Since the death of her parents in 1791, Lily McEvoy has lived as a recluse in her isolated Armagh County manor with her two maidservants and Titus, the farmhand who has become her whipping boy. But tonight, the heiress is expecting company. Her guest is Master Anselm, the legendary stone…

A Crossing of Hearts continues Michel Tremblay’s Desrosiers Diaspora series of novels, a family saga set in Montreal during World War I. August 1915. Montreal is stifled by a heat wave while war rages in Europe. The three Desrosiers sisters – Tititte, Teena, and Maria – had been planning a…

Survive! Survive! transports readers to September 1935, to glorious, tragic times in the colourful company of Ti-Lou and “the Duchess” Édouard, whose sparkling exchanges hide indissoluble pain; to sombre, twilight times with Victoire and Télesphore at the bottom of the ruelle des Fortifications, and between Josaphat and Laura Cadieux, his…

Boas, Teit, Hill-Tout, Barbeau, Swanton, Jenness, the luminaries of field research in British Columbia, are discussed here in A Guide to B.C. Indian Myth and Legend, and their work in Indian folklore evaluated. Other scholars, amateurs and Native informants of the past and present are given ample consideration, making this…

A Matter of Gravity is about the forces that draw two men together. Hermann, an embalmer and doctor’s son, devotes himself to the dead to mask his disappointment that, unlike his father, he cannot cure the ­living. Hu is an ailing pianist who dwells in memories of past glory. Hermann…

At age 41, Eddy is in existential extremis. He once had an enviable life—a wife he adored, a young son, a cozy suburban house surrounded by carefully planted and sculpted gardens, the luxury to pursue his passion and become a professional horticulturalist. Now he’s separated from his wife, estranged from…

March, 1963. Winter has launched its final assault on Montreal. The Fat Woman, Thérèse, Édouard, Pierrette, Marcel, all the star-crossed characters of Tremblay’s Chronicles of Plateau Mont-Royal are here again, 20 years later. Marcel, now 23, learns that his Auntie Nana—The Fat Woman who is here finally named—is gravely ill…

Is an artist born, or rather, created by experience? From the moment in childhood when he is forced to take drastic action to defend his adoptive mother from a violent assault – the only maternal figure that he has ever known – it is evident that the life of Joseph…

In 1914, Simon Dulac enrolls in a Canadian contingent of military police, a perfect cover for his real ambition—to comb the battlefields of Europe unhindered in his search for the legendary Templar treasure said to have been buried in Flanders in 1307. An inveterate and uncannily lucky gambler, Dulac encounters…

About 10 years ago, George Bowering and Linda Hutcheon came up with the idea for a short fiction collection called Likely Stories: A Postmodern Sampler. It was a great idea at a time when a lot of people were still trying to figure out what “postmodern” actually meant.That fine collection…

This award-winning novel by playwright Wadji Mouawad is a thriller and a road novel – written in the North African storytelling tradition in which events unfold from an animal point of view. The novel opens with a brutal murder: the protagonist arrives home to find his wife lying in a…

Heartily sincere, human, and compassionate, Around Her is a multifaceted novel that explores, through the words and reflections of a large community of characters, the bonds that unite us, and love in all of its manifestations – the love that one finds, that one loses, destroys, desires, or recovers.In the…

A new play from award-winning playwright and novelist Anosh IraniIn a Mughlai restaurant in Toronto, a late-night visit from a mysterious stranger rattles the cage and shatters the peace. Now Ayub must face reality, the family he’s left behind, and the dreams he’s abandoned, all while keeping the restaurant clean…

From one of the most exciting novelists writing in France today comes Birth of a Bridge – the story of a handful of men and women of various backgrounds and classes, who assemble around the construction of a giant suspension bridge in Coca, a fictional city somewhere in a mythical…

In this disturbing collection of investigative fictions, Brian Fawcett asserts that the informational white noise of the Global Village is creating a cultural and intellectual breakdown that will eventually lead to the disappearance of local and individual identity. He argues that under the glitzy surfaces of television and the information…

