- canadian (127)
- literary (100)
- women authors (22)
- historical (20)
- post-confederation (1867-) (20)
- contemporary women (17)
- short stories (single author) (16)
- essays (14)
- coming of age (12)
- family life (12)
- friendship (12)
- mysteries & detective stories (12)
- personal memoirs (12)
- law & crime (11)
- crime (10)
- self-esteem & self-reliance (10)
- social history (10)
- urban (10)
- western provinces (10)
- anthologies (multiple authors) (9)
Alequiers
Alequiers is the story of a one–hundred–year–old log house on the banks of the Highwood River in Southern Alberta, with particular emphasis on the time that author Mike Schintz and his family spent there. The book details what little is known about Alexander McQueen Weir, the original settler on the site and goes on to describe the changes in …
From the Iron House
In From the Iron House: Imprisonment in First Nations Writing, Deena Rymhs identifies continuities between the residential school and the prison, offering ways of reading “the carceral”—that is, the different ways that incarceration is constituted and articulated in contemporary Aboriginal literature. Addressing the work of writers like Tomso …
Spirit Builders
The inspiring story of how one organization has tried to alleviate the struggles faced by First Nations peoples in Canada by building houses and developing livable communities for those in desperate need.
The people who were living here on Turtle Island (North America) before us have been pushed aside from their own land for decades. Mining companie …
The Secret Deepens
Shortlisted for Ontario Silver Birch Award 2010
Selected, Canadian Children's Book Centre's "Best Books for Kids & Teens" (Starred selection, 2009)
Since Halloween, things are getting back to normal for Cat Peters. Now the big drama in her life isn’t a battle against diabolical fairies, but a battle of the sexes on the soccer field. Meanwhile, ever …
The Trap
The famous novelist Linda Conrads, 38, is a mystery to her fans and the media. She hasn’t set foot over the threshold of her villa on Lake Starnberg for more than eleven years, and yet she’s extremely successful. Her life, though comfortable, is highly artificial and her grip on reality is fragile. Only very few know that she is tormented by a …
Come 'n' Get It
A wholesome and hearty collection of authentic recipes and local history from ranch country.
Come ‘n’ Get It is an authentic collection of down-home recipes and early Western Canadian ranch lore. Featuring material and recipes gathered from letters, history books, family cookbooks, and interviews with ranching families, this book represents a cr …
Magyarazni
The word "magyarázni" (pronounced MUG-yar-az-knee) means "to explain" in Hungarian, but translates literally as "make it Hungarian." This faux-Hungarian language primer, written in direct address, invites readers to experience what it's like to be "made Hungarian" by growing up with a parent who immigrated to North America as a refugee. In forty-f …
Battle Stories — The English Throne & the Fate of Europe 3-Book Bundle
Three battles that shook the British Isles and changed the course of world history. Three renowned experts each take up one crucial day when the future of the throne, or Europe itself, hung in the balance.
Hastings 1066
In 1066, a foreign invader won the throne of England in a single battle and changed not only the history of the British Isl …
Inside Hamilton's Museums
Exploring Hamilton through its heritage museums.
Inside Hamilton’s Museums helps to satisfy a growing curiosity about Canada’s steel capital as it evolves into a post-industrial city and cultural destination. With an emphasis on storytelling and unsung heroes, the book identifies where Sergeant Alexander Fraser bayonetted seven enemy soldiers in …
Throaty Wipes
In 1934, Gertrude Stein asked 'What is poetry and if you know what poetry is what is prose.' Throaty Wipes answers this question and many more! How does broadband work? Does 'chuffed' mean pleased or displeased? What if the generations of Adam had mothers? Through her signature fusion of formal innovation and lyricism, Holbrook delivers what we've …
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 …
The God of Gods: A Canadian Play
Carroll Aikins’s play The God of Gods (1919) has been out of print since its first and only edition in 1927. This critical edition not only revives the work for readers and scholars alike, it also provides historical context for Aikins’s often overlooked contributions to theatre in the 1920s and presents research on the different staging techni …
Happy Birthday, Alice Babette
It’s Alice’s birthday! A beautiful spring afternoon in Paris — what could be better? Little does she know that her friend has arranged some surprises!
It’s Alice’s birthday! But her friend Gertrude seems to have forgotten. No matter, Alice goes out and enjoys her day just the same. A beautiful spring afternoon in Paris — what could be be …
Buddy and Earl Go Exploring
Our favorite odd-couple friends explore the wilds of their house after dark in book two of the Buddy and Earl series.
Buddy is just settling in for the night when Earl announces that he’s going on a trip.
