Strange Bedfellows
Through the filter of the human condition, Strange Bedfellows – a new anthology from Thistledown Press – examines relationships at every stage, in stories and essays filled with humour, grace, and occasionally complete irreverence. The difficulties common to romantic relationships are brought to the forefront in this collection about courtship, …
The Critic
An actress visits a bishop she knew in her college years and gives him the kiss he didn't have the nerve to ask for fifty years ago; a retired diplomat encounters a female colleague he served with years ago in Cambodia and learns an unsuspected secret; an aspiring skater is taken up by a former Canadian champion and has to decide what price he is p …
A Run on Hose
Rona Altrows’ short stories go to the core of what it is to be human — to cherish a departed mate beyond reason, to love a child to distraction, to keep the faith with a friend no matter what, to laugh in the face of self-doubt. This collection delivers a humorous yet poignant series of tales told from the perspectives of women.
The Fate of Bonté III
Bonté III was five years old. A cow at that age is at her prime. Prime is an accounting term. A dairy farm is a business and must be managed as such. From this perspective, Bonté III’s days were numbered. Numbered is not an empty word. She had been a good representative of her breed. A cow, after all, has no need to try to be a cow. Her life is …
In Ballast to the White Sea
In Ballast to the White Sea is Malcolm Lowry’s most ambitious work of the mid-1930s. Inspired by his life experience, the novel recounts the story of a Cambridge undergraduate who aspires to be a writer but has come to believe that both his book and, in a sense, his life have already been “written.” After a fire broke out in Lowry’s squatte …
What Can't Be Undone
In her first collection of short fiction, dee Hobsbawn-Smith creates protagonists struggling to navigate the troubles common to life everywhere, including children attempting to make their parents proud, the collapse of romantic relationships, and dealing with death and loss. Her stories are rife with the disasters of homelessness, domestic violenc …
Brunch with the Jackals
A man seeking the high life realizes too late that he has destroyed his possibilities for happiness. Four junkies wait anxiously for a drug dealer who seems to have forgotten their existence. A gang leader attempts to navigate racism, greed, and mutiny within the ranks. An aspiring writer assesses and obsesses over a crime close to home as a young …
These Good Hands
Set in the early autumn of 1943, the These Good Hands interweaves the biography of French sculptor Camille Claudel and the story of the nurse who cares for her during the final days of her thirty-year incarceration in France's Montdevergues Asylum. Biographers have suggested that Claudel survived her long internment by writing letters, few of which …
The Breakwater Book of Contemporary Newfoundland Short Fiction
Following an unprecedented explosion of literary talent in Newfoundland over the past twenty years, The Breakwater Book of Contemporary Newfoundland Short Fiction assembles the very best work by the island’s most accomplished fiction writers. Featuring selections by Michael Crummey, Jessica Grant, Lisa Moore, and Michael Winter, among others, thi …
The Children of Mary
As teenagers in the ’70s, Sonya and Kat are trying desperately to be hip in the Ukrainian ghetto of North End Winnipeg. They experiment with everything from religion to marijuana, against a backbeat of Abba songs, Olivia Newton ballads, and endless reciting of the rosary. After her sister dies under mysterious circumstances, Sonya spends the next …
Bindy's Moon
In a series of reflections focused on his hard-working Mennonite family and touching on childhood exploits from shoplifting and go-kart racing to the fear of dying (which arises during the rehearsal for a school Christmas concert), Lloyd Ratzlaff takes readers on a journey from youth to philosophical maturity. Combining elegy and joyful nostalgia i …
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 …
Ledger of the Open Hand
Ledger of the Open Hand looks at the intimate power of money and emotional debt through the eyes of a woman trying to grab hold of her own life. Beholden to a shrewd friend and burdened by family obligations and guilt, Meriel-Claire (MC) finally stumbles into what she’s been missing. She falls in love and finds her calling as a debt counsellor in …
