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CELA has restarted production and distribution of embossed braille, printbraille and reloading of Envoy Connect devices. There may be delays in receiving your materials due to rotating strikes by Canada Post workers.
Showing 1 - 14 of 14 items
By Farah Ghafoor. 2025
Borrowing its title from a finance term—"the estimated price of a good or service for which no market price exists"—Shadow…
Price is a stunning debut that examines the idea of value in a world that burns under our capitalist lens. What gives life value? How do we serve existing societal structures that determine its cost? Employing both surreal and documentary imagery, Farah Ghafoor's arresting collection articulates how narrative is used to revise the past and manipulate the future, ultimately forming our present-day climate crisis. Interrogating personal complicity, generational implications, and the shock of our collective disregard for a world that sustains every living thing, Shadow Price captures the complexities of living and writing as a young poet born in the year that "climate change denial" first appeared in print. Mourning the loss of Earth's biodiversity, from insects to mammoths to trees, these introspective poems invite us to consider the risks and rewards of loving what may vanish in our lifetime. Shadow Price charges readers to contemplate their power and purpose in the world today, recognizing that there is hope even in the belly of the beastBy Aimee Wall. 2024
Roman magistral sur les relations féminines intergénérationnelles et la résistance que l'on retrouve dans les endroits les plus improbables, Nous,…
Jane explore la précarité de l'existence rurale et le droit fondamental à l'avortement. Cherchant à donner un sens à sa vie, Marthe entame une amitié intense avec une femme plus âgée, également originaire de Terre-Neuve. Celle-ci lui raconte une histoire de but, de devoir à accomplir qui porte un nom : Jane. Accompagnée par sa nouvelle amie, Marthe quitte sa vie montréalaise et retourne dans une petite communauté de l'ile pour poursuivre le travail d'un mouvement clandestin du Chicago des années 1960 : les services d'avortement pratiqués par des femmes, toujours appelées Jane. Elle s'engage à perpétuer cet héritage et à protéger ses nouvelles connaissances. Mais la noblesse de la tâche et la réalité de la vie en région éloignée entrent en compétition, et les fractures personnelles au sein du petit groupe commencent à se creuser. Nous, Jane sonde l'importance du travail de soins effectué par les femmes pour les femmes, souligne la complexité des relations dans ces réseaux, et capture magnifiquement l'inévitable conflit intérieur qui accompagne le retour au bercailBy Kyle Edwards. 2025
"Part coming-of-age novel, part searing examination of a community finding itself, Small Ceremonies is a tantalizing and heartbreaking debut. 'I…
fear for our friendship, for the day it will end, wondering when that day will be . . .' Tomahawk Shields (a.k.a. Tommy) and Clinton Whiteway are on the cusp of adulthood, imagining a future rife with possibility and greatness. The two friends play for their high school’s poor-performing hockey team, the Tigers, who learn at the start of the new season that the league wants them out. Their annual goal is now more important than ever: to win their first game in years and break the curse. As we follow these two Indigenous boys over the course of a year, we are given a panoptic view of Tommy and Clinton’s Winnipeg, where a university student with grand ambitions chooses to bottle her anger when confronted with numerous micro- (and not so micro-) aggressions; an ex-convict must choose between protecting or exploiting his younger brother as he’s dragged deeper into the city’s criminal underbelly; a lonely rink attendant is haunted by the memory of a past lover and contemplates rekindling this old flame; and an aspiring journalist does everything she can to uncover why the league is threatening to remove the Tigers. These are a sampling of the chorus of voices that depicts a community filled with individuals searching for purpose, leading them all to one fateful and tragic night. Ferociously piercing the heart of an Indigenous city, Kyle Edwards's sparkling debut is a heartbreaking yet humour-flecked portrayal of navigating identity and place, trauma and recovery, and growing up in a land that doesn't love you."--Front flap of jacketBy Benjamin Hertwig. 2024
Sixteen-year-old Plinko is attending basic training before high school starts up again in the fall. Feeling adrift from his own…
