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WINNER, American Meteorological Society’s Louis J. Battan Authors’ Award
WINNER, 2019 Science Writers & Communicators of Canada Book Award
WINNER, 2018 Lane Anderson Award
“With wit and a humbling sense of wonder, this is a book that can be shared and appreciated by a wide audience who now religiously check their phones for daily forecasts.” — Publishers Weekly Starred Review
“This terrific, accessible, and exciting read helps us to better understand the aspects of weather and the atmosphere all around us.” —Library Journal Starred Review
We live at the bottom of an ocean of air — 5,200 million million tons, to be exact. It sounds like a lot, but Earth’s atmosphere is smeared onto its surface in an alarmingly thin layer — 99 percent contained within 18 miles. Yet, within this fragile margin lies a magnificent realm — at once gorgeous, terrifying, capricious, and elusive. With his keen eye for identifying and uniting seemingly unrelated events, Chris Dewdney reveals to us the invisible rivers in the sky that affect how our weather works and the structure of clouds and storms and seasons, the rollercoaster of climate. Dewdney details the history of weather forecasting and introduces us to the eccentric and determined pioneers of science and observation whose efforts gave us the understanding of weather we have today.
18 Miles is a kaleidoscopic and fact-filled journey that uncovers our obsession with the atmosphere and weather — as both evocative metaphor and physical reality. From the roaring winds of Katrina to the frozen oceans of Snowball Earth, Dewdney entertains as he gives readers a long overdue look at the very air we breathe.
Musings from a “one-man flash mob” (Toronto Star)
Comedian Shawn Hitchins explores his irreverent nature in this debut collection of essays. Hitchins doesn’t shy away from his failures or celebrate his mild successes — he sacrifices them for an audience’s amusement. He roasts his younger self, the effeminate ginger-haired kid with a competitive streak. The ups and downs of being a sperm donor to a lesbian couple. Then the fiery redhead professes his love for actress Shelley Long, declares his hatred of musical theatre, and recounts a summer spent in Provincetown working as a drag queen.
Nothing is sacred. His first major break-up, how his mother plotted the murder of the family cat, his difficult relationship with his father, becoming an unintentional spokesperson for all redheads, and many more.
Blunt, awkward, emotional, ribald, this anthology of humiliation culminates in a greater understanding of love, work, and family. Like the final scene in a Murder She Wrote episode, A Brief History of Oversharing promises everyone the A-ha! moment Oprah tells us to experience. Paired with bourbon, Scottish wool, and Humpty Dumpty Party Mix, this journey is best read through a lens of schadenfreude.
Award recognition for book one of the Cupids trilogy, A Roll of the Bones
***CANADA BOOK AWARD WINNER***
***SILVER, THE MIRAMICHI READER‘S THE VERY BEST! COVER ART/DESIGN AWARD***
This dramatic conclusion to a trilogy foregrounds the experiences of women settlers in North America as they grapple with notions of homeland, colonization, and sense of belonging.
A Company of Rogues completes the Cupids trilogy, moving the action back to the New Found Land seven years after John Guy’s colonists first settled Cupids Cove. After their wanderings across the ocean, Ned and Nancy are united—but will the shores of New Found Land provide a permanent home? Kathryn and Nicholas Guy join the effort to found a second colony at Bristol’s Hope, but their work is threatened by a shadowy enemy who holds a dangerous power over Kathryn. And a newcomer to the colony, the Wampanoag traveller Tisquantum, settles among the English colonists, challenging their beliefs about the New World they have come to settle and the people who call it home.
Detectives Lane and Harper are back for the third installment of the Detective Lane Mystery Series in this gripping twister of a novel that baffles with its ever increasing body count and suspect list.
When Ryan Dudley ventures out on horseback and his horse returns without him, Lane and Harper are summoned to unravel the mystery. Dudley’s disappearance marks the first anniversary of a young boy’s murder in the same neighbourhood, and evidence indicates the two incidents are connected. When Dudley’s roommate also goes missing and mysterious shootings start happening in the area, Harper and Lane are swept into a feud between neighbours, races, and land owners, all in search of a murderer on the loose for much too long.
Confirmed bachelor and professional art authenticator Leonard Anderson, long the protégé of aged and wealthy Luella Pryce, is so in love with her early Cartwright paintings that he cannot wait to receive them—as he has been led to believe—in her will. He removes them for cleaning, has them copied, returns the forgeries to Luella and keeps the originals. Then Luella drops a bomb: she tells Leonard she plans to donate her collection to the local gallery on the Caribbean island of St. Napoli on her death.
Fearing exposure, as Luella is in poor health, yet spurning any notion of switching the paintings back, Leonard conspires with his wicked nephew Tibor to destroy the fakes by burning down Luella’s house while she is away at a gala. But Luella never makes it to the gala. Asleep in her bathtub, she burns along with her house. Authorities blame her careless smoking for the conflagration.