In Canoes seven stories orbit a central novella, creating a collection that resonates with the vibrations and frequencies of women’s voices. Daughters, friends, sisters, young and old, talkative or daydreaming – in this moving and poetic collection, Maylis de Kerangal casts light on them all, exploring human entwinement and the…

“The leopard may not be able to change its spots, but the chameleon sure can.” In Chameleon & Other Stories, Bill Schermbrucker takes as his central metaphor a creature who changes its colour to reflect and blend in with the environment, just as human beings are sometimes asked to change…

Guillermo Verdecchia is primarily known for his award-winning plays; Citizen Suárez is his first book of short stories, and it is a remarkable debut.These stories take on the quintessential issues forced upon a generation betrayed by their citizenship—a betrayal the more profound because it subsists primarily in the global death…

The story continues … The second in Michel Tremblay’s new series of novels presents two very different lives. We meet Maria as she leaves the city of Providence, Rhode Island, pregnant and alone. Two years later, we also meet Maria’s older daughter, Rhéauna, as she disembarks the train at Windsor…

Born in Providence, Rhode Island, to a Cree mother and a French father, Rhéauna, affectionately known throughout Tremblay’s work as “Nana,” was sent with her two younger sisters, Béa and Alice, to be raised on her maternal grandparents’ farm in Sainte-Maria-de-Saskatchewan, a francophone Catholic enclave of two hundred souls. At…

Edmond Rostand’s beloved classic, Cyrano de Bergerac, is an epic and heroic tale that has fascinated and enchanted generations. Not since 1938 has there been a more readable or stageable prose translation of this classic favourite. With a rich tapestry of gallant soldiers, starving poets, musketeers, marquises and bluestockings, Cyrano…

These new, off-side stories continue M.A.C. Farrant’s exploration of the relation of fiction to the evolving corporate construction of reality in the media and information age. Objective reality (what’s out there) in our culture has become a performance of make-believe (fiction), and the disassociation and confusion this causes in our…

Garry Thomas Morse deploys his prodigious classical repertoire to compose the edgy new voices that reflect the cultural simultaneity of our everyday—a transnational, ahistoric cosmopolitanism: an idealized Helen is confounded by Molly Bloom’s monologue from Joyce’s Ulysses; a Dostoyevskian character parodies the libidinal excesses of William Burroughs with “the stone…

“Neil Bishop has … revived this novel, Death of the Spider, in the true light of its prophecy (be it but dreamed), in the bright light too of its modernism, for this novel is both a poetic indictment of our contemporary society and a forerunner of the feminist novel—while admirably…

When Jane Rule’s first novel, Desert of the Heart, was published in 1964, it was an auspicious beginning for a writer who would build a reputation on her unflinching views about sexuality, relationships and the painful constrictions of societal convention. Even more astonishing is the way in which the novel…

A bold new work from award-winning playwrights James Long and Marcus YoussefThirty years from now, three social planners visit Vancouver’s Russian Hall, long abandoned due to earthquakes and flooding, with a seemingly straightforward task: repurpose the hall for common use. But the trio soon discover the project won’t be an…

In 1876, Jack the Ripper, otherwise known as Canadian Doctor Thomas Neill Cream, graduated with merit from McGill’s faculty of medicine. Cream was a backstreet abortionist and managed an exclusive brothel called The Elite Club. His notorious reputation eventually forced him to flee Canada for London. He was hanged in…

Douglas Glover is at his versatile best in this new collection of short stories. Urbane, stylish and slightly off-beat, the stories touch on the lives of a wide variety of human beings, whose only shared experience is the age in which they happen to meet: an abbot and a tramp…

Down the Road to Eternity: New & Selected Fiction is a collection of M.A.C. Farrant’s work dating from 1985 to 2009. Compiled of selected fiction from Sick Pigeon (1991), Raw Material (1993), Altered Statements (1995), Word of Mouth (1996), What’s True, Darling (1997), Darwin Alone in the Universe (2003) and…

This is Marie-Claire Blais’s third novel in the trilogy of Pauline Archange.

