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Beautiful Beautiful

By: Brandon Reid

$24.95

Imbued with passion, creativity and insight, Brandon Reid’s debut novel is a wonderfully creative coming-of-age story exploring indigeneity, masculinity and cultural tradition.

Twelve-year-old Derik Mormin travels with his father and a family friend to Bella Bella for his grandfather’s funeral. Along the way, he uncovers the traumatic history of his ancestors, considers his relationship to masculinity and explores the contrast between rural and urban lifestyles in hopes of reconciling the seemingly unreconcilable, the beauty of each the Indigenous and “Western” way of life—hence beautiful beautiful.

He travails a storm, meets long-lost relatives, discovers his ancestral homeland; he suffers through catching fish, gains and loses companions, learns to heal trauma. In Beautiful Beautiful we delve into the mind of a gifted boy who struggles to find his role and persona through elusive circumstance, and—

All right, that’s quite enough third-person pandering; you’re not fooling anyone. Redbird here, Derik’s babysitter, and narrator of this here story. Make sure to smash that like button. We’re here to bring light to an otherwise grave subject, friends. It’s only natural to laugh while crying. I bring story to life. One minute I’m a songbird singing from a bough, the next, I’m rapture. I connect you to the realm of spirit… Well, as best I can, given your mundane allocation.

Follow us through primordial visions, dance with a cannibal (don’t worry, they’re friendly once tamed) and discover what it takes to be united. Together, we’ll have fun. Together, we are one. So tuck in, and believe what you’ll believe, for who knows what yesterday brings. Amen and all my relations, all my relations and amen.
Bebakhshid

By: Nina Mosall

$18.00

Bebakhshid revolves around intimate identity intersections of being Iranian, an immigrant, and a woman. Mosall touches everyday banalities as well as challenges, exploring familial relationships, as well as chosen social environments. Her work is social commentary on the treatment and experience of Middle Easterners, as well as a focussed view of realities of its youth?not just challenges, but the romantic and mundane experiences of the everyday. Instead of being separated into parts, Bebakhshid transverses more intimate accounts, storylines, and snippets, weaving narrative poetry throughout, to foreground the importance of community and relationships.
Because

By: Andrew Steinmetz

$21.95

An engrossing punk-rock novel about teenage daydreams and sibling dynamicsTeenaged brothers Hombre and Transformer spend their days locked up in their suburban bedroom, writing songs and dreaming of stardom on their own terms. The music of the early 80s is brimming with post-punk ethos and a disdain for classic rock, but closer to home the pair can’t find anyone else to join their band, Because, and frankly they don’t really want another member to enter the fray of their complicated sibling dynamic. Hombre, the younger one, is quiet, contemplative, and talented, a poet in the making. His older brother Transformer is stubborn, domineering, and secretly struggling with mental health issues. Their sequestered world is broken open one summer when their mother hires Spit, a girl from the local guitar shop, to help the boys improve their modest skills. But these good intentions set off a chain reaction with tragic consequences.
Behold Things Beautiful

By: Cora Siré

$19.95

After twelve years in exile, living and teaching in the safety of Montreal, Alma Alvarez has been persuaded to return to Luscano by her old friend Flaco, who has invited her to give a lecture at his university on the tragic Uruguayan poet Delmira Agustini, a writer with a cult-like following known for her erotic poetry and film noir demise.

Having been arrested herself after the publication of a poem which offended the military regime, Alma knows how influential and dangerous poetry can be. But her mother is dying, and her return to Luscano feels inevitable. She soon discovers that life in Luscano is still rife with secrecy and duplicity. And Flaco turns out to have a hidden agenda as well. As Alma attempts to readapt to a country that, despite its seductive charms, may not have broke free of its brutal past, she catches sight of the man whose actions prompted her exile and begins to follow him in secret.

The imaginary country of Luscano, an amalgam of Uruguay, Argentina and Chile, is vibrantly brought to life with a nod to the region’s literary tradition of magic realism.
Belinda’s Rings

By: Corinna Chong

$19.95

Half-Asian teenager Grace (but she’d prefer it if you called her “Gray” instead) is not a perfect little supermom-in-the-making like her older sister Jessica, and would rather become a marine biologist than a mother–although she does understand how to take care of her special-needs kid brother Squid better than anyone else in her family. When her mother Belinda abruptly runs out on her family and flies across the Atlantic in order to study crop circles in the English countryside, Grace is left alone to puzzle out her life, the world, and her unique place within it.

