Books

Previously published as Dead Cold

A New York Times Bestseller

'Chief Superintendent Armand Gamache of the Quebec police isone of the most interesting detectives in crime fiction' The Times

Winter in Three Pines, and the sleepy village is carpeted in snow. It's a time of peace and goodwill - until a scream pierces the biting air. A spectator at the annual Boxing Day curling match has been fatally electrocuted. Despite the large crowd, there are no witnesses and - apparently - no clues.

Chief Inspector Armand Gamache discovers a history of secrets and enemies in the dead woman's past. But he has enemies of his own, and as he is frozen out of decision-making in the Surete du Quebec, he has to decide who he can trust...

'A cracking storyteller, who can create fascinating characters, a twisty plot and wonderful surprise endings' Ann Cleeves

Louise Penny is the number one New York Times bestselling author of the Inspector Gamache series, including Still Life, which won the CWA John Creasey Dagger in 2006. Recipient of virtually every existing award for crime fiction, Louise was also granted the Order of Canada in 2014 and received an honorary doctorate of literature from Carleton University and the Ordre Nationale du Québec in 2017. She lives in a small village south of Montreal.

An affecting glimpse into the ways millennials cope with mental health struggles

Clara's at a breaking point. She's got writer's block, her friends ask a lot without giving much, her psychologist is useless, and her demanding publishing job leaves little time for self care. She seeks solace in the community around her, yet, while her friends provide support and comfort, she is often left feeling empty, unable to express an underlying depression that leaves her immobilized and stifles any attempts at completing her poetry collection. In This Is How I Disappear, Mirion Malle paints an empathetic portrait of a young woman wrestling with psychological stress and the trauma following a sexual assault.

Malle displays frankness and a remarkable emotional intelligence as she explores depression, isolation, and self-harm in her expertly drawn novel. Her heroine battles an onslaught of painful emotions and while Clara can provide consolation to those around her, she finds it difficult to bestow the same understanding on herself. Only when she allows her community to guide her toward self-love does she find relief.

Filled with 21st century idioms and social media communication, This Is How I Disappear opens a window onto the lives of young people as they face a barrage of mental health hurdles. Scenes of sisterhood, fun nights out singing karaoke, and impromptu FaceTime therapy sessions show how this generation is coping, connecting, and healing together.

Mirion Malle is a French cartoonist and illustrator who lives in Montreal. She studied comics at the École Superieure des Arts Saint-Luc in Brussels before pursuing a master's degree in sociology specializing in gender and feminist studies, via Université Paris Diderot and the Université du Québec á Montréal. Malle has published three books. The League of Super Feminists was her first book to be translated into English and was nominated for the 2020 Prix Jeunesse at the Angoulême International Comics Festival.

She met the man of her dreams and suddenly had it all. Then, in one fateful night, she lost everything, and the nightmare began

Jennifer Robertson was working hard to build a life for herself from the ashes of her first marriage. Still only twenty-six, she swiped right on a dating app and met Gerry Cotten, a man she would not normally have considered—too young and not her type—but found she’d met her match. Eccentric but funny and kind, Cotten turned out to be a bitcoin wizard who quickly amassed substantial wealth through his company, Quadriga. The couple travelled the world, first class all the way, while Cotten worked on his multitude of encrypted laptops. Then, while the couple was on their honeymoon in India, opening an orphanage in their name, Gerry fell ill and died in a matter of hours. Jennifer was consumed by grief and guilt, but that was only the beginning. It turned out that Gerry owed $250 million to Quadriga customers, and all the passwords to his encrypted virtual vaults, hidden on his many laptops, had died with him. Jennifer was left with more than one hundred thousand investors looking for their money, and questions, suspicions and accusations spiralling dangerously out of control. 

The Quadriga scandal touched off major investment and criminal investigations, not to mention Internet rumours circulating on dark message boards, including claims that Gerry had faked his own death and that his wife was the real mastermind behind a sophisticated sting operation. While Jennifer waited for a dead man’s switch e-mail that would probably never come, it became clear that Cotten had gambled away about $100 million of the funds entrusted to him for investment in his many schemes, leaving Robertson holding the bag. 

