It's about his hilarious blue-collar family. It's about growing up in a campground in NJ, skipping college, and moving to NYC on a drunken whim. It's about making art even if that means writing a novel during 1000 consecutive lunch breaks.

    When she was fourteen years old, Maud wrote in her journal, "I love books. I hope when I grow up to be able to have lots of them." Not only did Maud grow up to own lots of books, she wrote twenty-four of them herself as L. M. Montgomery, the world-renowned author of Anne of Green Gables. For many years, not a great deal was known about Maud’s personal life. Her childhood was spent with strict, undemonstrative grandparents, and her reflections on writing, her lifelong struggles with anxiety and depression, her "year of mad passion," and her difficult married life remained locked away, buried deep within her unpublished personal journals. Through this revealing and deeply moving biography, kindred spirits of all ages who, like Maud, never gave up "the substance of things hoped for" will be captivated anew by the words of this remarkable woman.

    Critics have called her "sweet, adorable, and vicious." But there is so much more to be said about Samantha Bee. For one, she's Canadian. Whatever that means. And now, she opens up for the very first time about her checkered Canadian past. With charming candor, she admits to her Lennie from "Of Mice and Men"-style love of baby animals, her teenage crime spree as one-half of a car-thieving couple (Bonnie and Clyde in Bermuda shorts and braces), and the fact that strangers seem compelled to show her their genitals. She also details her intriguing career history, which includes stints working in a frame store, at a penis clinic, and as a Japanese anime character in a touring children's show.Samantha delves into all these topics and many more in this thoroughly hilarious, unabashedly frank collection of personal essays. Whether detailing the creepiness that ensues when strangers assume that your mom is your lesbian lover, or recalling her girlhood crush on Jesus (who looked like Kris Kristofferson and sang like Kenny Loggins), Samantha turns the spotlight on her own imperfect yet highly entertaining life as relentlessly as she skewers hapless interview subjects on "The Daily Show." She shares her unique point of view on a variety of subjects as wide ranging as her deep affinity for old people, to her hatred of hot ham. It's all here, in irresistible prose that will leave you in stitches and eager for more.

    In story after story, she illumines the moment a life is forever altered by a chance encounter or an action not taken, or by a simple twist of fate that turns a person out of his or her accustomed path and into a new way of being or thinking. A poet, finding herself in alien territory at her first literary party, is rescued by a seasoned newspaper columnist, and is soon hurtling across the continent, young child in tow, toward a hoped-for but completely unplanned meeting. A young soldier, returning to his fiancée from the Second World War, steps off the train before his stop and onto the farm of another woman, beginning a life on the move. A wealthy young woman having an affair with the married lawyer hired by her father to handle his estate comes up with a surprising way to deal with the blackmailer who finds them out. While most of these stories take place in Munro's home territory - the small Canadian towns around Lake Huron - the characters sometimes venture to the cities, and the book ends with four pieces set in the area where she grew up, and in the time of her own childhood: stories "autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact." A girl who can't sleep imagines night after wakeful night that she kills her beloved younger sister. A mother snatches up her child and runs for dear life when a crazy woman comes into her yard.

    Many settled on the north coast of British Columbia, on Haida Gwaii or around Prince Rupert. GUMBOOT GIRLS tells the stories of thirty-four women, through their own eyes, as they moved from their comfortable city-dwelling surroundings to the rugged north coast. Part back-to-the-land, part adventure, heartbreak and love, this collection of stories edited by Lou Allison and compiled by Jane Wilde was inspired by the book GIRLS LIKE US by Sheila Weller. Wilde, the creator of the collection, encouraged, prodded and cajoled her friends (and some of their friends) to tell the story of a generation of young women who flocked to the north coast of BC in the 1970s.