With a warmth and a boisterous sense of humour reminiscent of Miriam Toews’ A Complicated Kindness and Peter Hedges’ What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? author Corinna Chong introduces us to two lovable and thoroughly original female characters: persnickety, precocious Grace, and her impractical, impulsive mother Belinda–very different women who nevertheless persistently circle back into each other’s hearts.
Between Clay and Dust

By: Musharraf Ali Farooqi

$19.95

Ustad Ramzi was once the greatest wrestler in the land, famed for his strength and unmatched technique. Young apprentices flocked to his akhara to learn his craft, fans adored him, and rival wrestling clans feared his resolve that would never admit defeat. The courtesan Gohar Jan was just as renowned. Celebrated throughout the country for her beauty and the power of her singing, her kotha was thronged by nobles, rich men, and infatuated admirers.

Musharraf Ali Farooqi’s latest novel presents these extraordinary characters in the twilight of their lives. Their skills are no longer what they once were, new challengers to their eminence have risen, and the adoring crowds and followers are long gone. An immense catastrophe has laid waste to the country; its new inheritors have no time for the old ways. Stripped of their resources and their old powers, Ustad Ramzi and Gohar Jan must face their greatest challenge yet.

Powerful and haunting, Between Clay and Dust is a triumph of storytelling and a poignant exploration of love, honour, redemption, and the strength that great souls find to go on when all is lost.
Bird Suit

By: Sydney Hegele

$23.95

A tourist town folk tale of stifled ambition, love, loss, and the bird women who live beneath the lake.

Every summer the peaches ripen in Port Peter, and the tourists arrive to gorge themselves on fruit and sun. They don’t see the bird women, who cavort on the cliffs and live in a meadow beneath the lake. But when summer ends and the visitors go back home, every pregnant Port Peter girl knows what she needs to do: deliver her child to the Birds in a laundry basket on those same lakeside cliffs. But the Birds don’t want Georgia Jackson.

Twenty years on, the peaches are ripening again, the tourists have returned, and Georgia is looking for trouble with any ill-tempered man she can find. When that man turns out to be Arlo Bloom—her mother’s ex and the new priest in town—she finds herself drawn into a complicated matrix of friendship, grief, faith, sex, and love with Arlo, his wife, Felicity, and their son, Isaiah. Vivid, uncanny, and as likely cursed as touched by grace, Bird Suit is a brutal, generous story as sticky and lush as a Port Peter peach.
Bitter Medicine

By: Clem Martini, Olivier Martini

$23.95

In 1976, Ben Martini was diagnosed with schizophrenia. A decade later, his brother Olivier was told he had the same disease. For the past thirty years the Martini family has struggled to comprehend and cope with a devastating illness, frustrated by a health care system lacking in resources and empathy, the imperfect science of medication, and the strain of mental illness on familial relationships.

Throughout it all, Olivier, an accomplished visual artist, drew. His sketches, comic strips, and portraits document his experience with, and capture the essence of, this all too frequently misunderstood disease. In Bitter Medicine, Olivier’s poignant graphic narrative runs alongside and communicates with a written account of the past three decades by his younger brother, award-winning author and playwright Clem Martini. The result is a layered family memoir that faces head-on the stigma attached to mental illness.

Shot through with wry humour and unapologetic in its politics, Bitter Medicine is the story of the Martini family, a polemical and poetic portrait of illness, and a vital and timely call for action.
Bittersweet Sands

By: Rick Ranson

$19.95

In Bittersweet Sands, Rick Ranson recounts a twenty-four-day shift at an oilsands operation undergoing a shutdown, giving us a glimpse at a world most of us only know from the evening news. Along the way, he encounters a group of engaging roughnecks, including a husband-and-wife welding crew, a petty fascist safety inspector, and the tough-as-nails secretary that keeps them all in line.
Black and Blue

By: Stanley Péan

$21.95

Author and radio personality Stanley Péan is a jazz scholar who takes us seamlessly and knowledgeably through the history of the music, stopping at a number of high points along the way. He gets behind the scenes with anecdotes that tell much about the misunderstandings that have surrounded the music. How could French existentialist writer Jean-Paul Sartre have mixed up Afro-Canadian songwriter Shelton Brooks with the Jewish-American belter Sophie Tucker? What is the real story behind the searing classic “Strange Fruit” made immortal by Billie Holiday, who at first balked at performing it? Who knew that an Ohio housewife named Sadie Vimmerstedt was behind the revenge song “I wanna be around to pick up the pieces when somebody breaks your heart?” And since this is jazz, there is no shortage of sad ends: Bix Beiderbecke, Chet Baker, Lee Morgan, to name a few.Jazz is liberation music, from Fats Waller to Duke Ellington to John Coltrane who walked side by side with Martin Luther King with his piece “Alabama.” Péan shows how musicians like Miles Davis worked with the emerging voices of hip-hop to widen jazz’s audience. The intricate crisscross between Black musical forms, from Marvin Gaye to the Last Poets is explored, as well as how the movies, Hollywood and European cinema alike, tried to use jazz, often whitening it in the process (with the exception of Spike Lee).
Black Dog

