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ebooks for Everyone Lists

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Mischief in High Places

By: Ted Rowe

$22.95

Mischief in High Places examines the spectacular career and personal life of the man who, in 1919, first became elected prime minister of Newfoundland.

The political successes of Sir Richard Squires’ career are overshadowed by a legacy of scandal and deceit that paved the way for Newfoundland’s loss of democracy in 1933.

Perhaps best known for slipping out of the Colonial Building during the 1932 riot, Squires had survived three corruption-ridden terms in office in the final decades of responsible government while living a high-flying lifestyle with his wife, Helena.
Modern and Normal

By: Karen Solie

$17.00

Evade your eye. Try to see as others do
what is desired or refused. What went wrong.
Or right, then wrong. Objectively, what hangs.
Pull yourself together. Years are neither kind
nor cruel. You drag on. The girl is gone.
Consider that it might be time to call in
a professional. Blood is fearless, runs
to meet a touch, indiscriminate, remembering
the first time it fell in love with the world, unaware
that now you are alone.
From “Mirror”
In Modern and Normal, Karen Solie takes her on-the-road fascination with being between places to a new level, exploring conceptual and perceptual states of in-betweenness – for example, between what is perceived and what is actually there, or between and among the patterns the world repeats from the cell to the structure of the universe — to find points of intersection. Solie finds a middle ground between the discourses of the hard sciences and the intuitive, a realm of weird overlap wherein lie questions of probability, fate, determinism, chance, luck, and faith. She writes about fractals and physics, but also about bar bands, broken hearts, and the trappings of desire. Some splendid landscape poems celebrate nature while mourning the way in which it’s often exploited and used. Once again Karen Solie offers readers her lovely dexterity and skill in poems which entertain as they move.
Mondegreen Riffs

By: Angeline Schellenberg

$24.95

In her third full-length collection, acclaimed poet Angeline Schellenberg takes a ?long, loving look at the real? (to borrow theologian Walter Burghardt?s phrase). With her ear formed by Ignatian spirituality, her body sensitized by neurodivergence and trauma, Schellenberg listens to the world with humour, reverence, and above all, empathy.

Weaving the sights and sounds we perceive with the questions we dare to ask, Mondegreen Riffs explores the intersection of sensation, meaning, and wonder. This groundbreaking collection intertwines three series: prose poetry on the social history of colour; poems impersonating musical instruments; and lyrical answers to odd online inquiries such as ?If I eat myself, would I become twice as big or disappear completely?? Schellenberg invites us to embrace a holy uncertainty, and in doing so to ?mishear the most beautiful things.?
Monkey Ranch

By: Julie Bruck

$19.00

Comic and sober by turns, these poems ask us what is sufficient, what will suffice?

… a mandrill, a middle-aged woman, a shattered Baghdad neighbourhood, a long marriage, even a spoon, grapple with this unanswerable conundrum — sometimes with rage, or plain persistence, sometimes with the furious joy of a dog who gets to ride with his head through a truck’s passenger window. Julie Bruck’s third book of poetry is a brilliant and unusual blend of pathos and play, of deep seriousness and wildly veering humour. Though Bruck “does not stammer when it’s time to speak up,” and “will not blink when it’s time to stare directly at the uncomfortable,” as Cornelius Eady says in his blurb for the book, “in Monkey Ranch she celebrates more than she sighs, and she smartly avoids the shallow trap of mere indignation by infusing her lines with bright, nimble turns, the small, yet indelible detail. Bruck sees everything we do; she just seems to see it wiser. Her poems sing and roil with everything complicated and joyous we human monkeys are.”
Moon of the Crusted Snow

By: Waubgeshig Rice

$22.95

2023 Canada Reads Longlist Selection

National Bestseller

Winner of the 2019 OLA Forest of Reading Evergreen Award

Shortlisted for the 2019 John W. Campbell Memorial Award

Shortlisted for the 2019/20 First Nation Communities READ Indigenous Literature Award

2020 Burlington Library Selection; 2020 Hamilton Reads One Book One Community Selection; 2020 Region of Waterloo One Book One Community Selection; 2019 Ontario Library Association Ontario Together We Read Program Selection; 2019 Women’s National Book Association’s Great Group Reads; 2019 Amnesty International Book Club Pick

January 2020 Reddit r/bookclub pick of the month

“This slow-burning thriller is also a powerful story of survival and will leave readers breathless.” — Publishers Weekly

“Rice seamlessly injects Anishinaabe language into the dialogue and creates a beautiful rendering of the natural world … This title will appeal to fans of literary science-fiction akin to Cormac McCarthy as well as to readers looking for a fresh voice in indigenous fiction.” — Booklist

A daring post-apocalyptic novel from a powerful rising literary voice

With winter looming, a small northern Anishinaabe community goes dark. Cut off, people become passive and confused. Panic builds as the food supply dwindles. While the band council and a pocket of community members struggle to maintain order, an unexpected visitor arrives, escaping the crumbling society to the south. Soon after, others follow.

