The pro league just seemed too far away from the young man’s small-town life in the Prairies. But Wendel had a talent for hockey that was surpassed only by his love for the sport, and it wasn’t long before he embarked on a path that would take him away from his hometown to a new life. Wendel honed his talents in cities across western Canada and earned a reputation as a force to be reckoned with on the ice. Drafted by the Toronto Maple Leafs first overall in the 1985 NHL Entry Draft, Wendel burst onto the pro scene and immediately made an impact, all the while staying true to his roots. As he learned from the players around him, Wendel steadily matured into a respected leader. He soon assumed the mantle as the Leafs captain, and his willingness to lay it all on the line transformed him into a player who could inspire courage in his teammates and fear in his opponents in equal measure. The future seemed limitless for the young star. But just as Wendel’s talents were set to peak, everything unraveled. Years of no-holds-barred, physical play were taking their toll, and soon his greatest competitor wasn’t anyone on the ice, but his own body. Every movement brought agony, every shift was a challenge, and every game meant the decision to keep fighting. But as Wendel’s body broke down, his resolve only grew. Determined to succeed no matter what the cost, Wendel set out on a course that would allow him to keep doing what he loved and that would turn him into one of the most beloved hockey players of all time. Emotional and uplifting, Bleeding Blue is the story of a man who refused to say no, who wore his heart on his sleeve, and who would do anything to keep going, even when everything told him to quit.

    Beloved by a devoted Canadian audience, Lightfoot's work has been performed and admired by musicians from around the world, including Joni Mitchell, Nico, Ronnie Hawkins and Robbie Robertson. Nobel Prize-winner Bob Dylan once listed Sundown and If You Could Read My Mind among his favourite Lightfoot songs, before adding, I can't think of any I don't like. In addition to winning nearly every Canadian music award, in 2012, Lightfoot was inducted into the American Songwriters Hall of Fame alongside such luminaries as Leonard Cohen, Kris Kristoffersen, and Dylan; it honoured Lightfoot as a singer who helped "define the folk-pop sound of the 1960s and '70s."Biographer Nick Jennings has had unprecedented access to the notoriously reticent musician. He chronicles Lightfoot's early efforts--his school principal recorded a disc of "Gordie" singing at age 9--to his beginnings as a songwriter to his heyday in concert halls around the globe. Possessed of a strong work ethic and a perfectionist bent, Lightfoot brought discipline to his craft and performances. But he partied just as hard in that rock 'n' roll era, and alcoholism began to take its toll. Lightfoot toured relentlessly and his personal life suffered as marriages and relationships unravelled. At 63, he suffered an aortic aneurysm that nearly killed him and kept him in a coma for six weeks. But his amazing stamina helped him survive and miraculously saw him on stage once again, resuming his touring and yearly sold-out show at Massey Hall.Jennings paints an unforgettable portrait of an artist in the making, set against the turbulent era of sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll. Voices from the music industry mix with loyal fans to illustrate how the boy from small-town Ontario became the legendary bard of Canada. Stuffed with anecdotes and the singer's own reminisences, Lightfoot is an exhilarating read.

    They have a monopoly on New Brunswick’s English-language print media and billions of dollars in offshore accounts.They are the Irvings. And they have always placed a premium on discretion and family unity. They built their empire—which includes Canada’s largest refinery, soon to be linked by pipeline to Alberta’s oil fields—by remaining private. Irving vs Irving tells the story of how these ambitious, often ruthless entrepreneurs came to dominate the economic and political affairs of Atlantic Canada, and how they learned to love the property that perplexed them most: their media monopoly.The Irvings’ control of all of New Brunswick’s daily newspapers often allowed the family’s business pursuits to escape journalistic scrutiny. Readers frequently wondered what wasn’t in the newspaper, such as the Irving’s lobbying for their logging interests and the sinking of their tanker loaded with PCBs.In Irving vs Irving, veteran reporter Jacques Poitras uses the empire’s media holdings to examine previously untold episodes of this family epic from patriarch K.C. Irving’s manipulation of his mother’s affections to a Shakespearean confrontation between generations.

