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Amah and the Silk-Winged Pigeons

By: Jocelyn Cullity

$22.95

Winner of the 2018 American Bookfest Best Book Award for Historical Fiction; Shortlisted for the 2018 GOETHE Book Awards for Post-1750s Historic Fiction; Shortlisted for the 2018 Eric Hoffer Award Grand Prize; Finalist for the 2018 International Book Awardfor Historical Fiction

Prior to 1857, the year it was engulfed by tragic historical conflict, the cosmopolitan city of Lucknow thrived on open-mindedness, great prosperity and pride, the city a magnet for musicians, poets, painters and chefs, drawing the finest cultural talent from other parts of India and the wider world. It proved too tempting a prize for the English East India Company not to attempt a takeover of the Kingdom of Awadh with its capital city, Lucknow. The devastation and disaster that came to be known as “the Red Year” was a turning point in the history of Indian colonialism. It gave birth to the self-conscious, anti-colonial nationalism that would define the next ninety years, eventually leading to Gandhi’s nonviolent measures to oust the British from India once and for all.

Synthesizing a wealth of meticulous historical research, Amah and the Silk-Winged Pigeons plunges the reader into the complex drama and historical dilemmas faced by both ordinary and extraordinary Lakhnavis (people of Lucknow) at the time. The story is centered on a group of strong, independent women who take action to defend their world and way of life. The novel’s protagonist, Amah, is a member of the Rose Platoon, an elite corps of female military guards of African descent who have protected Lucknow’s royalty for generations. Appalled by the mounting affronts and threats to her absent ex-husband’s kingdom, Begam Hazrat Mahal, one of Lucknow’s former queens and also of African descent, enlists Amah to be her eyes and ears and help coordinate resistance to the British takeover.

When the women decide to take on the English colonists who declare rule, what will be the ultimate price of the women’s loyalty to the royal family and to the place they’ve grown to love?
An Exile’s Perfect Letter

By: Larry Mathews

$19.95

**NEWFOUNDLAND AND LABRADOR BOOK AWARDS FICTION LONGLIST**

Sixty-two-year-old English professor Hugh Norman is getting ready to retire and just going through the motions. He’s detached, irreverent, and quite pleased with himself. But then he learns of a long-lost friend’s sudden death, and shockingly discovers a body while walking through a city park. Suddenly, over just a few days, Hugh is compelled to deal with a large cast of eccentric characters and a police detective who has taken a sudden interest in his life. With a perfect sense of comedic timing, An Exile’s Perfect Letter is a portrait of a man forced to come of age all over again. It’s a send-up, a love story, an elegy for lost youth, and a celebration of friendships that stand the test of time.
An Old Man’s Winter Night

By: Tom Dawe

$15.95

An Old Man’s Winter Night: Ghostly Tales is the newest collection of ghost stories by Tom Dawe, one of Newfoundland and Labrador’s most distinguished writers. The stories, all based on ones Dawe himself has collected across the province over the years, include tales of visitations both malevolent and benign.

There are stories of ghostly galleons, of unsettling graves, of strange omens and fetches; an eerie tale of a notoriously haunted house?haunted, or built on a fairy path; and another of a ghostly sled dog that returns to save its master lost in a blizzard.

Targeted to middle readers, the book includes original, deeply atmospheric illustrations by acclaimed artist Veselina Tomova. The images, as powerful as the stories themselves, fuse word and image, hauntingly.
And Me Among Them

By: Kristen den Hartog

$21.95

Ruth grew too fast.

A young girl over seven feet tall, she struggles to conceal the physical and mental symptoms of her rapid growth, to connect with other children, and to appease her parents, Elspeth, an English seamstress who lost her family to the war, and James, a mailman rethinking his devotion to his wife. Not knowing how to help Ruth, Elspeth and James turn inward, away from one another. As their marriage falters, Ruth finds herself increasingly drawn to Suzy, the dangerous girl next door.

