In North East, Wendy McGrath expands on the story she began with Santa Rosa, as a working class couple living in 1960s Edmonton drift further apart while their young daughter tries to understand subtle shifts she senses taking place under the surface of her family and her neighbourhood. A visit to her grandparents’ farm in the country reveals the …

What is real when seen through the eyes of a child? When does the harshness of reality transform idyllic memories? The young narrator of Santa Rosa seeks the answers to these questions as she tries to make sense of the disintegration of her parents' marriage—a process echoed by the slow disintegration of their neighbourhood. In subtle poetic pros …

In 2005, Maurice Mierau and his wife, Betsy, travelled to Ukraine to adopt two small boys, age three and five. After weeks of delays while navigating a tangled bureaucracy, they returned to Canada as a proud new family of four. Now what? Does fatherhood begin the moment that the adoption papers are signed? Is family something that is created in an …

A prostitute takes shelter with a group of young anarchists. A sister goes missing, mailing a trail of encoded postcards from destinations across the globe. The daughters of a Montreal bagel-shop owner navigate the tricky terrain of being young, Sikh, and female, one growing larger while the other fades. A woman watches with lust and longing as the …

While The Sun Is Above Us takes readers deep into the extraordinary world of Sudan through the intertwined narratives of two women. In the midst of a bloody civil war, Adut is brutally captured and held as a slave for eight years. Sandra, fleeing her life in Canada, travels to South Sudan as an aid worker but soon finds herself unwittingly embroile …

Claudia, single mom of two, pines for her past independent life. Her ex, after all, has moved on to a new wardrobe, new hobbies and—worst of all—new adult friends. But in Claudia's house she's still finding bananas in the sock drawer, cigarettes taped to wrestling figures, and colourful doodles on her MasterCard bills. Then Claudia receives the …

After retiring from the heady world of academia, Sidonie von Täler has returned to the small Okanagan Valley town she escaped in her youth for the lights of the big city. The family orchard has since gone to seed, and ever decades later Sidonie still finds herself living in the shadow of her deceased older sister Alice.

As she gets down to work sif …

“Some days I wish something truly bad would happen so that I would have something genuine to worry about.”

When his parents’ car is hit by a train, Luke, a failed actor, returns to his Edmonton hometown to attend their funeral, wrap up their affairs, and prepare their house to be sold off. But while all others around him grieve, Luke remains d …

"Roadkill stuffed and presented as art, an OB/GYN appointment gone horribly wrong, and government spies with a weakness for salmon bagels and Timmy Ho’s. Tender, satirical, and occasionally absurd, Barb Howard’s new story collection Western Taxidermy is a perfect introduction to one of Western Canada’s most high-spirited literary voices.

In th …

From the multi-talented author of Inventory and Open Pit comes a new collection of short stories, filled with lost souls drifting through exotic locales, reinventing themselves on the fly.

Marguerite Pigeon’s gifts for quick characterization and muscular dialogue are on full display in this collection, where you will encounter competitors in an en …

“Three weeks it’s been raining, but no puddles…”

Author Sara Pierce is slowly drowning in Windsor, a city where water will seemingly not stay put long enough to form puddles. While living with her germophobic best friend Angie and dealing with her online gaming-addicted boyfriend Dan, Sara finds herself obsessively writing and rewriting her …

At the height of the Great Depression, two Prairie children struggle with poverty and uncertainty. Surrounded by religion, law, and her authoritarian father, Cora Wagoner daydreams about what it would be like to abandon society altogether and join one of the Indian tribes she’s read so much about.

Saddened by struggles with Indian Agent restricti …

After a severe winter storm and extended power failure, thousands become trapped in their homes during one of the coldest weeks of the year. For one small group of people, thrown together by catastrophe, a state of anxiety and claustrophobia follows as they discover no precautions have been made for a disaster of this magnitude. When the darkness a …

p>You wake up, and your sister is dead.

With an absent father and their mother constantly ill, sisters Darcy and Carly Nolan were forced to rely on each other growing up. While unpredictable Carly bounced around, her life’s direction uncertain, Darcy fell in love, went to University, and moved to another province. When nineteen-year-old Carly unex …

“I know why Mr. Giacomo wants Rose’s baby and why he can’t have him. And I want to make sure none of this is forgotten.”

Robert Pepper-Smith’s graceful new novel, House of Spells, follows the friendship between teenagers Rose and Lacey and their search for self-confidence, acceptance, and love in a small village in southeastern British Col …

Cole Blackwater’s life isn’t what it used to be. Once a political superstar within Ottawa’s environmental movement, he now runs a nearly defunct conservation strategy consulting firm that distinctly lacks a paying client. His ex-wife loathes him for a scandalous affair that ended their marriage, he feels he’s failing his eight-year-old daug …

Anna Gareau has a secret. Unwanted visions of strangers' lives haunt her when she touches certain objects. What she wants most is a normal life but Anna is far from normal. Travelling through Victoria, BC, Anna gets an unwelcome glimpse into a murderer's mind. She meets Colette Kostyna and senses Colette may be the next victim. Caught between her d …

Rebee Shore’s life is fragmented. She’s forever on the move, ricocheting around Alberta, guided less than capably by her dysfunctional mother Elizabeth.

