I Found You


Praneeth Chandra - 2021
    Divided into seven chapters, from love to the family. It's all about falling in love madly, getting hurt deeply, bearing all the pain in darkness. Still finding hope and waiting for a miracle to heal the broken heart, waiting for the love, makes me feel like home. It is all about love and trusting the universe

Knots


Deblina Bhattacharya - 2019
     Knots is a collection of poetry and prose about love and heartbreak, tragedy and grief, survival and loss. It's a journey through the numerous knots that we tie in life, and the ones we tangle and untangle with. It explores the realities of mental illness & suicide, social taboos & violence against women, pain & darkness, self love & healing in all its naked glory. The rhythm of Knots resonates directly with the poet's heart, conveying to the readers that there is a way to untangle every knot in life, but sometimes, some of these knots are what we are made of. Foreword by Dr. Santosh Bakaya

House of Hate


Percy Janes - 1992
    Set in the stark, confining atmosphere of a Newfoundland milltown, this semi-autobiographical novel tells the story of the Stone family-caught in relentless poverty and tyranized by Saul Stone, an illiterate man whose primitive fury warps and twists his wife and children. A brilliant portrayal of existence bereft of tende ess, House of Hate is a Tale of human ordeal and of an anguished striving for love in the midst of bitte ess. It is, as Farley Mowet has observed, a book unique in Canadian Literature. Percy Janes is a Canadian author who was raised in Newfoundland and retu ed there to live after extended travels in Europe.

Let Her Go


M. Ocean - 2015
    M. Ocean explores the depths of love deeply felt and violently lost. For those whose wounds are fresh and hearts still raw with ample emotion, Ocean portrays pain and suffering in apt and heart wrenching candour.

Causeway: A Passage From Innocence


Linden MacIntyre - 2006
    At once a vibrant coming-of-age story, a portrait of a vanishing way of life and a reflection on fathers and sons, the narrative revolves around the construction of the Canso Causeway that would link the small Cape Breton village of MacIntyre's childhood to the wide world of the mainland. Shot through with humour, humanity and vivid characters, Causeway is an extraordinary book, a memoir that has set a new standard for the genre.

Local Customs


Audrey Thomas - 2014
    But, still single at thirty-six, she fears ending up as a wizened crone in a dilapidated country cottage, a cat her only companion.Just as she is beginning to believe she will never marry, she meets George Maclean, home on leave from his position as the governor of Cape Coast Castle on the Gold Coast of West Africa. George and Letty marry quietly and set sail for Cape Coast. Eight weeks later she is dead — not from malaria or dysentery or any of the multitude of dangers in her new home, but by her own hand. Or so it would seem.Local Customs examines, in poetic detail, a way of life that has faded into history. It was a time when religious and cultural assimilation in the British colonies gave rise to a new, strange social order. Letty speaks from beyond the grave to let the reader see the world through her eyes and explore the mystery of her death. Was she disturbed enough to kill herself, or was someone — or something — else involved?

The Stowaway


Robert Hough - 2004
    With the suspense of a thriller and the moral depth of a Joseph Conrad classic, "The Stowaway is an adventure story of the highest caliber and a riveting tale of good and evil, all the more moving because it is based on actual events.

Mercy


Alissa York - 2003
    Divided into two parts, Mercy pairs a single year in the past with a single night in the present, as they unfold in the town of Mercy, Manitoba, and in the neighbouring black spruce bog.In 1948, a dedicated priest named August Day arrives in Mercy to take over from Father Rock, who has passed away. Although Father Day is young, the bishop has seen fit to let him take over the parish, and August feels he is fulfilling his years of devotion, study and struggle -- at last being able to serve God as alter Christus, or another Christ. The first service he is to perform in his new church is the marriage of Thomas Rose, the town butcher, to Mathilda Nickels, the orphaned niece of the church housekeeper.Thomas Rose is a good man who waited years to express his love for Mathilda. And when Mathilda accepted his proposal, he was sure that their life together would bring them both joy, though in truth he knew little about his betrothed. Mathilda grew up in a Catholic orphanage and has since been living with her aunt Vera at St. Mary’s; she has not explored the world beyond the realm of her religious devotion, and approaches her wedding day with a mix of fear and dread. But when her eyes meet those of Father Day at the ceremony, Thomas seems to dissolve beside her and she feels physical passion for the first time in her life. As of that moment, August and Mathilda will only have eyes, and hearts, for each other.Over the coming weeks, the young bride spends more and more time at St. Mary’s, caring for her ailing aunt and taking over the woman’s cleaning duties, but also savouring her brief moments with Father Day. Her marriage remains unconsummated, and her lust for the priest grows to fever pitch, as does his for her -- fuelled not only by the secrets they share in the confessional, but by the fiery text of the Song of Songs. When they do unite, it seems to mark the end of their secret relationship… but the child Mathilda carries away from the encounter assures us their story is not over. Rather, it is yet another thread to add to the tapestry of unspoken stories underpinning Mercy itself, and one that will affect the town’s psyche for decades to come.Half a century later, another sort of preacher comes to Mercy -- a womanizing widower who wants to develop the black spruce bog on the edge of town and build a religious camp. Reverend Carl Mann is fairly confident of success, having taken up with Mayor Lavinia Wylie, but worries about the well-publicized protests of a woman known as Bog Mary, who has lived her entire life in the heart of the bog. He heads off to confront her and ends up lost and hurt, but Mary uses her natural remedies and knowledge to heal not only his wounds but his broken spirit.A dark yet compassionate novel, Mercy rivals the fiction debuts of Anne Michaels, Ann-Marie MacDonald and Gail Anderson-Dargatz. Alissa York brings to life a tale of misguided love and damaged souls with language of incredible clarity and intensity.From the Trade Paperback edition.