Better the Devil You Know
Set in Vancouver in 1907, Better the Devil You Know is the outrageous tale of three unique and curious characters: the small-time con man who passes himself off as an evangelical preacher, the scrawny street-worker whom he reluctantly befriends, and the five-year-old hellion left in his care by a former lady friend. In the course of their adventure …
Mostly Happy
Bean E. Fallwell's story in Mostly Happy begins with an inventory of items, shiny bits of beauty that she has collected and tucked into a red Samsonite Saturn suitcase. This suitcase, a dominant metaphor in the novel, becomes Bean's touchstone that keeps her from spiralling into the dark worlds of her beautiful, screwed up mother and all the stray …
Spaz
Best of 2010 Pick, Uptown Magazine
Meet Walter Finch, an ungainly kid who survives his cloying suburban childhood to make it only as far as the local mall, where he rises through the ranks to become manager of a shoe store. Unlike his other childhood friends who either flee suburbia or remain as resigned fixtures, Walter is content with his lot and …
The Dreamlife of Bridges
The Dreamlife of Bridges is the debut novel from Vancouver writer Robert Strandquist. Leo is a middle-aged, divorced handyman capable of mending almost anything outside of himself. The denial of his son’s death, and his inability to deal with his own pain, has rendered his life fractured and untenable. June is a single mom struggling in the bottl …
The Beautiful Dead End
Finalist, Books in Canada/Amazon.ca First Novel Award
The Beautiful Dead End is a visceral crime thriller that takes the reader on an existential journey to the “other side” and almost back again. In a bizarre, shadowy interzone populated by disturbing characters, our anti-hero confronts the dark secrets of his past, and comes face to face with …
Some Girls Do
In prose that’s as sharp as broken glass and shot through with poetry, Teresa McWhirter unlocks the extraordinary subculture of urban adults in their twenties and early thirties. Most startling of all are the portraits of young women—tough, independent party girls who are strong enough to say “no” to love and smart enough to know why.
Praise …
Salvage King, Ya!
Finalist, ReLit Award
Amazon.ca's 50 Essential Canadian Books selection
First published in 1997 to much critical acclaim, Salvage King, Ya! is a novel firmly rooted in Canada’s favourite national pastime—hockey. Critics have called Salvage King, Ya! “the great Canadian novel,” and a “postmodern Canadian classic.” Drinkwater, Jarman’s n …
Budge
From the author of Dead Man in the Orchestra Pit and Foozlers comes another tale of madcap human folly.
Louella Debra Poule is doing an eighteen-month stint on a weapons charge at a minimum-security institution up the Fraser Valley. Her drug-dealing, sometime-boyfriend Jimmy Flood and his sidekick, Blacky Harbottle, should have taken the rap, but th …
Kaspoit!
Kaspoit! puts speculative illustration to the most profuse series of crimes ever to take place on Canadian soil. Set in the lower mainland of Vancouver, the time is now—criminals are brazen, cops are cynical—and no one is trying to solve the disappearance of dozens of women. Throughout, the novel conveys a savage, dystopian depiction of a nethe …
The Sky Manifest
A dark and riveting journey of one man in a broken world
With nothing left to lose, Nathan Soderquist is moving west; his wife is dead, his infant daughter too, all because of a kiss and a snowstorm and his failure to prevent distant consequences. In his desperate isolation, he commits acts of violence, cowardice, nobility, and bravery as he passes …
Ravenna Gets
Winner, 2011 ReLit Award
From the author of Pontypool Changes Everything, Ravenna Gets is a new collection of “wheeled” stories that continue the author’s exploration of “apocalypse “ction.”
In a single convulsion of homicide, the population of Ravenna tries to erase the population of Collingwood. The innocent, standing in their living ro …
White Lung
Finalist, City of Vancouver Book Prize
A blackly comic new novel from Vancouver author Grant Buday, based on his eight glorious years working in a mass production bakery. Dickensian in magnitude, White Lung is a sardonic portrait of B.C.’s racial conflicts and chaotic economy.
