The Maritimes are rich in story-telling traditions, and home to many of Canada's great short story writers. Their strong Maritime voices are collected here in this splendid anthology of short stories. Best Maritime Short Stories is a collection of the work of long-established and lesser-known writers, including stories by Charles Bruce, Ernest Buckler, Lesley Choyce, Susan Kerslake, Janice Kulyk Keefer, Alistair Macleod, Alden Nowlan, J J Steinfeld, Kent Thompson, among others. Best Maritime Short Stories is a wonderful introduction to the exciting contemporary literature of Canada's Maritime ... View More...
Sometimes those who have the most seem bent on throwing it away. Meet Bob Sterling, a comfortable middle-aged professor, a specialist in the life of Edgar Allan Poe, married to a former student with whom he has a young son. In the space of a week his family, marriage, career, sanity, and life are brought to the brink of ruin in the aftermath of a trip he makes with a student, the intense young poet Sienna Chu, who tweaks into florescence a long-harboured, secret sexual fetish. Then add to the mix the misadventures of his wife s mentally failing mother, a shy night prowler, and Sienna s explosi... View More...
Long-listed for the 2006 Re-Lit Award for Best Novel Grant McRae has a loving wife, a healthy son, and a new career with the local police department. Bert Commerford has a pretty good life too, as the proud owner of Commerford & Sons Auto Service. But Bert's sons are polar opposites: Travis is a budding junior hockey star, and Russell is a thug loaded with resentment for Bert. When tragedy befalls the Commerfords, Bert finds himself too haunted by his murky past to stop his life from buckling. Russell leaves home and almost immediately finds disaster as his path intersects with Constable McR... View More...
Uniquely imagined and vividly evoked, Andr Alexis's prize-winning novel chronicles the childhood - or perhaps the loss of childhood - of Thomas MacMillan, who sets out to piece together the early years of his life. Raised in a Southern Ontario town in the '50s and '60s, Thomas is abandoned to the care of his eccentric Trinidadian grandmother. Then, at ten, his mother, Katarina, reclaims him, taking him to Ottawa and to the once-splendid Victorian home of Henry Wing, a gentle conjurer whose love of science and the imagination becomes an important legacy. But is he Thomas's father? Moving and w... View More...
Winner of the 2015 Scotiabank Giller PrizeFinalist for the 2015 Toronto Book AwardsWinner of the 2015 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize" Alexis] devises an inventive romp through the nature of humanity in this beautiful, entertaining read ... A clever exploration of our essence, communication, and how our societies are organized." - Kirkus Reviews"This might be the best set-up of the spring." - The Globe & Mail "Andr Alexis has established himself as one of our preeminent voices." - Toronto Star-- I wonder, said Hermes, what it would be like if animals had human intelligence.-- I'll wager a... View More...
"The cure for death by lightning was handwritten in thick, messy blue ink in my mother's scrapbook, under the recipe for my father's favourite oatcakes: Dunk the dead by lightning in a cold water bath for two hours and if still dead, add vinegar and soak for an hour more." So begins Gail Anderson-Dargatz's extraordinary first novel, a seductive and thrilling book that captures the heart and imagination, as filled with the magic and mystery of life as it is with its lurking evils and gut-wrenching hardships. The Cure for Death by Lightning sold more than a staggering 100,000 copies in Canada al... View More...
First published in l965, Hubert Aquin's Next Episode is a disturbing and yet deeply moving novel of dissent and distress. As he awaits trial, a young separatist writes an espionage story in the psychiatric ward of the Montreal prison where he has been detained. Sheila Fischman's bold new translation captures the pulsating life of Aquin's complex exploration of the political realities of contemporary Quebec. View More...
On a snowy winter night, Gerry Adamson hides from his family in a laid-up sailboat. Pushing sixty, holed-up with a laptop, he's trying to make a novel out of thirty-odd years of compromises and betrayals that have seen him go from youthful erratic passion to late-middle-aged dithering. He's making one last effort to make it mean something. View More...
