"Extraordinary -- and totally engrossing. Lásko is at once an intimate tale of personal awakening, a love story, and a provocative parable about the lures and dangers of influence." JOHANNA SKIBSRUD, author of Island
When Mája was seven, her mother disappeared. Now Mája has an urge to do the same. She leaves her fiancé in Canada and follows signs that she believes are leading her to the Czech Republic, her mother's home country.
In Prague, she falls in love with Kuba, a charismatic musician who is a rising star in Czech New Age circles. As she navigates this irresistible and overwhelming relationship, Mája is guided by dreams, visions, and synchronicities, but she also suffers from a mysterious illness and the unshakeable sense that something is terribly wrong.
Revealing both the falseness and truth of the stories we tell ourselves, Catherine Cooper's novel is sharply observed, darkly funny, and ultimately moving -- a profound...
A stunning memoir of coming of age and recovering from anorexia in the 2020s
Charlotte Bellows wrote The Definition of Beautiful between the ages of fifteen and seventeen, in the wake of lockdown and in recovery from anorexia. In the tradition of Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar and Françoise Sagan in Bonjour Tristesse, Bellows writes with deceptively straightforward urgency, pushing through society's constraints on the bodies and minds of girls and women to offer a story both achingly familiar and devastatingly new.
In 2020, fourteen-year-old Charlotte's lifelong drive to achieve 'perfection' distorts into an all-encompassing obsession. Living between the suffocating world of lockdown and an uncanny dreamscape inhabited by competing avatars, Charlotte faces a parade of masked faces in hospital rooms, the aftermath of first love, the erosion of lifelong friendship, and the agony of seeing her illness devastate her family as it threatens to destroy her; as the world...
Curious, uncanny tales blending Indigenous oral storytelling and meticulous style, from an electric voice in Canadian fiction
These are stories that are a little bit larger than life, or maybe they really happened. Tales that could be told 'round the campfire, each one-upping the next. Tales about a car that drives herself, ever loyal to her owner. Tales about an impossible moose hunt. Tales about the Real Santa(TM) mashed up with the book of Genesis, alongside SPAM stew and bedroom sets from IKEA.
G.A. Grisenthwaite's writing is electric and inimitable, blending meticulous literary style with oral storytelling and coming away with a voice that is entirely his own. Tales for Late Night Bonfires is truly one of a kind, and not to be missed.
"One day, not long ago, I was kidnapped by a bitter but fun-loving South Korean art collector named Mr. Jackie Lin who had been burned one too many times by art forgers and wanted a bit of revenge."
So begins The Abduction of Seven Forgers, a brilliant and immensely entertaining novel with a colourful and unforgettable cast of characters. A group of artists are brought together under mysterious circumstances to a leafy London suburb. Once there, they are taken hostage by Mr. Lin, an angry art collector who demands that they create original works that will replace the forgeries he has obtained from each of them in the past.
Over the following days, the hostages discover that a twelve-year-old boy is hiding in crawl spaces behind the walls, and they agree to continue to keep him hidden from Mr. Lin. But things become immensely more complicated once Mr. Lin's daughter...
by Joan Crate, Cheryl Foggo, and Tchitala Nyota Kamba
Price:
CA$16.95
ISBN: 9781990601521
Pub Date: July 2023
Imprint: Freehand Books
A diverse group of seven writers comes together to create seven tender scenes about their hopes for the future.
The Many Mothers Collective came together during the pandemic, hoping to make sense of the world they found themselves in. What evolved was their need to not only focus on the present moment, but on the world they will leave behind for their children and grandchildren?and for seven generations to come. In seven scenes for the stage, the members of the collective explore the past, where they come from, and the future, where they are going, with a deep sense of hopefulness rooted in resistance.
From Leacock finalist Ali Bryan, a witty and immensely fun dramedy about a family's memorial trip to the City of Love, where chaos ensues at every turn.
It's been ten years since Claudia's mother died after a tragic collision with a banana boat. Her kids are now teenagers, her brother's wife has left him, and her ex has had a spiritual awakening that has him hinting at reconciliation -- all things she can handle.
But when her septuagenarian father decides to remarry after a brief courtship with a woman who is decidedly different than their mother, the entire family is thrown off course, and plans a long overdue memorial trip to the only place their mother ever dreamed of going: Paris. However, minutes after take-off, the trip takes an unpredictable turn and sets off a chain of events that threatens to derail the closure the family desperately seeks.
End Times is an astounding debut collection of stories about evangelical culture, ideological polarization, and the messiness and mysteries of humanity.
A Vancouver mother convinces her opioid-addicted son to attend church, and sparks her own personal emergency. A jet-setting consultant tries to help a rural fundamentalist teen, while her own secular life unravels in Toronto, Davos, and beyond. An atheist doctor attempts to expose a hipster megachurch pastor as a closeted hypocrite.
At a time when the end feels nigh for many, End Times brings together an expansive cast of the devout and the dissenting, the elderly and the young, immigrants, elites, the burned-out, and the lonely, exploring our hidden anxieties and longings.