    On the hundredth night, they shared pancakes to celebrate, but it soon became evident that neither wanted to let go of their storytelling ritual. So they decided to continue what they called "The Streak." Alice's father read aloud to her every night without fail until the day she left for college. Alice approaches her book as a series of vignettes about her relationship with her father and the life lessons learned from the books he read to her.Books included in the Streak included: Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, the Oz books by L. Frank Baum, Harry Potter by J. K. Rowling, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, and Shakespeare's plays.

    The marriage of the young Irish Catholic woman to an older English man is thought scandalous, but they work happily together, playing music to accompany the films. When George succumbs to illness and dies, leaving Janie with one young child and another on the way, the unscrupulous Joey Elias tries to take over the business. But Janie guards the theatre with a shotgun, and still in mourning, re-opens it herself. “If there was no real bliss in Janie’s life,” recounts her grandson, “there were moments of triumph.”One night, deceived by the bank manager and Elias into believing she will lose her mortgage, Janie resolves to go and ask for money from the Catholic houses. Elias has sent out men to stop her, so she leaps out the back window and with a broken rib she swims in the dark across the icy Miramichi River, doubting her own sanity. Yet, seeing these people swayed into immoral actions because of their desire to please others and their fear of being outcast, she thinks to herself that “…all her life she had been forced to act in a way uncommon with others… Was sanity doing what they did? And if it was, was it moral or justified to be sane?” Astonishingly, she finds herself face to face that night with influential Lord Beaverbrook, who sees in her tremendous character and saves her business. Not only does she survive, she prospers; she becomes wealthy, but ostracized. Even her own father helps Elias plot against her. Yet Janie McLeary King thwarts them and brings first-run talking pictures to the town. Meanwhile, she employs Rebecca from the rival Druken family to look after her children. Jealous, and a protégé of Elias, Rebecca mistreats her young charges. The boy Miles longs to be a performer, but Rebecca convinces him he is hated, and he inherits his mother’s enemies. The only person who truly loves her, he is kept under his mother’s influence until, eventually, he takes a job as the theatre’s projectionist. He drinks heavily all his life, tends his flowers, and talks of things no-one believes, until the mystery at the heart of the novel finally unravels.“At six I began to realize that my father was somewhat different,” says Miles King’s son Wendell, who narrates the saga in an attempt to find answers in the past and understand “how I was damned.” It is a many-layered epic of rivalries, misunderstandings, rumours; the abuse of power, what weak people will do for love, and the true power of doing right; of a pioneer and her legacy in the lives of her son and grandchildren.“David Adams Richards is perhaps the greatest Canadian writer alive,” wrote Lynn Coady in the Vancouver Sun. From this winner of the Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award comes a story of a woman’s determined struggle against small town prejudice, and her son’s long battle against deceit. Richards’ own family ran Newcastle’s Uptown Theatre from 1911 to 1980, and Janie is based on his grandmother. Cast upon this history is a drama that explores morality and “the question of how one should live,” as The Atlantic Monthly said of Mercy Among the Children, his previous novel.Reviewers agree that Richards’ fiction sits firmly in the tradition of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky by concerning itself explicitly with good and evil and the human freedom to choose between them. Once again, in River of the Brokenhearted, his twelfth novel, Richards has created a work of compassion and assured, poetic sophistication which finds in the hearts of its characters venality and goodwill, cruelty and love.From the Hardcover edition.

    It hints at the existence of an extraordinary artifact that—if he can find it—would redefine history. Traveling in one of Europe’s earliest automobiles, he sets out in search of this strange treasure.Thirty-five years later, a Portuguese pathologist devoted to the murder mysteries of Agatha Christie finds himself at the center of a mystery of his own and drawn into the consequences of Tomás’s quest.Fifty years on, a Canadian senator takes refuge in his ancestral village in northern Portugal, grieving the loss of his beloved wife. But he arrives with an unusual companion: a chimpanzee. And there the century-old quest will come to an unexpected conclusion.The High Mountains of Portugal—part quest, part ghost story, part contemporary fable—offers a haunting exploration of great love and great loss. Filled with tenderness, humor, and endless surprise, it takes the reader on a road trip through Portugal in the last century—and through the human soul.