family, he moves in with an older soldier, where he forges an unlikely group of friends in the military: the very tall Walsh, who moves in shortly after Plinko does; Abdi, whose Somali immigrant parents often welcome the group of young men over for dinner; and the unpredictable and gun-loving Krug, who is brash and exasperating yet magnetic. After 9/11, the military prepares to move into Afghanistan — to go to war. Plinko and his friends have no idea that the trajectory of their lives is about to be irrevocably altered. Drawn from the author's experiences as a soldier in Afghanistan, Juiceboxers tenderly traces the story of a young man's journey from basic training, to the battlefields of Kandahar, to the inner city of Edmonton, braiding together questions of masculinity and militarism, friendship and white supremacy, loss and trauma and hard-won recoveryBy Null Anusree Roy. 2025
In the vibrant heart of Toronto’s Gerrard India Bazaar, Dilpreet and his daughters, Jasmeet and Simran, are frantically preparing to…
open their new sari shop in time for Canada Day. While Jasmeet prepares designs for the store’s logo and signs, she is also preparing for her high-school prom. Meanwhile, Simran anxiously awaits her LSAT scores that will grant her access to the best law schools in the country. Amidst the flurry of activity, Simran experiences a mental-health crisis, threatening to derail not only her future but the family’s shared dream. As she spirals into a dangerous breakdown, the family's dedication to their shop and to each other is put to the ultimate test.Little Pretty and The Exceptional is a candid and compassionate portrait of a family haunted by a traumatic past, exposing the stigmas surrounding mental health in the South Asian community. This heartfelt tale reveals what it truly means to support and care for our loved ones during their darkest times.By Fawn Parker. 2024
One of Indigo&’s Most Anticipated Canadian Books • One of the CBC&’s Canadian Fiction Books to Read in Fall 2024…
Women Talking meets Study for Obedience in this stunning depiction of fresh grief by Fawn Parker, the Scotiabank Giller Prize–longlisted author of What We Both Know.Shortly after her mother&’s death, Fawn arrives at the farmhouse. While there, she will stay in her mother&’s bedroom in the house that is also occupied by four other women who live by an unusual set of beliefs.Wrestling with longstanding compulsive and harmful behaviours, as well as severe self-doubt, Fawn is confronted with the reality of her mother&’s death. It is her responsibility to catalogue the furniture and possessions in the room, then sell or dispose of them. Instead, Fawn becomes fixated on archiving her mother&’s writing and documents, searching for signs, and drawing tenuous connections to help her understand more about the enigmatic woman in the pages.I am surrounded by mocking evidence of her inhabitancy of this room. Quickly, it is expiring. Today she was alive. When the day runs out that will no longer be true. Tomorrow I will be able to say that yesterday she was alive, at least. The next day, nothing. She will just be dead. The fact seems to be at its smallest now, growing with time. For now she is many things, and there are many places left to find her.In Hi, It&’s Me, Fawn Parker is unafraid to explore the bewildering relationship between the living and the dead. Strikingly original, provocative, and engrossing Hi, It&’s Me takes us into the furthest corners of grief, invoking the physicality and painful embodiment of terminal illness with astonishing precision and emotional force. This mesmerizing, devastating novel asks: Why must it be this way?By Heather Smith. 2024
A new, heartwarming middle-grade story from the critically acclaimed author Heather Smith featuring Tig, a young girl struggling to find…
peace within herself and in her new family. For fans of Rebecca Stead, Wendy Mass and Lynda Mullaly Hunt.After months of living without electricity or parents, Tig and Peter are forced to move in with their Uncle Scott and his partner, Manny. The transition from down-and-out to picture-perfect isn't easy, especially in pristine Wensleydale with the idyllic couple and their beautiful home.Tig, with Peter's support, decides to make their new life messy, starting with daily arguments and her plans to become a competitive cheese racer. She'll run circles around her new guardians, outrun a wheel of cheese, and leave the past buried in her dust. But things don't always go as planned, and Tig must decide what to truly leave behind in order to move forward.By Deborah Ellis. 2024
What can you do when the adult world lets you down? Suspended from school and prone to rages, twelve-year-old Kate…
