novel

Available in the US
World Rights Available

novel

Available in the US
World Rights Available

The Wolsenburg Clock
Jay Ruzesky

ISBN 978-1-897235-62-1 / trade paper
$18.95 CAD / 173 pages / September 2009

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.

Reading Group Guide

short fiction

Available in the US
World Rights Available

Nothing Sacred
Lori Hahnel

ISBN 978-1-897235-63-8 / trade paper
$16.95 CAD / 197 pages /September 2009

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.

“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

novel

Available in the US
World Rights Available

Reviews

The Beautiful Children
Michael Kenyon

ISBN 978-1-897235-47-8 / trade paper
$18.95 CAD / 192 pages / 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

Other Books by Michael Kenyon
The Biggest Animals

novel

Available in the US
World Rights Available

The Serpent's Veil
Maggi Feehan

ISBN 978-1-897235-56-0 / trade paper
$18.95 CAD / 269 pages / 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.

short fiction

Available in the US
World Rights Available

Reviews

The Old Familiar
Alix Hawley

ISBN 978-1-897235-49-2 / trade paper
$17.95 CAD / 279 pages / September 2008

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.

short fiction

Available in the US
World Rights Available

The Well and Other Stories
Nick Faragher

ISBN 978-1-897235-48-5 / trade paper;
$16.95 CAD / 197 pages / September 2008

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.

short fiction

Available in the US
World Rights Available

Reviews

Carnival Glass
Bonnie Dunlop

ISBN 978-1-897235-46-1 / trade paper
$16.95 CAD/ 271 pages / September 2008

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.

• Nominated for the 2008 Saskatchewan Book Award for Fiction

Other Books by Bonnie Dunlop
The Beauty Box

ISBN: 978-1-897235-39-3 / trade paper
$18.95 CAD/ 275 pages / January 2008

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