Bookland: 20 books

THE PHILOSOPHY OF AS IF" is a poetry collection that describes ideas that may not correspond with reality but help us to interact with reality better. Fiction writers often say that they tell a higher truth but poets like to pretend that what they write is sincere direct truth-telling. However poems...

On Guard For Thee: Canadian Peacekeeping Missions is a collection of stories about Canadian men and women who have served overseas on UN or NATO missions from the end of the Cold War to the present day. The stories are collected directly from the individual veterans. Contributors represent virtually...

The poems in The Serenity of Stone emerge from places as disparate as author's childhood in Grenada, adolescence in Edmonton, and teenage years and adulthood in Toronto. They span the themes of diasporadic life, themes ranging from landscape and family history, romance and love, crime and racism to kindness...

Edward Lacey was one of the rare North American writers who intimately knew the Third World in the latter twentieth century. A superb speaker and translator of multiple languages, Lacey was a gifted teacher in Mexico, Trinidad, Brazil, Thailand, and Indonesia. While he was a college student in the 1950s,...

The river winds through Above and Below the Waterline, the first collection of poetry from novelist, Marianne Paul. The author navigates the joy and the grief that is life in the process of being lived, those events and passages that mark the flow of time, the undercurrents of family, the rough waters...

In this poetry collection, Michel Pleau uses simple and moving images that go straight to the heart. He shapes words with painstaking care to give us moments of pure beauty and flashes of luminous landscape. He evokes the nostalgia of childhood in language as refreshing and bracing as the wind. With...

Rising with a Distant Dawn is a powerful and moving poetry collection, which stretches across the boundaries of skin colour, language, and religion to give voice to the lives and experiences of ordinary Aboriginal Canadians. The book captures timely personal and cultural challenges, and ultimately shares...

When disinherited loser Sam Giltine catches pneumonia, stemming from depression he emerges from his feverish state completely changed. Believing his body to be inhabited by a malevolent angel, he embarks on a spiritual journey that devolves into a series of random murders. He must confront the guilt-ridden,...

"Thoughts and Other Human Tendencies" is a poetry collection where stories of Aboriginal experiences are distilled into feelings and thoughts that are universal. Reneltta Arluk weaves the traditional and the contemporary together through the eyes of a young Aboriginal woman. She draws from the Aboriginal...

This is a book for all those who yearn for far away places: the adventurers and the armchair travellers. The stories run the gamut from searching for Polar bears on the shores of Hudson Bay through mountain climbing in Western Canada to tracking Royal Bengal tigers in Bangladesh jungle. They depict often...

When Winnie finds herself suddenly widowed and an unemployed mother of six, she is forced to change her life in order to keep her family together. Illiterate, shy and inexperienced, Winnie relies on her eldest son and the strength of her Chippewan ancestors to give her the courage to find help. The story...

Whistle for Jellyfish is a poetry collection written by six award-winning poets - Sylvia Adams, Brock Currie, Gill Foss, Glenn Kletke, Barbara Myers, and Margaret Malloch Zielinski. Their decision to write a collection of travel poems was based on a desire to share experiences in a way that would preserve...

Years after a near-miraculous birth imposes impossible life expectations on him, a lonely and unaccomplished man tries to radically reinvent himself. A prominent female author is stricken with a writing block just a few hours before she is scheduled to deliver the keynote speech of her life. On a train,...

Canada is synonymous with success in figure skating. "Taking the Ice" tells us about some of the people who have been instrumental in creating the "Ice Dynasty" that we have come to enjoy as Canadians. It all begins with the love affair between Canadians and Barbara Ann Scott the 1948 Olympic Champion...