Bitcoin Widow is Catch Me If You Can meets a widow betrayed, a life of fairy-tale romance and private jets torched by duplicity, as Jennifer Robertson tries to reset her life in the wake of one of the biggest investment scandals of the digital age.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

“One of [Mandel’s] finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet.” —The New York Times 

“Mandel’s sensational sixth novel offers immense pleasures of puzzle box plotting and high-flying imagination. . . . Masterfully plotted and deeply moving, this visionary novel folds back on itself like a hall of mirrors to explore just what connects us to one another, and how many extraordinary contingencies bring us to each ordinary day of our lives.” —Esquire  

From the acclaimed, bestselling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel, a “bold and exciting” (The Economist) and “transcendent” (Wall Street Journal) novel filled with “puncturing emotional truths” (Glamour)  

In this captivating tale of imagination and ambition, a seemingly disparate array of people come into contact with a time traveller who must resist the pull to change the past and the future. The cast includes a British exile on the west coast of Canada in the early 1900s; the author of a bestselling novel about a fictional pandemic who embarks on a galaxy-spanning book tour during the outbreak of an actual pandemic; a resident of a moon colony almost 300 years in the future; and a lonely girl who films an old-growth forest and experiences a disruption in the recording. Blurring the lines between reality and fantasy, Emily St. John Mandel’s dazzling story follows these engrossing characters across space and time as their lives ultimately intersect.

Sea of Tranquility is a breathtaking and wondrous examination of the ties that bind us together, by a master storyteller. 

Critical Praise

“Mandel is an easy read…No matter where or when we touch down we feel at home in worlds much like our own….Which may be the point she’s getting at: we’re all, and will always be, part of a larger human story. In the face of pandemic or other catastrophes, all roads lead to home, whether those roads connect to the far edge of the Western world or the Far Colonies of space.” — Toronto Star

“In Mandel’s stunning latest, people find themselves inhabiting different places and times, from early 20th-century Canada to a 23rd-century moon colony… The novel’s narratives crystallize flawlessly. Brilliantly combining imagery from science fiction and the current pandemic, Mandel grounds her rich metaphysical speculation in small, beautifully observed human moments. By turns playful, tragic, and tender, this should not be missed.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"A complicated and mysterious puzzle concerning the nature of reality solved perfectly, all loose ends connected...Even more boldly imagined than Station Eleven. Exciting to read, relevant, and satisfying." — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“In Sea of Tranquility, Mandel offers one of her finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet, but it is her ability to convincingly inhabit the ordinary, and…project a sustaining acknowledgment of beauty, that sets the novel apart…Born of…empathy and hard-won understanding, beautifully built into language, for all of us who inhabit this ‘green-and-blue world’ and who one day might live well beyond.”  — New York Times Magazine

“Sea of Tranquility is broader in scope than any of Mandel’s previous novels, voyaging profligately across lands and centuries…Destabilizing, extraordinary, and blood-boiling…Mandel weds a sharp, ambivalent self-accounting—the type of study that tends to wear the label ‘autofiction’—to a speculative epic. We are shown what two forms can offer each other, and exposed to the interrogating possibilities of science fiction.”  — New Yorker

“‘Reality is things as they are,’ Wallace Stevens declared, and who could argue with that? Well, legions of philosophers and any number of novelists, among them Emily St. John Mandel, who, like an ingenious origami artist, seems determined with each new work to add yet another fold to our perception of what is real and one further twist to what we think of as time…Transcendent.”  — Wall Street Journal

"Mandel delivers...with an impish blend of wit and dread. The paradoxes of Gaspery’s adventure will be familiar to anyone who’s studied Jean Baudrillard or seen “Back to the Future.” But Mandel has the stylistic elegance and emotional sympathy to make this more than merely an undergraduate bull session. Absent your own time portal to the 1990s, it’s a chance to... wrestle with the mind-blowing possibility that what is may be entirely different from what we see." — Washington Post

"An emotionally devastating novel about human connection: what we are to one another—and what we should be."  — Omar El Akkad, author of What Strange Paradise

“I could write a thousand words about Emily St. John Mandel, and this book, and this moment but I won’t dare spoil it. Truly soul-affirming.” — Emma Straub, best-selling author of All Adults Here

"A spiraling, transportive triumph of storytelling—sci-fi with soul." — Kiran Millwood Hargrave, author of The Mercies