The Shore Girl follows Rebee from her toddler to her teen years as she grapples with her mother’s fears and addictions, and her own desire for a normal life. Through a series of narrators—fa …

Carmen and Griffin, young and white, are goofy, head-over-heels in love. When Carmen turns into a black woman, Griffin thrills at a love turned exotic. But Carmen's transformation means trouble for Griffin's racist mother, already struggling with a new lover and a husband nicknamed God. The question is, can love be relied on to save the day? Moon H …

These are short stories about people who harbour relics from their past: a postcard from Vienna, the cigarette burns that scar a boy's chest, a stolen USB pen, blue concentration camp numbers tattooed on a forearm, a man's sense of his own body as HIV overtakes him. Alice Zorn's remarkable debut collection displays these talismans of personal histo …

Emma Phillips is a 35-year-old divorcée with an undemanding job, a rustic old house, and a friend who provides all the benefits she needs. She’s comfortable, complacent, and accustomed to getting her own way—until she is shipwrecked during a violent storm in the Queen Charlotte Strait off Vancouver Island and is forced to assume temporary guar …

Winner of the 2010 Alberta Readers' Choice Award!
Winner of the George Bugnet Award for Fiction at the 2010 Alberta Literary Awards!

My name’s Bacon Sobelowski, and I’m trying to find my someone. Kenny Rogers sings a song that says there’s someone for everyone, and in Bellevue where I live, Kenny Rogers’ word is gold. It’s just too bad my …

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 …

Digger, an 85-kilo wrestler, and Sadie, a 26-year-old speed swimmer, stand on the verge of realizing every athlete’s dream – winning a gold medal at the Olympics. Both athletes are nearing the end of their careers, and are forced to confront the question: what happens to athletes when their bodies are too worn to compete? The blossoming relatio …

Shortlisted for the 2009 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book!
Shortlisted for the 2009 Relit Award!

Cleavage tracks the patchwork musings of Leah, who, at twenty-four years old and two years into a relationship, discovers she has breast cancer. Told in fragments reminiscent of A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews, Cleavage details Le …

Joelle is about to lose her husband Marc, who has become obsessed with Ketia, a young Haitian woman. Ketia lies to her family to conceal her liaison with Marc. Joelle’s friend Diane does not realize that her boyfriend Nazim has never told his Muslim family in Morocco about her. Then Nazim gets a letter that threatens his secret.

Alice Zorn leads r …

Adele Wiseman was a seminal figure in Canadian letters. Always independent and wilful, she charted her own literary career, based on her unfailing belief in her artistic vision. In The Force of Vocation, the first book on Wiseman's writing life, Ruth Panofsky presents Wiseman as a writer who doggedly and ambitiously perfected her craft, sought a wi …

Winner of the 2013 Leacock Memorial Medal for Canadian Humour Writing!
Long Listed for Canada Reads 2018!
Nominated for the First Book Award at the 2013 Saskatchewan Book Awards!
Twenty-seven-year-old Frieda Zweig is at an impasse. Behind her is a string of failed relationships and half-forgotten ambitions of being a painter; in front of her lies t …

Shortlisted for the 2016 O’Reilly Insurance and the Co-Operators First Book Award!

As a long, hot Saskatchewan summer dawns, Darby Swank’s life is forever changed when she finds her beloved aunt floating dead in a lake. All at once, her blinders are lifted and she sees the country lifestyle she’s always known in a whole new way, with hidden pa …

The Peak: a university student newspaper with a hard-hitting mix of inflammatory editorials, hastily thrown-together comics and reviews, and a news section run the only way self-taught journalists know how—sloppily. Alex and Tracy are two of The Peak's editors, staring down graduation and struggling to keep the paper relevant to an increasingly i …

Enrique Tomás lives a quiet life with a large, loving family in an unnamed South American country. But Enrique has secrets. When his second eldest son, Hector, and Hector’s beloved friend Nadia uncover one of Enrique’s secrets, the course of Hector's life is irrevocably altered. Exiled by his parents to the isolated countryside, Hector is accu …

Everyone deals with grief in their own personal way. Take Carrie, for example. Getting over her mother’s death from ovarian cancer takes the form of ramping up passive-aggressive office warfare, continuing her campaign to show her ex-husband she’s over him (further increasing the distance between herself and her teenage daughter, natch), riddin …

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Edith Stoker’s father is building a wall in their backyard. A very, very high wall—a brick bulwark in his obsessive war against their hated neighbour Edward Black.

It is 1969, and far away, preparations are being made for man to walk upon the moon. Meanwhile, in the Stokers’ shabby home in the East Midlands, Edith remains a virtual prisoner, …

“No one should ever work at a gas station long enough to get good at it,” observes Brendan, the narrator of the debut novel from Sean Trinder.

