Signature Editions

Give Us This Day is a striking collection of short fiction that explores the weight of the past through a kaleidoscope of voices and styles. From retired grandparents thrust into unexpected childcare parenthood to young labourers adrift in mines and road crews, from teachers struggling to find meaning in their classrooms to couples at a crossroads, these stories capture the quiet reckonings of everyday existence. Whether intimate or expansive, meditative or urgent, each story reveals how missteps and circumstances shape identity, and how, for many, the past is never truly left behind. Give Us This Day is a profound meditation on regret, resilience, and the fragile beauty of human connection.

Sergeant Roxanne Calloway should be on maternity leave for six more weeks--but when a body turns up in a sunflower field near her home in Manitoba's Interlake region, she can't resist the pull of duty. Especially when the victim is Coop Jenkins, a former Winnipeg police detective who once saved her life.Drawn into the case, Roxanne is determined to find Coop's killer. But when the Major Crimes sergeant assigned to the investigation is also murdered, the danger becomes all too real. Her partner, Matt, fears she's getting too close--too emotionally involved, too at risk.Teaming up with Coop's fierce and grieving daughter, Hailey, Roxanne is prepared to go all the way. But at what cost?

George Amabile's thirteenth book and newest collection of poetry, Seeing Things, is a poetic journey through clarity and distortion, presence and memory, grief and wonder. Structured in three movements, Seeing Things probes what lies beneath the visible world. Whether contemplating the current political climate, examining mundane objects, or reflecting on past experiences, this collection traces the current of the river of life and the invisible forces and laws that poet and reader alike will never understand. From quiet elegies to fierce political commentary, from meditative stillness to the surreal, Seeing Things celebrates the fragile, persistent beauty of looking closer.

These interconnected short stories navigate love, loss, and the search for meaning in the wake of tragedy. Clare's husband Richard is battling cancer in St. Boniface Hospital, and when his cellphone is stolen, she embarks on a restless search, tracking its signal through the city--trying to grasp onto something tangible as everything familiar slips away. Tracing the threads of Clare and Richard's relationship, from the exhilaration of their first meeting to the raw ache of his absence, Seeing You Home is an intimate portrait of devotion, grief, and the impossible task of finding a way forward.

Gerry Coneybear has her hands full. Between her work as a cartoonist and children's book author, raising one-year-old Dot with partner Doug, and caring for the 19 cats her late aunt left her--along with the rambling old house known as The Maples--life in the village of Lovering on the Ottawa River is anything but quiet. Add a busy social calendar, and Gerry is already stretched thin.So what does she do? She signs up for a three-month, once-a-week art conservation internship in downtown Montreal. It's chaotic, yes--but also invigorating. Gerry finds purpose volunteering at a women's shelter, strikes up a friendship with a homeless man, and starts to notice a troubling pattern of thefts--small and not-so-small--back home in Lovering.Theft is one thing. But when a suspicious death rocks the village, Gerry and her faithful friend Prudence are once again pulled into a mystery with deadly consequences.

Richard Suttle's just taken a detour from his quiet life as a fraud investigator in Winnipeg--into the heart of Mexico City's dark underworld. His mission? Find Brendan Thorst, the reckless 22-year-old son of his ailing high school friend.Brendan's no saint. He's a spoiled troublemaker who vanished after raising the ire of brutal cartels and street dealers by selling drugs to unsuspecting tourists. But that's only the surface.The real story is far more twisted--and deadly. Brendan's on the run after threatening to expose a powerful televangelist who's hiding a horrifying secret: a child porn operation protected by corrupt cops and blind faith.Now Suttle must navigate a lethal maze of deception, violence, and betrayal. Because in this city, the only thing more dangerous than the criminals is the man who's supposed to be on your side.

