Canadian Books

Now two groups are after them—the law, in the form of veteran state investigator Kirk Stevens and hotshot young FBI agent Carla Windermere, and an organized crime outfit looking for payback. As they crisscross the country in a series of increasingly explosive confrontations, each of them is ultimately forced to recognize the truth: The real professionals, cop or criminal, are those who are willing to sacrifice everything.

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Owen Laukkanen is the author of the Stevens and Windermere series, beginning with The Professionals, which was nominated for the Anthony Award, Barry Award, Spinetingler Magazine Best Novel: New Voices Award, and the International Thriller Writers’ Thriller Award for best first novel. His follow-up, Criminal Enterprise, was nominated for the ITW Thriller Award for best novel. A resident of Vancouver, British Columbia, he is now at work on the next book featuring Stevens and Windermere.

Imbued with longing, erudition and hard-earned wisdom, Heartbroken dares to delve into a universal ordeal—perhaps the one that makes us the most human of all.

When Laura Pratt’s long-distance partner of six years tells her “it’s over” at a busy downtown train station, she is sent reeling, the breakup coming out of the blue. He, meanwhile, closes himself off, refusing to acknowledge Laura and her requests for explanation.

In the following days, months, and then years, Laura struggles to make sense of this sudden ending, alone and filled with questions. A journalist, she seeks to understand the freefall that is heartbreak and how so many before her survived it, drawing on forces across time and form, and uncovers literary, philosophical, scientific and psychological accounts of the mysterious alchemy of how we human beings fall in love in the first place, and why, when it ends, some of us take longer to get over it, or never do. She weaves this background of cultural history with her own bracing story of passionate love and its loss, and offers some hope for arriving—changed, broadened, grateful—on the other side.

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LAURA PRATT is a long-time journalist, writer and editor. She writes for Canadian magazines and edits books. Her first memoir, The Fleeting Years, was published in 2004. She lives in Toronto with whichever of her kids and dogs she can corral to join her. She’s a 2020 graduate of the University of King’s College’s creative nonfiction MFA. She won an honourable mention in Prairie Fire’s 2020 CNF contest and was shortlisted for The Fiddlehead’s 2019 CNF contest. She has served as a judge at the National Magazine Awards for several years.

*LONGLISTED FOR CANADA READS 2023*

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

A family tries to learn from the mistakes of past generations in this whirlwind memoir from a wholly original new voice.

The Caetanos move into a doomed house in the highway village of Happyland before an inevitable divorce pulls Cody’s parents in separate directions. His mom, Mindimooye, having discovered her Anishinaabe birth family and Sixties Scoop origin story, embarks on a series of fraught relationships and fresh starts. His dad, O Touro, a Portuguese immigrant and drifter, falls back into “big do, little think” behaviour, despite his best intentions.

Left alone at the house in Happyland, Cody and his siblings must fend for themselves, even as the pipes burst and the lights go out. His protective big sister, Kris, finds inventive ways to put food on the table, and his stoic big brother, Julian, facilitates his regular escapes into the world of video games. As life yanks them from one temporary solution to the next, they steal moments of joy and resist buckling under “baddie” temptations aplenty.

Capturing the chaos and wonder of a precarious childhood, Cody Caetano delivers a fever dream coming-of-age garnished with a slang all his own. Half-Bads in White Regalia is an unforgettable debut that unspools a tangled family history with warmth, humour, and deep generosity.

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CODY CAETANO is a writer of Anishinaabe and Portuguese descent and an off-reserve member of Pinaymootang First Nation. He has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Toronto, where he wrote this memoir under the mentorship of Lee Maracle. Excerpts of Half-Bads in White Regalia earned him a 2020 Indigenous Voices Award for Unpublished Prose.

A leading thinker on Canada's place in the world contends that our country's greatest untapped resource may be the three million Canadians who don't live here.

Entrepreneurs, educators, humanitarians: an entire province's worth of Canadian citizens live outside Canada. Some will return, others won't. But what they all share is the ability, and often the desire, to export Canadian values to a world sorely in need of them. And to act as ambassadors for Canada in industries and societies where diplomatic efforts find little traction. Surely a country with people as diverse as Canada's ought to plug itself into every corner of the globe. We don't, and sometimes not even when our expats are eager to help.

Failing to put this desire to work, contends bestselling author and longtime foreign correspondent John Stackhouse, is a grave error for a small country whose voice is getting lost behind developing nations of rapidly increasing influence. The soft power we once boasted is getting softer, but we have an unparalleled resource, if we choose to use it. To ensure Canada's place in the world, Stackhouse argues in Planet Canada, we need this exceptional province of expats and their special claim on the twenty-first century.