finds her own way to get on with her life, despite the messed-up adults around her. Her gran, for one, is stubborn and aloof — not unlike Kate herself, who has no friends, and who’s been expelled for “behavioral issues,” like the meltdowns she has had ever since her mom dumped her with her grandmother three years ago. Kate dreams that one day her mother will return for her. When that happens, they’ll need money, so Kate sets out to make some. Gran nixes her idea to sell psychiatric advice like Lucy in Peanuts (“You’re not a psychiatrist. You’ll get sued.”), so Kate decides to open a philosophy booth to provide answers to life’s big and small questions. She soon learns that adults have plenty of problems and secrets of their own, including Gran. When she finds that her grandmother has been lying to her about her mother, the two have a huge fight, and Gran says she can’t wait for Kate to finish high school so she’ll be rid of her at last. Kate decides to take matters into her own hands and discovers that to get what she wants, she may have to reach out to some unexpected people, and find a way to lay down her own anger. Key Text Features quotations dialogue literary references signs Correlates to the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.6.2 Determine a theme or central idea of a text and how it is conveyed through particular details; provide a summary of the text distinct from personal opinions or judgments. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.6.5 Analyze how a particular sentence, chapter, scene, or stanza fits into the overall structure of a text and contributes to the development of the theme, setting, or plot.By Tara Beagan. 2025
“The map of the land is in our blood.”A woman trawls the bottom of a riverbed with a makeshift plough,…
hoping to dislodge something—anything. The world has drastically changed: rivers run dry, rampant bushfires leave little left to burn. Still she persists searching for the stories of her loved ones, maybe even her own. She is not alone—an ancestor watches nearby. This desolate landscape is about to unearth its long-held secrets.Inspired by the grassroots organization Drag the Red, which searches for evidence of missing Indigenous and settler women, girls, 2 Spirit, and people of all genders in the Red River of Treaty One Territory, this ethereal and engrossing drama is a profound offering to those who persevere in spite of sorrow. Told in Anishinaabemowin, English, and French, Tara Beagan’s prophetic play draws a direct connection between the treatment of Indigenous peoples and the abuse inflicted on the land. Fluid and majestic like the river itself, Rise, Red River is an invocation, a revelation, and a call to action.By Null Claire Cameron. 2025
In this debut memoir from the bestselling author of The Bear and The Last Neanderthal, Claire Cameron confronts the rare…
genetic mutation that gave her cancer by investigating an equally rare and terrifying event—a predatory bear attack.When Claire Cameron was nine years old, her father, a professor of Old English, told her he was dying. In the years after he was gone, she found a way to overcome her grief among the rivers and lakes of Algonquin Park, a vast Canadian wilderness area. Around that same time, in 1991, a couple was killed by a black bear in a rare predatory attack in the park. Claire was shocked and, never fully sure of what happened, the attack haunted her. Now older, with children of her own, Cameron was diagnosed with the same kind of deadly skin cancer as her father. Caught in a second wave of grief, she was told by her doctor, &“the ideal exposure to UV light is none.&” No longer able to venture into the wilderness as she once had, with long scars on her back, she became obsessed with the bear attack in Algonquin Park again. How could terror rip through such a beautiful place? Could she separate truth from fiction? She headed north to investigate. Seamlessly weaving together nature writing with true crime investigation in this unflinching account of recovery, How to Survive a Bear Attack is at once an intimate portrait of an extraordinary animal, a bracing chronicle of pain, obsession, and love, and a profoundly moving exploration of how we can understand and survive the wildness that lives inside us.By Vinh Nguyen. 2025
An inventive memoir about one family’s escape from Vietnam and the father’s mysterious disappearance along the way. This book is…
an intricate exploration of a searching mind, shedding light on the psyche of a grieving son, as he chases certainty and seeks elusive resolution.With the Fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, the U.S. war in Vietnam ended, but the refugee crisis was only beginning. Among the millions of people who fled Vietnam by boat was Vinh Nguyen, along with his mother and siblings, and his father, who left separately and then mysteriously vanished.Decades later, Nguyen goes looking for answers. What he discovers is a sea of questions drifting above sunken truths. To find his father—and anchor himself in the present—Nguyen must piece together the debris of history with family stories that have been scattered across generations and continents, kept for years in broken hearts and guarded silences.As the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War approaches, The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse takes readers on a poignant tour of disappeared refugee camps, abandoned family homes, and reimagined lives.Part fractured reminiscence, part invented history, and part fictional fabulation, Nguyen’s story is about learning to live with what’s already lost and the memories of what might have been.By Null Karen Solie. 2025