Praise for White Lung:
"a rollicking black comedy of errors with a host o …
Five Little Bitches
Five Little Bitches chronicles the rise and fall of the all-woman band, Wet Leather. Each of the women is plagued by her own unique demons, but their devotion to music and the punk lifestyle keeps them pushing on. As the band progresses, they tour Canadian, American and European towns and cities—and all the alleys, gutters, back stages, vans, hot …
Skin
Winner, 3-Day Novel-Writing Contest (1999)
Winner, Inaugural ReLit Award (2001)
Salacious, funny, and painfully emotive, Skin is a provocative and ruminative parable about our deep-rooted urge to ostracize the freakish and shun the disfigured among us. An unconventional love story, Bowman probes the surface to reveal deeper, more lingering impulses c …
The Skeleton Dance
The Skeleton Dance takes place on the mean, formerly clean streets of Toronto before the century ticked over into the new millennium. This graphic novel artfully depicts the human casualties and debris piled up around the downtown bank towers. Wiped out in the rush of the thousand-eyed crowd hurrying to beehive office cubicles, and unhinged by the …
Lucia's Masks
Wendy MacIntyre creates a fictional dystopian world so dark that her characters’ chances of survival look next to impossible. When art-lover Lucia finds her most precious possession destroyed, she resolves finally to abandon The City. Along the way she gathers companions, including: the Outpacer, a former hedonist and philanderer now hiding his i …
Going to New Orleans
Longlisted for the ReLit Award (2006)
Going to New Orleans is the story of Lewis King, a jazz trumpet player who lands a gig in the Big Easy. King is a genius on cornet, but his private life is emotionally, morally, and financially bankrupt. He’s a heavy drinker and compulsive sexual manipulator, prone to paranoid fits of violent rage. His girlfri …
The Newcomers
Lily Poritz Miller brings us this story of family, love and displacement with the same vivid, haunting prose and skilled storytelling as In a Pale Blue Light, her critically-acclaimed debut novel.
Recently-widowed Sara Hoffman is filled with dreams of a new beginning. She is bringing her children from South Africa to join her brother, Meyer, in a sm …
The Cage
“First published in 1975, The Cage was a graphic novel before the form had a name. Considered an early masterpiece of the medium, the Canadian cult comic has been out of print for decades. The new edition includes an introduction and appreciation by Canadian comics master and Lemony Snicket collaborator Seth (Palookaville; It’s a Good Life, If …
Tacones
Tacones is a hangout for a subculture of outlaws and rejects-crackhead murderers, transvestite prostitutes, biastogerontophiles, hustler boys, and addicts-all painfully beyond denial, searching for connection, solace, humour, thrills, sex, and the perfect high. A rollicking and caustic romp through the violent and ambivalent world of the Toronto af …
Spat the Dummy
Spat Ryan has demons. They haunt him by day and share his drink at night. Raised in Montreal by a bagman for the Irish mob, Spat has fictionalized or ignored chunks of his life too painful to recall. A chance meeting with an old friend of his father’s in a bar on the Main exposes the dark secret they’ve both been harbouring, the secret that has …
Whitetail Shooting Gallery
Finalist, ReLit Award
Finalist, McNally Robinson Book of the Year (Manitoba Book Awards)
Finalist, Bisexual Book Award (USA)
Whitetail Shooting Gallery, a new novel from award-winning author and Giller Prize nominee, Annette Lapointe, is set in the outer urban, often desolate, landscape of the Saskatchewan prairie.
Cousins Jennifer and Jason live clo …
Toy Gun
Toy Gun continues the exploration of character and fate on the streets of Vancouver that began with the novel Stupid Crimes (1992) and continued in Krekshuns (1995). Written in the style of the “hard-boiled” detective thriller, Toy Gun is very much a literary treatment of contemporary life in one of the world’s most densely populated urban ce …
Dirtbags
Longlisted for the ReLit Award
Editor's Pick, Vancouver Sun
Dirtbags is a novel about reckoning—with one's past, one's choices, and one's expectations for the future. Spider is a scrappy kid growing up in rural B.C., and when a tragic event causes her world to implode she heads to Vancouver for solace, distraction, and experience.
We witness a shift …
The Dove in Bathurst Station
Marta Elzinga has been searching for a sign. When she spots an elusive mink on the shoreline of the Toronto Island Airport, she thinks it is her sign. The pigeon that boards the subway at Bathurst Station is the second sign. But how to read these dispatches?
