Part of the CBC Massey Lectures Series

In History’s People internationally acclaimed historian Margaret MacMillan gives her own personal selection of figures of the past, women and men, some famous and some little-known, who stand out for her. Some have changed the course of history and even directed the currents of their times. Others are memorab …

On the The Scotiabank Giller Prize 2015 Longlist

A love story, an adventure story, a fable without a moral, and an ink-black comedy of manners.

Lucien (Lucy) Minor is the resident odd duck in the hamlet of Bury. Friendless and loveless, young and aimless, Lucy is a compulsive liar, a sickly weakling in a town famous for begetting brutish giants. Then …

This biography explores what drove William Smith to change his name, in the gold fields of California in the 1850s, to Amor De Cosmos. Hawkins traces how De Cosmos became one of the most feared journalists in British Columbia and then how he forced his way into British Columbia politics, becoming BC’s second premier. Although De Cosmos played a c …

When her family’s car goes through the ice on Rainy Lake one cold March day in 1962, six-year-old Rebecca Archer is the only person her father is able to pull from the sinking vehicle. But as Rebecca grows up in a farmhouse haunted by the absence of her mother and baby brother, raised by a man left nearly paralyzed with grief, she wonders if her …

In the late 1960s Penny is the youngest of four kids, known on her street as the girl with the mean brothers. She spends all year looking forward to her summers spent at Go Home Lake, where she passes the days in a soaked bathing suit, catching frogs, and getting her daily fill of fresh air.

Yet Penny's summers are far from pleasant. Her father’s …

Despite Canada’s enduring image as a natural paradise, every year thousands of Canadians become ill or die prematurely as a result of exposure to environmental hazards. Canadians understand that their health is inextricably linked to the health of the environment and are deeply concerned about the impacts of toxic substances on themselves and the …

A new collection of short fiction from the Governor General’s Literary Award-winning author and Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist Greg Hollingshead.

Act Normal is a collection of sharp, new comic stories about sex, art, and the daily risk of having accidents. Highly original, occasionally dark, but always endearing, these stories are filled with ch …

In 1950, the biggest firestorm documented in North America—one fire alone burned 3,500,000 acres of boreal forest in northern Alberta and British Columbia—created the world’s largest smoke layer in the atmosphere. The smoke travelled half way around the northern hemisphere and made the moon and sun appear blue. The Chinchaga Firestorm is an h …

Gay never recorded an album, never won a Juno. His music existed in the moment, appreciated by the few who were lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. For the rest of us, those late-night jam sessions in a shack in an alley on the bad side of Edmonton never happened. We never got to hear him play the Cole Porter songs he loved wit …

Non-lethal weapons take many forms – from rubber bullets to electroshock and long-range acoustic devices – which their proponents argue are ethical, legal, and humane. Social scientists, historians, legal scholars, and activists have long challenged the use of non-lethal weapons in policing and war. Until now, little scholarly attention has bee …

Working Memory: Women and Work in World War II speaks to the work women did during the war: the labour of survival, resistance, and collaboration, and the labour of recording, representing, and memorializing these wartime experiences. The contributors follow their subjects’ tracks and deepen our understanding of the experiences from the imprints …

Canada is a country founded on relationships and agreements between Indigenous peoples and newcomers. Although recent court cases have upheld Aboriginal title rights, the cooperative spirit of the treaties is being lost as Canadians engage in endless arguments about First Nations “issues.” Each new court decision adds fuel to the debate raging …

Exploring the shared intersections of mothering, motherhood and sex work, Mothers, Mothering and Sex Work weaves together a range of voices from academic and sex-worker communities around the world. It features interdisciplinary contributions, scholarly essays, academic research, artwork, poetry, photography and experiential narratives. Notable amo …

Increasingly known as the “poet’s poet,” Governor General’s Award–winner Phil Hall has long been a constructor of intricate sequences, collecting and arranging lines and phrases, artifacts, and small revelations. He writes on influences, literary and local; he writes of rural Ontario, attempting to comprehend a deeply personal family viol …

Literature not only represents Canada as “our home and native land” but has been used as evidence of the civilization needed to claim and rule that land. Indigenous people have long been represented as roaming “savages” without land title and without literature. Literary Land Claims: From Pontiac’s War to Attawapiskat analyzes works produ …

A novel about Montreal during the not-so-halcyon era of a couple of decades ago when gangs and girls made rum-running and slot machines big business.
from the 1950 edition

Ronald J. Cooke’s second novel, The Mayor of Côte St. Paulis the tale of a struggling writer living in Depression-era Montreal. Winnipegger Dave Manley arrived in the city thi …

Swing in the House paints an utterly contemporary portrait of Canadian families in their most private moments. Anand pulls back the curtains to reveal the unspoken complexities within the modern home, from sibling rivalries to fracturing marriages, casual racism to damaged egos, hidden homosexuality to mental illness. Each of these stories offers a …

