But the serenity of Maggie’s new surroundings is soon disturbed by the irrational jealousy of the lodge-keeper’s wife. Restoring her own broken spirit, Maggie must also become a healer to others. In this, she is supported by her eccentric friend, Nell Severance, whose pearl-handled revolver – the Swamp Angel – becomes Maggie’s ambiguous talisman and the novel’s symbolic core.Ethel Wilson’s best-loved novel, Swamp Angel first appeared in 1954. It remains an astute and powerful study of one woman’s integrity and of the redemptive power of compassion.

    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.

    It's a time when the growing threat of fascism in Europe is a constant worry, and people escape from reality through radio and the movies. Meanwhile, the two sisters -- vastly different in personality, yet inextricably linked by a shared past -- try to find their places within the complex web of social expectations for young women in the 1930s.While Nora embarks on a glamorous career as a radio-soap opera star, Clara, a strong and independent-minded woman, struggles to observe the traditional boundaries of a small and tight-knit community without relinquishing her dreams of love, freedom, and adventure. However, things aren't as simple as they appear -- Nora's letters eventually reveal life in the big city is less exotic than it seems, and the tranquil solitude of Clara's life is shattered by a series of unforeseeable events. These twists of fate require all of Clara's courage and strength, and finally put the seemingly unbreakable bond between the sisters to the test.

    Sara Peters combines poetry and short prose vignettes to create a singular, unflinching portrait of a Town in which the lives of girls and women are shaped by the brutality meted upon them and by their acts of defiance and yearning towards places of safety and belonging. Through lucid detail, sparkling imagery and illumination, Peters' individual characters and the collective of The Town leap vividly, fully formed off the page. A hybrid in form, I Become a Delight to My Enemies is an awe-inspiring example of the exquisite force of words to shock and to move, from a writer of exceptional talent and potential.

    It can also be as dark, as violent, as rapturous. In the end, there may be no difference between them.A girl grows up in Nunavut in the 1970s. She knows joy, and friendship, and parents' love. She knows boredom, and listlessness, and bullying. She knows the tedium of the everyday world, and the raw, amoral power of the ice and sky, the seductive energy of the animal world. She knows the ravages of alcohol, and violence at the hands of those she should be able to trust. She sees the spirits that surround her, and the immense power that dwarfs all of us. When she becomes pregnant, she must navigate all this.Veering back and forth between the grittiest features of a small arctic town, the electrifying proximity of the world of animals, and ravishing world of myth, Tanya Tagaq explores a world where the distinctions between good and evil, animal and human, victim and transgressor, real and imagined lose their meaning, but the guiding power of love remains.Haunting, brooding, exhilarating, and tender all at once, Tagaq moves effortlessly between fiction and memoir, myth and reality, poetry and prose, and conjures a world and a heroine readers will never forget.

    When Peter’s nipples begin speaking to him one day and inform him of their diabolical plan to expose his secret desires to the world, Peter finds himself cornered in a world that seems to have no tolerance for difference.Peter’s only solace is “The Bedtime Movies” — perfect-world fantasies that lull him to sleep every night. But when the lines between Peter’s fantasy world and his reality begin to blur, no one is safe from the depths of Peter’s imagination — especially Peter himself.

    . . Three-year-old Sherry is the adored only child of Simon and Karen Barrett. When Sherry is critically injured in a hit-and-run accident, the fault lines in the Barretts's marriage begin to show. As her parents' marriage falls apart, it is discovered that Sherry--in her coma-like state--has miraculous healing powers.    Meanwhile, the guilt-stricken driver of the truck attempts suicide--but is unable to die. Henry Denton instead finds himself in a place of darkness, somewhere between this world and the next, invisible to all but a group of mysterious and downtrodden men. Haunted by his shame, Henry struggles to understand this mysterious limbo, and what he must do to free himself.     As word of Sherry's powers spread, her parents must decide how best to shelter their daughter and help the many sick and dying who are drawn to her side. At the same time, a larger battle is brewing--one that has been raging for close to two-thousand years, and one that might yet claim the lives of Sherry and her family.

