NOVEL

Water, H.E. Taylor

ISBN 978-1-897235-23-2; trade paper;
$17.95 CAD; 221 pages; May 2007

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.

NOVEL

The Reddening Path , Amanda Hale

ISBN 978-1-897235-26-3; trade paper;
$18.95 CAD; 368 pages; March 2007

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.

“A powerful and well-written novel.” — George Szanto

NOVEL

Shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize, Canada and Caribbean Region for Best First Book!

Post, Arley McNeney

ISBN 978-1-897235-28-7; trade paper;
$18.95 CAD; 474 pages; April 2007

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.

SHORT FICTION

Boundary Country, Tom Wayman

ISBN 978-1-897235-25-6; trade paper;
$18.95 CAD; 282 pages; April 2007

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, which first appeared in such journals as The Hudson Review, The Ontario Review, and Descant, 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. Wayman captures the voices of his characters in perfect pitch, their personalities echoing their geography, their substance steeped in authenticity, and their collective truth reminding us that the only true wilderness that remains is within ourselves.

LITERARY ESSAY

Emrys' Dream, Dwayne Brenna

ISBN 978-1-897235-27-0; trade paper;
$21.95; 96 pages, 8.25x10.5; May 2007
160 black & white photographs

It was both providence and necessity that created Canada’s and the Commonwealth’s first degree-granting drama department at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. Born out of the University’s Dramatic Society that flourished in the first three decades of the Twentieth Century, the Greystone Theatre emerged to become a force in theatre development and a prominent shaper in the family tree of Canadian theatre. Known for its program range — from classic repertory to cutting-edge new plays — it continues to this day to teach and inspire theatre production, management, artistic direction, and acting. Its history is a fascinating amalgam of anecdote, commentary, and biography that show its contribution to the cultural evolution of Canadian theatre in the last century.
Emrys’ Dream captures the energy that has driven and sustained the Greystone Theatre. Drawing on the well-preserved and substantial visual and written archives at the University of Saskatchewan, and selectively reconstructing interviews of directors, actors, and alumni whose Greystone experience animates the book’s text, actor, writer and present Greystone director, Dwayne Brenna, has forged a lively testament: that Emrys’ Dream is alive and the Greystone Theatre lives on revealing the quiet, steady influence it has had on Canadian theatre.

SHORT FICTION

All In Together Girls, Kate Sutherland

ISBN 978-1-897235-24-9; trade paper;
$12.95 CAD; 147 pages; March 2007

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.