The novel centres upon the hapless members of a love triangle united by their sexual obsessions and by their fascination with Catherine Tekakwitha, the 17th-century Mohawk saint. By turns vulgar, rhapsodic, and viciously witty, Beautiful Losers explores each character’s attainment of a state of self-abandonment, in which the sensualist cannot be distinguished from the saint.

    Keeping a watchful eye is Bernard Valcourt, a jaded foreign journalist, but his closest attention is devoted to Gentille, a hotel waitress with the slender, elegant build of a Tutsi. As they slip into an intense, improbable affair, the delicately balanced world around them–already devastated by AIDS–erupts in a Hutu-led genocide against the Tutsi people. Valcourt’s efforts to spirit Gentille to safety end in their separation. It will be months before he learns of his lover’s shocking fate.

    This discovery set her on a time-sensitive mission: to understand how her own family had somehow wound up in Canada.Chop Suey Nation weaves together Hui’s own family history with those dozens of Chinese restaurant owners from coast to coast. Along her trip, she meets a Chinese-restaurant owner/small-town mayor, the owner of a Chinese restaurant in a Thunder Bay curling rink, and the woman who runs a restaurant alone on the very remote Fogo Island. Hui also explores the fascinating history behind “chop suey” cuisine, detailing the invention of classics like “ginger beef” and “Newfoundland chow mein,” and other uniquely Canadian fare like the “Chinese pierogi” of Alberta.Hui, who grew up in authenticity-obsessed Vancouver, starts out her journey with a dim view of “fake" small-town Chinese food. But along the way she comes to understand the values that drive these restaurants — perseverance, entrepreneurialism and deep love for family. Using her own family’s story as a touchstone, she reveals the importance of these restaurants to this country’s history and makes the case for why chop suey cuisine is quintessentially Canadian.

    Outraged, a Royal Canadian Air Force squadron leader, Sandy Watson, quickly assembled a team of air force hockey players who were “amateur enough” to complete under the Olympic guidelines.Sergeant Frank Boucher was recruited to coach the team and begin the cross-Canada search for players. Hubert Brooks, a decorated flying officer and serial escapist from POW camps, was another early recruit. Andy Gilpin joined from the RCAF base in Whitehorse, as did airmen from Quebec, the Maritimes and western Canada. And when their starting goalie, Dick Ball, didn’t pass a medical exam, Murray Dowey was called up from his job as a TTC driver and occasional practice goalie for the Toronto Maple Leafs.The ragtag team got off to a rough start, losing so many exhibition games that Canadian newspapers called them a disgrace to the country. But the RCAF Flyers battled back, and Boucher’s defensive strategy paid off. They eliminated the American team, tied the Czech team and beat the Swiss as the hometown crowd pelted the Canadians with snowballs during the game. On the same ice where Barbara Ann Scott won a gold medal, the underdog RCAF Flyers also won Olympic gold, and their goalie, Murray Dowey, set an Olympic record that still stands.Against All Odds is the inspiring untold story of a group of determined men, fresh from the battlefields of WWII, who surprised a nation and the world.

    Chanie’s home was 400 miles away. He didn’t know that. He didn’t know where it was, nor how to find it, but, like so many kids—more than anyone will be able to imagine—he tried.

    Named one of the "Young Guns" and one of the "five hot minds in economics" by the Yale Economic Review, he serves on the National Economic Council in Prague, where his provocative writing has achieved bestseller status. How has he done it? By arguing a simple, almost heretical proposition: economics is ultimately about good and evil. In The Economics of Good and Evil, Sedlacek radically rethinks his field, challenging our assumptions about the world. Economics is touted as a science, a value-free mathematical inquiry, he writes, but it's actually a cultural phenomenon, a product of our civilization. It began within philosophy--Adam Smith himself not only wrote The Wealth of Nations, but also The Theory of Moral Sentiments--and economics, as Sedlacek shows, is woven out of history, myth, religion, and ethics. "Even the most sophisticated mathematical model," Sedlacek writes, "is, de facto, a story, a parable, our effort to (rationally) grasp the world around us." Economics not only describes the world, but establishes normative standards, identifying ideal conditions. Science, he claims, is a system of beliefs to which we are committed. To grasp the beliefs underlying economics, he breaks out of the field's confines with a tour de force exploration of economic thinking, broadly defined, over the millennia. He ranges from the epic of Gilgamesh and the Old Testament to the emergence of Christianity, from Descartes and Adam Smith to the consumerism in Fight Club. Throughout, he asks searching meta-economic questions: What is the meaning and the point of economics? Can we do ethically all that we can do technically? Does it pay to be good? Placing the wisdom of philosophers and poets over strict mathematical models of human behavior, Sedlacek's groundbreaking work promises to change the way we calculate economic value.

    in a literary sense, ever written in Canada."Completed just before Emily Carr died in 1945, Growing Pains tells the story of Carr’s life, beginning with her girlhood in pioneer Victoria and going on to her training as an artist in San Francisco, England and France. Also here is the frustration she felt at the rejection of her art by Canadians, of the years of despair when she stopped painting. She had to earn a living, and did so by running a small apartment-house, and her painful years of landladying and more joyful times raising dogs for sale, claimed all her time and energy. Then, towards the end of her life, came unexpected vindication and triumph when the Group of Seven accepted her as one of them. Throughout, the book is informed with Carr’s passionatate love of and connection with nature.Carr is a natural storyteller whose writing is vivid and vital, informed by wit, nostalgic charm, an artist’s eye for description, a deep feeling for creatures and the foibles of humanity--all the things that made her previous books Klee Wyck and Book of Small so popular and critically acclaimed.