    Accident or suicide?On the other side of the world, a young woman walks out of a sandstorm in sub-Saharan Africa. In the labyrinth of the Niger Delta, a young boy learns to survive by navigating through the gas flares and oil spills of a ruined landscape. In the seething heat of Lagos City, a criminal cartel scours the internet looking for victims.Lives intersect, worlds collide, a family falls apart. And it all begins with a single email: “Dear Sir, I am the son of an exiled Nigerian diplomat, and I need your help ...”419 takes readers behind the scene of the world’s most insidious internet scam. When Laura’s father gets caught up in one such swindle and pays with his life, she is forced to leave the comfort of North America to make a journey deep into the dangerous back streets and alleyways of the Lagos underworld to confront her father’s killer. What she finds there will change her life forever...

    Daughter of a debonair Czech father, whose floral work gave him entrŽe into St. Paul society, and a distrustful Irishwoman with an uncanny ability to tell a tale, Hampl remained, primarily and passionately, a daughter well into adulthood. She traces the arc of faithfulness and struggle that comes with that role from the postwar years past the turbulent sixties. The Florist’s Daughter is a tribute to the ardor of supposedly ordinary people. Its concerns reach beyond a single life to achieve a historic testament to midcentury middle America. At the heart of this book is the humble passion of people who struggled out of the Depression into a better chance, not only for themselves but for the common good. Widely recognized as one of our most masterful memoirists, Patricia Hampl has written her most intimate, yet most universal, work to date.

    She has sold somewhere between one to two million books and is an author recognised by bookshops and the general public. Her manual One Hundred Ways for a Cat to Train its Human has sold more than a quarter of a million copies so far and her One Hundred Secret Thoughts Cats have about their Humans has sold 147,000. A cat behaviour practitioner with the Centre of Applied Pet Ethology, she has a B Sc. in applied animal behaviour.

    A god-like ocean deposits many a thing, yet it also takes away. The 1960s blaze off shore and draw the island’s inhabitants into politics, the Vietnam War, and the peace movement. Sound impossible? Not on Whalebone Island, AKA the Republic of Nothing. Where else can a dead circus elephant, a long-dead Viking, the discovery of uranium, a raven-haired castaway who may be psychic, an anarchist turned politician, and refugees fleeing from the United States all be part of everyday life? Where else is eccentricity embraced with such open arms? In this new readers’ guide edition, complete with an afterword by Neil Peart, Lesley Choyce’s novel about resilience, independence, and anarchy comes alive, leading readers to discover once again that everything is nothing and nothing is everything.

    She’s an aspiring, young seamstress who is enchanted by a charming new suitor. His worldly ways and grandeur captivate her—until secrets, lies and unsavory behaviors bring her harm.Uncovering more than she ever imagined, Lillie is pushed to make decisions that she never expected. With the help of a close family friend and her brother Frank, Lillie tries to leave behind her mistakes.The discovery of a 1951 convertible dragged out of its watery grave leads reporters to the doorstep of Lillie Mae. The Cotton Blossom is a spellbinding journey about finding your power, learning from your mistakes and trusting your heart.

    When the fragile peace between them is shattered, a young boy, exiled to a distant land, rises to become worshipped as the falcon-headed god. This is his prophecy. This is his story.This is how it all began.

    When it ended, he was the most notorious criminal in North America, the object of the largest manhunt in RCMP history.This is the story of Albert Johnson, the Mad Trapper, a silent man of superhuman strength and endurance, who defied capture for fifty days in the bitter cold of winter, north of the Arctic Circle. He was a man who crossed hundreds of miles of frozen tundra on foot, who survived dynamite blasts and the pursuit of police, trappers and the army, and who became the first man to cross the Richardson Mountains in a blizzard.