Fiction

Britt Holmström’s stories contain all-too-human portraits meticulously rendered but with enough mischief and humour to keep the reader rapidly turning the pages. With an acutely clear eye she describes fateful events through narrators that are utterly authentic, and intimate. Her style is, as ever, incredibly lucid, her narrative powers effortless with a generous warmth of vision, her tone oscillating between gentle nihilism and practical optimism. Each tale bristles with a very human fierceness.

At the heart of each story is her remarkable ability to reveal painful truths visible only when we turn a critical eye upon ourselves. These are stories of hard-fought revelation where picaresque meets romance, tales of mismatched couples, doomed encounters, and “If only…” moments in Canada and abroad

These urban, commuter-friendly stories capture quirky events in satisfying ways. Their dark undertones and sharp-witted ironies employ familiar settings such as apartments, lofts, studios and city streets , but use unusual and unexpected urban moments as backdrops to outré characters and their given idiosyncrasies.

Some of Hayes’ characters are on the social fringe, such as the mentally challenged narrator of the title story who finds his way through urban life with the aid of his seventy-year-old neighbour and the possibilities inherent in a game of chess. Some obsess privately, such as the protagonist in “The Runner” who becomes neurotically repulsed by the hair follicles on his girlfriend’s upper lip, while others, like the proven street ball “cager” of the story “In the Low Post” stews over his eroding prestige and control on the inner-city basketball court.

Edgy, smart and unpredictable, Derek Hayes; stories bend linear story-telling, and shift the narrative voices with such an energetic frequency that readers will want to go back again just to them just to see how he does it.

Ben Robe is a retired political science professor who has returned to his reserve at Moccasin Lake to live out his life in relative peace and solitude. But the complications of a sudden and intense US annexation of Canada change his plans. Cued into a Canadian resistance movement by his former student and lover, Monica, Ben soon learns that the layers of political and military activity go far beyond his careful social conscience in this dystopian world.

Radical young women like Monica, Betsy Chance, and Joan Lightning post one face of the resistance, while farmers like Abe Friesen, and Mennonite Mary Wiens post another. Paralleled with characters like these are the reserve’s citizens who remain sheltered from the immediate troubles down south, but must accept that they cannot remain passive forever.

The Cast Stone’s themes are not emphatic; rather they emerge slowly from within the narratives as Ben encounters the players in the Canadian resistance and must balance his call to civil action with the call to defend Canada amid the discovery of a son he never knew he had, his friendship with his neighbours, and the community elders with their long-standing knowledge of Treaties, history, and racial oppression conflict. The novel accents Ben’s struggles with his own desire for independence, love, and forgiveness, but at its core it remains a telling and passionate portrait of First Nations community life, the value and safety of family, and the need for friendship. It achieves an understanding of what an individual’s responsibilities are when civil liberty, order and stability are jeopardized by an occupying power, but shows that solitary acts of defiance that champion family trust and the individual’s capacity to love are their own agents of resistance.

This vibrant collection of short fictions explores how families work, how they are torn apart, and, in spite of differences and struggles, brought back together. Darcie Friesen Hossack’s stories in Mennonites Don’t Dance offer an honest, detailed look into the experiences of children—both young and adult — and their parents and grandparents, exploring generational ties, sins, penance and redemption.

Taking place primarily on the Canadian prairies, the families in these stories are confronted by the conflict between tradition and change — one story sees a daughter-in-law’s urban ideals push and pull against a mother’s simple, rural ways, in another, a daughter raised in the Mennonite tradition tries to break free from her upbringing to escape to the city in search of a better life. Children learn the rules of farm life, and parents learn that their decisions, in spite of all good intentions, can carry dire consequences.

Hossack’s talent, honed through education and experience, is showcased in this polished collection, and is reflected in the relatable, realistic characters and situations she creates. The voices in the stories speak about how we measure ourselves in the absence of family, and how the most interesting families are always flawed in some way.

Through a protracted series of vignettes, Devin Krukoff transforms Flyways into an interconnected, psychologically intense novel. Exploring the concept of "six degrees of separation", the work dramatizes people’s unseen connections to others while they encounter their own problems awaiting an impending snowstorm.

Each vignette opens with a sometimes poetic, sometimes scientific description of a specific bird carefully chosen to help establish details of the characters’ situations, providing a “bird’s eye view” of the human world.

With scenarios ranging from teenage pregnancy and skydiving psychotherapy, to S&M lust, Catholicism, and goose hunting, Flyways delves into the intricacies and implications of the Human Web, and proves that, whether we know it or not, we are all linked, and the results of our actions reach far beyond our limited perception, often impact upon one another's lives.

Book Trailer

A man wakes up in a hospital with one word in his head: Sapporo. He dimly recalls this as the place where he was raised, and it becomes his name and identity. Like an immigrant without language or memory he relies on his young son as guide and interpreter, but soon drifts away into what some might see as madness.

In Sapporo’s floating world, he is also Prospero, summoning the ancestors and channeling the lost dreams that gave way to the modern industrial era.

His son, meanwhile, has escaped to the city’s underworld. His laconic account of the anarchic, callous, tender tribe of street kids is beyond the scope of any realist fiction, yet compelling as a documentary and fiercely poetic.

Parallel to these worlds, and destined to reconnect them, is a young woman’s journey through what is indeed the Third World – as surreal in its poverty and shifting realities as anything in Sapporo’s visions or his son’s predations.

The Beautiful Children is a triumph of language and structure; it is also a haunting, and haunted, elegy upon innocence.

“Not only does Kenyon forge imaginative narrative paths, but also he has a compelling gift for language on a sentence level . . . Anyone who respects attempts to make fiction will be rewarded by reading Kenyon’s work.” — Candace Fertile, Malahat Review

• Winner of the 2010 ReLit Award for Fiction

The Path to Ardroe is an exploration of friendship and its limits, life changes, and the challenges and aspirations of writers. Peter Chisholm, a writer wrestling with his craft, finds himself at forty-two without direction, and so it seems an eerie coincidence to him that unplanned events have conspired to place him in Lochinver, Scotland, developing his next novel, seeking out his former lover, and trying to find a solution to his restlessness and self-imposed fakery. But he has no idea of the fearful ghosts he will conjure. In various states of introspection Peter’s friends are also coming to terms with their own life-changing moments. For emerging writer Melissa Picard, on a six-month trip to Strasbourg, France, it will be her struggle with the past criticisms of her writing. Through a budding friendship with a celebrated writer and a transformative affair with an artist, she begins to understand that her challenges are not unique and that to write with a simple purity, the way Derain painted, she must finally listen to her own voice.

Another friend, Rick Connelly, at a creative crossroads of self and meaning is struggling with the control of his writing voice and intently floundering in his need to show what his father meant to him. He seeks the solitude of nature to reshape his instincts about himself and the life path he has chosen.

Finally there is Tania, who lost her mother too young and whose immigrant roots shape her in ways she is only beginning to understand. Faced with her own immanent death from pancreatic cancer, she is stripping her life bare of all pretense, while taking stock of the people and events who have made her who she really is. But it will be Peter Chisholm at the novel’s end, who in a profound epiphany, will discover the fulcrum that balances private compromises with the artistic quandaries of the literary life, and it will not be the revelation he assumed.

Philip Skyler learned early in his life that his face would get him into trouble and there was nothing he could do about it. Born with an extreme facial deformity, he became the object of attention. Though medical scientists named his condition Van der Woude syndrome, his classmates, especially the bullies, just called him “Monkeyface”. Monkeyface Chronicles is his sweet story of revenge.

Philip’s aphorism-toting grandfather used to say, “Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect,” and Philip Skyler is about to embark on a life journey of payback that has everything to do with cause and effect. Philip’s journey ultimately takes him through the most unusual family circumstances, where no one was really who they seemed to be, whether it was his reclusive scientist father, or his Citizen Kane-like grandfather.

While riding his father’s motorcycle to Toronto to escape the dregs of Faireville, Philip has a life-changing experience that transforms him from the dupe he was as a kid into a conquering hero in his twenties. His unforgettable ride brings him to triumph over adversity and redeems him from the world of losers into which he was cast.

• Winner of the 2011 OLA Forest of Reading White Pine Award

Raising Orion tells the tale of an eccentric, timeless woman, Molly, a second-hand bookshop owner, and her childhood as the daughter of the last lighthouse keeper of Devil’s Island at the mouth of the Halifax Harbour. At its core, Raising Orion is a novel of discovery, and a chronicle of intense individualism where to believe you can set the stars in the sky will make it so.
Molly is an enigmatic person, powerful over her own destiny. She is at the centre of an eclectic, unlikely group of people — customers of  her bookstore that have become her friends — searching for meaning in their own lives through the books they find in her store. Their test begins when Molly is on the verge of being criminally charged for interfering with authorities in rescuing a young cancer patient. Her dedicated book-customer friends must help save her, which, given Molly’s eccentricities, philosophical outlooks, and strong independence, isn’t an easy task.

The Wolsenburg Clock chronicles the development of a complex machine, and the risks and devotion that went into its construction throughout the Medieval, Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Modern periods of history.

In a small Austrian city near the Italian border, a Canadian academic wants desperately to save a 600-year-old artifact while Second World War bombs terrorize the area. The artifact, a fourteenth century astronomical clock, has been constructed and restored by a series of gifted individuals dedicated to producing the finest timepiece of their age. From its creation in the newly consecrated cathedral in Wolsenburg, to its near-demise in a unruly fire, to it’s final incarnation as the most impressive clock ever built, the academic uncovers the secrets and infatuations of the clock’s remarkable engineers. This magical device — that kept time, charted celestial motion, and entertained parishioners with a show of automated figures — was not built without personal costs.