    The first journey is that of the young men who came from Newfoundland’s outports, fields, villages and narrow city streets to join the storied regiment that led many of them to their deaths at Beaumont-Hamel during the Battle of the Somme on July 1, 1916. The second journey is the author’s, taken a century later as he walks in the footsteps of the dead men to discover what remains of their passage across land and through memory.      Part unconventional history, part memoir-travelogue, part philosophical inquiry, Michael Winter uniquely captures the extraordinary lives and landscapes, both in Europe and at home, scarred by a war that is just now disappearing from living memory. In subtle and surprising ways, he also tells the hidden story of the very act of remembering – of how the past bleeds into the present and the present corrals and shapes the past. As he wanders from battlefield to barracks to hospital to hotel, and finally to a bereft stretch of land battered by a blizzard back home, Winter gently but persistently unsettles us – startling us with the unexpected encounters and juxtapositions that arise from his physical act of walking through the places where the soldiers once marched, this time armed with artifacts and knowledge those earlier souls could not have, yet undone by the reality of their bodily presence beneath the earth.      In this unusual, poignant and beautiful book, Michael Winter gives us a new way of looking at a powerful piece of history that, he reminds us, continues to haunt our own lives.

    Symptoms of decline are all around us today, it seems: slowing growth, crushing debts, aging populations, anti-social behaviour. But what exactly is amiss with Western civilization? The answer, Niall Ferguson argues, is that our institutions - the intricate frameworks within which a society can flourish or fail - are degenerating. Representative government, the free market, the rule of law and civil society: these were once the four pillars of West European and North American societies. It was these institutions, rather than any geographical or climatic advantages, that set the West on the path to global dominance after around 1500. In our time, however, these institutions have deteriorated in disturbing ways. Our democracies have broken the contract between the generations by heaping IOUs on our children and grandchildren. Our markets are increasingly distorted by over-complex regulations that are in fact the disease of which they purport to be the cure. The rule of law has metamorphosed into the rule of lawyers. And civil society has degenerated into uncivil society, where we lazily expect all our problems to be solved by the state.The Great Degeneration is a powerful - and in places polemical - indictment of an era of negligence and complacency. While the Arab world struggles to adopt democracy, and while China struggles to move from economic liberalization to the rule of law, Europeans and Americans alike are frittering away the institutional inheritance of centuries. To arrest the degeneration of the West's once dominant civilization, Ferguson warns, will take heroic leadership and radical reform. This book is based on Niall Ferguson's 2012 BBC Reith Lectures, which were broadcast under the title 'The Rule of Law and Its Enemies'.

    This powerful, true account of the action he saw, fighting desperately to push the Nazis out of Italy, evokes the terrible reality of war with an honesty and clarity fiction can only imitate. In scene after unforgettable scene, he describes the agony and antic humor of the soldier's existence: the tedium of camp life, the savagery of the front, and the camaraderie shared by those who have been bloodied in battle.

    The historical record is unclear on whether Champlain was baptized Protestant or Catholic, but he fought in France's religious wars for the man who would become Henri IV, one of France's greatest kings, and like Henri, he was religiously tolerant in an age of murderous sectarianism. Champlain was also a brilliant navigator. He went to sea as a boy and over time acquired the skills that allowed him to make twenty-seven Atlantic crossings without losing a ship.But we remember Champlain mainly as a great explorer. On foot and by ship and canoe, he traveled through what are now six Canadian provinces and five American states. Over more than thirty years he founded, colonized, and administered French settlements in North America. Sailing frequently between France and Canada, he maneuvered through court intrigue in Paris and negotiated among more than a dozen Indian nations in North America to establish New France. Champlain had early support from Henri IV and later Louis XIII, but the Queen Regent Marie de Medici and Cardinal Richelieu opposed his efforts. Despite much resistance and many defeats, Champlain, by his astonishing dedication and stamina, finally established France's New World colony. He tried constantly to maintain peace among Indian nations that were sometimes at war with one another, but when he had to, he took up arms and forcefully imposed a new balance of power, proving himself a formidable strategist and warrior.Throughout his three decades in North America, Champlain remained committed to a remarkable vision, a Grand Design for France's colony. He encouraged intermarriage among the French colonists and the natives, and he insisted on tolerance for Protestants. He was a visionary leader, especially when compared to his English and Spanish contemporaries -- a man who dreamed of humanity and peace in a world of cruelty and violence.This superb biography, the first in decades, is as dramatic and exciting as the life it portrays. Deeply researched, it is illustrated throughout with many contemporary images and maps, including several drawn by Champlain himself.

