At thirteen, bookish Veronica Reid lives in a world inside her head, even if she isn’t entirely successful at resisting the intrusions of the world outside. It’s bad enough that she has to wear awful new glasses; it’s downright disastrous that she’ll have to spend the summer at Laughing Willows Trailer Park with her obnoxious younger brothe …

The poet Li Bai has journeyed across the world and perhaps across centuries. When he comes across a bag of money in a downtown parking lot, we also meet the delinquent who lost the bag of money in the first place. The assemblage in Jack Hannan’s first novel are driven by wordsmithery, trickery, and flights of such fancy—for an instant, the sign …

The landlord, the husband, the wife, and the lover. Giulio di Orio, an assistant lecturer in Philosophy, brings one of his students, known as Torp—short for Torpedo—to the Vancouver flat he shares with his wife Nicole. Soon their landlord is convinced that Torp is the devil incarnate, and the police have arrested him for the street bombings tha …

Mordecai Richler meets Jane Austen in The Book of Faith. Faith, Rhoda, and Erica, affectionately known the Three Graces, are members of a liberal Jewish congregation in contemporary Montreal. Rabbi Nate wants a grand new synagogue; Marty, the congregation's treasurer, harbours a raunchy secret; and Melly is a hard-nosed Holocaust survivor with an a …

Counterterrorism and Identities presents a detailed analysis of Canadian public opinion on questions of national security, terrorism, and counterterrorism. Where we live, our religious identification, our age, gender, and values all have an impact on our views on these issues, as do events such as 9/11 and more recent terrorist incidents in Canada …

A Guatemalan journalist is kidnapped, and the only message from her kidnappers is the murder of her lawyer. In a race against time, Luc Vanier sets about reconstructing her life, through the sordid world of human trafficking, the secretive underbelly of a multinational mining corporation, and the hiding places of desperate refugees. When Vanier is …

The second novel by award-winning novelist Jennifer Quist is a black comedy of birth, death, love, marriage, mothers-in-law—and five sassy sisters. When Suzanne’s role as the perfect daughter-in-law ends in a deadly accident, she panics, makes a monumentally bad decision, and upends her world. The bond with her sisters is the strongest force Su …

Canada Lives Here tells the tumultuous story of public broadcasting in Canada, from its inception in 1933 to the CBC’s current, controversial attempts to adapt to collapsing revenues and new technologies. It explores in detail the struggle to preserve public space and foster community in an environment devoted to profit-making, arguing that the i …

The Sicilian Wife is both a literary novel and a mystery. Fulvia, the Mafia Princess, must be a dutiful daughter or the family will be dishonoured. Though she eventually escapes and makes a new life in Canada, she is betrayed and then her husband is murdered on the Sicilian coast. The police Chief investigating the case is Marisa, who faces a stati …

Burlington VT private investigator Hack Loomis meets up with a UFO group run by a charismatic psychiatrist who treats people who believe they’ve been abducted by aliens and his partner, a disarmingly beautiful woman who claims to be in contact with an alien mother ship. As Loomis’s investigation takes him and Connie to the edge of the lunatic f …

When an early-morning phone call from a former childhood friend threatens to derail the political fortunes of a popular PM, his director of communications must dig deep into the past to salvage the present. Part political and literary coming-of-age story, part lyrical meditation on friendship, family, and mortality, Sons and Fathers traces the fort …

A Migrant Heart is about departures and arrivals, uprooting and attachment, resettling and returning. Denis Sampson left Ireland as a student, leaving behind the farming countryside of his childhood, the city of Dublin where he was educated, and the history and culture of his native country. He arrived in the cosmopolitan city of Montreal and disco …

Adam is happily married when he has a stroke at the age of fifty, and his behaviour changes to that of a ten-year-old. What are his secrets? Are there any he should be sharing? His wife would like to know. A Second Chance reveals its secrets slowly. We can see how changed Adam is, but we also sense that we don’t know the whole story. The wife is …