The poems in Wellwater, Karen Solie’s sixth collection, explore the intersection of cultural, economic, and personal ideas of “value,” addressing…
housing, economic and environmental crisis, and aging and its incumbent losses. In an era of accelerating inequality, places many of us thought of as home have become unaffordable. In “Basement Suite,” the faux-utopian economy of Airbnb suggests people with property “share” it with us and, presumably, we should be grateful. In “Parables of the Rat” the speaker feels affinity with scavengers while also wanting the rats gone. Having grown up in Saskatchewan on a small family farm, Solie sees the economic and environmental crises as inseparable. Climate change has made small farming increasingly untenable, allowing overbearing corporate control of food production. But hope, Solie argues, is as necessary to addressing the crises of our time as bearing witness, in poems that celebrate wonder and persistence in the non-human world. Tamarack forests in Newfoundland that grow inches over hundreds of years, the suddenly thriving pronghorn antelope, or a new, unidentified and ineradicable climbing vine, all hint at renewal, and a way to move forward.By Kenneth Oppel. 2025
From award-winning author Kenneth Oppel comes a startling, can't-wait-to-talk-about-it-with-someone novel that defies genre to create a teen survival thriller unlike…
any you've read before. For fans of Leave the World Behind, A.S. King, M.T. Anderson, and Margaret Atwood.Xavier Oaks doesn't particularly want to go to the cabin with his dad and his dad's pregnant new wife, Nia. But family obligations are family obligations, and it's only for a short time. So he leaves his mom, his brother, and his other friends behind for a week in the woods. Only . . . one morning he wakes up and the house isn't where it was before. It's like it's been lifted and placed . . . somewhere else.When Xavier, his dad, and Nia go explore, they find they are inside a dome, trapped. And there's no one else around . . . Until, three years later, another family arrives.Is there any escape? Is there a reason they are stuck where they are? Different people have different answers — and those different answers inexorably lead to tension, strife, and sacrifice.In this masterpiece, award-winning author Kenneth Oppel builds a heart-stopping story that feels very much of our moment, where our very human choices collectively lead to humanity's eventual fate.By Maria Reva. 2025
In the absurdist literary tradition of George Saunders and Percival Everett comes a brilliant debut novel by a writer who…
is "bang-on brilliant" (Miriam Toews), about a biologist in Ukraine battling to save the country&’s snail species from the brink of extinction. One of Literary Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2025 • One of 49th Shelf's Most Anticipated 2025 Spring FictionUkraine, 2022. Yeva is a loner and a maverick scientist who lives out of her mobile lab. She scours the country&’s forests and valleys, trying and failing to breed rare snails, while her relatives urge her to settle down and finally start a family of her own. What they don't know: Yeva already dates plenty of men—not for love, but to fund her work—entertaining Westerners who come to Ukraine on guided romance tours believing they'll find docile brides untainted by feminism and modernity. Nastia and her sister, Solomiya, are also entangled in the booming marriage industry, posing as a hopeful bride and her translator while secretly searching for their missing mother, who vanished after years of fierce activism against the romance tours. Together they embark on the journey of a lifetime across hundreds of miles: three angry women, a truckful of kidnapped bachelors, and Lefty, a last-of-his-kind snail with one final shot at perpetuating his species. But their plans come to a screeching halt when Russia invades. In a stunningly ambitious and achingly raw metafictional spiral, Endling brilliantly balances horror and comedy, drawing on Reva's own experiences as a Ukrainian expat tracking her family's delicate dance of survival behind enemy lines. As fiction and reality collide on the page, Reva probes the hard truths of war: What stories must we tell ourselves to survive? To carry on with the routines of life under military occupation? And for those of us watching from overseas: Can our sense of normalcy and security ever be restored, or have they always been a fragile illusion? Endling is a tour de force from an author who weaves a story of love, loss, humor, and hope that only she can tell.