Launch thrusts readers into the life of Theo Strahl, a quirky artist and inventor from Winnipeg who's spent the past two decades happily scavenging back lanes and transforming scrap into art. But beneath his contented exterior, Theo has always been quietly expecting the world to end within his lifetime.On his fortieth birthday, Theo's fears are brought to life when an otherworldly voice named Ford disrupts his celebration, commanding him to build a Noah's Ark-esque spaceship to escape the doomed planet. As someone who's convinced that the countdown to global collapse is ticking away, Ford's message feels disturbingly plausible. In the weeks that follow, Theo becomes consumed by Ford's impossible task, unraveling his once-happy life as he prepares to escape from a world he's always feared would implode. His obsession strains his marriage and alienates his son -- leaving Theo to confront his deepest fears about life, love, and the meaning of survival.Launch explores the haunting echoes of Cold War trauma, the fragility of family bonds, and the eternal struggle between hope and despair. In a world on the brink of ruin, can Theo salvage his relationships -- or will his journey to the stars tear everything apart?

Tilting Towards Joy is a collection of interconnected stories that trace the delicate threads binding lives across continents and through time. Set against the backdrop of rural France, each story follows familiar characters through unfamiliar terrain, offering insight into how we navigate new experiences, unexpected conflicts, and shifting relationships.Among the characters we meet are an empty-nest couple who trade their Edmonton home for a farmhouse in rural France; a young girl who exacts revenge on her siblings by serving an unconventional "dessert"; a woman who after being scammed chooses to view the situation with hope rather than pessimism; visiting friends who show their true colours; and siblings hurriedly preparing for a wildfire evacuation. Each story, grounded in a moment of personal reckoning, pulses with a sense of yearning -- tilting always toward the possibility of joy, even as it remains just out of reach.

Gerry Coneybear is back from vacation and settling in for the last three months of her pregnancy -- or trying to settle. She's busy with her work as a cartoonist and children's book author; looking after the twenty cats her aunt bequeathed her along with the big old house on the Ottawa River; and trying to blend her solitary life with her cats with that of her boyfriend Doug and his three almost adult sons.Gerry is nervous about navigating motherhood for the first time without her mom but finds support from her new friends at her prenatal yoga class. Baby showers, candy-making, and prepping the nursery fill her free time -- but things take a dark turn when Gerry stumbles upon a body at a local archeological dig site, soon followed by news of the suspicious suicide of her new friend's husband.As a massive winter storm brews, Gerry -- now almost nine months pregnant -- finds herself snowed in, with a missing cat and a couple of ghosts. With danger lurking close to home, can Gerry piece together the clues before her due date?

It is June 1940 and fifteen-year-old Olivia Baldini's idyllic English life is shattered as Britain declares war on Italy. With hyperthymesia, Olivia possesses an extraordinary ability to recall information with vivid detail, a gift that makes her invaluable to Churchill's secret sabotage army, the Special Operations Executive (SOE). Trained in nursing, coding, and espionage, Olivia is dispatched behind enemy lines in Italy, aiding partisans and resistance fighters.Nino Fabris, dreaming of world travel with the merchant marines, is thrust into the war when his ship is conscripted. Captured in North Africa and sent to a POW camp in Kenya, Nino seizes a chance for freedom by joining the SOE.In the chaos of war, Olivia and Nino's paths intertwine. The Cipher is a gripping tale of love, resilience, and the power of the truth -- and who you trust with it.

Inheriting the Skipper's House from her late aunt Deirdre MacPhail, a famed Scottish writer, looks like the solution to all Elspeth Laird's financial problems -- but this inheritance comes with a dark legacy.New to Sulla Island's wild beauty and fierce weather, Elspeth soon discovers a community divided by her aunt's memory. Some cherish the tourism Deirdre brought, while others blame her for ruining their traditional way of life. Practical jokes escalate to sinister threats, and a murder confirms Elspeth's worst fears: a killer is among them. With tensions rising and allies scarce, Elspeth must navigate a web of secrets and old grudges.As legend says, the Skipper's House brings doom to its owners. Elspeth must unravel the truth before she becomes the next victim of Sulla Island's deadly legacy.