Creating an engaging fiction about an extraordinary contraption and its brilliant mechanics, Jay Ruzesky also sketches the battle between the Church and the scientists of the time who both desired to be at the forefront of social conscience, as time became understood and measured in new ways in Western Europe.

• Long-listed for the 2010 ReLit Award for Fiction

Reading Group Guide

Lori Hahnel’s stories fracture stereotypes of the sanctity of marriage, the values of good people, and the expected happy ending. Provocative, talkative, sardonic and glib, Hahnel’s characters strike friction between the sentimental values of bygone Hollywood flicks and the misgivings of lower class life in western Canada. In their attempts to stretch their skins over frames of idealism, they turn to bygone Hollywood films and popular icons. These are the stories of the everyday and commonplace, where superstars become leaping comparisons for personalities and appearances, and working in retail or having a motel romance is as good as it gets.

“These are intimate voices in Lori Hahnel’s stories. They draw us in with a sense of privacy and privilege. Yearning, wistful, and wise-cracking, they beg understanding, from the world and for themselves. Nothing Sacred satisfies like a late night visit with a close friend and a bottle of good wine.” — Betty Jane Hegerat, author of Running Toward Home

“Lori Hahnel’s stories unravel seductive lines of pretzel logic, revealing bright new planets of mischief and music and mystery. This collection is a sly balancing act of yearning and humour, night cool and power pop, regret and miscreant wit.” — Mark Anthony Jarman, author of My White Planet

“Nothing Sacred is a wonderful read, full of idiosyncratic people faced with tough choices. In these riveting stories, Lori Hahnel mixes economy with generosity. She writes sparely, yet at the same time, brings in an abundance of delicious, sometimes disturbing detail.” — Rona Altrows, author of A Run On Hose

This is a story of family, of death, and of the art of living. It is also the story of the ties that bind a mother to a daughter and the dynamics that govern their love. Shaped as a memoir, shared by Sarah Flett and her daughter Rhegan, the narrative begins with the death of Sarah's husband and builds in complexity with the untimely and sudden death of Rhegan.

Are life and death at their core intertwined? As Rhegan speaks from beyond the grave, her life is revealed in unexpected ways to her mother. And as Rhegan reconstructs her past and her memories of the last six months of her life, their impact and energy become one with her mother's own remembering. This unheralded reconnection forms the nexus of the novel. It becomes their shared memoir. Through it the reader is invited into the intricacies of grieving and the irreducible nature of mother-daughter love.

Sorbie's steady hand meshes the dual narrative perspectives using land and water imagery. Within this narrative frame, the balance that grieving and celebrating, and holding on and letting go require is carefully constructed. Rhegan's and Sarah's lives become meaningful because we share in their heartbreak and their joy. Their lives intertwine and together become the memoir of a good death.

 "When the dead speak we must listen. Anne Sorbie’s dead and eloquent narrator is full of wild humour, pain, rebellion, compassion, wisdom. And she tells a wickedly good story. How can we know heaven from hell?" — Robert Kroetsch

The woman is flying in small airplane and sees in the distance the great cumbrous mass of El Yunque, the flat-topped mesa that announces the historic town of Baracoa. She has likely heard the legend of the Honey River, where it is said that the person who bathes in its waters and gets married in Baracoa must stay there forever. She knows people in Baracoa. She is going to meet Onaldo, her Afro-Cuban lover, and she will become ‘Katrina’ to continue her private journals. In this series of linked fictions, unified by place and a cast of overlapping characters, Karina travels the length of El Caimán, the alligator which is Cuba.

The narratives that make up this book have their origins in Hale’s travel journal, but emerge as stories, arriving at that place just beyond creative non-fiction. Vivid and sensitive portraits are balanced with the dark undercurrents of Cuban life. Katrina witnesses how politics have re-shaped the culture and lives of the people she encounters, while she falls deeply in love with the true and hidden life of El Caimán.

Spanning three continents and the ten years leading up to the close of the nineteenth century, The Serpent’s Veil follows the personal journeys’ of Constance Stubbington and Ank Maguire who grapple with what haunts them: the impact of colonialism, the death of family members, and the intuitive gifts that shape them.

Constance, a bold woman who severs her father’s rigid ideas with a sharp tongue, is thrown from a horse and wakes in Guy’s Hospital in London, England. The hospital staff is tight-lipped about her father’s whereabouts and the medical implications of her accident. It is here that she meets Ank Maguire and the two discover that they share a connection with the spiritual world, an intuition that is both a gift and a curse.

Through a series of flashbacks, dreams, and up-to-the minute storytelling we travel from the bogs of Ireland, to the streets of Victoria, BC through the Raj lands of India, and to the grimy world of London’s Southwark district. The Serpent’s Veil is a spellbinding tale of action and mystery where people are born and die, mystical revelations dominate and consciousness is transformed, but above all, spirit lives.

Author's website

Charlie Muskrat, out of moose meat for the winter and committed to getting some, finds himself in Prince Albert with a 30/30 Winchester under the seat of his truck, Thunder, half a tank of gas, half a thermos of coffee, lots of Cheezies and a desire to drive south. Accompanied during the trip by phantom hitchhikers from history and myth — the Trickster, Wesakicak, Greek gods, writers, philosophers and politicians — Charlie motors along to the backdrop of Johnny Cash gospel songs and his own foggy memories of his purpose. Through Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Trenton, Sudbury, Ottawa and Toronto and all along the way are those moments of laughter that Johnson does so well — the US border guards who turn Charlie away on gun issues, the Indian Affairs people with their bags of money, the bar conversations on literature in Toronto.
Charlie Muskrat is socially insightful, politically incorrect, funny, and dangerous in his own naivety, and his road trip unfolds as an unforgettable journey in Canadian culture.

• Shortlisted for the 2008 Saskatchewan Book Award for Fiction and Best Book

My Sweet Curiosity tells the story of Natalya, a young medical student, too smart for her own good, who twists an already complicated genetic background rooted in the Romanov family into an impossible fantasy of reproductive technology which ultimately reveals its own strange truth. Talya falls in love with Dai Ling, a cello student of extraordinary talent, and daughter of Jia Song Xiang, doctor of traditional Chinese medicine.

Set in modern day Toronto, the story ventures into Renaissance Europe, looking over the shoulder of Andreas Vesalius as he opens the body and maps it accurately for the first time; to Beijing where Dai Ling’s parents meet and emigrate before the Tianenmen Square massacre; to Palestine, following Vesalius on his pilgrimage; to the deathbed of Talya’s mother in a Geneva cancer clinic.

My Sweet Curiosity explores the border between fact and fiction, the relation between medical science and music, and the enduring mysteries of the human body.

• Long-listed for the 2010 ReLit Award for Fiction

Against a backdrop of traditional Cree mythology, Johnson's novel creates a tangled murder chronicle and harrowing tale of four Cree brothers, bound to each other through family and tradition, separated from each other by their chosen life paths. As one brother kills, another reinforces the principle of a circle of life, as one capitulates to weakness, another conquers his demons. Driving the action is a manhunt for the killer of conservation officers; but at the heart of the story there is reparation through cultural wisdom and the restoration of traditional beliefs.

Authentic and well-paced, Back Track crosscuts through the cultural ruts, economic conventions, and stereotypes of Cree families living in northern Saskatchewan.

Set on the East Coast, and focusing on sixty-nine year old Jonas, this novel reflects the title character's energy, rage and humour as he looks upon his world, past and present, and is filled with memorable characters, adventures, and a pervading rugged gentleness.

This crically-acclaimed novel is an excellent choice for Canadian Studies and courses that investigate themes of maturity and old age.

 Reviews

Broughton, Katheryn. Canadian Materials (Novemer 1989): 275.
“Children's books fun and informative.” Halifax Sunday Daily News . November 7, 1993. 51.
Dorsey, Candas Jane. “Sci-fi nominations don't fail to amaze.” Edmonton Journal . February 10, 1991. C7.
Doucet, Clive. “Nova Scotian soul.” Globe and Mail. August 12, 1989. C8.
Finnie, John. “East coast eloquence.” Matrix . no. 32 (Fall 1990).
James-French, Davy. “The Rhythms of Nature.” Books in Canada (April 1990): 40.
McFadyen, Isobelle. Freelance (June 1990): 33.
McRae, Siobhan. Dalhouse Review 70.1 (July 1991): 137.
Nowlan, Michael O. Canadian Book Review Annual (December 1990): 162.
“Quick readings.” Ottawa Citizen . October 1989.
Skelton, Robin. “An arrogant old man and the sea.” Quill & Quire (August 1989).
Stewart, Beverly. “More life, universe and everything.” Th Whig-Standard Magazine . October 7, 1989. 20.
Woods, Thomas. “Lyric Atlantic fiction with wisdom, humour.” Vancouver Sun . December 30, 1989. H4.

*Teacher Resource Guide Available

The Streets of Winter is a fast-paced, intricately crafted novel of life in the city. The characters find in Montreal the anonymity they crave, bartering their identities for the chance to reinvent themselves: Marcel, a young entrepreneur torn between duty and desire, and his wife Maryse, who is blinded to life by her search for art; André, an intellectual retreating from political engagement into a quest for sensual pleasure; Adriana, whose family cannot understand her need to flee them; Teddy, spoiled, angry and idealistic; João, a solitary immigrant pursued by a secret shame which holds him apart from Vitória, who needs him to escape a culture that has trapped her; and Rollie, a homeless teenager who founds a personal empire in the basement of a dilapidated apartment building.

Scrupulously plotted, rich in cultural detail and alive with Montreal’s many voices and accents, The Streets of Winter is an absorbing novel about life in modern urban Canada.

