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Winner, Canadian Authors Award for Canadian History, Jeanne Clarke Memorial Local History Award, and Prince Edward Island Book Award for Non-Fiction
Is it possible to reach back in time and solve an unsolved murder, more than 170 years after it was committed?
Just after midnight on April 21, 1842, John McLoughlin, Jr. — the chief trader for the Hudson’s Bay Company at Fort Stikine, in the northwest corner of the territory that would later become British Columbia — was shot to death by his own men. They claimed it was an act of self-defence, their only means of stopping the violent rampage of their drunk and abusive leader. Sir George Simpson, the HBC’s Overseas Governor, took the men of Stikine at their word, and the Company closed the book on the matter. The case never saw the inside of a courtroom, and no one was ever charged or punished for the crime. To this day, the killing remains the Honourable Company’s dirtiest unaired laundry and one of the darkest pages in the annals of our nation’s history. Now, exhaustive archival research and modern forensic science — including ballistics, virtual autopsy, and crime scene reconstruction — unlock the mystery of what really happened the night McLoughlin died.
Using her formidable talents as a writer, researcher, and forensic scientist, Debra Komar weaves a tale that could almost be fiction, with larger-than-life characters and dramatic tension. In telling the story of John McLoughlin, Jr., Komar also tells the story of Canada’s north and its connection to the Hudson’s Bay Company.
The debut novel by acclaimed poet Lisa Robertson, in which a poet realizes she’s written the works of Baudelaire.
One morning, Hazel Brown awakes in a badly decorated hotel room to find that she’s written the complete works of Charles Baudelaire. In her bemusement the hotel becomes every cheap room she ever stayed in during her youthful perambulations in 1980s Paris. This is the legend of a she-dandy’s life.
Part magical realism, part feminist ars poetica, part history of tailoring, part bibliophilic anthem, part love affair with nineteenth-century painting, The Baudelaire Fractal is poet and art writer Lisa Robertson’s first novel.
Lisa Braun struggles to understand both her own life and the tragic historic events that haunt her in this engaging new novel written in Marlis Wesseler’s characteristically understated, confiding prose.
The novel begins with Lisa heading off into a beautiful beech forest in Germany, near where her in-laws live. As she walks, she ponders the stark contrast between the peaceful forest and the notorious concentration camp, both known as Buchenwald. Her husband Gerhardt’s family has always been reticent, or maybe evasive, about the Holocaust and their family’s World War Two experiences, and Lisa has learned not to ask too many questions.
After they return to Canada, Lisa unexpectedly finds herself very alone and at loose ends, and through a series of events befriends an elderly man, Ben Meisner, who was interned in Buchenwald–and the questions she has always wanted to ask come searingly into focus. Lisa gets a closer view of unthinkable events than she bargained for, and in time Ben Meisner relies on her in a way she could never have predicted.
This wry, perceptive novel is about secrets and silences; about estrangements between family members, and gaps in understanding between well-intentioned people who struggle to bridge the distances between one another. The Beech Forest looks into the dark corners of the human heart, and brings us back out into the light of day with humour and compassion.
A history of the Beothuk of Newfoundland. Exciting in its detail, this book gives us a rare picture of a lost people whose culture was destroyed after the arrival of white settlers.
Bunny Best has met her unfortunate end after a mishap at a Gay Days parade. Now her two sons, Kyle and Hamilton, have the task of arranging her funeral and caring for her most beloved companion, a troublesome Italian greyhound named Enzo. In the bustle of obituary-writing, eulogy-giving, and dog-sitting, sibling rivalry quickly reaches its peak and years of buried contentions surface.
The Best Brothers is a bittersweet comedy that explores the many ways in which we grieve and the love we find in unexpected places.
***2022 PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND BOOK AWARD: FICTION – WINNER***
***2022 BMO WINTERSET AWARD – LONGLIST***
A haunting and evocative exploration of the meaning of family and home.
Ingrid and Norah have an unconventional upbringing—growing up in a motel, raised by their mother and her female partner. The girls’ grandmother, Ada, who owns the Blue Moth, has always kept them at a distance. But when she buys a piano for the motel, that all changes. Years later in England, training to be a soloist, Ingrid loses her voice and must decide what to do. She hears from Norah, who’s reviving a party that began during their childhood to celebrate the arrival of mysterious and elusive blue moths. The Blue Moth Motel deals with family dynamics, grief, and the concept of home.
