Thistledown Press

Fierce, clear-eyed poems that confront head on the struggle to have faith in some kind of future in our complex, ecologically challenged world. U ALIVE, Chelsea Coupal's second poetry collection, documents the cusp between young adulthood and new motherhood, between being responsible for no one but yourself — and having the responsibility of a newborn generation in your arms. And with parenthood comes a sharp new awareness of mortality and its ubiquitous threat. The collection tracks the past through its many collisions with the present, as the speaker moves between her new existence as a mother and the tumult of her life as a single person in her 20s. The poems deal with being pregnant in the pandemic, and giving birth — while being unable to dismiss or forget the wild parties and romantic misadventures that came before settling into a life in the city with a partner. The collection is structured around innovative "calendar" poems taking us through a full year, in which the author explores intersections and transitions between childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, between the death of grandparents and the birth of the great grandchild they will not meet. Many poems are based on a deep connection with the life and land in rural Saskatchewan, the beauty of the brilliant yellow canola fields contrasting harshly with the sometimes toxic and disheartening realities of agribusiness. These poems are honest, visceral, sensual, and alight with startling rhythmic cadences. The collection will appeal to millennial readers, especially women, new mothers, and women in Western Canada, as well as readers who know the Prairies well, or who grew up or live rurally, as well as younger fans of Canadian poetry.

This atmospheric coming-of-age tale follows Ben, a sensitive boy struggling to unravel his family history while caught in the vortex of other people's lives. Vancouver Island, 1875. Three-year-old Ben comes to live with Agda and her volatile husband James in their small wilderness cabin. Entranced by the lushly overarching rainforest, he helps his loving adoptive mere in the garden, learns his letters at the kitchen table and wonders what it would be like to go to school. When James takes Ben, age nine, on a whisky run, the boy is plunged into the rough world of a ramshackle coastal city. Left alone in a canoe he can barely paddle, he is saved from drowning by a man who is later found dead in the same sea. The frightened boy waits for James to reappear while in the care of James's sweet but listless niece Lily. When James and Ben return to the cabin, they find Agda injured and limping badly. In a few days, Agda is dead. And grieving Ben suspects James of being involved in both sudden deaths. The nearby Stenhouse farm becomes Ben's refuge, where he helps with chores and grows up alongside their lively children, including spiky, truth-telling Effie. When James dies, seventeen-year-old Ben is offered a home there as the hired man. First, though, he makes the wilderness trek to the city, to give Lily a bequest from James. With the encroaching rainforest and the sea always ready to reclaim the poor streets and crude dwellings of the tumultuous city, Ben gets hopelessly entangled with Lily and other new friends. The longer Ben stays, the more he learns about his birth mother -- and the farther he is from the Stenhouse farm. Only when he knows who he really is, and frees himself from everyone else's plans for him, can he act on his own desires and claim his place in the world.

This beautifully illustrated Métis picture book is book is fully bilingual in Michif and English. A feast for the eyes and a tickle for the funny bone, Kohkum cooks up a HUGE order of bannock in her own kitchen, for the Queen and 299 guests! This lively and whimsical tale begins with a letter from the government asking Kohkum to cook bannock for the Royal visit. Kohkum's grandson Xavier is as excited as she is, until they do the math and are shocked to learn that they are cooking not just for the Queen but for her entourage and guests too. A mad scramble ensues, with a rushed trip to the grocery store to buy a ridiculous amount of flour and milk, and a perilous trip home with the car stuffed with supplies and Xavier riding on the roof. Several aunties come to the rescue, helping with bannock assembly and sharing in the excitement of cooking for the Queen. Written by an educator, this story provides many opportunities to count in English and Michif, with many laughs along the way as Kohkum, aunties, and Xavier scramble to cook the bannock in time for the Queen's visit. Boldly colourful, humourous illustrations by illustrator Hawlii Pichette bring this entertaining story to life. Full translation makes this book ideal for in-class cultural learning and Michif language acquisition.

In this inspiring memoir rich with the flavours of other cultures, the author journeys by bike, on foot, by bus, plane, and train in her quest to understand the lives of the people she meets. You know you're not on a typical turista tour when you read, "We stopped for a mid-day lunch of piranha and hiked to a lagoon." This writer's explorations are unpredictable, sometimes perilous, often amusing, and always fascinating. While Elizabeth J. Haynes is an outsider -- in the Philippines as a volunteer working with disabled children, at a pig killing in a remote Indonesian village, or even at a family wedding in rural North Carolina -- she offers a compassionate view of those around her. Insights and revelations emerge from stories Haynes tells about the vagaries of the human heart. Cycling with her sister in Cuba, she hopes her sister will find the strength to leave a difficult relationship. On a working trip in Armenia, she recalls a lost love; in Cambodia, in an encounter with a little girl, she faces the tragedy of the Khmer Rouge regime. Like many first-world travellers, she is pained by the want and suffering she witnesses and is moved by the generosity she receives. As Elizabeth Haynes writes, "No one travels alone. No one journeys without help." And sometimes help comes in the form of food -- Southern grits with pancakes, Armenian eggplant stuffed with walnuts and pomegranate, grilled guinea pig in Peru -- nourishment for the soul of the traveller. This travel memoir is a sumptuous meal with many courses, savoury and sweet.

