"All girls [should read] The Breadwinner by Deborah Ellis." — Malala Yousafzai, New York Times

The three books in Deborah Ellis's Breadwinner trilogy bound into one handsome volume

Deborah Ellis's novels The Breadwinner, Parvana's Journey and Mud City have been a phenomenal success, touching the hearts of readers the world over.

Here are the three b …

In the crucial discussion of Aboriginal education in Canada, there are two distinct schools of thought: parallelism and integrationism. For the first time in one volume, leading thinkers on both sides share their perspectives, allowing readers to examine this complex and emotionally charged issue from all angles.

Parallelism argues for Aboriginal s …

Rediscovering the British World is one part of an ongoing attempt to approach British Imperial history from a different viewpoint, placing the colonies of settlement at the centre. Editors Phillip Buckner and Douglas Francis have included nineteen essays from expert scholars in the field, which cover a broad range of cultural, social, and intellect …

With Home/Bodies, Wendy Schissel brings together a diverse range of voices which explore the concepts of home, gender, and identity. The metaphorical geographies of bodies, places, and spaces are the backdrop for such topics as: transgendered identities; young people and sexual health; kinetic art and disability; adolescent girls and consumer socie …

Set in Jewish London in the 1930s, Susan Glickman's The Violin Lover is written against the backdrop of Hitler's escalating campaign against the Jews. This beautifully written novel tells the story of Clara Weiss and Ned Abraham, "the violin lover," brought together by Clara's 11-year-old son, Jacob. A successful doctor and amateur violinist, Ned i …

In her early twenties, Alma met a tree-planter and fell in love — not with the man but with his strangely romantic work. Now, after several seasons of planting trees out west, the tough-minded hero of Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer's visceral first novel has come home to northern Ontario to help reforest the ravaged landscape with a gang of filthy ex-hipp …

One night, Agatha Winter's phone rings. Jasmine, her 13-year-old sister, has run away from home and needs to be picked up at the bus terminal. It's the anniversary of their mother's accident and subsequent split from the family. Jasmine is determined to exact revenge. Their mother, now a flashy self-help guru under a new moniker, preaches "willing …

On a summer visit to Germany, George, a young medical student at Cambridge, meets Anna von Kleist, whose intellectual force, beauty, and self-assurance smite him full in the heart. It is 1936. Hitler is already in power, and a shift has occurred in Germany that Anna, George, and their friend Werner have not fully grasped. Europe is on the cusp of w …

A unique compilation of real-life stories and striking black and white photographs by formerly violent teens. They grapple with issues of bullying, neglect, self-image, domestic violence and sexual abuse that are sometimes compounded by drug abuse and cri

Can the strategy of negative political advertising developed in the United States succeed in Canada, or does this kind of advertising do more harm than good?

The year 1988 saw elections in both the United States and Canada. It also saw a turning point in the tenor of television campaign advertising. By the early 1990s there was a growing reliance u …

Doing Ethics in a Pluralistic World is an apt title for this collection of essays in honour of Roger C. Hutchinson who, over many decades, has encouraged and participated in shaping a Canadian contextual social ethics. His abiding interest in social ethics and in religious engagement with public issues is reflected in his life’s work — seeking …

How do older women come to terms with widowhood? Are they vulnerable or courageous, predictable or creative in dealing with this life challenge?

Most books about widows usually focus on younger women; this book interweaves the voices of older widows their experiences and insights to show how they have come to terms with widowhood and have recreated …

In this re–examination of the roots of the relationship between religion and science, David Hawkin focuses on the concept of autonomy as he explores the question: Is there continuity and compatibility between the autonomy that underlies Christian faith and the role of individual freedom in the technological age?

What makes this work particularly …

Suzanne Leblanc's The Thought House of Philippa transposes a theory of individuality into a stunningly reflective, sensuous and frank philosophical novel. Setting the chapters in the various rooms of the house Ludwig Wittgenstein designed for his sister in Vienna, Leblanc's novel lays out P.'s intensely emotional and intellectually acute way of see …

Margaret Laurence Writes Africa and Canada is the first book to examine how Laurence addresses decolonization and nation building in 1950s Somalia and Ghana, and 1960s and 1970s English Canada.

Focusing on Laurence’s published works as well as her unpublished letters not yet discussed by critics, the book articulates how Laurence and her character …

How does the imagination entwine the shreds of memory of family, place and culture to root a self in the fluid experience of the present?