Following an unprecedented explosion of literary talent in Newfoundland over the past twenty years, The Breakwater Book of Contemporary Newfoundland Short Fiction assembles the very best work by the island’s most accomplished fiction writers. Featuring selections by Michael Crummey, Jessica Grant, Lisa Moore, and Michael Winter, among others, this stellar anthology, expertly edited by Larry Mathews, stands as the quintessential introduction to Newfoundland fiction. These are the best stories written by our most talented writers during the most exciting time in the island’s literary history.
It’s April 1st and young artist Gerry Coneybear, inheritor of her Aunt Maggie’s big old house The Maples (and her aunt’s twenty cats!), wishes her mountain of bills was a joke. She’s just self-published her children’s book The Cake-Jumping Cats of Dibble, and that cost money. Plus the valuable painting she was hoping to sell is missing from the auctioneers’. And on top of everything else, her kitten Jay is acting weird, keeping her up at night. It’s almost as if the cat’s possessed.
At least Gerry’s personal relationships are going well: with her boyfriend Doug, part-time house keeper Prudence, and the odd assortment of friends she’s made over the year since she moved to Lovering, a tiny village by the Ottawa River. All seems well as Gerry bakes treats for the art class she teaches at home, cleans out the woodshed and plans a surprise birthday party. But then one of her students begins sketching ghosts, someone eggs Gerry’s home, and she feels she’s being stalked. There’s trouble with Prudence’s long lost husband too.
Things come to a head when Gerry’s house is tagged while she’s in it, her house is rammed by a car, and one of her relatives attacks another. Add in a suspicious death and you have another cozy Maples Mystery.
“It is the voice of the characters, the kindness of strangers, and the ingenuity and determination of our protagonist against terrible forces that make this story sing.” — San Francisco Chronicle
“[An] unbelievably accomplished first novel.” — NOW Magazine
American Booksellers Association Indie Next List pick
Shortlisted for the 2017 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize
Shortlisted for the 2017 Atlantic Book Awards
Publishers Weekly, starred review
A deeply compassionate novel about a gentle child who radiates goodness and the way that light refracts — even in the harshest of circumstances.
For the Appleton sisters, life has unravelled many times before. But with a sudden gunshot, it finally explodes.
In the aftermath of chaos and tragedy, eight-year-old Hariet Appleton, known to all as Ari, is shipped off to Cape Breton and her Aunt Mary, who is purported to eat little girls. But Mary and her partner, Nia, offer an unexpected refuge to Ari and her steadfast companion, Jasper, an imaginary seahorse. Yet the respite does not last, and Ari is forced to return to her addiction-addled mother and broken sisters.
Through the sexual revolution and drug culture of the 1960s, Ari struggles with her father’s legacy and her mother’s addictions, testing limits with substances that numb and men who show her kindness. Through it all, her epic imagination colors her grim reality. Ari spins through a chaotic decade of loss and love with wit, tenacity, and the astonishing balance unique to seahorses.
The Clay Girl is a beautiful tour de force with the voice of an unforgetting child, sculpted by kindness, cruelty, and the extraordinary power of imagination.
Spanning two decades, Smallwood’s story is anchored and propelled by one of Johnston’s most memorable creations: the fictitious Sheilagh Fielding, a caustic newspaper columnist whose own battles with the past and alcohol addiction find full vent and expression in her tireless dogging of Smallwood’s climb to power. At its heart, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams is the story of a man whose career is buoyed and sometimes sunk by his unresolved feelings for a woman he never allowed himself to love. It is also the story of Newfoundland’s final years as a country, the end of one cultural and political trajectory, and the beginning of another.
Based on the classic novel by Wayne Johnston, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams is a fictionalized portrait of Joseph R. Smallwood, the controversial political figure who ambitiously led Newfoundland into Confederation with Canada, and became its first premier.