Think your in-laws are scary? Try meeting Paige Winterbourne's potential father-in-law: CEO of the Cortez Cabal, a multinational corporation...and the supernatural equivalent of the Mafia. Lucas Cortez has devoted his life to ruining the Cabals, though that doesn't stop his father from expecting him to take over the family business someday. Benicio's favorite ploy is to appeal to Lucas's quixotic ideals by asking him to investigate Cabal cases of injustice.After years of failure, Benicio finally has the perfect case: a teenage witch attacked and left for dead. Refusing will be difficult enough... View More...
" Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge." These words are spoken by Iris Chase Griffen, married at eighteen to a wealthy industrialist but now poor and eighty-two. Iris recalls her far from exemplary life, and the events leading up to her sister' s death, gradually revealing the carefully guarded Chase family secrets. Among these is " The Blind Assassin, " a novel that earned the dead Laura Chase not only notoriety but also a devoted cult following. Sexually explicit for its time, it was a pulp fantasy improvised by two unnamed lovers who meet secretly in rente... View More...
In this multi-award-winning, bestselling novel, Margaret Atwood has created a stunning Orwellian vision of the near future. This is the story of Offred, one of the unfortunate "Handmaids" under the new social order who have only one purpose: to breed. In Gilead, where women are prohibited from holding jobs, reading, and forming friendships, Offred's persistent memories of life in the "time before" and her will to survive are acts of rebellion. Provocative, startling, prophetic, and with Margaret Atwood's devastating irony, wit, and acute perceptive powers in full force, The Handmaid's Tale is ... View More...
Imagining a world where citizens take turns as prisoners and jailers, the prophetic Margaret Atwood delivers a hilarious yet harrowing tale about liberty, power, and the irrepressibility of the human appetite. Several years after the world's brutal economic collapse, Stan and Charmaine, a married couple struggling to stay afloat, hear about the Positron Project in the town of Consilience, an experiment in cooperative living that appears to be the answer to their problems--to living in their car, to the lousy jobs, to the vandalism and the gangs, to their piled-up debt. There's just one drawbac... View More...
In this astonishing tour de force, Margaret Atwood takes the reader back in time and into the life and mind of one of the most enigmatic and notorious women of the nineteenth century. In 1843, at the age of sixteen, servant girl Grace Marks was convicted for her part in the vicious murders of her employer and his mistress. Some believe Grace is innocent; others think her evil or insane. Grace herself claims to have no memory of the murders. As Dr. Simon Jordan - an expert in the burgeoning field of mental illness - tries to unlock her memory, what will he find? Was Grace a femme fatale - or a ... View More...
Set against the tumultuous backdrop of a fragmenting Punjab and moving between Canada and India, Can you Hear the Nightbird Call? charts the interweaving stories of three Indian women - Bibi-ji, Leela and Nimmo - each in search of a resting place amid rapidly changing personal and political landscapes. The ambitious, defiant Sikh Bibi-ji, born Sharanjeet Kaur in a Punjabi village, steals her sister Kanwar's destiny, thereby gaining passage to Canada. Leela Bhat, born to a German mother and a Hindu father, is doomed to walk the earth as a half-and-half. Leela's childhood in Bangalore is scarred... View More...
In a small town by the Bay of Bengal in India, Sripathi Rao, a headstrong man and disenchanted copywriter, lives in his crumbling ancestral home, uncomfortably aware of the encroaching modern world. Then, early one morning, Sripathi is awakened by a call from Canada: his long-estranged daughter and her husband have been killed in a car accident. Their surviving seven-year-old child, Nandana, is about to become his reluctant ward. Yet Nandana has never met her grandfather, has never been to India, and hasn't spoken a word since the tragedy. With" The Hero's Walk," Anita Rau Badami ushers us int... View More...
