Books

I am from Halifax, salt-water city, a place of silted genius, sudden women, figures floating in all waters. “People from Halifax are all famous,” my sister Faith has said. “Because everyone in Halifax knows each other’s business.”

From basement rec rooms to midnight railway tracks, Action Transfers to Smarties boxes crammed with joints, from Paul McCartney on the kitchen radio to their furious teenaged cover of The Ramones, Aubrey McKee and his familiars navigate late adolescence amidst the old-monied decadence of Halifax. An arcana of oddball angels, Alex Pugsley’s long-awaited debut novel follows rich-kid drug dealers and junior tennis brats, émigré heart surgeons and small-time thugs, renegade private school girls and runaway children as they try to make sense of the city into which they’ve been born. Part coming-of-age-story, part social chronicle, and part study of the myths that define our growing up, Aubrey McKee introduces a breathtakingly original new voice.

A CANADA READS 2019 FINALIST
A Penguin Book Club Pick

Winner of the 2017 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, David Chariandy's Brother is his intensely beautiful, searingly powerful, and tightly constructed second novel, exploring questions of masculinity, family, race, and identity as they are played out in a Scarborough housing complex during the sweltering heat and simmering violence of the summer of 1991.

With shimmering prose and mesmerizing precision, David Chariandy takes us inside the lives of Michael and Francis. They are the sons of Trinidadian immigrants, their father has disappeared and their mother works double, sometimes triple shifts so her boys might fulfill the elusive promise of their adopted home. 
     Coming of age in The Park, a cluster of town houses and leaning concrete towers in the disparaged outskirts of a sprawling city, Michael and Francis battle against the careless prejudices and low expectations that confront them as young men of black and brown ancestry--teachers stream them into general classes; shopkeepers see them only as thieves; and strangers quicken their pace when the brothers are behind them. Always Michael and Francis escape into the cool air of the Rouge Valley, a scar of green wilderness that cuts through their neighbourhood, where they are free to imagine better lives for themselves. 
     Propelled by the pulsing beats and styles of hip hop, Francis, the older of the two brothers, dreams of a future in music. Michael's dreams are of Aisha, the smartest girl in their high school whose own eyes are firmly set on a life elsewhere. But the bright hopes of all three are violently, irrevocably thwarted by a tragic shooting, and the police crackdown and suffocating suspicion that follow.
     With devastating emotional force David Chariandy, a unique and exciting voice in Canadian literature, crafts a heartbreaking and timely story about the profound love that exists between brothers and the senseless loss of lives cut short with the shot of a gun.

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DAVID CHARIANDY lives in Vancouver and teaches literature and creative writing in the department of English at Simon Fraser University.  His first novel, Soucouyant, was nominated for several prizes, including the Governor General’s Award and the Scotiabank Giller Prize.  His second novel, Brother, was also nominated for several prizes, winning the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and the Toronto Book Prize.  Brother was also named a book of the year by The Globe and Mail, The National Post, The Toronto Star, The Montreal Gazette, The New York City Public Library, Kirkus Reviews, Esquire Magazine, and The Guardian.  His most recent book is a memoir entitled I’ve Been Meaning To Tell You: A Letter To My Daughter.  David’s writings have been published internationally and translated into a dozen languages.  In 2019, he was awarded Yale University’s Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction.

Following the Scotiabank Giller Prize-shortlisted Son of a Trickster comes Trickster Drift, a national bestseller and the second book in Eden Robinson's captivating Trickster trilogy.

Jared Martin, seventeen, has quit drugs and drinking. But his troubles are not over: the temptation to slip is constant (thanks to his enabling, ever-partying mom, Maggie). He's being stalked by David, his mom's ex--a preppy, khaki-wearing psycho with a proclivity for rib-breaking. And Maggie, a witch as well as a badass, can't protect him like she used to because he's moved from Kitimat to Vancouver for school.
     He figures that in order to be safe from both magic, addiction and David, he's got to get his grades up, find a job that doesn't involve selling weed cookies, and learn how to live with his Aunt Mave, who has been estranged from the family ever since she tried to "rescue" him as a baby from his mother. Though she smothers him with hugs, Mave is blind to the real dangers that lurk around them--the spirits and supernatural activity that fill her apartment.
     As the son of a Trickster, Jared is a magnet for magic, whether he hates it or not. He sees ghosts, he sees the monster moving underneath his Aunt Georgina's skin, he sees the creature that comes out of his bedroom wall and creepily wants to suck his toes. He also still hears his father in his head, and other voices too. When David finally catches up with him, Jared can't ignore his true nature any longer. And neither can anyone else he loves.

