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Showing 1 - 19 of 19 items
By Heather O’neill. 2012
"There are some people who know when they are in love, and there are some people who don't. Jules was…
the type of person who know when he was in love. Manon was the type of person who did not." Heather O'Neill revisits her award-winning novel Lullabies for Little Criminals with a trip back in time to Val des Loups, the town Jules was born in, and where he met Baby's mother, Manon. This story first appeared in the July/August 2012 issue of The Walrus magazine. Lullabies for Little Criminals was the winner of CBC Canada Reads 2007, the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction 2007, and shortlisted for multiple prizes, including the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Governer General's Award.By Margaret Atwood. 2012
'"Time isn't the same in dreams," says Charis, who likes reading about what's going on in her head when she…
isn't awake, though sometimes, thinks Roz, it's hard to tell the difference. "In dreams, nobody's dead, really. That's what the man who...he says, in dreams the time is always Now."' Long ago, when they were all a lot younger, Zenia stole a man from each of them. Then she died. Now she's come back. Or has she? There's a lot more than one kind of ghost. Margaret Atwood revisits her classic characters from The Robber Bride. This story first appeared in the July/August 2012 issue of The Walrus magazine.By Cherie Dimaline. 2019
A #1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLEROne of the most anticipated books of the summer for Time, Harper's Bazaar, Bustle and Publishers Weekly'Deftly…
written, gripping and informative. Empire of Wild is a rip-roaring read!' Margaret Atwood'Empire of Wild is doing everything I love in a contemporary novel and more. It is tough, funny, beautiful, honest and propulsive' Tommy Orange, author of There There 'Dimaline turns an old story into something newly haunting and resonant' New York Times'Close, tight, stark, beautiful - rich where richness is warranted, but spare where want and sorrow have sharpened every word. Dimaline has crafted something both current and timeless' NPR'Revelatory... Gritty and engaging, this story of a woman and her missing husband is one of candor, wit and tradition'Ms. Magazine Broken-hearted Joan has been searching for her husband, Victor, for almost a year - ever since he went missing on the night they had their first serious argument. One hung-over morning in a Walmart parking lot in a little town near Georgian Bay, she is drawn to a revival tent where the local Métis have been flocking to hear a charismatic preacher. By the time she staggers into the tent the service is over, but as she is about to leave, she hears an unmistakable voice.She turns, and there is Victor. Only he insists he is not Victor, but the Reverend Eugene Wolff, on a mission to bring his people to Jesus.With only two allies - her Johnny-Cash-loving, 12-year-old nephew Zeus, and Ajean, a foul-mouthed euchre shark with deep knowledge of the old Métis ways - Joan sets out to remind the Reverend Wolff of who he really is. If he really is Victor, his life and the life of everyone she loves, depends upon her success.Inspired by traditional Métis legends, Cherie Dimaline has created a propulsive, stunning and sensuous novel.By Elizabeth Hay. 2015
Starting with something as simple as a boy who wants a dog, His Whole Life takes us into a richly…
intimate world where everything that matters to him is at risk: family, nature, home.At the outset ten-year-old Jim and his Canadian mother and American father are on a journey from New York City to a lake in eastern Ontario during the last hot days of August. What unfolds is a completely enveloping story that spans a few pivotal years of his youth. Moving from city to country, summer to winter, wellbeing to illness, the novel charts the deepening bond between mother and son even as the family comes apart.Set in the mid-1990s, when Quebec is on the verge of leaving Canada, this captivating novel is an unconventional coming of age story as only Elizabeth Hay could tell it. It draws readers in with its warmth, wisdom, its vivid sense of place, its searching honesty, and nuanced portrait of the lives of one family and those closest to it. Hay explores the mystery of how members of a family can hurt each other so deeply, and remember those hurts in such detail, yet find openings that shock them with love and forgiveness. This is vintage Elizabeth Hay at the height of her powers.By Elizabeth Hay. 2011
In a small prairie school in 1929, Connie Flood helps a backward student, Michael Graves, learn how to read. Observing…
them and darkening their lives is the principal, Parley Burns, whose strange behaviour culminates in an attack so disturbing its repercussions continue to the present day. Connie's niece, Anne, tells the story. Impelled by curiosity about her dynamic, adventurous aunt and her more conventional mother, she revisits Connie's past and her mother's broken childhood. In the process she unravels the enigma of Parley Burns and the mysterious, and unrelated, deaths of two young girls.By Elizabeth Hay. 2015
Starting with something as simple as a boy who wants a dog, His Whole Life takes us into a richly…
