Literature - Canadian

• Michael Turner
• Doubleday Canada, 2009
• Hardcover, 164 pages
• 9780385665933

Shockingly original and intensely intelligent, 8 × 10 is a series of snapshots of a world torn apart by war and migration.

Fearless in form, Michael Turner’s 8 × 10 casts aside traditional narrative structure and characterization to delve deeper into the issues gnawing at today’s global society. Through a sequence of possibly intertwined events, Turner creates a challenging portrait of our modern age, drawing solely on the actions of people rather than their appearance — whether advertising executives or soldiers, tailors or doctors — they fall in love, have children, fight in wars, and flee their homes. In 8 × 10 there are no names, no racial or ethnic characteristics, and only a vague sense of time. Turner’s characters, familiar yet implacable, are both no one and everyone.

• Martel, Yann
• Knopf Canada; 2010
• Hardcover; 224 Pages
• 9780307398772

Henry’s second novel, written, like his first, under a pen name, had done well.
 
Yann Martel’s astonishing new novel begins with a successful writer attempting to publish his latest book, made up of a novel and an essay. Henry plans for it to be a “flip book” that the reader can start at either end, reading the novel or the essay first, because both pieces are equally concerned with representations of the Holocaust. His aim is to give the most horrifying of tragedies “a new choice of stories,” in order that it be remembered anew and in more than one way.
 
But no one is sympathetic to his provocative idea. What is your book about? his editor repeatedly asks. Should it be placed in the fiction section of a bookstore or with the non-fiction books? a bookseller asks. And where will the barcode go? To them, Henry’s book is an unpublishable disaster. Faced with severe and categorical rejection, Henry gives up hope. He abandons writing, moves with his wife to a foreign city, joins a community theatre, becomes a waiter in a chocolatería. But then he receives a package containing a scene from a play, photocopies from a short story by Flaubert – about a man who hunts animals down relentlessly – and a short note: “I need your help.”
 

• Ivan E. Coyote
• Arsenal Pulp Press, 2006
• Paperback, 221 pages
• ISBN: 9781551522135

Winner of the ReLit Award for Best Novel

Shortlisted for the Ferro-Grumley Award for Women's Fiction
An American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book

Ivan E. Coyote is acclaimed as one of North America's most beguiling storytellers; Ivan's honest, down-to-earth tales, many of which are based on personal experience, are compelling for their simple human truths. Her 2005 story collection, Loose End, was also shortlisted for the prestigious Ferro-Grumley Award for Women's Fiction.

Bow Grip, Ivan's long-awaited first novel, is a breathtaking story about love and loneliness, and the long road one must travel between them. Joey is a good-hearted, fortysomething mechanic from small-town Alberta whose wife has recently left him for another woman. When a stranger named James approaches his shop and agrees to purchase a beat-up blue Volvo in exchange for a beautiful, hand-crafted cello, Joey sees it as an opportunity to finally make some overdue changes in his life.

• Michael Blouin
• Coach House, 2008
• Paperback, 250 pages
• ISBN: 9781552452035

This book is not currently in stock, but is available to order (2-3 weeks).

Haven is fiercely protective of her little brother, Chase, spiriting him away when their fathers temper is about to flare yet again. She hides the bread away so hell have something for lunch, and she teaches him to hide himself. But when thats no longer enough to keep him safe, she steals the car and takes them both away to their aunt, Mary, who tries her best to love and nurture them.</p> <p>They try to redeem their harrowing childhood in different ways: Haven, lost and damaged, goes to medical school and teachers college, and marries young, hoping to find meaning through her daughter, April. Chase battles his demons through cathartic but doomed performance art. And, always, they try to keep one another afloat.

Chase and Haven is a haunting story inventively told and deeply felt  of suffering and love, made of thousands of small impressionist facets that refract the quiet spectrum of the beauty and the detritus of two entwined lives.

