"Grady's novel reads with the velvety tempo of the jazz music of its day. . . . Grady fearlessly explores heated race relations and the masks we all assume." —ChatelaineWith his curly black hair and his wicked grin, everyone swoons and thinks of Frank Sinatra when Navy musician Jackson Lewis takes the stage. It's World War II, and while stationed in St. John's, Newfoundland, Jack meets the well-heeled Vivian Clift, a local girl who has never stepped off th...

October 1970. Two kidnappings. One dead. A crisis unlike anything the country had ever seen — here is the story behind history . . .Thirty years after the October Crisis, Sam Nihilo, a freelance writer whose career is in a slump, is drawn to the conspiracy theories that have proliferated in the wake of the events. While investigating the death of one of the FLQ hostages, Nihilo sees his life consumed by an inquiry that leads him further into a flurry of facts, both known and newly ...

The story of a single tree, from the moment the seed is released from its cone until, more than five hundred years later, it lies on the forest floor as a nurse log, giving life to ferns, mosses, and hemlocks, even as its own life is ending.In this unique biography, David Suzuki and Wayne Grady tell story that spans a millennium and includes a cast of millions but focuses on a single tree, a Douglas fir, Tree describes in poetic detail the organis...

From award-winning, bestselling author Wayne Grady comes The Good Father, his first contemporary novel, which comically and tragically reckons with a father and daughter's estrangement, the failures brought on by hubris, the limits of perception and the price we pay for second chances.Every story has two sides, two perspectives. And when it comes to a relationship between a daughter and her father, separated first by divorce and then by both generational g...

What begins as a road trip through America soon becomes a journey of discovery into themselves and into the heart of the next-door neighbour they thought they knew. For Wayne Grady, the thrill of landscape and history is tempered by memories of racism and his own family roots. Merilyn Simonds, her ear tuned for the offbeat, finds curious echoes of the ex-pat promised land she grew up with. Together they travel against the tide of American history, followin...

A bold and innovative novel, I Am Ariel Sharon dives into the tortured mind of the controversial Israeli prime minister as he lies comatose and faces an ultimate reckoning.Award-winning Palestinian Canadian novelist Yara El-Ghadban imagines the confrontation at death’s door between Ariel Sharon, the “King of Israel,” and the women closest to him — his mother, his wives, and the mysterious nurse Rita. Like latter-day Greek furies, they lament the brutality ...

Only God can make a tree,” wrote Joyce Kilmer in one of the most celebrated of poems. In Tree: A Life Story, authors David Suzuki and Wayne Grady extend that celebration in a biography” of this extraordinary - and extraordinarily important - organism. A story that spans a millennium and includes a cast of millions but focuses on a single tree, a Douglas fir, Tree describes in poetic detail the organism’...

For readers of Colson Whitehead, James McBride, Yaa Gyasi and Lawrence Hill, Up From Freedom is a powerful and emotional novel about the dangers that arise when we stay silent in the face of prejudice or are complicit in its development.As a young man, Virgil Moody vowed he would never be like his father, he would never own slaves. When he moves from his father's plantation in Savannah to New Orleans, he takes with him Annie, a tiny woman with sharp eyes a...

Student Jerome Lupien is swept up in a series of misadventures and criminal escapades in this portrait of a city infamously mired in the corrupt alliances of politicians, political lobbyists, and construction magnates. The school is unconventional, but the education singular.Jerome Lupien — libidinous, unscrupulous, and fresh out of university — is ambitious and at loose ends. Whether on a hunting trip in the woods, on an escape planned in good faith to Cuba, or se...

First published in 1972, Columbus and the Fat Lady introduced readers to Governor General’s Literary Award–winning author Matt Cohen’s skewed and hilarious worldview. By turns funny, surreal, wistful, savagely satirical, and brilliantly inventive, the stories in this collection intrigue and surprise the reader with their unexpected language and plots. He conjures up images that are both absurd and perceptive. From Sir Galahad as a schoolteacher to Christopher Columbus as a carniva...

Helen, alias "Joe," would rather be a boy and have all kinds of adventures like Lady Oscar, her favourite cartoon heroine. She daydreams about living in another time and achieving great things, but she must be content delivering newspapers and working at the bingo hall. After all, she is only eight years old, even though she claims to be ten.When Roger, an old man who drinks like a fish, swears like a sailor, and dreams about dying, moves into the working-class neighbourhood where ...

The Great Lakes have been central to the development of eastern North America. In this beautifully designed, comprehensive gem of a guide to the ecosystem at the heart of Canada” (The Tyee), award-winning science and nature writer Wayne Grady makes scientific concepts accessible as he reveals how human impact has changed this life-giving region.The Great Lakes: A Natural History of a Changing Region is the most authoritative, complete and...