Esker Mike & His Wife, Agiluk is a social satire about Eskimo life in the Mackenzie River Delta and how it is affected by white settlers, priests and government officials. The play is also a tragic reflection on the role of women who are forced to bear children in a…

In 1895, the arctic explorer Captain Ian Ryder has let his house in Blackpool on the Nova Scotia coast to the recently married Clara Weiss, who is about to become the compass of a social circle far too intimate for its own good. Lost in a maze of obsessive Victorian…

Internationally acclaimed as a playwright, screen-writer, comic and sardonic commentator on the endless gaffs, absurdities and the profound and painful misunderstandings that continue to characterize social interactions between aboriginal and non-aboriginal peoples, Taylor’s stories in Fearless Warriorsare a full frontal assault on stereotypes of all kinds and an edifying affirmation…

Guillermo Verdecchia’s new play Feast follows a comfortable North American family as they contend with breakfast, family life, and the end of things as we know them. The family deals with the coming troubles in their own ways. Twenty-something daughter Isabel is increasingly convinced that something drastic must be done.…

There I was just out of high school, all eager for the future, and there was the road to the future stretching out in front of me like fifteen miles of broken glass.”Set in Winnipeg in August, 1945, Fifteen Miles of Broken Glass is Tom Hendry’s look at post-World War…

What would happen if the Messiah was a woman, and not the man people have always taken her to be? What if she showed up in rural America, instead of riding triumphantly into Jerusalem? If she preached moral license, not repentance?All of that does happen, and more, in this startlingly…

Go Figure is the hauntingly beautiful tale of a Montreal couple alienated from each other after suffering the miscarriage of twin girls. Mammy, the wife of Rémi Vavasseur, has gone away. Not because she no longer loves him but because she no longer loves herself. She is criss-crossing Europe and…

An unforgettable tale of healing and forgiveness When Graziana’s violent stalker dies in a car crash, the abrupt news and its resulting catharsis land her in hospital. Her eight-year-old, the willful and creative Hazel, suddenly becomes the ward of Grandpa “Grumpy” Herman, while her mother embarks on a necessary path…

In a parody of a thriller novel, Harry the Hack, newly recruited literary spy, follows a mystery woman seeking wisdom and sanity.

In these quirkily imaginative short stories about writing and writers, the scrivener Quartermain (our “Bartleby”) goes her stubborn way haunted by Pauline Johnson, Malcolm Lowry, Robin Blaser, Daphne Marlatt, and a host of other literary forebears. Who is writing whom, these stories ask in their musing reflections – the writer…

Bestselling author Alice Livingstone is dead. She leaves her philosopher husband, Antoine, to deal with her legacy, towards which he feels increasingly estranged. Confronted with his wife’s much-reported disappearance, Antoine revisits their past relationship: open and liberal on the outside, but constrained and deviant on the inside. The news of…

In this atmospheric, post–Cormac McCarthy western novel, four disparate characters criss-cross the desert in pursuit of an impossible ideal. Along the way, these wily characters captivate and intrigue as they seek the American dream in a lawless town in the 1860s.Reverend Aaron is found lying unconscious on the dusty trail…

Set in the desert on either side of the Mexico-U.S. border, this harrowing novel was inspired by an actual event: the abandonment to starvation and death of a “shipment” of Mexican immigrant workers. The sinister shadow of the vulture falls over every character in Ryga’s story—Ramon, the flesh-merchant; Juan, the…

You take your seat in the theatre. You are given a remote control. The play begins. An urban couple are on a getaway to visit her father at his vast rural estate. But when they arrive, they find him missing and a local Indigenous man staying there instead. They ask…

In the seemingly endless small-town summer of 1968, a twelve-year-old girl contemplates with dread the social prospects of her fast-approaching enrollment in a class for gifted students at the local high school, arranged by her mother who “blows up” at the drop of a hat—she doesn’t intend to let her…

Maya is a hikikomori, an extreme recluse who hasn’t left her bedroom in five years, spending all her time in Virtual Reality. So her father hires an actor to befriend her online and entice her back into the real world. How? By visiting the scariest place on earth, Aokigahara, the “Suicide Forest.” Can virtual worlds offer real solutions? Is an honourable

A brilliant and intense journey through a relationship, and through language and myth—as well as a literary journey spanning three continents.