    Smith is a multi-talented force of nature: a novelist, poet, improv comic, filmmaker, drag queen, performance artist, and occasional clown. In this, his first work of nonfiction, Michael traces his early years as an inadequate male—a fey kid growing up in a small town amid a blue-collar family; a sissy; an insecure teenager desperate to disappear; and an obsessive writer-performer, drawn to compulsions of alcohol, sex, reading, spending, work, and art as many means to cope and heal.Drawing on his work as an artist whose work focuses on our preconceived notions about the body, this disarming and intriguing memoir questions what it means to be human. Michael asks: How can we know what a man is? How might understanding gender as metaphor be a tool for a deeper understanding of identity? In coming to terms with his past failures at masculinity, Michael offers a new way of thinking about breaking out of gender norms, and breaking free of a hurtful past.Michael V. Smith won the inaugural Dayne Ogilvie Prize for Emerging LGBT Writers from the Writers Trust of Canada for his first novel, Cumberland. He's since published two poetry books and a second novel, Progress. He teaches creative writing in the faculty of creative and critical studies at University of British Columbia's Okanagan campus.

    From the online hookup world of DMs, double taps, and secret texts to earth-shakingly erotic encounters under the northern stars to the ever-complicated relationship Indigenous women have with mainstream society, this poetry collection doesn't shy away from depicting the gorgeous diversity in decolonized desire. Instead, Campbell creates the most intimate of spaces, where the tea is hot and a seat is waiting, surrounded by the tantalizing laughter of aunties telling stories.These wise, jubilant poems chronicle many failed attempts at romance, with the wry humour needed to not take these heartbreaks personally, and the growth that comes from sitting in the silence of living a solo life in a world that insists everyone should be partnered up. With a knowing smile, this book side-eyes the political existence and celebrates the lived experience of an Indigenous woman falling in love and lust with those around her--but, most importantly, with herself.nedí nezų is a smart, sensual, and scandalous collection dripping in Indigenous culture yet irresistible to anyone in thrall to the magnificent disaster that is dating, sex, and relationships.

    The collection features Canada's much-loved fictional family: Dave, Morley, Stephanie and Sam. Stories from the Vinyl Cafe also introduces a host of other wonderfully imagined characters, such as Margaret Dwyer, a suburban housewife who startles herself by shoplifting a pepperoni sausage, and Flora Perriton, who is consumed with thoughts of lost opportunities when an old friend passes away. Then there's Ed, who-overcome by the death of his favourite rock star-embarks on a pilgrimage to New York City to meet the singer's widow.As always, the stories in this rewarding and irreverent collection prove that Stuart McLean is indeed a national treasure.

    It is said that even the Czarina Anastasia Romanova had received one in her trousseau. The workers come from the three neighboring villages on the border of Romania and Ukraine. Nourished, dressed and educated, they are the envy of all at a time when a famine programmed by Stalin sweeps the countryside and cannibalism rages from city to town to farm. But what is the secret of this factory and why does the Grazyn family protect its employees so scrupulously?The Bone Mother revives the great figures of Slavic mythology on the eve of the Second World War, from rusalka and Baba Yaga--The Bone Mother herself--to the golem. The existence of mortals is intimately linked to that of witches and vampires, in a universe where strigois rub shoulders with mermaids, ghosts and seers...and all are in peril from the Nichni Politsiyi, the Night Police, which wish to eradicate them.

    A novel which follows the lives of three generations of Japanese-Canadian women, blending myth, folk legend and fiction.

    Alligator Pie, which remains the classic Canadian bedtime book, is written as if Mother Goose had the Latin name Branta canadensis, from William Lyon Mackenzie King, who "loved his mother like anything," to Trois-Rivières, which, of course, rhymes with "eat you hair."

    P. Kinsella in 1977.The book contains seventeen stories narrated by Silas Ermineskin and is set on a Cree Indian reserve in Central Alberta and is about what happens in the lives of the people that live on the reserve.

    Most of the world sees a painfully and chronically shy software engineer in his mid-20s, soft-spoken, a bit of a loner, and someone easy to escape notice wherever possible—and that’s just the way Alex wants it. Because no matter how many years have passed, the incident known only as “Gabriel” in the MacAskill family is something that still haunts him.But when his mother, one of the only people in the world who Alex felt comfortable as himself around, dies after a long illness, he suddenly has no choice but to face the very thing that he’s been avoiding since that night in high school. In an instant, Alex finds himself trying to piece together the mystery of his identity, and on a search for parts of his family he never knew existed—a search that takes him from Ottawa to London to Moscow, encountering along the way the KGB, painful memories from his past, and even the 1972 Russian hockey team—a search that ultimately helps Alex discover himself.With his trademark wit and captivating storytelling, Terry Fallis has written a novel unlike any of his others. One Brother Shy is at once poignant and humorous, heartbreaking and heartwarming, and readers will not soon forget Alex MacAskill.