A note to US-based customers: All Lit Up is pausing print orders to the USA until further notice. Read more

ebooks for Everyone Lists

Browse featured titles from the ebooks for Everyone collection of accessible epubs.

Browse by Category

All Books in this Collection

Showing 541–560 of 892 results

Ray Guy

By: Ray Guy

$19.95

Ray Guy: The Final Columns, 2003-2013 is a collection of the columns Ray Guy wrote for The Northeast Avalon Times, a community newspaper based in Portugal Cove. Guy previously achieved fame and acclaim for his astute and humorous observations of Newfoundland politics and society in columns in The Telegram and The Sunday Express from the 1960s to 1990s. Guy began writing for The Northeast Avalon Times in 2003, the same year Danny Williams was elected premier of the province. During the ensuing decade, Guy exercised the wit and satire that made him so admired by Newfoundland readers. Ray Guy: The Final Columns, 2003-2013 aims to make the brilliant writing of his last decade available to a broader audience. The foibles and folly of premiers on Confederation Hill, the looming disaster of the Muskrat Falls hydroelectric project and the frustrating fickleness of “the great Newfoundland voter” were repeatedly addressed by Guy in his unequaled style. Guy was quick to recognize Danny Williams as “another Smallwood,” and had much to say and much to mock about the pomp, arrogance and authoritarian rule that largely led to the troubled times Newfoundland subsequently found itself in.
Reconciling

By: Larry Grant, Scott Steedman

$26.95

“Larry Grant’s life is a model of what it means to rise above hardship, transcend preconceived notions, and live life in a good way. I’ve had the honour of meeting him, but this book makes me feel as if I know him. And that is a profound gift.” — Shelagh Rogers, Honorary Witness, Truth and Reconciliation Commission; broadcast journalist, CBC Radio

A personal and historical story of identity, place, and belonging from a Musqueam-Chinese Elder caught between cultures

It’s taken most of Larry Grant’s long life for his extraordinary heritage to be appreciated. He was born in a hop field outside Vancouver in 1936, the son of a Musqueam cultural leader and an immigrant from a village in Guangdong, China. In 1940, when the Indian agent discovered that their mother had married a non-status man, Larry and his two siblings were stripped of their status. With one stroke of the pen, they were disenfranchised—no longer recognized as Indigenous.

Reconciling is a series of conversations between Larry and writer Scott Steedman as they visit pivotal geographical places together, including the Musqueam reserve, Chinatown, the site of the Mission residential school, the Vancouver docks and the University of British Columbia. Larry tells the story of his life, including his thoughts on reconciliation and the path forward for First Nations and Canada. His life echoes the barely known story of Vancouver and spans key events of the last two centuries, including Chinese immigration and the Head Tax, the ravages of residential school and now Indigenous revival and the accompanying change in worldview.

When Larry talks about reconciliation, he uses the verb reconciling, an ongoing, unfinished process we’re all going through, Indigenous and settler, immigrant and Canadian-born. “I have been reconciling my whole life, with my inner self,” he explains. “To not belong was forced upon me by the colonial society that surrounded me. But reconciling with myself is part of all that.”
Red With Living

By: Diane Driedger

$18.95

In this compelling collection of poems and art, the colour of living is red with excitement, pain, sunsets, blood, and tropical flowers. Along the way, the poet paints herself into the works of Frida Kahlo, Vincent Van Gogh, Claude Monet and Maud Lewis. Diane Driedger confronts the body in two different contexts: through her participation in the Trinidad and Tobago Carnival and through her experience of undergoing breast cancer treatment and of being chronically ill. This is poetry that celebrates the body in all its varied forms.
Reunion

By: Deanna Young

$20.00

Poems that unfold like liturgy, confronting old violence with a trembling, dignified restraint.

Reunion is a parable, an origin story, a cautionary tale. It is also a time machine in which poems commune with ghosts in an attempt both to reckon with and subvert their legacy. It is a tale of the impossible quest for the original, unhurt self. A girlhood is re-inhabited and oddly transformed as the adult becomes ally of her younger self.

Young’s writerly range extends through language both candid and stylized, and to forms from ballads to prayer to Biblical sermons. The voice is often interior, but at times it gains a public character–often through the use of religious language and song forms–and we sense that the child’s suffering is in many ways a community failure. The emotional and psychological landscape of these poems seems at once near and far, familiar and strange, uncanny in Freud’s sense. Young has created a distinctive pastoral-gothic hybrid; her daring spirit shapes a collection both deeply generous to and demanding of the reader.