Brendan is 20. He’s been pumping gas for three years, working the evening shift at the CountryGas station in a small town outside of Winnipeg. He’s gotten good at it. Which is sad. And Brendan knows t …

A treasure chest of exceptional stories by one of Canadas classic authorsall now available in one volume.

Ernest Buckler, best known as the author of the Canadian classic, The Mountain and the Valley, never achieved the lasting fame he deserved. His first story was published in Esquire, a significant American literary magazine known for publishing …

A passionate believer in the power of art—and especially poetry—to influence and critique contemporary culture, Louis Dudek devoted much of his life to shaping the Canadian literary scene through his meditative and experimental poems as well as his work in publishing and teaching. All These Roads: The Poetry of Louis Dudek brings together thirt …

Marian Engel emerged as a writer during that period in Canada when nationalism increased and “new feminism” dawned. Although she is recognized as a distinguished woman of letters, she has not been widely studied; consequently we know relatively little about her and her craft. The material collected in Marian Engel’s Notebooks: “Ah, mon cahi …

Dennis Cooley, one of Canada’s most prominent poets, says writing becomes political when you play with certain kinds of voices. His poetry has been influenced and inspired by the prairies and other Canadian poets, but he insists on disturbing the formal poetic inheritance he esteems. His engagement with a variety of speaking voices asks that read …

Blues singer, preacher, cultural critic, exile, Africadian, high modernist, spoken word artist, Canadian poet—these are but some of the voices of George Elliott Clarke. In a selection of Clarke’s best work from his early poetry to his most recent, Blues and Bliss: The Poetry of George Elliott Clarke offers readers an impressive cross-section of …

Lorna Crozier’s radical imagination, and the finely tuned emotional intelligence that is revealed in the clarity of her poetry, have made her one of Canada’s most popular poets. Before the First Word: The Poetry of Lorna Crozier is a collection of thirty-five of her best poems, selected and introduced by Catherine Hunter, and includes an afterw …

The career of Eli Mandel (1922–1992) was one of the most prolific and distinguished in all of Canadian literature, yet in recent years his work has gone unsung compared with that of such peers as Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen, Robert Kroetsch, Irving Layton, and P.K. Page. Though he was a critic, anthologist, and editor of national prominence, M …

A four-time Governor General’s-award nominee for both poetry and non-fiction, Christopher Dewdney is celebrated internationally as a writer and a visionary and is best known for his particular imagining of place and memory. Beginning with Paleozoic fossil formations in southwestern Ontario and moving through eons of natural history to cityscapes …

The Crisp Day Closing on My Hand: The Poetry of M. Travis Lane is a collection of thirty-five of her best poems, selected with an introduction by Jeanette Lynes. An environmentalist, feminist, and peace activist, M. Travis Lane is known for witty and meticulously crafted poems that explore the elusive nature of “home” in both historical and pre …

Verse and Worse: Selected and New Poems of Steve McCaffery 1989–2009 presents texts from the last two decades of work by Steve McCaffery, one of the most influential and innovative of contemporary poets. The volume focuses on selections from McCaffery’s major texts, including The Black Debt, Theory of Sediment, The Cheat of Words, and Slightly …

Winner of the Quebec Writers' Federation Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and shortlisted for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize

In the Carnival city there are two types of taxi drivers -- the spiders and the flies. The spiders patiently sit in their cars and wait for the calls to come. But the flies are wanderers - they roam the streets, looki …

Here is the best of Bill Gaston's stories since the publication of his Giller Prize nominated collection, Mount Appetite (2002). In this extraordinary work, Gaston crafts his fiction around the idea of the gargoyle -- the concrete representation of extremes of human emotions.

In Gaston's marvellous, riotous, Rabelaisian world, Gargoyles are physical …

A New York Times Book Review choice as one of the 10 Best Illustrated Children's Books of 2008.

Skim is Kimberly Keiko Cameron, a not-slim, would-be Wiccan goth stuck in a private girls' school in Toronto. When a classmate's boyfriend kills himself because he was rumoured to be gay, the school goes into mourning overdrive, each clique trying to find …

Winner, CODE’s 2016 Burt Award for First Nation, Inuit and Métis Literature

In this important graphic novel, two brothers surrounded by poverty, drug abuse, and gang violence, try to overcome centuries of historic trauma in very different ways to bring about positive change in their lives.

Pete, a young Indigenous man wrapped up in gang violence, …

Winner of the Helen and Stan Vine Jewish Book Award and finalist for the Man Booker Prize

In Far to Go, one of our most accomplished young writers takes us inside the world of an affluent Jewish family in Prague during the lead-up to Hitler's invasion of Czechoslovakia.

In 1939, Pavel and Anneliese Bauer are secular Jews whose lives are turned upside …

Winner of the Quebec Writers' Federation Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction

Beena and Sadhana are sisters who share a bond that could only have been shaped by the most unusual of childhoods — and by shared tragedy. Orphaned as teenagers, they have grown up under the exasperated watch of their Sikh uncle, who runs a bagel shop in Montreal' …