Powerfully written, it's an eloquent reminder that our hold on life is tenuous, and communication, love and togetherness are the key to surviving such a tragedy.Christopher was 17 and he had everything to live for. He was smart, charismatic, loving and deeply loved, and a champion rugby player. Yet behind the veneer of a popular and confident athlete he was struggling. Diagnosed a year earlier with depression and severe anxiety, he hid his fears from family and friends. Finally, Christopher chose to stop fighting. This is the story of Christopher's shocking death and its tragic aftermath for the family. It is also the story of a mother and father's love, and their determination not to lose another son to the temptation of taking his own life. Honest, raw, and deeply moving, Jayne's account brings to life the visceral experience of grief and the long, painful journey towards finding meaning in life again. This is compelling and inspirational reading for anyone affected by the death of a young person.

    Respected physician, loving husband, devoted father, and trusted friend. Grant was a straight-laced kid who grew up to be a clean-living adult. No drinking, no smoking, and certainly no drugs. It took everyone by surprise, most of all himself, when he became addicted to narcotics in his 30s. His story hit local press when he was found guilty of professional misconduct related to his addition, including over-prescribing painkillers to patients so he could buy them back--an infraction that caused his physician license to be suspended.Matheson's memoir is a gritty account of his narcotic addiction and all that it cost him: various relationships, his career, and almost his life. The Golden Boy takes the reader from the very first day of Matheson's drug addiction to that moment when he decided to rebuild his life through rehab and recovery.

    Her teacher was busy chatting, so we waited patiently in the corridor. When he did come out, he indicated that the meeting would take place downstairs and headed off with us in tow. Before sitting down, I introduced myself using my first name, and put out my hand to be shaken. He mumbled back his full name as he took my hand, although I suspect he would have been shocked if I had actually dared use it. By this stage, I had already understood that teachers did not expect to be questioned about their practices. Of course, I did—question him, that is; politely and almost deferentially. There was a slight pause, as he dipped his head to better digest what he had heard. Then, with the assurance of a perfect, unarguable answer, he replied, “But you are in France, Madame”. Some months before, my husband, three children and I had casually unzipped and discarded our comfortable Australian lifestyle and slipped on life in the country of haute couture. On arrival, there was no celebrity designer waiting for us, ready to pin and fit our new life to us; so we threw it on and wore it loosely, tightly, uncomfortably, any old how—until we learned for ourselves how to trim, hem and stitch à la française. This book is testament to the joyous, but not always easy, journey that we took along the way.

     It is currently estimated that one in five couples have difficulty conceiving. Hepburn’s book which describes her long and, at times, heartbreaking journey to have a child has been called a cross between Bridget Jones Diary and Eat Pray Love for the infertile generation. 'After reading dozens of fertility books over the years, I’ve realised how hard it is to get a memoir about treatment right and to tell your own story in a way that other people will actually want to read, but Jessica Hepburn has managed it brilliantly in her book The Pursuit of Motherhood... Whether you’re at the start of your journey or in the middle of treatment, I think you’ll find something for you in Jessica’s book.' Kate Brian, Author of The Complete Guide to IVF and The Complete Guide to Female Fertility ‪www.fertilitymatters.org.uk 'I started the book a few hours ago and have just finished it… I couldn’t stop reading. I love it. The honesty wrapped in engaging writing with a liberal dose of humour is awesome. I want everyone to read it so people can really understand what the journey is like.' Russell Davis, Fertility Coach, Author and Speaker www.thefertilemind.net 'A much needed, honest, moving and compassionate book. At times laugh-out-loud funny, at times incredibly touching, I know it will be of such help to many people.' Anya Sizer, Author of Fertile Thinking www.thefertilitycoach.co.uk 'I have just read The Pursuit of Motherhood in under 24 hours, I could not put it down. It felt like having a long intimate conversation with the author or having stumbled across her diary and once you join her on the rollercoaster ride of trying, and failing, to start a family, you are desperate to see if there is a happy ending. This book is heartbreaking, informative, inspiring and funny! An excellent read for anyone experiencing infertility or for anyone who wants to understand a little of what it is like.' Mindful Muma-To-Be mindfulmumatobe.blogspot.co.uk

    Legions of loyal fans tune in for her opinions on today's high-profile cases and her expert commentary on the challenges facing the American judicial system. Now, in Objection!, she makes her case for what's wrong with the legal system and what can be done about it.