Dan Yashinsky's son Jacob died tragically in a car accident at the age of 26. Dan, Jacob and Jacob's best friend Effie were driving back to Toronto after a magical trip to Montreal when Dan fell asleep at the wheel and crashed. Dan and Effie survived, but Jacob did not. When the unimaginable happens--a parent is still somehow here but their child is gone--all that's left are stories. In the process of grieving his son, Dan realized that he was now Jacob's storykeeper, and I Am Full is Jacob's story.Jacob's death is the least interesting thing about him. How he lived, the kind of man he became, is what matters most. All his life, Jacob had struggled with Prader-Willi Syndrome, but rather than let it defeat him, he became an advocate for people suffering from PWS as well as people coping with various other disabilities. He was a jewelry-maker, a photographer, a songwriter, a TPS crossing guard, and an avid fisherman. Six months after Jacob's death, Dan began to gather and create the texts that make up this chronicle, all the while guided by Jacob's imagined voice. The events in I Am Full are drawn from many periods of Jacob's life. Much of it--poems, sayings, speeches, letters, notes--are in Jacob's own words and the rest is told in his imagined voice narrating things that Dan saw him do or hear him talk about. Jacob's voice has been captured and carried in this unique book, which goes beyond the terrible grief of losing a child to preserving and sharing his story.

When Landon and Joy meet they feel an instant connection and quickly become inseparable. One day shortly after they've met, they take a trip to view The Hart Farm, an idyllic property located in a remote area. It's perfect, with room for Landon to set up his carpentry shop and Joy to have an art studio. The real estate agent feels complete disclosure of the property's tragic and potentially violent past is necessary but Landon and Joy decide ignorance is bliss and ask to not be told the details. They're in love and smitten with the farm and decide on the spot to buy it.As they spend their days creating art, reading, cooking for each other, listening to music, and making love, they can barely believe their good fortune. However, when the heat of summer--as well as their initial infatuation--begins to wane, Landon and Joy realize how little they know about each other or the house they now call home. They begin to feel a mounting sense of danger and uncertainty about what they used to delight in--the mysterious and tragic history of The Hart Farm, the wolves that prowl in the dark of night, and the near stranger they share a bed with.In the Country in the Dark is a thrilling psychological exploration of the secrets we keep and why, the obsessions we live with, the love we all need, the family we sometimes find--and the lengths we might go to keep it.

Housekeeper Prudence Crick expects a peaceful month by the river housesitting at The Maples, her employer Gerry Coneybear's beautiful old home. (And cat-sitting Gerry's twenty cats, too!) But instead of peace she gets trouble. Ghosts of the past haunt her, including her murdered bank robber ex-husband. And she's bedevilled by the present. When two houses are burned to the ground in suspicious circumstances, she's drawn to the scene of the crime and into the lives of its victims, including one uncatchable cat. But more: she's reached a crossroads. Should she change jobs? Buy a new home? Get married? And what should she bake for that tea party she's hosting?Louise Carson's latest cozy mystery is full of delectable desserts, fast friendships, and, of course, an abundance of cats.

A hot dry summer and a pall of smoke from the forest fires drifts over the lakeshore. Still, tourists and cottagers flock to Cullen Village, including the Borthwicks, who own Hazeldean, a treasured 100-year-old heritage cottage. Family matriarch Lois Borthwick, in a nearby care home, no longer recognizes any of her four children, each of whom has a decidedly different plan for the old place. The eldest, Donna, a successful local realtor married to a well-known MP, wants to tear it down and build anew. When Donna's lifeless body is found hanged from a pier, the death is ruled a suicide. Case closed. Or is it?After a life-threatening incident with the Major Crimes Unit, Sergeant Roxanne Calloway has decided to put family before ambition and seek a quieter, safer life with her young son. She now runs the local RCMP detachment in the heart of cottage country, and protocol dictates that she has no reason to participate in the Borthwick investigation, which is being led by her former protegee, Izzy McBain. As more of the unlucky Borthwick clan succumb to foul play, however, Roxanne cannot help but be drawn in.