Ruth is not precocious, nor a prodigy, but her extraordinary size affords her extraordinary vision: a bird’s-eye perspective that allows her not just to remember but to watch her past play out. Possessing an uncanny ability to intuit the emotional secrets of her family’s past and present, Ruth gently surfaces Elspeth and James’s vulnerabilities, their regrets, and their deepest longings.
And the Birds Rained Down

By: Jocelyne Saucier

$18.95

A CBC Canada Reads 2015 Selection

Finalist for the 2013 Governor General’s Literary Award for French-to-English Translation

Deep in a Northern Ontario forest live Tom and Charlie, two octogenarians determined to live out the rest of their lives on their own terms: free of all ties and responsibilities, their only connection to civilization two pot farmers who bring them whatever they can’t eke out for themselves. But their solitude is disrupted by the arrival of two women. The first is a photographer searching for survivors of a series of catastrophic fires nearly a century earlier; the second is an elderly escapee from a psychiatric institution. The little hideaway in the woods will never be the same. Originally published in French, And the Birds Rained Down, the recipient of several prestigious prizes, including the Prix de Cinq Continents de la Francophonie, is a haunting meditation on aging and self-determination.
And We Shall Have Snow

By: Raye Anderson

$17.95

New to the RCMP’s Major Crimes Unit, Corporal Roxanne Calloway is keen to make her mark. She’s young and ambitious. But when she’s called from the big city to tiny Cullen Village to lead the investigation into the death of the talented but devious star of the local music scene–discovered frozen and dismembered at the local dump–she finds much to contend with. The close-knit community does not give up its secrets willingly. Barely has she begun her investigation when another very dead, very frozen body disturbs the rural peace.

In the summer Cullen Village is filled with cottagers and day-trippers who flock to the lakeshore’s tranquil beaches. But when the temperatures drop the tourists disappear and the year-round residents settle in for months of bitter cold. The local book club likes to cozy up with good food and good friends–and, of course, good books.

But not this winter.

As the wind bowls and the snow deepens, the book club–and the village–are riven by suspicion and rumour. Can there be a serial killer in their midst? As tensions mount, Corporal Calloway scrambles to make sense of an ever more perplexing set of clues–before someone kills again.
Anomia

By: Jade Wallace

$21.95

In Euphoria, a small, fictional town that feels displaced in time and space, an affluent but isolated couple have vanished from their suburban home. Their estranged friend, Fir, a local video store employee, is the only person who notices their disappearance. When the police refuse to help, Fir recruits Fain, who moonlights as a security guard, and they set off on a seemingly hopeless search for the lost lovers. Their chance at an answer, if they can ever find it, lies on the wooded edge of Euphoria, where Slip, an elderly trailer park resident, finds a scattering of bones that cannot be identified. Distrusting everyone, Slip undertakes a would-be solitary quest to discover the bones’ identity. Yet secretly, Limn and Mal, two bored, true crime-loving teenagers from the trailer park, are dogging Slip. Determined to bring justice to the dead, Limn and Mal will instead bring the lives of all seven characters into fraught and tangled confrontation.

Beneath the familiar surface of this missing-persons novel lies an unparalleled experiment: the creation of a folkloric alternate reality where sex and gender have been forgotten. Expanding on the work of Anne Garréta’s Sphinx and Jeannette Winterson’s Written on the Body, and joining gender-confronting contemporaries like Joshua Whitehead’s Jonny Appleseed and Akwaeke Emezi’sThe Death of Vivek Oji, Anomia is an atmospheric exploration of a possible world, and a possible language, existing without reference to sex or gender.
Another Spy for Paris

