Finalist for the Wildrid Eggleston Award for Nonfiction at the 2017 Alberta Literary Awards!

The long rivalry between the Hudson's Bay Company and the North West Company for control of the fur trade in Canada's northwest came to an explosive climax on June 19th, 1816, at the so-called Battle of Seven Oaks. Armed buffalo hunters – Indigenous allies …

After saving the Calgary Stampede from a potential terror attack in Glycerine, Detectives Lane and Li find themselves on the hunt yet again, this time following a pair of gruesome killers whose perfectly composed crime scenes match those of an inmate put away by Calgary Police years earlier. As more people come into the line of fire, Lane must team …

A finalist for the Best First Novel Award at the Arthur Ellis Awards

“Sins don’t destroy people here. Dreams do.”

Enter the premier’s old friend Harry Asher—lawyer, former hockey star, self-styled intellectual, and recent divorcé—who is hired to dig into the incident. And it isn’t long before Asher’s investigation threatens to expose …

Memory Serves gathers together the oratories award-winning author Lee Maracle has delivered and performed over a twenty-year period. Revised for publication, the lectures hold the features and style of oratory intrinsic to the Salish people in general and the Sto: lo in particular. From her Coast Salish perspective and with great eloquence, Maracle …

In a flash, everything changes. After a group of radical environmentalists breaks into the house of a prominent oil company executive and holds him and his family hostage, the stage is set for a popular movement to coalesce around the incident.

They call themselves “Tarstoppers,” and by occupying Calgary’s parks and public areas they hope to s …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

“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 …

In Bittersweet Sands, Rick Ranson recounts a twenty-four-day shift at an oilsands operation undergoing a shutdown, giving us a glimpse at a world most of us only know from the evening news. Along the way, he encounters a group of engaging roughnecks, including a husband-and-wife welding crew, a petty fascist safety inspector, and the tough-as-nails …

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 …

With the traumatic events of Foxed behind him, Detective Lane has been promoted to the head of the Calgary Major Crimes Unit, a position that brings new responsibilities, as well as a new partner in the form of headstrong rookie Nigel Li.

Lane and Li’s first case, an investigation into the death of a migrant worker, points them in the direction of …

When the young daughter of popular radio talk show host Bobbie Reddie disappears along with Bobbie’s ex-husband, Detectives Lane and Harper are on the case. Haunted by flashbacks from a previous missing child case, Lane once again takes to the streets of Calgary looking for answers.

Meanwhile, university student Jay Krocker befriends the mysteriou …

“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 …

When Vancouver psychiatric social worker Chris Ryder spots an abandoned cell phone during his afternoon jog, the innocent discovery drags him into the psychotic games of Ray Owens, a former patient at the centre of a high-profile kidnapping and murder case.

As the violence increases, Owens’ intricate web of lies threatens to ensnare the lives of R …

The fires of the Second World War are beginning to burn down, but legendary Canadian aviatrix Sharon Lacey is not out of danger just yet. Complications enter the young ace's life as deep-seated racial and class prejudice, potential fifth columnists and even her own killer code of honour threaten her hard-fought reputation, while a new and wonderful …

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 …

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 …

“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 …

Finalist for the 2014 LAMBDA Literary Award for Best Gay Mystery!

After a long series of professional and personal upheavals, Detective Lane begins his latest adventure happy, at peace, and enjoying life with his partner Arthur, their children Christine and Matt, and his able new co-worker, RCMP officer Keely Saliba.

But when the body of a young boy …

Get caught up on the Calgary Herald-bestselling Detective Lane series of novels by mystery maestro Garry Ryan with this collection of his first three books, Queen's Park, The Lucky Elephant Restaurant and A Hummingbird Dance!

“Garry Ryan is one of our finest novelists in any genre.”

- Drewey Wayne Gunn, Reviewing the Evidence

"Ryan balances suspen …

"So I have always walked alleys alone, with my monster face, listening through a wall for the words that might cultivate me, that are contained within the homes of ex-lovers, the ones who caught a glimpse and ran away."

