Your cart is currently empty!
A note to US-based customers: All Lit Up is pausing print orders to the USA until further notice. Read more
Browse featured titles from the ebooks for Everyone collection of accessible epubs.
When Gerry Coneybear, a cheerful young artist, comes to her Aunt Maggie’s funeral, she is shocked to learn that she has inherited her aunt’s rambling 200-year-old waterfront home. Unfortunately, the house comes with a multitude of her aunt’s cats as part of the bequest. As Gerry fends off the greedy, jealous relatives and the mysterious part-time housekeeper, she gradually comes to realize that her aunt may have been murdered. Cats, teacups, horticulture and art come together to help Gerry solve the mystery.
Trying to beat the mid-winter blahs by snowshoeing and cross country skiing when she?s not teaching art history at a local college (or being driven crazy by her numerous cats, cooped up in her rambling old country home), Gerry Coneybear thinks she has her busy life under control. That is, until she rescues her neighbour?s injured cat. Then a body pops up where she?d least expect it. And she even knows the victim ? slightly. From gossiping with friends to discussing events while baking at home with her housekeeper Prudence, Gerry manages to pick up a few clues, although Prudence tries to discourage her from getting involved. And at first Gerry tries to stay clear of the murder ? for murder it is. She gets to know Jean-Louis, a handsome ski instructor, and his adorable blond husky Harriet. Her friendship with the other man in her life, Doug, seems to be floundering. And Jean-Louis lives just down the road?The discovery of a mysterious package tucked up in a tree brings the police to Gerry?s home again. But that?s not all she finds in the woods.
Catalina has an almost purrrfect life, although sometimes she is sad and sometimes she is a little bit lonely. Then one day her owners come home with not one, not two, but three puppies. Now she isn?t lonely?she?s cranky! What?s a cat to do? It takes a while, but Catalina comes to see that perhaps puppies aren?t so bad after all.
In this charming picture book, Lori Doody explores the importance of accepting change, adapting to an expanding family situation and making friends. With its playful language and retro-style illustrations, this delightful story will appeal to cat-lovers of every age.
An intimate and enlightening no-holds-barred memoir that uncovers the many unexpected details of dying, Cautiously Pessimistic is one woman’s personal account of her husband’s death and what it means to die in the public eye.
Cautiously Pessimistic is both deeply moving and funny, as it recounts McGee’s husband’s diagnosis of brain cancer and the eight months leading up to his death. It is told in the first person and through posts from Facebook and Twitter, text exchanges, and email. Alternating chapters tell the story of McGee and her husband’s tumultuous early relationship, through the use of excerpts from journals and letters. Throughout the narrative the presence of the tightly knit St. John’s arts community is strongly felt. The etiquette of offering condolences on social media is examined in an afterword by the author.
Explore the true resilience of the heart and our raw determination to find goodness in a world fraught with adversity
One woman’s courage in the face of personal tragedy is at the heart of Heather A. Clark’s debut novel. Thirty-three-year-old Nicky Fowler thought her whole life was mapped out — a rewarding career as a third grade teacher, an adoring husband, and the perfect house in the suburbs — but complicated fertility issues lead to a devastating tragedy. Nicky’s marriage crumbles and she’s left unable to cope with her now-changed life.
When Nicky accepts a volunteer teaching position at an orphanage in Kenya, she finds that life there is unlike the world she’s known. Drought has brought famine, violence is everywhere, and the jaded orphanage director takes out her hatred on the parentless children.
But Nicky finds strength in Mama Bu, her host mother, who provides wisdom and perspective over cups of chai, Kenya’s signature drink. Nicky comes to realize that she must do much more than teach the orphans — she must save them.
When Ralph Thomas comes across graffiti of a horse in an alleyway in the early hours of the morning, he is stopped in his tracks. He recognizes this horse. A half-asleep Indigenous homeless man sees Ralph’s reaction to the horse and calls out to him. Over the course of a morning’s worth of hot coffee on a bitterly cold day, Ralph and the homeless man talk and Ralph remembers a troubling moment from his childhood when an odd little girl, Danielle, drew the most beautiful and intriguing horse on his mother’s Everything Wall, winning the competition set up for children on the Otter Lake Reserve.