Set on a US college campus in 1964, In the Defense of Liberty is a powerful, fast-paced novel exploring gender nonconformity and the reach of history.
It's 1964, and the students at Merida University in Ohio can sense that something is brewing -- the campus is rippling with undercurrents of anger and alienation. As they work to make sense of the rapidly shifting cultural and ideological climate, the four main characters of In the Defense of Liberty are also consumed by their own personal dramas.
There's Mason, a history student growing his hair long and struggling to find anywhere he belongs. There's Lorianne, a young wife who left a promising career in academia when she got pregnant. There's Henry, Lorianne's husband, who is working year after year on his thesis, with no end in sight. And there's Jessie, a TA who has always been a bit of an enigma. Over...
A compelling and inventive collection about the ways we leave and the reasons we choose what to leave behind.
Framed within a tale about a journalist investigating choices of life and death, the stories in this collection explore restlessness, belonging, freedom, and mortality. A prisoner falls in love with his cellmate's fiancée and breaks out to confess his feelings. A woman journeys from Honduras to the United States in the hope of a better life. Convenience store owners attempt to free themselves from financial burden by withholding evidence to a murder. The characters in Exit Strategies are all in need of a way out, a way forward, a way through.
In Exit Strategies, it is less about the destination and more about the initial decision to leave. In this daring and inventive debut, Paul Cresey weaves narratives that are sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking, but always utterly captivating.
A gorgeous new illustrated edition to commemorate the 75th anniversary of this seminal Canadian classic.
Since its publication in 1947, Who Has Seen the Wind -- a classic tale about a boy growing up on the Saskatchewan prairie -- has been read and loved by millions. With his unique blend of poetry and humour, W.O. Mitchell perfectly captures childhood and small-town life. Featuring an unforgettable cast of characters -- young Brian O'Connal and his family, including his fiery-tongued Uncle Sean and his formidable Scotch grandmother, and the colourful inhabitants of their prairie community -- it is not only the story of one boy, but an ageless story of growing up and the search for meaning.
This new edition commemorates the 75th anniversary of the book's publication, bringing together the complete and unabridged version of the text with 8 full-colour paintings and 32...
Modern Fables is a darkly funny, feminist collection of essays about love and place.
In this darkly funny book about love in the digital age, Mikka Jacobsen challenges the notion that a single woman in her thirties writing about love is simply desperate. Instead, in an unflinching collage of coming-of-age narratives, she both elevates singledom and upholds the value of finding profound love. A work of feminist thinking, these interlinked essays blend memoir with cultural and literary criticism, exploring first loves and teenage drug-slingers, sports culture and blowjobs, catfishing and the problematic advice of self-help gurus.
At the same time, Modern Fables considers how we are shaped as much by the places we are from as by the times in which we live. Growing up and living in the deeply conservative Canadian prairies, what does it mean when you're not at home at home? Whether she's writing about a settler...
A thrilling novel about two people stranded under mysterious circumstances in the South China Sea, battling the memories of the crimes that haunt them.
A U.S. Navy intelligence officer, Jess is serving on an aircraft carrier (the first woman ever to do so) until she gets assigned a top-secret mission. When the mission goes wrong, she's rescued by Philippine Navy sailors who've been strategically moored for far too long. Things get complicated when their unhinged leader declares Jess an angel sent to save them from their disastrous mission. But Jess is no angel; she's done horrible things and she's desperate for absolution.
The only person who can give it to her is Zi Shan. Exiled by the Communist Party of China to a coral sprawl called Mischief Reef, he's been tasked with turning the reef into an island by dredging sand from the...
"Wan is a masterpiece. This beautiful, painterly, sublime, and sonically exquisite novel by Dawn Promislow is a work of utter genius." - Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, author of All the Broken Things
Narrated in a completely distinctive and mesmerizing voice, Wan is the story of Jacqueline, a privileged artist in 1970s South Africa. After an anti-apartheid activist comes to hide in her garden house, Jacqueline's carefully constructed life begins to unravel.
Written in gorgeous and spare prose, this exquisite debut novel grapples with questions of complicity and guilt, of privilege, and of the immeasurable value of art and of life.
A tender ensemble novel about coming home to oneself and one's family through the beauty and soulfulness of Earth, even in an age of unravelling.
Brothers Justin and Oliver have never been close. Justin owns an iconic Toronto restaurant and lives with his wife and daughter in Baby Point. Oliver, a former environmental reporter, does admin for a local gym and rents an attic apartment. Yet both men know their worlds stand on the brink. With their mother's abrupt death, each sets out to set things right: Oliver to reclaim a beloved home, Justin to save one that's falling apart.
Intersecting Justin's and Oliver's journeys is Gabe: a budding biologist enchanted by the underappreciated beauty of moths, and conflicted by the demands of scientific scrutiny. As the brothers' pursuits take them from Toronto Island to the Humber River, from drugs and transgressive...
