Last Night in Montreal
Regular price $23.00From the bestselling author of Station Eleven and Sea of Tranquility—when Lilia Albert was a child, her father appeared on the doorstep of her mother’s house and took her away. Now, haunted by an inability to remember much about her early childhood, Lilia moves restlessly from city to city, abandoning lovers and eluding the private detective who has dedicated a career to following close behind.
Then comes Eli. When Lilia goes out for a paper and fails to return to their Brooklyn apartment, he follows her to Montreal, not knowing whether he wants to disappear, too, or help her find her way home. But what he discovers is a deeper mystery, one that will set past and present spinning toward collision.
Look for Emily St. John Mandel’s bestselling new novel, Sea of Tranquility!
“Breathtaking. . . . Simply blew me away.”—Nancy Pearl, NPR, “Morning Edition”
“Emily St. John Mandel is astonishing.” —Emma Straub, author of The Vacationers
“Stunning. . . . A brilliant tale of desperation and identity.” —Richmond Review
“Lilia is more or less Newton’s first law of motion personified. . . . [A] knot of a novel.” —The New York Times
“[Mandel’s] writing is pure elegance.” —Patrick DeWitt, author of Sisters Brothers
“[Mandel] is a stunningly beautiful writer whose complex, flawed, and well-drawn characters linger with you.” —Sarah McCarry, Tor.com
“The pages fly.” —Paste
“Last Night in Montreal is an exciting debut: a thriller, a love story, and a quiet ballad about life’s fleeting connections.” —Quill & Quire
“Taut, gripping. . . . The lost souls in this elegantly compelling novel are lost to themselves as much as they are to others.” —Booklist
“Mandel is a terrific writer, so good that even the furthest reaches of her tale make perfect sense.” —PopMatters.com
“Shockingly real, and so hard to put down.” —Three Guys One Book
“Exquisite. . . . At its heart this book is a mystery, a few mysteries; we wait and we wonder while being charmed by Mandel’s intricate narrative dance.” —Foreword magazine
Rumi and the Red Handbag
Regular price $19.95Finalist 2016 Alberta Readers’ Choice Award
Harper’s Bazaar Top Books of Fall 2015
Fiction
ISBN-13: 978-1-926794-26-6
$19.95 CDN / $18.95 US | Trade Paperback
October 2015
“What is the soul?” asks Rumi, the poet. “If I could taste one sip of an answer, I could break out of this prison for drunks.”
Rumi and the Red Handbag follows the lives of Shaya and Ingrid-Simone, working together one winter at a second- hand clothing shop. Theodora’s Fine Consignment Clothing shop becomes a small world where Shaya, an academic who abandoned studying the secrets of women writers, finds in Ingrid-Simone a reason to begin writing again, on scraps of paper and post-its. Fresh, unique and intelligent, Rumi and The Red Handbag is a journey to the Museum of Bags and Purses in Amsterdam, a journey to find Rumi, the soul, and the secret hidden in a red handbag.
Praise for Rumi and the Red Handbag
This book isn’t just a novel, it’s a small and wonderful work of art. —Wayne Arthurson
Hump
Regular price $18.002010 John Hirsch Award for most Promising Manitoba Writer
Winner 2011 Aqua Books Lansdowne Poetry Prize
Finalist 2011 ReLit Award
Hump is a mash-up of pregnancy-and-mothering poems and urban/nature/love poems that functions as an anti-sentiment manifesto from Winnipeg writer Ariel Gordon. Month by month, stanza by stanza, Gordon attempts to adequately represent the wonder and devilment of being-with-child. Hump is a love poem written simultaneously to a father and child, to a lover and the glimmer in his eye, and to a city that is gritty, faded, but still greener-than-most.
Praise for Hump
Gordon channels Adrienne Rich’s dichotomy of love and frustration.—Winnipeg Free Press
Ariel Gordon’s writing allows the reader access to the essence of a place and time. Her command of language brings an importance to moments both fateful and seemingly insignificant. Her work displays a surprising combination of ease and conviction, of playfulness tempered with insight, and evokes a vivid sense of the word in its studied context, the image in its rightful place.—Jury for Hirsh Award
Ariel Gordon is superbly, supremely, a poet of the body. She finds words for the physicality of the forest, of the garden, of pregnancy. Hump speaks the erotics of being alive and being in love with being alive.—Robert Kroetsch
The focus of Hump is the rich experience of motherhood and marriage on the one hand, and of city life in the integrated context of the natural world, which is everywhere engaging, fierce, beautiful, and unstoppable. This is capable, exuberant writing, at once passionate and meticulous. Hump is a worthy first book indeed.—Michael Harris, Kenneth Meadwell, and Serge Patrice Thibodeau, jurors for the Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry
Brimming with finely crafted poems that thrum with life and love, Hump is indeed a very promising debut.—CV2
Everything Affects Everyone
Regular price $18.95Do you believe in angels?