Like a Child of the Earth, the first volume of Jovette Marchessault’s autobiographical trilogy, won the Prix France-Québec in 1976. In it, the largely self-taught artist and author, who left school at the age of fourteen to work in a factory, reflects upon her “years of wandering before encountering painting…

It is a hot June day. A woman sits in a bar in Montreal’s Main, waiting. Pushing down the disturbing scene (the police, a blanket) she saw that morning in the park. To focus herself, she tries to guess the stories of other women who come and go as the…

Martine Desjardins delivers to readers of Maleficium the unexpurgated revelations of Vicar Jerome Savoie, a heretic priest in nineteenth-century Montreal. Braving threats from the Catholic Church, Savoie violates the sanctity of the confessional in a confession-within-a-confession, in which seven penitents, each afficted with a debilitating malady or struck with a…

Mend the Living is the story of a heart transplant, centred around Simon Limbeau, the boy whose heart is given, and his family. Taking place within exactly twenty-four hours, the novel traces the thrill of an early-morning winter surf session, the terrible accident that follows, and all the urgency and…

The narrator of this Governor General’s Award-winning novel does not have a name. She is simply a grotesque “fat woman,” getting larger every day—a clown, a monster, in her own words, with no self, no identity save her enormous mound of flesh, its blubber, its perceived deformity. She is used…

An authentic recreation of an extraordinary life set against the turbulent background of colonial Africa. Schermbrucker’s enigmatic prose creates a sweeping historical saga from Cairo to the Cape.Mimosa is Bill Schermbrucker’s second published work of fiction. His first book Chameleon was published by Talonbooks to high critical acclaim.

In tribute to the surrealist narrative techniques of André Breton and Robert Desnos, Minor Episodes documents the serial adventures of Minor, the ubiquitous “everymogul” who embodies the economic 1% and keeps musically erotic quixotics on tap. Having entered a “rent in time” that gives each chapter an alternate reality, Minor…

In this prequel within a sequel, Diminuenda discovers that she stands to win a vast inheritance from her estranged father, the inimitable Minor, if she travels into the past and "collects" a number of objets d’art.The cheeky diva travels to classical Greece, becoming the subject of the very painting she…

Sixteen-year-old Miles has run away from home, inviting his childhood companion, the fourteen-year-old Inuit orphan Chateaugué, to join him in a rented flat opposite Notre-Dame-de-Bonsecours in Montreal. There they construct a chaste life for themselves, living as brother and sister. They spend their days riding bicycles wildly through the streets…

Born at the end of the first volume in this autobiographical trilogy, the little Jovette sets off on her journey across the Land of Permanent Sacrifice in Mother of the Grass. Wrenched from her childhood paradise on the banks of the St. Lawrence, she is plunged into the child-battering hell…

“Always carry a bar of soap!” his father advises, as Allstair sets off to drive from Nairobi halfway across Africa in a secondhand Austin in the 1950s. “It wasn’t clear to me how you could fix a leak in the gas tank with soap,” Allstair reports, “but I never doubted…

“Women are at last beginning to talk about their bodies, not only among themselves, but also in print. When I began writing Mrs. Blood … this was not the case. So many women have come up to me and said, ‘Yes, I’ve been through that too—a messy miscarriage, a still…

Brian Fawcett explores the connection between track and existentialism, pool and foolscap, tomato cans and the Knights of the Round Table. In the process, he becomes a horse, confronts the Red Menace and almost drowns himself. This book is for anyone who knows what it’s like to learn—literally and figuratively—the…

Sabaheta is a literature student at the University of Sarajevo when war breaks out in Bosnia-Herzegovina. After her brother is taken from the family by armed thugs and her mother descends into madness, she goes into the forest with her father to join the guerrillas, where she dresses like a…

Édouard, whom we met in The Duchess and the Commoner, a common shoe salesman at the feet of the well-heeled by day; but the “Duchess of Langeais,” star of the transvestite shows on the Main by night, has been left an inheritance by his mother, Victoire. With this money, he…

Set in 1920s Hong Kong, Nine Dragons is a hard-boiled detective fiction with a twist: an inquisition into colonialism, racism, assimilation, and the clash of cultures. It’s the classic mystery/detective genre overlaid with the topical issue of identity – a struggle that any person of colour faces in any society…

Zanzibar, an island set like a jewel in the Indian Ocean off the coast of east Africa is rich in cultural heritage: inhabited since the last Ice Age; birthplace of Kiswahili, the purest form of the Swahili language group; its original hunter-gatherer culture overlaid with Indian, Arab, Persian, Portuguese and…

An exquisite and highly aesthetic coming-of-age novel.