A debut poetry collection, both lyrical and surprisingly playful, about overcoming a harsh evangelical upbringing and seeking consolation from the beauty of the natural world. This collection by the author of three books of nonfiction takes readers into one man's struggle to escape the corrosive effects of a punishing religion. We meet the small, frightened boy afraid of hell-fire and eternal guilt, and decades later, the man kicking free of the habit of self-excoriation. There is humour in the observation of the antics of birds, especially magpies and other corvids, and profound humility in the struggle to resist a confining culture. Magpie, I love you more for your flight and strut than for your squawk, but can't vilify a creature ten times tougher than I am and a hell of a lot more handsome. We walk with the poet-as-flaneur through neighbourhoods and along the river in a small prairie city, observing the incongruities, absurdities, and startling images and sounds of city life. And as the mystic who believes in something far beyond himself, so the beetle he sees on a path is "a little Buddha," and the wind and the flowing river are "irresistible forces," while a pine teaches him "how you move / without going / anywhere."

Canadian literary great Guy Vanderhaeghe's eclectic and wryly insightful collection of nonfiction pieces spans his forty-year writing career. Many editors and publishers over the years have asked Guy Vanderhaeghe for his thoughts on books and writers, on history, literature, and his own specialty, the historical novel. Because Somebody Asked Me To has all the hallmarks of the author's fiction: it is intelligent, wise, wry, and a pleasure to read. These essays, reviews and occasional pieces are about the difficult craft of fiction, about growing up on the prairies, and about the struggle to find his own voice as a writer, as well as about novels by writers he deeply admires. And, throughout, he casts a bemused eye on the entire human comedy. In 1982, when Guy Vanderhaeghe's first book appeared, Canadian literature was beginning to be recognized at home and abroad as culturally engaging and significant. Because Somebody Asked Me To gives readers a glimpse into those beginnings and how they shaped the author and his generation of fiction writers. The book also examines how the Canadian literary scene has shifted during the course of his career -- the economic, societal, and cultural changes that have made the old world of writing and publishing scarcely recognizable. Because Somebody Asked Me To invites readers to ponder the transformations Canadian writing has undergone, where it is now, and where it might go from here.

A thrilling novel of self-discovery that is part adventure, part mystery, and part Celtic myth, set in Dublin in 1913. Fifteen-year-old Finnegan Wilde steals to survive. Always on the run from gangs and police, Finn is also fleeing her own mysterious past, glimpsed only through nightmares and an unusual Celtic mark on her arm. When, in a chance encounter outside the museum, she scores a journal filled with strange diagrams, maps, and a drawing identical to her mark, Finn hungers for more than the next meal. She wants answers, and more than anything, she wants to find her family. Eddie Moore, a young apprentice archaeologist, has spent months trying to decipher an ancient manuscript he and his father excavated from a bog. The Moores believe it was written by Tomas, a 9th century monk, and that it holds the clue to finding the legendary Cauldron of Plenty, one of four Treasures of Ireland. But when Eddie's father is seriously injured by a gang in an attempted robbery, Eddie alone must find the Cauldron. When their search brings them together, Finn and Eddie realize the mark on her arm and his ancient manuscript are connected. Finn doesn't trust this awkward scholar from the rich side of town. Eddie is just as suspicious of this wild girl with no home, no past, and no rules. But if they can work together, perhaps — as Tomas hoped — they will make the greatest discovery of all. Three voices — those of Finnegan, Eddie, and Tomas — intertwine like a Celtic knot that readers will delight in unravelling to the very last page.