A bold and explicit debut novel by one of the most visceral new voices in gay fiction. Breathing Lessons is the story of Henry Moss, a homosexual everyman whose life knows none of the limitations or abuses his predecessors experienced. When a teenaged Henry came out to his mother, she worried only that he’d be lonely. At the time, he thought her …

The North-South Project is an original work of collective storytelling made up of prose pieces that consider what it means to be lost, the significance of memory, imagination, and history, and how all of these intersect and contribute to our sense of place and belonging. Edited by Noah Richler, author, journalist, cultural critic, and Literary & Id …

Public Poetics is a collection of essays and poems that address some of the most pressing issues of the discipline in the twenty-first century. The collection brings together fifteen original essays addressing “publics,” “poetry,” and “poetics” from the situated space of Canada while simultaneously troubling the notion of the nation as …

In The Forest of Bourg-Marie, originally published in 1898, Toronto author and musician S. Frances Harrison draws together a highly mythologized image of Quebec society and the forms of Gothic literature that were already familiar to her English-speaking audience. It tells the story of a fourteen-year-old French Canadian who is lured to the United …

ReLit Long Shortlist, 2015

Savour is the follow-up to Bateman’s award-winning debut novel, Nondescript Rambunctious, and the second book in a trilogy about a dark, suspected serial killer named Oliver. Savour retains the dark threads of sociopathic depravity that ran through the debut novel, but is once again tempered with a tender ray of humanity …

Drawing on Samuel Hearne’s gruesome account of an alleged massacre at Bloody Falls in 1771, Emilie Cameron reveals how Qablunaat (non-Inuit, non-Indigenous people) have used stories about the Arctic for over two centuries as a tool to justify ongoing colonization and economic exploitation of the North. Rather than expecting Inuit to counter these …

Winner, 2016 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for Fiction

Finalist, 2016 Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize

The stories in Specimen are a unique exploration of science and the human heart; the place where physical reality collides with our spiritual and emotional lives.

In “The Blood Keeper,” a young academic travels to North Korea to work on her dissertation …

Years of surveillance-related leaks from US whistleblower Edward Snowden have fuelled an international debate on privacy, spying, and Internet surveillance. Much of the focus has centered on the role of the US National Security Agency, yet there is an important Canadian side to the story. The Communications Security Establishment, the Canadian coun …

Sometimes tragic, sometimes uproariously funny, This Place a Stranger is a diverse collection of Canadian women writing about their experiences of travelling alone. From the deceptiveness of the everyday to the extremes of geography, weather and violence, these stories go beyond the usual tales of intrepid male explorers and reveal the varied and u …

Hugh Garner’s Best Stories received the Governor General’s Literary Award for English-language fiction in 1963. The collection consists of twenty-four stories composed between the late 1930s and the early 1960s and reflects the immense flux of the mid-century, from the Great Depression to the Spanish Civil War, World War II, the Civil Rights mo …

"Man in Scrubs" follows the story of a queer black nurse who is getting awfully tired of being put in a box. He's queer, not gay, and he'll tell you the difference. He's always been an outcast, and constantly finds himself at the bottom of any and every hierarchy. With his patience waning, he confronts what it means to be an outsider, and, more imp …

Odette is a young Rwandan-born Canadian filmmaker who has travelled to Turkey to investigate stories of genocide and hidden identity for an upcoming film. When she interviews Sahana, an elderly Muslim woman who has spent her life assisting survivors of the Armenian genocide, she learns a devastating secret about Sahana, one that she resolves to sha …

Winner of the 2016 Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award at the East Coast Literary Awards!
Shortlisted for the Book Design Award at the 2016 Alberta Book Publishing Awards!
Shortlisted for the 2015 New Brunswick Book Awards!

In this collection of stories, author and filmmaker R. W. Gray (Crisp) finds the place where the beautiful, the strange, and …

Engendering Transnational Voices examines the transnational practices and identities of immigrant women, youth, and children in an era of global migration and neoliberalism, addressing such topics as family relations, gender and work, schooling, remittances, cultural identities, caring for children and the elderly, inter- and multi-generational rel …

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin meets The Marrying of Chani Kaufman in this cinematic novel about the birth of Israel and the true story of the marriages of convenience that were arranged to smuggle Jewish women out of Nazi-occupied Europe.

On the eve of World War II, a ship bearing twenty young men sets sail from the Palestine Territory toward Europe …

Does true love have supernatural power?

Where Did You Sleep Last Night is a love story about a teenage girl who embarks on a relationship with Kurt Cobain.