By: Robert J. Young

$18.95

While Canadian history professor Andrew Stanhope is doing research in Paris on the German invasion of France, he stumbles upon an odd and long-lost exchange between Colonel Marius Michel, principal deputy in France’s counter-intelligence agency, the Deuxième Bureau, and the Directeur-Général of the Val de Grâce military hospital. The Colonel wants the Directeur to warn the incoming Prime Minister, Philippe Pétain, that there is an active spy in the French war ministry and that the Marshal’s own ring of advisors includes at least one Nazi sympathizer. By means of alternating flashbacks between 1940 and the 1970s, the author uncovers Michel’s attempts to track down the traitor and other collaborators whose espionage may have led to the sudden and ignominious defeat of France. Working undercover, and with his life definitely at risk, Michel follows a trail that stretches from the heart of the war ministry on the Left Bank of Paris to the bustlng high fashion industry on the Right. It is there, within the Maison d’Ariège that he encounters its treasonous owner, Louis Loriot, two beautiful German-born spies, two cases of cold-blooded murder, as well as his own would-be killer. All this, Stanhope pieces together decades later, before making the most startling discovery of them all.
Any Night of the Week

By: Jonny Dovercourt

$26.95

The story of how Toronto became a music mecca.

From Yonge Street to Yorkville to Queen West to College, the neighbourhoods that housed Toronto’s music scenes. Featuring Syrinx, Rough Trade, Martha and the Muffins, Fifth Column, Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet, Rheostatics, Ghetto Concept, LAL, Broken Social Scene, and more!

“Jonny Dovercourt, a tireless force in Toronto’s music scene, offers the widest-ranging view out there on how an Anglo-Saxon backwater terrified of people going to bars on Sundays transforms itself into a multicultural metropolis that raises up more than its share of beloved artists, from indie to hip-hop to the unclassifiable. His unique approach is to zoom in on the rooms where it’s happened – the live venues that come and too frequently go – as well as on the people who’ve devoted their lives and labours to collective creativity in a city that sometimes seems like it’d rather stick to banking. For locals, fans, and urban arts denizens anywhere, the essential Any Night of the Week is full of inspiration, discoveries, and cautionary tales.” —Carl Wilson, Slate music critic and author of Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, one of Billboard’s ‘100 Greatest Music Books of All Time’

“Toronto has long been one of North America’s great music cities, but hasn’t got the same credit as L.A., Memphis, Nashville, and others. This book will go a long way towards proving Toronto’s place in the music universe.” —Alan Cross, host, the Ongoing History of New Music

“The sweaty, thunderous exhilaration of being in a packed club, in collective thrall to a killer band, extends across generations, platforms, and genre preferences. With this essential book, Jonny has created something that’s not just a time capsule, but a time machine.” —Sarah Liss, author of Army of Lovers
Any Other Way

$25.95

Toronto is home to multiple and thriving queer communities that reflect the dynamism of a global city. Any Other Way is an eclectic and richly illustrated local history that reveals how these individuals and community networks have transformed Toronto from a place of churches and conservative mores into a city that has consistently led the way in queer activism, not just in Canada but internationally.

From the earliest pioneersto the parades, pride and politics of the contemporary era, Any Other Way draws on a range of voices to explore how the residents of queer Toronto have shaped and reshaped one of the world’s most diverse cities.

Any Other Way includes chapters on: Oscar Wilde’s trip to Toronto; early cruising areas and gay/lesbian bars; queer shared houses; a pioneering collective trans archive project; bath house raids; LBGT-police conflicts; the Queen Street art/music/activist scene; and a profile of Jackie Shane, the gay R&B singer who performed in drag in both Toronto and Los Angeles, and gained international fame with his 1962 chart-topping single, ‘Any Other Way.’
Approaching Fire

By: Michelle Porter

$19.95

***IPPY AWARDS: BEST REGIONAL NON-FICTION: CANADA-WEST – SILVER***

***INDIGENOUS VOICES AWARDS 2021, PUBLISHED PROSE IN ENGLISH: CREATIVE NON-FICTION AND LIFE-WRITING: FINALIST***

***FIRST NATION COMMUNITIES READ AWARDS 2021/22: LONGLIST***

***NEXT GENERATION INDIE BOOK AWARDS, REGIONAL (NON-FICTION): FINALIST***

***THE MIRAMICHI READER‘S 2020 MOST PROMISING AUTHOR AWARD***

***BMO WINTERSET AWARD 2020 LONGLIST***

In Approaching Fire, Michelle Porter embarks on a quest to find her great-grandfather, the Métis fiddler and performer Léon Robert Goulet. Through musicology, jigs and reels, poetry, photographs, and the ecology of fire, Porter invests biography with the power of reflective ingenuity, creating a portrait which expands beyond documentation into a private realm where truth meets metaphor.