"Bold and exciting...Sea of Tranquility is Ms Mandel’s most ambitious novel yet (which is saying something). Inventive and...mind-bending, thanks to her disrupted timelines and fully realised vision of lunar settlements and parallel universes...Her depiction of a future pandemic is recognisable and touching...An illuminating study of survival and, in the words of one character, 'what makes a world real.'" — The Economist

“Fusing sci-fi and great storytelling, this imaginative novel from the author of Station Eleven explores how technology might control our fate if we abandon compassion.” — People

"St. John Mandel’s tender and idiosyncratic novel will undeniably make its own mark on its readers’ imaginations." — The Guardian

"Mandel’s sensational sixth novel offers immense pleasures of puzzle box plotting and high-flying imagination...Masterfully plotted and deeply moving, this visionary novel folds back on itself like a hall of mirrors to explore just what connects us to one another, and how many extraordinary contingencies bring us to each ordinary day of our lives." — Esquire

“Sea Of Tranquility is a poignant, ingeniously constructed and deeply absorbing novel that surveys big questions about the cruel inevitability of time passing, loss, the nature of what we consider reality and, in the end, what finally matters…Mandel is an important novelist of our moment, but doesn't settle for merely replicating our moment. She inhabits it even as she sees beyond it.”  — Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air

"There is both elegance and tenderness in Mandel’s narrative design...For her, science fiction allows us only enough escape from our context to let us regard it from a softening distance." — The Nation

“Lovely, life-affirming…The project of Sea of Tranquility is about finding meaning and beauty within a world that is constantly dying, about relishing a life that seems always on the cusp of awful and irrevocable change…. Mandel’s prose is shot through with moments of unexpected lyricism…that take you by surprise with their limpid sweetness… Nourishing and needed. The world is always ending, this book says, and there is always beauty to be found in it.” — Vox

"If there is one thing Emily St. John Mandel is going to do, it’s tell a story that’s so good that you’ll keep reading even though the plot includes pandemics and loss and the frightening future of the planet. St John Mandel’s swift storytelling and puncturing emotional truths will leave you wishing it was hundreds of pages longer. She remains an instant-buy writer." — Glamour

“‘When have we ever believed that the world wasn’t ending?’ asks a character in Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility… At a time when that fear is so acutely alive, the question is revelatory. While Mandel focuses on many of the things that terrify us, she also illustrates how hope and humanity are flames that can never be fully extinguished.” — Elle

"With vivid and memorable characters, gorgeously imaginative settings and a plot that will have you gasping aloud, it ping-pongs from an eerie encounter in North America in 1912 to the anxiety of trying to escape a plague-ravaged Earth to moon colonies that feel at once just like home and far from it. This is a triumph of science fiction, so give it a try even if the genre usually leaves you cold."  — Good Housekeeping

"Survival, [Mandel] has suggested again and again, may depend more on one’s ability to love than on how well-appointed a fortress one’s bunker is….Mandel almost seems to be looking straight at the reader…asking us, in effect, to look beyond the spectacle of apocalypse to the long sweep of history. The point isn’t the end, because there isn’t a definitive end, just a series of endings. The point is what the people left do next.”
— Oprah Daily

"It is the human story that Mandel excels at portraying...Her writing on nature echoes a brutal solitude, the unease that comes when one ascends a mountain, crosses an expanse of golden plains, or finds themselves floating in space." — Nylah Burton, Shondaland

“Readers of Mandel’s other novels will remember her talent for subtly interweaving disparate narratives, and Sea of Tranquility rises to that area of expertise….Mandel masterfully connects characters’ observations and senses within any given moment….Sea of Tranquility is…for anyone who wants to think about what the end of the world means, and how our lives matter in the face of it.” — Observer-Reporter (Pennsylvania)

"Reading about a pandemic when the real world is still recovering from one would have been heavy going, were it not for the unerring grace of Mandel's prose." — The Straits Times

“A very knowing novel…Powerful…Very enjoyable…A book brimming with a sense of wonder, a sense of humour, and a sense for the weirdness we’ve all been experienc­ing over the last couple of years.” — Locus

“Each character alone could probably carry a book, and so could the picture — not rosy, but hardly hopeless — that Mandel paints of a future Earth…Generous with flashes of wry humor…Mandel’s style is distinctly her own, and she excels at bringing brightness out of the dark. Readers will leave Sea of Tranquility like Station Eleven before it, feeling hope for humanity.”  — Gail Pennington, St. Louis Post Dispatch

