In the early 1930s, Oscar Wolf, a 13-year-old Native from the Chippewas of Rama Indian Reserve, sets fire to the business section of his village north of Toronto in a fit of misguided rage against white society, inadvertently killing his grandfather and a young maid. Tortured by guilt and fearful of divine retribution, Oscar sets out on a lifetime quest for redemption.His journey takes him to California where he works as a fruit picker and prizefighter during the Great Depression, ...

2016 Speaker's Book Award — ShortlistedA look back over Bartleman’s seventy years, from his childhood of poverty to becoming the Queen’s representative in Ontario.James Bartleman, Ontario’s first Native lieutenant governor, looks back over seventy years to his childhood and youth to describe how learning to read at any early age led him to dream dreams, empowering him to serve his country as an ambassador. In time, Bartleman’s exciting and fulfilli...

A novel of love and betrayal dealing with the biggest issues facing Canada’s Indigenous peoples today.In the summer of 1972, a float plane carrying a team of child welfare officials lands on a river flowing through the Yellow Dog Indian reserve. Their mission is to seize the twin babies of an Indigenous couple as part of an illegal scheme cooked up by the federal government to adopt out tens of thousands of Native children to white families. The baby girl, Brenda, ...

From the accomplished memoirist and former Lieutenant-Governor of Ontario comes a first novel of incredible heart and spirit for every Canadian.The novel follows one girl, Martha, from the Cat Lake First Nation in Northern Ontario who is "stolen" from her family at the age of six and flown far away to residential school. She doesn't speak English but is punished for speaking her native language; most terrifying and bewildering, she is also "fed" to the school's attendant priest wit...

Autumn, 1970: Hostage-taking separatists in Quebec abduct a foreign diplomat and a cabinet minister and threaten violence across the country. As fear sets in, the government turns to Luc Cadotte, a specialist on international terrorism and veteran of the clandestine struggles in Latin America.From the jungles of Colombia to Montreal under siege, former diplomat James Bartleman plots a turbulent thriller based on events he witnessed first-hand. Swerving between fanatical ideologues ...

Novelist, diplomat, statesman, representative of both the First Nations and the Crown in Canada, James Bartleman always writes from his incredible personal experience. Presented here are three extraordinary books, each touching on a different aspect of his life, whether a candid tell-all about the halls of power, or his unique novels in which the names and details have been changed to protect the innocent. Guaranteed to captivate readers of all stripes.Includes:

A warm, at times hilarious, yet dark childhood memoir from a bestselling author.This memoir recalls the boyhood years of Ontario’s future lieutenant-governor, living in a dilapidated old house complete with outdoor toilet and coal oil-lamp lighting. Behind the outrageous stories, larger-than life-characters, and descriptions of the mores of a small village in the heart of Ontario’s cottage country are flashes of insight from the perspective of a child that recall the great classic ...

John Bemrose’s highly acclaimed national bestseller tells the story of a family who slips from fortune’s favour in a southwestern Ontario mill town during the mid-1960s. Like his father before him, Alf Walker is a fixer in the local textile mill. When a labour dispute forces him to choose between loyalty to his friends and his own advancement, Alf’s actions inadvertently set in motion a series of events that will reverberate far into the future. Meanwhile, Alf’s wife, Margaret, must reconc...

Part intellectual mystery and part spiritual adventure, A Year at River Mountain tells the story of an aging actor from Vancouver who has immersed himself in monastic life inChina and is now examining his past as an actor, husband,and father. As his Western consciousness grapples with Taoist philosophies and acupressure techniques, he assesses his life and records the struggles of transformation that accompanysuch thinking. The monastery’s Old Master has given the narrator permission to wr...

The stories in Sandy Bonny’s collection take place in settings from the Arctic Circle to Alberta’s badlands, and from the waters of the Georgia Straight to the grasslands of the prairies, and the characters that we meet in these places will be oddly familiar or perhaps familiarly odd. There are children who live in the magical territory between their imagination and their parents’ realities; road builders from China and Australia who know the ghostly secrets at road’s end; men who shape th...

Half-Asian teenager Grace (but she’d prefer it if you called her “Gray” instead) is not a perfect little supermom-in-the-making like her older sister Jessica, and would rather become a marine biologist than a mother—although she does understand how to take care of her peculiar kid brother Squid better than anyone else in her family. When her mother Belinda abruptly runs out on her family and flies across the Atlantic in order to study crop circles in the English countryside, Grace is left ...

"Lin Enger sets out from the conventions of the traditional Western and brings the reader into new emotional territory, that of the soul of an exquisitely drawn American family. The High Divide is a novel to get lost in." —James Scott, author of The KeptIn 1886, Gretta Pope wakes up one morning to discover that her husband is gone. Ulysses Pope has left his family behind on the far edge of Minnesota's western prairie, with only the briefest of note...