Friendly Fire
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 …
Meadowlark
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 …
Entropic
Winner of the 2016 Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award at the East Coast Literary Awards!
Shortlisted for the Book Design Award at the 2016 Alberta Book Publishing Awards!
Shortlisted for the 2015 New Brunswick Book Awards!
In this collection of stories, author and filmmaker R. W. Gray (Crisp) finds the place where the beautiful, the strange, and …
Things You've Inherited From Your Mother
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 …
The Guy Who Pumps Your Gas Hates You
“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 …
North East
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 …
Blind Spot
“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 …
Chorus of Mushrooms
Winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book (Caribbean and Canadian Region)!
Co-winner of the Canada-Japan Book Award!
Hiromi Goto’s debut novel has become a Canadian classic. It is a powerful narrative of three generations of Japanese Canadian women on the Canadian prairies.
Funny, scandalous, and melancholic, this superlative n …
After Alice
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 …
Shallow Enough to Walk Through
“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 …
Insistent Garden, The
Winner of the 2014 Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction at the Manitoba Book Prizes!
Finalist for Best Book Cover / Jacket Design at the 2014 Alberta Book Design Awards!
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 fa …
The Insistent Garden
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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, …
Rupert's Land
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 restriction …
Some Extremely Boring Drives
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 …
Swallow
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 …
The Shore Girl
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 …
Dance, Gladys, Dance
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 …
Western Taxidermy
"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 …
House of Spells
“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 …
Arrhythmia
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 …
Santa Rosa
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 …
The Bone Cage
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 …
Extensions
Long-listed for the Scotiabank Giller Prize!
A chance discovered of a sepia photograph of her grandmother and her twin sister leads RCMP Constable Arabella Dryvynsydes on an investigation: how did a picture taken in 1914 in the mining town of Extension, BC end up at a garage sale in rural Saskatchewan almost one hundred years later?
As Arabella sifts …
Drift Child
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 …
Seal Intestine Raincoat
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 …
Ruins and Relics
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 …
The Cardinal Divide
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 …
Cleavage
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 …
Touch
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 …
Diamond Grill
Winner of the 1997 Howard O’Hagan Short Fiction Award!
“In the Diamond, at the end of a long green vinyl aisle between two booths of chrome, Naugahyde, and Formica, are two large swinging wooden doors, each with a round hatch of face-sized window. Those kitchen doors can be kicked with such a slap they’re heard all the way up to the soda fount …
Fishing for Bacon
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 …
Moon Honey
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 …
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 …