     As a child, I was known as "Jessica Pelley." When I was nine, I went to a sleepover at a friend's house for the weekend. While I was away, my entire family was murdered. I would spend the next 30 years fighting, crawling, and clawing my way through the darkness. This wasn't just a national news headline, a cold case, or a true crime show. It was my family. And my life. I was the broken little girl left behind to tell this story. I am now "Jessi," in the pages of this unapologetic memoir, set free. *** JESSI - APRIL 29, 2016 April 29, 1989. A date I cannot forget. Numbers forever seared deep into my soul. It was 27 years ago, today. Jesus. Get a grip, Jessi. They’re just numbers. They don’t mean anything. You’re giving them power over you, again. That’s what I tell myself. But the numbers—those damn numbers—they haunt me. They always will. I cannot escape them. Not now. Not ever. For most people, dates are just numbers on a calendar. No big deal. Random markers of time affixed to the top left corner of small, white squares on a page to depict days filled with choices, chances, and opportunities. At least that’s what they are for the normal people. But I’m no longer one of them. For me, they serve as numeric reminders of the girl I used to be. A tragedy that would irrevocably and mercilessly alter the life of a little girl wearing dark blue jeans, canvas lace-up sneakers, and a white tee shirt, accessorized by prominent coke bottle glasses, her hair hanging in a messy bob. Her life would be forever dismantled. Gone. The moment they told me the words. The ones that I will never forget. At that moment, my life froze and shattered into pieces, splintering like bits of broken glass, dropping down onto the ground around me, like the remnants of a cracked windshield, falling fast before the spinning mind and broken heart of a wide-eyed little girl. Life, as I knew it, was over in that moment. What happened on April 29, 1989, has scarred me forever. A day that started out normally, before it became ensnared in marred memories, tucked between folds of tragedy and darkness. The lingering memories cut straight to the core of the hollow girl left behind. The darkness delivers itself to me, every year, on schedule. Steadily. Greedily. On the 29th day of April. Relentless. Haunting. It taunts the pieces of me that remain. Every single year. I try to lift myself out of the darkness. I tell myself the numbers shouldn’t matter. Not after 27 years have passed. Jessi, It’s just another day. You can do anything you want with it. Don’t slip into the darkness. But not even the voice in my head believes those lies I tell myself. Year after year, my happiness recoils, my thoughts run to a dark place filled with foggy memories and a void that swallows me whole. The door of despair opens and I’m trapped: alone, numb to the bone, emotionally deplete, void of all reality, space, and time. I hate the helplessness as I slip further into that dark place. A place that, long ago, was filled with light. A place where three little girls would sing happy songs, pick flowers, hold hands while skipping through tall blades of grass, and sit down at the dining room table, where they would bow their heads to pray before plates filled with food, in a home filled with laughter. Then it hits me—the life-defining, self-inflicted images of horror—of their final moments—dragging me deep into the darkness.

    in a literary sense, ever written in Canada."Completed just before Emily Carr died in 1945, Growing Pains tells the story of Carr’s life, beginning with her girlhood in pioneer Victoria and going on to her training as an artist in San Francisco, England and France. Also here is the frustration she felt at the rejection of her art by Canadians, of the years of despair when she stopped painting. She had to earn a living, and did so by running a small apartment-house, and her painful years of landladying and more joyful times raising dogs for sale, claimed all her time and energy. Then, towards the end of her life, came unexpected vindication and triumph when the Group of Seven accepted her as one of them. Throughout, the book is informed with Carr’s passionatate love of and connection with nature.Carr is a natural storyteller whose writing is vivid and vital, informed by wit, nostalgic charm, an artist’s eye for description, a deep feeling for creatures and the foibles of humanity--all the things that made her previous books Klee Wyck and Book of Small so popular and critically acclaimed.

    With honesty and insight, Holly Alastra recounts growing up in a violent and abusive home and her later struggles with deadly eating disorders. Though Holly spent many years of her life hating and hurting herself, the story is ultimately inspirational, showing the ability of the human spirit to triumph over hardship and misfortune. The book opens with Holly in the throes of a passionate, yet dangerous love affair with food. Food is her greatest friend and her worst enemy—a fatal attraction. Holly tries to run from the affair, but she can't escape herself, the one person she wants to get away from most.

    Valerie Steiker’s Belgian Jewish mother, Gisèle—who, as a child in Antwerp, was hidden from the Nazis—wasn’t a typical American mom. She spoke with throaty Belgian Rs and wore only high heels. Before her marriage, she had studied acting with Lee Strasburg and been a model in Mexico. With her vitality and elegance, she created a joyous childhood for Valerie and her sister. Together they tangoed through their vibrant Manhattan apartment, took in great art, and shared “women’s hidden secrets.” Gisèle’s premature death left Valerie (at the time a junior at Harvard) unmoored, but in grieving and in finding her own path to womanhood, Valerie would ultimately grow to understand Gisèle more profoundly than she ever had as a child. Beautifully evocative of a glamourous and now-vanished world, The Leopard Hat is an extraordinary memoir about the warm and indelible bond between mother and daughter.