Witty, prickly and fresh, Playing Bare is a mordant satire on the relation between theatre and life. An accomplished actress is on the verge of a nervous breakdown as she directs Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. In her deranged effort to expose the emptiness of playing fictional characters, she casts…

In Real Mothers, a collection of short stories, Audrey Thomas journeys to France, Greece and Africa; she also writes about Galiano Island, B.C., where she lived while these stories were taking shape. Real Mothers concerns itself with women who, in one way or another, are mothers; with mothers and daughters;…

It has been some time since Luc, a 32-year-old actor and Jean-Marc, a 38-year-old French teacher, have seen each other, but the wounds from their seven year love affair are only partially healed. Each of them has current worries as well: Jean-Marc, apparently secure and well off, is tired of…

At the crossroads that lead to the end of childhood, Nana faces the hectic passage of her adolescence and the new responsibilities that fall on her shoulders when her grandmother Josephine approaches death. In parallel, Nina’s rebellious mother Maria, back in Montreal, languishes, torn between conflicting desires.

In Rogue Cells, Oober Mann emerges from his cryobed on high alert in New Haudenosaunee, a nation at war with the mysterious territory Nutella during a critical election year. Citizens here live in dread of celebrities who carry out terrorist actions in defence of their own fundamentalist belief systems, including…

When the electricity inexplicably goes out nationwide, the mundanities of life gradually shift to the rigours of survival. In this post-apocalyptic setting, an unnamed mechanic jumps into his beat-up car and drives east, journeying 4,736 kilometres to reach his dying father.As the narrator’s journey becomes one of essentials – gasoline,…

It’s a splendid moon-filled night at Coley’s Point in August, 1926. Eighteen-year-old Jacob Mercer has returned from Toronto to the tiny Newfoundland outport, hoping to win back his former sweetheart, Mary Snow. But Mary has become engaged to wealthy Jerome McKenzie, and she is still hurt and bewildered by Jacob’s…

In a small town apocalypse, the social order of things can no longer prevail against the larger forces brought to bear on its insular, traditional, incestuous community. Marcel, in a cleansing, destructive rage, sets his murderous sights on the powers that rule this world.Scattered in a Rising Wind records this…

One of Québec’s hottest writers gives an intimate portrayal of life on the streets ... and the importance of animal companionship.

While Mary Burns is a writer of exceptional talent in the “social-realism” school, Shinny’s Girls is a collection of stories which are more than just a “good read.” All of the stories in this collection are about mothers and daughters, written from a sensitive and perceptive “post-feminist” point of view,…

Steve Marsh is a mystery writer, the protagonist of David French’s gripping thriller, Silver Dagger. Soon after his third novel is published, Marsh’s wife receives a series of phone calls and letters that threaten to destroy their marriage. Adultery, blackmail, murder, a figure lurking in the rain. All these classic…

An evening at the opera spills out onto the street and into an odyssey through Montreal by night. The narrator, both innocent and cynical, rushes headlong down what appears to be the road to ruin—or perhaps merely to the loss of his virginity. We follow him from a café called…

Republished with a new introduction, this is Audrey Thomas’s classic coming-of-age novel about madness, loneliness, despair and escape.

Simon Brousseau’s beautifully crafted literary snapshots, each written in a single, stylistically accomplished sentence and featuring a different character, will linger with readers.