The three novellas in The Emptiest Quarter find their inspiration in the sands and streets of Abu Dhabi, where author Raymond Beauchemin lived for four years, a time that overlapped with the building of the Louvre and Guggenheim museums and the opening of Sorbonne and NYU campuses, the convulsions of the Arab Spring and the eruption of civil war in Syria. The characters who populate The Emptiest Quarter live at both the centre and the fringes of the conflict between preservation and progress, including sheikhs, western oil-and-gas men, burned-out journalists, pearl divers, and Filipina caregivers, all striving to find themselves, to find love, to find balance in ever-shifting sands.

The eleven interconnected stories in The World Is But a Broken Heart follow the Fitzpatricks, a blue-collar family constantly followed by bad luck. Dale, Kenny, and Patrick are tied to each other as only brothers can be. They antagonize each other, fight and argue. More importantly, they look out for one another in a sometimes-violent household. These stories do not shy away from difficult truths: parents who struggle to be parents; a mother who falls into despair; a father numbed by killing for a living; a sudden and violent death during a strike at a meat packing plant; a life insurance salesman who specializes in selling to the bereaved; a grieving student who finds comfort in a relationship with a teacher; and finally, a grown man who makes amends with his estranged--and dying-brother. This coming-of-age collection of stories is a testament to the human spirit and the unbreakable bond between brothers.

After a dangerous incident, Sergeant Roxanne Calloway has left the RCMP's Major Crimes Unit and is now working as the Team Commander of the Fiskar Bay detachment. Roxanne is adjusting to her new job when the body of retired Sergeant Bill Gilchrist, her predecessor, is discovered in a ditch at the side of the road. Spring in Fiskar Bay often means flooding as the normally peaceful stream--home to ducks and teals and the occasional blue heron during the warmer months--fills to the top of its banks with fast-moving, murky brown water, sweeping chunks of ice and broken tree branches along with it. The locals from the close-knit community show up in droves to help sandbag and Roxanne organizes the local RCMP to help with the effort. But when another RCMP officer is found dead, tensions begin to rise as quickly as the water levels. Roxanne moved to Fiskar Bay to keep herself out of harm's way, but with a cop killer on the loose, she isn't sure who she can trust. Can Roxanne find the killer before it's too late?

Karin Martel had never considered what happened to her in ninth-grade shop class as sexual abuse. So when she sees a therapist to talk about the stress of her job as a 911 call-taker and police dispatcher, she surprises herself by suddenly bringing up the memory of the groping she endured in high school. In her job, Karin deals with victims of abuse on a regular basis but has never identified herself as one of them. Shop Class Hall Pass delves into the difficult eighteen months of therapy as she unravels the serious consequences of trauma and recognizes the impact trauma has on her callers and in her community. She also must come to terms with the realization that for thirty-five years she has been trying to fix, or control, or do, or not do whatever it was that made the boy sexually assault her all year in class, humiliating her in front of her classmates and teacher. Most importantly, Karin learns to feel compassion for her past, current, and future self.

Struggling mystery author Claire Denman is enjoying a relaxing vacation at her brother's secluded house in the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia after helping a wealthy elderly woman move her cats across the country. The woman happens to be the wife of the man Claire had an affair with 30 years ago and she happens to be renting Claire's brother's rental property next door. Claire's days are filled with writing poetry, birdwatching, and exploring the nearby town. But then strange things begin to occur on the property. Claire finds messes she doesn't remember making, objects start to go missing, and entire days are seemingly missing from Claire's memory. So, when the elderly lady is found murdered, how can Claire be sure she wasn't somehow involved? The Last Unsuitable Man is a slow-burn thriller filled with twists that no one--least of all the victim--could see coming.