intimate world where everything that matters to him is at risk: family, nature, home.At the outset ten-year-old Jim and his Canadian mother and American father are on a journey from New York City to a lake in eastern Ontario during the last hot days of August. What unfolds is a completely enveloping story that spans a few pivotal years of his youth. Moving from city to country, summer to winter, wellbeing to illness, the novel charts the deepening bond between mother and son even as the family comes apart.Set in the mid-1990s, when Quebec is on the verge of leaving Canada, this captivating novel is an unconventional coming of age story as only Elizabeth Hay could tell it. It draws readers in with its warmth, wisdom, its vivid sense of place, its searching honesty, and nuanced portrait of the lives of one family and those closest to it. Hay explores the mystery of how members of a family can hurt each other so deeply, and remember those hurts in such detail, yet find openings that shock them with love and forgiveness. This is vintage Elizabeth Hay at the height of her powers.By Elizabeth Hay. 2011
In a small prairie school in 1929, Connie Flood helps a backward student, Michael Graves, learn how to read. Observing…
them and darkening their lives is the principal, Parley Burns, whose strange behaviour culminates in an attack so disturbing its repercussions continue to the present day. Connie's niece, Anne, tells the story. Impelled by curiosity about her dynamic, adventurous aunt and her more conventional mother, she revisits Connie's past and her mother's broken childhood. In the process she unravels the enigma of Parley Burns and the mysterious, and unrelated, deaths of two young girls.By Anita Majumdar, Maria Nguyen. 2016
Fish Eyes is the story of Meena, a classically trained Indian dancer who, despite being obsessed with Bollywood movies and…
her dance career, just wants to be like the rest of her high-school friends. When she develops a massive crush on Buddy, the popular boy at school, Meena contemplates turning down an incredible opportunity to pursue him, even if he barely notices her.Boys With Cars follows Naz, also a classically trained Indian dancer, who dreams of getting out of small town Port Moody to attend the University of British Columbia. But when Buddy causes a stir over Naz at school, Naz’s university plans begin to crumble quickly.Let Me Borrow That Top centres on Candice, a girl who appropriates Meena’s Indian dance skills and bullies Naz after a nasty rumour spreads through the halls of their high school. But like her two enemies, Candice shares a passion for Indian dancing, and has just been accepted to the Conventry School of Bhangra. Will she leave behind the comforts of home to pursue her dreams?By Robert W. Service, Michael Gnarowski. 2011
The writing of Robert W. Service is mostly known through his poems and ballads. Immortalized by his two iconic ballads,…
"The Cremation of Sam McGee" and "The Shooting of Dan McGrew," he has entered the world’s imagination as the Bard of the Yukon. But Service was much more than a chronicler of the Great North.A traveller and adventurer who tried his hand at many occupations, Service left a fascinating set of impressions: the successful literary life in the course of which he produced everything from poems and ballads to fictional romance to thrillers and how to stave off the dreary process of aging.Robert W. Service is a fresh selection of the most interesting and significant works of the author with a biographical introduction and a select bibliography of additional readings.By Tamara Faith Berger. 2012
Myra, naive and curious, is on a family vacation to the southernmost tip of Florida - a mangy Key West…
full of Spring Breakers. Here, suffering through the embarrassments of a family on the verge of splitting up, she meets Elijah, a charismatic Tanzanian musician who seduces her at the edge of the tourist zone. Myra longs to lose her virginity to Elijah, and is shocked to learn he lives with Gayl, a secretive and violent woman with a strange power over him. Myra and her family return to an unnamed, middle-class, grey Canadian city and she falls in with a pot-smoking, intellectual anarchist crowd. When Gayl and Elijah travel north and infiltrate Myra's life, she walks willingly into their world: Myra continues to experiment sexually with Elijah, while Gayl plays an integral part in the increasingly abject games. Maidenhead traverses the desperate, wild spaces of a teenage girl's self-consciousness. How does a girl feel scared? What is she scared of? And how does telling yourself not to be scared really work? As Myra enters worlds unfamiliar of sex, porn, race and class, she explores territories unknown in herself.By Andre Alexis. 2015
And so it begins: a bet between the gods Hermes and Apollo leads them to grant human consciousness and language…
to a group of dogs overnighting at a Toronto veterinary clinic. Suddenly capable of more complex thought, the pack is torn between those who resist the new ways of thinking, preferring the old 'dog' ways, and those who embrace the change. The gods watch from above as the dogs venture into their newly unfamiliar world, as they become divided among themselves, as each struggles with new thoughts and feelings. Wily Benjy moves from home to home, Prince becomes a poet, and Majnoun forges a relationship with a kind couple that stops even the Fates in their tracks. André Alexis's contemporary take on the apologue offers an utterly compelling and affecting look at the beauty and perils of human consciousness. By turns meditative and devastating, charming and strange, Fifteen Dogs shows you can teach an old genre new tricks.By Anita Majumdar, Maria Nguyen. 2016
Fish Eyes is the story of Meena, a classically trained Indian dancer who, despite being obsessed with Bollywood movies and…