With an afterword by Linda M. MorraDiscovered in her papers in 2008, Jane Rule’s autobiography is a rich and culturally significant document that follows the first twenty-one years of her life: the complexities of her relationships with family, friends, and early lovers, and how her sensibilities were fashioned by mentors…

Tales of the Emperor is based on the life of Qin Shi Huang (circa 260–210 BCE), the “First Emperor” – he who unified China, gave it his name, built the Great Wall, entombed an army of terra cotta soldiers, authored legalism, erased history, insinuated governance, and established paranoia as a…

The two one-act plays in Talker’s Town and The Girl Who Swam Forever are set in a small northern B.C. mill town in the 1960s. They portray identical characters and action from entirely different gender and cultural perspectives. In many ways, the two separate works are inter-related coming-of-age stories, with…

In the post-apocalyptic future, 50 years after the last government of turbo-liberals and its president-for-life have been elected, a group of researchers convenes a Congress to address the curious cultural phenomenon of the Baldwins, whose stories have been gathered and archived by the chroniclers since the end of history. “Who…

Singularly obsessed with his all-consuming passion for Anna, the object of his adolescent desire, the photographer Christophe Langelier is beside himself. Ten years ago, he failed the test of eating a bicycle for her as proof of his love and devotion. Since then, he has created a photographic catalogue of…

In the heart of the Latin Quarter, meeting place of marginal characters of all sorts, Céline Poulin works the night shift at a cheap and popular restaurant, Le Sélect, serving hamburger platters and spaghetti and meatballs to student misfits, transvestites, hookers and queens from the Main—Montreal’s disreputable Boulevard Saint-Laurent. Hanging…

When Fine Dumas’s notorious transvestite Boudoir is shut down after Expo 67, Céline is condemned to go back to working as a waitress at Le Sélect, attending to the frustrated appetites and exquisite pathos of its exotic clientele. Then a newcomer appears, the gorgeous Gilbert Forget, a musician who is…

The Jonathan Swift of the bingo hall and elder-care, the Alexander Pope of pet-care and the dinner parties of the liberal intelligentsia, Marion Farrant continues her assault on the unaccountably disaffected and disillusioned of the Western world with The Breakdown So Far, her eighth volume of extremely short stories for…

The Circus Performers’ Bar is a second collection of finely crafted stories by David Arnason, written in every conceivable style: the urbane New Yorker story, the fireside chat, the war correspondent’s report, the poignant personal memoir and the hysterical small-town gossip. Hilarious role reversals and role substitutions provide the context…

It’s hard to worry about the future when you’re laughing at the hilarious absurdity of daily life. The days we live go by like slugs eating their way through leaves; everything changes, yet nothing changes, and the years soon accumulate. Who doesn’t read their daily horoscope, searching for guidance about…

(This third volume in the Chronicles of the Plateau Mont-Royal—an epic series of novels which imagines the lives of the characters of Tremblay’s plays—deals with an explicitly gay thematic: Tremblay’s metaphor for the Québécois desire for a more glamorous identity on the world stage.)This is the third volume in Michel…

According to the 19th-century historian Michelet, “Les fées” were women who would rather sing than pray. For this crime, they were punished by being imprisoned in containers that would be opened only at the end of time. In Les fées ont soif (The Fairies Are Thirsty) Denise Bocher takes this…

It is the glorious second day of May, 1942. The sun is drawing the damp from earth still heavy with the end of a long Quebec winter, the budding branches of the trees along rue Fabre and in Parc Lafontaine of the Plateau Mont Royal ache to release their leaves…

In 2003, a mild-mannered historian named Moses Lapinsky jots down notes for a biography. It is to tell the tale of his father Sonny, a famous Jewish- Canadian boxer. As Moses buries himself in his research, he is transported back in time to the pivotal events of his father’s life.…

Daniel Brooks’s The Full Light of Day is a modern epic tragedy, a timely exploration of crumbling privilege and power, beautifully told and innovative in form. Mary’s family finds itself in serious difficulty, and some bad decisions lead to disaster. Mary soon falls ill, and as she is dying wrestles…

It’s May 1922, wedding preparations are in full swing, and old memories, past desires, and big regrets threaten to turn the big celebration into a big melee.