Michael Blouin resides in Kemptville, near Ottawa. He has been the recipient of the Diana Brebner Prize for Poetry from Arc, Canadas National Poetry Magazine, as well as the Lillian I. Found Prize for Poetry from Carleton University, and his work has been shortlisted for a National Magazine Award. His collection of poetry, Im not going to lie to you, was published by Pedlar Press in fall 2007.

• Rawi Hage
• Anansi; 2008
• Hardcover; 312 pages
• 978-0-88784-209-2

This book is not currently in stock, but is available to order (1-2 weeks).

One of the most highly anticipated novels of the year, Cockroach is as urgent, unsettling, and brilliant as Rawi Hage's bestselling and critically acclaimed first book, De Niro's Game. The novel takes place during one month of a bitterly cold winter in Montreal's restless immigrant community, where a self-described "thief" has just tried but failed to commit suicide by hanging himself from a tree in a local park. Rescued against his will, the narrator is obliged to attend sessions with a well-intentioned but naïve therapist. This sets the story in motion, leading us back to the narrator's violent childhood in a war-torn country, forward into his current life in the smoky émigré cafés where everyone has a tale, and out into the frozen night-time streets of Montreal, where the thief survives on the edge, imagining himself to be a cockroach invading the lives of the privileged, but willfully blind, citizens who surround him.

Like De Niro's Game, Cockroach combines an uncompromising vision of humanity with razor-sharp portraits of society's outsiders, and a startling, poetic sensibility with bracing jolts of dark humour.

• Stuart Ross
• Anvil Press, 2005
• Paperback, 126 pages
• 9781895636659

Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer is equal parts literary memoir, advice for the emerging writer, and reckless tirade. Ross has been active in the Canadian literary underground for a quarter of a century: he’s sold thousands of his books in the streets, published and edited magazines, trained insurgents in his Poetry Boot Camps, and started Canada’s first Small Press Book Fair. Where the media focusses only on the glamorous literary lives of its few superstars, Ross gives us a glimpse into How Writers Really Live.

In Confessions, he declares himself the King of Poetry, explores his floundering Jewish identity, wanders into the best bookstore in Canada, offers a crash course in avoiding writing, pisses off his publishers, runs a renegade Canada booth at the International Book Fair in Managua, and begs egomaniacal young writers to stop bugging the hell out of him. Many of these essays are culled from Ross’s bimonthly Hunkamooga column in Word: Toronto’s Literary Calendar. Others are written specifically for this collection.

• Gartner, Zsuzsi
• Douglas & McIntyre; 2010
• Paperback; 464 pages
• 9781553654926

These 23 stories take us on a twisted fun ride into some future times and parallel universes where characters as diverse as a one-legged International Actuarial Forensics specialist, a pharmaceutical guinea pig, and a far-sighted fetus engage in their own games of the survival of the fittest. From a new short story by William Gibson in which a teen disassociated from his body haunts his neighborhood through the decades, to Douglas Coupland's balls-out satire of a slightly futuristic Survivor, to Sheila Heti's meditative romp about beleaguered physicists and Oracle of Delphi-like Blackberrys, "Darwin's Bastards" is a fast-moving, thought-provoking reading extravaganza.

• Lisa Moore
• House of Anansi, 2009
• Hardcover, 310 pages
• ISBN: 9780887842023

This book is not currently in stock, but is available to order (2-3 weeks).

In 1982, the oil rig Ocean Ranger sank off the coast of Newfoundland during a Valentine's Day storm. All eighty-four men aboard died. February is the story of Helen O'Mara, one of those left behind when her husband, Cal, drowns. It begins in the present-day, but spirals back again and again to the "February" that persists in Helen's mind and heart.

In her external life, Helen O'Mara cleans and does yoga and looks after her grandchildren and shakes hands with solitude. In her internal life, she continually revisits Cal. Then, one night she gets a phone call: her son John is coming home. He has made a girl pregnant after a brief, sex-filled week in Iceland. As John grapples with what it might mean to be a father, Helen comes to terms with her need to remember the dead.