The community leadership loses its grip on power as the visitors manipulate the tired and hungry to take control of the reserve. Tensions rise and, as the months pass, so does the death toll due to sickness and despair. Frustrated by the building chaos, a group of young friends and their families turn to the land and Anishinaabe tradition in hopes of helping their community thrive again. Guided through the chaos by an unlikely leader named Evan Whitesky, they endeavor to restore order while grappling with a grave decision.

Blending action and allegory, Moon of the Crusted Snow upends our expectations. Out of catastrophe comes resilience. And as one society collapses, another is reborn.
Most Anything You Please

By: Trudy J. Morgan-Cole

$19.95

For decades, the Holloways have operated a convenience store in the working-class neighborhood of Rabbittown in St. John’s, and every customer has a story. In a vibrant, contemporary family saga, filled with idiosyncratic characters, Trudy Morgan-Cole tells the tale of three generations of Holloway women—Ellen, Audrey, and Rachel—their loves and their livelihood in times of great change. Most Anything You Please captures the spirit of a community and the women who hold it together, revealing the bonds that break and the ties that bind.
Most of All the Wanting

By: Amanda Merpaw

$21.95

How do we speak what feels unspeakable?

Exploring the landscape of grief in the wake of divorce, Most of All the Wanting is a treatise on intimacy in the face of change. Throughout, Amanda Merpaw’s poems attend to the fluidity of queer desire, documenting the complexities of intimacy, longing, and joy where “there’s burning beyond / the cusp of our cups.” Set in an environment of political and ecological upheaval, Most of All the Wanting asks what queerness makes possible within the self and the world. An essential debut.
Moving to Delilah

By: Catherine Owen

$19.95

From award-winning poet Catherine Owen, a collection of poems about one woman’s journey from BC to a new life in Alberta, where she buys an old house and creates a new meaning of home.

In search of stability and rootedness, in 2018 Catherine Owen moved from coastal Vancouver to prairie Edmonton. There, she purchased a house built more than one hundred years earlier: a home named Delilah.

Beginning from a space of grief that led to Owen’s relocation, the poems in this collection inhabit the home, its present and its past. These poems share the stories of decades of renovations, the full lives of Delilah’s previous inhabitants, and Owen’s triumphs and failures in the ever-evolving garden. The poems ultimately whirl out in the concentric distances of the local neighbourhood and beyond — though one house can make a home, home encompasses so much more than one house.

In this exceptional and lyrical collection, Catherine Owen interrogates her need for economic itinerancy, traces the passage of time and the later phases of grief, and deepens her understanding of rootedness, both in place and in poetic forms.
Moving Upstream

By: Mary Barnes

$24.95

Drawing on her Ojibwa roots and storytelling, Barnes shares stories that take the heart on the path to the past, nostalgic though it may be, wherein lies discovery, memories, and rhythms that ease the soul. Touching, tender but never overwrought, Barnes’ poetry brings wonder to the spirit of nature and provides a sense of connection to the things most often overlooked.
Mowing

By: Marlene Cookshaw

$20.00

An award-winning poet’s day-book of poems, where both bounty and loss are tenderly assigned value.

Marlene Cookshaw, in her first collection of poetry in more than a decade, invites her readers to partake in a long-anticipated harvest that comes in many forms. Whether she’s haying June-high grasses, relishing a neighbour’s gift of new potatoes with her husband, logging fragments of poetry she’s read in a notebook, or honouring the deaths of her parents, Cookshaw works an open field. Through this pastorale wander dogs, horses, chickens, and donkeys in counterpoint to farm labourers and long-time residents who share in her abiding connection to the land they mutually watch over and tend. The power grid may fail while every monthly expense is brought to account, but observation as careful and particular as Cookshaw’s more than weighs the seasons that it seeks to bring into balance.

Each day
I plan how the next will differ,

will more resemble what
I want a life to be.

“These poems can confront quotidian life in plainspoken language because, like an extraordinary pencil drawing, there is so much subtle cross-hatching and shading. Cookshaw observes her mother’s death, for example, both directly and aslant, half turning away, as if unsure which is the more truthful. Mowing requires that you sit and visit for a good long while.” –Ross Leckie
Mr. Beagle and the Georgestown Mystery

By: Lori Doody

$11.95

When he decides to visit his cousin Georgie, Mr. Beagle is not looking for a new mystery to solve?but he finds one nonetheless. Books have been going missing in the neighborhood, and not just any books?storybooks. Of course, Mr. Beagle?s keen nose and sharp eyes help him find the answer.