“[Henighan’s] knowledge and depth of feeling for the region and the people are demonstrated on every page.”
— Ottawa Citizen

  Reviews

Brett, Melanie. “More Than Local.” Times Literary Supplement. 11 June 2004.
Clement, Carla Elm. “Reviews.” SubTerrain # 40. Fall 2004.
Czajkowski, Derek. “Real Fiction. Writing the Real Canada.” Echo (Kitchener-Waterloo, Ont.). 10-16 June 2004. Reprinted in Viewmag (Hamilton, Ont.). 1-7 July 2004.
Golfman, Noreen. “Letters in Canada 2004.” University of Toronto Quarterly. Vol. 75 No. 1 (Winter 2006).
Manners, Steven. “Fiction Reviews.” Quill & Quire. June 2004.
McGillis, Ian. “Portrait of a Fractured Metropolis.” The Gazette (Montreal). 27 March 2004.
Solie, Karen. “The Many Solitudes of Montreal.” The Globe and Mail. 12 June 2004.
White, Erinn. “Characters in Professor’s Novel Might Be Familiar to Readers.” Guelph Mercury. 3 July 2004.

Wigston, Nancy. “Fresh Starts and Dead Ends.” Books in Canada. September 2004.

Harriet Richards' almost uncanny gift for inhabiting the minds and personalities of widely different characters is as evident in this collection as in her award-winning first novel, The Lavender Child.

The men and women in these stories, and perhaps most of all the children, make their own sense of a world where "There are forces at play so simple, natural, and accidental that nobody can figure them out and see them coming." It is a world, too, in which "there's lots more sorrow flying around people's heads than there is joy." That sorrow may be heartbreaking, occasionally it is horrific; but the reader is constantly reminded, with the quiet, clear-eyed and sometimes mischievous irony of Harriet Richards' voice, that in this world and — in the least likely places — we may entertain angels unawares.

Mourre’s short stories are marked with the wry awareness of authentic prairie people — their bluntness, honesty and dishevelled truths. There is in each of them a universality that is both mythical and ordinary, delivered in a straight-ahead dramatic telling. Mourre’s writing weaves its prairie spells as it did in her first collection Landlocked.

Set against extended metaphors of seeding, harvesting, seasonal migration, and the implacable forces of nature, Helen Mourre’s fiction quietly takes its place in the front row of western Canadian realism.

"Only a very few writers capture their settings so precisely." — Saskatoon StarPhoenix

There are always invisible connections between people in a small community. There are always loyalties and betrayals. In Walking Through Shadows a clutch of these citizens are singled out for attention. What we discover is both disturbing and yet morbidly fascinating. We meet the apparently mute Butterfly Girl who can only find her voice and beauty in the bed of the town’s seedy old drunk. We meet posers like The White Prince, the town’s revered administrator whose dark sexual fantasies leave him vulnerable to a beautiful young man who loathes him. We meet Spider Girl whose lonely teen life leads her to the dangers of internet chat rooms where Don Wand, the reticent high school teacher, stalks her between his trips to the garbage dump where he collects animal teeth as treasures.

Throughout the town the sway of the the Everlasting Church of the Evangelical holds the town’s morality in check while its members slink off into their own little corners of deviance. No one is really safe from the prying eyes, no one will escape scrutiny. Not the incredibly fit Walking Woman who allows her fear to overwhelm her fitness, or the lawyer who must post his nude shadow-dancing routines on YouTube. And not the Invisible Woman, who longs for any contact in her bottomed-out family life, but can only find a connection to herself through watching internet porn.

Alternating between controlled pathos and wicked wit, Alix Hawley’s stories refuse predictability, such as in “Romance”, when a young man, employed for the summer by a wealthy family, finds that he and his first-time lover have different sexual motivations, and in “They Call Her Lovely Rita”, in which a man goes in search of a wife he is sure he absentmindedly misplaced somewhere. Hawley also challenges the conjectures of beauty, revealing that a pristine surface does not secure a happy ending. In “Things Happen”, an aspiring playwright is disrupted by her sister’s continually revised visions of their youth. In “Chemical Wedding”, a gorgeous woman maneuvers the murky waters of a dinner party with caustic dissection.

Dark and sharp, tightly written, this collection will surprise even readers familiar with the crusty undersides of middle-class lives, and the bizarre obsessions that harbour there.

Bonnie Dunlop’s new fiction collection, is an examination of the infirmity of marriages, brotherhood, friendships, parent-child relations hindered by negligence and altered by death, and where presumption is crushed by revelation — an eccentric old cowboy looks to avoid industrial pollution, a newly widowed woman attempts to untangle the secrets of her conventional marriage, a successful yet guilt-ridden man returns to his hometown for his brother’s funeral, a motherless teenage girl reconstructs her life, and a young woman struggles with the final term of her first pregnancy. All reach a precise moment when choice dictates to their unwilling spirits and when transformation begins its painful journey.
It is with such controlled transcendence that Dunlop’s characters live and that the assured writing in Carnival Glass situates award-winning author Bonnie Dunlop as a contending voice for Canadian women’s fiction.

• Shortlisted for the 2008 Saskatchewan Book Award for Fiction

When the anniversary of a suicide reunites five former friends who haven’t seen each other for ten years, each is forced to confront secrets from the past — secrets that lock their present lives in limbo. Through the perspectives of Siobhan, Evan and Lance, layers of the past peel away to expose connections to the central trauma of their shared lives.
Never Going Back is set in a small town in the BC interior, where potheads, loggers, environmentalists, conspiracy theorists, and aging hippies provide a vibrant backdrop to the dark themes explored in the narrative.
This story is about memory, loss and redemption, and moving beyond nostalgia and into the future with perspective and understanding. It focuses on the role that many of us play in a tragedy, watching helplessly from the sidelines, believing we are not involved when, in fact, we are.

“Banyard has written an engaging novel, original in concept and convincing in its portrait of the people of a unique and intriguing place.” — Jack Hodgins

Sweeping from Nazi Germany in 1939 to the war in Bosnia in the 1990s, Stephen Henighan’s A Grave in the Air is a masterful sequence of stories. In these tales, dominated by Central and Eastern European themes, readers are transported across borders and into the lives of characters who have something serious at stake, people enmeshed in acts of destruction, and people redeemed through honour and grace. These narratives bear Henighan’s cosmopolitan stamp, but they do not take place in a sanitized global village. There are no stereotypes on which to hang a plot, no filtered sense of the human condition. There are stories of betrayal, luminous studies of introspection and character, and ironic stories of historical displacement.

Whether moving readers to reflection or providing engaging entertainment, Henighan’s prose is sharp and clean. Once again, he is as instructive in his understanding of peoples and cultures as he is instinctive in taking us inside the worlds that shape them.

Emily Givner’s stories were about to break on the Canadian literary landscape when she met her untimely death. The stories in A Heart In Port are themselves a kind of literary metamorphosis in which Givner’s fragile life transcends her early death. In a way they are prophetic. The fictional worlds that Givner was intent on evoking are subtle, yet lucid, her characters often wrought with inherent contradictions, her narrators keen-eyed and pithy. In the title story of the collection, “A Heart In Port”, a seemingly light hearted send up of heartbreak, a Canadian woman waits in vain for the return of her European lover, amid the comedic shards of those close to her. Irony is apparent in “In-Sook” when a visiting music professor adored by his Korean students finds himself in conversation with the glass eye of one. When the glass eye starts speaking to Professor Andresj, the voice leads him to certain infidelity with the one student who is capable of the encounter. This mode of the surreal also enlightens the Kafkaesque “The Resemblance Between a Violin Case and a Cockroach”, a story which (quite apart from its quiet forewarning of Emily Givner’s own death) is a juggling act of improbability, breakdown, sly rhetoric, fairytale and literary allusion, all sustained by the perceptions of a young girl. These stories are never quite what they present themselves as being and the consummate beauty of the writing in A Heart In Port is that nothing is but what is not.

Rona Altrows’ short stories go to the core of what it is to be human — to cherish a departed mate beyond reason, to love a child to distraction, to keep the faith with a friend no matter what, to laugh in the face of self-doubt. This collection delivers a humorous yet poignant series of tales told from the perspectives of women.

“Rona Altrows delivers keenly-observed tales with a serious kick. She draws her characters and their travails in beautifully controlled, precise strokes that render them arresting, haunting and immediate. This is fiction at its best, revealing fresh insights into a world we think we know. This is the real deal.”
— Ian Samuels

“[Rona Altrows'] straight-talking narrators join a lineage of working-class female protagonists that stretches back at least to Margaret Lawrences' Stacey in The Fire Dwellers." — subTerriain

• Winner of the 2007 City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize

Matthew Manera’s novel tells the story of Gretchen Williamson, a young woman searching for her independence in the Ontario townships near Port Credit in the 1850s. With effective research and engaging story telling, Manera’s novel designs the catalysts that change Gretchen’s life — her allurement to an Ojibwa sage, her enchantment with an Irish seer, her attraction to a young stone hooker, and ultimately her love of books and the emerging technology around them.

This collection of ten stories by one of Canada's foremost fiction writers is designed to be a bedside book for people living with death.

In his challenging, affirmative introduction Seán Virgo suggests: “We prepare best for death, surely by loving life.” He refuses to accept the taboos and terrors which Western societies have erected around death: “Dying people are vitally concerned with life, if they're allowed. They are not lepers, or saints, or objects. And if they need stories about Death, too, it must be because the folklore of Death has withered, gone down in the twentieth-century with so many other dialects. Even humour, mankind's dance with taboo, has failed in this area for most of us. And with that dialect has been lost the sense of relationship with the dead that I've envied in older cultures.”

These stories express the full range of that dialect, from heartbreak to raunchy comedy, with more than a few speculations about what lies across the border of "the undiscovered country". Each story is prefaced with an intimate personal account of how it came to be written, and what it now means to the author.