Ralph has lived with many questions that arose from his eleventh winter. What did the horse mean — to him, his sister, his best friend, and, most importantly, the girl who drew it? These questions have never left him.
Chasing Painted Horses has a magical, fablelike quality that will enchant readers, and haunt them, for years to come.
Since its publication in 1994, Hiromi Goto’s Chorus of Mushrooms has been recognized as a true classic of Canadian literature. One of the initial entries in NeWest Press’ long-running Nunatak First Fiction Series, Hiromi Goto’s inaugural outing was recognized at the Commonwealth Writers’ Prizes as the Best First Book in the Caribbean and Canadian regions that year, as well as becoming co-winner of the Canada-Japan book award. Goto’s acclaimed feminist novel is an examination of the Japanese Canadian immigrant experience, focusing on the lives of three generations of women in modern day Alberta to better understand themes of privilege and cultural identity. This reprinting of the landmark text includes an extensive afterword by Larissa Lai and an interview with the author, talking about the impact the book has had on the Canadian literary landscape.
The first book in the Shanghai Quartet – City Rising – starts on the Hua Shan (the Holy Mountain) 250 years before Christ where the FIRST EMPEROR the most powerful man the world to that time had ever known bequeaths a talisman to his three trusted followers: the BodyGuard, his favorite Courtesan and his Head Confucian – a narwhal tusk with carvings depicting the growth for the next 2500 years of a city at the Bend in the River – Shanghai. The warning from the First Emperor before he commits suicide is to watch for the White Ships on Water – and so the progeny of the three who are entrusted with the Tusk do – and then – in 1841 – they arrive. British Men of War ships – and Opium.
City Rising tells the story of two destitute Baghdadi boys who become opium lords – and the battles against the powerful British Opium companies – and the boys’ eventual love of the City at the Bend in the River – Shanghai.
Alden Nowlan (1933-1983) once wrote of a desire to leave behind “one poem, one story / that will tell what it was like / to be alive.” In an abundance of memorable poems, he fulfilled this desire with candour and subtlety, emotion, and humour, sympathy and truth-telling. For many years, Nowlan has been one of Canada’s most-read and -beloved poets, but only now is the true range of his poetic achievement finally available between two covers, with the publication of Collected Poems of Alden Nowlan.
Nowlan takes us from nightmarish precincts of fear and solitude to the embrace of friendship and family. Delving into experiences of violence and gentleness, of alienation and love, his poetry reveals our shared humanity as well as our perplexing and sometimes entertaining differences. Nowlan’s childhood and adult years are colourfully reflected in his poetry. These autobiographical threads are interwoven with fantasies, an astute historical consciousness, and a keen awareness of the shiftings and transformations of selfhood.
Nowlan wrote with formal variety, visually shaping his poems with a dexterity that complicates impressions that he was primarily a “plainspoken” poet. His varied uses of the poetic line — his handling of line-lengths and -breaks, stanzas, and pauses — show him to be a writer who skilfully uses the page to suggest and embody the rhythms of speech. This long-awaited volume enables readers to experience his poetic genius in its fullness and uniqueness.
You will never know what really happened to Lech or any of us. We mean nothing by it, darling. It is a silent agreement we all have with ourselves, that nothing will ever make us prisoners again, not even memory.?
Set primarily in the neighbourhood of fictional Copernicus Avenue, Andrew Borkowski’s debut collection of short stories is a daring, modern take on life in Toronto’s Polish community in the years following World War II. Featuring a cast of young and old, artists and soldiers, visionaries and madmen, the forgotten and the unforgettable, Copernicus Avenue captures, with bold and striking prose, the spirit of a people who have travelled to a new land, not to escape old grudges and atrocities, but to conquer them.
