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The Pious Robber List Price: $18.95 Few writers have Harriet Richards’ understanding of childhood, and fewer still can evoke the never-lost child at the heart of our adult experience. Like her previous, critically-acclaimed books, this new collection is deft, comic, and poignant, but there is malice and tragedy at work in these stories — their gaiety and cool observation counterbalance the troubled lives they explore. Winner of the 2013 Saskatchewan Book Award for Fiction Reviewed in the Saskatoon StarPhoenix Buy this book For an eBook version of this book go to: Kobo, Amazon Kindle Store, or your favourite eBook store

A Crowbar in the Buddhist Garden

List price: $18.98

Stephen Reid has grown old in prison and seen more than his share of its solitude, its vicious cycles, and its subculture relationships. He has learned that everything is bearable, and that sorrow must be kept close, buried in a secret garden of the self, if one is to survive. 

Each of the essays in this collection is a recognition of how Reid’s imprisonment has shaped his life. Some describe his fractured boyhood, others detail the seductive rush and notoriety of the criminal life. There are the regrets too of how his choices have impacted the lives of his daughters, wife, and family. But in each essay the refrain is “prison life”, whether it is measuring the integrity of the books in the prison library, the violence and primal intimidation inherent in all-male communities, or the torment and solace of solitary confinement. 

"This is an important collection of essays, one that should be read by lawyers and police, by corrections officers and psychologists and, yes, most of all, by ordinary citizens and the politicians who purport to represent them." Lynn Van Luven, The Coastal Spectator

Reviewed in the Globe & Mail
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Given
List price: $19.95

The characters from Susan Musgrave’s Cargo of Orchids are back in this brilliantly engaging novel. Rainy, the Mexican-American woman, and Frenchy, the African-American, along with Musgrave’s narrator X, once inmates on death row, now reunited and hanging out at an old house in a BC outport, create a grand new afterlife adventure. As we are shuttled along an energetic storyline in an old hearse, through gated communities in Vancouver to BC’s First Nations island outposts, we witness the transformation of lives on the slopes of purgatory. The passageways are rife with wild rides, social satire and visually hilarious encounters. Musgrave’s comic gifts and ability to transcend this earthly plane create a ghost story that becomes a masterful allegory for personal loss and the potency of love.

Reviewed in the Vancouver Sun
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Dibidalen

List Price: $18.95

Seán Virgo knows the power of short fiction. He knows that the act of story-telling is hardwired into human consciousness and that the well-told story can appear in various shapes and sizes.

In Dibidalen, Virgo traces the journey and guises of a primitive story of transgression and transformation as it weaves its way through the centuries reinventing itself as fable, fairy tale, ghost story, and fantasy. The result is a fascinating dance between reader and text that is as rewarding as it is challenging, reminding us of what Anaïs Nin meant when she said, “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”

Nominated for the 2012 Saskatchewan Book Award for Fiction

Reviewed in theSaskatoon StarPhoenix
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