Evelyn Gray is a sad and lonely sixteen-year-old from Carnation, Washington who is terrorized by her classmates at school. She spends most of her time in her room reading, writing letters to dead …

Jenna Butler draws on her own experiences of her grandmother's disappearance into senile dementia to reassemble a sensual world in longpoem form that positively crackles with imagery and rhythm. Identities and memories flow and flicker as she strings together fragments of narrative into stories that comprise one woman's life. It entwines her disapp …

The past two decades have witnessed a vigorous challenge to social work. A growing global convergence between the market and the public sector means that private sector values, priorities, and forms of work organization increasingly permeate social and community services. As challenges facing people and communities become more layered and complex, …

Why don’t more Métis people go to traditional ceremonies? How does going to ceremonies impact Métis identity?

In Rekindling the Sacred Fire, Chantal Fiola investigates the relationship between Red River Métis ancestry, Anishinaabe spirituality, and identity, bringing into focus the ongoing historical impacts of colonization upon Métis relation …

Oral stories form a portal through which rich cultural and linguistic information is passed from generation to generation. Tellings from Our Elders, Volume 2, presents stories in the Skagit Valley dialects of Lushootseed, the language of the indigenous people of the southern and eastern shores of Puget Sound. Transcribed from recordings made of the …

Twenty years after activists set up a peace camp blocking a logging road into an extensive area of temperate rainforest in Clayoquot Sound, that summer of protest still holds a prominent place in Canadian environmental discourse. Although the camp was said to be based on feminist or eco/feminist principles, insufficient attention has been paid to i …

This latest collection of poems, “The Significance of Moths,” is an examination of life in Canada within a Filipino context. The title corresponds to a Filipino superstition that moths embody the souls of those who have recently passed on: though the person has died, the spirit still lingers, like a memory to an experience long gone. Much of th …

In 2008, a small-scale flour miller from British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast created a handmade bike mill to attract a dedicated farmers’ market following. Chris Hergesheimer wanted to challenge the belief that there is only one way—the big way—to grow, process and market grain and flour. For Chris and his family, it wasn’t about profit, bu …

Metis and the Medicine Line tells the remarkable story of the Plains Metis and the birth of the Canada/U.S. Border, brought vividly to life by history writing at its best. Exploring the borderland world of the prairies, Michel Hogue reveals how notions of race were created and manipulated to unlock access to Indigenous lands, while challenging Cana …

Life Among the Qallunaat is the story of Mini Aodla Freeman’s experiences growing up in the Inuit communities of James Bay and her journey in the 1950s from her home to the strange land and stranger customs of the Qallunaat, those living south of the Arctic. Her extraordinary story, sometimes humourous and sometimes heartbreaking, illustrates an …

In Search of Alberto Guerrero is the first full biography of the influential Chilean-Canadian pianist and teacher (1886-1959), describing Guerrero’s long career as virtuoso recitalist, chamber music collaborator, concerto soloist, and teacher. Written by composer John Beckwith, who was a student of Guerrero, the book blends research and memoir to …

The Sisters Brothers meets Master and Commander in Robert Hough’s rollicking and raucous new historical novel.

The year is 1664, and Benny Wand, a young thief and board game hustler, is arrested in London for illegal gaming. Deported to the city of Port Royal, Jamaica, known as “the wickedest city on earth,” Wand is forced by his depleted circ …

In her fourth collection, and the first since the Griffin Poetry Prize–winning Pigeon, Karen Solie advances her extraordinary poetics of impetus and second thoughts. Ferrying the intimate self through the public realm, these poems meditate on the tensile strength of our most elemental bonds and beliefs.

Consistently attuned to the demotic and the …

A chilling psychological thriller, Little One is the haunting story of adopted siblings Aaron and Claire—one the definition of normal, the other deeply disturbed and unpredictable—and the strange lives of their neighbours, a man and his mail-order bride.

In Other People’s Children, wealthy young power couple Ben and Ilana hire Sati, a live-in …

Navigate the fascinating twists and turns of rivers that have shaped history.

Rivers can be extraordinarily powerful, and not just because of their fast-flowing currents. They can make civilizations rise or crumble, divide cultures or link them together, and even provide crucial clues to where we came from. Dive into these 10 surprising stories abou …

Deluxe redesign of an aching solo situated at the mid-point of a long, melodious career.

On the occasion of the press's 40th anniversary, Brick Books is proud to present the third of six new editions of classic books from our back catalogue. This edition of Riffs features a new introduction by the poet Paul Vermeersch, a reprint of an extended inter …

In 1981 Jake Kennedy accidentally burnt down an abandoned house. Years later as an adult, he read a story about how Kurt Schwitters' "interior house-sculpture" ("Merz Structure No. 2") was destroyed in 1951 after some children playing with matches accidentally burnt the building down. This sad 'unmaking,' so similar in nature to his own haunting ex …

An indispensible guide for savvy teens to sort food myths from reality.

The everyday choices we make when it comes to food don’t just have an effect on us—they also affect other people and the planet. Today’s teens are more attuned to what they eat and where it comes from, but there’s still more to know. Foodprints enables readers to sort th …