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Following the Scotiabank Giller Prize-shortlisted Son of a Trickster comes Trickster Drift, a national bestseller and the second book in Eden Robinson's captivating Trickster trilogy.

Jared Martin, seventeen, has quit drugs and drinking. But his troubles are not over: the temptation to slip is constant (thanks to his enabling, ever-partying mom, Maggie). He's being stalked by David, his mom's ex--a preppy, khaki-wearing psycho with a proclivity for rib-breaking. And Maggie, a witch as well as a badass, can't protect him like she used to because he's moved from Kitimat to Vancouver for school.
     He figures that in order to be safe from both magic, addiction and David, he's got to get his grades up, find a job that doesn't involve selling weed cookies, and learn how to live with his Aunt Mave, who has been estranged from the family ever since she tried to "rescue" him as a baby from his mother. Though she smothers him with hugs, Mave is blind to the real dangers that lurk around them--the spirits and supernatural activity that fill her apartment.
     As the son of a Trickster, Jared is a magnet for magic, whether he hates it or not. He sees ghosts, he sees the monster moving underneath his Aunt Georgina's skin, he sees the creature that comes out of his bedroom wall and creepily wants to suck his toes. He also still hears his father in his head, and other voices too. When David finally catches up with him, Jared can't ignore his true nature any longer. And neither can anyone else he loves.

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A smart, sensual and witty novel about what happens when love and intellect are set on a collision course. This compact tour de force affirms Dionne Brand's place as one of Canada's most dazzling and influential artists.

     By effortlessly telling this short, intense tale in the voice of an unnamed, ungendered (and brilliantly unreliable) narrator, Dionne Brand makes a bold statement not only about love and personhood, but about race and gender--and what can and cannot be articulated in prose when the forces that inhabit the space between words are greater than words themselves.
    A gorgeous, profoundly moving, word- and note-perfect novel of ideas that only a great artist at the height of her powers could write.

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"Pasha Malla writes like a reincarnated Kafka." —Ian Williams, winner of the Giller Prize for Reproduction
 
Douglas Adams meets David Lynch in this ingenious, witty fable about one of North America's most surreal inventions—the local mall.

After writing a letter in praise of malls, our eccentric narrator is offered a residency at a shabby suburban shopping centre. His mission: to occupy the mall for several weeks, splitting his time between "making work" and "engaging the public," all while chronicling his adventures in weekly progress reports.

Before long, a series of strange after-hour events rattles our hero, and he sets forth on a nightly quest to untangle the mysterious forces at play in the mall's unmapped recesses. Things quickly get hairy, and our narrator's optimism about his mall residency descends into doubt, and then into a full-blown phantasmagoria of horror and (possibly) murder. With the aid of a weird and wonderful cast of mall-dwelling misfits--including a pony named Gary--our narrator is forced to conclude that his new residence may not be the temple of consumer bliss he initially imagined, but something far more sinister. And who, or what, is benefitting from its existence?

Much like the shopping centres it praises and parodies, Pasha Malla’s wildly adventurous novel follows its own internal logic, channeling its narrator’s unshakeable innocence to explore the darker edges of human (and other) nature.

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One of The Globe and Mail’s Best Books of 2017: A perfect mix of entertaining and edgy, Fugue States is a thought-provoking exploration of the first-generation Canadian experience from one of the more irreverent, inventive and daring minds writing fiction today

Fugue States begins as Ash Dhar, a thirty-something writer, opens his mouth to deliver a eulogy at a funeral—the funeral for his own father, a Kashmir-born doctor. But in that moment between thought and speech, something mysterious occurs: a terrible wordless gap into which Ash falls helplessly, recovering only as the concerned faces of friends and family shock him into focus. Later, still unsettled as he sorts through his father’s belongings, Ash discovers a partially completed and baffling work of fiction set in what seems to be Kashmir. Reading his father’s words, Ash feels compelled to know more about this ancestral land—and yet he resists the impulse to visit, loathe to be a cliché, chasing self-discovery in a war-torn homeland. But Ash’s childhood friend Matt—pothead, massage therapy student and self-described “maker of memories”—has no such hesitations and goes in Ash’s place . . . with unexpected and excruciating results. Soon, Ash is forced to rescue Matt by following him to India—where he experiences a second alarming gap, one that echoes and amplifies the mysterious “fugue state” with which the novel began.

Fugue States is at once a parody of clueless tourism; a knowing, uneasy look at contemporary masculinity; and a surprisingly poignant tale about the deep inchoate melancholy that abides in people who, like Ash and his father, and even Matt-the-fool, have never felt completely at home in the world.

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Now a Netflix Original Series!

The human race has reached its darkest hour. In the seven years since the Affliction first appeared, billions have died. All the children born since the plague are a strange new race of animal-human hybrids.