In Book Two of The Sun On the Mountains trilogy, Alexander James, a Quaker pursued by his violent past in the American Revolution, begins a new life as a fur trader in the forests of northern Canada. Travelling west with his Nahathaway wife and explorer David Thompson to the prairie of the Blackfoot Confederacy, Alexander cannot resist being drawn into the thrilling horse raids and buffalo hunts, and then by the mysteries of the Piikani medicine ceremonies.

Trafford’s writing is Quakerly: spare and modest, but never lacking in confident flow, illuminating that place and time as Alexander pushes deeper into the heart of the west to find the Light inside himself.” — Marina Endicott

“ . . . takes readers into the borderlands of history and fiction, memory and possibility.” — Elizabeth Jameson, Professor of History, University of Calgary

“The most compelling (characters) are the women, who are made of sturdy stuff — strong, insightful, fierce and sometimes frightening.” — Debora Steel, Editor in Chief, Windspeaker

“ . . . a refreshing perspective on such Woodlands Cree concepts as the many-faceted wihtiko and the pre-Judaeo-Christian concept of the pawakan. Trafford has achieved what few novelists have managed.” — David Westfall, editor and compiler of Castel’s English Cree Dictionary and Memoirs of the Elders

“More clues cleverly concealed here than in the most ingenious Agatha Christie mystery.” — Pam Asheton

 Candid and truthful stories about women, young and old, grappling with generational wariness, creative recklessness, and illusive purpose celebrate all that is beautiful, wild and distinctive in contemporary women. The title, All In Together Girls,is inspired by a jump rope rhyme, and the stories are a meeting place for girls as surely as the chant would have been on the playground. These stories relate the relentless search for identity, and the late night drive-through culture of bored teens whose “sleepover” alibis have left them with no place else to go. Hallmarked by entrances into, and thought-provoking points of exit from, moments of addiction, betrayal, misjudgement, and first love, they are defining portraits of girls and women during the storm and stress of self-discovery.

"Sutherland's stories are clearly focused, straightforward, and eminently readable. It's obvious that she cares deeply for her characters, but does not pander to them, forcing them to earn what they know and suffer when they make a mistake." — Bill Robertson, Saskatoon StarPhoenix (Oct 2007)

Angie Abdou’s short story debut is a sassy collection about likeable women running wild. In an irreverent vivisection of cultural myths of gender such as “women are born nurturers” or “men are inherently more aggressive”, Abdou reveals the silent contracts that lie at the underbelly of polished marriages, platonic friendships, barroom flirtations and not-so-meaningless sex.
Abdou’s characters have an easy honesty, a dirty-kneed grace that reminds us of girls who climbed trees and pulled the wings off butterflies. Now grown up, they offer biting and insouciant revelations into sexual stereotypes, fear of intimacy, and anger management. Abdou’s stories brim with the emotional, moral and social conundrum of living GAP commercial feminism on a thrift store budget, and provide a deliciously self-effacing joyride through the girl slums of Boystown.

Leaving her Montreal family and friends, Ariadne Hatzidakis returns to the land of her forebears — and a trap prepared for her by the old Greek gods. The lover they present her with is Death, in the guise of Yannis Vissinos, a musician whose only fidelity is to his "white bride," heroin.

The stages of Hell that we follow Ariadne through — the nightlife of Athens, the seasonal depravities of the love island, Nysas — are colourful, sexy, obsessive, and detailed with mordant wit. The odds are against Ariadne, but the gods are beginning to wish that they'd hedged their bets . . .

Stylish and elegant, Ariadne's Dream renders a lurid Greek landscape inhabited by striking and dangerous characters, entwined within the intensity of a nascent consciousness and a deeply-rooted living mythos.

• Longlisted for the 2003 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award

This is a gritty tale detailing the hardships faced by labourers (once known as “packsack miners”) in Northern Saskatchewan mining camps.

Billy Tinker offers a rare combination of realism and magic that draws out many of the contradictions and tests faced by Native Canadians and the working class. Billy’s anger and the loneliness of his itinerant lifestyle are transformed by a sweat lodge ceremony, and the “little people” through whom he renews his connections to the land and his culture.

Blind Man’s Drum is a collection of stories — at times irreverent and comical, at times serious — all set in Biggar, Saskatchewan during the early 1950s.

Biggar is as much a character as the blind patriarch, Will Coutts, whose story is told through the uncanny perception of his grandson, Robert. From age six to eight, Robert watches his grandfather push his wheelbarrow through the streets of Biggar, picking up scraps and depositing them in his backyard; he watches his grandfather strip naked and perform his ritual exercises on a neighbour’s farm; he watches various relatives visit and try to make sense of their sorry lives. He articulates a broad, sweeping, irreverent prairie landscape filled with vigour, youth and humour. 

The stories collected in Boundary Country — poet Tom Wayman’s first book of fiction — slide effortlessly across time and place. Some offer an insider’s guide to the people who live in British Columbia’s distinctive Kootenay mountain region. Others take as their starting point the family sagas of European immigrants to Toronto during the 1930s or the lives of contemporary working folk in Vancouver. Another turns on an incident during the American Civil War. Yet all the tales are set in the borderlands of human experience — the precise moments at which history becomes memory, desire is transformed into belief, and some locale or condition alters and we sense in the change a boundary.

"Descriptive prose that puts in mind the rhythms and precision of Cormac McCarthy ... Wayman gives us nature in the eyes of a man who knows it like his own skin."
— Jim Bartley, Globe & Mail (July 2007)

City of Rains is an atmospheric page-turner, a wholly original perspective on Indian and Western history. It details the weariness and elation that accompany a man’s journey to accomplish greatness within himself, while reaching into the life experiences of others who are extraordinary in their small lives.

Dass creates a multi-layered quest through a narrator who boldly accepts and challenges his Indian heritage and is rewarded with truth and love. He learns that no man’s knowledge exeeds his experience.

With controlled ease, Nirmal Dass breaks free from the clichés of ‘compassionate realism’ and ‘historical narrative sweep’ — City of Rains is lush, quiet, artistic and liberating.

The wit and sardonic humour which distinguished Sara O’Leary’s first book, Wish You Were Here are very much in evidence in this new collection of short fiction. Comfort Me With Apples has a wider range, though, and deeper resonances. Ten short stories combine with a novella, “Big As Life”, to evoke and explore life after the “nuclear family”. The characters in these stories display a kind of muddled bravery as they reflect without judgement on the failures of their parents’ generation, and face the task of creating rules from sctatch: for themselves, their friends, their lovers and their children. Self-righteousness has no place in Sara O’Leary’s world. The tensions between her characters’ humour and the heartbreaks which underpin it, charge every story with fierce, compressed energy. Yet it is moments of tenderness, wry and understated, which linger and haunt the reader.

 Devin Krukoff’s debut novel offers a bizarrely entertaining premise: the purpose of life is to avoid work in all its manifestations. Acknowledging the psychological architecture of his life, Richard Parks reconstructs the anatomy of this singular philosophy from his earliest recognitions. Whether drawing his slacker’s inspiration from his original muse — a grade school boy with leukemia — exploiting his father’s death for charity and pity, or devising the strategies that would parlay illness and injury into personal gains, Richard’s twisted reality attracts our morbid curiosity like a roadside accident, often generating wicked laughter.

The self-destructive exploits of Richard Parks, “demigod in the Church of the Useless”, leave a scattered trail of disturbingly brilliant images that shape his world of avoidance, disease, and reclusive plotting. Compensation is a refreshing affront to our politically correct sensibilities.

 Also by Devon Krukoff:

“Country Music Country is about the Calgary we never see at Stampede time. Bruce Hunter's people do dirty jobs for a living — if they're lucky. If they're unlucky they live hopeless and die dingy. This is lunchbucket literature and Bruce Hunter gives it a good name.” — David Carpenter.

Reviews

Broughton, Katheryn. Canadian Materials website. http://www.umanitoba.ca/cm/vol3/no8/countrymusic.html
Dandelion 24.1 (1997): 77.
van Luven, Lynne. “Figured out.” NeWest Review (February/March 1997): 28-9.
McGoogan, Ken. “Man of letters meets hostile historians.” Calgary Herald . October 12, 1996.
O'Connor, Donal. “Collection of short stories deals with lives of labourers.” Stratford Beacon Herald . September 25, 1996.

There was a man who called himself Coyote. He blew up bridges to clearcut logging sites. He liberated zoos, and torched shopping malls in the night. Then he died, twenty years ago, in a botched factory sabotage. Or did he?

A terrifying and troubled Brian doesn't believe it — he's come to Artemis Island to find a ‘retired’ Coyote, and kill him. It will be one of several murders.

RCMP Inspector, Janwar Singh, is poised to become the Chief of Homicide — if he can find his way through the maze of evidence.

In this dazzling “ethical thriller” novelist and poet, Brian Brett and a wildly unreliable narrator employ every trick in the storyteller’s arsenal, dancing us from slapstick to horror, from Godel’s Proof to oyster hunting, from high comedy to lyric portraits of one of the legendary Gulf Islands, while engaging in a wicked argument with the reader and the world we are losing.

Filling the Belly smashes the cliché of bourgeois attitudes and morals attributed to today’s young women. What emerges from Rosa’s haunting sexual memories, perplexing encounters with alternate reality, and the desire to return to the innocence of childhood, is a rare and unique character.

A collection that features 22 short fictions from some of Canada's finest authors, including Douglas Glover, Sharon Butala, Marlene Nourbese Philip, Seán Virgo, and Dianne Warren.

“This collection celebrates the short story in its incredible variety . . . The edition aptly describes the stories as a self-portrait, a cross-section of the Canadian imagination.”
— Canadian Materials.

