Does it move us with its beauty? Can we make a living from it? But what if we examined a landscape on its own terms, freed from our expectations and assumptions?This is what celebrated writer Helen Humphreys sets out to do in this stunning, groundbreaking examination of place. For more than a decade Humphreys has owned a small waterside property on a section of the Napanee River in Ontario. In the watchful way of writers, she has studied her little piece of the river through the seasons and the years, cataloguing its ebb and flows, the plants and creatures that live in and round it, the signs of human usage at its banks and on its bottom.The River is the result, a gorgeous and moving meditation that uses fiction, non-fiction, natural history, archival maps and images, and stunning full-color photographs to get at the truth. In doing this, Humphreys has created a work of startling originality that is sure to become a new Canadian classic.

    Required reading, I would say, for anyone remotely considering getting involved in politics. [...] It will become course material for political science courses in this province." - Marilla Stephenson for The Chronicle-HeraldOn October 8, 2013, Nova Scotia’s NDP government went down to a devastating election defeat. Premier Darrell Dexter lost his own seat, and the party held the dubious distinction of being the first one-term majority government in over 100 years. In this new memoir, former NDP finance minister and MLA Graham Steele tries to make sense of the election result and shares what he’s learned from a fifteen-year career in provincial politics. In his trademark candid style, Steele pulls no punches in assessing what’s right—and what’s often wrong—with our current political system. Includes an insert of colour photographs and a foreword from CBC Information Morning host Don Connolly.

    In 2001, Wayson Choy suffered a combined asthma-heart attack. As he lay in his hospital bed, slipping in and out of consciousness, his days punctuated by the beeps of the machines that were keeping him alive, Choy heard the voices of his ancestors warning him that without a wife, he would one day die alone. And yet through his ordeal Choy was never alone; men and women, young and old, from all cultures and ethnicities, stayed by Choy’s side until he was well. When his heart failed him a second time, four years later, it was the strength of his bonds with these people, forged through countless acts of kindness, that pulled Choy back to his life. Not Yet is a passionate, sensitive, and beautiful exploration of the importance of family, which in Choy’s case is constituted not through blood but through love. It is also a quiet manifesto for embracing life, not blind to our mortality, but knowing how lucky we are for each day that comes.

    Using binary code and texts from classics of the English language such as Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Joshua Whitehead unravels the coded "I" to trace the formation of a colonized self and reclaim representations of Indigenous texts.Joshua Whitehead is an Oji-Cree, Two-Spirit member of the Peguis First Nation.

    From the award-winning author of The Golden Mean.Saskia and Jenny are twins who are alike only in appearance. Saskia is a hard-working grad student whose interests are solely academic, while Jenny, an interior designer, is glamourous, thrill-seeking, capricious and narcissistic. Still, when Jenny is severely injured in an accident, Saskia puts her life on hold to be with her sister.Sara and Mattie are sisters with a difficult relationship. Mattie, the younger sister, is affectionate, curious and intellectually disabled. As soon as Sara is able, she leaves home, in pursuit of a life of the mind and the body: she loves nothing more than fine wines, sensual perfumes, and expensive clothing. But when their mother dies, Sara inherits the duty of caring for her sister. Arriving at the house one day, she finds out that Mattie has married Robert, her wealthy mother's handyman. Though Mattie seems happy, Sara cannot let this go, forcing the annulment of the marriage and the banishment of Robert. With him out of the picture, though, she has no choice but to become her sister's keeper, sacrificing her own happiness and Mattie's too. When Robert turns up again, another tragedy happens. The waves from these events eventually engulf Sara and Saskia, sisters in mourning, in a quest for revenge.Consent is a startling, moving, thought-provoking novel on the complexities of familial duty and on how love can become entangled with guilt, resentment and regret.

    Secure in the love of her beautiful mother, she is unaware that her father, Jack, is caught up in a web of secrets. When a very local murder intersects with global forces, Jack must decide where his loyalties lie, and Madeleine will be forced to learn a lesson about the ambiguity of human morality -- one she will only begin to understand when she carries her quest for the truth, and the killer, into adulthood twenty years later.

    But her immersion in contemporary war is offset by her refusal to put herself at risk, and by her insistence on keeping her past at bay.Ten years earlier, in the mid-1980s, Arcadia had fled Toronto for London after two university students--rivals for her love--fought a pistol duel over her. Now, through the interventions of her sister, Lux, and her increasingly complicated relationship with a new lover, Amir, who has secrets of his own, Arcadia is forced to confront what really happened on the day of the duel.Moving from the verdant ravines of Toronto to the secret canals of a gritty, vibrant London, The Rules of Engagement has an extraordinary sense of time and place. A powerful exploration of the nature of love, the novel provocatively explores the crossing of emotional, ethical, and literal borders.