Daughter, wife, mother, teacher, writer and feminist academic, Helen M. Buss / Margaret Clarke has lived in many parts of Canada and writes from a life of multiple perspectives full of contradictory loyalties and …

Prompted by the shattering of the bonds between religion and the political order brought about by the Enlightenment, Jean-Jacques Rousseau devised a “new” religion (civil religion) to be used by the state as a way of enforcing civic unity. Emile Durkheim, by contrast, conceived civil religion to be a spontaneous phenomenon arising from society …

Canada's Indian policy has, since the 1830s, consisted mainly of attempts at cultural replacement. Although rarely practised, cultural synthesis of native and western cultures has been advocated as an important alternative especially in the last ten years. This book is a study of E.F. Wilson (1844–1915), a Canadian missionary of British backgrou …

In 1964 the Senate Committee on Aging reported that “once admitted to an institution ... the veteran begins ... to show signs of social and physical degeneration,” a phenomenon that has not escapted the attention of clinicians, social scientists, veterans, and other chronic-care patients.

Assuming that social withdrawal in the institutional set …

“Every time we raise our voices, we hear echoes.” Jo-Anne Elder, from the Foreword

Through short stories, journal entries and poetry, the women in Voices and Echoes explore the changing landscape of their spiritual lives. Experienced writers such as Lorna Crozier, Di Brandt and Ann Copeland, as well as strong new voices, appear to speak to each …

What this book represents is, quite literally, a “slice” of (white) Australian life. By noting the patterns and parallels that emerge in a random sampling of social phenomena of widely varying types, from soap operas to political behaviour, Gaile McGregor has constructed a model that, in its challenge to uniformitarianism, is a test case in eth …

Over the last twenty years in Canada there has been an increasing trend toward retirement at age sixty-five or earlier. Despite this trend, relatively few social scientists have studied the transition and consequences of retirement. The need of Canadian research regarding retirement is especially acute because the processes of retirement are cultur …

Women, Reading, Kroetsch: Telling the Difference is a book of both practical and theoretical criticism. Some chapters are feminist deconstructive readings of a broad range of the writings of contemporary Canadian poet-critic-novelist Robert Kroetsch, from But We are Exiles to Completed Field Notes. Other chapters self-consciously examine the histor …

John Riddell is best known for “H” and “Pope Leo, El ELoPE,” a pair of graphic fictions written in collaboration with, or dedicated to, bpNichol, but his work moves well beyond comic strips into a series of radical fictions. In Writing Surfaces, derek beaulieu and Lori Emerson present “Pope Leo, El ELoPE” and many other works in a colle …

A prodigious body of innovative writing behind him, Robert Kroetsch turns to a starker lyrical mode in Too Bad: Sketches Toward a Self-Portrait. Oscillating between the many moods of a human heart that has lived through so much-from whimsy and scorn through desire, longing, lust, love, and serenity-these sketches mark a candid walk through the tort …

This volume is woven around the idea that wholeness (the firm) and fragmentation (risking formlessness) alternate in human affairs. This theme is applied to the history and the present condition of Australian Aboriginals. Their religion is seen as a way to bolster a precarious identity and to affirm order in an existence which would otherwise becom …

Insightful and thought-provoking journal entries, from the 1950s to 2007, on the creative process, art, life, and province of renowned Canadian artist Christopher Pratt. Ordinary Things is laced with astute observations that summarize the artistic process, and the motivations and contemplations of not only an artist, but any man. It contains slices …

“When we were children we made our own fun” is a frequent comment from those who were children in pre-television times. But what games, activities and amusements did children enjoy prior to the mid-1950s?

Recollections of older Canadians, selections from writings by Canadian authors and letters written to the children’s pages of agricultural …

When poet and essayist Kenneth Sherman was diagnosed with cancer, he began keeping a notebook of observations that blossomed into this powerful memoir. With incisive and evocative language, Sherman presents a clear-eyed view of what the cancer patient feels and thinks. His narrative voice is personal but not confessional, practical but not cold, th …

The central focus of Reclaiming Canadian Bodies is the relationship between visual media, the construction of Canadian national identity, and notions of embodiment. It asks how particular representations of bodies are constructed and performed within the context of visual and discursive mediated content. The book emphasizes the ways individuals des …

How did women in the early twentieth century, newly arrived in North-West Canada, cope with their strange new lives — so very different from the lives they used to lead? How did they see themselves and their role in frontier life?

In the early twentieth century, drawn west by the promise of free land, economic success or religious and political f …

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 …

This is a representative collection of the writings of a neglected Canadian author, William Wilfred Campbell (1858-1918).

Among the 112 poems in William Wilfred Campbell: Selected Poetry and Essays are the familiar “Indian Summer” and “How One Winter Came in the Lake Region,” along with many less well-known love poems, patriotic songs, and …

Cristina Peri Rossi is one of the most acclaimed and personal voices in Hispanic letters. This volume of short stories, Panic Signs, first published in 1970 in Montevideo, Uruguay, presages the atrocities that would come with dictatorship in 1972.

