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Showing 1 - 20 of 32 items
By Yves Beauchemin. 2005
Peinture sociale, fresque historique contemporaine et roman aux innombrables rebondissements. Dans ce deuxième volet, on retrouve Charles au début de…
sa vie adulte. Refusant de poursuivre des études collégiales, celui-ci part à la conquête de Montréal où il veut s'établir comme romancier. D'ici à ce que le milieu de l'édition lui manifeste de l'intérêt, il est contraint d'exercer des métiers les plus saugrenus pour survivreBy Pierre Caron. 2006
Après Thérèse et Marie, le dernier volume de La naissance d'une nation vient clore plus d'un siècle d'existence de la…
Nouvelle-France. Emilienne raconte la partie de l'histoire du Québec qui assurera sa pérennité française : l'avènement d'un peuple, aujourd'hui encore distinct, et que l'on dit québécois. -- 4e de couvBy Sylvain Meunier. 2003
"À ma nouvelle école, la première de classe s'appelait Anne-Marie Charlebois. Avec ses petits numéros d'élève parfaite, elle avait enlevé…
haut la main la place de chouchou. En un mot, cette fille m'agaçait. Anne-Marie Charlebois n'avait pas de faiblesses et, lors de la remise des bulletins, Mlle Larose, notre professeur, n'eut d'autre choix que de la citer en exemple. La jeune fille retourna à son pupitre les joues rougissantes et les yeux modestement baissés, avec quasiment une auréole au-dessus de la tête. Et ce fut à ce moment précis que, moi, j'acquis à tout jamais la conviction qu'il n'existait pas de plus joli visage en ce monde..." -- 4e de couvBy Sylvie Gobeil. 2007
"Un après-midi de l'été 1665, au port de La Rochelle, Jeanne attend le signal de l'embarquement. Discrètement, elle surveille ses…
quatre filles qui jouent près du navire. Jean Gobeil, son mari, déborde d'enthousiasme à l'idée du départ, une décision qu'il a prise et à laquelle Jeanne a consenti par amour. Tout quitter pour le pays du non-retour l'effraie. "Jean ne vous entraînerait pas dans une aventure insensée. Fais-lui confiance", lui a conseillé sa mère. Malgré la foi en son homme, rien n'a préparé la jeune femme de 24 ans à ces neuf semaines en mer avant d'atteindre la ville de Québec. Jeanne affronte le premier hiver en Nouvelle-France avec un courage teinté de nostalgie. La France lui manque. Partout, elle n'aperçoit que de la neige et de la forêt. "Comment résister?", se demande-t-elle. Jean la rassure. Ensemble, ils défrichent et cultivent leur lopin de terre à l'île d'Orléans. Deux autres filles et deux garçons viennent compléter la famille. Couple d'exception dans ce Québec du XVIIe siècle où mariage ne rime pas nécessairement avec amour, Jeanne confie à l'une de ses filles : "Jamais je n'ai laissé le travail prendre le dessus sur l'amour". Une vie chargée d'émotions que celle de Jeanne, la Poitevine! Une vie où l'amour qui l'unit à Jean triomphera. même au-delà de la mort." -- 4e de couvBy David Helwig. 2006
A lovely, meditative novel, a story about memory, and about how what once was continues to affect what is and…
what will be. It is the story of a place -- a hotel on the shores of Prince Edward Island, of the family that used to own it, and the people who have been its caretakers.By Claire Tacon. 2011
Ellie Lucan's about as far as she can get from the screwed-up teenager she used to be. She's got a…
doctorate, her husband's a prominent academic, and their children are excelling at a Montessori.When she loses her teaching job, however, she packs up her sons to spend the summer in her hometown. She finds her mother suffering from dementia and the house in squalor, and she is forced to confront small town prejudice towards her biracial sons.As Ellie is drawn back into the community, the strain on her marriage intensifies and she is forced to decide where her loyalties lie.Clare Tacon has an MFA in writing from the University of British Columbia and is a past editor of Prism Magazine. In the Field is her first novel.By Douglas Coupland. 2016
Bit Rot, a new collection from Douglas Coupland that explores the different ways 20th-century notions of the future are being…
shredded, is a gem of the digital age. Reading Bit Rot feels a lot like bingeing on Netflix... you can't stop with just one."Bit rot" is a term used in digital archiving to describe the way digital files can spontaneously and quickly decompose. As Coupland writes, "Bit rot also describes the way my brain has been feeling since 2000, as I shed older and weaker neurons and connections and enhance new and unexpected ones." Bit Rot the book explores the ways humanity tries to make sense of our shifting consciousness. Coupland, just like the Internet, mixes forms to achieve his ends. Short fiction is interspersed with essays on all aspects of modern life. The result is addictively satisfying for Coupland's legion of fans hungry for his observations about our world. For almost three decades, his unique pattern recognition has powered his fiction, and his phrase-making. Every page of Bit Rot is full of wit, surprise and delight.From the Hardcover edition.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 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 Alistair Macleod. 2004