    Wright brings to life the teeming streets of Elizabethan London and the seasonal rhythms of rural life in Oliver Cromwell's England as he interweaves the intriguing stories of the lovely Elizabeth, who allows herself to be seduced by a struggling young writer from Stratford, and her plain but clever daughter, who must live with the consequences.As their lives unfold, secrets are revealed, love is found and lost, and futures are forever changed. Readers will be fascinated by glimpses of the young Will as an actor with the Queen's Men and, fifteen years later, as a world-weary but increasingly wealthy playwright -- who may have had an unexpected daughter.An engaging blend of invention and historical detail, and echoing the unmistakable style of the Bard himself, Mr. Shakespeare's Bastard confirms Wright as one of our finest storytellers. This unforgettable novel will delight the senses and touch the heart.

    Some have changed the course of history and even directed the currents of their times. Others are memorable for being risk-takers, adventurers, or observers. She looks at the concept of leadership through Bismarck and the unification of Germany; William Lyon MacKenzie King and the preservation of the Canadian Federation; Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the bringing of a unified United States into the Second World War. She also notes how leaders can make huge and often destructive mistakes, as in the cases of Hitler, Stalin, and Thatcher. Richard Nixon and Samuel de Champlain are examples of daring risk-takers who stubbornly went their own ways, often in defiance of their own societies. Then there are the dreamers, explorers, and adventurers, individuals like Fanny Parkes and Elizabeth Simcoe who manage to defy or ignore the constraints of their own societies. Finally, there are the observers, such as Babur, the first Mughal emperor of India, and Victor Klemperer, a Holocaust survivor, who kept the notes and diaries that bring the past to life.History’s People is about the important and complex relationship between biography and history, individuals and their times.

    citizens are looking for a new leader. That leader is Canada, and they want your vote for president of the United States.Since launching their video campaign in January, the Canada Party has gone viral, with almost a million hits on YouTube and coverage ranging from CNN and the BBC to the Huffington Post and German State Television. Their new book, America, but Better: the Canada Party Manifesto, balances the doctrine of American exceptionalism with a dose of Canadian humility and common sense in an effort to secure Canada as the new leader of the free world, by proxy.Their promises: One gay couple will be allowed to marry for every straight couple that gets divorced. The phrase "job creators" will be changed to "job creationists," and they will be given seven days to actually create some. Corporations will still be people, but if they can't provide a birth certificate they will be legally obligated to care for your lawn. Corners will be installed in the Oval Office, and timeouts given to congressmen who can't play nice.Devoted to restoring America to its former glory, the Canada Party will soon have the whole world chanting, "Yes We Canada."

    The Cure for Death by Lightning sold more than a staggering 100,000 copies in Canada alone and became a bestseller in Great Britain, later to be published in the United States and Europe. It was nominated for the Giller Prize, the richest fiction prize in Canada, and received a Betty Trask Award in the U.K.The Cure for Death by Lightning takes place in the poor, isolated farming community of Turtle Valley, British Columbia, in the shadow of the Second World War. The fifteenth summer of Beth Weeks’s life is full of strange happenings: a classmate is mauled to death; children go missing on the nearby reserve; an unseen predator pursues Beth. She is surrounded by unusual characters, including Nora, the sensual half-Native girl whose friendship provides refuge; Filthy Billy, the hired hand with Tourette’s Syndrome; and Nora’s mother, who has a man’s voice and an extra little finger. Then there’s the darkness within her own family: her domineering, shell-shocked father has fits of madness, and her mother frequently talks to the dead. Beth, meanwhile, must wrestle with her newfound sexuality in a harsh world where nylons, perfume and affection have no place. Then, in a violent storm, she is struck by lightning in her arm, and nothing is quite the same again. She decides to explore the dangers of the bush.Beth is a strong, honest, and compassionate heroine, bringing hope and joy into an environment that is often cruel. The character of Beth’s haunted mother infuses the book with life by means of her scrapbook of recipes scattered throughout, with luscious descriptions of food, gardening, and remedies, both practical and bizarre. Seen through Beth’s eyes, the West Coast landscape is full of beauty and mysteries, with its forests and rivers, and its rich native culture.The Globe and Mail commented that The Cure for Death by Lightning was "Canadian to the core," with hints of Susannah Moodie and Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro. Anderson-Dargatz’s vision of rural life has drawn comparisons with William Faulkner and John Steinbeck. A magic realism reminiscent of Latin American literature is also present, as flowers rain from the sky, and men turn into animals. Yet the style of The Cure for Death by Lightning, which the Boston Globe called "Pacific Northwest Gothic," is wholly original. Launched in a year with more than the usual number of excellent first novels (1996 was also the year of Fall On Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald and Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels), this book with its assured voice heralds a worthy successor to Margaret Atwood, Carol Shields, Margaret Laurence and Alice Munro.