"A full-on mind-blower. Inspired by real-world ills and eccentric philosophical theories, Mandel has crafted an enthralling narrative puzzle, plunging her relatable characters into a tale that spans five centuries." — Kevin Canfield, StarTribune

“This slim novel is written in a cool, elegant voice, like that of a singer who never wastes a note and who suggests strong emotion underneath her reserve.” — Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

"Mandel's writing is incredibly fluid and gripping and never failed to keep me reading." — The Eastern Echo

“A time-travel puzzle…Mandel’s prose is beautiful but unfussy; some chapters are compressed into a few poetic lines. The story moves quickly…In the end, the novel’s interlocking plot resolves beautifully, making for a humane and moving time-travel story, as well as a meditation on loneliness and love.” — BookPage

"Sea of Tranquility is [Mandel's] airship, offering readers a lifeline, and transporting them on a thrilling, wistful and memorable journey into the stars." — Jodé Millman, Booktrib

One of Canada’s most celebrated author’s debut novel for young readers

Beatrice, a young girl of uncertain age, wakes up all alone in a tree house in the forest. How did she arrive in this cozy dwelling, stocked carefully with bookshelves and oatmeal accoutrements? And who has been leaving a trail of clues, composed in delicate purple handwriting?

So begins the adventure of a brave and resilient Black girl’s search for identity and healing in bestselling author Lawrence Hill’s middle-grade debut. Though Beatrice cannot recall how or why she arrived in the magical forest of Argilia—where every conceivable fish, bird, mammal and reptile coexist, and any creature with a beating heart can communicate with any other—something within tells her that beyond this forest is a family that is waiting anxiously for her return.

Just outside her tree-house door lives Beatrice’s most unlikely ally, the enormous and mercurial King Crocodile Croc Harry, who just may have a secret of his own. As they form an unusual truce and work toward their common goal, Beatrice and Croc Harry will learn more about their forest home than they ever could have imagined. And what they learn about themselves may destroy Beatrice’s chances of returning home forever.

Critical Praise

"At once a perfectly delightful childhood adventure story and a heart wrenching tale about very real, very current events, and the power of friendship and forgiveness to help heal divides at a time when we need it most. Lawrence Hill engages the reader with whimsy and humour, then slowly peels back the layers to some harder truths beneath. I loved this book so much." — Susin Nielsen, author of Tremendous Things and We Are All Made of Molecules

"Like the most memorable books for young people, Beatrice and Croc Harry touches heart, mind, and an ageless sense of wonder. A modern fable of great beauty and sophistication, it teaches us about the forging of unlikely alliances and the quest for truths and good relations in the mysterious and often frightening settings that we have found ourselves within. It teaches us, too, about the awesome courage of a Black girl in discovering herself and pursuing her own ending to a story. Lawrence Hill has poured so much of his celebrated wisdom, wit, and storytelling magic into these pages; and the result is a book to treasure and share across generations." — David Chariandy, author of Brother and I’ve Been Meaning To Tell You

"If Alice in Wonderland, Brown Girl Dreaming, the Wizard of Oz were overlayed with racial violence, integration, and racial identity circa 1950 to 2021, there would be Beatrice and Croc Harry-- a journey of epic proportions. Told in vibrant language about an intelligent, assertive but amnesic girl, the novel follows Beatrice through the Magical Argilia Forest as she, with the help of an overbearing crocodile, pieces together clues that hint to her origins and lead her home. This story has a familiar yet endearing quality that harkens back to children’s literature from the turn of the century." — Nadia L. Hohn, author of Malaika's Surprise

Netflix’s Never Have I Ever meets Crazy Rich Asians with a Nigerian twist in this brilliant young-adult novel about being caught in between worlds

The only things worth doing are those that will lead to success.

For seventeen-year-old Adanna Nkwachi, life is all about duty: to school and the debate team, to her Nigerian parents, and even to her cousin Genny as Ada helps prepare Genny’s wedding to Afrobeats superstar Skeleboy. Because ever since her older brother, Sam, had a fight with their parents a few years ago and disappeared, somebody has to fill the void he left behind. Ada may never know what caused Sam to leave home, but the one thing she’s certain of is that it’s on her to make sure her parents’ sacrifices aren’t in vain.