In this delightful picture book, Lori Doody has her quirky canine sleuth solve a new puzzle and celebrates the importance of stories in the lives of us all.
Mr. Beagle Climbs Signal Hill

By: Lori Doody

$9.95

Someone is snatching snacks on Signal Hill! Can Mr. Beagle suss out who? While taking a hike up Signal Hill, Mr. Beagle soon realizes that people?s picnics are being plundered! Who could the culprit be? With his nose for clues and a handy pair of binoculars, he solves the puzzle, and finds a way to encourage community and collaboration. Lori Doody?s quirky canine detective is back with another fun and charming picture-book mystery?the third in her on-going Mr. Beagle series.
Mr. Beagle Goes to Rabbittown

By: Lori Doody

$9.95

When Mr. Beagle moves to Rabbittown, his new neighbors aren?t sure what to make of him. Everyone else is a rabbit, after all. But then mittens start to go missing, and no one knows where they might be. Who better than Mr. Beagle to sniff out the culprit!

With quirky, charming illustrations and sweet, simple text, Mr. Beagle Goes to Rabbittown celebrates how one finds a space in a new place, and the warm embrace of community.
Muinjij Becomes a Man

By: Saqamaw Misel Joe

$9.95

Muinji’j has been waiting all his life to make this trip with his grandfather-a trip to the city to sell rich otter, beaver and muskrat pelts and bring back supplies to the village. It’s a long expedition that tests Muinji’j’s reserves of strength, patience and maturity. Just as he thinks he and his niskamij have faced all of their challenges, the worst happens-his naskamij falls ill. Although Muinji’j gathers the medicine his grandfather asks for, it doesn’t help fast enough. Both of them realize that there is only one solution: Muinji’j must continue the jou ey alone. He must face the challenges and mysteries of a city he has never seen, and retu to help his grandfather as well as his village that relies on him. Saqamaw Mi’sel Joe is the chief of the Miawpukek Mi’kamawey Mawi’omi – Conne River Mi’kmaq Tribal Nation in Newfoundland. The Miawpukek Band Reserve, which is the only one recognized in Newfoundland, has an on reserve population of approximately 700 people. The reserve is located on the south east shore of Newfoundland. The reserve covers an area of some 14 square miles. It lies 560 km from the capital city of St. John’s and 180 km from the nearest services center, Grand Falls. Saqamaw Mi’sel Joe was bo in Miawpukek on June 4, 1947 into a strong Mi’kmaq family; both his grandfather and uncle have held the office of hereditary Saqamaw. He has been educated in all the Mi’kmaq ways and traditions. Currently, Mi’sel Joe is in his fourth consecutive two-year term as Administrative Chief. He is also the spiritual leader of his people. In this capacity he has gained recognition provincially, nationally and inte ationally, particularly in the area of spiritual healing. He lives together with his wife Colletta and granddaughter Ansalewit at Miawpukek First Nation in Newfoundland. Muinji’j Becomes a Man is his first book.
Murder in a Minor Key

By: Robert Young

$24.95

Winnipeg, 1935. 47 year old Detective Inspector Sidney Baxter is the finest Detective with the Winnipeg Police Force with a keen analytical mind. He’s also blind. When two grisly murders are discovered in different places, they appear to be unrelated. There is no evidence of theft as motive and no witnesses to either killing.

From racetracks to hospitals, from sumptuous theaters like the Capital, and the carpeted elegance of Eaton’s Grill room, to the ten stool counter at Winnipeg’s first Salisbury House the reader is drawn into a city, time, and place of a decadent past. From site to site Sidney Baxter and his ever faithful assistant Maxime Godbout must identify and apprehend the killer. Or killers.
Murder in the Chilcotin

By: Roy Innes

$19.95

The third book in Roy Innes’ mystery series sends RCMP Inspector Coswell and the newly promoted Sergeant Blakemore to the district of West Caribou in British Columbia, where the murder of a neophyte Mountie, the son of a local rancher, threatens to ignite racial conflicts that have been simmering in the region ever since 1885, when five First Nations men were hanged for treason.
Murmurs of Decline

By: B Devakanthan

$22.95

The KANAVUCCHIRAI quintet develop the context of Sri Lanka’s tragic civil war. As the youth in the island village of Nainativu realize that their education and prospects are being curtailed by an increasingly Sinhala majoritarian nationalist government, they begin to rise up in opposition. Volumes 1 and 2, through its main characters, the young woman Rajalakshmi and her betrothed, Suthan, described the growth of the armed struggle from the 1980s onwards as the young people sail to Tamil Nadu in India to join the resistance.

