You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Longlisted for the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize Set in eighteenth-century Canada, this compelling new novel takes the reader deep into unexplored territory. Appearing only fleetingly in the historical record of the Hudson's Bay Company are the Native women who lived at the company's Prince of Wales Fort and served as companions to the European traders -- and whose survival was bound, for better or worse, to the fortunes of those men. Across more than two centuries, the mixed-blood woman Molly Norton, daughter of Governor Moses and personal favourite of the explorer Samuel Hearne, speaks to us from her dreams. As the story of her liaison with Hearne unfolds, we move toward its tragic consequences. When their small society is torn apart, Molly and the other women find themselves and their children abandoned by their British masters. Now -- in one of history's cruel ironies -- they must fend for themselves in the harsh country from which their own ancestors sprang. Unflinching, powerful and rich in moral ambiguity, Into the Heart of the Country explores a tragic meeting of cultures that still reverberates in the present day.
The art world of mid-16th century Italy comes to life through the eyes of a piebald slave stolen from her home and family in Africa. Chiara, as she is eventually named, is sold to Paolo Pallavicino, an artist in service of Giuliano de Medici. When several unfortunate incidents occur, the artist’s wife believes her to be a curse and demands that she be sent away. From this starting point, Chiara works her way from painter to painter, observing the games the artists play on each other and the rivalries that fuel their artistic creations.
Winner of the 2023 City of Victoria Butler Book Prize An outrageously comic novel documents a middle-aged writer and mother's grappling with mid-life crisis—her husband's and her own. Preoccupied with her fledgling literary career, intent on the all-consuming consolations of philosophy, and scrambling to meet the demands of her four children, the acutely myopic and chronically inattentive Vita Glass doesn’t notice that her house and her marriage are competing to see which can fall apart fastest. She can barely find time for her writing career, and just when her newfound success in vegetable erotica is beginning to take off. Our heroine’s only tried and trusted escape is the blissful detachment of Keith's hairdressing salon, but when her husband leaves the country, unannounced, she decides to do likewise—in the opposite direction, and with their children. Drawn from the pages of Vita’s journal, this outrageously comic novel documents Vita's passage through a mid-life crisis and explores all the ways we deceive each other and ourselves.
A feral girl roams the dense forests of nineteenth-century France, stealing food from remote farmyards and avoiding human contact. Seen on one of her thieving missions in the village of Freyzus, she is chased by suspicious townspeople to the edge of a deep gorge, where she jumps and disappears, vanishing into village legend. On the other side of the gorge, in an abandoned estate, Peyre Rouff lives out his self-imposed exile. Following a horrific hunting accident, he now focuses all of his attention on intricate taxidermic dioramas, keeping his thoughts from wandering too close to the day he lost everything. When Peyre encounters the wild girl, they find a link in their mutual estrangement fr...
A tale loosely based on the life of Artemisia Gentileschi, the story of a brilliant Renaissance Italy painter traces her efforts to take over her father's studio while avoiding the depredations of men and fighting her attraction to notorious sculptor Matteo Tassi, endeavors that are complicated by her relationship with a young female slave. Reader's Guide included. Reprint. 13,000 first printing.
In 1870, while France and Prussia are at war, an English ship is wrecked on the coast of France and a stranger enters the lives of a village family. Elisa Gagnon is married to the man bent on salvaging the wrecked Lady Morgan at any cost; her daughter Janik sees angels, but her father would rather see her married than enter the convent; Alan Bridges arrives among them with an unknown past and suspicious intentions. When a ruinous triangle develops between these three, they are forced to choose between their allegiances ? emotional, spiritual, and political ? and their desires.
The year is 1860. A priest, sent on a mission to an Indian village on the coast of British Columbia, believes he is successfully converting the people to Christianity. He is unaware of the anger, selfishness, and love that dictate their actions, and that lead to fatal consequences. With multiple viewpoints and haunting images, Pauline Holdstock recreates the collision between two cultures and the illusion of contact between a white European priest and native peoples of the west coast.
From the number one New York Times bestselling author comes another stunning memoir that is tender, touching...and just a little spooky. "Here’s a partial list of things I don’t believe in: God. The Devil. Heaven. Hell. Bigfoot. Ancient Aliens. Past lives. Life after death. Vampires. Zombies. Reiki. Homeopathy. Rolfing. Reflexology. Note that 'witches' and 'witchcraft' are absent from this list. The thing is, I wouldn’t believe in them, and I would privately ridicule any idiot who did, except for one thing: I am a witch." For as long as Augusten Burroughs could remember, he knew things he shouldn't have known. He manifested things that shouldn't have come to pass. And he told exactly n...
When Jane Munro’s husband is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, the Griffin-award-winning poet must chart a path through the depths of grief, learning to live with loss and to take solace and find freedom in the restorative powers of writing. Open Every Window is a genre-bending prose account of the unravelling of a life—two lives—when Jane Munro’s husband, Bob, is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Evoking Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, this memoir charts a path through sorrow—the pain of seeing a partner age and approach death, the exhaustion of caretaking, and the regret in seeing life’s scope narrow and diminish. Writing with courage and love, Munro grapples with what it...
This book is a survey of the life writings by and about Canadian missionaries at home and abroad, over the last one hundred and thirty years. A general missionary history of Canada appears first, to introduce separate chapters on the forms and themes of this body of literature. The critical problems presented by writing that has resisted modern and post-modern developments are discussed. Partial and fictional life writing, as well as marginal forms, are also explored. The book concludes with general statements about the whole of this literature and its effects. The first attempt at a comprehensive bibliography of Canadian missionary life writing is appended.