As I lay there on the couch

I bargained feebly,

weighing each thing I thought I loved
against the ache.
(from “Lamb”)

“Each of Deanna Young’s spare, pitch-perfect poems seems to contain a novel. Young weaves in and out of time, playing with perspective, to illuminate experience…. This is a poetry that makes memory sharper, consciousness larger, life longer in all directions.” –Jury, Trillium Book Award for Poetry.
Reverberations

By: Marion Agnew

$19.95

Most people think Alzheimer’s Disease is the same as memory loss, if they think about it at all. But most people prefer to ignore it, hoping that if they ignore it hard enough, it will go away. That was certainly Marion Agnew’s hope, even after she knew her mother’s diagnosis. Yet, with her mother’s diagnosis, Marion’s world changed. Her mother ? a Queens and Harvard/Radcliffe-educated mathematician, a nuclear weapons researcher in Montreal during Word War II, an award-winning professor and researcher for five decades, wife of a history professor, and mother of five ? began drifting away from her. To keep hold of her, to remember her, she began paying attention, and began writing what she saw. She wrote as her mother became suspicious on outings, as she lost even the simplest of words, as she hallucinated, as she became frightened and agitated. But after her mother’s death, Marion wanted to honour the time of her mother’s life in which she had the disease, but she didn’t want the illness to dominate the relationship she’d had with her mother. This moving memoir looks at grief and family, at love and music. It is a coming-to-terms reflection on the endurance of love and family.
Reverse Cowgirl, The

By: David Whitton

$21.95

Keen, intense, darkly comic, and accident-prone, the short fictions of David Whitton are full of sullen underdogs: his characters clean up real nice, but can’t help but unravel back to their original fallen and fascinating selves. Their mistakes and misdeeds, temptations and transgressions trample through these stories, twisting out intricate surprises at each turn.

Whitton navigates contemporary and future, real life and fantasy worlds, continually setting up, if only to send up, modern romantic scenarios. Ultimately, if the boy does get the girl—or vise versa—whether they meet online or on acid, at a wedding or in battle, the object of affection always topples from the pedestal in radical and delightfully refreshing ways.
Rhapsody Smith

By: Lorna Schultz Nicholson

$18.95

A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard selection

“Lorna is making stories that revolve around women’s hockey the norm to write, and she captures glimpses of its history with great stories like this mystery. This story featuring Rap also reminds me about my relationship with my Gram as she always supported me playing hockey.” — Cassie Campbell-Pascall, Team Canada hockey captain, two-time Olympic gold medalist, and broadcaster

Rhapsody “Rap” Queen Smith lives with her grandparents and plays for the Ice Angels hockey team, a tight group of girls who spend time together outside of hockey and school.

Her focus is on improving her power plays and crossovers until she meets Marion, an older woman who spends her days sitting on a bench outside the arena. Nobody seems to know who she is, but there are two mysterious things about her: she has an in-depth knowledge of hockey strategy and she wears a 1990 Women’s World Cup ring.

When Marion’s ring goes missing, Rap and her friends are determined to find it. Who is Marion, and why does she know so much about hockey? The Ice Angels work together to find out.
Ringo

By: Tom Doyle

$29.95

Often overshadowed by his former bandmates, Ringo Starr has his own remarkable story that is no less compelling. Ringo: A Fab Life highlights a life so jaw-droppingly eventful that one is left wondering how he also had time to become one of the best musicians on the planet.

Employing an episodic, mosaic format, critically acclaimed author Tom Doyle takes readers through the ride of a lifetime, from Starr’s brushes with death as a child brought up in poverty, through to dizzying heights of fame and success with the Beatles and beyond. By examining pivotal moments, anecdotes, and cautionary tales, we see Starr soar as part of the biggest band in the world — and then try to cope with life outside of it with a film career, misadventures with friends, children’s TV narration, furniture designing, and marriage to a Bond girl, before eventually finding peace and sobriety as one of the elder statesmen of rock.

So much more than another Beatles biography, Ringo follows Starr’s career far beyond the rose-tinted ’60s, through the various addictions and career left turns in the ’70s and ’80s, before reaching the ’90s, his legacy and reputation intact.

The life of Richard Starkey is long overdue for a proper inspection, and this book — with exclusive new interviews conducted by Doyle with Starr himself, among others — provides a never-before-seen level of detail that will delight hardcore fans and curious readers alike.
Riot

By: Andrew Moodie

$14.95

A dramatic and often humorous look at six black Canadians of diverse backgrounds who share a Toronto house. Their lives unfold against the backdrop of civil unrest, which erupted when the Los Angeles police ofÞcers on trial for the beating of Rodney King are acquitted. The fracas outside keeps intruding as characters clash, collide, and swap jokes about everything from racism to the status of Quebec as a distinct society, from Malcolm X to The Road to Avonlea.
Robert Bond

