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Distinguished by its lyricism, depth of emotion, its metaphysical bent and the colour and wide range of reference in its imagery, The Fifth Window, opens up new vistas of language and experience. The landscape and climate of Vancouver and the BC coast imbue this collection with a spiritual and physical immediacy and energy. The area’s trees, mountains, rivers, creeks and rain inform an ecstatic vision in which the psyche and natural world meet and become one.
"Readers are invited to witness first hand Dumont family life on the Okanese First Nation. Beyond the stereotypes and clichés of Rez dogs, drinking, and bingos, the story of a girl who loved to read begins to unfold"--P. [4] of cover.
Dear Peter, Dear Ulla is an imaginative and beautifully crafted historical middle-grade novel about two cousins who are fast friends even though they have never met. Letters fly back and forth between them, and although Ulla lives in Danzig, Germany, and Peter on a Mennonite farm in Saskatchewan, their lives become inextricably entwined through an intense, empathetic connection that plays out in the first months of World War Two. Peter is a talented pianist and Ulla a skillful storyteller with a talent for drawing--will these skills help or hinder them through the challenges brought about by war? They can't think of one another as enemies, even though that's what the world is telling them th...
Christine Wright is having a bad day. She's an ex-special forces soldier and a recovering alcoholic, and now her new career as an Anglican Minister has started off with the worst kind of bang. Could it be her reflexes are a little too twitchy for this job? From the opening page, this fast-paced tale is all about a cover up: the burying of a body, while fending off an angry widow, and a very suspicious parishioner appalled by the loss of a precious church artifact. And then there's the vengeful plot of a terminally ill military-cop-turned-stalker who plans to get Christine locked up if it's the last thing he does. Among the many revelations and surprises we experience is the fact that we're instantly on the side of the unfailingly flawed and irreverent Christine--who cannot imitate a perfectly pious priest even though her life so clearly depends on it. Mystic Julian Norwich, she of the famous "all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well," is the patron saint of this wickedly funny novel. All Is Well for Katherine Walker's readers despite, or because of, Reverend Wright's many wrongs.
This stellar debut collection by Métis poet Diana Hope Tegenkamp takes us through many worlds and wonders. In Girl running, we find solace and outrage, grief and tenderness, bewilderment and beauty, all "entangled in hope and dreaming." The poet's love of the natural world is both earthy and adamantine, and her passion for literature and art is just as rich a source for her questioning eye. On the edge of Saskatoon, a woman opens a car door and flees. A child runs away from residential school after a beating. A Métis man's ghost gallops on a ghost horse across the prairies. Henry James' 19th-century heroine, Isabel Archer, runs across a wintery yard. Lana Tisdel drives away from Falls City...
Peacekeeper's Daughter is the astonishing story of a French-Canadian military family stationed in Israel and Lebanon in 1982-1983. Told from the perspective of a twelve-year-old girl, Peacekeeper's Daughter parchutes the reader into the Lebanese Civil War, the Palestinian crisis, and the wave of terrorism--including the bombing of the American Embassy--that ravaged Beirut at the height of the siege. This novelistic memoir moves from Jerusalem to Tiberius, from the disputed No-Man's Land of the Golan Heights to Damascus, and on to Beirut by way of Tripoli, crossing borders that remain closed to this day. It's June, 1982. Twelve-year-old Tanya and her family are preparing to leave their home o...
Robert Currie's Shimmers of Light: New and Selected Poems uses the vernacular of ordinary working people to tell stories and sing songs of small-town prairie life. Like Alden Nowlan, or more recently, Billy Collins, this poet constructs poems from the unvarnished wood of common language--there's no veneer, no glossing over here. These poems "work like small exquisite time machines . . ." writes poet Lorna Crozier in her introduction to this extensive collection of work dating from the 1970s to the present day. Currie's poems powerfully evoke the reality of prairie life, with a frequent focus on the hard exteriors men and boys are expected to present to the world, despite the swarm of doubt a...
Shifting restlessly from dark to light and back again, written in lithe, precise prose, the stories in Phoebe Tsang's Setting Fire to Water illuminate the lives of those who exist inside otherness. A young Asian woman, an artistic over-achiever turned drifter, endures a mind-bending night of reckoning as she struggles to find her way "home," careening between flirtation and thievery, dream and memory. A reality TV star obsesses about the real stain that blemishes the set of her fake, made-for-TV life. A modern fairytale is told from the point of view of a fox having an argument with its enemy, hunger. A heart-broken accountant goes on a pilgrimage to India to get his fire back, and his attem...
A collection of short fictions set primarily on the Canadian Prairies, which explores how families, confronted by the conflict between tradition and change, are often torn apart and, in spite of differences and struggles, sometimes brought back together. Stories which explore generational ties, sins, penance and redemption.
Fifteen-year-old Alice keeps a diary as she struggles to cope with the embarrassments and trials of family, dating, school, work, small town life, and a serious case of "outcastitis."