drive, she’s always found a way to hit the road.

Years ago, when she abandoned her oil field job, she found herself chauffeuring around the Lever Men, a B-list band relegated to playing empty dive bars in far-flung towns. That’s how she found herself at the Crash Palace, an isolated lodge outside the big city where people pay to party in the wilderness.

And now, one night, while her young daughter is asleep at home, Audrey is struck by that old urge and finds herself testing the doors of parked cars in her neighbourhood. Before she knows it, she’s headed north in the dead of winter to the now abandoned Crash Palace in a stolen car, unable to stop herself from confronting her past

The Crash Palace is a funny, moving, and surprising novel by the author of the Amazon First Novel Award–nominated The Milk Chicken Bomb. Audrey is unlike any character you’ve met before, and you’ll love being along for the ride.
The Donkey Cutter

By: Gregory Koop

$25.00

Years after the death of her mother, Mareika Doerksen moves through her adolescence with feelings of loss, confusion, and isolation as she seems somewhere between not being a child and not being a complete woman. Her father, a Mennonite only ethnically and socially, and a long-time atheist, has always been distant but pragmatic as he prepared her for the day he expects her to abandon their homestead on the Canadian Prairies for an education once impossible for women of their time. They move day to day avoiding the tragedies, traumas, and social expectations they rebel against in their Mennonite community during the infancy of Canada. But with the looming arrival of the 1910 Halley’s Comet, so too comes a handsome, charismatic Doomsday preacher. He captivates Mareika as he offers her solace and his ear. Meanwhile the local Bishop with a troubling and violent past sewn to the Doerksens, too, becomes obsessed with the maturing Mareika and sets out with the goal of saving her from the chiliast stranger and her atheist father.
The Haweaters

By: Vanessa Farnsworth

$18.95

The Haweaters brings to life the violent, real-life double-murder of Charles and William Bryan by two members of the Amer family on Manitoulin Island in 1877. A murder case well known in its day, it featured a wealthy landowner determined to destroy his impoverished neighbour. It’s a tale of treachery, gossip, drunkenness, arson and the merciless deaths of two not-so-innocent victims.
The Loyal Daughter

By: Nancy Lam

$24.95

The Loyal Daughter is a novel in stories, told from the perspective of mother, daughter, and granddaughter and spans the 1940s to modern day. A young woman in a village in Communist China finds herself scrapping her way through the crowded streets of Hong Kong. She immigrates to an isolated Northern Ontario city and finally settling in Toronto. When she finds herself stuck in a small apartment above a clothing store, with four kids, her mother, two siblings, and a husband who is never home, the promise of a new beginning fades. Filled with heart-breaking sacrifices, struggles, and secrets that shape her identity, The Loyal Daughter stands testament to a woman’s true resilience.
The Pineapples of Wrath

By: Cathon

$22.95

Set in the heart of Trois-Rivières’ world-famous (and perfectly fictitious) Hawaiian district, The Pineapples of Wrath follows amateur detective Marie-Plum as she investigates the suspicious death of her next-door neighbour. While the local police believe the former limbo champion was the victim of a fatal piña colada overdose, Marie-Plum is convinced there’s more to the case than meets the eye. A funny, loving tribute to tiki kitsch and old Agatha Christie novels.
The Prairie Chicken Dance Tour

By: Dawn Dumont

$24.95

The hilarious story of an unlikely group of Indigenous dancers who find themselves thrown together on a performance tour of Europe.

The Tour is all prepared. The Prairie Chicken dance troupe is all set for a fifteen-day trek through Europe, performing at festivals and cultural events. But then the performers all come down with the flu. And John Greyeyes, a retired cowboy who hasn’t danced in fifteen years, finds himself abruptly thrust into the position of leading a hastily-assembled group of replacement dancers.

A group of expert dancers they are not. There’s a middle-aged woman with advanced arthritis, her nineteen-year-old niece who is far more interested in flirtations than pow-wow, and an enigmatic man from the U.S. — all being chased by Nadine, the organizer of the original tour who is determined to be a part of the action, and the handsome man she picked up in a gas-station bathroom. They’re all looking to John, who has never left the continent, to guide them through a world that he knows nothing about. As the gang makes its way from one stop to another, absolutely nothing goes as planned and the tour becomes a string of madcap adventures.

The Prairie Chicken Dance Tour is loosely based — like, hospital-gown loose — on the true story of a group of Indigenous dancers who left Saskatchewan and toured through Europe in the 1970s. Dawn Dumont brings her signature razor-sharp wit and impeccable comedic timing to this hilarious, warm, and wildly entertaining novel.
The Raw Light of Morning

By: Shelly Kawaja

$22.95

***2022 BMO WINTERSET AWARD – WINNER***

The Raw Light of Morning is a powerful debut novel about women and children finding humour and love in the aftermath of domestic violence.