By: Matthew Heiti

$17.95

The Breakfast Club meets Shirley Jackson in a fusion of live theatre and technology that tells a darkly comic but hopeful story of four teenage outsiders struggling with death, depression and the shadow of a black dog.

Two is fraught. While dealing with the impossible expectations of her parents, she is trying to understand why her brother, a bright and talented teenager, has taken his own life. It’s not until a fateful school detention that she meets three other students who all seem as lost as she is. There’s Three, a quiet, misunderstood guy who doesn’t quite know how to care for himself; Four, the fashionable, popular kid and class clown; and Five, a rebel ready to fight against everyone and everything. Despite their differences, they each grapple with depression and anxiety and become an unlikely source of comfort to one another. As the four unite to battle teachers, parents, therapists and their own demons, their promising futures begin to reveal themselves.
Blessed Curse, The

By: Sarmad Sehbai

$22.95

Fearing loss of their sexual potency, a closed circle of men in power embarks on a fabulous journey involving erotica, magical herbs, spiritual pimps, a virgin prostitute and a divine bird–to find the ultimate aphrodisiac for their masculinity. Their search carries symbolic overtones of Pakistan’s bizarre predicament and its nuclear ambitions in the global political arena. The Blessed Curse is a savage satire, blending the real and unreal; a topsy-turvy exposé of the country’s rulers in their corruption of religion, politics, and economy. The novel’s style carries the tradition of Punjabi humour, which is often dark, irreverent, and brutally frank.
Blind Spot

By: Laurence Miall

$19.95

“Some days I wish something truly bad would happen so that I would have something genuine to worry about.”When his parents’ car is hit by a train, Luke, a failed actor, returns to his Edmonton hometown to attend their funeral, wrap up their affairs, and prepare their house to be sold off. But while all others around him grieve, Luke remains detached, striking up a relationship with a woman in a neighbouring house . and stumbling across evidence that his mother may have engaged in a longstanding extramarital affair herself.In Luke, Laurence Miall has crafted an unforgettable literary antihero, a man disconnected from the pain of those around him, yet blind to his own faults. With his clean, forceful language and a familiarity with the darker corners of the male psyche, Blind Spot is a gripping literary debut.
Blue Bear Woman

By: Virginia Bordeleau

$22.95

Blue Bear Woman is the first novel written by an Indigenous woman that was published in Quebec in the French language. The story of a young Cree woman’s search for her roots and identity, Virginia Pesemapeo Bordeleau’s debut novel, Ourse bleue, was originally published in 2007, and is her second novel to be translated into English. The novel explores contemporary Indigenous life and the impact on the Cree of the building of the Eastmain dam in northern Quebec, posited as “virgin” territory, yet which has actually been part of the Cree traditional territory since time immemorial. In search of her roots, Victoria takes a trip to the country of her Cree ancestors with her companion, Daniel. It is a long journey to the north along the shores of James Bay. Colours, smells, and majestic landscapes arouse memories that soon devolve into strange and hauntings dreams at night. In bits and pieces, uncles, aunties, and cousins arrive to tell the story of Victoria’s family and bring with them images of her childhood that are tinged both with joy and sadness. Guided by her totem, the Blue Bear, she returns home to make peace with her soul, as well as release the soul of her Great-Uncle George, a hunter who has been missing in the forest for over twenty years.
Blue Sonoma

By: Jane Munro

$20.00

A wise and embodied collection of dreamscapes, sutras and prayer poems from a writer at her peak

In Blue Sonoma, award-winning poet Jane Munro draws on her well-honed talents to address what Eliot called “the gifts reserved for age.” A beloved partner’s crossing into Alzheimer’s is at the heart of this book, and his “battered blue Sonoma” is an evocation of numerous other crossings: between empirical reportage and meditative apprehension, dreaming and wakefulness, Eastern and Western poetic traditions. Rich in both pathos and sharp shards of insight, Munro’s wisdom here is deeply embedded, shot through with moments of wit and candour. In the tradition of Taoist poets like Wang Wei and Po-Chu-i, her sixth and best book opens a wide poetic space, and renders difficult conditions with the lightest of touches.

