By turns darkly comic and heartbreakingly sad, Sweetland is a deeply suspenseful story about one man's struggles against the forces of nature and the ruins of memory. For twelve generations, when the fish were plentiful and when they all-but disappeared, the inhabitants of this remote island in Newfoundland have lived and died together. Now, in the second decade of the 21st century, they are facing resettlement, and each has been offered a generous compensation package to leave. But the money is offered with a proviso: everyone has to go; the government won't be responsible for one crazy coot who chooses to stay alone on an island.  That coot is Moses Sweetland. Motivated in part by a sense of history and belonging, haunted by memories of the short and lonely time he spent away from his home as a younger man, and concerned that his somewhat eccentric great-nephew will wilt on the mainland, Moses refuses to leave. But in the face of determined, sometimes violent, opposition from his family and his friends, Sweetland is eventually swayed to sign on to the government's plan. Then a tragic accident prompts him to fake his own death and stay on the deserted island. As he manages a desperately diminishing food supply, and battles against the ravages of weather, Sweetland finds himself in the company of the vibrant ghosts of the former islanders, whose porch lights still seem to turn on at night.

    Rattled, Bird rushed home to Nova Scotia and enlisted in the army to take his dead brother's place. And We Go On is a remarkable and harrowing memoir of his two years in the trenches of the Western Front, from October 1916 until the Armistice. When it first appeared in 1930, Bird's memoir was hailed by many veterans as the most authentic account of the war experience, uncompromising in its portrayal of the horror and savagery, while also honouring the bravery, camaraderie, and unexpected spirituality that flourished among the enlisted men. Written in part as a reaction to anti-war novels such as All Quiet on the Western Front, which Bird criticized for portraying the soldier as "a coarse-minded, profane creature, seeking only the solace of loose women or the courage of strong liquor," And We Go On is a nuanced response to the trauma of war, suffused with an interest in the spiritual and the paranormal not found in other war literature. Long out of print, it is a true lost classic that arguably influenced numerous works in the Canadian literary canon, including novels by Robertson Davies and Timothy Findley. In an introduction and afterword, David Williams illuminates Bird's work by placing it within the genre of Great War literature and by discussing the book's publication history and reception.

    After her delayed diagnosis of colorectal cancer, Robin McGee reaches out to her community using a blog entitled "Robin's Cancer Olympics." Often uplifting and humourous, the blog posts and responses follow her into the harsh landscape of cancer treatment, medical regulation, and provincial politics. If she and her supporters are to be successful in lobbying the government for the chemotherapy, she must overcome many formidable and frightening hurdles. And time is running out. . . A true story, The Cancer Olympics is a suspenseful and poignant treatment of an unthinkable situation, an account of advocacy and survival that explores our deepest values regarding democracy, medicine, and friendship. Robin McGee has been decorated with medals by the Canadian Cancer Society and the Governor-General of Canada. www.thecancerolympics.com

    Lau alludes to the personal and political histories of a number of young Asian Canadian characters to explain their unique perspectives of the world, artfully fusing pure delusion and abstract perception with heartbreaking reality. Correspondingly, the book's title refers to an interview with Chinese basketball star Yao Ming, who when asked about the Shanghai Sharks, the team that shaped his formative sporting years, responded, "How does a single blade of grass thank the sun?" Lau's stories feature the children and grandchildren of immigrants, transnational adoptees and multiracial adults who came of age in the 1990s—all struggling to find a place in the Western world and using the only language they know to express their hopes, fears and expectations.