When Xaviere is tasked with transcribing taped interviews her deceased friend Daphne left to her in her will, she begins to piece together the story of the photographer Irene Guernsey, a moderately well known but elusive photographer Daphne was interviewing. Irene’s mysterious images captivate Xaviere as they had Daphne. Irene had never given interviews or talked about her work publicly, but near the end of her life, she reveals the magic hidden in plain sight in her mysterious and ethereal photographs and her attempt to capture angel wings on film. And once the angels appear, the reader is taken on a journey that spans decades and changes the lives of multiple women along the way.
Everything Affects Everyone, is a novel about listening, about how women speak to one another, and about the power of the question.
Home Waltz
Regular price $18.95
Finalist for 2021 Governor General Award for Fiction
Longlist 2021 First Nation Communities Read Award
In 1973, fifteen-year old Qʷóqʷésk̓iʔ, or “Squito” Bob, is a mixed-blood Nłeʔkepmx boy trying to find his place in a small, mostly Native town. His closest friends are three nłeʔkepmx boys and a white kid, an obnoxious runt who thinks himself superior to his friends. Accepted as neither Native nor white, Squito often feels like the stray dog of the group and envisions a short, disastrous life for himself. Home Waltz follows the boys over thirty-six hours on what should be one of the best weekends of their lives. With a senior girls volleyball tournament in town, Squito’s favourite band performing, and enough alcohol for ten people, the boys dream of girls, dancing, and possibly romance. A story of love, heartbreak, and tragedy, Home Waltz delves into suicide, alcohol abuse, body image, and systemic racism. A coming of age story like no other, Home Waltz speaks to one Indigenous teenager’s experience of growing up in a world that doesn’t want or trust him.
Praise for Home Waltz
In Squito Bob, Gordon Grisenthwaite has given us a latter-day Holden Caufield, fighting hormones, toxic friendships, and the general stupidity of others in the fleeting hope of his own brief shot at transcendence. Home Waltz is a tour de force, full of compassion and insight and humour and utterly unflinching in its look at the hard truths of life on the res.—Nino Ricci, author of Lives of the Saints, and Testament
Grisenthwaite weaves the classic coming-of-age tale into a story of deep grief and longing for place, the unfair treatment of First Nations people, but also the heart and kinship of First Nation’s communities—Crystal Mackenzie, Freefall Magazine
alfabet/alphabet
Regular price $15.95
Winner of the 2021 Governor General Literary Award for Non-fiction
A singular memoir from one of Canada’s most compelling poets.
alfabet / alphabet is the record of Sadiqa de Meijer’s transition from speaking Dutch to English. Exploring questions of identity, landscape, family, and translation, the essays navigate the shifting cultural currents of language by using an eclectic approach to storytelling. As such, fellow linguistic migrants to anglophone Canada will recognize elements of their experience in alfabet / alphabet, while lifelong English speakers will perceive their mother tongue in a new light.
Praise for Sadiqa de Meijer
Language as the mother of bond and breach is beautifully storied in Sadiqa de Meijer’s poignant and provocative memoir, alfabet/alphabet. This is a book that dreams of transforming migration, citizenship, families, nationhood and the very utterances upon which each is built. A deeply hopeful narrative about language itself, a singular exploration of the way that words build a home.—2021 Governor General Literary Awards Peer assessment committee: Sarah de Leeuw, Amanda Leduc and Evelyn C. White
A voice of authority and grace.–Michael Crummey
These lucid, penetrating meditations on language, loss, and identity glow with the tempered beauty of sea glass. English is Sadiqa de Meijer’s adopted tongue, but her voice sounds as strong as a breaking wave, mellifluous as running water. What is the Nederlands for peerless?–Susan Olding
The Junta of Happenstance
Regular price $19.95Winner 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize
Winner 2021 Governor General Literary Award for Poetry
Longlisted 2022 Gerald Lampert Award
Longlisted 2022 Raymond Souster Award
Personal, primordial, and pulsing with syncopated language, Tolu Oloruntoba’s poetic debut, The Junta of Happenstance, is a compendium of dis-ease. This includes disease in the traditional sense, as informed by the poet’s time as a physician, and dis-ease as a primer for family dysfunction, the (im)migrant experience, and urban / corporate anxiety. In the face of struggles against social injustice, Oloruntoba navigates the contemporary moment with empathy and intelligence, finding beauty in chaos, and strength in suffering. The Junta of Happenstance is an important and assured debut.
