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NORMA

By: Sarah Mintz

$22.95

Widowhood and weirdos, online and off, NORMA is so dark it smarts.

It’s a terrible freedom to linger unaccounted for.

Norma is waking up and cracking up. Decades of marriage, housekeeping, and family responsibility: buried with her husband Hank. Now, she’s free, gorging on an online riot of canceled soap operas, message boards, and grocery store focus groups. Transcribing chatter for fifty cents a minute. It’s all of humanity—grim, funny, and desperate—wafting into her world, a world reeking with the funk of old fast food wrappers, cold stale recycled air, and desiccated car upholstery. And one where appropriate boundaries are suddenly slipping too, when a voice from one of her transcripts goes from virtual to IRL and just down the block.

NORMA is a tart, unhinged flail into widowhood, the parasocial, and some of the more careworn corners of the internet.
North East

By: Wendy McGrath

$17.95

In North East, Wendy McGrath expands on the story she began with Santa Rosa, as a working class couple living in 1960s Edmonton drift further apart while their young daughter tries to understand something she senses is hiding under the surface of her family and her neighbourhood. A visit to her grandparents’ farm in the country reveals the abject poverty the couple came to the city to escape, and the internecine marital strife that threatens to be born anew.

McGrath’s crystalline, evocative prose conjures an image of the past that defies nostalgia, conjuring images of a city that is in the midst of rewriting its own history. Through the all-seeing eyes of her child protagonist McGrath conjures indelible scenes of harsh domesticity and small victories, of endless summertime days spent around the home and evenings at the drive-in theatre.
North End Love Songs

By: Katherena Vermette

$15.95

Katherena Vermette’s award-winning poetry collection North End Love Songs is an ode to the place she grew up, where the beauty of the natural world is overlaid with the rough reality of crime and racism. When a young girl’s brother goes missing, she learns what prejudice and discrimination mean, as the police and the media dismiss his disappearance because he is young and Indigenous.

Read alone, or as a companion to Vermette’s award-winning novel, The Break and its follow-up, The Strangers, North End Love Songs is a moving tribute to the people who make the North End their home.
Not Anyone’s Anything

By: Ian Williams

$21.95

Ian Williams’s Not Anyone’s Anything is a trio of trios: three sets of three stories, with three of those stories further divided into thirds. Mathematical, musical, and meticulously crafted, these stories play profoundly with form, and feature embedded flash cards and musical notations, literal basements, and dual narratives, semi-detached. Roaming through Toronto and its surrounding suburbia, Williams’s characters wittily and wryly draw attention to the angst and anxieties associated with being somewhere between adolescence and more-than-that. They are disastrously ambitious, performing amateur surgery or perfecting Chopin; they are restless and bored, breaking into units of new subdivisions hoping for a score; they continually test the ones they love, and, though every time feels like the last time, they might be up for one more game.
Not Being on a Boat

By: Esme Keith

$21.95

Rutledge, an aging, divorced man, has treated himself to a Cruise on the Mariola. The Cruise is not just any cruise. It’s the whole shebang. It’s around the world. It’s a lifestyle change: G & Ts and tuxedos and cigars and cognac galore. The service is top-rate. And Rutledge’s steward, Raoul, is a good kid.

But then a day trip to a Caribbean port ends in commotion. Some people don’t make it back onto the ship. Rutledge, nonplussed, makes use of the vacant machines in the Fitness Room and the unoccupied loungers on deck. But soon, crew members seem few and far between, and the menu in the Captain’s Mess significantly diminished. Rutledge gets the feeling that something is amiss. And that’s just unacceptable.

Welcome aboard Esme Keith’s debut dystopic novel, a cunning parody of modern day luxury and the coveted all-inclusive vacation, from the refreshingly blunt point of view of a man unable to see beyond his own needs, with hilarious results.
November Rain

By: Maureen Jennings

$24.95

“This is the second book in the Paradise Café series featuring private investigator Charlotte Frayne and it’s even better than the first. Jennings has made the jump from Victorian Toronto to the Depression era with ease and, once again, proves that Canadian history is far from dull.” — The Globe and Mail

Charlotte’s boss at T. Gilmore and Associates takes off on a mysterious trip to Europe, leaving Charlotte in charge of the detective agency. Mrs. Jessop hires the newly promoted Private Investigator to inquire into the untimely death of her son, a veteran injured in the Great War. The police ruled it a suicide, but Mrs. Jessop doesn’t agree and wants Charlotte to find out what really happened.