Set on an island in BC's Salish Sea, a richly imagined and often hilarious collection of linked stories by Bill Gaston, a master of the art of short fiction. Eleven stories feature a cast of characters striving to overcome pasts that often include a catastrophic error. On Tunnel Island, moral misjudgments, semi-legal schemes, and antisocial gaffes abound as characters seek a remedy for what ails them: loneliness, heartbreak, grief. Jack ekes out a living doing odd jobs and minding the estates of absent owners, until he takes a lover's bad advice and rents their houses through Airbnb. A dying woman retains her wry Wiccan sense of humour while lovingly ministered to by her partner — in between his trips to hand out Halloween candy at their door. The almost mystical disappearance of a toddler is revisited years later when her parents remarry in a surreal outdoor ceremony. Highly original and empathetic, Tunnel Island is electrified by dark undercurrents that jolt and illuminate by turns. Bill Gaston's bighearted vision of life on a heavily forested island immerses readers in a world rendered tender and tolerable by human folly and our stumbling attempts at redemption.

With fresh, understated wisdom, A Life in Pieces explores a woman's entire life, without ever forgetting the shadow of mortality trailing every one of us. This often lyrical and always thought-provoking memoir asks questions that confront many of us: What do we know, for sure, about our childhoods? Does a lively imagination enrich a life or blind us to opportunities? What choices shaped the path our lives have followed? In thirty short chapters, Jo-Ann Wallace take us on a journey from girlhood to elderhood, from one conundrum to another, with the crackle of synaptic energy flashing in the gaps -- in what isn't revealed, isn't told. The book parachutes us into working-class English Montreal in the 1950s and 1960s, into young womanhood in Toronto in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and then into professional life in Edmonton from the 1980s through the 2000s. "White Swan, Black Swan" delves into childhood games, and how the subconscious power dynamic between a younger and an older sister lets their imaginations fly free of their small shared bedroom. "Melmac" starts with that quintessentially mid-century dinnerware rattling around in an old motorhome as the author ponders the obsessive collecting of objects as a quirky coping strategy, an outlet for the stresses of contemporary working life. "Whimsy" takes us from the classic Jimmy Stewart movie "Harvey," with its 6 foot 3 1/2 inch rabbit to her own imaginary childhood friend, a Scottie dog, and to a present friend who will not watch any movie based in "whimsy." What dangers arise, the author wonders, when imaginations go unexamined, and unexercised. The many disparate pieces of the author's life are like an intricately worked mosaic, while the title, A Life in Pieces, foreshadows the final chapters that unfold with tenderness and awe in the wake of a cancer diagnosis.

Eleven-year-old Frazzy is mostly coping with not quite fitting in at school, until all the good stuff in her life goes haywire. Frazzy likes to chat her way through her school day, distracting her best friend Mel while secretly eyeing the boy she has a crush on -- all without attracting any more attention from Jake the bully. When her teacher springs a yearlong assignment on her class called The Genius Hour Project, Frazzy sees it as her ticket to "normal-ville." By choosing "the most boring topic ever," she tries to please everyone except herself -- with disastrous results. Meanwhile, Frazzy's BFF might be moving to a different school, and Frazzy's dad, just when she needs him most, disappears into a major depression. How can Frazzy be true to her own quirky self and survive all the challenges that life is throwing at her? That's the question at the heart of The Genius Hour Project.

Lisa Braun struggles to understand both her own life and the tragic historic events that haunt her in this engaging new novel written in Marlis Wesseler's characteristically understated, confiding prose. The novel begins with Lisa heading off into a beautiful beech forest in Germany, near where her in-laws live. As she walks, she ponders the stark contrast between the peaceful forest and the notorious concentration camp, both known as Buchenwald. Her husband Gerhardt's family has always been reticent, or maybe evasive, about the Holocaust and their family's World War Two experiences, and Lisa has learned not to ask too many questions. After they return to Canada, Lisa unexpectedly finds herself very alone and at loose ends, and through a series of events befriends an elderly man, Ben Meisner, who was interned in Buchenwald--and the questions she has always wanted to ask come searingly into focus. Lisa gets a closer view of unthinkable events than she bargained for, and in time Ben Meisner relies on her in a way she could never have predicted. This wry, perceptive novel is about secrets and silences; about estrangements between family members, and gaps in understanding between well-intentioned people who struggle to bridge the distances between one another. The Beech Forest looks into the dark corners of the human heart, and brings us back out into the light of day with humour and compassion.

A delightfully cunning, sharply insightful novel about ambition and subterfuge from the author of the Giller-longlisted novel A Beauty. This novel's unnamed narrator is so obsessed with the desire to write the biography of her literary hero, the late poet Marianne Rasmussen, that she assumes a false name and talks her way into the house of Rasmussen's former lover, Aubrey Ash. She gets more than a foot in the door--she moves in as a lodger, gaining precious daily contact with frail, crusty, almost-centenarian Aubrey and his handsome, younger (but hardly young) brother Harry. The would-be biographer tries to ingratiate herself with both the Ash Brothers. She flatters Aubrey and she flirts with Harry, but the harder she tries to get her hands on the coveted prize--access to the Rasmussen papers--the more she gets tangled in a trap that might just be of her own making. Can she resist the temptation to possess, by any means, the letters, photographs and first drafts that could unlock the secret to Marianne Rasmussen's genius? The Rasmussen Papers is a brilliant reply to Henry James' The Aspern Papers. Connie Gault flips James' story on its head and slides it into contemporary Toronto's Cabbagetown, among the marginalized and dispossessed, people the narrator studies as intently as she studies everyone she meets--until a confrontation on a streetcar makes her reconsider the limits of what you can know of another's story, and how hidden we all are, especially from ourselves.