Grey wood twisted tight
within the framework of the tree Ð
impossible to snap off,
forged as it dries.

And in me, parts I can’t imagine
myself without Ð silvering.
~from “The live arbutus carries dead branches … ”
Blue Sunflower Startle

By: Yasmin Ladha

$21.95

A home harbours secrets. Father has cancer. He is dying. Not a word.

Mother tells me to take care of my little brother.

In the early 1960s, a young girl and her brother move to their grandparents’ flourmill in Dodoma in newly-independent Tanzania. Her grandfather bellows his love for East Africa, where he and other Indian merchants have thrived. But the ground is shifting. President Nyerere is calling for the widespread nationalization of property. The hum of the mill has quieted. The young girl prays at the jamatkhana (Give me back my father) and spends evenings at the cinema watching cowboy films—grief and grievances, if only momentarily, disappear.

Hush, not a word.

Years later, the girl and her family immigrate to Calgary, Alberta and she begins a love affair with the prairies. Wary that her grandfather’s passion for his country consumed him, she is unwilling to settle for geographical monogamy. She travels to Chonju, South Korea to work as a language teacher, and Delhi, India for trysts with her Kashmiri lover. Frequently, she is startled by the appearance of things that remind her of the prairies, but show up in other countries. She aches for a home that beckons her return: the Canadian West, the hero that pulls a U-turn for its beloved.

Would you come for her, all ribby hair, or slicing the air like a boomerang, hollering at God? Would you strike a wild deal with Him, do anything to get her back?

Yasmin Ladha offers readers an exquisite exploration of the ways in which one can love a country. Written in unusual, intoxicating, and poetic prose, Blue Sunflower Startle is a modern day Romance for frequent travellers and nomadic spirits.
Blueberries and Apricots

By: Natasha Kanapé Fontaine

$20.95

Translated from French by Howard Scott

In this, her third volume of poetry, this Aboriginal writer from Quebec again confronts the loss of her landscape and language.

On my left hip
a face

I walk
I walk upright
like a shadow

a people on my hip
a boatload of fruit
and the dream inside
women and children first

“A cry rises in me and transfigures me. The world waits for woman to come back as she was born: woman standing, woman powerful, woman resurgent. A call rises in me and I’ve decided to say yes to my birth.”
Bodymap

By: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

$20.95

Finalist for the Triangle Awards, Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry, 2015
Shortlisted for the ReLit Award, Poetry, 2016

In Bodymap, Lambda Award-winner Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha sings a queer disabled femme-of-colour love song filled with hard femme poetics and disability justice. In this volume, Leah Lakshmi maps hard and vulnerable terrains of queer desire, survivorhood, transformative love, sick and disabled queer genius and all the homes we claim and deserve.
Bon: The Last Highway

By: Jesse Fink

$22.95

The death of Bon Scott is the Da Vinci Code of rockIn death, AC/DC’s trailblazing frontman has become a rock icon, and the legend of the man known around the world simply as “Bon” grows with each passing year. But how much of it is myth?At the heart of Bon: The Last Highway is a special — and unlikely — friendship between an Australian rock star and an alcoholic Texan troublemaker. Jesse Fink, author of the critically acclaimed international bestseller The Youngs: The Brothers Who Built AC/DC, reveals its importance for the first time.Leaving no stone unturned in a three-year journey that begins in Austin and ends in London, Fink takes the reader back to a legendary era for music that saw the relentless AC/DC machine achieve its commercial breakthrough but also threaten to come apart. With unprecedented access to Bon’s lovers, newly unearthed documents, and a trove of never-before-seen photos, Fink divulges startling new information about Bon’s last hours to solve the mystery of how he died.Music fans around the world have been waiting for the original, forensic, unflinching, and masterful biography Bon Scott so richly deserves — and now, finally, it’s here.
Bone Cage

By: Catherine Banks

$16.95

Jamie is twenty-two years old and works twelve-hour shifts operating a wood processor, clear-cutting for pulp. At the end of each shift, he walks through the destruction he has created looking for injured birds and animals and rescues those he can. Jamie’s desire to escape this world is thwarted by his fear of leaving the place where he has some status.

Bone Cage examines how young people in rural communities, employed in the destruction of the environment they love, treat the people they love at the end of their shift. Bone Cage is about the difficulty in growing and hanging on to dreams in a world where dreams are seen as impractical or weak. It is funny. It is tragic. It is about different kinds of escaping. It is about a soul trapped in its own rib cage, a cage of bone, a Bone Cage.