It's also a compelling story of a womanlearning to navigate pain, mental illness, and trauma, until finallybecoming an advocate for her own strength and healing.” –ELIZABETH RENZETTI, author of Shrewed: A Wry and Closely Observed Look at the Lives of Women and GirlsKaren Gosbee had it all: a successful husband, three beautiful children, the homes, the cars, the jewelry, the A-list invitations. Herlife looked perfect and as her husband, George, liked to say,appearances are everything. But at the height of his success as an ownerof a major American sports franchise, cracks appeared in George'scarefully constructed façade.Karen could not ignore his increasingly erratic and self-destructive behavior, which spiraled from affairs and hard-drinkingto prostitutes and drug abuse. Nor could she escape his abuse asemotional bullying escalated into dangerous beatings.A Perfect Nightmare is the story of a woman's awakening to the realities of her failing marriage and her desperate struggle - one thatwould end in headlines and tragedy - to bring herself and her childrento safety.

    With a repertoire of masterful pitches wielded with impeccable command, he piled up accolades during his 16 major league seasons, the very image of stability and dominance whenever he took the mound. Doc is a celebration and a profound remembrance of a beloved player, friend, and family man. Todd Zolecki traces Halladay's remarkable journey, from garnering the attention of major league scouts as a teenager in Colorado, to Halladay's methodical reinvention and ascent to ace status in Toronto, to the signature no-hitter he authored in his playoff debut with the Philadelphia Phillies. Also examined are Halladay's distinctive, disciplined approach to pitching, his impact as a teammate and community member, and the baseball world's honoring of these qualities in Cooperstown in 2019. Thoroughly and thoughtfully reported, with input and reflections from Halladay's teammates, coaches, competitors, and more, this is an essential biography for baseball fans everywhere.

    Can I advise you to just move?" A young family moves into a neighbourhood with a reputation for crime. As they make their home in one of the oldest parts of the city, Carissa Halton reflects on the changing view from her little yellow house. While others nervously examine the less than-stellar reputation of her surroundings, she heads out to meet her neighbours, and through them discovers the innate beauty in her community. Halton invites us to meet a cast of diverse characters including cat rescuers, tragic teens, art evangelists, and crime fighters, whose walks of life, though very different from her own, has led to them being the people in her neighbourhood. Threaded through this collection of essays are questions about the social and economic forces that shape and reshape our cities.

    Finding tradition in league with self-delusion, he attempts to shatter the ghetto’s illusory walls by entering the foreign territory of the goyim. But here, freedom and self-determination continue to elude him. Eventually, Noah comes to recognize “justice and safety and a kind of felicity” in a world he cannot – entirely – leave behind. Richler’s superb account of Noah’s struggle to scale the walls of the ghetto overflows with rich comic satire. Son of a Smaller Hero is a compassionate, penetrating account of the nature of belonging, told with the savage realism for which Mordecai Richler’s fiction is celebrated.

    Mouse’s world is constrained by a number of factors: her mother is dead, her father – the admired country doctor – is emotionally distant, her housekeeper Sal is prejudiced and narrow, and her grandmother and aunt, Big Louie and Little Louie, the only life-affirming presences in her life, live in another city. Enter Gentleman John Pilkie, the former NHL star who’s transferred to the mental hospital in Madoc's Landing, where he is to serve out his life-sentence for the murder of his wife and daughter. John becomes a point of fascination for young Mary, who looks to him for the attention she does not receive from her father. He, in turn, is kind to her – but the kindness is misunderstood. When Mary figures out that the attention she receives from the Hockey Killer is different in kind and intent from the attention her Aunt Little Louie receives, her world collapses. Set against the beautiful and dramatic shore of Georgian Bay, the climax will have readers turning pages with concern for characters they can’t help but love.Praise"Mouse Bradford is a unique and luminous creation... Gentleman John Pilkie, the hockey killer with a heart of gold, is dressed and ready to become a legend." — Paul Gross

    The band's story unfolds through the eyes of Jim, a small-town violin prodigy who struggles with her past as well as her present; and Rize, an emotionally charged trombone player who is stuck playing sidekick to his best friend, charismatic lead singer Jules. As the band's popularity mounts, the pressures of road-life and success begin to complicate relationships and The Angel Riots' chaotic world threatens to implode. Dark and dazzling, this novel will firmly establish Kaslik's reputation as a young literary talent.

