“A luminous novel told in snippets, The Alchemy of Paradise considers how best to live in the face of loss. […] Metaphysical and insightful, The Alchemy of Paradise is an innovative novel.”—Carolyn Wilson-Scott, Foreword ReviewsA curator confronts grief, loss, and mortality by arranging the fragments of her life—objects, memories, impressions—into a fragile order.Set in contemporary England, with Venice shimmering...

“Everything is new. Everything is strange. Everything is possible.” – Yumi SakugawaThe Fairy Tale Museum is an alchemical curiosity-cabinet-as-novel that showcases the original, spectacular, grotesque, endearing, and otherworldly. You’ll meet bird-headed lovers, a cyborg cyclops, a fortune teller, revolutionary ventriloquists’ dummies, a narcoleptic vampire, Eros and Thanatos, and a host of woodland creatures. A celebration of hybrids, creativity, and transformation, this ...

On an isolated island in Lake Ontario live twins Lucy and Levi and their father, Daniel. While Daniel desperately mourns for his dead wife, Levi and Lucy grow up ever more entwined in their enchanted childhood of fairy tales and rhymes.But when a fissure in the fragile cocoon of the family explodes into a chasm, each of the three is hurled in a different direction. Soon, there emerges a geographical triangle – Vancouver, Montreal, the island – that also maps out the terrain of love...

In her newest collection, Lorna Crozier describes the passage of time in the way that only she can. Her arresting, edgy poems about aging and grief are surprising and invigorating: a defiant balm. At the same time, she revels in the quirkiness and whimsy of the natural world: the vision of a fly, the naming of an eggplant, and a woman who — not unhappily — finds that cockroaches are drawn to her. “God draws a life. And then rubs it out / with the eraser on his pencil.” Lorna Crozier draws ...

A love story to the emotional self—this heart is tender, but it also has a savage bite.What does it mean to be the big heart? Or to hope to be the big heart? Or to fail to be that big heart? How far can a heart stretch? How does being a parent stretch it further? How does a heart manage under the pressure of children, of self, of hospital technician, of partner, of death? In this collection, big heartedness is both demand and desire. It emerges from family life—the...

Naomi Guttman's new poetry collection was inspired by the role of nursing in human evolution and culture. The first cycle of poems, "Wet Apples, White Blood," offers lyric glimpses into archetypes of breastfeeding women in history and myth. The dramatic action in the second cycle, "Galactopoesis," centers around the experience of a mother whose young child is hospitalized. Galactopoesis is the medical term for the continued secretion and production of milk. It derives from the Greek radica...

Penny Dreadfuls were popular, cheaply produced 19th century magazines filled with brutal and sensationalist tales. In her uncompromising second collection of poetry, Vancouver poet Shannon Stewart revisits their grisly spirit through a series of meditations that examine the medias obsession for luridness, be it tabloids or respectable newspapers. At the centre of the book is the story of accused serial killer Robert Pickton. In poems of great psychological risk-taking, Stewart tracks the m...

The North Yorkshire moors are always a magical place, but they’re particularly enchanting at the holidays…especially if one gets to travel back in time to a Victorian Christmas. For Bronwyn Dale, it is the stuff of dreams. Fancy-dress balls, quirky small-town traditions, even that classic one-horse open sleigh, complete with jingle bells. There’s just the tiny problem of the Butterfly Effect. How does a time-traveler make a difference without disrupting the future forever?Note:...

A best-selling novel of a failed relationship; about leaving and being left behind, loss, homelessness, and light.

In Leaving Now Arleen Paré, winner of the 2008 Victoria Book Prize, weaves fable, prose and poetics to create a rich mosaic of conflicted motherhood. Set in the volatile 1970s and '80s, when social norms and expectations were changing rapidly, Leaving Now is the emotionally candid story of a mother's anguish as she leaves her husband to love a woman. In this second book, Paré masterfully blends aspects of her personal journey with her own version of a well-loved fairy tale. Gudru, the five...

**A TIME Magazine Best Book of 2022“I loved it.” —Miranda Cowley Heller, author of The Paper Palace"Brilliant, elegant, and unsparing." —Emma Cline"Irresistible... I read it in an afternoon but I'll be thinking about it for a long time." —Douglas Stuart, author of Young MungoFrom an astounding new voice in Canadian literature comes an intoxicating, compact novel about a woman who walks out of her life and washes up in a seaside town**

Award-winning translator Peter Hargitai celebrates 100 years of Attila Jzsef (1905?1937) in this new selection of 100 poems. His previous selection, Perched On Nothing's Branch (1986), enjoyed a remarkable run of five editions and won for him the Academy of American Poets' Landon Translation Award. His translation of Attila Jzsef is listed among the world classics cited by Harold Bloom in The Western Canon.Praise for Peter Hargitai's translation of Attila Jzsef: