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Congress 2025
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All Books in this Collection
Showing 49–61 of 61 results
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The Ministry of Grace
$18.95It’s 1950 in the deserts of Southern California. Evangelist Brother Cain has a booming trade; his tent revival show moves from town to town, fleecing crowds desperate for something to believe in. When he discovers Mary, a Ntlaka’pamux woman from BC’s Nicola Valley, reading the Bible, he puts her onstage, renames her Grace, and displays her as a miracle: an Indian who can read. A grand, sweeping story of friendship and redemption, The Ministry of Grace is a powerful look at people struggling to live, love, and retain dignity in a heartless world.
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The Notebook
$26.95A Globe 100 Best Book of 2024 • A New Yorker Best Book of 2024 • A Kirkus Most Anticipated Book of Fall 2024
The first history of the notebook, a simple invention that changed the way the world thinks.
We see notebooks everywhere we go. But where did these indispensable implements come from? How did they revolutionize our lives? And how can using a notebook help change the way you think? In this wide-ranging history, Roland Allen reveals how the notebook became our most dependable and versatile tool for creative thinking. He tells the notebook stories of Leonardo and Frida Kahlo, Isaac Newton and Marie Curie, and writers from Chaucer to Henry James; shows how Darwin developed his theory of evolution in tiny pocket books and Agatha Christie plotted a hundred murders in scrappy exercise books; and introduces a host of cooks, kings, sailors, fishermen, musicians, engineers, politicians, adventurers, and mathematicians, all of whom used their notebooks as a space to think—and in doing so, shaped the modern world.
In an age of AI and digital overload, the humble notebook is more relevant than ever. Allen shows how bullet points can combat ADHD, journals can ease PTSD, and patient diaries soften the trauma of reawakening from coma. The everyday act of moving a pen across paper, he finds, can have profound consequences, changing the way we think and feel: making us more creative, more productive—and maybe even happier.
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The Pollination Field
$21.00Kim Fahner’s The Pollination Field is a poetic foray into the literal and metaphorical world of bees, but it also includes an exploration of other pollinators—bats, beetles, birds, butterflies, dragonflies, and even humans. In these poems, Fahner continues with her poetic observation and documentation of how the human world impacts the environment, but also incorporates myth and feminism in her consideration of how women evolve over time.
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THE TRUTH ABOUT THE ’37 OSHAWA GM STRIKE
$24.95How did autoworkers at the GM plant in Oshawa in 1937 beat a rabidly anti-union government, a hostile press, and the world’s largest corporation? The conventional wisdom popularized by academic Irving Abella has obscured the truth about the ’37 strike for 50 years. Abella claimed the international UAW was a hindrance, not a help. He downplayed the role of both reds and rank-and-file workers. And Abella completely ignored the role of women strikers, stewards, and bargainers.
The Truth About the ’37 Oshawa GM Strike sets the record straight by focusing on the voices and actions of rank-and-file workers and on the exciting day-to-day events of the strike. The book also shows that Abella’s account failed to grasp the degree to which class struggle organizing principles were crucial to the strike’s success.
Deeper understanding of the principles and strategies that brought about the victory of the 1937 can provide valuable lessons for workers today who want to revitalize a fighting labour movement.
The Truth About the’37 Oshawa GM Strike brings history to life with over 60 photos and illustrations ? many never before published.
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Theories of Everything
$22.99“I remember thinking to myself, as I said goodbye to my friends and walked home through the dimly lit backstreets, that the past comes back to haunt everybody sooner or later.”
In this finely honed collection of short fiction, Dwayne Brenna creates a series of unforgettable characters, from academics and street people to musicians, movie stars, videogame players and their mothers, cooks, actors, boxers, and even a parrot, and, with compassion and affection (and sometimes laugh-out-loud humour) tests their mettle in a variety of fascinating locations, from Saskatoon to Victoria to Libya to Los Angeles to London to Hawaii and beyond, with familiar and homey details and a fidelity to mood and atmosphere.
Along the way, Brenna tackles a wide selection of conflicts and social ills—good versus evil, scruples and the lack of them, doing or not doing the “right thing,” yielding or not yielding to temptations, and the many other struggles of the human heart—all without being didactic or preachy, but simply by addressing the very human circumstances his characters find themselves in, and how they manage to escape, or not escape, the predicaments arising because of who they are, who they’ve been, and who they could be.
