NOVEL

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The Beautiful Children
Michael Kenyon

ISBN 978-1-897235-47-8; paper;
$18.95 CAD; 192 pages , trade paper; March 2009

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

JUVENILE NOVEL

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Return To Bone Tree Hill
Kristin Butcher

ISBN 978-1-897235-58-4; paper;
$12.95 CAD; 144 pages , trade paper; March 2009

Did Jessica murder one of her playmates, a troubled boy named Charlie when she was twelve years old? A recurring dream forces her to ask that question. Disturbed by the vision and needing to clear her conscience, Jessica returns to Victoria, British Columbia, her hometown and the site of the possible crime. There she catches up with her longtime best friend, Jilly, who confirms that Charlie did in fact go missing the week that Jessica’s family relocated to Australia. But a memory-erasing bout of meningitis at the time of the incident means Jessica doesn’t recall the questioning police officers, the extensive ground search, or being the last person to see Charlie alive.

As a real best friend would, Jilly jumps head first into this six-year-old mystery and offers support during one of Jessica’s most trying times. She keeps Jessica from tackling the dangerous dilemma alone and summons the police when the two become neck deep in trouble. After a thrilling summer in Victoria will Jessica be able to acquit herself of murder before entering college in Calgary, or will her memory of Charlie’s death remain a fear she must learn to live with?

In Return to Bone Tree Hill, experienced YA writer Kristin Butcher chronicles a mystery that has the reader piecing together the evidence alongside Jessica and Jilly. From life and love conversations under the Bone Tree and the feverish nightmare that continues to offer nebulous clues, to midnight sleuthing and a few life or death confrontations, even the most reluctant readers will be caught up by the minute-to-minute action of these furtive, accidental detectives.

NOVEL

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World Rights Available

The Serpent's Veil
Maggi Feehan

ISBN 978-1-897235-56-0; paper;
$18.95 CAD; 276 pages , trade paper; March 2009

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.

NOVEL

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World Rights Available

Something To Hang On To
Beverley Brenna

ISBN 978-1-897235-57-7; paper;
$12.95 CAD; 144 pages , trade paper; March 2009

In the title story of Something to Hang On To, award-winning author Beverley Brenna develops the story of Taylor Jane Simon, the protagonist from her acclaimed young adult novel Wild Orchid, portraying Taylor’s return to city life after the wild orchid summer. Taylor’s story is just one narrative from the assembly of distinctive characters who inhabit this inventive collection of teen short stories, and readers will find the other characters just as compelling.

With warmth and immediacy, Brenna explores adversity from a variety of angles. Many protagonists in this collection deal with serious life issues: loss, family violence, autism, Down Syndrome, and marginalization by a society that judges without really seeing. From a boogie-boarding Australian who finds community in surfer culture to a young Cree girl with a unique gift, the twelve stories that comprise Something to Hang On To vary in time, place, and perspective. In addition to first and third person narrations, the collection even includes an existentialist one-act play. Offering pathos as well as zany humour, these stories share important messages about courage and finding your way, along with the belief that when the going gets tough, we all need something to hang on to.

POETRY

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Man Reading "Woman Reading in Bath"
John Livingstone Clark

ISBN 978-1-897235-59-1; paper;
$15.95 CAD; 80 pages , trade paper; March 2009

In his sixth poetry collection, John Livingstone Clark creates a series of meditations on, and poetic responses to the work of Anne Szumigalski: specifically the title poem from her debut collection Woman Reading in Bath, which is a radical, though humorous, deconstruction of all patriarchal theologies. Clark’s inspiration for this project was a question posed by the elder poet several times in her last few years: “Why do so many of my book titles have water in them?” For Clark, the poem “Woman Reading in Bath” reflects a number of major themes in her work, and by writing individual poems in relation to single lines (occasionally a couplet), the ‘mythopoesis” of her work could be opened up in a book of poetry.

Within this textual framework, Clark’s poems are dominated by the metaphor of a swimmer enveloped in a series of states and environments. From the personal to the universal, this collection is an ode to the harmonics of mind, body, and spirit. Why always about water? Characters and Selves within beg to know, and the swimmer reciprocates: the body is sixty-five percent water; the water breaks at birth; and in the unconscious process of Individuation, we are “drowning to life”.

POETRY

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World Rights Available

Paperwhite
Catherine Mamo

ISBN 978-1-897235-60-7; paper;
$15.95 CAD; 80 pages , trade paper; March 2009

In Catherine Mamo’s debut poetry collection, is a woman quietly buried, like dormant grass under months of snow, in a routine agenda: make meals, water the cactus, turn the baby, pay the mortgage, and pick up son at 2:00 pm from swimming. However, this poetry hosts an extraordinary, worldly voice that lives beyond the banality of chores, and understands the immensity of origin and coexistence. Whether Mamo is observing the evolution of a hoverfly or is contrasting her picket fence life with a scene of the Ganges “where wild dogs gnaw on charred corpses” she installs a remarkable balance between the concrete and imaginable. Where the mundane blurs and confuses the self, a mother escapes through her poet exoskeleton. Or is she a poet with a mother’s exoskeleton? A woman who wakes in the night holding scribbled notes feels the earth pulsate around her, finds meditation in laundry and snow; in the Ma — the space between.

Paperwhite is sound-rich with hums and chants, where butterflies are harmonic and “coyotes howl like ambulances”, and where a woman stands at the intersection of her life: remembering passed lovers and escaped dangers, searching for mid-life enlightenment, and projecting the loneliness of aging.