NEW BOOKS
Adventures with Camera and Pen is a collection of tales from Anthony Dalton’s nomadic life as an adventurer and photo-journalist. The stories run the gamut from searching for Polar bears on the shores of Hudson Bay through mountain climbing in Western Canada to tracking Royal Bengal tigers in Bangladesh jungle. They depict Dalton’s often hilarious encounters with an eclectic variety of wildlife in Canada, Europe, Asia and Africa. As an expedition leader, he documents a difficult journey to remote salt mines in the Sahara north of Timbuktu with a CBC-TV film crew. This is a book for all those who yearn for far away places: the adventurers and the armchair travellers.
“Be warned! Once you open this book you’ll be transported to a world of escapes and escapades through the nib of Anthony Dalton’s adventurous pen. Laugh with him. Escape with him. It’s all here along with more than a few characters, chills and thrills that you’ll never forget.”
- Steve Crowhurst
Columnist for Canadian Traveller
A cobra flies in through an open window. Wives form a pact against their bigamous, abusive husband. A mother and son battle over eagles' eggs. A homeless guest with a secret. An elephant protests on a highway. A woman marries a pumpkin. This is the teeming, hectic world of India. Diverse people – one country!
“Spiced with insight and charm ... Jasmine D'Costa's collection of short tales adds to the rich library of Indo-Canadian storytelling.”
- The Globe and Mail
“Corrupt politicians, idol worship, folklore — in her remarkable debut collection of short stories, Jasmine D'Costa traverses a wide spectrum of regional and religious flavours of India. Light and crisp, D'Costa's art of visual imagery is to be commended. Be it Mumbai, Goa or Mangalore, D'Costa deftly maneuvers the reader through different fragments of Indian society and its idiosyncrasies.”
- The Toronto Star
When a young university student is assigned the task of writing her obituary by her journalism professor, she procrastinates. Who wants to think about their own death? An obituary is really about life – how one has lived it – and the assignment sends Maxine down a road of hopes and dreams, what she imagines her life to be. But life doesn’t unfold in the way Maxine thinks it will.
Stopping along a dark highway to help a stranger with car trouble, Maxine is attacked and left for dead at the side of the road. But like her life, Maxine’s death is full of unexpected twists of fate. Her ghost tells the tale from the otherworld, an unearthly place where a renegade angel helps her escape the boredom of paradise, and God makes random appearances as a disembodied Voice, a snoring mountain and a manic rock star. Maxine, it seems, is never as much alive as when she is dead.
“Marianne knows how to work words, play with words, toss them across oceans. Just when we think they will land on our outstretched mind, she sends them snapping fingers as they dance off to the horizon.”
- The Leaf Literary Journal
Foreword by Giller Prize and Commonwealth Writers’ Prize winner Austin Clarke
The poems in The Serenity of Stone emerge from places as disparate as Fraser's childhood in Grenada, adolescence in Edmonton, and teenage years and adulthood in Toronto. They span the themes of diasporadic life, themes ranging from landscape and family history, romance and love, crime and racism to kindness and abuse, squalor and education. Stylistically the poems fall into many camps. The work is rooted in many traditions, from hip hop to the English canon. Fraser skillfully combines a hip street element with the attention to high standards of detail and style.
"Michael Fraser's expansive, generous poems, odes to being alive, recall Pablo Neruda's sensual language, alive with metaphor. Fraser takes us from the intimate all the way to the greater political world. As his poems move from the landscape of the body to the city-scapes of Edmonton, Toronto, Havana and Paris, The Serenity of Stone unfolds the progress of the making of a son and lover, a lover of the universe and universals as well as of the galaxies of words that describe them."
- Molly Peacock, Poetry Editor
The Literary Review of Canada
"A new, exciting voice has emerged in Canada’s poetry scene. The poet blends his unique heritage – birth in Grenada, boyhood in Edmonton and teaching high school in Toronto – with an unerring eye and ear for contrast and detail. All of Fraser’s lines crackle with an energy fuelled by deep empathy and the ability to take language to the edge. Unique parallels and concretes clothed in surprising abstracts challenge and delight."