 Reviews

Broughton, Katheryn. Canadian Materials (September 1991): 247.
Boettcher, Shelley. Vox No. 93 (November 1991).
Clemence, Verne. “Perceptual frontiers expand.” Saskatoon Star-Phoenix . March 16, 1991.
Eisenzimmer, Mark. Freelance (November 1991): 23.
McEnteer, James. “Canadian anthology holds rewards, surprises.” Calgary Herald . August 10, 1991. B11.
Montreal Gazette . May 11, 1991.
Noxon, Christopher. Books in Canada (May 1991): 55.
Redford, R. British Columbia Teacher-Librarians' Association Reviews (December 1991).

Mel Dagg’s newest collection of stories reinforces his stature as a writer of empathy and historical perspective. His characters — fishermen, farmers, First Nations people, drifters — battle the forces of history for their dignity and survival. Dagg invests economic and cultural realities with a distilled social realism.

These stories detail the Canadian landscape with the markers of nature and travel, while examining the ways in which individuals must cope with economic, social and environmental forces beyond their control. Irony and ambiguity often mark their fates; their lives often fractured by the unpredictable debris of their pasts.

Praise for Mel Dagg's fiction:

“Dagg demonstrates extraordinary poise...” — Eileen Manion, Montreal Gazette

“... a marvel of precision and personal vision.” — Frank Moher, Alberta Report

“... reverberates in the mind long after the book is closed.” — Joan Clark, Newest Review

“ . . . he is among the first to give a history book the power to involve us now and move us deeply . . . ”
— John Moore, Vancouver Sun

Charles Noble's counter-novel is a minefield and motherlode of jest, memory and speculation. If Stephen Daedalus had been put to school with the Lutherans instead of the Jesuits, he might have devised this technique to portray his hometown, its inhabitants and his own evolution.

Noble's exploration of the literary and topographical culture of Banff, past and present, yields a narrative filled with wit, style and playful exuberance.

Peopled with a cast of characters taken from real life and transformed by Noble's capacious imagination, Hearth Wild mingles personal and social history with a unique, compelling fictive style.

Joe Welsh irreverently and poignantly recreates the forties, fifties and sixties in and around Lebret, Saskatchewan. His ear for voice and his deprecating homespun portraits paradoxically intensify his loyalty to his people — the Métis. Enriched throughout with a relentless stream-of-consciousness, the writer merges vignette, poem, and dramatic monologue into a form that is unique in its authentic language and local colour.

From internationally recognized Canadian author W.P. Kinsella (Dance Me Outside, The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, The Fencepost Chronicles) comes a new collection of baseball stories that is sure to delight all lovers of engaging storytelling and fans of the sport he chronicles in the classics Shoeless Joe and The Thrill of the Grass. Kinsella weaves his characters into the thrill of the game, be it in Japan, Central America, Canada or the U.S., with a variety of comic, tragic, and mystical results. This collection captures the dazzling wit, compelling insight, and obsession with baseball that have made Kinsella more popular than a ballpark frank.

Kinsella has published 21 books of fiction, two books each of non-fiction and poetry, and three of his works, including Shoeless Joe which became Field of Dreams, have been made into major motion picture films. He has also won several prestigious awards, including the Order of Canada, the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship, and the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour.

"Thoughtful, charmed stories about the everyday magic of desire." — The Globe & Mail

Whatever it has taken to shape the prairie and its rhythm has also shaped and captured its people. Helen Mourre’s stories reveal these people in this place with subtle grace and dignity. The present is not merely an echo of the past, it is amplified by it. Yet there is no brashness here — the prairie will not tolerate it. There is only a wry awareness — authentic and honest.

A Jesus Christ look alike has trouble with his girlfriend . . . a bodybuilder does sit ups from the window of a speeding car . . . a burn victim and his freakishly beautiful love interest creatively loot homes while a forest fire approaches . . . a female cult member tries to convince a young man to let doctors harvest his recently-deceased wife’s organs . . .

In a second to none engagement of the reader, James Marshall’s stories bristle with fictional restlessness. This debut collection is a true literary “find” and Marshall’s an exciting new voice.

“James Marshall’s wit is acidic, salvaged by a deep, although shaken, humanism. His stories are charmed with the glow of small-time Canadian losers and dreamers living in a broken, plugged-in world. This is Heinrich Böll for our time, Alice Munro dressed in jeans and leather, pumped up on testosterone and fear, Raymond Carver taken north to drown in the middle of a forest fire, each alcoholic bubble bursting into flame, and, always, the wounded, broken, and oddly heroic Canada of a thousand ironies we all live in but haven’t yet had in a book, and, thankfully, miraculously have in this book now.”
— Harold Rhenish

• Shortlisted for the Best First Book category in the Caribbean & Canada region of the 2005 Commonwealth Writers' Prize.
• Finalist for the 5th Annual ReLit Awards.

“...John Lent has written a book of tender short stories which carries the kind of insight that encourages the reader to read on. His use of detail including the familiarity of Western Canadian landmarks creates an introspective that draws out aspects of Canadian culture which are often difficult to define.”
— Vernon Daily News.

“...his powerful expression of the hypnotic rhythm of the ordinary...” — Michael Estok.

 Reviews

Broughton, Katheryn. Canadian Materials 3.5 (November 1, 1996).
Compton, Valerie. “Edmonton 1960 evoked here.” Edmonton Journal . March 9, 1997.
Hagarty, Britt. “Lyricism, comprehension and the elements of style.” Vancouver Sun . March 29, 1997.
Harrison, Dallas. “Delicate connections.”
Keller, Betty. “Western writers well-represented in meagre crop of fall fiction.” Coast Independent . November 4, 1996.
“Lent releases short stories.” Vernon Daily News . October 1996.
van Luven, Lynne. “Figured out.” NeWest Review (February/March 1997): 28-9.
Martin, Cam. “In Monet's Garden with John Lent.” Night and Day (June 20 - July 3, 1997). 13-4.
Milestone Review (Fall/Winter 1997): 22.

Bean E. Fallwell’s story in Mostly Happy begins with an inventory of items, shiny bits of beauty that she has collected and tucked into a red Samsonite Saturn suitcase. This suitcase, a dominant metaphor in the novel, becomes Bean’s touchstone that keeps her from spiralling into the dark worlds of her beautiful, screwed up mother and all the stray men she brings home; her sad, exhausted father; and her magnetic stepfather as he transforms from family saviour into drunken dragon. Without remorse or bitterness Bean moves forward, seeking her friendships where she can, casting spells to protect her younger sister, and seeking solace from whatever small sanctuaries her transient life offers.

• Winner of the 2008 Saskatchewan Book Awards for Fiction and First Book
• Winner of the 2010 OLA Forest of Reading White Pine Award

At a time when North American writers prefer to probe the depths of individual angst and uncertainty, Henighan has unabashedly chosen to tell stories that tackle sociopolitical issues.

“They are refreshingly political, especially when they reflect the ideological contradictions of North American do-gooders in Nicaragua.”
– Montreal Gazette.

 Reviews

Addison, Catherine. “Southern Dreaming.” Canadian Literature . No. 141 (Summer 1994): 146-9.
Heighton, Steve. “Hybrid vigor: a survey of six first collections of stories.” Quarry . 42.3 (January 1994): 85-96.
Kulak, Lorne. “Thistledown Fiction.” NeWest Review (June/July 1993): 32-3.
Patrick, Susan. Canadian Book Review Annual (1993): 189
Robertson, Bill. “Patience rewarded for reader of Montreal poet's short stories.” Saskatoon Star-Phoenix . May 8, 1993. D5.
Summers, Merna. “Others in our lives.” Books in Canada (March 1993): 44-5.
Ternar, Yeshim. “Latin America explored in readable stories.” Montreal Gazette . November 21, 1992.

The thirteen stories in Orchestra of the Lost Steps are imbued with insight, and secured by Leedahl’s composed voice. These are traditional stories that burst with stunning emotional moments; stories that avoid ornament and excessive description or dialogue in order to allow readers a real connection to her characters’ lives.

Set widely across Canadian landscapes with travel into Mexico and Venezuela, her characters reveal glimpses of love, marriage, disillusionment, acts of healing and destruction played out on the personal battlegrounds of everyday life.
Shelley Leedahl is to the prairies what Lisa Moore is to Atlantic Canada.

“These stories are told from the point of view of an interesting range of voices. The stories themselves are full of the tensions and resolutions of lives often lived in the extreme . . . immensely readable and engaging.”
— Austin Clarke and Helen Humphreys (Judges, John V Hicks Manuscript Competition.)

“vigorous, economical, and precise prose, immediacy, fearlessness — qualities that combine to produce an unexpected and unusual sense of hyper-reality in Leedahl’s collection Orchestra of the Lost Steps. I found these stories gripping.” — Sharon Butala

Nolan Taylor is a thirteen-year veteran of the Canadian women’s wheelchair basketball team. Her position as “Big Girl” on the team belies her fragility when her decision to retire and undergo a long overdue hip replacement throws her into a post-retirement identity crisis. Spurred on by pain and a numbing domesticity with long-time love, Quinn McLeod, she retreats into her memory, reliving her rookie year and emerging sexuality with her much older mentor, Darren Steward. As Nolan struggles to maintain her tenuous connections to the people around her in the midst of physical anguish, we are reminded that, despite our bodies’ limitations, we have physical needs that we are driven to fulfill, and the adrenaline that pushes professional athletes can be harnessed to allow what may seem impossible.

• Shortlisted for the 2008 Commonwealth Writers' Prize, Canada and Caribbean Region, for Best First Book

Silence Invites the Dead opens in the storm of the Rwandan genocide that drives a Canadian journalist into a funk of regret and renouncement. Seven years later, Myles Sterling, still haunted by this past experience, accepts an invitation to join former Rwandan colleague Colonel John McTaggart in Candle Lake, Saskatchewan, where life is peaceful and the fishing is good. To his horror, Sterling arrives to find police dragging his friend’s corpse from the icy lake waters. This murder pulls Myles Sterling down the trail of a suspect casino development proposal, drugs, and violence. The further he looks, the more trouble he finds.