The inspiring story of an ordinary man who, from humble beginnings and against the odds of a devastating illness, has led—is leading—an extraordinary life.

To many people, Walter Gretzky is the ultimate dad, the father of the Great One, Wayne Gretzky, and the first inspired coach to a talented young boy. Walter’s major insight into hockey—that a player should “go where the puck is going”—guided Wayne’s brilliant style, and Wayne himself has said about his talent: “It’s God-given. It’s Wally-given.” It's safe to say that no other famous hockey player’s father is held in such high esteem, and that Walter Gretzky has carved out this singular niche in his own right.

Now, for the first time, Walter tells at length the story of his life, about growing up on a small family farm, about meeting and marrying Phyllis, about raising four boys and a girl in a modest home in Brantford on the salary of a telephone repairman, about hanging onto his modesty and values when the comet of talent and celebrity hit.

Walter also talks about the process of recovering from a stroke that came close to killing him ten years ago. Through his own grit and determination, and with the help of dedicated therapists and doctors, his family and friends, Walter battled back from an aneurysm that left him with many cognitive difficulties and destroyed a decade of memories—including his recollection of the death of his mother and almost all of Wayne’s NHL triumphs of the eighties.

As many of the people who have encountered Walter even briefly will testify, he is very charismatic, and it’s his extraordinary compassion, which has flourished since his stroke, that makes him so compelling. Yes, he struggles with some limitations, but he has also discovered a calling in helping others. All of his many public speaking engagements are for charity, and this book would not exist were it not for Walter’s role as the official spokesperson for Canada’s Heart and Stroke Foundation. The only way he would ever agree to talk about himself at such length was in the hope that his experience with stroke would be useful to other people. “Every second of every day is important to me,” he writes, “and I only hope that if telling my story can help even one person, then all of this will be worth it. And remember, there is life after stroke…look at me!”

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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 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!

In his bestselling book Dancing with a Ghost, Rupert Ross began his exploration of Aboriginal approaches to justice and the visions of life that shape them. Returning to the Teachings takes this exploration further still.

During a three-year secondment with Justice Canada, Ross travelled from the Yukon to Cape Breton Island, examining—and experiencing—the widespread Aboriginal preference for “peacemaker justice.” In this remarkable book, he invites us to accompany him as he moves past the pain and suffering that grip so many communities and into the exceptional promise of individual, family and community healing that traditional teachings are now restoring to Aboriginal Canada. He shares his confusion, frustrations and delights as Elders and other teachers guide him, in their unique and often puzzling ways, into ancient visions of Creation and our role with it.

Returning to the Teachings is about Aboriginal justice and much more, speaking not only to our minds, but also to our hearts and spirits. Above all, it stands as a search for the values and visions that give life its significance and that any justice system, Aboriginal or otherwise, must serve and respect.

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RUPERT ROSS is a retired assistant Crown Attorney for the District of Kenora, Ontario. Starting in 1985, he conducted criminal prosecutions for more than twenty remote Ojibway and Cree First Nations communities in northwestern Ontario. His first book, Dancing with a Ghost, started his exploration of aboriginal visions of existence and became a bestseller. His second book, Returning to the Teachings, was also a bestseller and examined the aboriginal preference for the “peacemaker justice” he observed during a three-year secondment with Justice Canada. Both books were shortlisted for the Gordon Montour Award for the best Canadian non-fiction book on social issues, and are presently used in universities and colleges across North America. Following his retirement, Ross was awarded the prestigious 2011 National Prosecution Award for Humanitarianism, and the Ontario Crown Attorneys Association has created an award named after him. He continues to live just north of Kenora with his wife, Val.

Imagine a world in which people see themselves as embedded in the natural order, with ethical responsibilities not only toward each other, but also toward rocks, trees, water and all nature. Imagine seeing yourself not as a master of Creation, but as the most humble, dependent and vulnerable part.  
 
Rupert Ross explores this indigenous world view and the determination of indigenous thinkers to restore it to full prominence today. He comes to understand that an appreciation of this perspective is vital to understanding the destructive forces of colonization. As a former Crown Attorney in northern Ontario, Ross witnessed many of these forces. He examines them here with a special focus on residential schools and their power to destabilize entire communities long after the last school has closed. With help from many indigenous authors, he explores their emerging conviction that healing is now better described as “decolonization therapy.” And the key to healing, they assert, is a return to the traditional indigenous world view.
 
The author of two previous bestsellers on indigenous themes, Dancing with a Ghost and Returning to the Teachings, Ross shares his continuing personal journey into traditional understanding with all of the confusion, delight and exhilaration of learning to see the world in a different way. 
 
Ross sees the beginning of a vibrant future for indigenous people across Canada as they begin to restore their own definition of a “healthy person” and bring that indigenous wellness into being once again. Indigenous Healing is a hopeful book, not only for indigenous people, but for all others open to accepting some of their ancient lessons about who we might choose to be.

