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Winner of the 2017 Alberta Readers’ Choice Award!
<Fifty Percent of Mountaineering Is Uphill is the enthralling true story of Jasper’s Willi Pfisterer, a legend in the field of mountaineering and safety in the Rocky Mountains. For more than thirty years, Willi was an integral part of Jasper’s alpine landscape, guiding climbers up to the highest peaks, and rescuing them from perilous situations. Originally from Austria, this mountain man came to Canada in the 1950s to assail the Rockies, and stayed to become an integral part of mountain safety in Western Canada and the Yukon.
His daughter, Susanna Pfisterer, has shaped his stories and lectures as an engaging and educational adventure story that features over 100 archival photographs, including avalanches in the National Parks, highlights from climbing 1,600 peaks and participating in over 700 rescues, and guiding adventures with prime ministers. Accompanied by the humorous wisdom of the “Sidehillgouger,” readers will traverse an historical and spectacular terrain.
A horrific betrayal sets the destiny of the Alevizopoulos family, farmers who dare to choose a side, first in the Great War of 1914-1918, then in the Greco-Turkish war of 1919-1922. Theodore, the patriarch, was given a significant plot of fertile farmland in the Peloponnese for his efforts to fight the Ottomans in the Cretan revolution of 1886-1896. After he dies, it is Callidora, the matriarch, who must protect this legacy, raising her children to ensure the land is passed down from one generation to the next. But will the treacherous schemes of a neighbour ever allow this to happen? Survival might mean leaving what is most precious: home.
Finding Callidora unfolds against multiple backdrops?the unforgiving terrain of the Anatolia, the isolated Greek islands of Naxos and Crete, the bustling, chaotic streets of Cairo and later the vast expanse of Canada. Reflecting the headlines of the day, the novel follows four generations of the Alevizopoulos family, starting with Callidora?s children, Nikos, Vasilis and Katarina. Each will carry and pass on the scars of the original betrayal and their need to find the place where they belong.
Charting the porous borderlands of the self and the social through a year of cataclysm, Matt Rader conjures a vision of the present from a deep future.The follow-up to Ghosthawk, Fine is set largely in the Kelowna area of the Okanagan Valley, BC, over the period of July 2021–June 2022. The poems address the extraordinary natural, historical and social events of that period including the June 2021 heat dome and the November 2021 atmospheric river, the ongoing pandemic and resulting social anomie, the public announcement of hundreds of unmarked residential school graves across the country, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. On a personal level, the poems grapple with questions of disability, illness, trans identity, healing and what a good future might look like. Written in a speculative mood, the poems in Fine look back on the contemporary moment with its terrors and mythopoetic digital scrim from an imagined future, so that the voice itself becomes an incantation, a summoning of a world of survivance and beauty.
A powerful story of childhood physical, emotional and sexual abuse unrolls as the author, at age 50 and living with Multiple Sclerosis, rides her 2009 Harley-Davidson — named Thelma D. — from Ottawa to Winnipeg and back, with detours to northern Ontario and a detour into Quebec. During her ride through the stunning landscape of the Canadian Shield, she shares stories of her childhood growing up in the 1970s in the Ottawa Valley with her three brothers, a violent father and an alcoholic mother. Told with a frank openness and humour, First Gear is ultimately a story of courage, survival, and recovery.
Winner of the 2019 American Book Fest Best Book Award for Women’s Fiction; Finalist for Literary Fiction
Kate, a somewhat clumsy widow of thirty-two, flees her stifling hometown on Vancouver Island to live alone on an even smaller island in the Salish Sea. In so doing, she has vague expectations of solace and sanctuary, despite past experience. Instead she meets Ivy, a woman who through their conversations transports her to the intoxicating world of 1926 Cuba. Within the context of their friendship, Ivy’s past begins to unravel from a long-held silence, just as Kate finds herself confronting her relationship with the colourful community she’s known all her life, along with an unexpected visitor who threatens to remove all peace from her chosen refuge. Told from the perspectives of three narrators: Ivy, Kate, and Kate’s mother Nora, Fishing for Birds is a novel that juxtaposes the expectations we cling to so fiercely and the unexpected and sometimes unconventional things that turn up. The novel challenges traditional constructs of time, ethnicity, and relationship. Set against the tropical beauty of 1920s Cuba and the Northwest Coast of contemporary time, both the landscape and unique character of island life underscore the experiences of three very different women.
Award recognition for Two for the Tablelands:
***THE HOWARD ENGEL AWARD FOR BEST CRIME NOVEL SET IN CANADA 2021 – SHORTLIST***
***ATLANTIC BOOKS TODAY STAFF PICK 2021 – SHORTLIST***
Award Recognition for Three for Trinity:
***THE HOWARD ENGEL AWARD FOR BEST CRIME NOVEL SET IN CANADA 2022 – SHORTLIST***
The fifth book in the Sebastian Synard mystery series takes our intrepid tour guide/private detective on a jaunt across Newfoundland and into Labrador, in pursuit of those towers of intrigue—lighthouses!
The final stop on Synard’s lighthouse tour is the one at L’Anse Amour, Labrador, the highest in all Atlantic Canada. It’s a long climb into the lantern room, and a long fall from its catwalk to the ground below. Dead is photographer Amanda Thomson. Who is the scoundrel that nudged her past the railing? The RCMP in Forteau are pointing to one of the tour groups, but Sebastian and his partner Mae have other ideas. They retrace the excursions of Amanda and her vagabond boyfriend back to a section of northern Newfoundland called the French Shore. Could the recent bizarre vandalism at its historic sites hold a clue? What is it about the French Shore that leads them back to murder at L’Anse Amour?
