- literary (44)
- canadian (29)
- historical (16)
- mysteries & detective stories (15)
- short stories (single author) (15)
- friendship (13)
- emotions & feelings (12)
- family life (11)
- law & crime (11)
- parents (11)
- women authors (10)
- personal memoirs (9)
- native american (8)
- orphans & foster homes (7)
- post-confederation (1867-) (7)
- prejudice & racism (7)
- contemporary women (6)
- crime (6)
- humorous stories (6)
- self-esteem & self-reliance (6)
The White Cat and the Monk
A monk leads a simple life. He studies his books late into the evening and searches for truth in their pages. His cat, Pangur, leads a simple life, too, chasing prey in the darkness. As night turns to dawn, Pangur leads his companion to the truth he has been seeking.
The White Cat and the Monk is a retelling of the classic Old Irish poem “Pangur B …
A Murder State of Mind
Deadly Secrets: A retired cop who suffered a personal tragedy is coming to grips with his grief and considering returning to law enforcement. That decision escalates when he finds a friend murdered. Coincidences, the emergence of a secret life, a treasure, an heiress searching for her birth mother and the ulterior motives of some regular citizens a …
Media Meltdown
While learning about media consolidation and the power of money over truth, Bounce, Pema and Jagroop decide to take on the developers and the media.
When Karl Reed, Owner of Oasis Developments, tries to force the sale of a local fruit farm—through whatever means necessary—Pema, Bounce and Jagroop decide to expose him through the media. Little do …
The Best Kind of People
A finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and a national bestseller, Zoe Whittall’s The Best Kind of People is a stunning tour de force about the unravelling of an all-American family.
George Woodbury, an affable teacher and beloved husband and father, is arrested for sexual impropriety at a prestigious prep school. His wife, Joan, vaults betwee …
The Kashmir Trap
Con man Max O’Brien takes a personal investigation into his own hands.
Max O’Brien’s nightmare has begun again. Eleven years after the tragic disappearance of his brother, an ambassador in Central America, Max’s nephew, also a diplomat, is assassinated in New Delhi. Max is on the run from police, and this time the professional con man decide …
Wishful Seeing
2017 Arthur Ellis Award, Best Novel — Shortlisted
Saddlebag preacher Thaddeus Lewis uncovers murder and conspiracy in Northumberland County.
A body is discovered on an isolated island in Rice Lake. Saddlebag preacher Thaddeus Lewis is sent on a desperate hunt for the truth when a woman for whom he feels a guilty attraction stands accused of the m …
Maritime Command Pacific
The Royal Canadian Navy crews that sailed the Atlantic during the early Cold War held a contemptuous view of their West Coast brethren, likening the Pacific fleet to a “yacht club” where sailors enjoyed a life of leisurely service on a tranquil sea. As David Zimmerman reveals, nothing could be further from the truth. From the fleet’s postwar …
Arts of Engagement
Arts of Engagement focuses on the role that music, film, visual art, and Indigenous cultural practices play in and beyond Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools. Contributors here examine the impact of aesthetic and sensory experience in residential school history, at TRC national and community events, and in a …
What Killed Jane Creba
The sensational story of a girl's tragic death and the whirlwind of racial prejudices that came in its wake.
On Boxing Day 2005, fifteen-year-old Jane Creba was fatally shot on one of the busiest streets in Toronto. Police and journalists reported her death as that of an innocent bystander caught in the crossfire of rival gangs.
In the months that fo …
Green River Falling
When a series of murders targeting oil pipeline workers strikes in a remote coastal community in northern BC, Dan Connor and Walker pair up once again to solve the mystery.
Five pipeline employees have been murdered and a journalist is missing, and all the clues seems to lead to a Haida man who is also Walker's friend.
Walker is convinced that his fr …
Trial by Fire
Riley Donovan is the new kid in a small town where her aunt (and guardian) has just started a job as a detective on the town’s police force.
Riley is home alone when a neighbor’s barn catches on fire; when she realizes that he is trapped in the barn, she calls 9-1-1 and then tries to save him. But instead of being hailed as a hero, Riley finds h …
Conversations on Dying
The story of the end-of-life experience of a palliative care physician who helped thousands of patients to die well.
We all die. Most of us spend the majority of our lives ignoring this uncomfortable truth, but Dr. Larry Librach dedicated his life and his career to helping his patients navigate their final journey. Then, in April 2013, Larry was dia …
Whelmed
What might a word lose – or gain – without its prefix?
Each prose poem in Whelmed features a word that has been unhinged from its prefix, allowing new meanings – radically unfamiliar, yet uncannily intimate – to emerge from these prefixless word deposits. Part prose-poem sequence and part encyclopedia of unpredictably irregular terms, Whelme …
In This Together
What is real reconciliation? This collection of essays from both Indigenous and non-Indigenous contributors from across Canada welcomes readers into a timely, healing conversation—one we've longed for but, before now, have had a hard time approaching.