Then Charlotte is hired to infiltrate a small women’s wear manufacturer to uncover communist agitators. When the factory supervisor is murdered on the job just as Charlotte starts to look into it, she gets seconded to the police to help find out what happened.

The November clouds darken and Charlotte is left to struggle to solve two mysteries at the same time — until they intersect. Add an aging grandfather, an absent boyfriend, and a mad scheme to mount a controversial play at the Paradise Café and Charlotte has her hands full.
Nucleus

By: Svetlana Ischenko

$18.95

Svetlana Ischenko tackles the creative tension between her identity as a Ukrainian poet, with deeply Ukrainian sensibilities, and that of an immigrant poet enthused by her adopted country.

In Nucleus readers will see through a Ukrainian immigrant’s eyes as she looks back at the land and traditions of her original country. This collection illuminates Ischenko’s poetic transformation, from a heroic crown of sonnets to freer, lyrical pieces, but all within the dynamic of Ukrainian and Canadian subject matter and sensibilities. A powerful collection, made even more profound in light of recent events in Ukraine.

Nucleus includes a fascinating introductory essay that explores the immigrant’s translation of self in a new country.
Oculum

By: Philippa Dowding

$12.95
Oculum Echo

By: Philippa Dowding

$13.95

The explosions come in the night.

Miranda1, Mannfred, Grannie, and the one thousand children of Oculum must flee their farm, chased by the UnRuly. But there is hope: an old friend sends word of a book that may hold the secret to their survival.

Just as they begin their journey through the wasteland, Echo1 wakes from an eighty-three-year sleep and is given a mission to find the four domes of the children of Oculum, and to find the First One, whatever the cost.
Of Hockey and Hijab

By: Sheema Khan

$25.95

In these thoughtful essays, Sheema Khan–Canadian hockey mom and Harvard PhD–gives us her pointed insights on being a modern and liberal, yet practising, Muslim, especially in Canada. Tackling a host of issues, such as terrorism and fanaticism, human rights post 9/11, Islamic law, women’s rights, sharia, and the meaning of hijab, she explains Islam to the greater public while calling for mutual understanding and tolerance. She tells us “Why Muslims are angry,” and protests, “You can’t pigeonhole 1.6 billion Muslims,” while calling on Muslims to “acknowledge the rise of fanaticism.” She explains the plausibility of Islamic financing and applies the Charter of Rights to Canada . “Can there be Islamic democracy?” she asks, and then, “Will Quebec adopt France ‘s peculiar brand of liberty?” Provocative and original, even-handed and conciliatory, these essays are an important contribution to an urgent modern debate.
Off Menu

By: Amy Rosen

$24.95

Twenty-something Ruthie Cohen, a data entry minion for a second-tier movie app, spends her days thinking about the kickass meals she’s going to make for her besties, Trish and Lilly, while pining for Dean (sigh, Dean), her vacation fling from six months earlier. Could they have made it work in real life?

On top of that, Bubbe Bobby Grace, Ruthie’s beloved and inspiring grandmother, passed away and left Ruthie an inheritance of $62,873.42, along with instructions on how to use it: “Follow your passion, Dollface.” During a prosecco-fueled night with her gal pals, Ruthie decides to turn her passion into a career and learn the art of French cooking, enrolling in culinary school, paying tuition, and buying her chef’s whites with a few quick clicks online. It’s not long before Ruthie marches into the kitchen and feels the heat from her cooking partner, Jeff, the super hunky (totally taken!) musician that weasels his way into her brain — right next to Dean.