A delightful collection of seventy miniature fictions and comics riffing on the theme of happiness, The Great Happiness offers a series of lively antidotes to the current climate of doom.

Set between 1913 and 1963 in one of Montreal’s well-known, upper-middle-class suburban neighbourhoods, Martine Desjardins’s The Green Chamber is a fast-paced, highly atmospheric, riveting novel that chronicles the decline of a wealthy French-Canadian family over the course of three generations.Every house has its secrets, but none hides them better than…

The Happiest Man in the World looks under the carpet of post-modernism to search for competence and humour in a world of habitual assumptions about social, political, and sexual awareness. The characters, and the author, in these stories discover that their roles, and their role models are not as clear…

Talonbooks is pleased to announce a new edition of one of Michel Tremblay’s most unusual novels. First published in English translation by M&S in 1989 under the title The Heart Laid Bare [Le coeur découvert, Leméac, 1986], British and American rights to this novel were sold to Serpent’s Tail, who…

A northern Canadian village, one of many remote settlements dotting the Quebec landscape, is in transition. Originally dependent on subsistence farming and logging, supplemented by winter hunting, its economy has gradually changed over the years: first increasingly dependent on guiding southern urbanites on hunting trips; then on providing a habitat…

As a way to draw visitors to their isolated fishing village on Quebec’s North Shore, the tourist bureau commissions a documentary film recreating life as it was lived there in the 1940s and 50s. To gather material for the project, the filmmaker is sent in search of Rose Brouillard, now…

Emily Carr lived in a magical place that she had christened The House of All Sorts. In this House which is open to all that is vital on Earth, Emily Carr, with all her greatness and her imperfections, receives visitors from her planet: Lizzie, her sister, is greeted with war…

For one year in her life, Mary Meigs and her long-term lover and friend, Marie-Claire Blais, lived in a ménage à trois with the beautiful and powerful “Andrée.” After the end of their stormy three-way relationship, both Marie-Claire and Andrée, who are fiction writers, embodied their memories in novels. The…

The Mystery Play is a detective story, a ghost story, and a memory play: a theatrical blending of Wit and The Woman In Black. Though fully self-contained, The Mystery Play is also the second in a trilogy about crime-solving Sister Vivian Salter, a flinty, fifty-ish Catholic nun forced into the…

Edgar, a timid, asocial thirty-something, witnesses the brutal rape of a young woman and subsequently bears the unconscious victim home. Haunted by the death of his overbearing mother, he pledges to act as the mysterious woman’s saviour. Gothic and darkly humorous, The Obese Christ explores the nebulous divide between Good…

Written in the tradition of Umberto Eco and Manuel Puig, The Pagan Wall is a first novel by a master storyteller. What appears on the surface as a murder mystery set in Alsatia and the Rhineland, involving international arms dealers, dangerous liaisons, and every other known mystery novel archetype, The…

Evelyn is an extraordinary product of a childhood tyrannized by her emotionally frigid and abusive mother, whose life centres on her pretentiously formal weekly bridge games and her banner-bearing role in the local Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire, even though her ancestors fought on the side of the American…

James Hoffman, George Ryga’s biographer, provides a brilliant guide to the reader of this collection, with a compelling reappraisal of Ryga’s fiction as far ahead of its time. The three short novels included here—Hungry Hills, Ballad of a Stonepicker and Night Desk—draw from the same large canvas of rural, depression-era…

Here are twenty-one user-friendly tales, set in the Okanagan Valley, Austria, Washington, Nanaimo, the Yukon, Iceland, Germany, the future — and Daphne’s Lunch Diner. The Rain Barrel is George Bowering’s first collection of short stories since 1983. Ten years in the making, these stories display Bowering’s meticulous attention to the…

From the theatre of Euripides to the theatre of Montreal’s Main, Michel Tremblay casts some of his most famous and exotic personae, The Duchess, Fine Dumas, Jean-le-Décollé and Babalu, in a whole new light in his new Notebooks. Unlike his Plateau Mount Royal novels, wherein these flamboyant transvestites and their…

David French’s brilliant translation of The Seagull, in collaboration with Russian scholar, Donna Orwin, is at one and the same time a revitalization of a Russian theatre classic, and French’s personal tribute to one of the greatest playwrights of all time.Cast of 5 women and 8 men.