One day, chance brings the siblings back together and they start working to repair their bond. Although she fears how their parents will react if they find out, Ada is determined to get answers about the night Sam left—Sam, who was supposed to be an engineer but is now, what, a poet? The more she learns about Sam’s poetry, the more Ada begins to wonder if maybe being happy is just as important as doing what’s expected of her. Amid parental pressure, anxiety over the debate competition, a complicated love life and the Nigerian wedding-to-end-all-weddings, can Ada learn, just this once, to put herself first?

In ten vividly told stories, Shimmer follows characters through relationships, within social norms, and across boundaries of all kinds as they shimmer into and out of each other’s lives.

Outside a 7-Eleven, teen boys Veeper and Wendell try to decide what to do with their night, though the thought of the rest of their lives doesn’t seem to have occurred to them. In Laurel Canyon, two movie stars try to decide if the affair they’re having might mean they like each other. When Byron, trying to figure out the chords of a song he likes, posts a question on a guitar website, he ends up meeting Jessica as well, a woman with her own difficult music. And when the snide and sharp-tongued Twyla agrees to try therapy, not even she would have imagined the results.

Praise for Shimmer

“Looking at Shimmer as a whole, one is struck by Pugsley’s mastery of the short-story form, his ability to distil entire lives’ worth of meaning into a few short pages. He’s not just a writer to watch: he’s a writer to savour.”—Robert Wiersema, Toronto Star

“His greatest gift as a writer is, I believe, his ability to carry dialogue … a brave departure from the highly-praised Aubrey McKee.”—Miramichi Reader

“Pugsley brings out the confusion of life well. No one is in control. Everyone has doubts about themselves and others. His ability to show the twists and turns of our constant, anxious questioning of ourselves makes each story revelatory in a different way. A truly impressive collection!”—Ottawa Review of Books

“[Pugsley’s] story proves that the digital mode of communication, while frequently castigated as impersonal and dehumanizing, can, in the right hands, carry with it strong emotional resonance.”—Steven Beattie, That Shakespearean Rag

“Pugsley excels at putting life on the page, mainly because he uses a profusion of concrete details. He out-Dickens Dickens. And it works.”—Maple Tree Literary Supplement

“Alex Pugsley’s Shimmer (2022) offers a character for every reading mood…poignant and moving.”—Buried in Print

Praise for Alex Pugsley

“Aubrey McKee is no austere, white-walled art gallery of a novel. It’s abundant, highly decorated, and unafraid of extravagance, of stylistic excess … From ordinary incidents — a childhood acquaintance, marital strife, a wedding — as well as a few extraordinary ones, Aubrey McKee builds a dazzling and complicated world, a childhood in Halifax as a vibrant universe in itself. While Pugsley’s literary performance is an immediate delight, the portrait of the early days of a ‘wayward oddity’ lingers long after.”—Toronto Star

“Evoking comparisons in both style and substance to the work of John Irving and Robertson Davies in its assemblage of perceptive, richly detailed character studies … The life of a Canadian city is revealed with verve and insight.”—Kirkus

“Although many peoples’ stories comprise the whole of Aubrey McKee, the city of Halifax is also a feature character … the reverence Pugsley provides about Halifax will resonate with anyone thinking about their own hometown, no matter its size or location … The richly defined personalities in Aubrey McKee are void of pretense or judgment and are, at once, knowable. Like a favourite song, it’s the hook that makes the adventures of Aubrey McKee and those he cares about so memorable.”—Winnipeg Free Press

“Pugsley, equal parts poet and meticulous historian of his own private Halifax, has accomplished, with “Aubrey McKee,” a work of high literary art, remaking and claiming the city as his own once again in a sustained performance that pulses with that deep, radical love.”—John Delacourt, The Ottawa Review of Books

“The mesmerizing, kaleidoscopic Halifax depicted in Aubrey McKee is as enchanted as it is benighted, an adolescent fever-dream. This is a rollicking, strange and unforgettable coming of age novel unlike anything you’ve ever read.”—Lynn Coady, Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning author of Hellgoing

“His prose style is among the finest anywhere: humorous, economical, deft without sacrificing accessibility, capable of laying bare the complicated depths, the tenderness, and the strangeness of personal relationships.”—Roo Borson, Griffin Poetry Prize-winning author of Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida

“Alex Pugsley’s novel, Aubrey McKee, is a whip-smart portrait of the artist at the end of the twentieth century. Funny and wildly intelligent, it captures a somewhat tragic cohort of young, ambitious Haligonians trying to become themselves, all seen through the eyes of the narrator, a young man of incomplete wisdom. In quicksilver prose, Pugsley shows us a whole generation, some of whom are lost, some found, but all viewed with a profound, comic humanity.”—Michael Redhill, Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning author of Bellevue Square

“A wonderful book, it absolutely floored me. It’s been a very long time since I’ve read anything like it … I found Aubrey McKee to be more reminiscent of Dubliners by James Joyce, not only because the sense of place is so strong, but because the narrative in this book is told through interconnected stories.”—Bookin’

Profound, perceptive, and wryly observed, Estates Large and Small is the story of one man’s reckoning and an ardent defense of the shape books make in a life.

What decades of rent increases and declining readership couldn’t do, a pandemic finally did: Phil Cooper has reluctantly closed his secondhand bookstore and moved his business online. Smoking too much pot and listening to too much Grateful Dead, he suspects that he’s overdue when it comes to understanding the bigger picture of who he is and what we’re all doing here. So he’s made another decision: to teach himself 2,500 years of Western philosophy.

Thankfully, he meets Caroline, a fellow book lover who agrees to join him on his trek through the best of what’s been thought and said. But Caroline is on her own path, one that compels Phil to rethink what it means to be alive in the twenty-first century. In Estates Large and Small Ray Robertson renders one man’s reckoning with both wry humour and tender joy, reminding us of what it means to live, love, and, when the time comes, say goodbye.

Praise for Estates Large and Small

“This wry novel follows a struggling used bookstore owner and Grateful Dead fan as he grudgingly moves his store online, decides to teach himself two millenniums of Western philosophy, falls in love and attempts to pin down the point of life.”—New York Times

“Ray Robertson asks us to think about life as a rental, and to make the best out of it before our lease runs out.”—Literary Review of Canada

“Estates Large and Small is a thoughtful book that manages to make its serious existential themes both entertaining and, yes, hopeful.”—Ottawa Review of Books

“The issues, relationships and real-life collisions in the novel keep reminding the reader that an intellectual exercise by itself doesn’t offer much beyond intellectual satisfaction. Estates Large and Small offers so much more if you can handle the trepidation it shares.”—Winnipeg Free Press

“With the publication of Estates Large and Small, novelist Ray Robertson succeeds in reminding his readers just what it means to live, love, and (when the time comes) to say goodbye. Deftly crafted and memorable characters, a narrative storyline laced with humor and acute observation.”—Midwest Book Review

“Chatham-born author Ray Robertson likes to tell a story in his novels that makes his readers ponder their own lives. He’s hit the mark again with Estates Large and Small.”—Chatham Daily News

“Ray Robertson’s novel Estates Large and Small is both poignant and heartwarming.”—Largehearted Boy

“A warmhearted and unconventional love story that’s also an opportunity for a gentle encounter with some of life’s fundamental questions … With Phil’s droll humor and world-weary cynicism, and Caroline’s clear-eyed determination to live her final days on her own terms, the two make for an appealing couple. Like the philosophers they encounter, Estates Large and Small only hints at answers to life’s deepest mysteries, but it’s a wise reminder that the journey is really the point.”—Harvey Freedenberg, Shelf Awareness

Praise for Ray Robertson

“While How to Die is a slim book, it offers some hefty insights, leavened with frequent, self-effacing humour. There are numerous passages here which, while quick to read (the book is very accessible, despite its philosophical bona fides), nonetheless take hours to fully internalize … Brilliant.” —Toronto Star

“Robertson is a moral writer and a bitingly intelligent one, a man who writes with penetrating insight of what needs to be written about: beauty, truth and goodness.”—Globe and Mail

“Heartfelt, funny, rigorous, practical without ever being preachy … a book that feels like a friend.”—Montreal Gazette

“Sharp-tongued … as Robertson ponders family and home as well as ‘what it means to love someone and to lose someone and to have to go on living anyway,’ he presents an intriguing character whose very real troubles are offset by bright flashes of hope.”—Publishers Weekly

“One of the country’s finest literary voices.”—National Post

“Many of us sense that the world has too many moving parts and can become utterly defeated. Ray Robertson has found a road back in this splendid and intriguing book [Why Not: Fifteen Reasons to Live].”—Jim Harrison

Award-winning Indigenous author Harold R. Johnson discusses the promise and potential of storytelling.

