When we meet Sebastian (Seb) he is already taking risks and putting himself in harm’s way as he and a couple of his friends carry out a failed break and enter and are arrested. As we get to know Seb we discover his life has been a series of bad foster experiences that have left him numb to the memories of his dead parents, and poor in his judgeme …

The stories in this collection represent the coming of age of a young writer. His earliest published work is here along with his later more sophisticated literary efforts. Perry’s fiction explores contemporary life mostly in urban centres like Toronto, though they are not bound by this parameter with stories also set in places such as Venice and …

Historian Tanis and high school teacher Neil just purchased their dream home on Saskatoon’s west side: a fixer-upper with plenty of character and an abundance of history to uncover. The house, however, also comes with a crumbling ruin of a garage tagged with gang symbols, a basement filled with mouse droppings, a mysteriously boarded up attic wit …

Immediately before his tragic death, stuttering mechanic Dave visits his younger brother Denny with a note for their sister Dianne. “D-don’t r-read it. D-don’t open it. D-don’t n-nothing it,” Dave commands before taking off one last time for the abandoned family cabin at Mahihkan Lake, a place where disputes are settled with shotguns and …

Lydia Buckingham is fifteen years old when her parents uproot the family and drag Lydia and her younger sister Victoria across the country to live on the abandoned family homestead in rural Saskatchewan. At first the girls see this as an adventure, a chance to collect prairie relics, take care of animals, learn to drive in the fields, and find out …

Corvus welcomes readers to a dystopian future not unlike our own where the illusions of an ideal society have been destroyed and rebuilt using technology and class warfare. By joining classical elements of speculative fiction including surveillance, forbidden relationships, and political dissent, to the traditions of aboriginal storytelling and the …

Backwater Mystic Blues is a suite of intimate essays that summon the secret hiding spots, makeshift rafts and uncomplicated childhood joys that lay the foundations for adult philosophy. Lloyd Ratzlaff is in tune with the vivid simplicities of the sensuous world and the honour of unassuming people. These essays assemble the disguises shaped by relig …

Eighty-year-old Alberto Camelo has searched for love in all the wrong places. Nevertheless, he claims that his experiences have made him the world’s greatest lover. This claim is belied by his ancient neighbour and closest friend Adriana who taunts: “Perhaps you are the greatest lover of last Tuesday.” Despite his claims, Alberto has never ex …

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 …

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 …

The essays in this inaugural volume were commissioned from a number of outstanding writers (many of them national prize winners). Some are professional naturalists, others are poets, filmmakers, dancers, philosophers, activists. All write with passion, originality and humour about the natural world, our place within it, and our impact upon it. The …

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 …

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 Little Washer of Sorrows is a collection of short stories that explores what happens when the expected and usual are replaced with elements of the rare and strange. The book’s emotional impact is created with strong, richly drawn characters facing universal issues in unusual settings. The collection is both dark and comical with engaging plot …

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, …

Travel has become the world’s favourite pastime, and this collection of stories and essays is sure to fuel your wanderlust. Let renowned Canadian writers including Susan Musgrave, Stephen Henighan, and Pauline Holdstock transport you to the relaxing beaches of the Caribbean islands, the lush forests of South America, the busy streets of Asia, and …

Canada is a vast country defined by its untamed wilderness, diverse ecologies, and natural beauty. It is a country associated with nature and exploration on the most fundamental level, whose people each have a story to tell of their experiences with the landscape. With Moon and Sun: Essays on Nature, Thistledown Press brings readers a series of int …

In a literary collection unlike any other, Thistledown Press brings together short fiction by women and about women. Readers interested in women’s perspectives will be drawn in by unique takes on the female experience provided in these ten short stories by Canadian women writers. Fiercely independent career women, sisters who butt heads, children …

Motherwild is an unvarnished journey of the struggle to survive on a violent and dangerous yet loving and alive Montreal working-class street. Set over the course of a year beginning in December 1959, Joey Cantell faces the personal confusion of growing up while attempting to navigate a difficult relationship with his quick-witted, strong-willed, a …

Parallel Rivers is a collection of stories that were coaxed into existence from Kenyon’s interest in seeing what fiction might learn from film, particularly the German, French, Italian, and Japanese cinema of the 70s. While Kenyon’s fictions are often immersed in postmodern sensibilities, adding the rituals and techniques and experiments of fil …