    It confronts difficult material in a frank and unflinching manner, yet remains grounded in an abiding authorial intelligence. Pedal marks the debut of a hugely promising writer.”–Steven W. Beattie, Quill & Quire“Julia, the protagonist of this intense first novel, is a psychology grad student who risks everything to pursue scientific research in truly forbidden territory: sexual attraction between adults and children. She persists in her quest in spite of skeptical friends, fragile relatives, a squeamish thesis advisor, an enigmatic bike-tour companion, severe social taboos, and her own painful memories of a birth father she calls Dirtbag–not to prove any point but to find out what lies beyond the conventional wisdom. This is an unsettling novel–smart, fierce, confident, funny, and full of surprises–with an unforgettable young woman at the heart of the storm.”–Mary Schendlinger, Senior Editor, Geist“[…] a taut, unsettling, and provoking debut novel […] [Chelsea Rooney] ought to be commended for perceptively addressing such a difficult and inflammatory (and decidedly uncommercial) topic with a subtlety that’s buoyed by ample empathy.”–Brett Josef Grubisic, Vancouver Sun“Pedal is a brave and captivating book, written with an unflinching eye and a deep understanding of the torment that is the human condition. Chelsea Rooney is a major talent.”–Steven Galloway, author of The Confabulist and The Cellist of SarajevoJulia Hoop, a twenty-five-year-old counselling psych student, is working on her thesis, exploring an idea which makes her graduate supervisor squirm. She is conducting interview after interview with a group of women she affectionately calls the Molestas—women whose experience of childhood sexual abuse did not cause physical trauma. Julia is the expert, she claims, because she has the experience; her own father, Dirtbag, disappeared when she was eight leaving behind nothing but a legacy of addiction and violence.When both her boyfriend and her graduate advisor break up with her on the same day, Julia leaves her city of Vancouver on a bicycle for a cross-Canada trip in search of her father, or so she tells people. Her unexpected travel partner is Smirks, a handsome athlete who also has a complicated history. Their travel days are marked by peaks of ecstatic physical exertion, and their nights by frustrated drinking and drugs. After an unsettling incident in rural Saskatchewan involving a trio of aggressive children, Julie wakes up in the morning to discover Smirks has disappeared. Everything, once again, falls apart.Sometimes shocking in its candour, yet charmed with enigmatic characters, Pedal explores how we are shaped by accidents of timing—trauma and sex, brain chemistry and the landscape of our country—and challenges beliefs we hold dear about the nature of pedophilia, the essence of innocence and the idea that the past is something one runs from.

    He has resumed his search for companionship, but has he truly moved on? Will's mother Katherine - one of the few people, perhaps the only one, who loves him unconditionally - is also in recovery, from a bout with colon cancer that haunts her body and mind with the possibility of relapse. Having experienced heartbreak, and fearful of tragedy, Will must come to terms with the rule of impermanence: to see past lost treasures and unwanted returns, to find hope and solace in the absolute certainty of change. In The Geography of Pluto, Christopher DiRaddo perfectly captures the ebb and flow of life through the insightful, exciting, and often playful story of a young man's day-to-day struggle with uncertainty.

    Miyashita. Despite differences in their age, race, and class, a friendship develops between them in the peaceful vacuum of Mr. Miyashita’s office. But outside, on the city streets, a dark chapter in North American history is taking shape. As war looms, relations between Canada and Japan grow steadily worse. Travel outside North America becomes impossible for Mr. Miyashita, so he asks Kay to cross the Pacific Ocean, even as the Imperial Navy is manoeuvring into position for the attack on Pearl Harbor. He sends her to Hong Kong on the famous Pan American Clipper to collect a precious family heirloom. On this journey, Kay commits some seemingly small sins of omission. But in the paranoid climate of the times, these little white lies put Mr. Miyashita at risk of being arrested as a spy.Told through the eyes of an older Kay, and set during the turbulent and racially charged times of the Second World War, Flying Time is a triumphant story of love and adventure, the impetuosity of youth and the regrets of age.

    She signs on, imagining that exotic hands-on work at the sandy location shoot for a made-in-Canada biopic will open doors of opportunity and spark her creativity - or at the very least supply interesting material for her family's annual Labour Day gathering. Meanwhile, her soon-to-be boss, the handsome cynic Jake Nugent, who's well experienced with shoot dynamics in remote sites, hopes only to stamp out inevitable problems before they swallow the budget and cost him a job. Script changes (massive), on-set mishaps (minor), and after-hours misadventures (many) guarantee that Marta and Jake won't easily forget this week in the Okanagan Valley. A wry look at the shoestring end of a billion-dollar industry and the occasional but profound foolishness of the human heart, This Location of Unknown Possibilities makes a case for black comedy being the best lens for viewing contemporary life.