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These are the Stories
$22.00These are the Stories is a memoir presented in short chapters, comprising the life of a survivor of the Sixties Scoop. Christine Miskonoodinkwe Smith reveals her experiences in the child welfare system and her journey towards healing in various stages of her life. As an adult, she was able to reconnect with her birth mother. Though her mother passed shortly afterwards, that reconnection allowed the author to finally feel “complete, whole, and home.” The memoir details some of the author’s travels across Canada as she eventually made a connection with the Peguis First Nation in Manitoba.
A memoir in the vein of Colleen Hele Cardinal’s Raised Somewhere Else and Alicia Elliot’s A Mind Spread Out On the Ground, These are the Stories is an inspirational and courageous telling of a life story. -
Treaties, Lies & Promises
$24.95This riveting account of the links between the Red River Resistance and the numbered treaties explores a largely unknown part of Canadian history.
An engaging, informative and essential account of how the Red River Resistance and the making of the numbered treaties are intrinsically linked. Through evocative details, journalist Tom Brodbeck brings to life pivotal events such as an armed insurrection; outdoor meetings held -29 C weather; a three-person delegation of negotiators from a remote community in Rupert’s Land going toe-to-toe with Canada’s most powerful politicians and First Nations chiefs negotiating their place in Canada under a dark cloud of presumed white, European superiority.
In his clear and easy-to-read prose, Tom describes the impact of these events on the development of Canada. In the span of just a few years, they laid the groundwork for the settlement of Western Canada, a period heavily influenced by Indigenous people: the Metis (French and English-speaking) and First Nations (including Anishinaabe and Swampy Cree). Together, they negotiated both the Manitoba Act and the first of the numbered treaties but the book reveals the challenges Indigenous people faced when confronting the colonial mindset of a federal government eager to populate the west, but less interested in preserving the dignity and long-term welfare of its original inhabitants. -
Tunnel Island
$24.95Set on an island in BC’s Salish Sea, a richly imagined and often hilarious collection of linked stories by Bill Gaston, a master of the art of short fiction.
Eleven stories feature a cast of characters striving to overcome pasts that often include a catastrophic error. On Tunnel Island, moral misjudgments, semi-legal schemes, and antisocial gaffes abound as characters seek a remedy for what ails them: loneliness, heartbreak, grief.
Jack ekes out a living doing odd jobs and minding the estates of absent owners, until he takes a lover’s bad advice and rents their houses through Airbnb. A dying woman retains her wry Wiccan sense of humour while lovingly ministered to by her partner — in between his trips to hand out Halloween candy at their door. The almost mystical disappearance of a toddler is revisited years later when her parents remarry in a surreal outdoor ceremony.
Highly original and empathetic, Tunnel Island is electrified by dark undercurrents that jolt and illuminate by turns. Bill Gaston’s bighearted vision of life on a heavily forested island immerses readers in a world rendered tender and tolerable by human folly and our stumbling attempts at redemption.
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undercurrent
$18.95The water belongs to itself. undercurrent reflects on the power and sacredness of water—largely underappreciated by too many—whether it be in the form of ocean currents, the headwaters of the Fraser River or fluids in the womb. Exploring a variety of poetic forms, anecdote, allusion and visual elements, this collection reminds humanity that we are water bodies, and we need and deserve better ways of honouring this.
Poet Rita Wong approaches water through personal, cultural and political lenses. She humbles herself to water both physically and spiritually: “i will apprentice myself to creeks & tributaries, groundwater & glaciers / listen for the salty pulse within, the blood that recognizes marine ancestry.” She witnesses the contamination of First Nations homelands and sites, such as Gregoire Lake near Fort McMurray, AB: “though you look placid, peaceful dibenzothiophenes / you hold bitter, bitumized depths.” Wong points out that though capitalism and industry are supposed to improve our quality of life, they’re destroying the very things that give us life in the first place. Listening to and learning from water is key to a future of peace and creative potential.
undercurrent emerges from the Downstream project, a multifaceted, creative collaboration that highlights the importance of art in understanding and addressing the cultural and political issues related to water. The project encourages public imagination to respect and value water, ecology and sustainability. Visit downstream.ecuad.ca.