The distinguished Arabic scholar, author, and translator Issa J. Boullata grew up in a Palestinian family in the Jerusalem of the 1930s and 1940s, when Palestine was under the British Mandate. His memoir, The Bells of Memory, is delightful in its reflections on an idyllic youth and detailed in its recollections of family members, classmates and tea …

The mere mention of the prostate gland is enough to make men cringe. Long a taboo subject, the walnut-sized man gland can cause mental anguish, emotional aggravation, bitterness, and anger. The prostate often affects everything from sexual performance to male ego-strength. When it is working well, the man’s world is good, but when it is affected …

Inspector Luc Vanier is back, and Montreal's Hochelaga district is in the throes of gentrification. Its drug dealers and prostitutes are disappearing, and Vanier, investigating the brutal death of one, suspects the neighbourhood cleanup may involve murdering the unwanted. The local Police Commander sees only declining crime rates and his improving …

Inspector Luc Vanier is drinking his way through Christmas Eve when he is called out to investigage the murder of five homeless people. His investigation takes hin into the backrooms of the Catholic Church, the boardrooms of Montreal’s business elite and the soup kitchens and back alleys of street life in winter.

In spite of its disturbing implications, the impact of climate change on our physical environment can be difficult for us to understand or imagine. Moving from a memoir of a journey through an abundant yet fragile natural world to the daunting scientific evidence that climate change will lead to the degradation of nature and upheaval within society …

A quintessential Calabrian love story.

The Girls of Piazza d’Amore traces the lives of three village girls and the forces that lead them to leave home for a new life across the ocean. Set in southern Italy in the 1950s, Connie Guzzo-McParland’s short novel walks us through the piazza and the narrow alleys of her own childhood, imaginatively recr …

A breathtaking literary debut, Love Letters of the Angels of Death begins as a young couple discover the remains of his mother in her mobile home. The rest of the family fall back, leaving them to reckon with the messy, unexpected death. By the time the burial is over, they understand this will always be their role: to liaise with death on behalf o …

Asked to name the institutions that best define this country, most Canadians place our pubic broadcaster somewhere high on the list. But there is a very real danger that the CBC will not survive beyond the next two years in any recognizable form. Decades of budget cuts have left it dangerously weakened, and now a massive loss of television advertis …

The novel follows world-weary Detective Inspector Luc Vanier as he hunts down a disturbed killer of homeless people. Vanier confronts his own demons while his investigation draws him into the heart of the Catholic Church in Quebec, the boardrooms of Montreal’s business elite, and the back-alleys and soup kitchens of the dispossessed. With a cast …

The roots of this book are real and full of characters and heroic stories of the sort one might expect from migration tales, , evoking border crossings past and present.
In Abou Farman's hands the stories turn into a larger meditation on movement, conveyed with humour and a subtle irony. Clerks of the Passage takes us on a journey in the company of …

The book you hold in your hand – or the e-book that you have just downloaded – is short and concise. Are We On Yet? is an insider’s look at what the interviewer – any interviewer – REALLY wants. And it comes with the author’s personal money-back guarantee –detailed in Chapter 20.

Was it good for you? It was really good for Aislin! Montreal’s infrastructure is crumbling at a faster rate than any city in North America – and there lurks Aislin amongst the thousands of orange construction cones, sketchbook in hand. Nationalism in Quebec would appear to be going through death throes while Aislin watches, just as he has since …

The idea for this collection came from a conversation I had with the great Russian cartoonist Oleg Dergachov, who now lives in Montreal. Oleg told me of a Moscow cartoonist who, on his deathbed, asked that onea of his favourite cartoons be engraved on his headstone rather than the usual text. Apparently a group of colleagues now gather annually and …

In 2007, a Canadian soldier stationed in Kandahar sent a letter to Maclean's magazine thanking the editors for the cover of their annual University Student Edition, which featured a young Canadian woman of Romanian descent who had become the new pin-up girl for the soldier and his comrades. Headlines flashed "The Darling of Kandahar," inspiring Rom …

Is there anything public schools do that no other form of education can? Only this: Simply by being what they are, they can teach kids about the society they live in. That's because public schools must let everyone in. "What's unique about public education isn't the education part, it's the public." Rick Salutin