When Leonard suffers disastrous financial losses in the Asian market, Tibor, who has his own needs for quick cash, presses him to sell the Cartwrights in the shady underworld of art acquisition. To get his nephew off his back, Leonard conspires to once again have copies made of the originals. But Cerise, the daughter of an old paramour and a con artist in her own right, catches him in the act. Not above a little blackmail despite her affection for him, she sells her silence for a very expensive necklace. Leonard, meanwhile, sets up a sting to lead Tibor to believe the original Cartwrights are fakes. The transaction with the buyer will take place at the Pleasant Inn, in eastern Ontario, which is run by the irascible Trevor Rudley and his long-suffering wife Margaret.
Deluxe redesign of the Gerald Lampert Award-winning classic.
On the occasion of the press’s 40th anniversary, Brick Books is proud to present the fourth of six new editions of classic books from our back catalogue. This edition of A Really Good Brown Girl features a new Introduction by Lee Maracle, a new Afterword by the author and a new cover and design by the renowned typographer Robert Bringhurst.
First published in 1996, A Really Good Brown Girl is a fierce, honest and courageous account of what it takes to grow into one’s self and one’s Métis heritage in the face of myriad institutional and cultural obstacles. It is an indispensable contribution to Canadian literature.
I am looking at a school picture, grade five, I am smiling easily … I look poised, settled, like I belong. I won an award that year for most improved student. I learned to follow really well. –from “Memoirs of a Really Good Brown Girl”
“No other book so exonerates us, elevates us and at the same time indicts Canada in language so eloquent it almost hurts to hear it.” –Lee Maracle, from the Introduction
John arrives in a Montreal airport with a suitcase in hand. We do not know where he is from, or who he is. The novel sets out to explore his identity by following his daily movements and intimate thoughts, as well as his connections to those coming into contact with him. He writes his own reflections and impressions in a notebook which he carries with him at all times.
The story unfolds through non-linear narrative connections that flow across city blocks, continents and oceans, and meander in and out of characters’ minds, dealing with questions of displacement, identity and meaning.
After retiring from the heady world of academia, Sidonie von Täler has returned to the small Okanagan Valley town she escaped in her youth for the lights of the big city. The family orchard has since gone to seed, and ever decades later Sidonie still finds herself living in the shadow of her deceased older sister Alice.
As she gets down to work sifting through the detritus of her family’s legacy, Sidonie is haunted by memories of trauma and triumph in equal measure, and must reconcile past and present while reconnecting with the family members she has left.
Karen Hofmann’s debut novel blends a poetic sensibility with issues of land stewardship, social stratification and colonialism, painting the geological and historical landscape of the Okanagan in vivid and varied colours.
After Light spans four generations of the Garrison family, over the course of the twentieth century. Irish Deirdre, forced into marriage at sixteen, never stops trying to regain her freedom, though her ruthless escape attempts threaten to destroy her family. Her son, Frank, raised in Brooklyn, is a talented young artist, until he’s blinded in WW2. With fierce determination, Frank forges a new life for himself, but the war has shaken him deeply. His two daughters, rebellious Von and sensitive Rosheen, grow up as isolated as the hothouse roses their mother breeds on the frozen Canadian prairie, and like the roses, they have scant protection against the violent elements that imperil them. Rosheen’s son, Kyle, raised without his mother, knows nothing of the family’s history until 1999, when he and Von gather Rosheen’s art works for an exhibit at a Brooklyn gallery. The story of the Garrisons is shaped by powerful forces – -a rogue north wind, a vengeful orphan, a sugar-dust explosion, an airborne jar of peaches, a scar that refuses to heal, a terrible lie, an unexpected baby, and a desperate drive across treacherous ice. Despite all the their tragedies, the creative fire that drives the Garrisons survives, burning more and more brightly as it’s passed from one generation to the next, into the twenty-first century.
Seeing beyond Winston’s disfiguring scars and foreseeing a future with him, Lise falls in love and the couple soon marry. Years later, having inherited Lise’s gift, two of their children, Theresa and Jerome, must struggle to find their place within the community. But for Leo, their middle child, that is just the start of his worries. As he grows older and the chasm between himself and his family grows, Leo realizes that he doesn’t belong to his family. While familial tensions mount and secrets are revealed, the Evans family come to see the monumental effect even the smallest spark can create. Based on the short story by Michael Crummey, Afterimage explores the connections built within both family and community, of finding a place to belong.
Winner of the 2014 Governor General’s Literary Award
Based on a true story, Get Yourself Home Skyler James follows the harrowing journey of a young lesbian who defects from the army when she is outed by fellow soldiers. The award-winning rihannaboi95 centres around a Toronto teen whose world comes crashing in when YouTube videos of him dancing to songs by his favourite pop heroine go viral. Finally, Peter Fechter: 59 Minutes chronicles the last hour of Peter Fechter’s life, a teenager in East Berlin shot while attempting to cross the Berlin Wall in 1962 with his companion. Together these solo plays explore the lives of three queer youth and their resilience in the face of violence and intolerance.