In this debut poetry collection, E. McGregor combines the lore of family history with personal memory, vividly parsing patterns of inheritance, particularly through the maternal line. What Fills Your House Like Smoke begins and ends at the deathbed of the writer's Metis grandmother. In between, McGregor composes an incomplete and wildly imaginative biography of her grandmother, interrogated by family photographs, stories, and the scant paper trail she left behind. McGregor sifts through the complexities of motherhood, daughterhood, anxiety, intimate relationships and addiction, weaving family history with memory to make sense of what is carried on. Especially affecting are poems about childhood and the people who disappear from a child's life, and the struggle to live as a societal outsider, finding strength in self-definition and the power of narrative. As these poems unfold, they move us toward an understanding of maternal inheritance, shifting identities, forgiveness, and finally love.

A debut novel about the heartbreak of habitat loss and family trauma by one of Canada's most beloved writer-naturalists. This debut novel by Trevor Herriot is the richly observed story of Nell Rowan, who has inherited her family's prairie farmstead and returned there to live after many decades away. Nell is increasingly obsessed by a 19th-century bird collector while haunted by memories of her mother's disappearance. Nell's fascination with 19th-century bird collector William Spreadborough began during her janitorial night shifts at the National Museum of Nature. Now retired and back home on the same prairie where Spreadborough collected birds, her obsession with his life and death becomes more urgent. Though she finds consolation in the company of her border collie and horses, and the wild birds passing through each season, Nell feels increasingly isolated. Her neighbours seem indifferent to the ongoing devastation contemporary agriculture wreaks on prairie ecosystems and less than supportive of Nell's attempts to track native bird populations. And now she is unable to escape the central mystery of her life: what happened to her mother in that long-ago snowstorm? Things begin to shift for Nell when she provides temporary shelter to Carmelita, a fifteen-year-old foster child whose fresh view of the world around her just might rescue Nell from the hopelessness she fears is her inheritance. Trevor Herriot's The Economy of Sparrows connects today's settler culture and natural science to their roots in colonial empire-building. As Nell Rowan finds the people who might help her come to some peaceful resolution of her life's challenges, readers are faced with questions of how we engage with and value the natural world, how its truths illuminate both history and our present lives, and how we justify ourselves to the wild things of the earth.

Intergenerational conflicts unfold in a context of environmental change and degradation in this eerily original debut short fiction collection. Emily Paskevics takes her characters--mothers, daughters, fathers, sisters--into the wilderness to lose themselves in their primal nature . . . or to find what they've always been missing, as they struggle in a borderland between irrevocable environmental change and hope for ecological connection and healing. A man searches for his wife and son who have mysteriously vanished into the woods while they were exploring a small island in Northern Ontario-- are they truly lost, or did the woods rescue them from an inadequate husband and father? A mother takes her daughters into the remote wilderness to tell them about a harrowing encounter with a mountain lion, only to find that her story has already been told and is no longer quite her own. An old woman stands on a frozen river, contemplating her own death, until she locks eyes with a curious fox. A retired professor-turned-beekeeper has an affair with a former student, and ultimately learns that she can live alone on the edge of wilderness. Subtly subverting traditional nature writing, in Paskevics' stories the forest is burning, rivers are flooding, and the exploitation of land looms large. At a time when human-animal sharing of territory is more fraught than ever, these enthralling tales challenge us to consider how our own existence intersects with the wild creatures we share the earth with, and to understand our place in a threatened ecosystem.