These reflective and personal pieces come from journalists, writers, academics, visual artists, f …
Don't Tell, Don't Tell, Don't Tell
Sixteen-year-old Frederick has a lot of rules for himself. Like if someone calls him Freddy he doesn’t have to respond; he only wears shirts with buttons and he hates getting dirty. His odd behavior makes him an easy target for the “Despisers” at school, but he’s gotten used to eating lunch alone in the Reject Room. Angel, in tenth grade bu …
Where the Bodies Lie
A finalist for the Best First Novel Award at the Arthur Ellis Awards
“Sins don’t destroy people here. Dreams do.”
Enter the premier’s old friend Harry Asher—lawyer, former hockey star, self-styled intellectual, and recent divorcé—who is hired to dig into the incident. And it isn’t long before Asher’s investigation threatens to expose …
Campfire Stories of Western Canada
A fun-for-all-ages collection of over thirty spooky stories in settings across Western Canada.
When friends and family gather around a campfire, good times and scary stories are sure to follow. In Campfire Stories of Western Canada, Barbara Smith, the author of twenty books of true ghost stories from across Canada, presents a creepy collection of ta …
A Knock on the Door
“It can start with a knock on the door one morning. It is the local Indian agent, or the parish priest, or, perhaps, a Mounted Police officer.” So began the school experience of many Indigenous children in Canada for more than a hundred years, and so begins the history of residential schools prepared by the Truth & Reconciliation Commission of …
Smoke and Mirrors
If you read the papers and listen to the “experts,” you’ve heard the usual pitches about retirement: you’ll need a million dollars so you better start an RRSP early and maximize your contributions, trust the stock market and mutual funds for the best returns and put your faith in a financial advisor. But what if this advice is wrong? By rea …
Speaking Power to Truth
Online discourse has created a new media environment for contributions to public life, one that challenges the social significance of the role of public intellectuals—intellectuals who, whether by choice or by circumstance, offer commentary on issues of the day. The value of such commentary is rooted in the assumption that, by virtue of their tra …
Two-Gun & Sun
In 1922 a lone woman arrives in a filthy frontier mining town in the Pacific Northwest. Her goal: to resurrect her dead uncle’s newspaper. Within two days a naked man is shot dead, a famous man is rumoured to be heading their way and the only man capable of fixing her broken-down press so that she might spread this news is a Chinese printer from …
Mockingbird
In poetry that strikes a delicate balance between candour and lament., Mockingbird tracks the aftershocks of a failed marriage through a variety of self-portraits. Derek Webster’s speakers itemize their regrets and fears while keeping sentimentality in check and the result is a first book of exceptional emotional power. Indeed, the distinctive an …
Friend or Foe
Rats, mosquitoes, bats, cockroaches, leeches, vultures — it’s easy to fear and despise them. But are they all bad? You probably know that rats destroy food supplies and can cause house fires when they gnaw on electrical wires, but did you know their supersensitive noses can help detect tuberculosis or even land mines?
Are these conventionally ic …
Blue Suicide
For Wyn Rhys, Director of the Special Police Oversight Agency, justice is not an idea, but a destination. Charged with investigating those who are meant to serve and protect, Rhys is at once a pragmatist and a maverick, intent on changing the world of oversight while fending off challenges from powerful political opponents.
When an artist staging a …
The Same River Twice
What if everything you believed to be true about your wife’s disappearance turned out to be a lie? In the third and final Red Rock Canyon Mystery, Silas Pearson finally unearths the truth.
It’s been five years since Silas Pearson’s wife, Penelope, disappeared, and two since she started appearing in his dreams. He had believed that she was tryi …
Hannah and the Wild Woods
It’s spring break, and 14-year-old Hannah Anderson is spending it with the “Coast-Is-Clear” program, a group committed to cleaning Pacific Rim National Park Reserve’s beaches of debris that has drifted across the Pacific from the tragic Japanese tsunami of 2011. Soon after Hannah arrives, Jack, her raven sidekick, discovers something washed …
A Whole Life
Andreas lives his whole life in the Austrian Alps, where he arrives as a young boy taken in by a farming family. He is a man of very few words and so, when he falls in love with Marie, he doesn't ask for her hand in marriage, but instead has some of his friends light her name at dusk across the mountain. When Marie dies in an avalanche, pregnant wi …
Yes, and Back Again
Historian Tanis and high school teacher Neil just purchased their dream home on Saskatoon’s west side: a fixer-upper with plenty of character and an abundance of history to uncover. The house, however, also comes with a crumbling ruin of a garage tagged with gang symbols, a basement filled with mouse droppings, a mysteriously boarded up attic wit …
Blondes Are My Trouble
"It's been a long time now, nearly two years since we met at that party." "Yeah," Tessie said bitterly, "and nearly five years since I was a clever little girl who thought she'd found a way to make a hundred dollars. There was only going to be one time. I needed the dough. Two months later I didn't have an excuse any more and I was still doing it. …
6 Essential Questions
6 Essential Questions tells the story of Renata as she travels to Brazil to reunite with the mother who abandoned her when she was just five years old. In Rio, Renata discovers more than she bargained for in her quest to uncover the truth of who abandoned whom. She is continually tossed about by her undead grandmother and a semi-invisible uncle as …
My Life Before Me
Cady has always wanted to be a reporter, like her hero Nellie Bly, so after a fire burns down the orphanage she lives in, she’s ready to leave small-town Ontario and make her mark as a newspaperwoman.