An industrial biography that investigates personal myths and the great “machines” that drive the world to the abyss of development.

“Anthropologist of the absurd” and “brave iconoclast,” M.A.C. Farrant positively bristles in this three-part novel-length work of prose fragments, snippets, questions, speculations, and meditations, by turns philosophical, dark, comedic, and lyrical in its attempts to imagine a multitude of possible futures for our accelerated age. It offers her readers nothing…

Roughly based on The Trial by Franz Kafka, this black comedy changes the lead character to a modern business woman who finds herself accused of an unknown crime. The more she delves into the bureaucratic nightmare the more her ordered, little world unravels and the more she is entangled in…

After surviving a major accident, a man is trapped in a village buried in the snow and cut off from the world by a nationwide power failure. He is entrusted to Matthias, a taciturn old man who agrees to heal his wounds in exchange for wood, food, and eventual escape from the village. Will they manage to stand up against external threats and intimate pitfalls

City of Victoria Butler Book Prize: M.A.C. Farrant, The World Afloat (Winner)In The World Afloat, a series of seventy-five “miniatures” that melds narrative with elements of prose poem and farce, master of the absurd and expert observer M.A.C. Farrant peers into the complexities of human experience – through the rear…

Jane Rule’s first collection of short stories, some of which were first published in The Ladder, the first nationally distributed lesbian publication in the United States. Jane Rule is also the author of Desert of the Heart and Memory Board.In the sensual and tender “Middle Children,” two closeted young lesbians…

This is the second of five novels in Michel Tremblay’s Plateau Mont-Royal series, an evocative, magical retelling of the author’s own birth, childhood, and adolescence in a working-class Montreal neighbourhood populated by eccentrics, dreamers and imaginary characters of mythic proportions.Three schoolgirls, “Thérèse ’n’ Pierrette” and their friend Simone, are caught…

In this contemplative novel-poem, Jean-François Beauchemin invites us to share in the inner world of the grieving Mr. Bartolomé, who, following the mysterious disappearance of his young son, wanders and wonders, seeking to transcend his pain by encountering something larger than himself. Continuously occupied by the memory of his lost…

Michel Tremblay’s Twists of Fate gathers volumes 6 and 7 of the critically acclaimed Desrosiers Diaspora series of novels, If by Chance and Destination Paradise. In If by Chance, set in 1925, the great Ti-Lou, the famous She-Wolf of Ottawa, returns to Montréal. After a fruitful career at the Château…

Award-winning author Meredith Quartermain’s second novel and seventh book, U Girl, is a coming-of-age story set in Vancouver in 1972, a city crossed between love-in hip and forest-corp square. Frances Nelson escapes her small-town background to attend first-year university in the big city. "You’ve got to find the great love,"…

Since Morris Panych’s classic black comedy, Vigil, premiered in 1996, it has been produced throughout North America, the United Kingdom and Europe, including a 2009 Off-Broadway production, which opened to rave reviews, a run as Auntie & Me in London and, most recently, shows at the Mark Taper Forum in…

Waiting for the Parade is John Murrell’s play, set in Calgary during World War II, in which five women gather to work for the war effort while their men are away. Waiting for the Parade was first performed by Alberta Theatre Projects, Calgary. Subsequently, it has been performed by Northern…

A love story in which a faded old queen finds his life slipping away from him along with his young lover, who meets a new, younger man.“One day when I was sitting in a tiny little basement bar I noticed a man sitting alone at the bar—an elegant old queen…

The third volume in Marchessault’s autobiographically based trilogy. White Pebbles in the Dark Forests traces a reconciliation between men and women, children and parents, animals and humans, and the past and future as it looks at the connections between the visible and the invisible. Following Like a Child of the…

Arsenault’s Rabelaisian fantasy is a gothic tale of the macabre and the bizarre, of black magicians and alchemists, and of the life and times of Zora Marjanna Lavanko, the daughter of a brutish tripe-dresser who dies for love. This surreal novel is set in the murky fictional domain of the…