In Accidents, her third collection of poems, Genni Gunn takes us on a roller coaster ride through past and present in different continents, to explore the various upheavals that alter our lives. From her birthplace in Trieste, where she attempts to unravel the mysterious lives of her parents; to Vancouver with its urban alienation and attraction; to Burma, where disruptions are a way of life under the Generals. Along the way, she treats us to a sardonic and sometimes appalling history of masks, and of spontaneous combustion. Poem by poem, Gunn examines the emotional, political, and geological upheaval that inevitably shape us as family members, as lovers, and as citizens, and the humble talismans we carry as reminders of the past. Heartbreak and humour leaven and disrupt these poems in equal measure, as does love.

The 14 stories in Exit Strategies explore the subtleties of memory and storytelling, masterfully creating the universal picture from the quotidian details. These stories do not shy away from difficult truths: a former actuary with a head injury which has robbed her of her mental acuity takes a job caring for a defiant farmer who is facing the decline of his body and his property; an elderly Belgian woman refuses to continue a road trip in BC when her soon-to-be-Canadian son and his dollhouse-obsessed girlfriend stop to help a stranded motorist; an intellectually disabled woman kidnaps three Black children and has the happiest day of her life. This collection gives voice to characters who are not always heard.

Canadian literary star Gordon Bridge is delighted with his celebrity, his family, and his bond with fellow writer Taylor Shepherd. But when Bridge publishes a scathing review of Shepherd's new novel, demonstrating how true critical insight is unswayed by personal loyalty, his hubris destroys the friendship, and his world begins to crumble. Something strange emerges out of Bridge's pain: an old-fashioned sonnet sequence, weirdly modern in content, as it focuses on CBC radio hosts. Its success, driven by every CBC arts show in the country, only deepens Bridge's guilt and accelerates a crippling series of side-effects. Finally, he starts a memoir, a sometimes hilarious, but urgent attempt to come to terms with his past and reshape his present. The result, Losing Shepherd, is a testament to literature and also to friendship, its power to lift and its ability to destroy.

Joel Robert Ferguson grew up in a family of working-class evangelical Baptists in the Maritimes and found an escape from that parochial world in literature. In his twenties, that escape became literal, as he hitchhiked across the country, working odd jobs. These experiences are reflected in his first poetry collection The Lost Cafeteria.The idea of place and transience forms the core around which the poems in this collection orbit. Stylistically, the poems vary, but often strive for a synthesis between experimental and traditional. Ferguson's sonically dense political poems and elegies confront the ways in which working-class masculinity is used by capitalism and white supremacism.

It's late spring and young artist Gerry Coneybear and her twenty cats are thrilled to finally be able to get out of the house and into the garden surrounding her 200-year-old house on the Ottawa River. But Gerry is having a time keeping her curious cats in their own yard, safe from the new neighbours' large dog. Her neighbours' marriage isn't quite what it should be, and when the philandering husband is murdered, the wife is the obvious suspect. Or ought to be. As events unfold next door, Gerry watches from her garden, where she picks rhubarb, weeds, and plants her flowers, catnip and herbs, all supervised by her cats and her friend and part-time housekeeper Prudence. A terrible car crash, an eccentric train engineer (and his equally eccentric wife), and a midnight visit to the house next door all contribute to this cozy mystery coming out all right in the end. And there's jam-making. And ghosts.

The horizon is a type of boundary phenomenon. This book embraces the horizon literally understood, as the apparent boundary between earth and sky. It also draws on various metaphorical horizons, tracing the limits of human perception, knowledge and experience. It is especially attentive to the horizons of the Anthropocene, reflecting on their significance for us as a species and as cultural and historical beings, bound to human and other-than-human communities of various sorts. The "Adagio" poems explore changes that are pending, as well as already underway, in the wake of global warming and sea level rise. Tracing the arc of human perception, they pause in places that are - like our shadow or skin - part us and part of the world that surrounds us.