Approached by an ecumenical society representing many faiths, from Judeo-Christians to fellow members of First Nations, Harold R. Johnson agreed to host a group who wanted to hear him speak about the power of storytelling. This book is the outcome of that gathering. In The Power of Story, Johnson explains the role of storytelling in every aspect of human life, from personal identity to history and the social contracts that structure our societies, and illustrates how we can direct its potential to re-create and reform not only our own lives, but the life we share. Companionable, clear-eyed, and, above all, optimistic, Johnson’s message is both a dire warning and a direct invitation to each of us to imagine and create, together, the world we want to live in.

Praise for The Power of Story

“Johnson’s idea is a powerful one: that a person is not only the ‘author’ but also the ‘editor’ of his or her life, that reframing a narrative is enough to change it.”
—Literary Review of Canada

“By examining Indigenous stories, ways of living, dying, and—yes—laughing, Johnson … offer[s] powerful alternatives to hierarchical structures of society that insist on consuming the Earth’s natural resources at an unsustainable pace.”
—Steven Beattie, That Shakespearean Rag

“Recently in conversation with a friend I remarked that the whole world is a story. Harold Johnson fills that phrase with profound meaning in The Power of Story as he takes ancient figures and modernizes their storied wit and role in creating the worlds we perceive and the boundaries we need. Harold blessed us one last time with a profound conversation on the role of story in every aspect of our lives.”
—Michelle Good, author of Five Little Indians

“The Power of Story begins where all great stories begin: around a fire. Harold Johnson gives us a seat at the fire to listen and take into ourselves some spellbinding, bracing, and provocative stories told with a view to healing and transforming. As Harold writes ‘It’s starting to get darker now, and a bright fire will help.’ The Power of Story is that bright fire. And it will help. His final book is a balm for our times.”
—Shelagh Rogers

Praise for Harold R. Johnson

“An extraordinary memoir by a Cree writer who understands the damage alcohol does when used to kill the pain caused by white Canadians stealing and torturing Indigenous children throughout this nation’s history. I know many white alcoholics but it’s always ‘the drunk Indian.’ Why? Firewater is a great book; it burns in the hand.”
—Toronto Star

“A natural storyteller, Johnson seeks imagined pasts and futurity with equal parts longing and care. This work allows readers and writers the possibility of new and ancient modes of storytelling.”
—Tracey Lindberg, author of Birdie

“A luminous, genre-bending memoir. Heartache and hardship are no match for the disarming whimsy, the layered storytelling shot through with love. The power of land, the pull of family, the turbulence of poverty are threads woven together with explorations of reality, tackling truth with a trickster slant.”
—Eden Robinson, author of Son of a Trickster

“Written in the style of a kitchen-table conversation, Johnson’s personal anecdotes and perceptive analysis are a call to return to a traditional culture of sobriety … [a] well-argued case.”
—Publishers Weekly

A defense of the dying art of losing an afternoon—and gaining new appreciation—amidst the bins and shelves of bricks-and-mortar shops.

Written during the pandemic, when the world was marooned at home and consigned to scrolling screens, On Browsing’s essays chronicle what we’ve lost through online shopping, streaming, and the relentless digitization of culture. The latest in the Field Notes series, On Browsing is an elegy for physical media, a polemic in defense of perusing the world in person, and a love letter to the dying practice of scanning bookshelves, combing CD bins, and losing yourself in the stacks.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

From beloved astrologer Chani Nicholas comes an essential guide for radical self-acceptance.

Your weekly horoscope is merely one crumb of astrology’s cake. In her first book You Were Born For This, Chani shows how your birth chart—a snapshot of the sky at the moment you took your first breath—reveals your unique talents, challenges, and opportunities. Fortified with this knowledge, you can live out the life you were born to. Marrying the historic traditions of astrology with a modern approach, You Were Born for This explains the key components of your birth chart in an easy to use, choose your own adventure style. With journal prompts, reflection questions, and affirmations personal to your astrological makeup, this book guides you along the path your chart has laid out for you.