Where will Earl go? Wherever the road leads him, of course!
Before Buddy knows it, he and Earl are off on another grand adventure. While exploring …
Max Finder Mystery Collected Casebook Volume 6
The sixth volume in this award-winning graphic novel series features ten new mystery comics and two never-before-published short stories by OWL Magazine editor, Craig Battle. Each solve-it-yourself story stars amateur detective Max Finder and his best friend, aspiring journalist Alison Santos. Seventh graders at Central Meadows Junior High, these t …
Malaika’s Costume
Malaika’s mother can’t buy her a carnival costume — will she still be able to dance in the parade?
It’s carnival time — the first carnival since Malaika’s mother moved to Canada to find a good job and provide for Malaika and her grandmother. Her mother promised she would send money for a costume, and Malaika marks off the days on her cal …
Tokyo Digs a Garden
Winner of the 2016 Governor General's Literary Award for Young People's Literature — Illustrated Books
Tokyo lives in a small house between giant buildings with his family and his cat, Kevin. For years, highways and skyscrapers have been built up around the family’s house where once there were hills and trees. Will they ever experience the natur …
Tod Inlet
Tod Inlet has been a place of refuge for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, but few are aware of its history. This tiny fjord, less than a half hour from downtown Victoria, is part of Gowlland/Tod Provincial Park and is accessed by a forested path beside Tod Creek. For centuries it was the home of the WSÁNEC (Saanich) people, providing everythi …
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 …
With Us Always
This book of devotions demonstrates how our faith journey can be explored and energized through vehicles of popular culture like movies. Using lectionary readings, the weekly themes remind us that God is with us in every situation. Designed for Lent, it can also be used at any time in the year. Includes a study guide and movie guide.
Men of Action
After his father, Saul, undergoes brain surgery and slips into a coma, Howard Akler begins to reflect on Saul's life, the complicated texture of consciousness, and Akler's struggles with writing and his own unpredictable mind. With echoes of Paul Auster's The Invention of Solitude and Philip Roth's Patrimony, Men of Action treads the line between m …
Beatrice More Moves In
Beatrice More is no average third-grader. She is a list-making, hyperorganized perfectionist whose laid-back parents and messy little sister consistently frustrate her high standards. And when a new house, a new neighborhood and new friends are thrown into the mix, Beatrice sends the family into a comic tailspin, all in the name of “professionali …
Victim Without a Face
The first book in the Fabian Risk series, Victim Without a Face is a chilling novel about the ultimate revenge.
Criminal investigator Fabian Risk has left Stockholm with his wife, Sonja, and their two children to start fresh in his hometown of Helsingborg. He has planned a six-week vacation before he starts a new job at the Homicide Department. But …
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 …
Nemesis
An explosive vision of contemporary Brazil’s underbelly by one of our greatest investigative reporters.
This is a book about a man known as Nem; about Rocinha, the slum or “favela” he grew up in and came to run as a private fiefdom; about Rio, the beautiful but damned city that Rocinha exists in; and about the battle for Brazil. Nemesis pans i …
Mission Creep
A spun radio dial passing clean through poetry. A stuttering loop of Endgame recorded by Stockhausen, remixed by Kraftwerk. The chatter of minotaurs and metadata. Transmissions from far-off futures or new pasts, recordings from a recoded present topped off with a cherry. Evel Knievel, above it all, mysterious, forever taciturn. Mission Creep comes …
Guano
Bartleby the Scrivener meets Catch-22 in this charmingly sardonic tale of love, war and fertilizer.
WINNER OF THE PRIX DES COLLAGIENS
Simon turned his thoughts to her daily. There were few enough
of them, but each one lingered. He imagined their life together.
Sometimes even their children’s lives. Sometimes he set his fantasies in Spain, sometim …
The Secret of Grim Hill
The new kid at Darkmont High, Cat Peters is already desperate to get out. So when she hears that Grimoire, the private school nearby, is offering scholarships to the winners of a Halloween soccer match, Cat jumps at the chance to apply, despite her sister Sookie’s warnings that there’s something creepy about the old school on the hill. Sookie …
Set You Free
The mayor’s six-year-old son, Ben Carter, is missing—and Lauren’s brother, Tom, is the main suspect. Lauren knows her brother would never harm anyone, but the police don’t agree. Ben’s stepbrother doesn’t agree. The mayor certainly doesn’t agree. To some people in Resurrection Falls, Tom is the freak who, rumor has it, once tried to l …
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 …
Three Times a Day
Three Times a Day was born of out of shared passions: Marilou’s for cooking and the art of entertaining and Alexandre Champagne’s for photography. Quebec pop sensation Marilou always loved food and cooking, but suffered from anorexia for six years in her late teens and early twenties. Now twenty-four, Marilou created a blog (Trois fois par jour …
The Murder of Halland
When Halland is found murdered almost right outside his door, his widow, Bess, is of course the prime suspect. She isn't worried about that, though, but about the daughter she abandoned years ago. As the police investigate, the slightly cantankerous Bess instead follows a trail of her own regrets and misapprehensions.