One of the few remaining humans, a drifter named Jepperd, has formed a bond with one such child, a sweet, deer-like boy called Gus. But even among the hybrid children, Gus is an anomaly, seemingly born before the sickness began.

Believing that Gus' history might be the key to the plague's origins, Jepperd and the boy will journey north together to Alaska in the hope that if they can uncover the story of his birth, it will lead them to a cure for the sickness.

But the troubling question remains: If Gus isn't a product of the Affliction, was he its cause?

Written and illustrated by Jeff Lemire (Descender, Green Arrow), Sweet Tooth is an exploration of kindness and cruelty in a dangerous post-apocalyptic world. Sweet Tooth Book Two collects issues #13-25, a pinup gallery from some of the comics industry's top talents and an introduction by colorist José Villarrubia.

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Margaret Atwood, whose work has been published in more than forty-five countries, is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry, critical essays, and graphic novels. In addition to The Handmaid’s Tale, now an award-winning TV series, her novels include Cat’s Eye, short-listed for the 1989 Booker Prize; Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy; The Blind Assassin, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize; Oryx and Crake, short-listed for the 2003 Man Booker Prize;The Year of the Flood, MaddAddam; and Hag-Seed. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the Franz Kafka Prize, the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Los Angeles Times Innovator’s Award. In 2019, she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for services to literature.

Part detective novel, part psychological thriller, Surfacing is the story of a young woman who returns to northern Quebec, to the remote island of her childhood, with her lover and two friends, to investigate the mysterious disappearance of her father. Flooded with memories, she begins to realize that going home means entering not only another place, but another time. As the wild island exerts its elemental hold and she is submerged in the language of the wilderness, she discovers that what she is really searching for is her own past. Permeated with an aura of suspense, complex with layered meanings, and written in brilliant, diamond-sharp prose, Surfacing has grown in reputation as a novel unique in modern literature for its mythic exploration of one woman’s spiritual pilgrimage.

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Margaret Atwood, whose work has been published in more than forty-five countries, is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry, critical essays, and graphic novels. In addition to The Handmaid’s Tale, now an award-winning TV series, her novels include Cat’s Eye, short-listed for the 1989 Booker Prize; Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy; The Blind Assassin, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize; Oryx and Crake, short-listed for the 2003 Man Booker Prize;The Year of the Flood, MaddAddam; and Hag-Seed. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the Franz Kafka Prize, the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Los Angeles Times Innovator’s Award. In 2019, she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for services to literature.

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Sonya Lalli is a romance and women’s fiction author of Punjabi and Bengali heritage. Her books have been featured in Entertainment Weekly, NPR, Washington Post, Glamour and more. She lives in Vancouver with her husband.…

INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER
*Indigo Top 10 of the Year*

Former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada Beverley McLachlin offers an intimate and revealing look at her life, from her childhood in the Alberta foothills to her career on the Supreme Court, where she helped to shape the social and moral fabric of the country—for readers of Educated and Becoming.

From a very early age, all I knew was that I wanted to do something that was not ordinary. Because, for a girl growing up in a remote prairie town in the 1940s, the ordinary was very ordinary indeed.

Beverley McLachlin has led an extraordinary life. One of the few women studying law in the 1960s, she graduated at the top of her class and began her long career—first as a dedicated lawyer and professor, later as a judge serving on the highest court in the country, and finally as the first woman to be named Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada.

The journey wasn’t easy. The options for women growing up in rural Pincher Creek, Alberta, were limited. But McLachlin was willful and spirited, and she wanted an education. She also had an innate sense of justice, which was reinforced by the lessons her parents taught her about equality and the value of hard work. It was this faith in justice that pulled her through dark times, especially when faced with sexism and exclusion at work and personal tragedy at home.

Over time, McLachlin became a champion for Canadians from all walks of life. As a judge on the Supreme Court, she presided over charged debates on topics such as same-sex marriage, euthanasia, and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. With each judgment, she laid down a legal legacy proving that fairness and justice are not luxuries of the powerful but rather rights owed to each and every one of us.

With warmth, honesty, and deep wisdom, McLachlin recounts her remarkable life on and off the bench. Truth Be Told is an inspiring reminder that integrity and the rule of law are our best hopes for a progressive and bright future.

About the Author:

Beverley McLachlin was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada from 2000 to 2017. She is the first woman to hold that position and the longest-serving Chief Justice in Canadian history. In 2018, McLachlin became a Companion of the Order of Canada, the highest honour within the Order. Her memoir, Truth Be Told, was an instant national bestseller, as was her debut novel, Full Disclosure. Visit her at BeverleyMcLachlin.com.