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Renaissance Press Book Sale!
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All Books in this Collection
Showing 1–20 of 54 results
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A Burning We Will Die
$20.00Nurses traditionally care for bodies; they don’t find murdered ones. Erin Rine, a gutsy, thirty-year-old nurse, inadvertently steps into murder when she trips over her patient’s body. With her headstrong Aries personality, a black belt in taekwondo, and only fearing the unpredictable bear population in her Northern Ontario woodland districts, Erin gets caught up in the investigation with the help of her best friend, an elderly neighbour who provides astrological influences, eerily apt psychic warnings.
Burned in prior relationships, Erin is disconcerted by her attraction to the handsome investigating detective, and strives to avoid a romantic entanglement despite the investigation bringing them closer.
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A Congress of Ships
$20.00In a desolate system on the outer edge of Pan Galactum, the skin of the universe has ruptured, tearing open a portal to an alternate reality. Witnessed only by the sentient science vessel N’Dea, a massive, battered ship falls through, housing a community of refugees fleeing an enemy that has pursued them across the cold reaches of space for decades.
But have they come alone?
Summoned by N’Dea while en route from a reunion with dear friends on the Galactum’s capital, the mystery is a lure that fellow Artificial Sentience, the Maverick Heart, cannot resist. It’s now up to Vrick, along with humans Keene, Lexa-Blue and Ember, and allies old and new, to come to the aid of this ship of lost souls. Together they must find a way to seal the breach for good, before a ravening hunger can spill through and rip the Galactum apart.
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A Killer Match
$20.00Jenna Hamilton is a dating coach and the co-owner of a bookstore, with Adam Owens, in the Net Loft on Granville Island in Vancouver. When her best friend, hairdresser Hillary, is a bystander in a car crash that kills her co-worker Bruno, Jenna is there to provide emotional support. But soon, Bruno’s condo is trashed, along with the salon where he used to work with Hillary.
As Jenna tries to make sense of what is happening, she makes some shocking discoveries about Bruno’s life, and realizes the facade he had presented to those around him was an almost complete fabrication. Who was Bruno, really? Did someone intentionally kill him? And what are they after?
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A Lethal Proposal
$22.95Jenna Hamilton and Adam Olsen co-own a bookstore on Granville Island, Vancouver. Jenna is also a Dating Coach who helps people deal with their qualms about dating. They attend the engagement party of Jenna’s friend, Carla, and her fiancé, Bruce. Carla is also one of Jenna’s clients and has been unlucky in love in the past. Her first two fiancés died, one in an accident and one in an unsolved murder, before the weddings could take place. But Carla is hoping the third time will be the charm.
The party is a huge success, but shortly after Jenna arrives home, she receives a frantic call from Carla. As she and the wedding party prepared to leave, she found a note telling Bruce to dump her or die.
Since Jenna and Adam had been influential in uncovering a killer the previous spring, Carla begs them to find out who left the note and why that person would threaten Bruce.
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A Refuge of Tales
$15.00What does it mean to make a home inside a story? Stories are safe, comfortable, familiar. Fairytales and myths, these stories we all know and grew up with are even more so.
A Refuge of Tales takes everyday tropes and asks: safe for who? This is a collection of poems for anyone who has ever felt outside of the myth.
With language both sharp and lyrical, Lynne Sargent weaves a treatise on the power of stories, and how those who have been left behind can take up that power and use it to build a new, better world.
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AfriCANthology
$25.00Truth spoken plainly and powerfully is difficult to dismiss and impossible to ignore. Edited with purpose by Greg Frankson, AfriCANthology: Perspectives of Black Canadian Poets brings together some of Canada’s most influential dub, page, and spoken word poetic voices and gives them space to speak freely about their personal journeys in piercing verse and unapologetic prose. Just as individual experiences of Blackness are diverse across Canada, each contributor recounts aspects of navigating their unique personal, professional, and artistic paths in Black skin with fearless candour and audacious forthrightness. Unforgettable in its charged emotional potency and stirring in its unrelenting urgency, AfriCANthology: Perspectives of Black Canadian Poets is a stunning tour de force by a celebrated gathering of truthtellers that demands we comprehensively reassess the present and reimagine the future of Blackness in Canada.
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Artificial Divide
$25.00Step into a world of rogue screen readers, Braille in fantasy worlds, a friend meeting an acquaintance after several years, and more.
This #OwnVoices anthology features fiction by Blind and visually impaired authors showing readers how they thrive, hurt, get revenge, outsmart bullies, or go on epic adventures. Artificial Divide is an own-voices story collection that captures the many layers of Blindness and, for once, puts visually impaired protagonists in the driver’s seat, letting us glimpse their lives.
When we think about it, we’re not really divided.
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Assassins! Accidental Matchmakers
$20.00Kennedy Fairfield just graduated in the class of 2002, and is now trying to find her purpose in life, or at least a job in her field. When she saves Jason Johnson, the leader of a secret Community of supernatural people called Aetherborn, from an attempted assassination, they embark on a whirlwind epic romance and adventure.