By: Ted Rowe

$19.95

The foremost political figure from the years of responsible government in Newfoundland, Robert Bond led a spectacularly successful but often tortured life. Cultured and well-to-do, he tried to play the game of politics like a gentleman, and over a period of 30 years never suffered a defeat at the polls. During his remarkable career, he built a reputation as a statesman, negotiating two trade agreements with the United States and reclaiming Newfoundland’s rights to the French Shore. In the dark days following the bank crash of 1894, he personally intervened to save the country from bankruptcy. As prime minister he led a scrupulous and scandal-free administration. In private life, he was a recluse. He idolized his mother, never married, agonized over his health, and suffered a tortured relationship with his mentor William Whiteway. His place of solace was Whitbourne, where he built a magnificent country estate, complete with an elegant manor house, beautiful gardens and a working farm. This carefully researched and engaging biography delves into Bond’s life and times, following him from his school days in St. John’s and England to his rapid rise in politics in the 1880s and ’90s and his time as prime minister in the first decade of the twentieth century. Along the way it reveals Bond’s relationship with the unforgettable characters in this formative and turbulent time in Newfoundland politics.
Robinson’s Crossing

By: Jan Zwicky

$16.00

My great-
grandmother slept
in a boxcar on the night
before she made the crossing. The steel
ended in Sangudo then, there was
no trestle on the Pembina, no siding
on the other side. They crossed
by ferry, and went on by cart through bush,
the same eight miles. Another
family legend has it that she stood there
in the open doorway of the shack
and said, “You told me, Ernest,
it had windows and a floor.” – from “Robinson’s Crossing”

The poems in this book arise from Robinson’s Crossing – the place where the railway ends and European settlers arriving in northern Alberta had to cross the Pembina River and advance by wagon or on foot. How have we crossed into this country, with what violence and what blind love? Robinson’s Crossing enacts the pause at the frontier, where we reflect on the realities of colonial experience, but also on the nature of living here- on historical dwelling itself. In long meditative narratives and shorter probing lyrics, Jan Zwicky shows us-as she has in her celebrated Lyric Philosophy and the Governor General’s award-winning Songs for Relinquishing the Earth – how music means and meaning is musical.
Rock Paper Sex

By: Kerri Cull

$19.95

St. John’s is known as a flourishing port city, a cultural gem, and popular tourist destination: a picturesque city of pubs and restaurants, music and colourful houses. But a thriving sex trade quietly exists beneath that polished conception, a trade few are aware of or even understand. In an engaging journalistic style, Kerri Cull respectfully reveals the people who make up the city’s surprisingly diverse sex industry and, in the process, makes a compelling humanistic argument for understanding before judgment.
Romancing History?

By: Stan Dragland

$14.95

Romancing History?: Wayne Johnston and “The Colony of Unrequited Dreams” closely re-examines how Wayne Johnston’s seminal historical novel combines fact and fiction to shape our perception of the truth.

First published in 2000, Wayne Johnston’s The Colony of Unrequited Dreams is an enduring contribution to the literature of Newfoundland and Labrador. In Romancing History?, Stan Dragland examines the novel’s indelible portrait of its central character, Joey Smallwood. What liberties did Johnston take in transforming Smallwood from historical figure to literary character, and to what end? Starting with this incisive analysis of Smallwood’s “sea change,” Dragland offers a luminous reading of Johnston’s novel that sees it as “a giant contemplation of Newfoundland,” one “large enough and compelling enough and playfully original enough to earn a place alongside other nation-making epics.”

Stan Dragland’s Romancing History?: Wayne Johnston and “The Colony of Unrequited Dreams” is the 2001 Pratt Lecture, the oldest public lecture at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador. The Pratt Lectures were established in 1968 to commemorate the legacy of E. J. Pratt. Over the years, the series has hosted world-renowned authors and scholars, including Northrop Frye, Seamus Heaney, Helen Vendler, Mary Dalton, George Elliott Clarke, and Dionne Brand.
Roosting Box

By: Kristen den Hartog

$24.95

Shortlisted, Toronto Book Awards

“A hospital … is like a roosting box: a communal space that provides ideal but temporary shelter for [the] vulnerable.”
In the aftermath of the First World War, a cash register factory in the west end of Toronto was renovated to treat wounded soldiers returning from war. From 1919 to the 1940s, thousands of soldiers passed through its doors. Some spent the remainder of their lives there.

The Roosting Box is an exquisitely written history of the early years of the Christie Street Hospital and how war reshaped Canadian society. What sets it apart from other volumes is the detail about the ordinary people at the heart of the book: veterans learning to live with their injuries and a world irrevocably changed; nurses caring for patients while coming to terms with their own wartime trauma; and doctors pioneering research in prosthetics and plastic surgery or, in the case of Frederick Banting, in a treatment for diabetes.

