As Ramsay tells his story, it begins to seem that from boyhood, he has exerted a perhaps mystical, perhaps pernicious, influence on those around him. His apparently innocent involvement in such innocuous events as the throwing of a snowball or the teaching of card tricks to a small boy in the end prove neither innocent nor innocuous. Fifth Business stands alone as a remarkable story told by a rational man who discovers that the marvelous is only another aspect of the real.

    When Emily's parents move to an eighteen-room house so that her four unpredictable cousins can live with them, life for Emily, an only child, is never again the same.

    The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is a virtuoso synthesis of storytelling, history, and myth by a writer who brings us back to our familiar legends with a renewed sense of wonder.

    

    This decision — bold to the point of recklessness — was to change the lives of every man, woman and child in Canada and alter the shape of the nation.Using primary sources — diaries, letters, unpublished manuscripts, public documents and newspapers — Pierre Berton has reconstructed the incredible decade of the 1870s, when Canadians of every stripe — contractors, politicians, financiers, surveyors, workingmen, journalists and entrepreneurs — fought for the railway, or against it.The National Dream is above all else the story of people. It is the story of George McMullen, the brash young promoter who tried to blackmail the Prime Minister; of Marcus Smith, the crusty surveyor, so suspicious of authority he thought the Governor General was speculating in railway lands; of Sanford Fleming, the great engineer who invented Standard Time but who couldn't make up his mind about the best route for the railway. All these figures, and dozens more, including the political leaders of the era, come to life with all their human ambitions and failings.

    Using primary sources-diaries, letters, unpublished manuscripts, public documents & newspapers-Berton has reconstructed the decade of the 1870s, when Canadians of every stripe-contractors, politicians, financiers, surveyors, workingmen, journalists & entrepreneurs-fought for or against the railway. Here's the fullest account ever published of the Pacific Scandal, whch left its scars upon the era. Here's the saga of the surveyors who struggled & often died in the mountains & of the construction men who fought to tame the muskegs & the granites of the Canadian Shield. Here's the unpublished story of how railroad contracts were awarded to political cronies-men who thought little of bribing public servants to get what they wanted. Between 1881 & 1885, Canada was forged into a nation by the building of the railway. The Last Spike reconstructs the story of how some 2000 miles of steel crossed the continent in 5 years, exactly half the time stipulated by contract. Berton recreates the adventures that were part of this vast undertaking: the railway on the brink of bankruptcy, with one hour between it & ruin; the land boom of Winnipeg in 1881/82; & the epic tale of how Wm Van Horne rushed 3000 soldiers over a half-finished railway to quell the Riel Rebellion. Dominating the whole saga are the men who made it all possible a host of astonishing characters: Van Horne, the powerhouse behind the transcontinental vision; Rogers, the eccentric surveyor; Onderdonk, the cool New Yorker; Stephen, the emotional businessman; Fr Lacombe, the black-robed voyageur; Sam Steele, of the NW Mounted Police; Gabriel Dumont, the Prince of the Prairies; over 7000 Chinese workers, toiling & dying in the Fraser Valley canyons; & many more land sharks, construction geniuses, politicians & entrepreneurs all of whom played a role in the founding of Canada west of Ontario.Vol 1: The National DreamVol 2: The Last Spike

    The novel’s rowdy concoction of grit and violence and rooming-house sleaze had a strongly polarizing effect on its readers. Many admired the frankness of Butler’s depiction of a sordid environment, and others deplored the obscenity of the language and the dangerous and careless ways in which his characters behave, bent as they are on downward self-transcendence. But Cabbagetown Diary was undeniably a promising debut by a young writer whose brash tone and pungent subject matter were unique in Canadian writing at that time. The novel takes the form of a diary written by a disaffected young Toronto bartender, Michael, over the course of his four-month liaison with Terry, a naive teenager who is new to the city. Michael introduces her to his friends and his inner-city haunts, to drink and drugs, and to the nihilist politics espoused by some in his circle. With hard-bitten cynicism and flashes of dark humour, Michael relates the vicissitudes of their summer together.