Scott Miller’s hard-boiled and principled protagonist, Myles Sterling, is a complex lead character who is blazing a new trail for mystery readers through Canadian crime drama. Miller’s suspenseful prose teases the imagination in a story where everyone becomes a suspect — until they wind up dead. The characters are as diverse as they are interesting: from an eccentric albino artist, to the Cree policeman who patrols the wild north. Layering the dimensions of northern politics and ethical dilemmas, Miller sets the stage for greed, power, and revenge. This is a skilful debut to a new “Detective”series.

Looking deep into the many facets of hockey and the eclectic array of people it attracts, Calvin Daniels presents the perfect collection of short fiction for anyone who loves storytelling and Canada’s national pastime. These fictions range from the youthful desires that hockey generates, through to the difficult realities and bitter disillusionments dedication to the game can bring.

“With inventive strings, lyrical descriptions and sophisticated imagery, Brett has created a myriad of complex worlds to perplex and stimulate the reader.” — Vancouver Sun.

 Reviews

Batchelor, Rhonda. “Grown-up fiction.” Victoria Times-Colonist, Monday Magazine . January 23-29, 1992.
Brett, Brian. British Columbia Teacher-Librarians' Association Reviews (1991).
Cruesot, Janine. Regina Leader-Post . October 5, 1991.
van Herk, Aritha. “Fiction.” Letters in Canada 1991 - University of Toronto Quarterly (Fall 92).
Homel, David. “'Making strange' serves B.C. writer's stories well.” Montreal Gazette . December 7, 1991.
Redl, Carol. “Stories hint of new slant in prairie fiction.” Edmonton Journal . September 15, 1991. D9.
Riskin, Mary Walters. “Energy is the key element of collection.”
Wiebe, Armin. “Odd Occurrences in an Odd World.” Prairie Fire 12.4: 97-100.
Turner, Lillian M. Canadian Materials (November 1991): 359.
Leach, Richard. “Short fiction melange.” Victoria Times-Colonist . February 9, 1992.
Aulin, Virginia. “Two inventive explorations of the dark side.” Vancouver Sun . September 26, 1991

Shalom Camenietzki’s short story collection details the fractal nature of the self as seen through the flaws and assets of the characters that stoically inhabit his pages. Each tale examines the rough edges of misguided obsession: an unrequited love affair with the nanny, the perils of a competitive look-a-like, the numbing indignity of going the wrong way on the corporate ladder. Fixated, let down, disappointed, enraged, and confounded by the shackles of their own consciences, Camenietzki’s characters unburden secrets and force the reader to bear witness to their “dark nights of the soul.” This is the place where the boundaries blur between religious fervour and lewd advance, money and mental illness, accident and destiny.

The fact that Bonnie Dunlop’s first short story collection possesses such power should not astonish readers who have heard her stories on CBC or read them in Canadian magazines and journals. The stories in The Beauty Box are traditional in the way they offer familiar settings, events, and characters, or the way Dunlop’s quiet voice directs our attention; however, they evolve beyond tradition in the controlled, purposeful way that Dunlop’s details are measured. Her appreciation for minutiae whether it be the meticulous attention to dress expressed by a gay bachelor, or the ritual motions of snakes in a well house create indelible moments, and lead the reader into Dunlop’s character’s fortunes. This is the debut of a distinctive and powerful new voice in Canadian short fiction.

“If these characters — with all their quirks, obsessions and secrets — were gathered together for a dinner party, I’d definitly want to be in that room. These entertaining stories deserve a wide audience . . . ” — Shelley A. Leedahl

 Rosa Pryznyk’s harrowing escape from the Great War to America left her knowing that she was ordained for an extraordinary life. She didn’t, though, see the aching beauty of it, nor did she see the wretchedness or hardship that would continually dog her fate. But Sam Gentles saw all of Rosa’s life completely because he invented her for his novel. And Herb Thedal, the film director of Sam’s script, also saw Rosa precisely and with purpose. But can they shape their own chaotic lives with such resolution and comparable acts of faith? Though ambitious in its structure, and unconventional in its plot, Michael Kenyon’s novel is rewarding, resourceful story telling.

A stunningly original work of speculative fiction,The Fungus Garden follows the plight of a man who becomes transformed into a termite. Impeccably researched, this story brings the reader effortlessly into a fascinating world of conflict and desire, ultimately becoming an investigation into what it means to be human.

 Selected Reviews

Boulanger, Annie. “Burnaby teacher inspires poet Brian Brett's works.” Burnaby Now . March 18, 1989. 15.
Dorsey, Candas Jane. “Canadian, U.S. SF approaches differ.” Edmonton Journal . February 10, 1990.
Dunn, James. “Life among the termites a wonderful allegory.” Vancouver Sun . December 3, 1988.
Gasparini, Leonard. “Shades of Kafka plus a plausible plot.” Toronto Star Saturday Magazine . May 13, 1989. M3.
 Hill, Douglas. “No redeeming social value.” Books in Canada (January/February 1989): 35.
Kathenor, Sansoucy. Statement - Ottawa Science Fiction Society(April 1989).
Lillard, Charles. “Art audience of one.” Victoria Times-Colonist . October 24, 1993. M5.
Lillard, Charles. “Novel of ideas a success built with imagination.” Victoria Times-Colonist . February 24, 1991. B5.
Reveyrand, M.L. BC Teacher-Librarians Association (June 1989).
Roberston, Bill. “Riches' short stories filled with symbols.” Saskatoon StarPhoenix . August 12, 1989.
Wallace, Bronwen. “Lives of termites and teens.” Kingston Whig-Standard Magazine . April 1, 1989. 23.
Wilson, Pat. Spintrian (June 1989): 21.
Wolfe, P. Choice (July 1989)

*Teacher Resource Guide

Set in contemporary Turkey, The Infidel weighs the elements of truth that flow out of Turkish consciousness in the wake of its historical massacres. In a culture where civic events, history and theology, are as often suppressed as invented, Piccard’s novel creates a path to truth for those with “ears to hear and eyes to see.” Told through a series of tape recordings and commentary, the eloquent narrative of Jesus the Infidel becomes the eyewitness account of the formative events that occurred in Turkish Kurdistan in the first quarter of the twentieth century. What is revealed is as much enigma as it is story for the journalist, Tarik, who records and researches Jesus the Infidel’s account. In counterpoint, Tarik is forced to grapple with his ignorance of his country’s past as well as his personal history of privilege.

Authentic and persuasive, The Infidel is an uncompromising novel of the focussed turning point of events following the revelation of truth. At a time when the world is alerted to the Kurdish peoples’ desire for separatism, Piccard’s novel sets the backdrop for their motivation.

The Places Where Names Vanish explores the frightening, encoded, and potentially explosive realities of Quebec and Montreal as seen by Ecuadorean expatriates. Marta longs for escape from her impoverished village, where she is pulled between traditionalism, spiritualism, Catholicism, and a dirty, brutal reality. She gives herself to a soldier stationed nearby who dreams of North America and a career in music. They leave and Marta learns the refugee's signposts: Escape, Exile, Endurance. The Places Where Names Vanish is a wonderfully evocative, subtle and heartfelt novel, which concentrates on one brave human spirit, but raises more questions than any sociological expose.

Ages 13+

Reviews

“Book Briefs,” Ottawa Citizen, November 8, 1998
Besner, Neil. “Letters in Canada 1998: English Fiction,” University of Toronto Quarterly, (Fall 1999-Winter 2000)
Fagan, Cary. “Olé for the ‘sin of self-love,’” Montreal Gazette, June 6, 1998
Keller, Betty. “New books examine dark side of the Canadian dream,” Coast Independent, September 7, 1998
Peters, Joanne.“The Places Where Names Vanish,” Canadian Materials, Vol. V No. 4, October 16, 1998
Rengger, Patrick, “Humane novel is missing its heart,” The Globe and Mail, June 27, 1998

Dispelling the languor often associated with the long historical novel David Richards’ epic novel reestablishes the role of the writer-craftsman in this genre.

Replete with historical accuracy, The Plough’s Share is as much about the complex struggles for self-worth as it is about taming the forces that shaped Canada in the last century.

Set alternatively in England, South Africa, and Canada, the novel translates the world of nineteenth-century England. A young man’s quest to regain his name and win a seductive young woman unfolds as Richards turns loose the hardship, blood, and terror of the Boer War, where men struggle to survive. The reprieve from such madness leads to Canada — the place of peace and plenty, where exploiting the dreamers and those who would reinvent themselves is turned into big business. Caught up in the fever that drew the Barr colonists to the challenge of settling the Canadian West, Richards’ characters are shaped by misdirected enthusiasm, implacable natural forces, and the hardened realism of ravaged dreams. The result is an exhilarating adventure, both tense and riveting.

Ages 13+

The Reddening Path is the story of Paméla who, adopted as an infant by Hannah & Fern, a Toronto lesbian couple, travels to Guatamala to search for her birth mother. Her quest uncovers a tangle of political and romantic intrigue as Paméla discovers her Mayan heritage and learns about the complexities of life in Guatemala. Resonating throughout is an account of Malintzín, the Mayan slave who became Cortes’ mistress. These details of the Spanish conquest weave throughout the narrative, colouring the lives of everyone she encounters in her birthland. Paméla’s journey casts light on the struggle between conqueror and conquered within the Guatemalan people and the spiritual and emotional complexities facing those of mixed blood, a reality which challenges her expectations for an easy resolution to her question of identity.