Agnes, Murderess is a graphic novel inspired by the bloody legend of Agnes McVee, a roadhouse owner, madam and serial killer in the Cariboo region of British Columbia in the late nineteenth century. Fascinated by this legend–which originated in a 1970s guide to buried treasure in BC, and has never been verified–Sarah Leavitt has imagined an entirely new story for the mysterious Agnes: her immigration to Canada from an isolated Scottish Island; her complex entanglement with shiny things; and her terrifying grandmother, Gormul, who haunts Agnes’s dreams and waking life.
Leavitt puts a decidedly queer twist on the story, moving from women’s passionate friendships in the gardens of St John’s Wood to female relationships in the Canadian wild. At the same time, the book grapples with the dangerous pre-conceived notions held by settlers that the country was a “new world,” free of ghosts and history. Agnes, Murderess presents a tortured, complicated woman struggling to escape her past. It is a spine-chilling tale of ghosts and murder, friendship and betrayal, love and greed, fate and choice.
Poems that form an eloquent, searching contemplation of “the warp and weft of being and nonbeing.”
All the Names Between is Nova Scotia poet Julia McCarthy’s meditative and crackling-with-dark-energy third collection. From her observation of “long-horned beetles… rearranging the landscape” to an apperception of “part of me /…seeded by dust / of meteors and asteroids,” McCarthy makes palpable, in richly layered imagery and with attentiveness that unfolds stillness, the “Singing Emptiness” that informs and quickens the crow’s flight, the stones’ weight, and our own being as we move in “the defined world both elegant / and maimed.” Concerned with both the inadequacy and the necessity of word to convey world, the poems move through a shifting landscape of seasons and creatures, of the remembered dead, and of scattered stones reading the Akashic field.
Grounded in the experience of presence, where the external and internal meet, a crossroads of consciousness where “a language without a name / remembers us” and the poem is a votive act, All the Names Between reflects the shadow-light of being, of what is and what isn’t, the seen and the unseen, the forgotten and the remembered where
every elegy has an ode at its centre
every ode has an elegy around its edges.
(from “Ode with an Elegy around its Edges”)
Praise for All the Names Between:
“It is Julia McCarthy’s incomparable eloquence as a poet to, as an experienced photographer might, wield darkness as an ever more powerful lens to reveal the intricate beauty of the world as she finds it. And it is with this extraordinary vision, that McCarthy ushers us into her newest collection, All the Names Between, ‘where the dead gather like trees in their white coats’ and bats hover overhead, ‘lucifugal as ashes from invisible fires.’ These are poems scintillate with vision and stunningly intimate–showing us page after page the full, and exquisite measure of ‘night’s worth.’” –Clarise Foster, Editor, Contemporary Verse 2
“Here is a book of meditations for even those immune to poetry, a poetry with no comfort zones. McCarthy takes readers to a world where the marriage between solitude and nature gives birth to memorable, haunting lines, where the mystery of poetry lies just between the words. I have no doubt readers will embrace this book as their own.” –Goran Simić, author of Immigrant Blues and From Sarajevo, with Sorrow
Almighty Voice and His Wife shakes up a familiar story from the Saskatchewan frontier, reimagining it from the postmodern late twentieth century. The “renegade Indian story” transforms into both an eloquent tale of tragic love and an often hilarious, fully theatrical exorcism of the hurts of history. A modern classic about the place of First Nations people in Canada.
Ruth grew too fast.
A young girl over seven feet tall, she struggles to conceal the physical and mental symptoms of her rapid growth, to connect with other children, and to appease her parents, Elspeth, an English seamstress who lost her family to the war, and James, a mailman rethinking his devotion to his wife. Not knowing how to help Ruth, Elspeth and James turn inward, away from one another. As their marriage falters, Ruth finds herself increasingly drawn to Suzy, the dangerous girl next door.
Ruth is not precocious, nor a prodigy, but her extraordinary size affords her extraordinary vision: a bird’s-eye perspective that allows her not just to remember but to watch her past play out. Possessing an uncanny ability to intuit the emotional secrets of her family’s past and present, Ruth gently surfaces Elspeth and James’s vulnerabilities, their regrets, and their deepest longings.
While Canadian history professor Andrew Stanhope is doing research in Paris on the German invasion of France, he stumbles upon an odd and long-lost exchange between Colonel Marius Michel, principal deputy in France’s counter-intelligence agency, the Deuxième Bureau, and the Directeur-Général of the Val de Grâce military hospital. The Colonel wants the Directeur to warn the incoming Prime Minister, Philippe Pétain, that there is an active spy in the French war ministry and that the Marshal’s own ring of advisors includes at least one Nazi sympathizer. By means of alternating flashbacks between 1940 and the 1970s, the author uncovers Michel’s attempts to track down the traitor and other collaborators whose espionage may have led to the sudden and ignominious defeat of France. Working undercover, and with his life definitely at risk, Michel follows a trail that stretches from the heart of the war ministry on the Left Bank of Paris to the bustlng high fashion industry on the Right. It is there, within the Maison d’Ariège that he encounters its treasonous owner, Louis Loriot, two beautiful German-born spies, two cases of cold-blooded murder, as well as his own would-be killer. All this, Stanhope pieces together decades later, before making the most startling discovery of them all.