    These visionary pieces build upon Simpson's powerful use of the fragment as a tool for intervention in her critically acclaimed collection Islands of Decolonial Love. Provocateur and poet, she continually rebirths a decolonized reality, one that circles in and out of time and resists dominant narratives or comfortable categorization. A crow watches over a deer addicted to road salt; Lake Ontario floods Toronto to remake the world while texting "ARE THEY GETTING IT?"; lovers visit the last remaining corner of the boreal forest; three comrades guerrilla-tap maples in an upper middle-class neighbourhood; and Kwe gets her firearms license in rural Ontario. Blending elements of Nishnaabeg storytelling, science fiction, contemporary realism, and the lyric voice, This Accident of Being Lost burns with a quiet intensity, like a campfire in your backyard, challenging you to reconsider the world you thought you knew.

    Living in the port city of Halifax, Goyette’s days are bounded by the substantial fact of the North Atlantic, both by its physical presence and by its metaphoric connotations. And like many of life’s overwhelming facts, our awareness of the ocean’s importance and impact waxes and wanes as the ocean sometimes lurks in the background, sometimes imposes itself upon us, yet always, steadily, is. This collection is not your standard “Oh, Ocean!” versifying. Goyette plunges in and swims well outside the buoys to craft a sort of alternate, apocryphal account of our relationship with the ocean. In these linked poems, Goyette’s offbeat cast of archetypes (fog merchants, lifeguards, poets, carpenters, mothers, daughters) pronounce absurd explanations to both common and uncommon occurrences in a tone that is part cautionary tale, part creation myth and part urban legend: how fog was responsible for marriages, and for in-laws; why running, suburbs and chairs were invented; what happens when you smoke the exhaust from a pride of children pretending to be lions. All the while, the anthropomorphized ocean nibbles hungrily at the shoreline of our understanding,refusing to explain its moods and winning every staring contest. “I wrote these poems,” comments Goyette, “because I know very little about the ocean and yet rely on it like a mirror, a compass.” In Ocean, Goyette demonstrates how a spirited, playful and richly mythopoetic engagement with the world can actually strengthen our grasp on its bigger truths.

    She's forever on the move, ricocheting around Alberta, guided less than capably by her dysfunctional mother Elizabeth."The Shore Girl" follows Rebee from her toddler to her teen years as she grapples with her mother's fears and addictions, and her own desire for a normal life. Through a series of narrators--family, friends, teachers, strangers, and Rebee herself--her family's dark past, and the core of her mother's despair, are slowly revealed.

    Effortlessly written and candidly observed, All Saints is a moving collection of tremendous skill, whose intersecting stories illuminate the tenacity and vulnerability of modern-day believers.Praise for All Saints"Fictional places have been mostly secular of late: the home, the bar, the workplace. Standing at the centre of K.D. Miller's touching and intimate collection of linked stories is, unfashionably, a church. All Saints is not just the setting for the habits and rituals of this motley group—parishioners, priest, passersby—but the central image that gives these stories their poignancy. As obsolescence threatens the church, it also puts in peril the connections each character has to others at the very time the world so badly needs human connections. All Saints is a moving and soulful book."—Caroline Adderson

    And that’s just since the Halifax musician started making records of his own in 1999. For a decade before that, he was one-quarter of Thrush Hermit, a band of scrappy Superchunk disciples who became hard-rock revivalists and one of the last survivors of the ’90s pop “explosion” of major-label interest in Halifax.Canada’s east coast has never been much of a pop-culture mecca. Most musicians from the region who’ve ever made it big moved away. But armed with a stubborn streak and a knack for great songwriting, Plaskett has kept Halifax as his home, building both a career and a music community there. Along the way, he’s earned great respect: when he plays shows in Alberta, east-coast expats literally thank him for staying home.Nowhere with You is the study of how he pulled this off, from the origins of Canada’s east-coast exodus to Plaskett’s anointment as “Halifax’s Rick Rubin.” It’s a story about what happens when you call a city “the new Seattle,” about the lessons you learn playing to empty rooms in Oklahoma, and about defying radio-single expectations with rock operas and triple records. It’s about doing what you want, where you want, no matter how much work it takes.

    One, Rocco Perri, from southern Italy, rose from the life of a petty criminal on the streets of Toronto to running the most prominent bootlegging operation of the Prohibition era, taking over Hamilton and leading one of the country’s most influential crime syndicates. Perri was feared by his enemies and loved by the press, who featured him regularly in splashy front-page headlines. So great was his celebrity that, following the murder of his wife and business partner, Bessie Starkman, a crowd of 30,000 thronged the streets of Hamilton for her funeral.Perri’s businesses—which included alcohol, drugs, gambling and prostitution—kept him under constant police surveillance. He caught the interest of one man in particular, the other arrival from Italy, Frank Zaneth. Zaneth, originally from the Italian north, joined the RCMP and became its first undercover investigator—Operative No. 1. Zaneth’s work took him across the country, but he was dogged in his pursuit of Rocco Perri and worked for his arrest until the day Perri was last seen, in 1944, when he disappeared without a trace.With original research and masterful storytelling, Cole details the fascinating rise to power of a notorious Prohibition-era Canadian crime figure twinned with the life of the man who pursued him.