    Catherine Porter, a newly minted international reporter, was on the ground in the immediate aftermath. Moments after she arrived in Haiti, Catherine found her first story. A ragtag group of volunteers told her about a “miracle child”—a two-year-old girl who had survived six days under the rubble and emerged virtually unscathed.Catherine found the girl the next day. Her family was a mystery; her future uncertain. Her name was Lovely. She seemed a symbol of Haiti—both hopeful and despairing.When Catherine learned that Lovely had been reunited with her family, she did what any journalist would do and followed the story. The cardinal rule of journalism is to remain objective and not become personally involved in the stories you report. But Catherine broke that rule on the last day of her second trip to Haiti. That day, Catherine made the simple decision to enroll Lovely in school and to pay for it with money she and her readers donated.Over the next five years, Catherine would visit Lovely and her family seventeen times, while also reporting on the country’s struggles to harness the rush of international aid. Each trip, Catherine’s relationship with Lovely and her family became more involved and more complicated. Trying to balance her instincts as a mother and a journalist, and increasingly conscious of the costs involved, Catherine found herself struggling to align her worldview with the realities of Haiti after the earthquake. Although her dual roles as donor and journalist were constantly at odds, as one piled up expectations and the other documented failures, a third role had emerged and quietly become the most important: that of a friend.A Girl Named Lovely is about the reverberations of a single decision—in Lovely’s life and in Catherine’s. It recounts a journalist’s voyage into the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, hit by the greatest natural disaster in modern history, and the fraught, messy realities of international aid. It is about hope, kindness, heartbreak, and the modest but meaningful difference one person can make.

    These 11 profoundly moving and finely crafted stories encapsulate wildly divergent themes of love and loss, containment and exclusion. In the title story, a parks & rec worker faces an assailant who does not leave the altercation intact. A medical researcher and his claustrophobic fiancée are locked in the trunk of their car after a failed carjacking (the thief can't drive standard). A young woman enters a pharmaceutical trial in the outer reaches of suburbia and slips between sleeping and waking with increasingly alarming ease. Pairing the cultural acuity of Lost in Translation with the compassion and reach of The World According to Garp, Heighton breathes new life into the short story, a genre that is finally coming into its own.

    Set largely in the small Newfoundland mining town of Black Rock, but straying as far west as Vancouver and as far east as China, these stories are subtle, stark portrayals of people alternately looking for or trying desperately to escape their place in the world.A young boy confuses love and allegiance, then stumbles into the complexities of adulthood; a brother and sister fall in love with the same woman; a frustrated wife protests her husband’s neglect by going on strike with the miners’ union; a lover’s drug habit reunites a woman with the sister she has lost.Anchor Books is proud to publish an expanded edition of Michael Crummey’s brilliant collection Flesh and Blood, which includes three original stories written just for this edition. Graceful, affecting, and generous of spirit, these stories are unforgettable.

    Featuring a revolving cast of characters—the newly retired couple, the church warden, the musician, the small-town girl with big city dreams—Carney’s keen observations of the personalities and dramas of coastal life are instantly recognizable to readers who are familiar with life in a small community. With her narrative of dock fights, pet shows, family feuds, logging camps and the ever-present tension between islanders and property-owning “off-islanders,” Carney’s witty and perceptive voice describes how the islanders weather the storms of coastal life.Carney writes evocatively of the magical landscape of the British Columbia coast, where she has lived and worked for five decades. At the same time, she addresses the less-idyllic moments that can also characterize coastal life: power outages, winter storms, isolation. On Island brings the West Coast landscape—human and natural—to life, and gives islanders and mainland dwellers alike a taste of what it means to be “on island.”