Sean Johnston will leave readers smiling at the acrobatics of his words and techniques in this eagerly anticipated second short story collection after the Relit award winning A Day Does Not Go By. Several stories, such as “We Don’t Celebrate That”, explore the difficulty of survival in an increasingly indifferent political reality, while othe …

After You’ve Gone vibrates with authenticity: two eras, two young women caught up in the giddy thrall of love and music and feckless men. — Lee Kvern, author of The Matter of Sylvie and Seven Ways to Sunday After You’ve Gone is a thoughtful, offbeat story about two guitarists from two different generations. Through the linked lives of Lita an …

After losing her job and being left by her rock musician husband, Rose Okanese, a single mother of two feisty girls, resolves to claim some self-respect. She decides the fastest way to do that is to run the reserve’s annual marathon, but her training is sidetracked when she must do battle with an ancient demon. With a cast of unusual characters, …

In the heady days of the 1920s Jazz Age, people went to the movies almost every day, living vicariously through their heroes: Valentino, Garbo, Fairbanks, and Pickford. But comedians were the biggest draw, and broad slapstick the order of the day, with one very significant exception. Standing beside Keaton and Chaplin in popularity and prowess was …

How do you find a bully who lurks on the Internet and lashes out at helpless victims? Intrepid kid detectives Marty, Remi, and Trina must answer that question if they’re to stop a cyber bully targeting their classmates.

In their toughest case yet, the sleuths must follow the electronic trail to their enemy, but the cyber bully outsmarts them at ev …

Marty Chan is back with a sequel to his award-winning juvenile romp The Mystery Of the Frozen Brains. Nine-year-old Marty and his francophone buddy, Remi Boudreau, stumble upon graffiti on the school’s equipment shack and begin the adventure of tracking down the culprit. Marty spies on his classmates, wears his mom’s dress to go undercover, and …

Wild Talent tells the strange tale of Jeannie Guthrie, a sixteen-year-old Scottish farm worker, who possesses a frightening talent. Believing that she has unintentionally killed her ne’er-do-well cousin, and fearing that she will be sentenced as a witch, she flees to London. There, she is befriended by the free-spirited and adventurous Alexandra …

It’s 1914. Sixteen year old Sophie Pritchard, orphaned two years earlier by the sinking of the SS Titanic, is about to begin a new life in the unfamiliar world of British India. For Sophie, still devastated by her parents’ death, India proves a dangerously unsettling environment. Are her terrifying experiences in Kali’s temple and the Park St …

Shimmerdogs is the story of young Lester B. Hopkins — Mike to almost everyone except his mother, Master Corporal Alice Mackelwain. He is just a boy trying to make sense of his life, which is becoming more complicated by the world of his absent soldiering mother. Mike is very worried about his mother’s safety while she is in Bosnia. He, like his …

In these stories, readers will not find heartwarming sentimentality, but mature literary prose with surprising twists and indeterminate endings, and women of intense substance and spirit. P. J. Worrell understands girls who dream of being wives and mothers in safe cozy homes, then find out that trying hard to secure that life does not necessarily m …

The Alchemist’s Daughter will pull you from whatever you are supposed to be doing into Sidonie’s fortunes, and hold you there cover to cover.Marked by high adventure, and delicious language, Kernaghan’s use of real historical figures like Dr. John Dee, Lady Mary Herbert, Sir Philip Sidney and William Shakespeare, blended with original fiction …

"Toil and Peaceful Life" is the axiom that lies at the heart of Doukobor spiritual, personal, and community values. These values have always been, and continue to be, integral to the people who belong to this historically rich and vibrant community. During particular periods of their history, certain groups of Doukobors seemed to have carved a path …

It was supposed to be a homecoming and reunion, but when Anne Tennyson Miller (Tenn to her friends and family) returns to Driftwood Bay with her new friend Una, they find a ghost town. Something has gone terribly wrong in the world. The sea is rising fast, and everyone — almost everyone — has fled to the hills. Danger and treachery lurk on a hi …

The Mystery of the Frozen Brains is adapted from Marty Chan’s successful radio series The Dim Sum Diaries. Set in a French Canadian town in rural Alberta, the novel develops the coming to awareness of a Chinese boy in a community under the myriad of ethnic influences including French, English and Ukrainian and the ever present “red neck” atti …

These urban, commuter-friendly stories capture quirky events in satisfying ways. Their dark undertones and sharp-witted ironies employ familiar settings such as apartments, lofts, studios and city streets , but use unusual and unexpected urban moments as backdrops to outré characters and their given idiosyncrasies. Some of Hayes’ characters are …