From award-winning author Kate A. Boorman comes her first middle grade historical novel, set in France in the Middle Ages at a time of great religious upheaval. The Heathens and the Dragon: A 13th-Century Adventure stars twelve-year-old Elodie, a resourceful guardian to her little brother Bertran and his often willful pet chicken Codet. Together with Joie, a young troubadour, they perform for their very survival. Elodie works hard to keep a clean house for her master, take care of her little brother, and guard the secret pagan beliefs she was taught by the mother they recently lost. But the world around her is growing suspicious of paganism and violent toward non-Christians. When Crusaders arrive to arrest her kindly master, a Cathar, for heresy, he flees, and the orphans Elodie and Bertran try to follow his trail. Armed only with meagre supplies and a few good stories, and accompanied--to Elodie's dismay--by Bertran's pet chicken, they head into the forest, where they soon become lost. Luckily, they stumble upon a penniless female troubadour, Joie, who has mysteriously left court life and appears eager to help them. To earn money and food, the trio improvises a spectacle involving storytelling, music, and a chicken-assisted magic trick. The crowd's applause almost allows Elodie to forget that her dragon tale dishonours an origin story sacred to her mother. When Joie's own secrets emerge, Elodie is faced with a new dilemma. With Crusaders hovering and a voracious audience clamouring, Elodie realizes that, to save herself and Bertran, she'll need to decide who to trust--and who to betray.

Sharon Butala's new novel begins with the wrong kind of bang when retiring social worker Judith falls on the ice on the way to her retirement party. The debilitating concussion that follows seems to shake loose a confusing whirl of memories. Judith is a mother of four, and her relationships with her daughters are complicated. They all seem to have men trouble, except for the wild daughter who seems to have settled down, inexplicably to Judith, in Jerusalem. With her ears still ringing and her strength compromised by a shaky recovery, Judith leaves Calgary and, to everyone's bewilderment, moves back to the town near the family farm. In Wisdom, Saskatchewan, she confronts many unanswered questions: Why was her father, a World War Two vet, so troubled? What are her brother and sister hiding from her? As she pursues answers to unsolved mysteries in her own life, more complicated and wider ranging questions arise. Living in a small town is a shock after the anonymity of a big city. Judith finds herself exposed to watchful neighbours, and she is watchful in turn, seeing things that are mystifying at first--and then alarming. Small town bigotry and what looks like a serious crime unfolding in the house next door make her return even more difficult--what is she doing here? Does she have enough wisdom to unravel her past? Does she have a future in a place where she is not exactly welcome? This thought-provoking and very readable tale shows not only the suffering that comes from family secrets, but also unfolds one woman's late life awakening to the complex shadows cast by World War Two and the Holocaust.

Set in Saskatchewan during the Great Depression, this is the story of hockey legend Gordie Howe and his first experience with skating. The book is charmingly illustrated in full colour by Leanne Franson. Bill Waiser is a popular historian and Governor-General's-Award-winning author. Times were hard for five-year-old Gordie and his family in the 1930s. One day, a neighbour, desperate for some money, sold Mrs. Howe a bag of meager possessions. Inside was something wonderful: an old pair of men's hockey skates. Even though they were several sizes too large, Gordie and his sister pounced on them. At first, she and Gordie tried skating on just one foot... then holding hands to keep their balance. Eventually, his sister abandoned her skate, and Gordie grabbed it. He never looked back! Gordie's Skate is an ode to the love of hockey and a tale about hard times, where a family makes do with what little they had, even eating oatmeal for lunch and supper. It's also a story about kids creating their own fun, with determination-Gordie and his friends played for hours with little or no equipment. This inspirational picture book shows how people came to depend on one another to endure the Great Depression. Gordie Howe's long and celebrated NHL career owed much to his mother's willingness to help a neighbour. Lively illustrations capture life in Saskatoon in the 1930s, and show how a pair of old skates helped Gordie build skill and confidence and achieve his dreams.

This evocative new poetry collection speaks with a fierce tenderness of many aspects of the poet's life: a childhood spent on the banks of the Churchill River, the death of a beloved one, the struggle to try to find forgiveness for wrongs done and the weariness of trying to redress those wrongs. And, most poignantly, a beautiful rebellion reaches one hand back to Louis Riel and one hand forward to future Metis generations. The poems navigate losses that we all suffer when the world of our childhoods has altered irrevocably; they reveal the pain caused by residential schools and share despair at the lack of progress in social justice and self-determination. Rita Bouvier's work is intimate and insightful, written in inviting, open-hearted language that includes many Cree and Michif phrases and their translation. A quiet power -- riverine, deep, unstoppable -- flows through these poems.