How can anyone be expected to focus on school, cooking, career planning, baking, friends, and deciding between two hot guys, especially when one of them also thinks that John Cusack is woefully underrated? And what if neither feels quite like Ruthie’s perfect pairing?
Off the Tracks

By: Pamela Mulloy

$24.95

Train travel is having a renaissance. Grand old routes that had been canceled, or were moldering in neglect, have been refurbished as destinations in themselves. The Rocky Mountaineer, the Orient Express, and the Trans-Siberian Railroad run again in all their glory. Pamela Mulloy has always loved train travel. Whether returning to the Maritimes every year with her daughter on the Ocean, or taking her family across Europe to Poland, trains have been a linchpin of her life. As COVID locked us down, Mulloy began an imaginary journey that recalled the trips she has taken, as well as those of others. Whether it was Mary Wollstonecraft traveling alone to Sweden in the late 1700s, or the incident that had Charles Dickens forever fearful of trains, or the famous actress Sarah Bernhardt trapped in her carriage in a midwestern blizzard in the 1890s, or Sir John A. Macdonald’s wife daring to cross the Rockies tied to the cowcatcher at the front of the train, the stories explore the odd mix of adventure and contemplation that travel permits. Thoughtful, observant, and fun, Off the Tracks is the perfect blend of research and personal experience that, like a good train ride, will whisk you into another world.
Omphalos

By: Gerald Lynch

$19.95

When Eugene DeLint, the head of Omphalos, the world?s dominant philanthropic organization, is found murdered, Detective Kevin Beldon is called in. Beldon, who readers will be familiar with Detective Kevin Beldon from Lynch’s previous novels, Missing Children and Troutstream, has been on medical leave, and he brings along much personal and professional baggage: his wife Cynthia is a recent suicide, his absent son Bill is a disappointment, and his daughter Kelly, who began her legal career at Omphalos, is emotionally distant with him. Kevin is still disturbed from his failure the year before to have solved the so-called Widower serial killings. He still suspects that the escaped Widower was connected to Omphalos, and secretly he views Eugene DeLint?s murder as a last chance to solve the Widower case and so absolve his wife of the sin of suicide.
On Nostalgia

By: David Berry

$19.95

From Mad Men to MAGA: how nostalgia came to be and why we are so eager to indulge it.

From movies to politics, social media posts to the targeted ads between them, nostalgia is one of the most potent forces of our era. On Nostalgia is a panoramic cultural history of nostalgia, exploring how a force that started as a psychological diagnosis of soldiers fighting far from home has come become a quintessentially modern condition. Drawing on everything from the modern science of memory to the romantic ideals of advertising, and traversing cultural movements from futurism to fascism to Facebook, cultural critic David Berry examines how the relentless search for self and overwhelming presence of mass media stokes the fires of nostalgia, making it as inescapable as it is hard to pin down. Holding fast against the pull of the past while trying to understand what makes the fundamental impossibility of return so appealing, On Nostalgia explores what it means to remember, how the universal yearning is used by us and against us, and it considers a future where the past is more readily available and easier to lose track of than ever before.

“If nostalgia was a disease in the Good Old Days, then David Berry’s cogently argued, intelligent, and witty book should be prescribed reading for anyone wishing to understand what sometimes feels like a peculiarly virulent epidemic of our current times.” —Travis Elborough

“We’re so lucky to have a writer as thoughtful, funny, smart, and cutting as David Berry. Nostalgia dictates so much of our world, and there isn’t a better cataloger, critic, and guide through it than Berry.” —Scaachi Koul
One For the Rock

By: Kevin Major

$19.95

Sebastian Synard doesn’t want any more trouble than he already has. But when he leads a group of tourists along the cliffs of St. John’s harbour, one of them ends up dead. Not only is there a murderer in his tour group, but the cop assigned to the case is sleeping with Sebastian’s ex-wife. It seems like things can’t get any worse, but as he’s enlisted to help flush out the perpetrator, the trail leads deeper than expected, and Sebastian finds himself on the edge.
One in Six Million

By: Amy Fish

$26.00

Maria was eight months old in 1942 when a childless couple found her, wrapped in a blanket, at the side of a road near Krosno, Poland. A note pinned to the blanket stated only her first name and her date of birth. The couple picked up Maria and raised her, but she grew up longing for identity and connection. Who was she, and what had happened to her family?

Years later, Maria’s story came to the attention of Stanley Diamond. Diamond was the founder of Jewish Records Indexing-Poland, one of the largest databases of Jewish vital records and a crucial tool in researching the stories of the victims and survivors of the Holocaust.

In this engrossing story, Amy Fish shows how Diamond and an intrepid band of international volunteers compared photographs with genealogical records and smuggled DNA tests to provide Maria with family ties that she thought were lost to her forever. A tale of unexpected coincidences, astonishing revelations, and more than a little luck, One in Six Million is an amazing story of lost — and found — identity.
One Madder Woman

By: Dede Crane

$23.95

A memorable and clandestine love story between two visionary artists in 19th-century Paris.

