Marooned in the shiftless, unnamed space between a map of the world and a world of false maps, the poems in Methodist Hatchet cling to what's necessary from each, while attempting to sing their own bewilderment. Carolinian forest echoes back as construction cranes in an urban skyline. Second Life returns as wildlife, as childhood. Even the poem its …

2011 Governor General's Literary Awards Finalist - Fiction

Shortlisted for the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize

It is August 1978. Brezhnev sits like a stone in the Kremlin and nuclear missiles stand primed in the Siberian silos. The Iron Curtain divides East from West as three generations of the Krasnansky family leave the Soviet Union to get their firs …

Idaho Winter is a boy who, through no fault of his own, is loathed by everyone in the town where he lives—his father feeds him roadkill for breakfast, the crossing guard steers cars toward him as he crosses the road, and parents encourage their children to plot cruelly against him. Then he meets a young girl named Madison who empathizes with his …

Ruth grew too fast.A young girl over seven feet tall, she struggles to conceal the physical and mental symptoms of her rapid growth, to connect with other children, and to appease her parents, Elspeth, an English seamstress who lost her family to the war, and James, a mailman rethinking his devotion to his wife. Not knowing how to help Ruth, Elspet …

Like a tourist visiting his own life, David Gilmour’s narrator journeys in time to re-examine those critical moments that created him. He revisits the terrible hurt of a first love, the shock of a parent’s suicide, the trauma of a best friend’s bizarre dissembling, and the pain and humiliation of unrelenting jealousy, among other rites of pas …

These are poems of critical thought that have been influenced by old fiddle tunes. These are essays that are not out to persuade so much as ruminate, invite, accrue.

Hall is a surruralist (rural & surreal), and a terroir-ist (township-specific regionalist). He offers memories of, and homages to -- Margaret Laurence, Bronwen Wallace, Libby Scheier, a …

??Robert Brand has given up on real women. Relationships just haven’t ever worked out well for him. He has, however, found a (somewhat problematic) solution, a new feminine ideal: the 110-pound sex doll he ordered over the internet.

Showing an uncanny access to the voice of the rejected, unimpressive, emotionally challenged modern male, Helen Guri …

Earworm, the second book from acclaimed poet Nick Thran, expertly combines wicked cleverness, adept craftsmanship and a uniquely insightful perspective in an entertaining yet substantial tour de force. Building on the success of his debut, Thran has enhanced his compelling pop culture rhythms and distinctive voice with bolder formal experimentation …

Edited by master storyteller Dede Crane and award-winning author Lisa Moore, both of whom contribute their own stories, Great Expectations is a must-have collection for parents and parents-to-be.Uniquely honest and transformative, Great Expectations takes the reader on an emotional and physical journey like no other: Lynn Coady relates the painful …

"In simple terms, pathology is the scientific study of the way things go wrong."In these fifteen searingly honest personal essays, debut author Susan Olding takes us on an unforgettable journey into the complex heart of being human. Each essay dissects an aspect of Olding's life experience—from her vexed relationship with her father to her tr …

Astonishing poetry that moves between conversational simplicity and dense metaphor by the author of the story collections If Only We Could Drive Like This Forever (Penguin) and Our Lady of All the Distances (HarperCollins). Readers who know Elisabeth Harvor as an accomplished writer of fiction will experience the thrill of discovery with The Fortre …

Joyfully melding knowing humour and torqued-up wordplay, Holbrook’s second collection is a comic fusion of the experimental and the experiential, the procedural and the lyric. Punch lines become sucker punches, line breaks slip into breakdowns, the serious plays comical and the comical turns deadly serious. Holbrook's poems don’t use humour as …

With an Introduction by A.S. Byatt

Winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, the Trillium Book Award, and the O. Henry Award, and A 2004 CBC Canada Reads selection

In The Love of a Good Woman, Alice Munro looks back to the beginning of the sixties and provides nothing less than a portrait of a generation.