Plagued with indecision and prone to magical thinking, Marta needs direction. A floundering …
The Federov Legacy
Surgei Galipova, a Russian immigrant and a rancher in the Cariboo region of British Columbia, owes his life to the Countess Catherine Stanislavovna Federov. When the Countess asks Surgei to send his eighteen-year-old daughter, Alice, to help her in a private hospital she is establishing in St. Petersburg, Alice adamantly refuses. But when her fathe …
Pilgrimage
Pilgrimage opens in the deep winter of 1891 on the Métis and missionary settlement of Lac St. Anne, Canada. A young woman of mixed-blood named Mahkesîs is carrying the child of the married Englishman who manages the Hudson Bay Company trading post. She is forced to reveal her devastating secret to her Cree grandmother. As an unmarried Catholic gi …
Resurrection of Joseph Bourne
In this new edition of Jack Hodgins’ Governor General–winning novel (for 1979), the reader is taken into the everyday eccentricities of life in Port Annie on the west coast of Vancouver Island, a town that keeps slipping into the ocean and whose people have long been in a continuous slumber. Everything changes, however, when a beautiful sea nym …
Swarm
In a not-so-far-off future of diminished energy reserves and collapsing economies, thirty-seven-year-old Sandy Burch-Bailey lives a difficult existence. She survives by fishing, farming, and beekeeping in a small island community with her partner, Marvin, and their elderly and ill friend, Thompson. As they wait for an overdue supply ship to arrive …
Swinging the Maelstrom
Swinging the Maelstrom is the story of a musician enduring existence in the Bellevue psychiatric hospital in New York. Written during his happiest and most fruitful years, this novella reveals the deep healing influence that the idyllic retreat at Dollarton had on Lowry. This long-overdue scholarly edition will allow scholars to engage in a geneti …
The Strangers' Gallery
St. John’s archivist Michael Lowe’s life is turned on its head when a Dutch colleague, Anton Aalders, arrives on his doorstep in 1995. Anton is searching for a father he never met, ostensibly a Newfoundland soldier part of the Allied force that liberated the Netherlands at the end of World War II. Anton’s visit stretches from a few days to a …
Tracks
Tracks is a compilation of personal travel essays that range across three continents: from Italy, where Genni Gunn was born and spent her early years, to Canada and Mexico, and through Asia, where she has travelled many times, both reconnecting with her sister and witnessing the emergence of new political realities in Myanmar. While these are journ …
Hat Girl
Pertice McIlveen, a young Ontario woman who loves Hemingway and hates hats, receives a mysterious key in the mail. Accompanied by her best friend Es, she travels to Gannet Island off the coast of New Brunswick to find the door it fits into. There she discovers a charming cottage by the sea has been willed to her by a secret benefactor identified on …
Foozlers
Longlisted for the ReLit Award (2005)
Foozlers is a 24-hour “Odyssey” that runs a juggernaut through the high- and lowlands of Vancouver. Jerry Lowe is the reluctant driver of a getaway car for two sketchy junkies on the make. A pair of cops spend a shift wobbling on the cusp of total breakdown. The groom-to-be in an Indian arranged marriage see …
Following the Summer
In the stifling heat of summer in a northern Canadian mining town, Marie, a young teacher, is fascinated by her new friend Corrine, a waitress who is determined to squeeze every drop of experience and sensation from life.
As summer ends, Marie marries an immigrant from Eastern Europe. She has chosen Ervant because she senses -- or hopes -- that desp …
Icefields
On an expedition in the Canadian Rockies at the end of the nineteenth century, Dr Edward Byrne slips and falls almost 60 feet into a crevasse on the Arcturus Glacier. While trapped, hanging upside down and wary that the slightest movement could send him plunging deeper into the abyss, Byrne notices a mysterious winged figure embedded in the ice wal …
Mantis Dreams
Mantis Dreams: The Journal of Dr. Dexter Ripley is a crackling, searing satire that ridicules both political correctness and the restrictive world of academia. But Adam Pottle’s first novel is also a poignant and difficult glance into the world of a man battling a rare and debilitating disease. A wheelchair user living voluntarily in a care home, …