Fourteen-year-old Laurel Long does something unimaginable. In a house at the back end of Woods Road, she commits an act of violence that alters the course of her life. Laurel finds herself living in Stephenville, a small town on Newfoundland’s west coast, trapped in a system of poverty and generational neglect, haunted by trauma. Laurel needs a fresh start, and education is her ticket out, but when her past starts to catch up with her, she must decide how far she will go to protect herself and the ones she loves.
The Repoetic

By: Benjamin Dugdale

$20.00

A whorling pseudotranslation of French Symbolist Saint-Pol-Roux’s La Repoetique, The Repoetic: After Saint-Pol-Roux is a herniating long-poem, a w(h)orld built by and for the word. Unconventional and otherwise inconceivable relationships thrive in this unreal space, where hot tub (s)cum, The Tinder-Poem, comes to life to date a mercurial living-meme, the Chose-Coke Poser: sometimes Goblin, sometimes aristocratic variant of the Femboy Hooters meme. The whorld at once a food-tray fastness, a clotted pocket mirror propping open a mouth, and a bloody buffet for twenty befanged criminals seeking refuge from the law. Whorld as ever-unrolling unraveling rug; as yawnsense; as slimey timey oneness; as aerated English, Nu-Cue-Ler Alberta English, used-to-be-the-bottom-of-an-Ocean English, as the trembling timbre of the Tinder-Poem’s voice asking “does your English always fight like this, or just at the holidays?” The Repoetic is the realm of the loser, the cruiser, and the havering grief that an immortal Mother asks of us. Sieve for the unreal, forgotten, and trampled; for Lady Di and Dido and Bart Simpson’s unending boyhood. The cerebral, no-chill, scab-picking, contours flush to contours queertopia, the nemesis to cartopia, straight-time and straight-rhyme alike. The Res Poetica a long-overdue middle-finger to Plato?s no-poet Res Publica. And though no panacea nor samizdat, The Repoetic‘s an annihilating solvent; the joke-rupt-by-hiccup haghounding its way into existence twixt split sycamore Pocky sticks; the stretched elastic embouchure of the things we wish we could say yet can’t couch-twirl thru the threshold. The Repoetic a singu(hi)larity, the Poem a noise the Poem annoys.
The Things I Came Here With

By: Chris MacDonald

$22.95

“Does it hurt?” When you’re a tattoo artist, that’s the most universal question. For Chris MacDonald, the answer is simple: hurts less than a broken heart. Those words are painted above the entrance to his shop, Under My Thumb Tattoos, as a reminder.Chris and his brothers were as wild as the wind, in their house among the fields of Alliston, Ontario, when their parents divorced. Shell-shocked, they were uprooted and brought to Toronto by their dad. Their mother’s mental illness worsened in the aftermath, and she disappeared. As a teenager, Chris left home and found himself immersed in the city’s underbelly, a world where drugs, skateboarding, and punk rock reigned. Between the youth shelters, suicidal thoughts, and haunted apartments, a light shined: and it was art.He eventually found himself following the path of his brother, Rob, and pursuing life as a tattooist. Then, at the height of a destructive summer, everything changed: he met Megan, the girl who would become his rock of ages.This remarkable memoir examines what tattooing means to MacDonald and traces the connection his artistic motives have to both his family and childhood. The Things I Came Here With is about how crucial our past is to understanding our future, but it’s also a love letter to his daughter about the importance of expression, life’s uncertainty, and beauty.
Thick Skin

By: Hilary Peach

$24.00

Thick Skin: Field Notes from a Sister In The Brotherhood, is a deep dive into the secret language and hidden culture of one of the most esoteric heavy construction trades: Boilermaking.
For more than two decades, Hilary Peach worked as a transient welder – and one of the only women – in the Boilermakers Union. Distilled from a vast cache of journals, notes, and keen observations, Thick Skin follows Peach from the West Coast shipyards and pulp mills of British Columbia, through the Alberta tar sands and the Ontario rust belt, to the colossal power generating stations of the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. At times edging up to the surreal, Thick Skin is a collection of strange stories carefully told, in tenderness and ferocity, for anyone who has spent time in a trade, or is curious about the unseen world of industrial construction.
This House Is Not a Home

By: Katłıà

$24.00

After a hunting trip one fall, a family in the far reaches of so-called Canada’s north return to nothing but an empty space where their home once stood. Finding themselves suddenly homeless, they have no choice but to assimilate into settler-colonial society in a mining town that has encroached on their freedom.

An intergenerational coming-of-age novel, This House Is Not a Home follows Kǫ̀, a Dene man who grew up entirely on the land before being taken to residential school. When he finally returns home, he struggles to connect with his family: his younger brother whom he has never met, his mother because he has lost his language, and an absent father whose disappearance he is too afraid to question.