The River Twice, by the Giller-nominated author of the bestselling The Island Walkers, is a gripping new World War I novel set in the Southern Ontario factory town familiar to his many readers, where residents are reeling as the wounded return and the list of local young men who have been killed continues to grow.Wounded in body and spirit, Ted Whitfield returns home from the trenches to his wife, Miriam, who finds him deeply altered and virtually unreachable. Her sister, Grace, afflicted by her own secret trauma, falls into an immediate and electric affinity with Ted, and soon he is telling her-and only her-a story from the front lines that's as shocking as it is extraordinary. As the novel moves back and forth between the lush, rolling landscape of southern Ontario and the devastated French countryside where exhausted Canadian troops are entrenched, the three characters at the centre of the narrative become entwined in almost unbearable tension.Miriam and Grace's nine-year-old brother Will, a thoughtful quiet boy who often sees the adults more clearly than they see themselves, is at the moral centre of the story. Each of Bemrose's finely constructed characters strives to be as true and as honest as they can with one another, and yet are caught up in the evasions and deceptions that so complicate human life, especially during a war and its aftermath.The River Twice does for Canada what Pat Barker's The Regeneration Trilogy did for England-focuses our collective memory on the moral injustices that attend any war, contemporary or historic. John Bemrose draws read¬ers in and won't let them go until the last page of this astonishingly lyrical and deeply humane novel.

David Carpenter's collection of essays explores a city boy's love of the wild, a passion that has enriched his life from boyhood. At 80, this irrepressible Saskatchewan raconteur examines his intense fascination with predators large and small, and his awe in the face of the variety of creatures that may be out to get us-or who are out to get one another. How does this combination of fear and wonder affect our relationship with the natural world? And why has Carpenter personally been both drawn to, and repelled by, so many wild animals, including alligators, wolves, cougars, spiders, black bears, grizzlies, weasels, and of course, snakes, and particularly deadly rattlesnakes? The stories that fuel the essays in this entertaining memoir are as diverse as the animals-and insects!-at the heart of Carpenter's inquiry. As a young man, Carpenter is working in Jasper National Park, and he's lugging his banjo-hustling on his way to a paid gig-when he takes a short cut through the woods, makes a wrong turn and ends up at the dump. He looks across at some large animals. Horses? No, five, count `em, five grizzlies. Luckily a ranger on an actual horse leads him out of danger. He's fishing for brook trout in the mountains with a friend, cooling their catch in a convenient snow bank. But the fish keep disappearing. He finds them cached under a nearby rock, and when he tries to pull one out, he's in a tug-of-war with some hidden creature, small but fierce-is it a mink? Encounters like these drive the author into philosophical conjecture, into reading everything he can get his hands on about these and other creatures as he contemplates our place in the wild, and the value of the wild in our lives. These essays are essential reading for those of us who share David Carpenter's fascination with the predators that so funda¬mentally shape our understanding of wilderness and the necessity to preserve it.

David Carpenter's collection of essays explores a city boy's love of the wild, a passion that has enriched his life from boyhood. At 80, this irrepressible Saskatchewan raconteur examines his intense fascination with predators large and small, and his awe in the face of the variety of creatures that may be out to get us-or who are out to get one another. How does this combination of fear and wonder affect our relationship with the natural world? And why has Carpenter personally been both drawn to, and repelled by, so many wild animals, including alligators, wolves, cougars, spiders, black bears, grizzlies, weasels, and of course, snakes, and particularly deadly rattlesnakes? The stories that fuel the essays in this entertaining memoir are as diverse as the animals-and insects!-at the heart of Carpenter's inquiry. As a young man, Carpenter is working in Jasper National Park, and he's lugging his banjo-hustling on his way to a paid gig-when he takes a short cut through the woods, makes a wrong turn and ends up at the dump. He looks across at some large animals. Horses? No, five, count `em, five grizzlies. Luckily a ranger on an actual horse leads him out of danger. He's fishing for brook trout in the mountains with a friend, cooling their catch in a convenient snow bank. But the fish keep disappearing. He finds them cached under a nearby rock, and when he tries to pull one out, he's in a tug-of-war with some hidden creature, small but fierce-is it a mink? Encounters like these drive the author into philosophical conjecture, into reading everything he can get his hands on about these and other creatures as he contemplates our place in the wild, and the value of the wild in our lives. These essays are essential reading for those of us who share David Carpenter's fascination with the predators that so funda¬mentally shape our understanding of wilderness and the necessity to preserve it.

In this genre-bending debut YA novel combining elements of horror, magic realism, and realistic fiction, Rebecca Waldmann's sheltered life as an Orthodox Jewish teen in Toronto is shattered when her father moves them to Edmonton, where she is plunged into the worldly life of a public high school. Ordinary teenage angst is complicated by Rebecca's lack of experience with a culture of wearing cool clothes, swearing, talking back to teachers, and other aspects of secular teen life. Things take a darker turn when Rebecca encounters antisemitism and discovers a secret about the long-ago death of her mother that her father has been hiding from her. Rebecca doesn't just defy the strictures of her ultraorthodox religion by wearing tight jeans and flirting with a non-Jewish boy. She discovers to her horror that she has undergone a change that makes puberty look easy- she's been transformed into a golem! When this mythical clay creature from Jewish folklore takes her over, body and soul, she's helpless to resist- or almost. Is it because she's so furious with her father, is that why she is sometimes a girl with a cute boyfriend, and sometimes a very earthy, ugly monster? In this new and very disturbing back-and-forth existence, Rebecca fights off the attention of a predatory schoolmate and her father's determination to force her into an arranged marriage. She struggles to name her own desires and speak her own truths, and still be true to her own beliefs. But it's hard to know your own beliefs when you are in a battle for your existence as a human...

