During that one blustery winter solstice day, between the railway station and the church where a funeral mass is underway, he meets old villagers, forgotten neighbours, and characters who are either imagined or real. But there's only one person he seeks: the von Croft twin he taught to read music and to whom he wants to atone.Soucy creates a world where nothing is left to chance and the line between dream and reality is always shifting.

    An almost deliberately ham-handed police investigation has Constable Hook suspecting a cover-up. The powerful United Council of Scottish Societies is demanding an inquiry. The killing has become a political issue with an election not far away.The city is buzzing with rumours. Miss Stewart's fellow nannies have accused the Chinese houseboy of murder, capitalizing on a wave of anti-Chinese propaganda led by the Asian Exclusion League and enthusiastically supported by the sensational press--not to mention the Ku Klux Klan, which has taken up residence in upperclass Shaughnessy.The White Angel is a work of fiction inspired by the cold case of Janet Smith, who, on July 26, 1924, was found dead in her employer's posh Shaughnessy Heights mansion. A dubious investigation led to the even more dubious conclusion that Smith died by suicide. After a public outcry, the case was re-examined and it was decided that Smith was in fact murdered; but no one was ever convicted, though suspects abounded--from an infatuated Chinese houseboy to a drug-smuggling ring, devil-worshippers from the United States, or perhaps even the Prince of Wales. For Vancouver, the killing created a situation analogous to lifting a large flat rock to expose the creatures hiding underneath.An exploration of true crime through a literary lens, The White Angel draws an artful portrait of Vancouver in 1924 in all its opium-hazed, smog-choked, rain-soaked glory--accurate, insightful and darkly droll.

    He does so, not with abstract opinions but with apt and colourful examples taken from the past and the present: Sam Steele’s gold rush censorship of the Turkish Whirlwind Danseuse; Ontario’s grudging acceptance of beer in three Toronto ballparks; New York’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade; Lorne Greene’s rueful return to Toronto; William Van Horne’s tirade against winter carnivals; the role of Kentucky in the War of 1812; W.A.C. Bennett’s surprising takeover of the B.C. Electric Company on the day of its president’s funeral. All these apparently disconnected incidents are woven into a carefully thought-out dissection of the national character, a distillation of more than thirty years of Berton research.

    She relates her experiences living in different cultures; the issues and causes she so passionately upheld; her personal battle against censorship. She also pays tribute to the three women from whom she drew important spiritual strength. Including a selection of her articles, speeches, and letters – many never before published – and photographs selected by Margaret Laurence from her personal family albums, Dance on the Earth is a book in which Margaret Laurence speaks about her place in the world as a woman, a writer, and a concerned human being.

     was inspired by the life of David Thompson, a Welshman who came to the New World at the age of fifteen, and went on to become its greatest cartographer. He walked or paddled 80,000 miles and mapped 1.9 million square miles, cataloguing flora and fauna as well as the language and customs of the Natives. But though he has been described as the greatest land geographer who ever lived, he died impoverished and unknown. KanataFollowing the lives of Thompson's illegitimate son and his descendants, Kanata takes readers on a fictionalized, multi-generational journey through millennia and across a continent to examine the stories, myths, and legends of those who formed the country and who were formed by it.Kanata is the story of the invention of a nation.

    With irony and an unfailing eye for telling detail, she cannily observes the illusions that people necessarily create and destroy in the tangle of life.

    Gothic, outrageous, yet tender and wise, Black Bird is as liberating as the dreams of its wayward characters, and as gripping as the insurgencies that split its heart.The Desouches have inhabited the same run-down house in working-class Montreal for years, much to the dismay of their landlord, and its ramshackle architecture perfectly mirrors that of the eccentric family living inside. Grandfather is a sour old grave-robber who relishes in the anguish he causes his wife and family. Uncle shares the same occupation, and otherwise spends much of his time drunk and alone. Neither is looking forward to the winter, which means lost work, due to the frozen ground. Father doesn’t share their gruesome job, but comes up with his own schemes anyway. Mother lies down to sleep away her grief when her father dies, and does not wake up for months. A plain French woman named Aline marries into the family, having been fooled by Grandfather’s smooth ways, only to find herself alienated in a household that chooses to speak English. Marie, the granddaughter and an FLQ terrorist, could share her language — she certainly resents that a part of her is English — but is too caught up in her politics and her anger to get involved. It falls to Marie’s twin brother, Jean-Baptiste, to play occasional translator, though as always he’d prefer to be upstairs in his attic room reading literature and writing awful poetry. Throw in a judgemental pet crow, a confused ghost, a mad doctor, peculiar neighbours, maverick policemen and the walking dead, and you’ve got the makings of the ultimate domestic drama, Montreal-style.When an FLQ bomb set by Marie kills not only the expected strangers but her anglo maternal grandfather (what was he doing out for a smoked-meat sandwich at that hour, anyway?) it sets the family off on a notably bad run of luck. Then again, not many stretches would stand out as stellar for this peculiar group. Which points to one of the wonderful truths that Basilières allows to guide his characters: that life is crummy and a struggle just as often as it’s not, but that doesn’t keep us from wanting to enjoy it in our own ways and hoping for a better tomorrow. As in life, there is a level of coincidence here that is too uncanny to not be believable. When the drunken premier runs down a man in the street, it is not only Marie’s boyfriend and fellow activist who is killed, but the crooked cops bring the fresh corpse to Grandfather’s door to be suitably dealt with. When some of Marie’s separatist pamphlets get mixed up with Jean-Baptiste’s poetry chapbooks, a prison term and a kidnapping are among the unexpected results. When Grandfather loses an eye, his vision improves. And as events spiral out of control, it seems that some of the Desouches are at their most content.With Black Bird, Michel Basilières has written a comic noir, a disturbing and hilarious study of how the October Crisis and the question of Canadian nationalism play out through the disjointed relationships within one family. And as with all of the best fiction, here the facts of our history do not get in the way of the truth, or of telling a good story. Compared to such disparate novels as One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Corrections, and Two Solitudes, Black Bird marks the fiction debut of a masterful and thoroughly entertaining storyteller.