For Kennedy and Jason to discover why people are disappearing in time to save her friends, they’ll have to face teleporting assassins, grumpy wizards, gossiping hags, mafia robots, and secret military groups, all in the city of Westmeath, Ontario, which has more secrets than residents.
The first book of four in The Gates of Westmeath series.
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Ballet Is Not For Muslim Girls
$20.00From biryani to borscht, the food was always fabulous in Canada’s only Polish-Pakistani family. Mariam S. Pal’s memoir, Ballet is not for Muslim Girls, is set in this remarkable Victoria B.C. household in the 60s and 70s. Growing up, Mariam struggled to navigate three cultures: her Pakistani father’s, her Polish-Canadian mother’s and Canada’s, where Mariam was born and raised.
Mariam wanted to be a Canadian girl.
A “normal” first name would have been a good start. At school they called her Marilyn, Marian – anything but Mariam. Hers was the only house for miles that didn’t hand out Halloween candy or put up Christmas lights. When Mariam came home from Grade 1 bawling because she was the only kid who didn’t have a turkey sandwich the day after Thanksgiving, her parents started a roasting a bird each year.
Mariam was determined to be Canadian, fighting hard to attend high school dances or act in a drama class play. Ballet, Brownies forget it. Sleepovers were not allowed. Her martini-loving Muslim father fretted that a bacon and eggs breakfast might be on the menu the morning after.
Ballet Is Not For Muslim Girls is an engaging, fascinating account of Mariam’s search for identity and belonging. Though her journey is sometimes painful, it is always thought provoking. Each chapter begins with an evocative and often hilarious photograph from Mariam’s family album.
Ballet is not for Muslim Girls raises, with humour and affection, the fundamental issues of integration and cultural adaptation that all immigrants, from Adelaide to Quebec to Yonkers, grapple with. Ballet is not for Muslim Girls’ poignant yet uplifting story will appeal to a broad spectrum of readers, regardless of their origin.
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Black Wolf
$25.00Love and loyalty are powerful ties, but even the strongest fetters can be broken. Odin has established absolute dominion over the Nine Worlds, but he knows that one day a Jötun named Loki will destroy everything he has created. To avert a bloody war, he adopts the peculiar child and forges a bond of kinship with him. However, when a powerful seeress foretells the death of Baldr and the coming of Ragnarök, Odin and Frigg begin to redirect the course of their foster son’s life. As the future’s shadow grows longer, their measures grow more desperate.
Embittered by Odin’s manipulations, Loki becomes ever more sly and secretive; when he discovers that his own brothers have betrayed him at Odin’s command, he spirals into madness. Soon, Loki and Odin are circling one another, and the fate of the worlds depends on two men who will sacrifice everything to get what they want.
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Blood State
$20.00Three generations ago, the Modernist Mission arrived on the ice planet Tählti to find it already inhabited by the Firsts, humanoids who have evolved an antifreeze glycoprotein in their blood. With the next ice age nipping at everyone’s heels, the Modernist government will do anything to get the protein – even experimenting on the Firsts in secret. Despite Modernist general Lucian Devereaux’s best efforts, what began as a medical research facility to ensure his people’s survival becomes a concentration camp. When an exiled vigilante learns this secret, he threatens to tell the world and spark a war between Modernist and First – a war neither can afford before the ice age. Surrounded by enemies, Lucian must figure out whom to trust, or neither subspecies will survive much longer.
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Choices
$31.95As the horrors close in around us, we turn to story to process our fears, our desires, and our futures. In Choices: An Anthology of Reproductive Fiction, nineteen writers whose reproductive rights are under threat explore the stories of those who, like them, have had their choices stolen from them:
The horror of being forced to carry a child you don’t want.
The catharsis of taking revenge on a man who stole your right to choose.
The terror of being threatened by the world for having a baby you do want because you’re “the wrong gender”.
The pride of knowing you fought for a better future, even if that future claimed your life.
These stories serve as a reminder of the power of choice and the importance of fighting for every human’s right to choose their own future.
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Coffee Shop Between the Verses
$20.00Jackie sometimes likes to have conversations with the characters, and as he reads five novellas in the small Ontario town of Baker…
In The Ridiculous Adventures of Felix Felicitous, the grumpy Felix is thrown into an adventure through time, despite his protestations.
In Only Human, Rachel has accidentally signed up for the University of Monsters.
In Wargrave Island, Inspector Riko Dulac has to find out who’s killing all her former high school classmates before there’s no one left.
In Database of the Ageless Kings, Sophia rebuilds an alien ship, only to find the galactic prince still inside.
In Devices of Desire, follow Artemis, Diana, and Ezekiel as they navigate secret identities, demons, and love in the kingdom of Cillian.
Are the characters Jackie is talking with real? Is he just talking to himself? Or is something else going on?
