Malcolm MacPhail's Great War


Darrell Duthie - 2017
    THE WESTERN FRONT IS IN STALEMATE. Captain Malcolm MacPhail of the Canadian Corps has been in the trenches for longer than he cares to remember. He’s just landed a new job on the intelligence staff, but if he thinks staying alive is going to become any easier, he’s sorely mistaken.The rain is pelting down, the shells are flying and the dreaded battle for Passchendaele looms. Malcolm reckons matters can still get worse. Which proves to be an accurate assessment, especially as his unruly tongue has a habit of making enemies all on its own.The Allies are fighting desperately to swing the tide of war, and Malcolm’s future hangs in the balance, so keeping his head down is simply not an option… Authentic and gripping military historical fiction. Praise for MALCOLM MACPHAIL'S GREAT WAR: "Darrell Duthie skilfully blends history and fiction... He brings his invented hero, Malcolm MacPhail, into conjunction with real characters, to inform and stimulate readers... Malcolm MacPhail's Great War is realistic and often gripping... deserves a Mentioned-in-Despatches at least!" -- Dr. Peter Stanley, professor, former principal historian of the Australian War Memorial, author"The concept of trench warfare... is a prominent theme in this very readable work of 'faction'... The friction between HQ politics and the front line resonates throughout this tale. All in all, it is an enjoyable read."-- Soldier Magazine (magazine of the British Army)

Bone & Bread


Saleema Nawaz - 2013
    Orphaned as teenagers, they have grown up under the exasperated watch of their Sikh uncle, who runs a bagel shop in Montreal's Hasidic community of Mile End. Together, they try to make sense of the rich, confusing brew of values, rituals, and beliefs that form their inheritance. Yet as they grow towards adulthood, their paths begin to diverge. Beena catches the attention of one of the "bagel boys" and finds herself pregnant at sixteen, while Sadhana drives herself to perfectionism and anorexia.When we first meet the adult Beena, she is grappling with a fresh grief: Sadhana has died suddenly and strangely, her body lying undiscovered for a week before anyone realizes what has happened. Beena is left with a burden of guilt and an unsettled feeling about the circumstances of her sister's death, which she sets about to uncover. Her search stirs memories and opens wounds, threatening to undo the safe, orderly existence she has painstakingly created for herself and her son.Heralded across Canada for the power and promise of her debut collection, Mother Superior, Nawaz proves with Bone and Bread that she is one of our most talented and unique storytellers.

Home Game: Hockey and Life in Canada


Ken Dryden - 1989
    In that same month Roy MacGregor published what was hailed as the best novel ever written about hockey – The Last Season. In 1989 these two writers teamed up to write another extraordinary book: inspired by Ken Dryden’s major CBC-TV series on hockey, Home Game takes us all the way from street hockey to the showdowns between Canada and the Soviets.On publication, Home Game shot to the top of the bestseller lists, establishing itself as must reading for every hockey fan. Not only was this lavish book with over 95 full-colour photographs popular among ordinary Canadians: book reviewers loved it.From the Hardcover edition.

The Purple Palace & other poems


Shayna Klee - 2021
    The semi-autobiographical book is divided into two parts and takes place between two countries; Part I, “is a cloud a living thing?”, takes place during the Author’s tumultueuse teen years with tropical Florida as a backdrop. Part II, “Inside my Shell”, explores themes of transformation as the Author creates a new life in Paris, France. ​The poems in this collection explore the surreal rollercoaster of youth, the performance of identity, being an outsider and the tension between romantic idealism and the dystopic world in which the author finds herself. Her approach to her work as a visual artist is mirrored in her poetry style, which is accompanied by all original illustrations by the Author.

The colours of my heart


Faiz Ahmad Faiz - 2017
    Although he is best remembered for his revolutionary verses that decried tyranny and called for justice, his oeuvre also extended to scintillating, soulful poems of love. In this remarkable selection of Faiz’s most memorable poems and ghazals, readers will be able to experience a new dimension of the great poet’s genius. Along with popular favourites like ‘Subh-e Azadi’, with its anguished evocation of the horror and pain of the Partition, The Colours of My Heart also introduces readers to little-known gems that display Faiz’s extraordinary flair for tender hope and quiet longing. A rich cornucopia of delights, The Colours of My Heart celebrates Faiz’s greatest work. Baran Farooqi’s superb translation is accompanied by an illuminating introduction to Faiz’s incredible life and enduring legacy.

Execution Poems: The Black Acadian Tragedy of "George and Rue"


George Elliott Clarke - 2001
    After the overwhelming interest generated by the original limited letterpress edition of Execution Poems, Gaspereau Press released this trade edition which went on to win Canada's highest literary honour in 2001. The jurors of the Governor General's Literary Award called this book "raging, gristly, public — and unflinchingly beautiful," and remarked on Clarke's "explosive, original language."In 1949, George and Rufus Hamilton were hanged for the murder of a taxi driver in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Fifty years later, Clarke has written, in his abundant style, a series of poems that embody both damnation and redemption, offering convoluted triumphs alongside tragedy and blurring the line between perpetrator and victim. What Clarke presents in Execution Poems is uncomfortable. He reminds us of racism and poverty; of their brutal, tragic results. He reminds us of society's vengefulness. He blurs the line between the perpetrator and the victim — a line we'd prefer remain simple and clear. At the heart of it, Clarke is frustrating the notion that society deals any better with these issues today than it did in the 1940s.

