Maria Chapdelaine, the quintessential novel of the rugged life of early French-Canadian colonists, is based on the author's experiences as a hired hand in the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean area. A young woman living with her family on the Quebec frontier, Maria endures the hardships of isolation and climate. Maria must eventually choose between three suitors who represent very different ways of life: a trapper, a farmer, and a Parisian immigrant.Powerful in its simplicity, this ...

First published in 1957, Mazo de la Roche’s last autobiography is a vivid look at her life in Ontario, and a parting shot at her critics.Mazo de la Roche was once Canada’s best-known writer, loved by millions of readers around the world. Her Jalna series is filled with unforgettable characters who come to life for her readers, but she herself was secretive about her own life and tried to escape the public attention fame brought.In this memoir, de la Roche d...

Voyageur Classics is a series of special versions of Canadian classics, with added material and new introductory notes. In this bundle we find five biographical and autobiographical titles that shed light on some of Canada’s most important figures at crucial times in the country’s development. William Kilbourn brings to life the rebel Canadian hero William Lyon Mackenzie: able political editor, first mayor of Toronto, and the gadfly of the House of Assembly. The Scalpel, the Sword...

Voyageur Classics is a series of special new versions of Canadian classics, with added material and special introductions by noted experts. This bundle contains some of the greatest Canadian fiction, including influential literature from Quebec (Maria Chapdelaine, The Town Below), a collection of the best of the legendary Pauline Johnson, Peregrine Acland’s gripping Great War novel All Else is Folly, a classic tale of Irish immigration (The Yellow Briar)...

A new edition of the classic novel by Douglas LePan.Returned from the ravages of war, met with a city that offers him only despair, a young man finds himself caught between two opposing worlds — the ordered but empty everyday life of “schedules and obligations,” and the hellish chaos of the city’s underside, a dark world of brutality and vice. Gripped with a restless passion for perfection, haunted by a brief and idealized experience of love, the hero of this poeti...

First published in 1935, Pilgrims of the Wild is Grey Owl's autobiographical account of his transition from successful trapper to preservationist. With his Iroquois wife, Anahereo, Grey Owl set out to protect the environment and the endangered beaver. Powerful in its simplicity, Pilgrims of the Wild tells the story of Grey Owl's life of happy cohabitation with the wild creatures of nature and the healing powers of what he referred to as "the great Northland" of "Over the ...

Folktale, memoir, fiction, literary hoax, The Yellow Briar is all of these. Ostensibly the charming remembrance of an Irish orphan who escapes the Great Famine of 1840s Ireland and comes to the New World to seek a fresh start on the streets of Toronto and in the pioneer hinterland of Canada West (Ontario), the book was actually a fictional humbug perpetrated by John Mitchell, a Toronto lawyer, who first published the tale in 1933.Patrick Slater, the protagonist of the "mem...

Arthur James Marshall Smith prize-winning poet, essayist, influential anthologist, and critic died in 1980. His last book, The Classic Shade: Selected Poems, on which Selected Writings is based, stands as his final intention in the world of literature.To this long out of print book the editor has added original material by Smith in which he defined and advanced modernism in Canadian writing. This edition also includes annotation, an extended introduction, and a bibliography.

The writing of Robert W. Service is mostly known through his poems and ballads. Immortalized by his two iconic ballads, "The Cremation of Sam McGee" and "The Shooting of Dan McGrew," he has entered the world's imagination as the Bard of the Yukon. But Service was much more than a chronicler of the Great North.A traveller and adventurer who tried his hand at many occupations, Service left a fascinating set of impressions: the successful literary life in the course of which he produc...

The Town Below takes place in St. Joseph Parish of Quebec City's Saint-Sauveur suburb. Saint-Sauveur is a parochial and provincial place where narrow piety and corruption can be found in every corner, and Denis and Lise, two adolescents in love, scandalize the town with their affair. Scheming politicians and clergymen and grasping social climbers mix with salt-of-the-earth citizens in a rough-and-tumble satiric assault on pre-Quiet Revolution Quebec mores and attitudes.

A new edition of Philip Child’s great Canadian novel of the First World War.A horrifying description of war, specifically embodied in the vain and inglorious futility of the First World War, God’s Sparrows is a novel rich in compassion and firm in its faith in the human spirit. Philip Child created a Canadian family saga, a modern pilgrim’s progress in which individuals surmount the corrosive effects of brutality, maintaining their ability to love and endu...

Pauline Johnson was an unusual and unique presence on the literary scene during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Part Mohawk and part European, she was a compelling female voice in the midst of an almost entirely male writing community. Having discovered her talent for public recitation of poetry, Johnson relied on her ancestry and gender to establish an international reputation for her stage performances, during which she appeared in European and native costume. These poems were la...