Writing at the peak of her form, her steadfast refusal to sentimentalize coupled with an almost shocking ability to render the precise details of her characters' physical and emotional worlds, Lisa Moore gives us her strongest work yet. Here is a novel about complex love and cauterizing grief, about past and present and how memory knits them together, about a fiercely close community and its universal struggles, and finally about our need to imagine a future, no matter how fragile. A profound, gorgeous, heart-stopping work from one of our best writers.

• Jennifer Whiteford
• Gorsky Press, 2007
• Paperback, 252 pages
• ISBN: 97809753696445

Teenaged Marlie doesn’t always know what she’s looking for, but she knows it can’t be found in her dreary suburban high school. As Marlie struggles with nasty classmates, sexual confusion, and the trials of starting her own band, she pours her thoughts and frustrations into her ever-present diary. As high school progresses, Marlie’s rock star dreams and curious crushes lead her into an underground world of punk rock, riot grrrls, and a dangerous relationship with an older indie rocker. Set in the suburbs of Toronto, Grrrl is a tender and beautiful novel about the pains of growing up.

• Zoe Whittall
• Anansi Press, 2009
• Hardcover, 302 pages
• 9780887842344

What is it like to grow into adulthood with the "war on terror" as your defining political memory, with SARS and Hurricane Katrina as your backdrop? In this robust, elegantly plotted, and ultimately life-affirming novel, Zoe Whittall presents a dazzling portrait of a generation we've rarely seen in literature -- the twenty-five-year olds who grew up on anti-anxiety meds, text-messaging each other truncated emotional reactions, unsure of what's public and what's private.

Holding Still revolves around the interlocking lives of two young women and a man who live in the seedy but gentrifying Toronto neighbourhood of Parkdale: Billy, a former teen idol from the Lilith Fair days; Josh, a shy and sardonic paramedic who travels the city patching up damaged bodies; and Amy, a filmmaker coping with her first broken heart. When a freak accident changes everything, each character must decide how to cope with the things they can't control.

With this extraordinary novel -- which, among other things, offers a detailed inside look at the work of paramedics, and entertaining celebrity gossip -- Zoe Whittall fulfills the promise of her acclaimed first novel, Bottle Rocket Hearts, and proves herself as one of our most talented younger writers.

• Elizabeth Hay
• McClelland & Stewart; September 2007
• Paperback; 376 pages
• 978-0-7710-4019-1

The eagerly anticipated novel from the bestselling author of A Student of Weather and Garbo Laughs.

• Heather O'Neill
• Harper Collins; October 2006
• Paperback; 352 pages
• 0060875070

Heather O'Neill dazzles with a first novel of extraordinary prescience and power, a subtly understated yet searingly effective story of a young life on the streets—and the strength, wits, and luck necessary for survival.

At thirteen, Baby vacillates between childhood comforts and adult temptation: still young enough to drag her dolls around in a vinyl suitcase yet old enough to know more than she should about urban cruelties. Motherless, she lives with her father, Jules, who takes better care of his heroin habit than he does of his daughter. Baby's gift is a genius for spinning stories and for cherishing the small crumbs of happiness that fall into her lap. But her blossoming beauty has captured the attention of a charismatic and dangerous local pimp who runs an army of sad, slavishly devoted girls—a volatile situation even the normally oblivious Jules cannot ignore. And when an escape disguised as betrayal threatens to crush Baby's spirit, she will ultimately realize that the power of salvation rests in her hands alone.

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• David O'Meara
• Brick Books, 2008
• Paperback, 69 pages
• ISBN: 9781894078689

Many of the poems in Noble Gas, Penny Black explore the subject of departure and arrival, an ongoing theme in David O’Meara’s work. Travel—being between places, in stations and airports and unfamiliar cities—creates a psychological, emotional space rife with reassessment, where the individual dwells simultaneously in the future and in the past. At the same time, O’Meara imbues the domestic with a similar compelling transience, in poems on love and current events, where "History’s narrowed eye" roams over landscapes "felt / but never held, like wind over water." O’Meara gives us lucid, accurate detail and music at every turn, and is entangled enough with the world to make us ache:Through the candid gloom of the bar I watch you / mourning there among the faces, a hall of mirrors / lit with stories and clumsy stabs / at humour / we hope will frame and explain a life. I hold / myself in a cool remove, stubborn over beers. / Wanting, times like this, to be like you. / In tears. (– from "After the Funeral")