Nirvana: Pieces of Self- Healing (Poetry & Prose)


Michael Tavon - 2017
    The author discusses, regret, anxiousness, racial issues, craving for love, and much more. Tavon gets deeply personal and introspective, in hopes of helping those who are in need of self-healing too. "Entrapped inside your Heart-shaped box For lonely years You’ve left me here To survive off hope and tears I know your return is unlikely Unlike me, You have a gift Of hurting others with a smile Luring your victims Into the traps of your eyes I enjoy this place Although it’s often cold It has pockets of warmth In your Heart-Shaped Box I’ll forever be stored Waiting for you Love me more Than August loves to storm."

Don't Tell Me What to Do


Dina Del Bucchia - 2017
    Sometimes they succeed and sometimes they fail, and sometimes they end up in a slapstick sex scene that climaxes with a broken table. The book embraces characters who are flawed, emotional, and who care too much about things that are ridiculous.

The Boy


Betty Jane Hegerat - 2011
    Robert Raymond Cook, Ray Cook's son from his first marriage, was convicted of the crime, and had the infamy of becoming the last man hanged in Alberta. Forty-six years later, a troublesome character named Louise in a story that Betty Jane Hegerat finds herself inexplicably reluctant to write, becomes entangled in the childhood memory of hearing about that gruesome mass murder. Through four years of obsessively tracking the demise of the Cook family, and dancing around the fate of the fictional family, the problem that will not go away is how to bring the story to the page. A work of non-fiction about the Cooks and their infamous son, or a novel about Louise and her problem stepson? Both stories keep coming back to the boy. Part memoir, part investigation, part novella, part writer's journal, The Boy, is the author's final capitulation to telling the story with all of the troublesome questions unanswered.

Mysterium


Eric McCormack - 1992
    What he finds is the dying and the dead, an entire population suffering from a strange and unnatural plague. Is it possible that every one of the townsfolk have been poisoned? At the heart of the mystery is the local pharmacist, Aiken. He is responsible for summoning young Maxwell to Carrick. He offers motives, explanations, stories, questions. But could he also be guilty of this heinous crime? Maxwell soon realizes that, although a great violence is being done to Carrick, the town itself hides from its own secrets - events from long ago and truths hidden from outsiders at all costs, even their lives. Maxwell interviews the final survivors who are suffering from a disease characterized by a barely recognizable but nonetheless identifiable odour, and a garrulousness unusual in such taciturn people, long accustomed to keeping secrets. yet their confessions lead constantly to more questions and always back to Aiken. As one who knows him well queries, "He's like a stick in water. Is he bent or not?"In The Mysterium, Eric McCormack's second novel, the nature of truth is found to be as deadly as the poison killing the people of Carrick. For at the heart of everything, at the heart of every story and every truth, there is only the mystery.

MxT


Sina Queyras - 2014
    These poems mourn the dead by turning memories over and over like an old coin, by invoking other poets, by appropriating the language of technology, of instruction, of diagram, of electrical engineering, and of elegy itself. Devastating, cheeky, allusive, hallucinatory: this is Queyras at her most powerful.'Like the central conceptual apparatus, Queyras is smart and insightful in her work to expand and challenge the nature of language and poetry . . . Lend Queyras your ears, your minds, your hearts, your Time. She will reward you, repeatedly.' – The Rumpus'A collection of gorgeous and cantankerous poems that ask testy questions of all contemporary poets, and for this, the book is a must-read.' – The Globe and Mail'This year's most devastating and enlightening Canadian poetry collection.' – Telegraph-Journal

Richard Wagamese Selected: What Comes From Spirit


Richard Wagamese - 2021
    Always striving to be a better, stronger person, Wagamese shared his journey through writing, encouraging others to do the same.Following the success of Embers, which has sold over fifty thousand copies since its release in 2016, this new collection of Wagamese’s non-fiction works, curated by editor Drew Hayden Taylor, brings together more of the prolific author’s short writings, many for the first time in print, and celebrates his ability to inspire. Drawing from Wagamese’s essays and columns, along with preserved social media and blog posts, this beautifully designed volume is a tribute to Wagamese’s literary legacy.

The Wheeling Year: A Poet's Field Book


Ted Kooser - 2014
    Because those wobbly stones are only inches above the quotidian rush, what’s jotted there has an immediacy that is intimate and close to life. Kooser, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a former U.S. poet laureate, has filled scores of workbooks. The Wheeling Year offers a sequence of contemplative prose observations about nature, place, and time arranged according to the calendar year. Written by one of America’s most beloved poets, this book is published in the year in which Kooser turns seventy-five, with sixty years of workbooks stretching behind him.