her dance career, just wants to be like the rest of her high-school friends. When she develops a massive crush on Buddy, the popular boy at school, Meena contemplates turning down an incredible opportunity to pursue him, even if he barely notices her.Boys With Cars follows Naz, also a classically trained Indian dancer, who dreams of getting out of small town Port Moody to attend the University of British Columbia. But when Buddy causes a stir over Naz at school, Naz’s university plans begin to crumble quickly.Let Me Borrow That Top centres on Candice, a girl who appropriates Meena’s Indian dance skills and bullies Naz after a nasty rumour spreads through the halls of their high school. But like her two enemies, Candice shares a passion for Indian dancing, and has just been accepted to the Conventry School of Bhangra. Will she leave behind the comforts of home to pursue her dreams?By Sara Jeanette Duncan, Douglas Lochhead. 1973
After experiencing life in London, the narrator and her brother discover that they are Canadians, not colonials. Their encounters with…
Englishmen and Americans demonstrate that there are three distinct countries, each with a character of its own, but sharing common interests. This is an early novel on the eternal theme of identity.By Sarah Sheard. 1985
In Sarah Sheard's celebrated novel Almost Japanese, a young girl's obsession with a famous Japanese musician blossoms into personal transformation.…
In spare, lyrical prose, Sheard documents Emma's discovery of her new next door neighbour, a dazzling Japanese symphony conductor. Things Japanese soon begin to transform Emma's world. Several years later, she must journey to Japan on a private pilgrimage to connect to the source of her obsession.By Stuart Ross. 2017
A fragmented, surrealist novel of loss, nostalgia, and childhood secrets from the award-winning poet and author of A Sparrow Came…
Down Resplendent. A wonderful dream and a horrific nightmare, a fuzzy consciousness of pain and family, Pockets is a novel of fragments—both literally and figuratively. In a series of prose-poem chapters, the nameless narrator, in a largely Jewish 1960s suburb in the northern reaches of Toronto, repeatedly enters the world, as if for the first time. His landscape is one of bicycles with banana seats, Red Skelton, trilobite fossils, and overwhelming loss. Among shadows that both comfort and threaten, a brother who drifts through the sky, he finds his narrative full of pockets of emptiness he can&’t help but try to fill. A heartbreakingly personal and brilliantly evocative work, Pockets redefines the novel, delivering infinite scope in something diminutive and pocket-sized. It is a work to be read and reread for its poetic beauty and hidden gems of revelation.By Hugh MacLennan. 2009
George and Catherine Stewart share not only the burden of Catherine's heart disease, which could cause her death at any…
time, but the memory of Jerome Martell, her first husband and George's closest friend. Martel, a brilliant doctor passionately concerned with social justice, is presumed to have died in a Nazi prison camp. His sudden return to Montreal precipitates the central crisis of the novel. Hugh MacLennan takes the reader into the lives of his three characters and back into the world of Montreal in the thirties, when politics could send an idealist across the world to Spain, France, Auschwitz, Russia, and China before his return home.By Susanna Moodie, Michael A. Peterman. 2014
Flora Lyndsay is Susanna Moodie's prequel to Roughing it in the Bush and Life in the Clearings. It completes her…
trilogy on her emigration from Suffolk to Upper Canada that began in 1832. Though Moodie chose to fictionalize herself in the context of this novel, this work remains a close personalized record of her family's experiences in planning their emigration and crossing the Atlantic. Although surprisingly little critical attention has been paid to it, this novel offers its readers the opportunity to appreciate Moodie's style, her sense of form and her distinctive approach to writing female autobiography. This edition, complete with a wide corpus of endnotes, an extensive list of emendations and a critical introduction, should help address this absence and give readers a closer look at the iconic phenomenon that is Susanna Moodie.Flora Lyndsay is Susanna Moodie’s prequel to Roughing it in the Bush and Life in the Clearings. Though Moodie fictionalizes…
herself in the context of this novel, Flora Lyndsay remains a close personalized record of her family’s experiences in planning their emigration and crossing the Atlantic. Despite the limited critical attention it receives, Flora Lyndsay reveals Moodie’s style, her sense of form, and her distinctive approach to writing female autobiography. This edition, complete with a wide corpus of endnotes, an extensive list of emendations, and a critical introduction, helps address this oversight and gives a closer look at the iconic phenomenon that is Susanna Moodie.By Richard Rohmer. 2003
This volume combines three of Richard Rohmer's best-selling novels in one book. Ultimatum, Exxoneration, and Periscope Red are all fast-paced,…
incisive novels in which Rohmer makes fiction read like fact. They are chilling visions of a world of military conflict, legal and political entanglements, and Canada's role in domestic and international spheres. The issues inside are just as important to Canada today as they were when the books were written. In all of these works, Rohmer demonstrates his insider's knowledge of the energy industry and the military, and his master storyteller's ability to bring it alive.