“These madmen—and one madder woman—paint as if suffering seizures! One cannot make heads or tails of the work without taking ten paces back.”

In One Madder Woman, Dede Crane vividly recreates the life of Berthe Morisot, the sole female member of the renowned group of artists known as the Impressionists. Inspired by true events, One Madder Woman charts her complicated relationship with her sister and rival, Edma, and her tumultuous love affair with Édouard Manet, the charismatic enfant terrible of the Paris Salon, against a backdrop of upheaval and war in mid-19th-century Paris.

One Madder Woman illuminates the stories behind familiar masterpieces, and sketches a life teeming with obstacles defied and conquered by the genius of Morisot. At a time when art was a space completely dominated by men, Morisot upends all expectations of what a “proper woman” should be and manages to carve out her own place in the art world. Crane’s rich prose and lyrical expression bring this revolutionary artistic period to life, in vivid and glorious colour.
Openly Karl

By: Karl Wells

$24.95

Openly Karl is a frank and generous memoir by one of Newfoundland and Labrador’s most well-known media figures.

Dive into the private and public life of Karl Wells, as told in his own words. From his birth in Buchans and early life in St. John’s, to his rise in media and a 32-year career with Here and Now at the CBC, Openly Karl is a rare opportunity to bring the face and voice you know from your television back into focus. While he will forever be known as “the weatherman,” Openly Karl explores the expanse of Karl Wells’s career and the nuances of his personal life, including coming to terms with being gay during a less tolerant period of Newfoundland and Labrador’s history and throughout the subsequent decades of social change. At times fascinating and funny, at others harrowing and heartbreaking, Karl’s story will keep readers tuned in.
Operation Stealth Seed

By: George Amabile

$18.95

NYPD Detective Nicola Cortese, veteran of three tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, is leading a routine drug bust at a warehouse in the Bronx, but the SWAT team Commander pulls rank and starts a firefight that gets Cortese?s partner killed. The tragedy triggers combat flashbacks, sleepless nights with cold sweats, nightmares, and violent outbursts during which he assaults fellow officers. He is demoted and transferred to a desk job in Operations. For months, all his appeals are denied. But when a new Precinct Commander returns him to active duty, he is elated — until he?s told Captain Chase expects him to act out again and get kicked off the Force. His first case, a B & E homicide, leads him to uncover an international conspiracy that is using a genetically engineered seed to take control of the world?s wheat. This draws him into deadly conflict with Corporate power backed by US Intelligence. Haunted by issues from his military past, he must survive attacks by contract mercenaries, neutralize threats to loved ones, prove his innocence when framed for a Capital Crime and unravel the Stealth Seed Agenda. He has an ally, a therapist who is also a Marine, but can they clear up his symptoms before it?s too late?
Other Evolutions

By: Rebecca Hirsch Garcia

$24.95

“A phantom ache made real. Garcia vividly chronicles the fraught love within a splintered family, their isolated world rippling with a hint of the uncanny beneath her polished prose.” —Andrew F. Sullivan, author of The Marigold

With sharp human insight and unflinching prose, Other Evolutions is O. Henry Prize-winning author Rebecca Hirsch Garcia’s dark, speculative debut, perfect for readers of Iain Reid and Emily St. John Mandel.

Alma Alt, the sheltered youngest daughter of an interfaith, interracial Jewish-Mexican couple, rarely ventures far from her home on a wealthy tree-lined street in Ottawa, where nothing ever happens. The one time she did, striking out to visit her older sister, Marnie, in Montreal, things ended in disaster as she found out that beautiful, blonde Marnie had been lying about their family’s background, trying to pass herself off as white. The fallout from that betrayal leads to a devastating accident, one that claims Alma’s arm and someone’s life.

Alma is now stuck in a holding pattern, unable to move past her grief. But Alma’s life is turned upside down by an encounter just steps from home with an impossible person: the boy she watched die.

Other Evolutions is a literary debut with a dark twist that reveals the uncanny in the mundane, seeing us through the worst parts of our lives toward the weird and wonderful things right in our own backyard.