A crumbling newspaper clipping leads her to Orrenstown, Indiana, where her investigation into a long-ago murder earns her a hard lesson in race rela …
Stones on a Grave
June 1964, Sara has never been out of the tiny town of Hope, Ontario, where she has been in an orphanage all her life.
After a fire destroys the Benevolent Home for Necessitous Girls, clues about her parentage—a medical certificate and a Star of David—lead her to Germany. Despite her fears—she doesn’t speak the language, she knows no one in …
Innocent
After the orphanage she lives in is destroyed by fire, Betty, an innocent and trusting teen, takes a job as a maid in Kingston, Ontario. Welcomed into the household of the wealthy Remington clan, Betty makes friends with the staff at the house and soon discovers that her mother had also been a maid there—and that her father is in a nearby jail, c …
Small Bones
Dot, whose name reflects her stature, has always had big dreams—but her dreams have to be put on hold while she searches for the truth about her parents. She gets a job as a seamstress at a lakeside resort in rural Ontario and falls hard for Eddie, a charming local boy who is equal parts helpful and distracting as Dot investigates her past. Searc …
Shattered Glass
Toni has always had nightmares about fire, and she also has burn scars but no idea how she got them. So when fire destroys the orphanage she has grown up in, she is ready to make her way to Toronto, where she hopes to discover the truth about the mother she believes hurt and then abandoned her. Toronto proves to be both daunting and exciting for To …
Prospecting for Love
Take two old prospectors, one modern day writer/photographer, and one handsome, if somewhat absent-minded mine owner and mix them up with an explosion gone awry in the Nevada mining town of Peavine. Add to that a time difference of over 145 years, and the chances for mishaps, mayhem and romance are as abundant as the gold mines scattered in the hil …
The Mud Rose
No one knows what happened to the little Princes of the Tower. That’s what Dane, Paige, and Jack are told when they start working on a medieval documentary for Dane and Paige’s filmmaker father. But then an ancient medallion transports them back to the fifteenth century and gives them a chance to discover the truth about the mysterious disappea …
The Snow Kimono
Ilona Martonfi’s third poetry collection, The Snow Kimono, can best described as an obsession with truth. The Snow Kimono invites the reader into a magical world where reality shimmers with the fragile beauty of the moment and the dark, haunting awareness of a painful past that lingers just out of sight. Compassionate and disturbing, witness poem …
The Disappearing Rose
No one knows what happened to the little Princes of the Tower. That’s what Dane, Paige, and Jack are told when they start working on a medieval documentary for Dane and Paige’s filmmaker father. But then an ancient medallion transports them back to the fifteenth century and gives them a chance to discover the truth about the mysterious disappea …
Act Normal
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 …
Captive
In the spirit of Emma Donoghue’s international bestseller Room, Captive throws readers into the mind of a woman who wakes to find herself in a terrifying and surreal situation: she’s confined to a small grey room and she has no idea why she’s there.
Emma has an unremarkable life, a mundane job, and very little contact with her family and frien …
Also Known as Lard Butt
Can Rebecca turn her new stepbrother into her new love? When Rebecca's mother marries Pres's father, Rebecca is sure that living in the same house with the guy of her dreams will have its perks and it will be just a matter of time before Pres sees her as more than a kid sister. Even though her best friend, Celeste, warns her to face reality, Rebecc …
The Winter War
On the surface, the Paul family are living the liberal, middle-class Scandinavian dream. Max Paul is a renowned sociologist and his wife Katriina has a well-paid job in the public sector. They live in an airy apartment in the centre of Helsinki. But look closer and the cracks start to show.
As he approaches his sixtieth birthday, the certainties of …
Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Volume One: Summary
This is the Final Report of Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its six-year investigation of the residential school system for Aboriginal youth and the legacy of these schools. This report, the summary volume, includes the history of residential schools, the legacy of that school system, and the full text of the Commission's 94 recomm …
Literary Land Claims
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 …
The Perfect Guy
Can Rebecca turn her new stepbrother into her new love? When Rebecca's mother marries Pres's father, Rebecca is sure that living in the same house with the guy of her dreams will have its perks and it will be just a matter of time before Pres sees her as more than a kid sister. Even though her best friend, Celeste, warns her to face reality, Rebecc …
Swing in the House and Other Stories
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 …
I, Animal
"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 …
Wake The Stone Man
Set in a small northern town, under the mythical shadow of the Sleeping Giant, Wake the Stone Man follows the complicated friendship of two girls coming of age in the 1960s. Molly meets Nakina, who is Ojibwe and a survivor of the residential school system, in high school, and they form a strong friendship. As the bond between them grows, Molly, wh …
Ground-Truthing
Derrick Stacey Denholm has spent twenty-five years as a forestry field worker, planting trees, marking cutblock boundaries and timber-cruising. In Ground-Truthing, he combines this experience with his perspective as a poet and artist to guide us through the tangle of social, ecological and economic slash piles that dominate BC’s North Coast. Scie …