The Reddening Path is cleverly structured, with a style that fluctuates between dreamlike poetic imagery and a traditional quest-for-identity narrative...Hale's novel is an intriguing look at post-colonial biculturalism set against a moving backdrop of familial love and personal enlightenment.— Laurel Smith, Quill & Quire (June 2007)

A powerful and well-written novel.
— George Szanto

If you wish to know the tragic history of Guatemala and of Latin America from the time of the conquistadores, read this compelling novel.
— Rosemary Sullivan

The Secret of the Northern Lights continues the chronicle which has delighted thousands and outraged a select few since Silas Ermineskin first appropriated the English language in 1977 with Dance Me Outside. Silas shares the inside information learned as part of his apprenticeship to Mad Etta, medicine woman on the Ermineskin reserve. When he heads out on the road with “Brother” Frank Fencepost, the Trickster incarnate, the reader joins Silas on a slapstick First Nations tour through the follies of our culture. Humour, as always, is the leveler in these twelve new Hobbema stories. While nothing is taken too seriously, serious, even tragic, things do happen and sacred things are accomplished.

Reviews

Clemence, Verne. “Fiction, pure and simple.” Western People . May 21, 1998. 14.
Clemence, Verne. “Serious issues probed by Kinsella's Indians.” Saskatoon StarPhoenix . March 28, 1998.
Kenney, Trevor. “In a league of his own.” Lethbridge Herald . April 2, 1998. B1.
Osborne, Catherine. Quill & Quire Quotables (April 9, 1998).
Rankin, Bill. “Kinsella tackles risky subjects gracefully”. Edmonton Journal . June 14, 1998
Fertile, Candace. “Kinsella at bat: he swings, he misses”. Vancouver Sun. May 23, 1998

The Story of Blue Eye, opens at a full gallop over the western prairie controlled by the powerful Plains Indian horse culture of the early 1800’s. Without stopping a moment of drama, Trafford constructs the foundation of a western Canadian epic that layers Indian and European mythology in a perfect blend of history and adventure through his central character Blue Eye James, whose time honoured codes of hard work, honour, fairness and trust lay the foundation for an empire.

• Finalist for the 2005 Grant MacEwan Author's Award.
  

A provocative reconstruction of the Frog Lake Massacre of 1885 that draws on published accounts of survivors Theresa Gowanlock and William Cameron. A must read for anyone interested in the convolutions of Canadian history.

Ages 13+

 Reviews

Canadian Content (Fall 1994): 14. Clemence, Verne. “Female voices heard in account of Frog Lake confrontation.” Saskatoon Star-Phoenix . April 3, 1993.
Conte, Christy. Canadian Book Review Annual (1993): 185.
Hildebrandt, Walter. “Native tales show depth of frustration.” Calgary Herald . June 26, 1993. C12.
Kennedy, Michael P. J. “Common participants offer unique view of historic events.” Saskatoon Star-Phoenix . June 19, 1993. D6.
Kulak, Lorne. “Thistledown Fiction.” NeWest Review (June/July 1993): 32-3.
Moore, John. “Scenes from a massacre.” Vancouver Sun Saturday Review . May 29, 1993.
Ritz, Earla. Dandelion 20.1: 76-7.
Schmidt, Lisa. Prairie Fire 14.2 (Summer 1993): 105-7.

When you meet Bill Stenson’s sharply rendered characters, you will see those people whom you know and maybe even catch a glimpse of yourself in the process. What you won’t expect are the highly unpredictable situations that he creates for them, and the diagonal humour Stenson employs to herald his approach to fiction. Life does look different from up in a tree, and the man who lives in the root cellar in his long johns has something to tell you. Maybe you will discover what it is like to be an out-of-control pacifist or determine the psychological value of a good pair of shoes. In Translating Women, Stenson performs on the high wire between short story and tale, manipulating narratives while deftly abstracting them.

“Bill Stenson’s stories fly easily as kites in a blue sky in the best wind. However high they soar — often high indeed — they are as down-to-earth as honey and jam. A fine and fascinating collection.”
— Leon Rooke

“Like Twain and Kinsella, Bill Stenson’s work has a glint in its eye. Make room on your shelf for his stories, and make his characters feel welcome, for they are people you know.”
— Bill Gaston

“The people in Bill Stenson’s stories may dance the cha-cha and work the green chain, but what they do best is break your heart. Stenson paints men and women as they are: honest and foolish and brimful of hope, the kind of people who know that “when there’s no good answer to a question, the wisest thing to do is say nothing at all.” I know these people. I’ve met them. I like them.”
— Terence Young

What happens in the small prairie town of Tuckahoe? An irresponsible drifter fakes a unique illness to break an engagement . . . a preacher stops a feud by performing an impromptu wedding . . . a minister’s wife rescues a young man from the threat of blindness . . . a woman scandalizes a town by naming her children after different fathers . . . a schoolteacher finds love on a woodpile . . . a wanted man starts a new life in a piano box . . . and a hen-pecked husband repairs his marriage by getting drunk and losing his money. Neil McKinnon’s debut collection kicks up some dust, skews small town hokum, and offers a wrap on the knuckles for the individuals of the classic prairie town of Tuckahoe. Thoughout the desperation and adversity rides an undercurrent of sly humour.

• Nominated for the 2007 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour

When all the animals are gone, and the world become a desert, where shall hope be found? After the extinctions, a post-human Métis woman reaches out in hope and encounters a strange and unexpected future.

Billie Featherstone is one of few people to survive “the great extinction” thanks to a genetic mutation carried largely in the Metis population. Her skeleton is charged with Restart — a video game-like element for reanimating. She routinely patrols the biological war-plagued borders of her people’s territory where extinctions abound, deserts spread, and post-humans struggle. Water is a solidly researched novel inspired by the mathematical extrapolation of the length of time a technological civilization can exist. From such thinking, Taylor creates a world of the future based on society’s current environmental indifference.

Brenda Hasiuk’s debut novel details eight weeks in the lives of four teens in a hardcore mining town in northern Canada. Ally and Toby, life-long locals, Rina, a Sarajevo refugee, and Adam, the returning urban native warrior get lost in each others’ individual and collective mythologies as they find love, friendship, violence and tragedy in one long, last summer. Unflinchingly honest, and disturbingly poignant, this story captures the displacement of “northerners”, the struggle for identity, and the restlessness of teens in isolated communities. In a place that makes them feel lonely, they try never to be alone; and in lives confounded by rituals and restraints, their search for meaning is illusive.

• Nominated for the 2007 McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award; the Eileen MacTavish Sykes Award; and the Margaret Lawrence Award for Fiction

“John Lent's suite of stories and poems is a disarming and pleasing work that resists categorization.” – Malahat Review.

Reviews
Leblanc, John. “Male Expression.” Canadian Literature (November 1992): 179-181.
Clemence, Verne. “New writers reap rewards for Thistledown.” Saskatoon StarPhoenix. December 15, 1990.
Kelly, Elinor. Canadian Materials (March 1991): 128.
Kenyon, Michael. Malahat Review (April 1991): 108-9.
Moyles, R.G. Canadian Book Review Annual (1990): 196.
St. Jacques, Elizabeth. Freelance (December/January 1991-2): 38.
Gom, Leona. “Thistledown titles worthwhile fiction.” Edmonton Journal . June 16, 1991.

“This collection comes highly recommended. It is a sparkling, vigorous debut and bodes well for Ms. Berkeley's future in fiction.” — Irish Times.

“The Swimmer in the Deep Blue Dream is a collection of stories from a young writer with enormous talent.” 
— Sunday Press.

 Reviews

Keane, Madeleine. “Punching-in data of life.” Sunday Independent . December 1, 1991. S1.
McKay, Susan. “Writing comes naturally!” Sunday Press . November 1991.
Morrissy, Mary. “A sparkling debut.” Irish Times . December 28, 1991.
O'Donnell, Mary. “When she's good she's brilliant.” Sunday Business Post . December 1, 1991.
Robertson, Bill. “Three studies of the dark side of human relations.” Saskatoon Star-Phoenix .
“Weak links tarnish promising collection.” Sunday Press . December 1, 1991.

This special limited edition was published in handsomely designed cloth with dust jacket artwork by Kath Kornelson Rutherford. Each copy is numbered and signed by the author.

Man Facing West presents a collection of fiction and nonfiction, sewn together with traces of autobiography. This collection is part of Don Gayton’s ongoing life journal, recounting moments of his boyhood in the United States and the Peace Corps, and detailing his opinions regarding the draft and the Vietnam War. Guiding these accounts are the forces of science and geology that have shaped Gayton’s career in Canada.

As his stories of scheming university students, prodding 19th century scientists, and geologists time-tunneling into the prehistoric past of the prairies appear, we are always aware of Gayton’s ability to transform science into magic.

“Toil and Peaceful Life” is the axiom that lies at the heart of Doukhobor spiritual, personal, and community values. These values have always been, and continue to be, integral to the people who belong to this historically rich and vibrant community. However, as the history of the Doukhobor people demonstrates, putting this into practice was more difficult than envisioned and, paradoxically, has generated a great deal of conflict within the various spheres of the community itself — most certainly it has created conflicts with those from outside their self-contained community. It is at this juncture of conflict in the decades of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s that the name Doukhobor was to etch itself into the Canadian consciousness. Stenson sets his novel’s action against the backdrop of the Kootenay Region in and around Nelson, BC.

To say Svoboda is a “Doukhobor” novel is misleading, for it is much more than that. While Doukhobor culture plays a central role in creating conflict, from the first few pages right to the end, it is also a novel of coming of age, a novel of accepting fate, and a great entertaining story. The story of Vasili, who walks in the shadow of the past and in the light of the future, marks this novel as a distinctive cultural read in a territory where few writers have gone before.