    Klein’s most innovative and visionary work. The five “books” of the novel are a modern testament of Jewish experience to which are appended “glosses” or commentaries in the form of drama, epistle, poetry, and psalm. The action centres on a young writer from Montreal, whose search for his legendary Uncle Melech becomes a journey of revelation through Italy, Morocco, and the Holy Land. Dissident and exile, reformer and scholar, Melech is a messianic figure who enacts the destiny of his people and embodies the spiritual yearnings of everyman.The Second Scroll, Klein’s only novel, combines the lyric genius of his poetic works with compelling reportage to create one of the most eloquent and original works in Canadian fiction.

    And Vivienne, a young assistant, accidentally captures a creature unknown to science: a kind of fish, both sentient and distinctly female. As the project supervisor and lead researcher attempt to exploit the discovery, the creature begins to waste away, and Vivian must endanger herself to save them both.

    Oh, he may win again but he won’t get a majority. Oh, his trick bag is emptying fast, the ads are backfiring, the people are onto him, and soon his own party will turn on him. And let me tell you, it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy . . .Despite a constant barrage of outrage and disbelief from his detractors, Stephen Harper is on his way to becoming one of Canada’s most significant prime ministers. He has already been in power longer than Lester B. Pearson and John Diefenbaker. By 2015, and the end of this majority term, he’ll have caught up to Brian Mulroney. No matter the ups and downs, the triumphs and the self-inflicted wounds, Harper has been moving to build the Canada he wants—the Canada a significant proportion of Canadian voters want or they wouldn’t have elected him three times. As Wells writes, “He could not win elections without widespread support in the land. . . . Which suggests that Harper has what every successful federal leader has needed to survive over a long stretch of time: a superior understanding of Canada.”In The Longer I’m Prime Minister, Paul Wells explores just what Harper’s understanding of Canada is, and who he speaks for in the national conversation. He explains Harper not only to Harper supporters but also to readers who can’t believe he is still Canada’s prime minister. In this authoritative, engaging and sometimes deeply critical account of the man, Paul Wells also brings us an illuminating portrait of Canadian democracy: “glorious, a little dented, and free.”

    As he awaits trial, a young separatist writes an espionage story in the psychiatric ward of the Montreal prison where he has been detained. Sheila Fischman’s bold new translation captures the pulsating life of Aquin’s complex exploration of the political realities of contemporary Quebec.

    As a young child, Moth's father smiled, tipped his hat and walked away from her forever. The summer she turned twelve, her mother sold her as a servant to a wealthy woman, with no intention of ever seeing her again. These betrayals lead Moth to the wild, murky world of the Bowery, filled with house-thieves, pickpockets, beggars, sideshow freaks and prostitutes, where eventually she meets Miss Everett, the owner of a brothel simply known as "The Infant School." Miss Everett caters to gentlemen who pay dearly for companions who are "willing and clean," and the most desirable of them all are young virgins like Moth. Through the friendship of Dr. Sadie, a female physician, Moth learns to question and observe the world around her, where her new friends are falling prey to the myth of the "virgin cure" - that deflowering a "fresh maid" can heal the incurable and tainted. She knows the law will not protect her, that polite society ignores her, and still she dreams of answering to no one but herself. There's a high price for such independence, though, and no one knows that better than a girl from Chrystie Street.

    Written in a lean and muscular style and brimming with both violence and compassion, these stories unflinchingly explore the lives of those — MMA fighters, the institutionalized, small-town criminals — who exist on the fringes of society, unveiling the blood and guts and beauty of life in our flyover regions.

    As Sawai deftly turns over the stones of these people's lives and reveals the squalor, the fear and the unhappiness that lie beneath, she also uncovers that most precious of human qualities - hope.

    A woman runs away to a cottage in the English moors to escape a love affair; shards of glass reconcile a middle-aged wife to her husband’s estrangement; a grandmother makes a startling confession from her youth; a young woman discovers herself through the life of an Italian saint; and, in a spellbinding story of artistic jealousy, we enter the mind of poet Robert Browning at the end of his life. In these beautifully crafted stories, ordinary objects brim with meaning and memories radiate with significance as Jane Urquhart illuminates the things that lie just beneath the surface of our lives.