- Canadian Bookseller Magazine
Rachel Morganstein forages through her library of muddled thoughts to try and find some semblance of sanity in the odd turn her life has taken. She has just discovered that her youngest child, Aaron, is about to get married and she has not been invited. In the twenty-two years of living at home with his mother and siblings it was never apparent that such a volcanic reaction was brewing in Aaron’s mind or heart.
But, at twenty-three, hell erupted and Rachel was dubbed Satan. While pondering the depth of her son’s rejection, Rachel begins to scrutinize her own childhood memories in the hope of finding a clue as to what could cause such vitriol to surface after so many years. The tumultuous train wreck of Rachel’s life steams down the track carrying us through tunnels of dry wit, untapped sadness and sanguine arrivals. This Water Buffalo has indeed stepped away from the herd while searching for an oasis.
“Reva Stern is a woman for all seasons. Her qualifications and experience underline her abilities in the field of theatre and more recently as an accomplished author of her first novel, The Water Buffalo That Shed Her Girdle. ”
- The Women’s Post
On Guard For Thee: Canadian Peacekeeping Missions is a collection of soldiers’ stories from Canadian men and women who have served overseas on UN or NATO missions from the end of the Cold War to the present day.
The stories are collected directly from the individual veterans. Contributors represent virtually every major Canadian mission, including Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Cambodia, Somalia, and Afghanistan. They represent the whole of the operational experience, from the training they undergo before the mission begins, to the moment they land on foreign soil, to the return to Canada and beyond.
The result is a raw, honest look at peacekeeping, from the legendary missions in Rwanda and Bosnia, to the slums of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, to the ongoing fight in Afghanistan. The full Canadian peacekeeping experience is here, showing, from the ground level, how Canada’s international reputation was built.
“This book opens people's eyes to the daily lives of Canadian peacekeepers and the experiences they have during missions”
- Cambridge Times
When Aley Pierce writes, her words don’t stay on the page but spill into reality. Or so her neighbours think, who see her words as evil. Tensions escalate into an organized campaign of book banning and book burning, until Aley herself doubts who she is and what she does.
A century and a half earlier, Elizabeth Barnes’ talent for water dowsing unearths a body in her neighbour’s field. Under growing accusations that she is a witch, Elizabeth is blamed for the drought that puts a stranglehold on the small farming community.
But water dowsing isn’t Elizabeth’s only talent – she is a clairvoyant. Does she see the future or create it? Even Elizabeth doesn’t know. Beneath the unfolding of the blue moon, events resurface across time, and the lives of the two women interlink. Does Aley create Elizabeth, or is Elizabeth dreaming Aley?
“Paul is lovely writer. She uses descriptions that are brief and tightly written, yet full of importance.”
- The Record
Spanning two continents, one war and several generations, Where Lives Take Root follows the stories of three unforgettable characters as their lives become forever linked and grounded in Muskoka. First there is Nan, a grown woman and mother of two young boys who suddenly discovers her family secret: that her deceased mother was half Chippewa. Then there is Gunner, a First Nations classmate from Nan’s small rural community and the only reference point Nan has to her new identity. Finally, there is Hamar, Gunner’s father, a displaced Norwegian who escaped his homeland during the German occupation and found himself at the end of the war, still tied to the Norwegian airforce training camp in Muskoka.
Weaving together different decades and narrative points of view, Where Lives Take Root is about the universal search for identity and belonging. Suitable for both adults and young adults, this story examines the meaning of blood and ancestry and the inevitable conclusion that what really matters is not about race or religion, but about finding a place and purpose in the world.
“Kilbourne’s deceptively simple prose employs shifts of memory and point of view, place and time, to build a narrative structure that supports a gentle, sweetly moving climax. [The] story weaves disparate voices into a convincing and increasingly seductive narrative whole.”
- The Globe and Mail