Atmospheric and haunted by the …
The Xenotext: Book 1
The first work of 'living poetry' in the world, by the author of the bestselling book Eunoia
Shortlisted for the 2016 Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry (Alberta Literary Awards)
Internationally renowned poet Christian Bok has encoded a poem (called ‘Orpheus’) into the genome of a germ so that, in reply, the cell builds a protein that encode …
Pauls
National Post "NP99" Best Book of 2015
Paul, who is not always the same Paul, but could very well be a similar Paul, another Paul in a long line of Pauls. Paul runs through forests, drinks in student housing, flirts with girls, at times is a girl, loves men, makes friends, jumps from buildings, hurts people, gets hurt, climbs up towards the sky, w …
Pillow
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2016 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2016 KOBO EMERGING WRITER PRIZE
Most of the things Pillow really liked to do were obviously morally wrong. He wasn't an idiot; clearly it was wrong to punch people in the face for money. But there had been an art to it, and it had been thrilling and thoughtful for him. The zoo was al …
Country Club
A lyrical wilderness of power, wealth, leisure and desire, the poems of Country Club freewheel across state lines with panache and flagrant feeling. In this bold debut from Andy McGuire, all passions – even unpleasant ones – stare down the barrel of a world in which freedom is the fifty-first state, and love is the eleventh province.
The manate …
Ardour
something like wait for me
in the braille of scars
tonight can i suggest a little punctuation
circle half-moon vertical line of astonishment
a pause that transforms
light and breath
into language and threshold of fire
Even as vowels tremble in danger and worldly destruction repeats itself on the horizon, Ardour reminds us that the silence pulsing w …
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 …
The Spirit Rose
The discovery of an old book provides more information on the medallion, but Paige and Dane will soon be returning to Canada and know it will be several months before they can make another time trip with their cousin Jack. Then, amidst all the preparations for Grantie Etta’s one hundred and fifth birthday party, strange things start to happen. As …
Cat and Mouse
A woman is shot dead while looking for her dog in a woodlot below her house. But local vet, Dr. Erica Merrill, who heard the shot, and her boyfriend Clay Caldwell, a deputy sheriff, don't think the killing was an accident, but that the wrong person was accidentally shot. When another attempt at murder is made, the police have two crimes with no sus …
Wild Pieces
One has lost a child and paints her house blue, another has found a not-so-handy man she can’t get rid of; one perches in a tree and observes the neighbourhood, and yet another goes off into the woods with Jesus. These are some of the “wild pieces” that fill Catherine Hogan Safer’s remarkable new book, Wild Pieces – characters as wry and …
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 …
Till the Boys Come Home
A century after the beginning of the Great War, the contributions of the Maritimes to the formation of the Canadian Expeditionary force remain relatively unexplored. Till the Boys Come Home examines the conduct of the war through the eyes of one particular agricultural and coal-mining community.
As the clouds of war gathered across the Atlantic, the …
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 …
My name be Cain and my color be Se'ben
Deep in the woods that slide off into Stone Creek Swamp, teenage drug dealers retrieve their stash and receive an unexpected dividend—the unwitting resurrection of Cain, powerful Bokor of Black Magic. Atop Coleman Hill, two young attorneys renovate a decrepit relic of a house for their home and office. A house with a past it wants to share, showi …
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 …
Basic Black with Pearls
A lost feminist classic — and winner of the Toronto Book Award — reissued to coincide with the 35th anniversary of publication.
In her yearning, elusive search for a lover, Shirley Kaszenbowski sheds her drab “basic black” existence together with torturous memories of guilt and loss as a Jewish immigrant in Toronto.
Shirley Kaszenbowski, née …
Mirror on the Floor
Reissued as part of Anvil Press's Lost BC Literature series
Set in Vancouver in the mid-1960s, Mirror on the Floor focuses on one summer in the life of UBC grad student Bob Small and his roommate, George Delsing.
They spend their time carousing the downtown eastside and engaging in conversations with the old-timers—dockworkers, unemployed loggers, …
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 …