In the neon-slick streets of Thea Bowering's imagination, monster girls and femme flâneurs roam, anthropologist's eyes on barroom …

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 …

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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, …

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 …

On a warm spring day in June of 1914, two hundred and thirty-five men went down into the depths of the Hillcrest mine found in Alberta's Crowsnest Pass. Only forty-six would make it out alive. The largest coal-mining disaster in Canadian history, the fateful tale of the Hillcrest Mine is finally captured in startling detail by Stephen Hanon.

A deft …

On a warm spring day in June of 1914, two hundred and thirty-five men went down into the depths of the Hillcrest mine found in Alberta’s Crowsnest Pass. Only forty-six would make it out alive. The largest coal-mining disaster in Canadian history, the fateful tale of the Hillcrest Mine is finally captured in startling detail by Stephen Hanon.

A def …

While working to restore an historic theatre in a seedy part of the city, a graduate student named Anthea searches to find her best friend, lost to the rhetoric of an itinerant street mystic. Almost a century earlier, Liam, a tenth-rate tenor, visits the same theatre while eking out a career on the dying Vaudeville circuits of the day. In both eras …

While working to restore an historic theatre in a seedy part of the city, a graduate student named Anthea searches to find her best friend, lost to the rhetoric of an itinerant street mystic. Almost a century earlier, Liam, a tenth-rate tenor, visits the same theatre while eking out a career on the dying Vaudeville circuits of the day. In both eras …

El Salvador, 2005: a group of Canadian human-rights activists are taken hostage by a former revolutionary fighter who demands that a new gold mine stops production. For Danielle Byrd, the situation is all too familiar, as she was there twenty years previously as an embedded journalist with a guerrilla faction during the country's civil war. Now, he …

Half-Asian teenager Grace (but she'd prefer it if you called her "Gray" instead) is not a perfect little supermom-in-the-making like her older sister Jessica, and would rather become a marine biologist than a mother--although she does understand how to take care of her special-needs kid brother Squid better than anyone else in her family. When her …

Canada in the twenty-first century is a place of growth and expansion. Cities like Vancouver and Toronto have become word-class destinations for business and tourism. Meanwhile, smaller, less prominent communities face changes of different sorts, as residents depart for the opportunities present in our country’s largest cities. Nowhere is this mo …

When young Sharon Lacey travels from Canada to England in the spring of 1940 in search of the father she never knew, she finds herself called upon to participate in a much larger and more dangerous mission. For at eighteen, she is a gifted flier in an England desperate for pilots to fend off the impending attack from Hitler’s Luftwaffe. In the mo …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

"The elders in Those Who Know have devoted their lives to preserving the wisdom and spirituality of their ancestors. Despite insult and oppression, they have maintained sometimes forbidden practices for the betterment of not just their people, but all humankind.

First published in 1991, Dianne Meili’s book remains an essential portrait of men and …

"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 …

Garry Ryan follows up Smoked with his most revelatory Detective Lane adventure yet. Under investigation by the Calgary Police Department, Lane finds himself fighting for his career. Then, when an Eastern European war criminal winds up dead in the city, and his partner Arthur is diagnosed with cancer, Lane must contend with dangerous criminals, brok …

“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 …

David Sanders is a penniless poet struggling to hold onto his lowly teaching position in his university’s English department. When his girlfriend, botany professor Claire Dumont, receives an invitation from an old friend to investigate a mystery at his vineyard in Niagara wine country, David convinces her to let him tag along. But what starts out …

The 1920s were one of the wildest decades in Canada’s history, a time of frivolous fads, shocking crimes, and political and social changes that definitively yanked the country out of the 19th century and into the modern age. In Strange Days, Ted Ferguson revisits dozens of stories that could only have happened in the ’20s — tales of serial ki …

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 …

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 …