    Determined to find redemption in the midst of their derision and to find joy despite uncertainty, Moira faces impossible choices with consequences beyond anything she can imagine.Thrown into the purgatory of a bleak prairie landscape as unforgiving as her mother, twenty-year-old Newfoundlander Moira Burns is certain she will rise above the locals of Ibsen, Saskatchewan. Until the reasons for her flight west become clear. Until she is befriended by a prostitute and courted by a ‘half breed’. Until she becomes the “dolly-bird” of superstitious Irish Catholic homesteader, Dillan Flaherty.Scattered through with birth, death, and the violent potential of both man and the elements, Dollybird excavates the small mercies which come to mean more than they should on a prairie peopled with characters struggling under a huge sky that waits, not so quietly, for them to fail.

    Longfellow's epic poem about the expulsion of the Acadians has become mythologized and immortalized by Acadians in the Maritimes and Cajuns in Louisiana.

    The historic milestone was celebrated across the nation.About a month earlier, in the lead up to his election, Jagmeet held community meet-and-greets across Canada. At one such event, a disruptive heckler in the crowd hurled accusations at him. Jagmeet responded by calmly calling for all Canadians to act with “love and courage” in the face of hate. That response immediately went viral, and people across the country began asking, “Who is Jagmeet Singh? And why ‘love and courage’?”This personal and heartfelt memoir is Jagmeet’s answer to that question. In it, we are invited to walk with him through childhood to adulthood as he learns powerful, moving, and sometimes traumatic lessons about hardship, addiction, and the impact of not belonging. We meet his strong family, including his mother, who teaches him that “we are all one; we are all connected,” a valuable lesson that has shaped who he is today.This story is not a political memoir. This is a story of family, love, and courage, and how strengthening the connection between us all is the way to building a better world.

    An essential book for readers of Peter Hart, Tim Cook and Nick Lloyd.The men of the 46th Canadian Infantry Battalion were some of the most effective shock troops of the Allied forces in the Great War. They drove back German forces wherever they met and refused ever to surrender. Such tactics struck fear in their enemies, yet, it came at a tremendous cost. Of the 5374 officers and men who passed through the unit, a total of 4917, or 91 per cent, were either killed or wounded.J.L. McWilliams and R. James Steel chart the history of this battalion from when it was formed on 7th November 1914 through all of its major battles, including the Somme, Vimy Ridge, Hill 70, Passchendaele, Amiens, the Hundred Days Offensive and breaking through the Hindenburg Line, to when it was finally disbanded at the end of the war. Rather than focus simply on the grand strategies of generals, McWilliams and Steel use numerous personal accounts, both written at the time and afterwards, to depict what life was like for the regular soldier of the 46th Battalion during these treacherous years spent in muddy trenches in France and Belgium.

    In the five months that followed, he learned a way of life on the land with which few are familiar, where the daily focus is on the necessities of life, and where both skill and finesse are required for self-sufficiency.In The Shoe Boy, that boy – Duncan McCue – takes us on an evocative journey that explores the hopeful confusion of the teenage years, entwined with the challenges and culture shock of coming from a mixed-race family and moving to the unfamiliar North. As he reflects on his search for his own personal identity, he illustrates he relationship Indigenous peoples have with their lands, and the challenges urban Indigenous people face when they seek to reconnect to traditional lifestyles.The result is a contemplative, honest, and unexpected coming-of-age memoir set in the context of the Cree struggle to protect their way of life, after massive hydro-electric projects forever altered the landscape they know as Eeyou Istchee.

    . . . Healing is a likely outcome of a book imbued with the righteous anger, compassion and humanity of Swing Low.” —Globe and Mail (Canada)Reverberating with emotional power, authenticity, and insight, Swing Low is Miriam Toews's daring and deeply affecting memoir of her father’s struggle with manic depression in a small Mennonite community in rural Canada. Personal and touching, a stirring counterpart to her novel IrmaVoth and reminiscent of works by Susan Cheever, Gail Caldwell, Mary Karr, and Alexandra Styron, Swing Low is an elegiac ode to a difficult life by an author drawing from the deepest well of insight,craft, and emotion.