Weaving through multiple genres and traditions, Approaching Fire fashions a textual documentary of rescue and insight, and a glowing contemplation of the ways in which loss can generate unbridled renewal.
Apron Strings

By: Jan Wong

$24.95

Shortlisted, 2018 Taste Canada Awards and 2018 Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick Book Award for Non-Fiction
Longlisted, 2018 RBC Taylor Prize

Jan Wong knows food is better when shared, so when she set out to write a book about home cooking in France, Italy, and China, she asked her 22-year-old son, Sam, to join her. While he wasn’t keen on spending excessive time with his mom, he dreamed of becoming a chef. Ultimately, it was an opportunity he couldn’t pass up.

On their journey, Jan and Sam live and cook with locals, seeing first-hand how globalization is changing food, families, and cultures. In southeast France, they move in with a family sheltering undocumented migrants. From Bernadette, the housekeeper, they learn classic French family fare such as blanquette de veau. In a hamlet in the heart of Italy’s Slow Food country, the villagers teach them without fuss or fanfare how to make authentic spaghetti alle vongole and a proper risotto with leeks. In Shanghai, they home-cook firecracker chicken and scallion pancakes with the nouveaux riches and their migrant maids, who comprise one of the biggest demographic shift in world history. Along the way, mother and son explore their sometimes-fraught relationship, uniting — and occasionally clashing — over their mutual love of cooking.

A memoir about family, an exploration of the globalization of food cultures, and a meditation on the complicated relationships between mothers and sons, Apron Strings is complex, unpredictable, and unexpectedly hilarious.
Are You Ready to Be Lucky?

By: Rosemary Nixon

$21.95

Are You Ready to Be Lucky? If so, meet Roslyn, a spirited divorcée eager for new beginnings. Meet Duncan, a British conman with a penchant for collecting ex-wives. Meet Floyd, a hard-living contractor who can fix anyone’s house but his own. Irritating, vulnerable, hopeful, they ricochet off one another, trailing a mess of family and friends, all of them trying to beat the odds and find happiness. With razor-sharp wit, Rosemary Nixon takes on the chaos and absurdity of friendship, marriage, divorce, and betrayal—and the heart-pounding, breathtaking, always astonishing complexities of luck and love.
Assi Manifesto

By: Natasha Kanapè Fontaine

$20.95

Translated from French by Howard Scott

Assi Manifesto is a celebration of the Innu land in the tradition of Joséphine Bacon. This telluric power is reminiscent of Paul Chamberland’s Terre Québec. Natasha Kanapé’s challenge is to name her land, but also to reconcile opposites.

In this collection of poetry, the author engages with the environment, colonialism, anxiety, anger, healing, solitude, and love. “Assi” in Innu means Land. Assi Manifesto is primarily a land of women. If the manifesto is a public space, Assi is a forum of life, a song for those who open their spirit to its mystery.
Autokrator

By: Emily A. Weedon

$24.95
Avant Desire

By: Nicole Brossard

$26.95

The definitive survey of an essential feminist poet.

In June 2019, Nicole Brossard was awarded the Lifetime Recognition Award from the Griffin Poetry Trust. Rarely has a prize been so richly deserved. For five decades she has been writing ground-breaking poetry, fiction, and criticism in French that has always been steadfastly and unashamedly feminist and lesbian.

Avant Desire moves through Brossard’s body of work with a playful attentiveness to its ongoing lines of inquiry. Like her work, this reader moves beyond conventional textual material to include ephemera, interviews, marginalia, lectures, and more. Just as Brossard foregrounds collaboration, this book includes new translations alongside canonical ones and intertextual and responsive work from a variety of artist translators at various stages of their careers.