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RUPERT ROSS is a retired assistant Crown Attorney for the District of Kenora, Ontario. Starting in 1985, he conducted criminal prosecutions for more than twenty remote Ojibway and Cree First Nations communities in northwestern Ontario. His first book, Dancing with a Ghost, started his exploration of aboriginal visions of existence and became a bestseller. His second book, Returning to the Teachings, was also a bestseller and examined the aboriginal preference for the “peacemaker justice” he observed during a three-year secondment with Justice Canada. Both books were shortlisted for the Gordon Montour Award for the best Canadian non-fiction book on social issues, and are presently used in universities and colleges across North America. Following his retirement, Ross was awarded the prestigious 2011 National Prosecution Award for Humanitarianism, and the Ontario Crown Attorneys Association has created an award named after him. He continues to live just north of Kenora with his wife, Val.

In this compelling whodunnit, Elaine Dewar reads the science, follows the money, and connects the geopolitical interests to the spin.

When the first TV newscast described a SARS-like flu affecting a distant Chinese metropolis, investigative journalist Elaine Dewar started asking questions: Was SARS-CoV-2 something that came from nature, as leading scientists insisted, or did it come from a lab, and what role might controversial experiments have played in its development? Why was Wuhan the pandemic's ground zero—and why, on the other side of the Atlantic, had two researchers been marched out of a lab in Winnipeg by the RCMP? Why were governments so slow to respond to the emerging pandemic, and why, now, is the government of China refusing to cooperate with the World Health Organization? And who, or what, is DRASTIC?

Locked down in Toronto with the world at a standstill, Dewar pored over newspapers and magazines, preprints and peer-reviewed journals, email chains and blacked-out responses to access to information requests; she conducted Zoom interviews and called telephone numbers until someone answered as she hunted down the truth of the virus’s origin. In this compelling whodunnit, she reads the science, follows the money, connects the geopolitical interests to the spin—and shows how leading science journals got it wrong, leaving it to interested citizens and junior scientists to pull out the truth.

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2017 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE

Winner of the 2018 Western Canada Jewish Book Awards - Fiction - The Diamond Foundation Prize

Nominated for the 2018 OLA Evergreen Award

Energized, irreverent, novelistic stories full of longing, strange humour, and the complications of human entanglement from Governor General’s Award nominee Deborah Willis


The characters in these thirteen masterful and engaging stories exist on the edge of danger, where landscapes melt into dreamscapes and every house is haunted. A drug dealer’s girlfriend signs up for the first manned mission to Mars. A girl falls in love with a man who wants to turn her into a bird. A teenage girl and her best friend test their relationship by breaking into suburban houses. A wife finds a gaping hole in the floor of the home she shares with her husband, a hole that only she can see. Full of longing and strange humour, these subtle, complex stories—about the love between a man and his pet crow, an alcoholic and his AA sponsor, a mute migrant and a newspaper reporter—show how love ties us to one another and to the world. The Dark and Other Love Stories announces the emergence of a wonderfully gifted storyteller whose stories enlarge our perceptions about the human capacity to love. 

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Deborah Willis's latest book, The Dark and Other Love Stories, was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Her first book, Vanishing and Other Stories, was named one of The Globe and Mail's Best Books of 2009, and was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for fiction. Her work has also appeared in The Walrus, The Virginia Quarterly, The Iowa Review, Lucky Peach, The Wall Street Journal, and Zoetrope. She has worked as a bookseller at Munro's Books in Victoria, BC, as a technical writer, and as a writer-in-residence at Joy Kogawa House in Vancouver and at the University of Calgary. Deborah was born and raised in Calgary and is currently the Writer in Residence at MacEwan University in Edmonton.

With COVID-19 comes a heightened sense of everyday risk. How should a society manage, distribute, and conceive of it?

As we cope with the lengthening effects of the global COVID-19 pandemic, considerations of everyday risk have been more pressing, and inescapable. In the past, everyone engaged in some degree of risky behaviour, from mundane realities like taking a shower or getting into a car to purposely thrill-seeking activities like rock-climbing or BASE jumping. Many activities that seemed high-risk, such as flying, were claimed basically safe. But risk was, and always has been, a fact of life. With new focus on the risks of even leaving the safety of our homes, it’s time for a deeper consideration of risk itself. How do we manage and distribute risks? How do we predict uncertain outcomes? If risk can never be completely eliminated, can it perhaps be controlled? At the heart of these questions—which govern everything from waking up each day to the abstract mathematics of actuarial science—lie philosophical issues of life, death, and danger. Mortality is the event-horizon of daily risk. How should we conceive of it?