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Vigil: Stories
$22.95The interconnected stories of Vigil are packed with uncomfortable characters caught in situations of complex morality, with each piece both a chapter in the overall story and also a stand-alone investigation of the concepts of addiction, crime, redemption, and complicity.
Vigil is a collection of interconnected short stories set in the fictional, ex-urban community of Bay Mal Verde, a town that rests between the ocean and the wilderness. A beautiful but harsh environment with few employers and even fewer social resources, residents of Bay Mal Verde must make difficult choices to survive, and these decisions set the characters swinging between self-serving greed and selfless bravery. In Bay Mal Verde, every action has a ripple effect that spreads through the community, making everyone complicit in the lives and deaths of their neighbours.
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Voices in the Air
$22.95What would drive women to risk the lives of their children and innocent people to leave their mother country forever?
On April 30, 1982, two women and their families hijack a Polish passenger plane flying from Breslau to Warsaw in a bold attempt to escape Martial Law in Communist Poland and find safety in West Berlin. Among the hijackers are a cotton spinner whose husband wants to avoid a long prison sentence, a schoolteacher with a sick daughter, a pregnant fourteen-year-old who has visions of the Virgin Mary, and an ambitious young filmmaker. Inspired by real events, Voices in the Air is told from the point of view of these four women and a stewardess in love with the married pilot. Will they find happiness beyond the Iron Curtain or was the hijacking not worth the risk?
Told using traditional narrative and documentary film-style interviews, Voices in the Air follows the main characters’ lives before and after the hijacking, and through real-life events as the fall of the Berlin Wall, the fight for women’s rights in modern Poland, the Covid pandemic and the refugee crisis on the Polish-Belarus border. A must-read novel exploring ambiguous moral choice, censorship, emigration, fate and regret.
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Walking Upstream
$19.95A debut poetry collection, both lyrical and surprisingly playful, about overcoming a harsh evangelical upbringing and seeking consolation from the beauty of the natural world.
This collection by the author of three books of nonfiction takes readers into one man’s struggle to escape the corrosive effects of a punishing religion. We meet the small, frightened boy afraid of hell-fire and eternal guilt, and decades later, the man kicking free of the habit of self-excoriation.
There is humour in the observation of the antics of birds, especially magpies and other corvids, and profound humility in the struggle to resist a confining culture.
Magpie, I love you morefor your flight and strut
than for your
squawk,
but can’t vilify a creature
ten times tougher than I am
and a hell of a lot more handsome.
We walk with the poet-as-flaneur through neighbourhoods and along the river in a small prairie city, observing the incongruities, absurdities, and startling images and sounds of city life. And as the mystic who believes in something far beyond himself, so the beetle he sees on a path is “a little Buddha,” and the wind and the flowing river are “irresistible forces,” while a pine teaches him “how you move / without going / anywhere.”
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Zulaikha
$24.95In the winter of 2007, Zulaikha is travelling from Amsterdam to Tehran when she is approached by Kia, a family acquaintance she hasn’s seen for many years, who is on the same flight. Kia’s father has passed away and she is flying home to attend his funeral. In a shocking twist, Zulaikha suspects that Kia may have had information about her missing brother, Hessam, and their mutual friend, Abbass, who was murdered before Hessam’s disappearance during the Iran and Iraq War.
When the flight is suddenly cancelled, and Zulaikha is later taken into custody and questioned about her relationship with Kia by both the European and Iranian authorities, who ultimately confiscate her passport, a tense thriller unfolds revealing the impacts of war and the consequences for one young woman unknowingly caught in the crossfire of greed, power, and international politics.
This sweeping novel explores many timely topics including issues related to gender, class, race, and interracial marriage. It also sheds light on the tumultuous history of Iran from a new perspective. The novel reveals a forty-year period of war and upheaval in the Middle East, and specifically, in Zulaikha’s home territory of Khuzestan, which boasts the bulk of Iran’s oil reserves, a place of intense tension between Iran and the U.S. still today.