Praise for The Junta of Happenstance
Tolu Oloruntoba uses a “safecracker ear” (“Child at Sleep”) to perceive both the subtle and overt mechanics of human interactions and to explore the interlocking parts of past and present, individual and community, and the here and there.—Samantha Jones, ARC Poetry magazine
The Junta of Happenstance, Tolu Oloruntoba’s dazzling debut collection, collides the language of revolution with the landscapes of the body. These poems go beyond the desire to ward off death. They emerge out of a life intimate with death’s randomness. Like the vicissitudes of war, Oloruntoba’s poems make peace with accident and fate. They bring breath to survival. ‘If the timeline ahead is/ infinitely longer than the/ knives behind, perhaps/ as we set to mending/ we can heal more/ than we ever undid./ But we, too,/ would like a piece of the plunder.’ These exquisite poems leave an imprint both violent and terrifyingly beautiful.—Judges’ Citation, 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize
Tolu Oloruntoba’s voice in The Junta of Happenstance is at once thoughtful and authoritative, metaphorically rich and lyrically surprising. Oloruntoba’s language travels through history and myth to speak to today and engage with a future transformed by new understanding. The combination of craft and spirit cuts a fine place for this debut work, expanding our literary view.—2021 Governor General Literary Award Peer assessment committee: Kaie Kellough, George Murray and Anna Marie Sewell
The Missing Person
Regular price $17.00Swing Low: A Life
Regular price $21.00________________
Miriam Toews is the author of seven bestselling novels: Women Talking, All My Puny Sorrows, Summer of My Amazing Luck, A Boy of Good Breeding, A Complicated Kindness, The Flying Troutmans, and Irma Voth, and one work of non-fiction, Swing Low: A Life. She is a winner of the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Writers Trust Marian Engel/Timothy Findley Award. She lives in Toronto.
The Flying Troutmans
Regular price $21.00________________
Miriam Toews is the author of seven bestselling novels: Women Talking, All My Puny Sorrows, Summer of My Amazing Luck, A Boy of Good Breeding, A Complicated Kindness, The Flying Troutmans, and Irma Voth, and one work of non-fiction, Swing Low: A Life. She is a winner of the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Writers Trust Marian Engel/Timothy Findley Award. She lives in Toronto.
A Boy Of Good Breeding
Regular price $21.00________________
Miriam Toews is the author of seven bestselling novels: Women Talking, All My Puny Sorrows, Summer of My Amazing Luck, A Boy of Good Breeding, A Complicated Kindness, The Flying Troutmans, and Irma Voth, and one work of non-fiction, Swing Low: A Life. She is a winner of the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Writers Trust Marian Engel/Timothy Findley Award. She lives in Toronto.
Super Detectives (Simon and Chester Book #1)
Regular price $13.99Woman Enough
Regular price $29.95The Boy in Number Four
Regular price $21.99“The Boy in Number Four had a passion and a dream … to one day be a player on a big league hockey team.” It takes hard work and dedication to make it to the big league, but those aren’t the only things that are important. Respect, determination and the sheer thrill of the game brought Bobby Orr from a small northern town in Canada to one of the best teams in the NHL. Using Bobby Orr and his journey as a model, The Boy in Number Four celebrates the game of hockey—from backyard rinks to the big leagues. A book for hockey enthusiasts of all ages!
Lost Immunity
Regular price $22.00*Instant National Bestseller
In this explosive new thriller from international bestselling author Daniel Kalla, an experimental vaccine is deployed to battle a lethal outbreak—until patients start dying of unknown causes.
An ordinary day
The city of Seattle is stunned when a deadly bacteria tears through a nearby Bible camp. Early tests reveal the illness is a form of meningitis, and the camp’s residents are among its most vulnerable victims: children and teenagers.
A new vaccine
Facing a rapidly rising death rate, Seattle’s chief public health officer, Lisa Dyer, and her team quickly take all steps necessary to contain the devastating outbreak. And when further testing reveals that the strain of the bacteria is one that caused catastrophic losses in Iceland six months before, Lisa decides to take a drastic step: she contacts Nathan Hull, vice president of a pharmaceutical company that is doing final-phase trials on a viable vaccine, and asks him to release it early for use on the city’s population.