    Poetry. Queer. LGBT studies. Ekphrastic poems. Persona poems. Love poems. Maternal poems."Extraordinarily good work. So multivalenced, hard-hitting, delicate and continually surprising." Marilyn Hackeravailable only from Canadian bookstores and online sellersReview: http://www.lambdaliterary.org/reviews...Review: http://michaeldennispoet.blogspot.ca/...Review: http://prismmagazine.ca/tag/love-will...Art, children, marriage, breaking, rejoicing. Love is a many-branched tree and in Hamilton's newest poetry collection, her third, it's autumn or winter, the winds are kicking up and branches are flying everywhere - bursting into a thousand shapes. Or maybe it's Hamilton's heart that explodes into many dimensions. Tender, furious, grief-stricken, witty, urbane, elegiac, political, personal, erotic - these poems are all those things. Hamilton can't stop loving big no matter how chancy it is.All these shapes lend raw material for a poem: Mothers lose their babies. A boy loses his leg to war. A girl hides from serial killer Richard Speck. A virgin gets pregnant. Women tumble into love, celebratory and foolhardy.Frank and elemental, LOVE WILL BURST INTO A THOUSAND SHAPES reminds us that life is worth everything we can throw at it."In her new collection of poetry--ekphrastic, maternal, erotic--Jane Eaton hamilton writes with grace, vigrou, and brilliant colour." Ellis Avery"Jazzy and engaging. Hamilton proves herself to be a real wordsmith, with a trickster's soul and a heart as big as New Mexico. The poems are enlightening, risky, rough, funny as hell and ultimately very moving." Barry Dempster

    One year later, as the lilacs blossomed once again, she returned to her hometown of Szatmár and set her memories, raw and vivid, to paper. Her unflinching words convey the bitter details of the Szatmár ghetto, Auschwitz, the Schlesiersee forced labour camp and a perilous death march. At forty-eight years old, Anna had survived a lifetime of trauma, and as she wrote, she waited, desperately hoping her family would return.

    After the death of her beloved husband, Sarah is left on her own to care for her five young children in this harsh and unforgiving place.Sarah is strong, fiercely determined to see her family right, but her blinding pride gets in the way, to disastrous result. Life soon offers Sarah an unexpected gift, one that allows her to rethink their future, and she makes a decision that will alter the course of their lives forever. Sarah and her family leave the grit and grime of Manchester behind to start life anew; but leaving isn't always letting go, and she is forced to face all that has held her back from truly moving on. The Porter's Wife is a touching story about love and faith in the face of adversity. It is a celebration of self-discovery and the resiliency of the human spirit.

    But its tight rhythms, startling images and vivid, arresting turns of phrase make it utterly compelling"—The Toronto StarThe LifeboatAll night in his lifeboat my father sangto keep the voices of the other menwho cried in the wreckage from reaching him,he sang what he knew of the requiem,of the hit parade and the bits of hymns,he sang until he would never sing again,scalding his raw throat with sea-wateruntil his ribs heaved, until the saltwept from his eyes on dry land,flecked at his lips in his squalling rages,streaked the sheets in his night sweatsas night after night the reassembled shipscattered its parts on the shore of his bed,and the lifeboat eased him out againto drown each night among singing men.Inspired by a shipwreck endured by her father during the Second World War, and by his struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder and eventual suicide, Inheritance is a powerful poetic debut by the winner of the 2013 Boston Review Fiction Contest and The Malahat Review Far Horizons Award.

    Rooted in Sze’s first experience of Asia, these poems mingle the familiar spaces of her childhood home in Winnipeg with impressions of the distant villages of her parents’ origins. The result is a complex exploration of the relationship between identity, place, and history. Landscape and language prove unstable, inhabited by ghosts and other echoes of passing time which leave indelible impressions on the poet: A market in Hong Kong seems reminiscent of Montreal; the spirit of her great-grandmother shows up on a commercial street in China, then in Queen Elizabeth Park in Vancouver. The mundane–a bite of fruit, a boy selling raisins, the floured hands of a baker–takes on a contemplative cast. In such a world, a traveller is never wholly certain whether she is discovering an unexplored world or descending into memory, but Sze’s lyrically-driven poems navigate confidently, mapping new terrain while remaining sensitive to the claims of the past.

    Adam is afraid of anything new, hates nature and just wants to go home. Meanwhile, Neil discovers a secret network of caves below the camp that seem linked to a series of mysteries — and a troubled ghost. He needs someone to help him explore further and may have to recruit Adam’s favourite girl camper if his friend refuses to help. Things get even more complicated when the creepy camp director gets suspicious about Neil’s evening activities.

    From a female trickster story centered on erotic lesbian tales to the farcical story about a new nation of Indigenous people called the Nation of Mischief, this collection creates a space to explore what it means to be queer and Indigenous.