In an African town somewhere between the Sahel and the Atlantic coast, cotton planter Toby Kunta takes a Berlin journalist hostage in a museum showroom. Kunta asks for compensation of several million francs for himself and a group of peasants ruined by the production of genetically modified cotton. As the tension rises inside the museum and a standoff begins with the chief of police, Kunta begins to burn the exhibited works one by one and threatens to do the same with his prisoner.
With this standoff behind closed doors, where words and gestures get exchanged with anger and hope, Edem Awumey takes us on a contemporary journey on the cotton road, from the African Savannah to the American South, from the luxurious salons of Berlin to the fields of Indian Rajasthan sprayed with glyphosate, from the valleys of Uzbekistan covered with white fibre to the spinning mills of Dhaka in Bangladesh. It is the novel of the crossing of worlds in a struggle against the domination of the multinationals. It is the great lamentation of the African people enslaved to the thirst for wealth in the West. It is a cry of freedom too long held back that finally bursts out with thunderous violence.
A pitch-perfect debut and a call to act in the service of Earth through radiant attention.
Humankind, at present, has breached floodgates that have only been breached before in ancient stories of angry gods, or so far back on geologic and biological timelines as to seem more past than past. Against this catastrophic backdrop (at the end of consolations, at the high-water mark), and equipped with a periscopic eye and a sublime metaphorical reach, poet Dan MacIsaac has crowded his debut vessel with sloths and gipsy-birds, mummified remains and bumbling explorers, German expressionists and Neolithic cave-painters.
MacIsaac knows that in order to render a thing in language, description itself must be open to metamorphosis and transformation; each thing must be seen alongside, overtop of, and underneath everything else that has been seen. With the predominant “I” of so many poetic debuts almost entirely absent, Cries from the Ark is catalogue and cartography of our common mortal–and moral–lot.
“These poems are fecund as black dirt, as carnal and joyous. Each piece is an owl pellet, a concentrate of bone and tuft, of bison, auk and Beothuk. Not since Eric Ormsby’s Araby have I read a book so empathic and so glossarily rich. Fair warning, MacIsaac: I’ll be stealing words from you for years.” –Sharon McCartney
“MacIsaac sings a raven’s work, sings the guts from our myths, sings our world with the breath that ‘for a century/ of centuries / only the wild grass / remembered.’ Present but acquainted with antiquity, MacIsaac’s instrument is our own breathing as we say these poems of reverence to ourselves.” –Matt Rader
No two curries are the same. This Curry asks why the dish is supposed to represent everything brown people eat, read, and do.
Curry is a dish that doesn’t quite exist, but, as this wildly funny and sharp essay points out, a dish that doesn’t properly exist can have infinite, equally authentic variations. By grappling with novels, recipes, travelogues, pop culture, and his own upbringing, Naben Ruthnum depicts how the distinctive taste of curry has often become maladroit shorthand for brown identity. With the sardonic wit of Gita Mehta’s Karma Cola and the refined, obsessive palette of Bill Buford’s Heat, Ruthnum sinks his teeth into the story of how the beloved flavor calcified into an aesthetic genre that limits the imaginations of writers, readers, and eaters. Following in the footsteps of Salman Rushdie’s Imaginary Homelands, Curry cracks open anew the staid narrative of an authentically Indian diasporic experience.
Alex is a playwright suffering from writer’s block and harsh reviews. His best friend, Roy, is a theatre director with lung cancer and six months left to live. In pursuit of fresh air and great wine, they go on a road trip to the Okanagan Valley, where Roy rediscovers his passion for theatre. But when he decides to stage a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at a winery, disaster ensues: the woman cast in the lead is the winery owner’s wife and has no talent; wildfires encroach upon the surrounding forest; and Roy slips closer to death, one cigarette at a time.
Curtains for Roy is a hilarious peek into the world of theatre, where the greatest drama is offstage and the best performances take place behind the curtain.