An epidemic in the making
Lisa gets the go-ahead on her controversial plan, despite the protests of dubious government officials, anti-vaxxers, and even those on her own team. Vaccine clinics roll out across the city, and the risky strategy appears to be working, leaving Lisa, Nathan, and thousands of others breathing a sigh of relief. Until people start dying from mysterious and horrific causes—and the vaccine itself is implicated.
But what if science isn’t to blame?
Butter Honey Pig Bread
Regular price $23.952021 CANADA READS FINALIST
Longlisted for the 2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize; finalist, Governor General's Literary Award; finalist, Amazon Canada First Novel Award; finalist, Lambda Literary Award
An intergenerational saga about three Nigerian women: a novel about food, family, and forgiveness.
Butter Honey Pig Bread is a story of choices and their consequences, of motherhood, of the malleable line between the spirit and the mind, of finding new homes and mending old ones, of voracious appetites, of queer love, of friendship, faith, and above all, family.
Francesca Ekwuyasi's debut novel tells the interwoven stories of twin sisters, Kehinde and Taiye, and their mother, Kambirinachi. Kambirinachi feels she was born an Ogbanje, a spirit that plagues families with misfortune by dying in childhood to cause its mother misery. She believes that she has made the unnatural choice of staying alive to love her human family and now lives in fear of the consequences of that decision.
Some of Kambirinachi's worst fears come true when her daughter, Kehinde, experiences a devasting childhood trauma that causes the family to fracture in seemingly irreversible ways. As soon as she's of age, Kehinde moves away and cuts contact with her twin sister and mother. Alone in Montreal, she struggles to find ways to heal while building a life of her own. Meanwhile, Taiye, plagued by guilt for what happened to her sister, flees to London and attempts to numb the loss of the relationship with her twin through reckless hedonism.
Now, after more than a decade of living apart, Taiye and Kehinde have returned home to Lagos to visit their mother. It is here that the three women must face each other and address the wounds of the past if they are to reconcile and move forward.
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Francesca Ekwuyasi is a writer, artist, and filmmaker born in Lagos, Nigeria. Her work explores themes of faith, family, queerness, consumption, loneliness, and belonging. Her writing has been published in Winter Tangerine Review, Brittle Paper, Transition Magazine, the Malahat Review, Visual Art News, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and GUTS magazine. Her story "Orun is Heaven" was longlisted for the 2019 Journey Prize. Butter Honey Pig Bread, longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, is her first novel.
Ridgerunner
Regular price $22.99Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize Winner
Scotiabank Giller Prize Finalist
Part literary Western and part historical mystery, Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize winner Ridgerunner is now available as a paperback.
November 1917. William Moreland is in mid-flight. After nearly twenty years, the notorious thief, known as the Ridgerunner, has returned. Moving through the Rocky Mountains and across the border to Montana, the solitary drifter, impoverished in means and aged beyond his years, is also a widower and a father. And he is determined to steal enough money to secure his son’s future.
Twelve-year-old Jack Boulton has been left in the care of Sister Beatrice, a formidable nun who keeps him in cloistered seclusion in her grand old house. Though he knows his father is coming for him, the boy longs to return to his family’s cabin, deep in the woods. When Jack finally breaks free, he takes with him something the nun is determined to get back — at any cost.
Set against the backdrop of a distant war raging in Europe and a rapidly changing landscape in the West, Gil Adamson’s follow-up to her award-winning debut, The Outlander, is a vivid historical novel that draws from the epic tradition and a literary Western brimming with a cast of unforgettable characters touched with humour and loss, and steeped in the wild of the natural world.
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GIL ADAMSON is the critically acclaimed author of Ridgerunner, which won the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and was named a best book of the year by the Globe and Mail and the CBC. Her first novel, The Outlander, won the Dashiell Hammett Prize for Literary Excellence in Crime Writing, the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, the ReLit Award, and the Drummer General’s Award. It was a finalist for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, CBC Canada Reads, and the Prix Femina in France; longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; and chosen as a Globe and Mail and Washington Post Top 100 Book. She is also the author of a collection of linked stories, Help Me, Jacques Cousteau, and two poetry collections, Primitive and Ashland. She lives in Toronto.
All I Ask
Regular price $22.95Like Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends and Eileen Myles’s Chelsea Girls, All I Ask by the award-winning and highly acclaimed author Eva Crocker is a defining novel of a generation.
A little before seven in the morning, Stacey wakes to the police pounding on her door. They search her home and seize her computer and her phone, telling her they’re looking for “illegal digital material.” Left to unravel what’s happened, Stacey must find a way to take back the privacy and freedom she feels she has lost.