The story is simple, seen through the eyes of an 11-year-old boy. As an adult he remembers the way things…
were back home on the farm on the west coast of Cape Breton. The time was the 1940s, but the hens and the cows and the pigs and the sheep and the horse made it seem ancient. The family of six children excitedly waits for Christmas and two-year-old Kenneth, who liked Halloween a lot, asks, “Who are you going to dress up as at Christmas? I think I’ll be a snowman.” They wait especially for their oldest brother, Neil, working on “the Lake boats” in Ontario, who sends intriguing packages of “clothes” back for Christmas. On Christmas Eve he arrives, to the delight of his young siblings, and shoes the horse before taking them by sleigh through the woods to the nearby church. The adults, including the narrator for the first time, sit up late to play the gift-wrapping role of Santa Claus. The story is simple, short and sweet, but with a foretaste of sorrow. Not a word is out of place. Matching and enhancingthe text are black and white illustrations by Peter Rankin, making this book a perfect little gift. For readers from nine to ninety-nine, our classic Christmas story by one of our greatest writers.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 Jane Urquhart. 1993
A stunning, evocative novel set in Ireland and Canada, Away traces a family's complex and layered past. The narrative unfolds…
with shimmering clarity, and takes us from the harsh northern Irish coast in the 1840s to the quarantine stations at Grosse Isle and the barely hospitable land of the Canadian Shield; from the flourishing town of Port Hope to the flooded streets of Montreal; from Ottawa at the time of Confederation to a large-windowed house at the edge of a Great Lake during the present day. Graceful and moving, Away unites the personal and the political as it explores the most private, often darkest corners of our emotions where the things that root us to ourselves endure. Powerful, intricate, lyrical, Away is an unforgettable novel.By Jane Urquhart. 2001
Set in the first half of the twentieth century, but reaching back to Bavaria in the late nineteenth century, The…
Stone Carvers weaves together the story of ordinary lives marked by obsession and transformed by art. At the centre of a large cast of characters is Klara Becker, the granddaughter of a master carver, a seamstress haunted by a love affair cut short by the First World War, and by the frequent disappearances of her brother Tilman, afflicted since childhood with wanderlust. From Ontario, they are swept into a colossal venture in Europe years later, as Toronto sculptor Walter Allward's ambitious plans begin to take shape for a war memorial at Vimy, France. Spanning three decades, and moving from a German-settled village in Ontario to Europe after the Great War, The Stone Carvers follows the paths of immigrants, labourers, and dreamers. Vivid, dark, redemptive, this is novel of great beauty and power.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 Jane Urquhart. 1990
Two worlds are intertwined in this hauntingly beautiful story as it moves from Toronto to the English moors and to…
Venice, Italy. The time frame shifts between present and past, linking the lives of a young Brontë scholar (a woman in the throes of a troubled love affair), a turn-of-the-century female balloonist, and an elusive explorer with the ghost - or the memory - of Emily Brontë. Urquhart reveals something about the act of artistic creation, the ways in which stories enter our lives, and about the cyclical nature of love throughout time. This is a novel of darkness and light, of intense weather and inner calm.By Beth Follett. 2001
Tell It Slant is a bold, luscious first novel by Beth Follett, publisher of one of Canada's most exciting and…
respected small presses, Pedlar Press. The novel tells - slantedly, of course - the story of Nora Flood, a young woman who lives between two sets of voices: those of her own fragmented desires and the internalized voices of western culture, which have always denigrated or refused her deepest desires. She struggles with these contradictory forces, overwhelmed, at times mute, seeking the roots of her psychosexual malaise, searching for the possibility of her own true voice, caught in an obsession that drags her away from the exploration of her own appetites and hungers into its sterile heart. But through the interventions of Djuna Barnes, creator of the literary Nora Flood of Barnes' novel Nightwood, this Nora begins to slip between the cracks and fissures of obsession to shape a life of her own. With language that is lush and startling and a shape that is disjointed and elliptical, Tell It Slant is a brave and beautiful book.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 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.