A curated collection of the best-of-the-best from renowned cartoonist Kevin Tobin — Fly on the Wall captures some of the most iconic moments from Newfoundland’s past and present with a recognizably sharp wit and a dose of the province’s famous humour.
Fly on the Wall doesn’t just collect the best of 40 years of Kevin Tobin’s editorial cartoons for The Telegram (“The Evening Telegram” when he began), it tracks 40 years of Newfoundland and Labrador’s history: politics, social movements, sports, celebrity, boondoggles, feel good stories, schemes, emergencies, and triumphs – all seen through the lens of keen, satirical, and no-holds-barred fly on the wall. Inside you’ll find many familiar faces and events, from Joey Smallwood and Danny Williams, to Muskrat Falls and the Pandemic — all skewered, marinated, and ready to BBQ. Tobin’s cartoons capture not only current events as they happen, along with the colourful characters in Newfoundland and Labrador, they bring into image and word the true nature of our province’s famous sense of humour. Readers of The Telegram will be familiar with Tobin’s tiny flies, sketched into the corners of his cartoons since the early days – inspiration for this title, Fly on the Wall, and a symbol for the cartoonist himself, a fly on the wall. Watching, listening in, waiting to cut through the buzz.
Translated from French by Howard Scott
A young woman arrives in Quebec from France and one day embarks on a journey along the north shore of the St Lawrence River. Beyond Tadoussac, well into Innu territory, she stops at Ekuanitshit. Here she meets two sisters, Penassin and Nuenau, and their father, Shimun, who invite her and make her one of their family. She learns of Innu folklore, their way of life, their joys, and their attachment to the north. She joins Shimun and others into the heart of the Quebec-Labrador Peninsula. “We walk, we paddle, we admire the lake, the mountains, we hunt, we cut our wood, we don’t stop for a moment,” says Nuenau. “You have to come with us to understand.”
Following Shimun paints a stirring picture of the Innu people, for whom the call of the land exerts a magnetic pull and the spirit of hospitality still dictates how they treat unexpected guests.
Foreign Homes, Joan Crate’s second book of poems, explores domesticity and dislocation, where what was thought to be home becomes alien, and where the alien is, piece by piece, made into home — often in such simple, physical acts as laying a table, or driving a highway, or reassembling a tom photograph. In Crate’s careful hands, the knife that cuts the vegetables for dinner can transform the blade-edge of a distant war. Her migratory poems slip from voice to voice, from love to landscape to language, present to past, exile to return, illuminating the boundary that is also a border crossing between one person, one place, and another:
Dowries
We have crossed borders to reach
each other and lost land
chafes our touch. I carry
snowshoes, winter wheat, raven call, winter pocked by arsenic flakes from the mines.
You bring donkey sweat and spent bullets,
voices that shriek out, tear bright.
We offer them to each other-
gift and sacrifice.
Domestic images and personal narrative surround a burning, incantatory sequence at the centre of the book, where poems circle Shawnandithit, a Beothuk who died in exile in Newfoundland in the nineteenth century, the last of her people. In giving voice to what is unknown, feared, lost, and silent, Crate’s playful language is itself powerfully involved in this act-often violent-of breaking and making anew. And whether these homes are stolen or lost or stumblingly found, Crate is unflinching even as her own homes are made and un-made, watching those “who wait on the porch steps/ eager to move into our youth,/ to reassemble our bones.”
The Four-Doored House evokes two key women in Pierre Nepveu’s life. First, his granddaughter Lily, who he imagines maturing into a complex world, haunted by her memory of him as he is haunted now by her projected self, navigating an era awash in uncertainty and unease. Imbued with both wonder and disquiet, it is an aging poet’s celebration of childhood, as well as a meditation on his own “future absence.” There follows his celebration of C, the woman with whom Nepveu shares his nights and days. These are love poems dedicated to a companion who has aided him in finding “new phrases that reformulate the impossible.” The culmination of a brilliant career, translated into fluent and thrilling English by Donald Winker, The Four-Doored House is Nepveu’s most enduring work yet.
Jem is a self-described butch dyke from Montreal who always imagined spending her life in bars and having multiple flings. When she meets Freda, a woman who exposes Jem’s vulnerabilities, her preconceived notions of who she is become moot as she finds herself partnered in a long-term relationship with kids. Which she surprisingly loves—most of the time. But that’s all changing as Jem and Freda’s marriage shifts from one of love and lust to one of gripes and grumbles. Freda & Jem’s Best of the Week is a love story that explores the struggle for identity as a couple reconciles a new way of loving one another while accepting their new familial reality.
Non-fiction authority Myrna Kostash merges the past and the present in The Frog Lake Reader, which offers a startlingly objective perspective on the tragic events surrounding the Frog Lake Massacre of 1885. By bringing together eyewitness accounts and journal excerpts, memoirs and contemporary fiction, and excerpts from interviews with historians, Kostash provides a panoramic perspective on a tragedy often overshadowed by Louis Riel’s rebellion during the same year. The history is contentious and its interpretation unresolved, but The Frog Lake Reader, with its broad survey of vital historical accounts and points of view, offers the most comprehensive and informative narrative on the Frog Lake Massacre to date.
Gigi and Lola live by one motto: love for gas, gas for cash, cash for living, living for love. Living in Zimbabwe’s depressed economy, both women live day-by-day, plying their trade with the truck drivers that stop at the border.
Gigi knows the limitations of her trade, while her young protege, Lola, looks for love in every man that comes her way. Lola’s brother, Chickn, ekes out his own living while keeping an ever-watchful eye for Gigi’s affections and Lola’s safety. But love is not a luxury these girls can afford. Through story, song, and play, Gigi and Lola inspire each other to find joy on the edges of survival.