It’s late 1969 and Communist China has successfully launched its first satellite. Inspired by this feat, a group of college students in Laguna Beach, California, set out to put their own satellite into orbit in homage to the recent Woodstock Festival. A young Canadian graduate student at the University of California finds himself at the centre of the mayhem when he and his friends break into a mothballed missile silo and commandeer everything they need, including a nuclear warhead, to blast the Woodstock Nation into the space age. The activists have big plans for their loot, schemes that may well culminate in the Light Show to End All Light Shows in the Nevada desert. An extraordinary black comedy shot full of the social and political issues of the time, Woodstock Rising is a coming-of-age tale couched in free love, rock anthems, and revolution as well as a chronicle of an era whose causes continue to speak to us.
Originally published in 1962, The Silence on the Shore is considered by many critics to be Hugh Garner’s best, most ambitious novel. Truly, in the person of Grace Hill, the landlady of the Toronto rooming house where most of the book’s events take place, Garner has created a fictional character never to be forgotten. Grace is a middle-aged snoop and an overweight nudist whose sexual release comes from watching wrestling matches at a hockey arena that is a thinly disguised Maple Leaf Gardens. Around Grace orbit her various boarders: alcoholic Gordon Lightfoot; Walter Fowler, an aspiring writer whose marriage has just broken up; Aline Garfield, a fundamentalist Christian grappling with various urges and torments; a Polish refugee woman; and a colourful cast of others whose lives intersect in drama that arises from arbitrary or coincidental encounters. According to scholar John Moss, the book is “the best realistic novel of Canadian city life yet to be written.”
First published in 1954, in Variable Winds at Jalna , the immediate sequel to Renny’s Daughter , Maitland Fitzturgis and his sister, Sylvia Fleming, travel from Ireland for his official acceptance by the family as Adeline’s husband. Finch and Maurice also return, and Maurice brings with him his own problematic affairs of the heart. It quickly becomes one of the most fateful years that Jalna has known, and the story ends with more than one peal of the wedding bells. This is book 15 of 16 in The Whiteoak Chronicles . It is followed by Centenary at Jalna .
First published in 1951, in Renny’s Daughter , Adeline Whiteoak is voyaging overseas. It is now 1948, and she travels with her Uncle Finch and cousin Maurice to Ireland and then London. On the ship she meets a charming Irishman and falls in love. However, when scandal breaks, she embodies her namesake and refuses to give him up. Meanwhile, back home, Jalna’s peace and beauty is threatened by a neighbour’s speculative designs. This is book 14 of 16 in The Whiteoak Chronicles . It is followed by Variable Winds at Jalna .
Returning to Ontario’s northern lakes as an adult to bury his father, Ray Carrier is taken back not only to a tangled romance in that green paradise but also to the forests and lonesome swamps that have haunted his dreams. As a teenager, Ray was enchanted by the grace and privilege of the Miller family on Providence Island, part of the wealthy resort community up the road from the farm where Ray and his widowed father spent their summers. Ray’s father had always said that he was too impressed by money. But it was more than that. There was Quentin Miller, a beautiful girl, older than Ray, who thought nothing of strolling to the end of a dock, stripping naked, and diving into the lake. But something happened near the abandoned railway tracks long ago something that shattered Ray’s illusions of love and money. And now something must be settled before Ray can achieve peace and let go of Providence Island and the Millers once and for all.
Winner of the 2012 LAMBDA Literary Award for Best Lesbian Fiction and of the 2011 Rainbow Awards Ismail Boxwala made the worst mistake of his life one summer morning twenty years ago: he forgot his baby daughter in the back seat of his car. After his daughter’s tragic death, he struggles to continue living. A divorce, years of heavy drinking, and sex with strangers only leave him more alone and isolated. But Ismail’s story begins to change after he reluctantly befriends two women: Fatima, a young queer activist kicked out of her parents’ home; and Celia, his grieving Portuguese-Canadian neighbour who lives just six metres away. A slow-simmering romance develops between Ismail and Celia. Meanwhile, dangers lead Fatima to his doorstep. Each makes complicated demands of him, ones he is uncertain he can meet.
Advance Praise for Doing the Continental : "Everyone has opinions about the state of Canada-U.S. relations, but few have the knowledge to provide informed judgments. Professor Dyment happily falls into the latter category. While some of the prescriptions are controversial, this concise book has been carefully thought out and provides excellent grist for the Canadian policy mill. Doing the Continental is a must read for those interested in Canadian-American relations." Michael Kergin, Canada’s Ambassador to the United States, 2000 to 2005. When President Barack Obama sat at his desk for the first time in the Oval Office in January 2009, one of the farthest things from his mind was Canada. On Capitol Hill the whirling pursuit of interests was intense. In Ottawa, Canada’s senior officials were too preoccupied to appreciate that the nations neighbours to the south weren’t paying attention to the affairs and concerns of the Great White North. Canada’s relations with the United States are broad and deep, and with Obama in his second term in office, the two countries have entered what could be considered a new era of hope and renewal. From water and energy policy to defence, environmental strategy, and Arctic sovereignty, David Dyment provides an astute, pithy analysis of the past, present, and future continental dance between two countries that have much in common, yet often step on each others feet.
When Alice, an elderly woman, smells the coffee her husband Jules has just made, she gets up. This ritual repeats itself every day, until one morning she finds him lifeless on the sofa in the living room – the coffee hasn’t quite finished filtering through. While Jules slowly turns into a statue that seems to be carved out of marble, Alice reminisces about earlier days and tells him things she hasn’t dared or been able to express before. When subsequently she has to come to terms with the sorrow and loss she is faced with, David, the autistic young son of a woman who lives in the same apartment building, becomes part of this process in an unexpected way. This deeply moving Belgian novel has been translated into many languages. The German edition alone has sold over 120,000 copies.
Limited time offer. How can an enterprising newspaper reporter sell his Babji dolls when there's a beheaded street youth, a Rave Messiah battling a berserk God Squad, and a conniving new editor to deal with? Especially when hes suffering all the symptoms of dengue fever? Hakeem Jinnah is back and as politically incorrect as ever. The chain-smoking, headline-chasing hypochondriac is in a race to find a killer and help save his buddy Sergeant Grahams career. But a bevy of She Demons bedevil him at each turn. Soon Jinnah is entangled in a cultic web that threatens his friends, his family, and his life. Fast-paced, funny, and suspenseful, this is the second Mister Jinnah novel featuring the larger-than-life crime reporter. Just as in his debut adventure, Mister Jinnah: Securities , the flirtatious and always resourceful Jinnah has to use every ounce of his investigative genius to solve a crime and make a few extra dollars on the side. [b]Watch for Pizza 911 , arriving June 2015.
In 1931 Grey Owl published his first book, The Men of the Last Frontier , a work that is part memoir, part history of the vanishing wilderness in Canada, and part compendium of animal and First Nations tales and lore. A passionate, compelling appeal for the protection and preservation of the natural environment pervades Grey Owls words and makes his literary debut still ring with great relevance in the 21st century. By the 1920s, Canadas outposts of adventure had been thrust farther and farther north to the remote margins of the country. Lumbermen, miners, and trappers invaded the primeval forests, seizing on natures wealth with soulless efficiency. Grey Owl himself fled before the assault as he witnessed his valleys polluted with sawmills, his hills dug up for hidden treasure, and wildlife, particularly his beloved beavers, exterminated for quick fortunes.