    But he becomes increasingly haunted by childhood ghosts and by the ever-growing influence of Danny, his psychopathic partner in crime. Billy finds himself starting to look beyond the violence and the scams, slowly descending into a drug-fuelled netherworld that affects his judgment and his perceptions. He is finally tipped over the edge when Danny commits an act even Billy cannot stomach. And that's when things really start to go wrong. This explosive first novel from a reformed career criminal comes with authenticity stamped throughout.

    He was a seemingly respectable businessman from Canada, so attentive and caring it was easy to ignore the warning signs - until he started, step by step, to take over her life. Six months after they first met Al Amin's web of lies started to unravel and Alison became aware that he had a sinister dark side. When she tried to end the relationship, the unthinkable happened and she found herself the victim of an escalating campaign of terror. Even when Al Amin was found with knives and guns, the police had no powers to detain him. Nobody could have imagined the events that were to follow, as Alison was left fearing for her life. It would take all her strength to survive. Brave and gripping, Stalked tells of one young woman's fight against the man who terrorized her, and her determination to defeat the fear and live a normal life.

    This is a story about justice, and terrible injustices, a story about a murder, and a courtroom drama as compelling as any thriller as it unravels the events that put Yvonne Johnson behind bars for life, first in Kingston's Federal Prison for Women until the riot that closed it, and presently in the Okimaw Ochi Healing Lodge in the Cypress Hills. But above all it is the unforgettable true story of the life of a Native woman who has decided to speak out and break the silence, written with the redeeming compassion that marks all Rudy Wiebe's writing, and informed throughout by Yvonne Johnson's own intelligence and poetic eloquence.Characters and events spring to life with the vividness of fiction. The story is told sometimes in the first person by Rudy Wiebe, sometimes by Yvonne herself. He tracks down the details of Yvonne's early life in Butte, Montana, as a child with a double-cleft palate, unable to speak until the kindness of one man provided the necessary operations; the murder of her beloved brother while in police custody; her life of sexual abuse at the hands of another brother, grandfather and others; her escape to Canada - to Winnipeg and Wetaskiwin; the traumas of her life thatled to alcoholism, and her slow descent into hell despite the love she found with her husband and three children.He reveals how she participated, with three others, in the murder of the man she believed to be a child abuser; he unravels the police story, taking us step by step, with jail-taped transcripts, through the police attempts to set one member of the group against the others in their search for a conviction - and the courtroom drama that followed. And Yvonne openly examines her life and, through her grandmother, comes to understand the legacy she has inherited from her ancestor Big Bear; having been led through pain to wisdom, she brings us with her to the point where she finds spiritual strength in passing on the lessons and understandings of her life. How the great-great-granddaughter of Big Bear reached out to the author of The Temptations of Big Bear to help her tell her story is itself an extraordinary tale. The co-authorship between one of Canada's foremost writers and the only Native woman in Canada serving life imprisonment for murder has produced a deeply moving, raw and honest book that speaks to all of us, and gives us new insight into the society we live in, while offering a deeply moving affirmation of spiritual healing.

    Proctor has always done the time-honoured work of generations of upcoast men—hand-logging, fishing, clam digging, repairing boats, beachcombing.But Billy eventually began to notice that the thriving runs of Pacific salmon, oolichans, and herring that he remembers from his early years were vanishing—some to near extinction—and he understood that it was time to take action.Heart of the Raincoast is the fascinating story of Billy Proctor’s life, and the wealth of knowledge and understanding that can only be gained from living in such close proximity to nature. The writing is funny, touching and honest—and offers an engaging insider’s view not only of the salmon, whales, eagles and independent people who populate Canada’s wild and lovely coastal rainforest, but on what we need to do to keep it as nature intended.

    

    We are then forced to re-live the moments we have spent decades burying beneath amicable smiles and a false sense of security. This is my story; one shrouded in as much truth as my mind can tolerate. My story may mean nothing to you, but I believe, that if these words were to fall into the right hands, then they could have the potential to change someone’s life, someone’s mind. At a young age I learned what it meant to carry the scorching secrets of a fiery hell. For years I allowed the flames to consume my mind as I proceeded to live a life devoted to destruction and chaos. I blamed my mother. I blamed the men that raped me. I blamed the woman that refused to love me back. But when the smoke cleared, the mirror on the wall only painted a single reflection, that of myself. So, when the big bad wolf no longer blows, yet the house still falls, who will I have to blame then? Only me.