  Unit Lessons Plan for Svoboda

Nick Faragher’s debut collection of short fiction deftly combines sharp-witted voyeurism, psychological twists, and an assembly of maladjusted characters whose dark desires govern their fates.
Set in 1960’s Greece the “The Watch Seller” and “Birds for Breakfast” turn on mystery and moral dilemma. Set in Italy, “Piazza del Cignois” details how lust and deceit easily conquer romance, while the title story, “The Well” unravels a contemporary account of deceit and Nazi ghosts. Faragher’s stories are relentless in their investigations of the alleys and sideroads of the human psyche, as witnessed in “The Promising Artist” — a sinister tale of a narcissistic man and an overweight young woman, and “A Wee Bit of Fun”, a story forged from a homophobic hate crime in Vancouver’s Stanley Park. Tense, compelling and unwavering in their truths, Faragher’s stories will linger long after the reading.

Alex was in harmony with the water. He taught himself to swim, and liked working the sea off Prince Edward Island as his fisherman father did, but he always yearned for something more. His brother Reggie despised it all — the water that brought death, the seasickness — and he longed for escape. Mercy Coles lived on the same island as Alex and Reggie, but lived in Charlottetown’s society and yearned for experience, wanting away.

All three would get their wish, but coincidence would shape those wishes in profound ways. Alex would find himself on a circus trapeze fated to meet the Niagara Falls tightrope artist, Farini. Reggie would join the farmers’ protests against the rent collectors, and battle the demons of guilt in the supposed death of his brother. Mercy would find herself landlocked on John A Macdonald’s mainland, a part of his campaign to promote Confederation. Repelled by his looks (he was considered by some to be “the ugliest man in Canada), but attracted by his charm and wit, she is unable to resist what he can offer her.

Anne McDonald weaves a series of spells that pull this beautifully written novel through a tightly woven script. Rich in tone and textured for a very rewarding reading experience, To the Edge of the Sea combines great storytelling with polished literary control.

In Nobody Cries At Bingo, the narrator, Dawn, invites the reader to witness first hand Dumont family life on the Okanese First Nation. Beyond the sterotypes and clichés of Rez dogs, drinking, and bingos, the story of a girl who loved to read begins to unfold. It is her hopes, dreams, and indomitable humour that lay bear the beauty and love within her family. It is her unerring eye that reveals the great bond of family expressed in the actions and affections of her sisters, aunties, uncles, brothers, cousins, nieces, nephews, and ultimately her ancestors.

It’s all here — life on the Rez in rich technicolour — as Dawn emerges from home life, through school life, and into the promise of a great future. Nobody Cries At Bingo embraces cultural differences and does it with the great traditional medicine of laughter.

• Shortlisted for the 2012 Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Award
• Shortlisted for the 2012 Alberta Readers Choice Award

 7 CDs Unabridged

“The Reddening Path is cleverly structured, with a style that fluctuates between dreamlike poetic imagery and a traditional quest-for-identity narrative . . . Hale’s novel is an intriguing look at post-colonial biculturalism set against a moving backdrop of familial love and personal enlightenment.” — Quill & Quire

Read by the author

Donald Ward’s stories in The Weeping Chair are confidently layered with unexpected situations and characters whose faith in themselves provides the strength to confront whatever weird or challenging experience befalls them. While Ward’s style is steeped in the traditional storytelling structures of Flannery O’Connor and P.G. Wodehouse, his highly imaginative settings and eccentric character profiles push the stories’ energies into contemporary spheres of literary entertainment. His thematic pursuits usually deal with the human willingness to carry on in the face of an often hostile and baffling universe, where nothing is as it first appears and that is clearly evident in this collection.

The Weeping Chair employs ideas that are both impossible and unexpected to serve as platforms for the edgy humour always lurking in the human condition and beyond: a race of superior chickens investigate their earthly origins, a badger shares his fears with a monk, a nasty grandmother’s false teeth take on symbolic power, and a female dwarf from the 17th century pursues an octogenarian at Starbucks — all serve as prime examples. With Ward’s stories you can always expect the unexpected and be assured that his intentions are not frivolous.

The stories in Sandy Bonny’s collection The Sometimes Lake will transport readers from the Arctic Circle to Alberta’s badlands, and from the waters of the Georgia Straight to the deep lasting space of the prairies. The characters that readers meet in these places will be oddly familiar or perhaps familiarly odd. There are children who live in the magical territory between their imagination and their parents’ realities; road builders from China and Australia who know the ghostly secrets at road’s end; men who shape their lives with the predictability of beehives; others who are confused by cultural shift or troubled by the security of cults; women who try to grieve for their unborn children, and others who play at suicide.

At the vortex of the surprising plots churns Bonny’s keen interest in science and its unexpected effect on human action and emotion. Her curiosity and scrutinizing intelligence as well as her ever playful wit guide the reader through close encounters with physical and psychological landscapes and then reveal the uncommon denominators in them that make people unique.

Ben Robe is a retired political science professor who has returned to his reserve at Moccasin Lake to live out his life in relative peace and solitude. But the complications of a sudden and intense US annexation of Canada change his plans. Cued into a Canadian resistance movement by his former student and lover, Monica, Ben soon learns that the layers of political and military activity go far beyond his careful social conscience in this dystopian world.

Radical young women like Monica, Betsy Chance, and Joan Lightning post one face of the resistance, while farmers like Abe Friesen, and Mennonite Mary Wiens post another. Paralleled with characters like these are the reserve’s citizens who remain sheltered from the immediate troubles down south, but must accept that they cannot remain passive forever.

The Cast Stone’s themes are not emphatic; rather they emerge slowly from within the narratives as Ben encounters the players in the Canadian resistance and must balance his call to civil action with the call to defend Canada amid the discovery of a son he never knew he had, his friendship with his neighbours, and the community elders with their long-standing knowledge of Treaties, history, and racial oppression conflict. The novel accents Ben’s struggles with his own desire for independence, love, and forgiveness, but at its core it remains a telling and passionate portrait of First Nations community life, the value and safety of family, and the need for friendship. It achieves an understanding of what an individual’s responsibilities are when civil liberty, order and stability are jeopardized by an occupying power, but shows that solitary acts of defiance that champion family trust and the individual’s capacity to love are their own agents of resistance.

For an ePub version of this eBook go to
Kobo
Amazon Kindle Store
or your favourite eBook store

In Nobody Cries At Bingo, the narrator, Dawn, invites the reader to witness first hand Dumont family life on the Okanese First Nation. Beyond the sterotypes and clichés of Rez dogs, drinking, and bingos, the story of a girl who loved to read begins to unfold. It is her hopes, dreams, and indomitable humour that lay bear the beauty and love within her family. It is her unerring eye that reveals the great bond of family expressed in the actions and affections of her sisters, aunties, uncles, brothers, cousins, nieces, nephews, and ultimately her ancestors.

It’s all here — life on the Rez in rich technicolour — as Dawn emerges from home life, through school life, and into the promise of a great future. Nobody Cries At Bingoembraces cultural differences and does it with the great traditional medicine of laughter.

For an ePub version of this eBook go to
Kobo
Amazon Kindle Store
or your favourite eBook store

 Alex was in harmony with the water. He taught himself to swim, and liked working the sea off Prince Edward Island as his fisherman father did, but he always yearned for something more. His brother Reggie despised it all — the water that brought death, the seasickness — and he longed for escape. Mercy Coles lived on the same island as Alex and Reggie, but lived in Charlottetown’s society and yearned for experience, wanting away.

All three would get their wish, but coincidence would shape those wishes in profound ways. Alex would find himself on a circus trapeze fated to meet the Niagara Falls tightrope artist, Farini. Reggie would join the farmers’ protests against the rent collectors, and battle the demons of guilt in the supposed death of his brother. Mercy would find herself landlocked on John A Macdonald’s mainland, a part of his campaign to promote Confederation. Repelled by his looks (he was considered by some to be “the ugliest man in Canada), but attracted by his charm and wit, she is unable to resist what he can offer her.

Anne McDonald weaves a series of spells that pull this beautifully written novel through a tightly woven script. Rich in tone and textured for a very rewarding reading experience, To the Edge of the Sea combines great storytelling with polished literary control.

For an ePub version of this eBook go to
Kobo
Amazon Kindle Store
or your favourite eBook store

 The woman is flying in small airplane and sees in the distance the great cumbrous mass of El Yunque, the flat-topped mesa that announces the historic town of Baracoa. She has likely heard the legend of the Honey River, where it is said that the person who bathes in its waters and gets married in Baracoa must stay there forever. She knows people in Baracoa. She is going to meet Onaldo, her Afro-Cuban lover, and she will become ‘Katrina’ to continue her private journals. In this series of linked fictions, unified by place and a cast of overlapping characters, Karina travels the length of El Caimán, the alligator which is Cuba.

The narratives that make up this book have their origins in Hale’s travel journal, but emerge as stories, arriving at that place just beyond creative non-fiction. Vivid and sensitive portraits are balanced with the dark undercurrents of Cuban life. Katrina witnesses how politics have re-shaped the culture and lives of the people she encounters, while she falls deeply in love with the true and hidden life of El Caimán.

For an ePub version of this eBook go to
Kobo
Amazon Kindle Store
or your favourite eBook store

 Britt Holmström’s stories contain all-too-human portraits meticulously rendered but with enough mischief and humour to keep the reader rapidly turning the pages. With an acutely clear eye she describes fateful events through narrators that are utterly authentic, and intimate. Her style is, as ever, incredibly lucid, her narrative powers effortless with a generous warmth of vision, her tone oscillating between gentle nihilism and practical optimism. Each tale bristles with a very human fierceness.

At the heart of each story is her remarkable ability to reveal painful truths visible only when we turn a critical eye upon ourselves. These are stories of hard-fought revelation where picaresque meets romance, tales of mismatched couples, doomed encounters, and “If only…” moments in Canada and abroad.

For an ePub version of this eBook go to
Kobo
Amazon Kindle Store
or your favourite eBook store