Longlisted for the 2018 International Dublin Literary Award
A masterful and gripping novel from “an undeniably talented writer” — Globe and Mail
On a sunny May morning, social worker Jessica Campbell sorts through her mother’s belongings after her recent funeral. In the basement, she makes a shocking discovery — two dead girls curled into the bottom of her mother’s chest freezers. She remembers a pair of foster children who lived with the family in 1988: Casey and Jamie Cheng — troubled, beautiful, and wild teenaged sisters from Vancouver’s Chinatown. After six weeks, they disappeared; social workers, police officers, and Jessica herself assumed they had run away.
As Jessica learns more about Casey, Jamie, and their troubled immigrant Chinese parents, she also unearths dark stories about Donna, whom she had always thought of as the perfect mother. The complicated truths she uncovers force her to take stock of own life.
Moving between present and past, this riveting novel unflinchingly examines the myth of social heroism and traces the often-hidden fractures that divide our diverse cities.
Toronto, 1968. Herbie Weingarten, a teenager in his last year of high school, finds that his uncle Jeffrey, a holocaust survivor, has been taken in by a new religious movement called, “Exalted Consciousness”. The young man tries to extricate his uncle from the group even while his uncle tries to pull him into it. Visit Toronto’s downtown core when Yorkville was a hippy haven, Rochdale College was a centre of the illicit drug trade and bands had names like Intercontinental Ballistic Grapefruit. Watch as personalities are broken down and moulded in the pursuit of power and money by the mysterious Baron Gerhard Von Albrecht. Take a walk along “cult row” from Davenport and Avenue Road through to Yorkville, as pernicious gurus create ugly alternatives within the Age of Aquarius. This propulsive plot is matched by Kasman’s meticulous and lavish illustrations capturing a bygone era of Canada’s largest city and the seedy characters within.
ONE OF BOOK RIOT‘S “20 MUST-READ HORROR BOOKS YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF”
Simon and Marie can’t seem to have a baby. And so they flee the city for an idyllic village, where things will certainly be better. But the town is gloomy, even hostile — things haven’t been the same since the factory closed down and a broadcast antenna was erected. Now there are no birds singing, and people have started disappearing.
Teresa is sexy, seductive, and mentally challenged. Worshipped by her boyfriend, she turns tricks at $5, is addicted to Tim Hortons’ doughnuts, lies without thinking, and overflows with endless kindness, but she continues to hold on to her limitless innocence. The Crackwalker captures the music, the dialect, and the unpretty realities of the inner city. First produced thirty years ago, Thompson’s striking portrayal of the discarded class in Canada continues to move audiences today.
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.
Enrique Tomás lives a quiet life with a large, loving family in an unnamed South American country. But Enrique has secrets. When his second eldest son, Hector, and Hector’s beloved friend Nadia uncover one of Enrique’s secrets, the course of Hector’s life is irrevocably altered. Exiled by his parents to the isolated countryside, Hector is accused of terrorism—a crime of which he is innocent, yet ruthlessly punished. As he struggles to extricate himself from the clutches of a brutal and paranoid military regime, he learns that freedom comes at a terrible price.
The Crimes of Hector Tomás is an epic novel about disappearance and deception, family and nation. Enrique, Hector, and Nadia are trapped in a nightmare world where innocence counts for nothing and justice is a dream. Once they make their choices, they can never go back.
Libraries are magical places. But what if they’re even more magical than we know?
In Cyrille Martinez’s library, the books are alive: not just their ideas or their stories, but the books themselves. Meet the Angry Young Book, who has strong opinions about who reads what and why. He’s tired of people reading bestsellers, so he places himself on the desks of those who might appreciate him. Meet the Old Historian who mysteriously vanished from the stacks. Meet the Blue Librarian, the Mauve Librarian, the Yellow Librarian, and spend a day with the Red Librarian trying to banish coffee cups and laptops.
Then one day there are no empty desks anywhere in the Great Library. A great horde of student workers has descended, and they will scan every single book in the library: the much-borrowed, the neglected, the popular, the obscure. What will happen to the library then? Will it still be necessary?
The Dark Library is a theoretical fiction, a meditation on what libraries mean in our digital world. Has the act of reading changed? What is a reader? A book? Martinez, a librarian himself, has written a love letter to the urban forest of the dark, wild library, where ideas and stories roam free.