Luckily, she has her friends. Smart and tough and almost terrifyingly open, Stacey and her circle are uncommonly free of biases and boundaries, but this incident reveals how they are still susceptible to society’s traps. Navigating her way through friendship, love, and sex, Stacey strives to restore her self-confidence and to actualize the most authentic way to live her life — one that acknowledges both her power and her vulnerability, her joy and her fear.
All I Ask is a bold and bracing exploration of what it’s like to be young in a time when everything and nothing seems possible. With a playwright’s ear for dialogue and a wry, delicate confidence, Eva Crocker writes with a compassionate but unsentimental eye on human nature that perfectly captures the pitfalls of relying on the people you love.
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EVA CROCKER is the author of the critically acclaimed debut novel All I Ask, which was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Her short story collection, Barrelling Forward, won the Alistair MacLeod Prize for Short Fiction and the CAA Emerging Writer Award, was a finalist for the Writers’ Trust Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Emerging Writers and the NLCU Fresh Fish Award for Emerging Writers, and was a National Post Best Book.
We Want What We Want
Regular price $22.95Thirteen glittering, surprising, and darkly funny stories of people testing the boundaries of their lives, from two-time Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist Alix Ohlin.
In the mordantly funny “Money, Geography, Youth,” Vanessa arrives home from a gap year volunteering in Ghana to find that her father is engaged to her childhood best friend. Unable to reconcile the girl she went to dances with in the eighth grade and the woman in her father’s bed, Vanessa turns to a different old friendship for her own, unique diversion. In the subversive “The Brooks Brothers Guru,” Amanda drives to upstate New York to rescue her gawky cousin from a cult, only to discover clean-cut, well-dressed men living in a beautiful home, discussing the classics and drinking cocktails, moving her to wonder what freedoms she might be willing to trade for a life of such elegant comfort. And in “The Universal Particular,” Tamar welcomes her husband’s young stepcousin into her home, only to find her cool suburban life knocked askew in ways she cannot quite understand.
Populated with imperfect families, burned potential, and inescapable old flames, the stories in We Want What We Want are, each one, diamond-sharp — sparkling with pain, humour, and beauty.
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ALIX OHLIN is the author of six books, including the novels Inside and Dual Citizens, which were both finalists for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Best American Short Stories, and many other publications. Born and raised in Montreal, she lives in Vancouver, where she chairs the creative writing program at the University of British Columbia.
Liminal
Regular price $22.95From award-winning playwright and filmmaker Jordan Tannahill comes a masterful and moving novel in the tradition of Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station and Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be.
At 11:04 a.m. on January 21st, 2017, Jordan opens the door to his mother’s bedroom. As his eyes adjust to the half-light, he finds her lying in bed, eyes closed and mouth agape. In that instant he cannot tell whether she is asleep or dead. The sight of his mother's body, caught between these two possibilities, causes Jordan to plunge headlong into the uncertain depths of consciousness itself.
From androids to cannibals to sex clubs, an unforgettable personal odyssey emerges, populated by a cast of sublime outsiders in search for the ever-elusive nature of self. Part ontological thriller, part millennial saga, Liminal is a riotous and moving portrait of a young man in volatile times, a generation caught in suspended animation, and a son’s enduring love for his mother.
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JORDAN TANNAHILL is an award-winning author, playwright, filmmaker, and theatre director. He is the winner of the Governor General’s Award for Drama for Age of Minority: Three Solo Plays and was shortlisted for the prize again for Concord Floral. He has twice received Dora Awards for Outstanding New Play. His play Botticelli in the Fire won the 2017 Toronto Theatre Critics Award for Best New Play and is currently being adapted into a feature by filmmaker Stephen Dunn. From 2012 to 2016, in collaboration with William Ellis, Tannahill ran the alternative art space Videofag, which became an influential hub for queer and avant-garde work in Canada. He is the author of Theatre of the Unimpressed: In Search of Vital Drama and The Videofag Book; and his latest play, Declarations, will be published to coincide with its premiere at Canadian Stage in January 2018. Tannahill’s films and multimedia performances have been presented at festivals and galleries such as the Toronto International Film Festival, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Tribeca Film Festival. Most recently, his virtual reality performance Draw Me Close, a co-production between the National Theatre (U.K.) and the National Film Board of Canada, premiered in May 2017 at the Tribeca Film Festival. His play Late Company will be transferring to the West End (London, U.K.) August–September 2017. Liminal is his first novel and is being made into a feature length art film by the NFB and the National Theatre in the UK. Born in 1988 in Ottawa, Ontario, he now makes his home in London, U.K.