The third book from acclaimed Dene, Cree and Metis writer Katłįà, This House Is Not a Home is a fictional story based on true events. Visceral and embodied, heartbreaking and spirited, this book presents a clear trajectory of how settlers dispossessed Indigenous Peoples of their land — and how Indigenous communities, with dignity and resilience, continue to live and honour their culture, values, inherent knowledge systems, and Indigenous rights towards re-establishing sovereignty. Fierce and unflinching, this story is a call for land back.
This Strange Visible Air

By: Sharon Butala

$24.95

A collection of essays on women and aging from Canadian legend Sharon Butala.

“What I didn’t have a clue about was that I was soon to be old, or what being old would mean to my dreams and desires. While dreading old age with every fibre, I was at the same time in full denial that it would ever happen to me, and so, was shocked down to the soles of my feet when it did.”

In this incisive collection, Sharon Butala reflects on the ways her life has changed as she’s grown old. She knows that society fails the elderly massively, and so she tackles ageism and loneliness, friendship and companionship. She writes with pointed wit and acerbic humour about dinner parties and health challenges and forgetfulness and complicated family relationships and the pandemic—and lettuce. And she tells her story with the tremendous skill and beauty of a writer who has masterfully honed her craft over the course of her storied four-decade career.

Butala gives us a book to be cherished—an elegant and expansive look at the complexities and desires of aging and the aged, standing in stark contrast to the stereotyped, simplistic portrayals of the elderly in our culture. This Strange Visible Air is a true gift.
Towards an Encyclopedia of Local Knowledge Volume I

By: Pam Hall

$79.95

From boat-building to berries, from knitting socks to mending nets, Towards an Encyclopedia of Local Knowledge vividly presents the rich, place-based knowings and doings of more than one hundred knowledge-holders from rural Newfoundland. Renowned artist Pam Hall perfectly marries her singular artistic vision and her exhaustive community-based research in a stunning celebration and preservation of rural knowledge. These images and texts come together to reveal and revalue the local in a time when global monoculture seems overwhelming.
Tulpa Mea Culpa

By: Garry Morse

$24.95

When Gellhorn, a notable poet, begins a university residency in a “dynamic metropolis” and stays at the illustrious Máximo College, he finds himself scandalized, and for little known reason. Scrutiny by his new academic neighbours is the least of his worries, as he learns of the existence of Aaron Schnell, his physical pseudo-twin, and an actor and film “double.”The Chair shares fragments from the oeuvre of Thomas Claque, a recently deceased author who contrived the tale of the pseudo-twins. The Chair’s scholarship leads him to the real Máximo College, where he revives those characters and scenarios, before travelling to a smaller prairie town where he reimagines one of Claque’s risqué getaways. There he meets a young woman doing her creative thesis on the double in literature.Petra, a police clerk in an entirely different prairie city, receives a photograph of a missing person and recognizes a passenger from her weekday commute. Non-routine surveillance draws her deeper into his world until a global pandemic abruptly stalls her progress. Her romantic prospect soon leads to a greater mystery punctuated by the words, TULPA MEA CULPA, although its uncanny truth will be ultimately less provocative than serial coverage in the Prairie Pulse.Tulpa Mea Culpa is a literary tour-de-force and solidifies Morse as one of Canada’s most exciting writers today and proves why he is a two-time Governor General Award nominee.
Tumblehome

By: Brenda Missen

$22.95

On a warm August evening, Brenda Missen, a 37-year-old single, unattached writer, pitches her tent beside a lake in Canada’s 7,600 square-kilometre [3,000 square-mile] Algonquin Provincial Park. She is on a four-night “reconnaissance mission,” an hour’s paddle from the parking lot, to find out if she has the capability-and nerve-to one day take a real canoe trip in the park interior by herself. Paddling and portaging from her campsite by day and surviving imaginary bear attacks by night, she decides she’s ready. Then a ranger arrives to check her permit, and an inexplicable, powerful intuition tells her this is the person she’s meant to marry. Going solo may not be necessary after all.

But the fairy tale unravels. In the wake of a broken engagement to her One True Paddling Partner, Brenda ventures into the near wilderness on a series of solo canoe trips that blow all her perceptions of romance, relationships, God, and her own self (gently) out of the water. In our high-tech, urban age, when so many people are disconnected from the natural world, Tumblehome-part spiritual memoir, part travel adventure, and great part ode to the Earth-is a timely and important exploration of where our real roots lie.
Two for the Tablelands

By: Kevin Major

$22.95

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

Sebastian Synard is back. It’s the off-season, and the Newfoundland tour guide introduced in One for the Rock has crossed the island with his spirited teenage son for a weekend exploring the wonders of Gros Morne National Park. But on a hike across the spectacular rockscape of The Tablelands, they discover the half-buried body of a murder victim. Life as a tour guide had its twists and turns, but now Sebastian—with his offhand, Scotch-enriched nature—is crossing a more dangerous landscape, on a path that will leave him face-to-face with a killer.