• Jon Paul Fiorentino
• ECW Press, 2009
• Hardcover, 178 pages
• 9781550228595

Part graphic novel, part journal, this tale follows one young man's embarrassing and hilarious journey to literary awareness. Jonny lives and works in a suburban strip mall but dreams of being a writer. He already possesses most of the elements needed to realize his dream—a supportive girlfriend, an active imagination, and an abundance of subject matter—but nonetheless finds his literary pursuits impeded by his own relentless stupidity. From big-box capitalism to growing up in the 21st century, Jonny's irreverent musings are captivating and deceivingly wise.

Jon Paul Fiorentino is the author of Asthmatica, Hello Serotonin, and The Theory of the Loser Class. He is a professor of writing at Concordia University and the editor in chief of Matrix magazine. He lives in Montreal.

• Paul Vermeersch (Ed.)
• Harbour Publishing, 2009
• Paperback, 157 pages
• 9781550175028

In 1957, Al Purdy and wife Eurithe purchased land onRoblin Lake in Price Edward County. During the next few years they built, by hand, the A-Frame cottage celebrated in this anthology.

A strong case can be made to place Purdy as Canada's greatest poet, and the work which established that reputation was written in the A-Frame nearly two decades after he began publishing. The site has been written, and re-written, by Purdy, and the best of these poems are in this book.

Moreover, the cottage was a site of pilgrimmage for young poets and contemporaries alike from the time it was built until Al's death in 2000; Michael Ondaatje, Margaret Atwood, David McFadden, George Bowering and many, many others visited Al and Eurithe, and here they document their experiences.

The book is raising money to preserve the A-Frame, and to establish a trust to create a retreat for future generations of Canadian writers.

• Lawrence Hill
• Harper Collins, 2007
• Paperback, 486 pages
• ISBN: 9781554681563

Abducted as an 11-year-old child from her village in West Africa and forced to walk for months to the sea in a coffle - a string of slaves - Aminata Diallo is sent to live as a slave in South Carolina. But years later, she forges her way to freedom, serving the British in the Revolutionary War and registering her name in the historic "Book of Negroes". This book, an actual document, provides a short but immensely revealing record of freed Loyalist slaves who requested permission to leave the US for resettlement in Nova Scotia, only to find that the haven they sought was steeped in an oppression all of its own. Aminata's eventual return to Sierra Leone - passing ships carrying thousands of slaves bound for America - is an engrossing account of an obscure but important chapter in history that saw 1,200 former slaves embark on a harrowing back-to-Africa odyssey.

Lawrence Hill is a master at transforming the neglected corners of history into brilliant imaginings, as engaging and revealing as only the best historical fiction can be. A sweeping story that transports the reader from a tribal African village to a plantation in the southern United States, from the teeming Halifax docks to the manor houses of London, The Book of Negroes introduces one of the strongest female characters in recent Canadian fiction, one who cuts a swath through a world hostile to her colour and her sex.

• Annabel Lyon
• Random House Canada, 2009
• Hardcover, 284 pages
• 9780307356208

On the orders of his boyhood friend, now King Philip of Macedon, Aristotle postpones his dreams of succeeding Plato as leader of the Academy in Athens and reluctantly arrives in the Macedonian capital of Pella to tutor the king’s adolescent sons. An early illness has left one son with the intellect of a child; the other is destined for greatness but struggles between a keen mind that craves instruction and the pressures of a society that demands his prowess as a soldier. 