Ayesha at Last


Uzma Jalaluddin - 2018
    Ayesha Shamsi has a lot going on. Her dreams of being a poet have been set aside for a teaching job so she can pay off her debts to her wealthy uncle. She lives with her boisterous Muslim family and is always being reminded that her flighty younger cousin, Hafsa, is close to rejecting her one hundredth marriage proposal. Though Ayesha is lonely, she doesn't want an arranged marriage. Then she meets Khalid, who is just as smart and handsome as he is conservative and judgmental. She is irritatingly attracted to someone who looks down on her choices and who dresses like he belongs in the seventh century.When a surprise engagement is announced between Khalid and Hafsa, Ayesha is torn between how she feels about the straightforward Khalid and the unsettling new gossip she hears about his family. Looking into the rumors, she finds she has to deal with not only what she discovers about Khalid, but also the truth she realizes about herself.

Fruits of the Earth


Frederick Philip Grove - 1933
    In his portrait of Abe Spalding, Frederick Philip Grove captures the essence of the pioneering spirit: its single-minded strength, its nobility, and ultimately, its tragedy. A novel of broad scope and perception, Fruits of the Earth displays a dignity and stature rare in contemporary works of fiction.

Slanky: Poems


Mike Doughty - 2002
    Doughty’s poems are at once absurdist and matter-of-fact; the images he conjures are thrown into high relief through cutting wordplay. In a series of prose poems about showbiz, he reimagines Cookie Monster as a burned-out suicide, and cheesy talk-show host Joe Franklin as a cross-dressing witness to the apocalypse. And in “For Charlotte, Unlisted,” he wrenchingly tracks the elusive memory of a faded romance.

A Place for Humility: Whitman, Dickinson, and the Natural World


Christine Gerhardt - 2014
    Yet for all their metaphorical suggestiveness, Dickinson’s and Whitman’s poems about the natural world neither preclude nor erase nature’s relevance as an actual living environment. In their respective poetic projects, the earth matters both figuratively, as a realm of the imagination, and also as the physical ground that is profoundly affected by human action. This double perspective, and the ways in which it intersects with their formal innovations, points beyond their traditional status as curiously disparate icons of American nature poetry. That both of them not only approach nature as an important subject in its own right, but also address human-nature relationships in ethical terms, invests their work with important environmental overtones. Dickinson and Whitman developed their environmentally suggestive poetics at roughly the same historical moment, at a time when a major shift was occurring in American culture’s view and understanding of the natural world. Just as they were achieving poetic maturity, the dominant view of wilderness was beginning to shift from obstacle or exploitable resource to an endangered treasure in need of conservation and preservation.A Place for Humility examines Dickinson’s and Whitman’s poetry in conjunction with this important change in American environmental perception, exploring the links between their poetic projects within the context of developing nineteenth-century environmental thought. Christine Gerhardt argues that each author's poetry participates in this shift in different but related ways, and that their involvement with their culture’s growing environmental sensibilities constitutes an important connection between their disparate poetic projects. There may be few direct links between Dickinson’s “letter to the World” and Whitman’s “language experiment,” but via a web of environmentally-oriented discourses, their poetry engages in a cultural conversation about the natural world and the possibilities and limitations of writing about it—a conversation in which their thematic and formal choices meet on a surprising number of levels.

The Whetting Stone


Taylor Mali - 2017
    She was a teacher, and it was morning on the first day of school. In this haunting new collection of poems, Taylor Mali, once a teacher himself, explores her life and their love as well as the shape and texture of his own guilt and resilience.

The World


Bill Gaston - 2012
    A recently divorced, early retiree accidentally burns down his house on the day he pays off the mortgage, only to discover that for the first time in his life he’s forgotten to pay a bill: his insurance premium. An old friend of his, a middle-aged musician, prepares for her suicide to end the pain of esophageal cancer. Her father, who left his family to study Buddhism in Nepal, ends his days in a Toronto facility for Alzheimer’s patients. The three are tied together not only by their bonds of affection, but by a book called The World, written by the old man in his youth. The book, possibly biographical, tells the story of a historian who unearths a cache of letters, written in Chinese, in an abandoned leper colony off the coast of Victoria. He and the young Chinese translator fall in love, only to betray each other in the cruellest way possible, each violating what the other reveres most.

Bad Things Happen


Kris Bertin - 2016
    Between jobs and marriages, states of sobriety, joy and anguish; between who they are and who they want to be. Kris Bertin's unforgettable debut introduces us to people at the tenuous moment before everything in their lives changes, for better or worse.Kris Bertin's stories have appeared in the Walrus, the Malahat Review, the New Quarterly, PRISM International, and other magazines. He lives and writes in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Leaving Home


David French - 1972
    The first part of what has come to be known as the Mercer Series, Leaving Home tells the story of a Newfoundland family that has emigrated and lost all sense of its place in the world.Leaving Home was named one of the "100 Most Influential Canadian Books" by the Literary Review of Canada.

Granta 141: Canada


Catherine Leroux - 2017
    Guest Edited by Catherine Leroux and Madeleine Thien.2017 marks the 150th anniversary of the Canadian Confederation, when the British colonies of Canada, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick were united.In this special issue of Granta, we celebrate the diversity of social, political and literary life in Canada, the largest country in the western hemisphere, and one of the few where the experiment of multiculturalism appears to have workedBringing you the best new fiction, reportage, photography, poetry and memoir from Canada, this issue showcases the best of both the English and French literary communities, throwing a spotlight on an enigmatic nation with a rich literary heritage.