Set in Prague and narrated with great panache by the 600-year-old Charles Bridge, this novel begins with an elephant named Sál escaping the Prague Zoo. As the elephant moves through the beautiful Czech city, the lives of the men and women she meets are altered by the encounter. Each character is at a crossroads, and desperately seeking the wisdom they need to wrestle with profound questions-how to live, how to love, who to love, how to heal. And the elephant herself is haunted, as mem¬ories of her long-ago capture in Africa resurface. Sál carries the narrative from one point of view to another: Vasha, a writer and night watchman at the zoo, and his wife Marta, a psychotherapist, confront the question of whether to have a child; Sárka, Marta's patient and a dancer at the end of her career, is visited by a charming and often abrasive manifestation of the long-dead ballerina Anna Pavlova; Joseph, a clown and bouffon, performs on the Karluv Bridge itself, and he is about to be struck down (literally and figuratively) by a new love... Through it all, Sál steals the show, wandering the streets in search of water and food, bearing her own share of sadness and painful memories as she struggles to find her way out of her bewildering predicament. Though she, like the humans she encounters, is free now to make her own choices, she is also displaced and lost. Thomas Trofimuk's novel masterfully convinces us to accept all the wonders contained in it: that a bridge can tell a story, that art is integral to our survival, that an elephant can scatter sudden flashes of insight in her wake, that there is no separation between the grief of elephants and the grief of humans.

Shifting restlessly from dark to light and back again, written in lithe, precise prose, the stories in Phoebe Tsang's debut collection 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 attempt to attain mercy from the most holy of rivers fizzles like his former fiancée's tepid devotion. The seventeen stories in Setting Fire to Water unfold outside the Canadian mainstream, where longing-for home, for love, for artistic achievement, for spiritual fulfillment-is a given, and acceptance-of self, of the knowability of others, of the limits to knowing-is always in question. Using unconventional storylines and slippages in time and space, these stories explore the mystical possibilities inherent in contemporary life.

The River Twice, by the Giller-nominated author of the bestselling The Island Walkers, is a gripping new World War I novel set in the Southern Ontario factory town familiar to his many readers, where residents are reeling as the wounded return and the list of local young men who have been killed continues to grow.Wounded in body and spirit, Ted Whitfield returns home from the trenches to his wife, Miriam, who finds him deeply altered and virtually unreachable. Her sister, Grace, afflicted by her own secret trauma, falls into an immediate and electric affinity with Ted, and soon he is telling her-and only her-a story from the front lines that's as shocking as it is extraordinary. As the novel moves back and forth between the lush, rolling landscape of southern Ontario and the devastated French countryside where exhausted Canadian troops are entrenched, the three characters at the centre of the narrative become entwined in almost unbearable tension.Miriam and Grace's nine-year-old brother Will, a thoughtful quiet boy who often sees the adults more clearly than they see themselves, is at the moral centre of the story. Each of Bemrose's finely constructed characters strives to be as true and as honest as they can with one another, and yet are caught up in the evasions and deceptions that so complicate human life, especially during a war and its aftermath. The River Twice does for Canada what Pat Barker's The Regeneration Trilogy did for England-focuses our collective memory on the moral injustices that attend any war, contemporary or historic. John Bemrose draws read¬ers in and won't let them go until the last page of this astonishingly lyrical and deeply humane novel.

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 and conflict roiling inside them. The characters who populate these poems are subject to difficult weather, internal and external, but their lives are sometimes illuminated by "a sudden radiance": a deeper understanding of self, a breathtaking expanse of sky, the generosity of a friend or lover. The beauty of the unflinching rhythm and cadence of the poems brings light to the darker corners of even the most painful times. From a father's tenderness in the face of his young son's fears, to the death of a lifelong friend from ALS, to earlier narrative poems about depres¬sion-era deprivation and hardship, this work is carefully crafted, deeply honest, and open-hearted. With a foreword by Lorna Crozier and an afterword by Mark Abley.