    Ava Lee is a young Chinese-Canadian forensic accountant who works for an elderly Hong Kong–based “Uncle,” who may or may not have ties to the Triads. At 115 lbs., she hardly seems a threat. But her razor sharp intellect and resourcefulness allows her to succeed where traditional methods have failed.In The Water Rat of Wanchai, Ava travels across continents to track $5 million owed by a seafood company. But it’s in Guyana where she meets her match: Captain Robbins, a huge hulk of a man and godfather-like figure who controls the police, politicians, and criminals alike. In exchange for his help, he decides he wants a piece of Ava’s $5 million action and will do whatever it takes to get his fair share . . .Featuring the Prequel: The Dragon Head of Hong Kong:Young Ava Lee is a forensic accounting who has just opened her own private firm. One of her clients, Hedrick Lo, has been swindled of more than a million dollars by a Chinese importer named Johnny Kung. Desperate, Lo persuades Ava to find and retrieve the monies owed. Ava goes to Hong Kong, where she plunges into the dangerous underground collection business and meets a man who will forever change her life . . .

    But to describe it as such restricts the book to its physical concerns, when in fact these are poems of great philosophical ambition, and startling ethical and psychological reach.Martens has made an elemental world both beautiful and severe, and on his stage, characters assume a collective status both emphatically human and radically mythic. He is interested in endurance, in addiction, loss, abuse, and pain, in how people are created, and how they create themselves, out of crude material both inherited, and scavenged. His language is rough and baroque; his metaphors are titanic in their range and scope. This is a book about grace and error, about hurtling towards the unknown, about acting out. Martens writes: "It is dark when you reach the excavation and you don't know if the road starts or ends here. If it's abutment, chimera, hole." Prologue for the Age of Consequence accrues the propulsive force of an epic. It will pry you open, and reorder what it finds inside."Of the various marvels in Garth Martens' Prologue for the Age of Consequence, the ones that strike me most are the powerful and original language, the stirringly concrete grappling with technological-industrial reality, and the approach through work life as lived today. His is poetry that embraces the harshest facts, then spirals through meditation and lyricism to a vision of our world from the towers of Troy to the towers of the oil derricks, set in their present-day 'microwavable / avatar country of the digital.' [A]n exceptional book." —A.F. Moritz"Prologue for the Age of Consequence speaks a demotic blurt, Woody Guthrie, early Dylan rough, consonants thunking like nail guns. And in the marvelous din, towers, ziggurats of the oil boom, rise, mammoth, purposeful and unhuman. Martens gives us the men who erect them in Fort Mac or somewhere east of High Prairie . . . The book is as character-crammed as the Inferno." —Tim Lilburn

    As Allied armies close in on the retreating armies of the Third Reich, Captain Jim McFarlane, a Canadian infantry officer, is coming apart at the seams. He is exhausted and his identity fragments as he tries to command his combat company under fire, waiting with equally bated breath for letters from his wife Marianne and for orders to advance into the fray. Written in extraordinarily vivid prose, A Beckoning War is alternatively cerebral and visceral, unsettling and gripping, propelled by the tension between the larger perspective of the war and the private perspective of an officer teetering at the edge. This novel marks the debut of an important new author.

    While Bentham’s design was ostensibly for a prison, he believed that any number of places that require supervision � factories, poorhouses, hospitals, and schools � would benefit from such a design. The French philosopher Michel Foucault took Bentham at his word. In his groundbreaking 1975 study, Discipline and Punish, the panopticon became a metaphor to describe the creeping effects of personalized surveillance as a means for ever-finer mechanisms of control.Forty years later, the available tools of scrutiny, supervision, and discipline are far more capable and insidious than Foucault dreamed, and yet less effective than Bentham hoped. Shopping malls, container ports, terrorist holding cells and social networks all bristle with cameras, sensors, and trackers. But, crucially, they are also rife with resistance. The Inspection House is a tour through several of these sites � from Guantánamo Bay to the Occupy Oakland camp and the authors’ own mobile devices � providing a stark, vivid portrait of our contemporary surveillance state and its opponents.

    In BLUE SONOMA, award-winning poet Jane Munro draws on her well- honed talents to address what Eliot called "the gifts reserved for age." A beloved partner's crossing into Alzheimer's is at the heart of this book, and his "battered blue Sonoma" is an evocation of numerous other crossings: between empirical reportage and meditative apprehension, dreaming and wakefulness, Eastern and Western poetic traditions. Rich in both pathos and sharp shards of insight, Munro's wisdom here is deeply embedded, shot through with moments of wit and candour. In the tradition of Taoist poets like Wang Wei and Po-Chu-i, her sixth and best book opens a wide poetic space, and renders difficult conditions with the lightest of touches.

    Luxury town-homes and upscale boutiques have replaced factories and corner stores. One night, the otherwise bucolic town explodes with gunfire. A hostage crisis ensues, and the local police department is caught flat-footed. Officers Grant Ambler and Arnold Strauss are both new to the department, and both carrying the weight of their own personal problems as they walk, unaware, into the mayhem. In a single evening, Peacefield is transformed from a quiet, anonymous place into a violent and unpredictable nightmare, where lives are shattered, faith is renewed and long-concealed mysteries are solved.