Naming chapters after parts of the body, den Hartog chronicles injuries and treatments, and through the voices of men and women, the struggles and accomplishments of the patients and staff. The cast of characters is diverse — Black, female, Indigenous, and people with all sorts of physical and mental challenges — and their experiences, gleaned from diaries, letters, service records, genealogical research, and interviews with descendants, are surprising and illuminating.

An unusual mix of history and story, The Roosting Box offers deeply personal perspectives on healing in the aftermath of war.
Rough Description

By: Don Pyle

$24.95

Don Pyle’s tantalizing memoir, Rough Description, recalls first bands, the absurdity and incredible rewards of touring, and dubious-dealing stories of the groups he’s been in, most prominently as drummer and co-founder of beloved group Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet. It recounts friend and work relationships with musician Dallas Good, venerable producer/engineer Steve Albini, iconic comedy troupe Kids in the Hall, whose series and theme his group created, and others.

Alternately melancholic and hilarious, this book chronicles Pyle’s bonkers experiences while attending hair school, his evolving relationship with his mother, how the Ramones affected his young teen brain, a life-changing car accident, and other situations from a creative life lived fully, providing oodles of salacious dish. You’ll discover how a punk rock pen pal led to a career in showbiz and how to put out the same record over and over again.

Photography, performing and writing music in bands, recording and producing numerous other artists, writing about music, and scoring for film and TV are all part of Pyle’s distinct observer’s eye — one that sees all creative media as aspects of the same stream.
Rue Des Rosiers

By: Rhea Tregebov

$24.95

Sarah is the youngest of the three Levine sisters. At twenty-five, she is rudderless, caught in a paralysis that keeps her from seizing her own life.

When Sarah is fired from her Toronto job, a chance stay in Paris opens her up to new direction and purpose. But when she reads the writing on the wall above her local Metro subway station, death to the Jews, shadows from childhood rise again. And as her path crosses that of Laila, a young woman living in an exile remote from the luxuries of 1980s Paris, Sarah stumbles towards to an act of terrorism that may realize her childhood fears.

In this new novel by the author of The Knife Sharpener’s Bell, writing that is both sensual and taut creates a tightly woven, compelling narrative.
Rum-runners and Mobsters

By: Jack Fitzgerald

$19.95

Prohibition in the United States created new opportunities for organized crime to make profits even they couldn’t imagine. It did not take long for the mobsters to push out the independent bootleggers and take control of the whole operation inside the United States. Their tentacles then reached into St. Pierre and Newfoundland, both of which had become legalized transshipment ports for liquor ? a real rum-runner’s heaven! Once it became clear that St. John’s was legally an open port for the movement of liquor the mob welcomed it as another St. Pierre. During the era of Prohibition in the United States, Al Capone emerged as the top mobster in the country. His capers made international headlines. Capone controlled the politicians, police, bootleggers, prostitution, and smuggling. He ruled a 1,000-man mob and his gross income was near $100 million annually. The tentacles of organized crime reached into Newfoundland in a big way. In Rum-runners and Mobsters: Prohibition’s 100th Anniversary Jack Fitzgerald leaves no stone unturned as he chronicles the start and end of the Prohibition era in Newfoundland, while exposing mobster involvement.
Rumi and the Red Handbag

By: Shawna Lemay

$19.95
Run

By: David Skuy

$12.95
Rust and Bone

By: Dietrich Kalteis

$24.95

Where does one seek refuge when all the world’s gone mad?

The last winter of the war comes as young Jakob Fritsch’s German village in Ukraine is torched by Russian troops. Separated from his mother and younger brother, he’s shoved onto a train’s stock car. Rumors float among them; they’re being taken to a work camp over the Urals, where they will be worked to death.

As morning dawns, a lone Stuka dives from the sky, dropping its bomb on the locomotive, and the stock cars are blown from the tracks, tipped, and smashed. Through splintered boards, Jakob and others scramble out, running for the surrounding woods as the Russian guards begin shooting them down.

Jakob escapes into the endless pines, running until he’s exhausted. Some time later, he chances upon other survivors from the train: his sick and aging schoolmaster who’s a Nazi supporter at heart and the disagreeable postmaster, a man Jakob can’t stand and doesn’t trust. Always on the lookout for deserters, partisans, and Russian soldiers, the three make their way across war-torn Ukraine, begging for food and shelter where they can.

A tragic turn of events forces Jakob to journey on alone. Ever watchful, he must chance crossing the desolate countryside of Poland en route to Berlin, the only place he can go — the land of his forefathers, the heart of Germany, which is being bombed to its knees and torn apart from all sides.