    Richards, a woman of no history, who appears briefly in 1873 in the civic archives of Vancouver. It is also the story of Annie, a contemporary, who becomes obsessed with the possibilities of Mrs. Richards's life. Ana Historic was Daphne Marlatt's first novel, and was originally published by Coach House Press in Canada and The Women's Press in the U.K. The French translation was published by Les Éditions du remue-ménage.

    A humorous look at Quebec's movement toward independence from Canada, remarking upon the Draconian language laws imposed on English-speaking Quebecois, the economic problems posed by the movement, and the troubles with blind nationalism.

    We should expect great things from her." --The Globe and MailHome of Sudden Service is a sad and scary book of punk rock villanelles and sonnets about delinquency.Set in Anyvalley, North America, Home of Sudden Service centres around the experiences of young people growing up in the suburbs. The contrast of elegant poetic forms with the colloquial, often harsh language of suburban teens makes for a compelling and engaging achievement.Bachinsky creates a gothic landscape that will be familiar to anyone who's visited the suburbs. Here, young Brownies dance, learn to sew and get badges in a series of eerie rituals, and smalltown girls settle down early. Murder, lust, teen pregnancy and a young man's disappearance are all discussed with a matter-of-fact, dispassionate voice.But this world is not without humour and hope. Home of Sudden Service concludes with "Drive," a series of fifteen sonnets about the poet's trip across Canada with her sister -- and out of the setting of their youth.

    John's. By the Rivers of Brooklyn traces the story of the Evans family across two countries and three generations, exploring the hopes, passions and heartbreaks of those who went away and those who stayed behind. By the Rivers of Brooklyn transforms into fiction the experience of the 75,000 first- and second-generation Newfoundlanders who once lived in Brooklyn, New York - and the experience of Newfoundlanders throughout history who have gone away to find work and prosperity but never stopped dreaming of home.

    The story of La Sagouine, a scrubwoman, a woman of the sea, who was born with the century, with her feet in the water. Water was her fortune: the daughter of a cod fisherman, a sailor’s girl, and later the wife of a fisherman who took oysters and smelts. A cleaning woman also, who ends up on all fours, with her bucket in front and her hands in the water." -Antonine MailletWith well over 10,000 copies sold in French and English editions, La Sagouine is fast becoming a classic of its genre. The single character is that of La Sagouine, the washerwoman, who fills the stage with the voice of poverty, and of pride. Straight from the heart of Acadian New Brunswick, she is the embodiment of her world, and yet touches the hearts and souls of readers and audiences from all walks of life.

    This second revised edition of Forever Yours, Marie-Lou, which played at the 1990 Stratford Festival, is John Van Burek and Bill Glasscos original French text.

    Convinced that the translator's happiness is in jeopardy, his boss helicopters in a few solitude-seeking companions-the beautiful and elusive Marie with her flirtatious cat Moustache; the seductive nudist, Featherhead; Professor Moccasin, the half-deaf comic strip scholar; the moody and contradictory Author; the Ordinary Man; and the Organizer, sent to "sensitize the population." As the spring tides drag ocean debris onto the shore, Teddy Bear and his companions seek out their own solitudes in this hilarious philosophical fable. Jacques Poulin's novels include Volkswagen Blues (a finalist for Canada Reads 2005) and La tournée d'automne (Autumn Rounds). Poulin received the 1978 Governor General's Award for Les Grandes Marées(Spring Tides) and the Molson Prize for lifetime artistic contribution in 1990 and 2000. He lives in Québec.

    Through careful use of modern examples and engaging activities, this text provides an accessible, readable, student-centred guide to Descartes' Meditations, which is a set text for AQA AS Philosophy.