    Thompson lived and breathed baseball even if he didn’t take to the sport at first. Trouble was, as a bookish kid and a daydreamer, he was never really great at it. Thompson played in little league where he lived too much in his head to do much of anything but strike out.Eventually he and his childhood friends started playing their own versions of the great game in backyards and basements, away from the pressures of organized sports. With no other teams to play against, winning became less important than the bonding between his friends and their fathers. When his own dad passes away suddenly at Christmas one year Thompson becomes acutely aware of these ties.Diary of a Fluky Kid paints a coming of age story in nine innings along with poignant and humorous short stories from Thompson’s childhood.E - Everyone over ten: Content is suitable for everyone but may contain mild violence and language and minimal suggestive themes.

    Breaking from the parameters of traditional English literature studies, this volume embraces a wider sense of poetics, including Indigenous oralities, languages, and understandings of place.Featuring work by academics and poets, the book examines four elements of Indigenous poetics. First, it explores the poetics of memory: collective memory, the persistence of Indigenous poetic consciousness, and the relationships that enable the Indigenous storytelling process. The book then explores the poetics of performance: Indigenous poetics exist both in written form and in relation to an audience. Third, in an examination of the poetics of place and space, the book considers contemporary Indigenous poetry and classical Indigenous narratives. Finally, in a section on the poetics of medicine, contributors articulate the healing and restorative power of Indigenous poetry and narratives.

    Over the course of four successive winters he steered his dogs and sled on long trips away from his remote Northwest Territories homestead, setting out in turn to the four cardinal compass points--south, east, north, and west--and home again to Hoarfrost River.His narrative ranges from the personal and poignant musings of a dogsled driver to loftier planes of introspection and contemplation. Olesen describes his journeys day by day, but this book is not merely an account of his travels. Neither is it yet another offering in the genre of "wide-eyed southerner meets the Arctic," because Olesen is a firmly rooted northerner, having lived and travelled in the boreal outback for over thirty years. Olesen's life story colours his writing: educated immigrant, husband and father, professional dog musher, working bush pilot, and denizen of log cabins far off the grid. He and his dogs feel at home in country lying miles back of beyond.This book demolishes many of the cliches that imbue writings about bush life, the Far North, and dogsledding. It is a unique blend of armchair adventure, personal memoir, and thoughtful, down-to-earth reflection.

    Astronauts leave earth's atmosphere in a spaceship. Spacewalkers don pressure suits and step outside into the universe.Spacewalking is a physically exhausting, mentally rigorous endeavor. It’s so difficult, only three Canadians have ever succeeded: Chris Hadfield, Steve MacLean and Dave Williams. Chris Hadfield and Dave Williams are record breakers; Hadfield completed thefirst Canadian spacewalk and installed the Canadarm 2 on the International Space Station, while Williams holds the record forthe longest spacewalk by a Canadian. And Steve MacLean, Senior Research Affiliate at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and former head of the Canadian Space Agency, was one of Canada’s original six astronauts.But what is it really like to step into that abyss; to leap out into space with only the thin fabric of your suit between you and the universe? In Canadian Spacewalkers , author Bob McDonald compiles each of the spacewalkers' perspectives and presents an extensive interview transcription -- a one-on-one with spacewalkers who tell tales of training underwater in the world's largest swimming pool, recount how they learned to use power tools in zero gravity while wearing bulky gloves and describe the moment when they opened the hatch and stepped outside.McDonald, science journalist and simulator-spacewalker, also shares his own experiences with astronaut training: the almost- reality of simulators, the sensory deprivation of the spacesuit, and even a zero-g airplane ride where he experiences the wonder and giddiness of floating weightless.Highly illustrated with stunning NASA photos, Canadian Spacewalkers will inspire, astound and surprise. This is the gripping first-hand story of unique adventurers -- in their own words -- who have gone where very few humans have had the privilege to go.

    And they almost became world famous. Almost. Told by film critic and pop-culture aficionado Geoff Pevere, this is their story.

    Sedna was once a young woman who refused to marry, but the lies and deception of a treacherous bird and her own father’s cowardice lead her to a life of solitude at the bottom of the ocean as the powerful, and at times vengeful, spirit of the sea. Steeped in Inuit traditional values and lifestyle, this book serves as an ideal introduction to the mythology of the first peoples to inhabit North America.