Set in Prague and narrated with great panache by the 600-year-old Charles Bridge, this novel begins with an elephant named Sál escaping the Prague Zoo. As the elephant moves through the beautiful Czech city, the lives of the men and women she meets are altered by the encounter. Each character is at a crossroads, and desperately seeking the wisdom they need to wrestle with profound questions-how to live, how to love, who to love, how to heal. And the elephant herself is haunted, as mem¬ories of her long-ago capture in Africa resurface. Sál carries the narrative from one point of view to another: Vasha, a writer and night watchman at the zoo, and his wife Marta, a psychotherapist, confront the question of whether to have a child; Sárka, Marta's patient and a dancer at the end of her career, is visited by a charming and often abrasive manifestation of the long-dead ballerina Anna Pavlova; Joseph, a clown and bouffon, performs on the Karluv Bridge itself, and he is about to be struck down (literally and figuratively) by a new love... Through it all, Sál steals the show, wandering the streets in search of water and food, bearing her own share of sadness and painful memories as she struggles to find her way out of her bewildering predicament. Though she, like the humans she encounters, is free now to make her own choices, she is also displaced and lost. Thomas Trofimuk's novel masterfully convinces us to accept all the wonders contained in it: that a bridge can tell a story, that art is integral to our survival, that an elephant can scatter sudden flashes of insight in her wake, that there is no separation between the grief of elephants and the grief of humans.

Lee Gowan's new novel, an audacious sequel to Sinclair Ross' prairie classic, As for Me and My House, is about a man who is in trouble in love and work-a darkly funny cautionary tale for our times. "A preposterous, pan-Canadian tale, straight-faced, that evolves into a quest for a dead man's frozen head. Subtly hilarious, beautifully crafted and with lots of moving parts, this novel is fresh, original, and compelling." --Ken McGoogan, award-winning author The man we know only as Bentley is facing a triple threat-in other words, his life is a hot mess every way he looks. Like anyone who feels that he's on the brink of annihilation, Bentley thinks back to his misspent youth, which was also when he met his famous grandfather, the painter Philip Bentley, for the first time. To make matters worse, he has inherited his grandfather's tendency to self-doubt, as well as that cranky artist's old service pistol. Our hero is confused about so much. How did he end up as a cryonics salesman-a huckster for a dubious afterlife-when he wanted to be a writer? And who is the mysterious Mary Abraham, and why is she the thread unravelling his unhappy present? What will be left when all the strands come undone? Lee Gowan's The Beautiful Place is the best kind of journey: both psychological and real, with a lot of quick-on-the-draw conversations and stunning scenery along the way -and only one gun, which may or may not be loaded.

This stellar debut collection by Métis poet Diana Hope Tegenkamp takes us through many worlds and wonders. In Girl running, 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, Nebraska, after the murder of her transgender boyfriend. After many losses-of a mother known and loved, of a Métis father unknown and imagined-the 'girl' of this collection is running towards and away from mortality. In these poems, disappearances, perpetual flights, river walks, shadowy descents and miraculous returns connect daily living and mortality, current social realities and ancient histories, the surface and the subterranean depths of our complicated lives. Lovers of contemporary Canadian poetry will find that this textured collection rewards reading and rereading.

This sensational debut collection of short stories takes readers on a tour of the astonishment inside the ordinary, the quotidian. Meet the happy wunderkind inside the sad elderly lover, the vulnerable teenager inside the high-powered lawyer, the loving father inside the vampire. Vampire? In these stories, no narrator is too far-fetched, because every voice is in some way our own. We unravel a mystery with a mortician troubled by the ghosts of his clients, stumble along a gravel road with a too-young pregnant woman searching for a lost girl, watch a feminist falling in love with the office Romeo, are charmed by a robotic humanoid with a penchant for merlot and sedition... Whether the subject is betrayal, disappointment, grief, love or longing, these stories will entertain you with zippy word-craft and sly humour, and seduce you with tenderness. Theressa Slind takes us on an exhilarating ride through the many chambers of the complicated, messed up, resilient human heart.

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 parachutes 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 on the military base in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, to move to Israel, where her father will serve a one-year posting with the United Nations. While they're packing up, Israel invades Lebanon. The President-elect of Lebanon is assassinated. Thousands of Palestinian men, women, and children are murdered at the Sabra-Shatila refugee camps in southern Beirut. The Middle East's relative peace explodes into waves of violence. It is in the midst of this maelstrom that the family arrives in Israel and settles into an apartment. The simple act of walking down the street is fraught with peril. Violence may come at them from any direction at any time. Peacekeeper's Daughter is a coming-of-age story, as well as an exploration of family dynamics, the shattering effects of violence and war-and the power of memory itself to reconcile us to our past selves, to the extraordinary places we have been and sights we have seen.