Chani makes the wisdom of your birth chart accessible with three foundational keys:

• The First Key: Your Sun (Your Life’s Purpose)        
• The Second Key: Your Moon (Your Physical and Emotional Needs)
• The Third Key: Your Ascendant and Its Ruler (Your Motivation for Life and the Steersperson of Your Ship)

Astrology is not therapy, but it is therapeutic. In a world in which we are taught to look outside of ourselves for validation, You Were Born for This brings us inward to commit to ourselves and our life’s purpose.

“We can do this!” Hayley Wickenheiser calls to her team as they skate out onto the ice. It’s been a long journey to the Olympics, but Hayley has worked hard to get here. From early-morning practices to playing with boys hockey teams during her childhood, from being the youngest player on Team Canada to winning two Olympic gold medals, Hayley knows she can make history again.

Ideal for young hockey fans and future stars, this level-2 I Can Read book is perfect for children learning to sound out words and sentences.

A narrative that amplifies a voice rarely heard—that of the child at the centre of a transracial adoption—and a searing account of being raised by religious fundamentalists

Harrison Mooney was born to a West African mother and adopted as an infant by a white evangelical family. Growing up as a Black child, Harry’s racial identity is mocked and derided, while at the same time he is made to participate in the fervour of his family’s revivalist church. Confused and crushed by fundamentalist dogma and consistently abused for his colour, Harry must transition from child to young adult while navigating and surviving zealotry, paranoia and prejudice.

After years of internalized anti-Blackness, Harry begins to redefine his terms and reconsider his history. His journey from white cult to Black consciousness culminates in a moving reunion with his biological mother, who waited twenty-five years for the chance to tell her son the truth: she wanted to keep him.

This powerful memoir considers the controversial practice of transracial adoption from the perspective of families that are torn apart and children who are stripped of their culture, all in order to fill evangelical communities’ demand for babies. Throughout this most timely tale of race, religion and displacement, Harrison Mooney’s wry, evocative prose renders his deeply personal tale of identity accessible and light, giving us a Black coming-of-age narrative set in a world with little love for Black children.

A poignant and evocative novel about the bonds of family and the gifts offered by the land

When a troubled father and his estranged teenage daughter head out onto the land in search of the family trapline, they find their way back to themselves, and to each other

Deep in the night, Matthew paces the house, unable to rest. Though his sixteen-year-old daughter, Holly, lies sleeping on the other side of the bedroom door, she is light years away from him. How can he bridge the gap between them when he can’t shake the emptiness he feels inside? Holly knows her father is drifting further from her; what she doesn’t understand is why. Could it be her fault that he seems intent on throwing everything away, including their relationship?

Following a devastating tragedy, Matthew and Holly head out onto the land in search of a long-lost cabin on the family trapline, miles from the Cree community they once called home. But each of them is searching for something more than a place. Matthew hopes to reconnect with the father he has just lost; Holly goes with him because she knows the father she is afraid of losing won’t be able to walk away.

When things go wrong during the journey, they find they have only each other to turn to for support. What happens to father and daughter on the land will test them, and eventually heal them, in ways they never thought possible.

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BILLY-RAY BELCOURT (he/him) is a writer from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He won the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize for his debut collection, This Wound Is a World, which was also a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award. His bestselling memoir, A History of My Brief Body, won the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the Governor General's Literary Award. A recipient of the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship and an Indspire Award, Belcourt is Assistant Professor of Indigenous Creative Writing at UBC.

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COLIN McADAM’s last novel, A Beautiful Truth, won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. It was also a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award and named a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year. His first novel, Some Great Thing, won the Amazon/Books in Canada First Novel Award and was nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Award, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in the U.K. His second novel, Fall, was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and awarded the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennon Prize. He lives in Chelsea, Quebec.

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RAWI HAGE was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and lived through nine years of the Lebanese civil war during the 1970s and 1980s. He immigrated to Canada in 1992 and now lives in Montreal. His first novel, De Niro's Game, won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for the best English-language book published anywhere in the world in a given year, and has either won or been shortlisted for seven other major awards and prizes, including the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award. Cockroach was the winner of the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and a finalist for the Governor General's Award. It was also shortlisted for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Award and the Giller Prize. His third novel, Carnival, told from the perspective of a taxi driver, was a finalist for the Writers' Trust Award and won the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction. His work has been translated into 30 languages.