    Ancient, complex and fast moving, it defies easy understanding.Ever since he was a boy, Alexandre Trudeau has been fascinated by this great county. Recounting his experiences in the China of recent years, Trudeau visits artists and migrant workers, townspeople and rural farmers. Often accompanied by a young Chinese journalist, Vivien, he explores realities caught in time between the China of our memories and the thrust of progress. The China he seeks out lurks in hints and shadows. It flickers dimly amidst all the glare and noise. The people he encounters along the way give up but small secrets yet each revelation comes as a surprise that jolts us from our preconceived ideas and forces us to challenge our most secure notions.Barbarian Lost, Trudeau’s first book, is an insightful and witty account of the dynamic changes going on right now in China, as well as a look back into the deeper history of this highly codified society. On the ground with the women and men who make China tick, Trudeau shines new light on the country as only a traveller with his storytelling abilities could.

    O’Keefe takes us on a heart-pounding journey at the sharp end of combat during the infamous Normandy campaign. More than 300 soldiers from the Black Watch found themselves pinned down, as the result of strategic blunders and the fog of war, and only a handful walked away. Thrust into a nightmare, Black Watch Highlanders who hailed from across Canada, the United States, Great Britain and the Allied world found themselves embroiled in a mortal contest against elite Waffen-SS units and grizzled Eastern Front veterans, where station, rank, race and religion mattered little, and only character won the day. Drawing on formerly classified documents and rare first-person testimony of the men who fought on the front lines, O’Keefe follows the footsteps of the ghosts of Normandy, giving a voice yet again to the men who sacrificed everything in the summer of 1944.

    Hogtown is dead. A shining metropolis lives." -- Peter C. NewmanIn the last sixty years, Toronto has been transformed from a provincial town to significant urban heavyweight. Few cities have experienced such sustained growth, and the packed streets of North America’s fourth-largest city are a far cry from the origins of the city as "Little York," which was comprised of the lieutenant-governor’s muddy tent --which he shared with his wife and many children -- and some barracks. Between then and now, fervent Orangemen have imposed strict morals on the growing provincial town, and an influx of immigrants changed the face of the city.Allan Levine delves into the character of a city that strives to balance urban development with the preservation of its distinct neighbourhoods, to maintain its status without losing its individuality. Its inhabitants have fought tooth and nail to prevent an expressway being built to the downtown core, have called in the army to clear the city of snow after a blizzard and consistently pack the Maple Leafs' arena every game, win or lose, making the hockey team the most valuable franchise in the NHL. The city can also claim one of the first Canadian politicians to stand up for gay rights, a store owner who almost single-handedly preserved theatre in Toronto, and then there’s Mayor Rob Ford...With the same eye for character, anecdote and circumstance that made Peter Ackroyd's London and Colin Jones's Paris so successful, Levine's captivating prose integrates the sights, sounds and feel of Toronto with a broad historical perspective, linking the city's present with its past through themes such as politics, transportation, public health, ethnic diversity and sports. Toronto invites readers to discover the city’s lively spirit over four centuries and to wander purposefully through the city's many unique neighbourhoods, where they can encounter the striking and peculiar characters who have inhabited them: the powerful and powerless, the entrepreneurs and the entertainers, and the moral and the corrupt, all of whom have contributed to Toronto's collective identity.

    Whispers at dinner parties. Warnings about bad dates with a Canadian celebrity. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, superstar CBC broadcaster Jian Ghomeshi revealed his interest in “rough sex” in a long Facebook post, and a scandal of unprecedented scale descended on the radio host.What the public did not know was that months before Ghomeshi’s emotional post, Canadaland podcaster Jesse Brown and Toronto Star journalist Kevin Donovan were quietly pursuing serious allegations against him. In Secret Life, Donovan takes us inside the Star’s investigation. Step by step, he explores the story as only he can: the media frenzy, his own personal and professional doubts, the women who came forward with stories about an alleged dark side of a national idol, and Ghomeshi’s ignominious firing and dramatic criminal trial. Taking us behind the scenes, Donovan sheds light on the journalistic process and the complexity of gathering information about a highly sensitive matter from named and confidential sources, including those women who feared it was their word against a beloved public figure’s.Secret Life is a thought-provoking account of the landmark Ghomeshi exposé that sparked a nation-wide discussion on sexual assault, the cult of celebrity, and the politics of power and gender in the workplace.

    Wright's acclaimed novel of Howard Wheeler's search for self-understanding is a journey through the past, both real and imagined, a brilliant gathering-together of the many threads of emotional inheritance that make up life.