Through their selections, the editors trace Brossard’s fusion of lesbian feminist desire with innovation, experimentation, and activism, emphasizing the more overtly political nature of her early work and its transition into performative thinking.

Devotees of Brossard will be invigorated by the range of previously unavailable materials included here, while new readings will find a thread of inquiry that is more than a mere introduction to her complex body of work. Avant Desire situates Brossard’s thinking across her oeuvre as that of a writer whose sights are always cast toward the horizon.
Away from the Dead

By: David Bergen

$24.95

Longlisted, Scotiabank Giller Prize

Violence is the domain of both the rich and poor. Or so it seems in early 20th-century Ukraine during the tumult of the Russian Revolution.

As anarchists, Bolsheviks, and the White Army all come and go, each claiming freedom and justice, David Bergen embeds his readers into the lives of characters connected through love, family, and loyalty. Lehn, a bookseller south of Kiev, deserts the army and writes poetry to his love back home; Sablin, an adopted Mennonite-Ukrainian stableboy, runs with the anarchists only to discover that love and the planting of crops is preferable to killing; Inna, a beautiful young peasant, tries to stop a Mennonite landowner from stealing her child. In a world of violence, Sablin, Lehn, and Inna learn to love and hate and love again, hoping, against all odds, that one can turn away from the dead.

In this beautifully crafted novel, David Bergen takes us to a place where chaos reigns, where answers come from everywhere and nowhere, and where both the beauty and horror of humanity are on full display.
Bad Artist

$24.00

The perfect antidote to the toxicity of the current productivity narrative, this collection of essays on creativity features 21 Canadian and international writers, providing warmth, support, camaraderie, and empathy.

In a world that worships productivity, creating for art’s sake is seen as romantic and nearly indefensible. For anyone who has ever struggled to honour their artistic impulses, Bad Artist offers an antidote to this toxic productivity narrative. This collection of essays features 21 Canadian and international writers from a breadth of backgrounds and experiences whose lives are not always proscribed by predictable work schedules or reliable support systems. They fit creating into the cracks of their lives, and through their stories show us all how to keep creating—not producing.

As artists, many of whom have faced systemic barriers, the collection’s contributors offer pragmatic reflections on resisting the culture of productivity, reminding us that creativity can take many forms. Taken together, the essays present a comprehensive rumination on creativity in late capitalism, providing warmth, support, comradery, and empathy. It’s The Paris Review meets the Billfold’s “Doing Money” with a generous dash of the friend who knows you’re an artist even on the days when you’re not so sure.
Bare Bones of Our Alphabet, The

By: Irene Marques

$20.95

The Bare Bones of Our Alphabet is a collection of poetry that reveals an all-consuming yearning: the desire to find a language that can tell the most about our existence. What the poet asks for, works obsessively to tap into, is a native tongue, a vernacular that bypasses the traps of a supposed rationality and objectivity forged in a body-politic consumed by self-interests that reduce our ontological experience. The Bare Bones of Our Alphabet calls for an activation of our primary ways of seeing that perceive spontaneously, without deliberation, which have been subdued by the material beneficiaries of our world and deemed non-intelligent. The poems invite us to re-enter our truly bare bones–our empty, sparkling space–before the codified verb, with its imposed grammar, placed us in a consented incarceration. The poet endeavours to uncover the bare alphabets we must return to–the redeeming letters–where the possibility of rebirth resides, for all and everything that has been annihilated by an unethical rhetoric, a verbosity of lies, engendered through undemocratic paradigms crafted by humans.
Barefoot Helen and the Giants

By: Andy Jones

$12.95

Helen is a fine hand with a slingshot, and more than at home in the woods. After all, she was raised by bears. When she stumbles upon three evil giants, she hatches the perfect plan to rid the land of them. Well, almost perfect…

Bulleybummus, the fiercest giant, catches her and insists she help kidnap the princess Antoinette. Instead, Helen manages to save the sleeping princess and finish off the giant before heading quietly back home. No one knows who the giant killer is, but Antoinette is determined to find out and comes up with a plan of her own.