When Trina’s bicycle is stolen, Marty and Remi gear up to solve the case. Once they start their investigation they are both stunned that the evidence leads them to the doorstep of their new elementary school teacher. Mr E proves to be quite resourceful as an opponent, and the new girl at school, Ida, seemingly foils their attempts to catch the sc …

At the heart of every story in Audrey Whitson’s collection is a character seeking personal purpose amongst the deep mysteries of self, and a wholeness amid the fractious nature of life. Whitson’s evocative narration guides us effortlessly through these often turbulent journeys, seamlessly taking in a vast range of time and place along the way. …

Jerry Levy’s gritty, urban tales are driven by arresting prose and engaging human drama. Urban Legend is psychologically intense with characters attempting to overcome personal loss in peculiar ways. In “Paris is a Woman” a man hopes that, by escaping to Paris, he will learn to manage his uncontrollable emotions; devastated by the death of hi …

The Deaf House is Joanne Weber’s life story. It illustrates the work and passion of a woman who grew up deaf and became an advocate for the deaf. It is a story of pain, loss and defeat balanced with joy, gain, and victory. Joanne Weber’s creative memoir, shows how deafness can be a brutal oppression of the mind. Her torment of not knowing exact …

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 …

The Reddening Path is the story of Paméla who, adopted as an infant by Hannah & Fern, a Toronto lesbian couple, travels to Guatamala to search for her birth mother. Her quest uncovers a tangle of political and romantic intrigue as Paméla discovers her Mayan heritage and learns about the complexities of life in Guatemala. Resonating throughout is …

In this reworking of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale, the magical worlds of Saami shamanism and the Kalevala coexist with the polite Victorian society of nineteenth-century Scandanavia. At a time when traditional faith is challenged by modern science, the old pagan gods still haunt the northern forests. One of the novel's two heroines, Ritva, …

The Crow Who Tampered With Time blossoms with essays that find radiance and coherence in a world (both natural and human) which formal religious dogma has forgotten. A visionary humility, and an original, engaging voice make these essays and recollections both accessible and wonder-filled. It begins with Vernon Leo Kuhn "who lived in this world for …

Bertrand Smith’s father, Alex, thinks he’s making the world a better place by developing a breed of super-intelligent canines. But SMART dogs turn out not to be such a smart idea when a global arms dealer decides to “dognap” the experimental litter to use as his next secret weapon. Bertrand, Ariel Krieger, and their four-legged friends Eins …

Stephen Bett's 12th book, Sound Off: a book of jazz, is loosely, a "serial" poem, a book of 76 linked poems, each responding (himself as a jazz fan) to the work of 76 very current jazz musicians. These "jazzers", as he calls them, are not the old tried & true names we all know—they fall, very roughly, into three general camps: the "sons of Miles" …

Every now and then, readers find themselves fortunate enough to come across a writer whose work fits their lifestyle and belief systems so well that the relationship between writer and reader seems familial. Though geographically estranged, perhaps, it’s as if both author and reader hail from the same town, studied under the same teacher, and spe …

The gluttonous, jazz-loving character of Neil Connelly in John Lent’s So It Won’t Go Away can never get enough out of life, no matter how much he over-indulges his desires: “Drinking, smoking, sex: a man’s hands twittering, eyes bugged out in a desperate longing to be held, fondled, stuffed, stroked. Guzzling and inhaling things in a big gr …

Josh Dempster fantasizes about achieving material success with the comic book series that he is drawing from visions in his sleep. But this street-savvy twelve year old is unaware that destiny has more in store for him than a BMW and a plush office for daydreaming. Craig Spence creates an engaging moral quest when Lil, the neighbourhood curiosity s …

Devin Krukoff’s delicate balancing of hyperbole and psychological realism is the book’s greatest achievement. Flyways is thematically reminiscent of Zsuzsi Gartner’s All the Anxious Girls on Earth, but without the moral didacticism. While Krukoff’s stories share Gartner’s sense of humour, they elicit the reader’s sympathy rather than co …

Part comedy, part mystery, part allegory, On Fire is narrated alternately by two characters: Matti Iverly, a fourteen-year-old girl with Tourette Syndrome. In Matti’s case, her tics are primarily vocal. As she confides early in the book, “At school they called me Tourette’s Girl, like I came out of a phone booth wearing a costume and made fun …