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Consensually Complicated
$22.95Bells doesn’t just fall in love – she dives into it enthusiastically. Although her romantic endeavours leave her with “emotional damage”, she is desperate to find inspiration – a Muse for her paintings – for her next piece. Mark, her crush turned friends-with-benefits, sets her up on a date with a former link. The date in question is Narisha, model and Muse extraordinaire. Bells is immediately smitten. She decides to take a risk for her new fixation by stepping into the unknown waters of polyamory.
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Crushing It
$22.99After an epic grounding for some bad decisions with even worse friends, Tommy Fairfield is lucky to even go to the Door Tech March Break camp. There, he crosses paths with Carter Batudev, chemistry isn’t just for the classroom anymore.
With love and a renewed interest in STEM, Tommy returns home to Parry Sound, where, to the relief of his parents, he makes better friends, and joins the STEM club. When the club goes to the province-wide competition in Toronto, he is reunited with Carter, whose team is also competing. Ensues a wild ride full of romance, hijinks, STEM, and singing.
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Daughters of Britain
$20.0068 ad. The Roman Empire has swallowed most of Europe. There are pockets of resistance but nowhere, no one, is safe.
Refugee. Slave. Queen.
Mederei, eldest daughter of the fallen war-queen, Boudicca, fled north with her sister to continue the fight for British freedom. But nowhere is safe from Rome. Now she must fight for her life for the amusement of her enemy.
Soldier. Hostage. Prince.
Adalbern, a proud Batavian, serving in the Roman auxiliary, lived by their rules. But no one is safe from Rome. His people scattered and his nephew held hostage in Rome itself, he is now nothing more than a glorified prisoner. It’s life or death both in the arena and out for Mederei and Adalbern as they try to survive and save their people.
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Dissatisfied Me
$20.00Rick “Dickie” Duncan is turning fifty. Meh.
On the eve of this mid-century milestone, he finds himself alone in his mother’s Ottawa basement, surrounded by gaudy decor and a carpet that hasn’t been raked in years. Grabbing some brews and frozen hotdogs, Rick rummages through the clutter that’s made up his dissatisfied life.
From the death of Santa to the last days of Scottish Rot, Rick meanders through the decades, mapping his existence amid the pop culture of the ’70s to the present day.
Marking key moments of his unsated misadventures and real-life dating disasters, Rick reminds himself that his journey is a love story. Sort of.
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Dissatisfied Me: West Coast Larry
$24.95Layabout Larry Johnstone’s life mission to find the perfect spouse began in his early teens. After dating (and being dumped) by nearly a hundred women, he finally meets and proposes to his dream girl, Heather—a successful advertising executive from Vancouver.
A shocking truth about Larry surfaces during his bachelor party, thwarting his plans for a traditional wedding. Determined to complete his quest, he abandons his Ottawa life and flies to his “schnookums” on the West Coast—only to discover his mission might not come to fruition as expected, thanks to a charismatic Scandinavian with ice blue eyes and a portable meatball oven.
Needing guidance, Larry stumbles into a non-conventional church, where a seagull-cawing woman reveals a prophecy: Larry will father a nation and be married to the voice of a generation. With the help of Peter, a hippie who “spreads the love” in the streets, and newfound friends at the Hospice of Good Hope, Larry is driven to seek the answer to the question: “How the hell will this prophecy be fulfilled?”
Dissatisfied Me: West Coast Larry is a spin-off from Bruce D. Gordon’s first novel, Dissatisfied Me: A Love Story.
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Distant Early Warning
$20.00Canada is in crisis. Climate change has taken hold, and amid the flooding and the super storms, the dead begin crawling out of the ground at night, screaming out strange gibberish songs that entrance anyone who hears them. The north quickly becomes a wild west, without the west.
Denny’s life changes forever one day when she sees her dad on TV, dead and screaming. Denny gives up her job, buys supplies, and heads out with her dad’s dog, Geoff, to discover the truth behind his death, but truth always comes with a cost. What Denny discovers in the wilds of Northern Ontario will shatter all of her assumptions about her life, and what lies beyond.
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Elvie, Girl Under Glass
$22.99Elvie, Girl Under Glass tells the poignant story of a child transplanted from a sunny mountain village in Italy to Montreal, Quebec, in 1952.
Raised in a household ruled by a cruel, controlling father, her desire to free herself from his oppression mirrors the French-language majority’s battle to wrest control of the province’s economic resources from the English-speaking elite.
Unlike some of the separatists who eventually turn violent, Elvie responds to her father’s growing strictures by withdrawing deeper into herself. Respite comes from the company of friends and long hours immersed in the thrall of books. Nevertheless, this coping mechanism results in an adult plagued by bouts of depression.
The memoir explores Elvie’s experience of growing up by the rules of an Italian household while navigating the French-English divide in Montreal with ease. She learns French on the streets of her lower-working-class neighbourhood and attends school in the English system.
Her efforts to break free of her constricting heritage coincide with the aftermath of Quebec’s Revolution of the 1960s and subsequent bloodshed and violence as the French-language majority wrests control of the province’s resources from the English elite.
Elvie, Girl Under Glass peeks into one person’s heart and soul as she seeks safe harbour.