If Body Work begins by writing desire through a belief in the stability of the physical body, this is undone in exploring symptoms of disease, new self-knowledge and rewriting one's personal story. Because Body Work explicitly undertakes to write of a protracted and often painful period of chronic illness, these poems complicate notions of ability and disability. Connecting all six long poems are prose footnotes chronicling a natural history of human skin. This emphasis on skin, as metaphor for the body, allows for both an exploration of the desire for connection as well as a fear of vulnerability. Body Work is also interested in expanding notions of what poetry is, or could be, and is especially interested in both language play and innovative lyricism. Of this poetry, Julia Emberley, editor of English Studies in Canada says: "Emilia Nielsen plays the dermographer and writes the skin as if she is wearing its language inside out. There is a lusciousness in Nielsen's language; you can not only taste the words but also feel the desire for touch in them." In spare, arresting language, Body Work explores not only pleasure but pain, wondering how to repair a self forever changed by illness.

In Electric Affinities, Michael Pacey's second collection, everyday household items become points of departure into wonder -- a handsaw becomes a “bird hooded, strung with jesses, strops with its beak.” A cup becomes “a tool for gripping liquids.” Mirrors are “windows turned inside out, always concentrating, trying to memorize each detail” and scissors are “Perpetually plural, twin sisters fastened together.” While it is Pacey’s particular magic to discover the amazing alchemical properties of everyday objects, in Electric Affinities he also illuminates the poetic “current” that connects them to larger questions of human nature, language and the environment.

Navigating through tragedy with sincere inquiry, Learning to Love a River explores unlikely existences in and of Thunder Bay, a small northern Ontario city which is rife with stereotype and misconception. With its insider's perspective, this collection offers a sympathetic but frank accounting for these misconceptions, challenging facile assumptions about race and class.Deep down, the poems are asking important epistemological and ontological questions. But, they are also reminding us to try and move forward with a light heart, while looking for the best in others.

George Amabile's eleventh book and newest collection of poetry explores the relationships between civilization, technology, empire and human violence, theatres of war, the collateral damage of military occupation, the machinations of power politics, oil spills, destruction of the environment, PTSD, and other characteristics of what we call "world events." These are tough poems for tough times -- our times -- when the human cost of military conflict, environmental disaster and gun violence have become the daily staple of news headlines. Provocative, unflinching and at times raw with the poet's fury at unfathomable acts, Amabile's poems converge as an urgent libretto against the militaristic tendencies that surround us, inciting a march toward the creation of a more peaceful and sincere world.

1970. The FLQ has kidnapped and murdered Pierre Laporte. For the narrator, growing up in those days meant living through one of the darkest episodes in Canadian history-a time when army tanks rolled through the streets and bombings and other random acts of violence became l'ordre du jour. Shortlisted for the QWF A.M. Klein Poetry Award, October is a collection of poetry set in the quiet Montreal suburb of Saint Lambert, where the clash between the "two solitudes" came to a head in 1970 with the kidnapping and subsequent murder of Pierre Laporte by the FLQ. For the narrator, growing up in those days meant living through one of the darkest episodes in Canadian history, a time when army tanks, bombings and other random acts of violence became l'ordre du jour.October spans three decades of Quebec life, chronicling one woman's attempt to forge some kind of reconciliation between the "warring" cultures, to find the common ground of the French and the English. It is a personal, unabashed look at her own marriage to a French Quebecer which finds her straddling two worlds, two cultures, two very different mentalities. From start to end, echoes of the October Crisis are carefully woven into the text, a constant reminder that the fractious past is never very far behind.

This is a book of the inner sea. Language, concept, and form alternate holding the depths. That broken diamond of sun on rough waters: she speaks egalitarian. That cool glass of viridian water just within reach of the surface: water daemons flit through meaning. Obeying the dictates of water, Put Your Hand in Mine guides us through a deep love of the world and all beings in it. It matters not, the pain, nor the broken flippers, nor the sting in old wounds. Reading this is a cleansing, a claim of survival against iron pleats of loneliness.