Volumes 3 and 4 return to the micro-environment of Nainativu and the main island of Sri Lanka and the Tamil struggle as it takes shape there. Volume 5 returns to the surviving characters from the first two volumes, and serves more as an afterward that places their story in a global context, as international actors enter the scene. These novels also bring in other characters that speak to the different political and ideological movements at the time: both militant and pacifist, leftist and nationalist. Devakanthan shows how different political movements drew inspiration from each other, and how divisions appeared and grew within what was first seen as an unshakeable organization.

Devakanthan’s characters are richly detailed, both male and female protagonists endowed with internal lives. The quintet thoughtfully and sensitively narrates the story of simple men and women trapped within a national struggle. As a whole it describes how a movement united by lofty goals begins to fall apart, as disagreements appear and former allies go their separate ways.

The quintet won the Government of Tamil Nadu Novel of the Year Award (1998) for THIRUPPADAIYAATCHI (His Sacred Army), and the Tamil Literary Garden’s Best Novel Award (Canada, 2014).
Museum of Kindness

By: Susan Elmslie

$20.00

A meditative and piercing collection that explores traumas both ordinary and out of the ordinary.

Museum of Kindness, Montreal poet Susan Elmslie’s searching second collection of poetry, is a book that bravely examines “genres” familiar and hard to fathom: the school shooting, PTSD, raising a child who has a disability. It is a collection about thresholds big and small. In poems grounded in the domestic and in workaday life, poems burnished by silence and the weight of the unspoken, poems by turns ironic and sincere, Elmslie asks “What, exactly, is / unthinkable?” Confronted by “the mismatch / between our need for meaning / and our inability to find it,” the poet reflects on the possibility of the miraculous in hard-won insights, in “a comparatively / uncomplicated joy.”

Of the “Museum of Kindness” evoked in the title poem, Elmslie writes, “There isn’t one.” This and many other poems in the collection confront that absence and emerge from the silence to consider the duality of loss, the gift of “ordinary comfort,” and the transformative possibilities of art. Candid, forthright, urgent, celebratory, and wise, this is a book for all of us; in it, we encounter a sober and unflinching gaze that meets us where we really live.

“… These poems are so acute, so clear-eyed in their brutal wisdom, that I had to put the book down to rest between poems, like a woman in labor, entirely wrung out. Museum of Kindness is a masterpiece of loss transformed by love into some of the most greathearted, lyrically daring poems I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading. Susan Elmslie has written a brilliant, unforgettable book.” –Rachel Rose, Vancouver’s Poet Laureate
Muslimah Who Fell to Earth, The

$24.95

These twenty-one personal stories are told by women from practically all backgrounds and persuasions–devout and not-so devout, professionals and housewives, westernized and traditional, wearing jeans, hijab, or niqab, straight and gay, and originally from Africa, North America, South Asia, the Middle East, and East Asia–revealing in their own ways what it means to them to be a Muslim woman (a “Muslimah”). What we get is a complex of stories, all challenging conventions and stereotypes, and united by two ideas–Islam (or the Quran) and nationality (Canadian).
My Indian

By: Mi’sel Joe, Sheila O’Neill

$16.95

***2022 ATLANTIC BOOK AWARDS: APMA BEST ATLANTIC-PUBLISHED BOOK AWARD – SHORTLIST***

***2022 BMO WINTERSET AWARD – LONGLIST***

***2022-2023 HACKMATACK AWARD: ENGLISH FICTION – SHORTLIST***

***2022 IPPY AWARDS: MULTICULTURAL FICTION: JUV/YA – SILVER***

In 1822, William Epps Cormack sought the expertise of a guide who could lead him across Newfoundland in search of the last remaining Beothuk camps on the island. In his journals, Cormack refers to his guide only as “My Indian.”

Now, almost two hundred years later, Mi’sel Joe and Sheila O’Neill reclaim the story of Sylvester Joe, the Mi’kmaw guide engaged by Cormack. In a remarkable feat of historical fiction, My Indian follows Sylvester Joe from his birth (in what is now known as Miawpukek First Nation) and early life in his community to his journey across the island with Cormack. But will Sylvester Joe lead Cormack to the Beothuk, or will he protect the Beothuk and lead his colonial explorer away?

In rewriting the narrative of Cormack’s journey from the perspective of his Mi’kmaw guide, My Indian reclaims Sylvester Joe’s identity.