Lisa Moore's Open makes you believe three things unequivocally: that St. John's is the centre of the universe, that these stories are about absolutely everything, that the only certainty in life comes from the accumulation of moments which refuse to be contained. Love, mistakes, loss — the fear of all of these, the joy of all of these. The interc …

Cat's Eye is the story of Elaine Risley, a controversial painter who returns to Toronto, the city of her youth, for a retrospective of her art. Engulfed by vivid images of the past, she reminisces about a trio of girls who initiated her into the fierce politics of childhood and its secret world of friendship, longing, and betrayal. Elaine must come …

Not a story about me through their eyes then. Find the beginning, the slight silver key to unlock it, to dig it out. Here then is a maze to begin, be in. (p. 20)
Funny yet horrifying, improvisational yet highly distilled, unflinchingly violent yet tender and elegiac, Michael Ondaatje’s ground-breaking book The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is …

In Lori Lansens’ astonishing second novel, readers come to know and love two of the most remarkable characters in Canadian fiction. Rose and Ruby are twenty-nine-year-old conjoined twins. Born during a tornado to a shocked teenaged mother in the hospital at Leaford, Ontario, they are raised by the nurse who helped usher them into the world. Aunt …

Lily Piper and her family live in an ephemeral world, due to collapse any moment when the Lord comes to pluck His faithful from the drought-ravaged Prairie. Lily tries to be ready, but she is restless, not the daughter she feels her mother wants. As she tries to invent herself, she conjures, too, an imagined past for her beloved father in an effort …

Heartbreaking and wicked: a memoir of  stunning beauty and remarkable grace. Improbable friendships and brushes with death. A schoolgirl affecting the course of aboriginal politics. Elvis and cocktails and Catholicism and the secrets buried deep beneath a place that may be another, undiscovered Love Canal — Lewiston, New York. Too Close to the …

When Alice Lay Down with Peter is a sweeping, magical novel that follows four generations of the McCormack family through more than a century of Canadian history, as it unfolds on the flood plains of southern Manitoba. The story of Alice and Peter McCormack and their progeny is a glorious, witty, and intimate epic that truly reminds us that life st …

When W.O. Mitchell died in 1998 he was described as ”Canada's best-loved writer.“ Every commentator agreed that his best – and his best-loved – book was Who Has Seen the Wind. Since it was first published in 1947, this book has sold almost a million copies in Canada.

As we enter the world of four-year-old Brian O’Connal, his father the dr …

Sixteen-year-old Nomi Nickel longs to hang out with Lou Reed and Marianne Faithfull in New York City’s East Village. Instead she’s trapped in East Village, Manitoba, a small town whose population is Mennonite: ”the most embarrassing sub-sect of people to belong to if you’re a teenager.“ East Village is a town with no train and no bar whos …

Anne of Tim Hortons: Globalization and the Reshaping of Atlantic-Canadian Literature is a study of the work of over twenty contemporary Atlantic-Canadian writers that counters the widespread impression of Atlantic Canada as a quaint and backward place. By examining their treatment of work, culture, and history, author Herb Wyile highlights how the …

Up Up Up heralds the arrival of a writer of astonishing range, compassion, and acuity. In this stunning short story collection, Julie Booker grabs the reins from writers like Lydia Millet and Miranda July and takes off at full speed, and in directions all her own.

A pair of plus-sized friends make tracks for a kayaking trip in Alaska. A woman vacat …

Nora Gould

In Nora Gould’s one-of-a-kind debut, the Prairie itself is a central character: muse, mythic persona, the place of deepest solace and of deepest questioning. The poems focus with great firmness and technical command on the facts of daily life on the farm: impregnating cows, the neighbour kid picking off a coyote, cutting hay, getting wa …

Winner of the Governor General's Award for Fiction and the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Scotiabank Giller Prize

Hermann Kermit Warm is going to die: Eli and Charlie Sisters can be counted on for that. Though Eli has never shared his brother's penchant for whiskey and killing, he's never known anyt …

Oh, admit this, man, there is no point in poetryif you withhold the truthonce you've come by it. - Alden NowlanWore Down Trust incorporates poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, biography, vodka and the blues in an examination of desperation and perseverance. Utilizing a blues format, the narrative strings through the lives—pre and post de …

With vivid and unflinching prose, Nicole Lundrigan has created a suspenseful and deeply human saga of the persistence of evil and the astonishing power of love.

When Roy Trench is killed in a drunken prank gone wrong, his brother Lewis sees blood on the hands of the man responsible: the abusive alcoholic, Eli Fagan. Though the courts rule the death …

Robin Richardson’s debut poetry collection is startling in its lyrical inventiveness and stylistic flair. Drawing heavily on her background as a visual artist, Grunt of the Minotaur offers poems rich in imagery and visual texture. Larger themes from history, art, music, and film are cast against moments of domestic intimacy in fanciful narratives …

With this collection of wise, querying stories, Giller Prize winner Johanna Skibsrud introduces an astonishing array of characters, showing us through their eyes what even they cannot see and uncorking minor epiphanies in the middle of ordinary days. These stories takes readers from South Dakota to Paris to Japan, into art galleries, foreign apartm …