The premonitory dimension is one of the striking characteristics in all the stories — a sense of imp …

Jem is a self-described butch dyke from Montreal who always imagined spending her life in bars and having multiple flings. When she meets Freda, a woman who exposes Jem’s vulnerabilities, her preconceived notions of who she is become moot as she finds herself partnered in a long-term relationship with kids. Which she surprisingly loves—most of …

Things no longer look the same for 45-year-old Emmanuel (“M”) Taggart. Thinking he has a bad case of the flu, M leaves the office to embark on a road of self-discovery. Although the doctors find nothing medically wrong, M becomes convinced that he is suffering from an undiagnosed terminal disease, a brain tumour perhaps. During his brief period …

Based on historical records, Silence of Stone recounts the story of Marguerite de Roberval, a young French noblewoman. During a colonising expedition to New France in 1542, she falls in love with a soldier. Jean-François de Roberval, commander of the expedition and Marguerite’s guardian, is so outraged at the disgrace she has brought upon the na …

These poems span the gamut of life from love to death; a eulogy for a people, who for the most part, are no longer with us. Their evolution in rural Newfoundland has taken hundreds of years and there is a good possibility that we will never see their likes again. Full of knowledge, self-sufficiency, independence, pride and dignity, most of them, I …

No Insignificant Part: The Rhodesia Native Regiment and the East Africa Campaign of the First World War is the first history of the only primarily African military unit from Zimbabwe to fight in the First World War. Recruited from the migrant labour network, most African soldiers in the RNR were originally miners or farm workers from what are now Z …

By turns joyous and adventurous, melancholy and nostalgic, Michelle Smith's debut collection of poems showcases a wide-ranging fascination with places, people, and story. Smith's limpid and humane handling of an array of themes, emotions, and styles-her Norwegian ancestry, her Canadian Prairie heritage, the significance of family, the fragility of …

Annie Leake Tuttle was born in Nova Scotia in 1839 and died there in 1934, yet her search for education and self-support took her far afield. During her life she filled important positions from Newfoundland to British Columbia, as an educator of teachers and as the matron of a Methodist rescue home for Chinese immigrant women who had worked as pros …

Post-secondary education, often referred to as “the new buffalo,” is a contentious but critically important issue for First Nations and the future of Canadian society. While First Nations maintain that access to and funding for higher education is an Aboriginal and Treaty right, the Canadian government insists that post-secondary education is a …

Sounds of Ethnicity takes us into the linguistic, cultural, and geographical borderlands of German North America in the Great Lakes region between 1850 and 1914. Drawing connections between immigrant groups in Buffalo, New York, and Berlin (now Kitchener), Ontario, Barbara Lorenzkowski examines the interactions of language and music—specifically …

Magie Dominic’s first memoir, The Queen of Peace Room, was shortlisted for the Canadian Women’s Studies Award, ForeWord magazine’s Book of the Year Award, and the Judy Grahn Award. Told over an eight-day period, the book captured a lifetime of turbulent memories, documenting with skill Dominic’s experiences of violence, incest, and rape. Bu …

In Desire for Development: Whiteness, Gender, and the Helping Imperative, Barbara Heron draws on poststructuralist notions of subjectivity, critical race and space theory, feminism, colonial and postcolonial studies, and travel writing to trace colonial continuities in the post-development recollections of white Canadian women who have worked in Af …

This volume features thirty-five of Don McKay’s best poems, which are selected with a contextualizing introduction by Méira Cook that probes wilderness and representation in McKay, and the canny, quirky, thoughtful, and sometimes comic self-consciousness the poems adumbrate. Included is McKay’s afterword written especially for this volume in w …

Butt out, Dante. Move over, Milton. Piss off, Pound. Outta the way, Olson. Here comes Cosmographia—a post-Lucretian faux micro-epic, the latest ground breaking incursion into the ever popular spectacle of the Epic Poem. Tracking the classic epic journey through the unfolding cosmos toward home, though occasionally disoriented by milling cows with …

Governance of the federation is more complex today than ever before: perennial issues of federalism remain unresolved, conflicts continue over the legitimacy of federal spending power, and the accommodation of Quebec nationalism and Aboriginal self-government within the federation is a persistent and precarious concern. From discussions on democrac …

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 …

What does it mean to be an Indigenous man today? Between October 2010 and May 2013, Sam McKegney conducted interviews with leading Indigenous artists, critics, activists, and elders on the subject of Indigenous manhood. In offices, kitchens, and coffee shops, and once in a car driving down the 401, McKegney and his participants tackled crucial ques …