Initially Aristotle hopes for a short stay in what he considers the brutal backwater of his childhood. But, as a man of relentless curiosity and reason, Aristotle warms to the challenge of instructing his young charges, particularly Alexander, in whom he recognizes a kindred spirit, an engaged, questioning mind coupled with a unique sense of position and destiny. Aristotle struggles to match his ideas against the warrior culture that is Alexander’s birthright. He feels that teaching this startling, charming, sometimes horrifying boy is a desperate necessity. And that what the boy – thrown before his time onto his father’s battlefields – needs most is to learn the golden mean, that elusive balance between extremes that Aristotle hopes will mitigate the boy’s will to conquer.

• Marianne Apostolides
• Mansfield Press, 2010
• Paperback, 204 pages
• 9781894469470

How do we construct the story of ourselves and our countries? How do we know our histories, our memories, our identities? These are the questions that compelled Marianne Apostolides to ask her father about his childhood in wartime Greece. Her probing unleashed a torrent of stories he’d kept hidden, even from himself — stories about honour, bravery, vengeance and betrayal. The Lucky Child tells this tale with honesty and ambiguity. It is a novel that resonates with a deeper “truth”: the truth of our universal need to question and engage, to create our own meaning through shared story.

Marianne Apostolides is a writer and critic whose first book was published by W.W. Norton and translated into Spanish and Swedish. Her current writing explores the ‘contact zone’ between genres — poetry vs. prose, fiction vs. non-fiction, creative vs. critical; it has appeared in The Walrus, Room, and Bookninja.com Magazine among other publications. She lives in Toronto with her two children.

• Lori Lansens
• Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2009
• Hardcover, 369 pages
• ISBN: 9780307398383

A brilliant new novel — deeply humane and entirely convincing — from Lori Lansens, author of two previous bestsellers and a writer who can be counted on to deliver an amazing story and characters to fall in love with.

In Lori Lansens’ Leaford, Ontario — home of Rose and Ruby Darlen, the sorrowing parents of Larry Merkel, and not far from Rusholme where Addy Shadd once looked after an abandoned child — love and grief combine to awaken an obese woman from her loneliness. When her husband doesn’t come home on the eve of their 25th wedding anniversary, Mary Gooch, who has never learned to be self-sufficient, sets out on a truly remarkable journey of self-discovery that takes her first to the big city and then to another country.

Lori Lansens is the author of two bestselling novels, Rush Home Road and The Girls, which was a Richard & Judy Best Read of the Year in 2006 (and sold over 300,000 copies in the UK) and a finalist for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction. Born and raised in Chatham, Ontario, Lori Lansens now makes her home in California.

•  Joseph Boyden
• Penguin; 2005
• Paperback; 400 pages
• 9780143056959

It is 1919, and Niska, the last Oji-Cree woman to live off the land, has received word that one of the two boys she saw off to the Great War has returned. Xavier Bird, her sole living relation, is gravely wounded and addicted to morphine. As Niska slowly paddles her canoe on the three-day journey to bring Xavier home, travelling through the stark but stunning landscape of Northern Ontario, their respective stories emerge—stories of Niska’s life among her kin and of Xavier’s horrifying experiences in the killing fields of Ypres and the Somme.

Inspired in part by real-life World War I Ojibwa hero Francis Pegahmagabow, this unblinking, impeccably researched novel is the astonishing story of two Cree snipers in the killing fields of Ypres and the Somme, and the winding journey home to northern Ontario that only one of them will make. A remarkable tale of brutality, survival, and rebirth, Three Day Road is an unforgettable reading experience.

• Joseph Boyden
• Penguin; Sept 2008
• Hardcover; 256 pages
• 978-0-670-06363-5

From internationally acclaimed author Joseph Boyden comes an astonishingly powerful novel of contemporary aboriginal life, full of the dangers and harsh beauty of both forest and city. When beautiful Suzanne Bird disappears, her sister Annie, a loner and hunter, is compelled to search for her, leaving behind their uncle Will, a man haunted by loss.While Annie travels from Toronto to New York, from modelling studios to A-list parties,Will encounters dire troubles at home. Both eventually come to painful discoveries about the inescapable ties of family. Through Black Spruce is an utterly unforgettable consideration of how we discover who we really are.