Widely praised by critics in Canada and the U.S., shortlisted for the 1994 SmithBooks/Books in Canada First Novel Award and a City of Toronto Book Award, Minus Time made a stunningly successful publishing debut. Now with the February 2000 release of Catherine Bush’s second novel, The Rules of Engagement (see page 9), and interest from the film community, this is the perfect time for the new PerennialCanada edition of Minus Time.With surreal lyricism and edgy, deadpan wit, Catherine Bush’s  Minus Time traces the desire of a young woman to make a place for herself in a media-mad, toxic-scare-filled world. Helen’s mother is an astronaut trying to set an endurance record in a space station. Her father, a disaster-relief specialist, circles the world saving people from catastrophe. What kind of family is possible when your parents are in constant motion and there’s so much space separating you from them? With risks of disaster all around, how do you dream a future for yourself? Set in a world where external events aptly mirror the drama of personal relationships, Minus Time offers up a brilliantly observed, deeply moving tale of millennial life, in a voice sliced through with irony and awe.

Minus time

BUSH, Catherine

Hyperion

The war raging within: the author of the critically acclaimed Minus Time delivers a powerful bullet on the nature of love and war, risk and responsibility
Despite her hatred of physical violence, Arcadia Hearne is a researcher who studies contemporary war. Specializing in issues of risk and military intervention, she methodically surveys the rich arsenal of current global conflicts available to her dispassionate intellect. Ironically, she can’t seem to come to terms with her own inner conflicts, desperately trying to balance the scales of emotional risk and emotional pain. Arcadia is haunted by a violent episode in her past, an incident involving two university students, both her lovers, who resort to an old-fashioned pistol duel in a Toronto ravine to decide who will win her love. Hidden in the trees, Arcadia can’t bring herself to intervene. Guilt-ridden and confused, she flees to London, England, as she says, looking for protection from violence through knowledge, through explanations, but not through love. Only when she meets Amir, her new lover, whom she discovers to be an (idealistic) passport forger, does she begin her reconciliation with her past. The Rules of Engagement is an exceptional second novel from rising literary star Catherine Bush. A powerful exploration of what love is, the emotional borders we must cross in order to try and attain it, and the responsibilities inherent in its possession, The Rules of Engagement is also a compelling literary thriller, as Arcadia’s past rushes up to meet her, and her future almost leaves her behind. With its strong and lyrically evocative prose that moves from 1980s university life in Toronto to the gritty, yet vibrant atmosphere of today’s London, The Rules of Engagement has an extraordinary sense of time and place, and a thoughtful, timely focus that both touches the heart and engages the mind.

Rules Of Engagement

Literature & Fiction

Phyllis Bruce Books

As a member of the twenty-something generation in the 1990s, Helen finds the threat of environmental disaster, chemical fires, and contaminated water connected to the collapse of her family's personal relationships.

Minus Time

Harper-collins Publishers

Genre Fiction

Phyllis Bruce Books Perennial

Widely praised by critics in Canada and the U.S., shortlisted for the 1994 SmithBooks/Books in Canada First Novel Award and a City of Toronto Book Award, Minus Time made a stunningly successful publishing debut. Now with the February 2000 release of Catherine Bush’s second novel, The Rules of Engagement (see page 9), and interest from the film community, this is the perfect time for the new PerennialCanada edition of Minus Time. With surreal lyricism and edgy, deadpan wit, Catherine Bush’s Minus Time traces the desire of a young woman to make a place for herself in a media-mad, toxic-scare-filled world. Helen’s mother is an astronaut trying to set an endurance record in a space station. Her father, a disaster-relief specialist, circles the world saving people from catastrophe. What kind of family is possible when your parents are in constant motion and there’s so much space separating you from them? With risks of disaster all around, how do you dream a future for yourself? Set in a world where external events aptly mirror the drama of personal relationships, Minus Time offers up a brilliantly observed, deeply moving tale of millennial life, in a voice sliced through with irony and awe.

The Rules of Engagement

A gripping novel of love and war, risk and responsibility Arcadia Hearne is a war researcher, specializing in military intervention. But her immersion in contemporary war is offset by her refusal to put herself at risk, and by her insistence on keeping her past at bay. Ten years earlier, in the mid-1980s, Arcadia had fled Toronto for London after two university students--rivals for her love--fought a pistol duel over her. Now, through the interventions of her sister, Lux, and her increasingly complicated relationship with a new lover, Amir, who has secrets of his own, Arcadia is forced to confront what really happened on the day of the duel. Moving from the verdant ravines of Toronto to the secret canals of a gritty, vibrant London, The Rules of Engagement has an extraordinary sense of time and place. A powerful exploration of the nature of love, the novel provocatively explores the crossing of emotional, ethical, and literal borders.

United States

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

Ten years after two university students fight a duel for her, Arcadia now lives in London, where she begins to unravel the truth of that awful day with the help of a new lover. By the author of Minus Time. 15,000 first printing.

Claire's Head

By the acclaimed author of The Rules of Engagement and Minus Time, Claire’s Head is a compulsive, psychologically charged new novel about a migraine sufferer and her search for her missing sister. On a quiet June morning, Toronto cartographer Claire Barber receives a phone call telling her that her sister Rachel, a freelance medical journalist living in New York, seems to have vanished. Last heard from while on assignment in Montreal, Rachel cancelled a trip to visit her six-year-old daughter, who lives with Claire’s middle sister, in Toronto. Among the many fears that haunt Claire as she begins to track Rachel’s whereabouts is that Rachel’s worsening migraines have pushed her beyond her limits. As Claire disrupts her orderly life to follow news of Rachel to Montreal, to Amsterdam, to Italy, and, ultimately, to Las Vegas and Mexico in the company of Rachel’s ex-lover, Brad, she enters a world of neurologists and New Age healers. Struggling with her own headaches, Claire embarks on what becomes an emotional journey, one that brings to the fore her parents’ sudden death eight years earlier. It also reveals the heightening tensions in her relationship with her partner, Stefan, portraying along the way long-held secrets from the past as well as the uniquely complex and irreplaceable bond between sisters. What Claire comes to discover will set her life on a new course. Taking place over one summer, but delving back into the past, Claire’s Head provides both a layered, engrossing story and a meditation on how we live with pain and what we will give up to be free of it, written with all the insight, intelligence, and storytelling artistry for which Catherine Bush’s fiction has come to be known. With this, her third novel, she has once again proved herself to be one of Canadian fiction’s most striking and original voices. From the Hardcover edition.

Literary

MCCLELLAND STEWART

Accusation

Goose Lane Editions

Selected as an Amazon.ca Best Book of 2013, a Canada Reads Top 40 Pick, and a NOW Magazine Book of the YearWhile in Copenhagen, Sara Wheeler, a Toronto journalist, happens upon Cirkus Mirak, a touring Ethiopian children's circus. She later meets and is convinced to drive the circus founder, Raymond Renaud, through the night from Toronto to Montreal. Such chance beginnings lead to later fateful encounters, as renowned novelist Catherine Bush artfully confronts the destructive power of allegations. With Accusation, Bush again proves herself one of Canada's finest authors as she examines the impossibility inherent in attempting to uncover "the truth." After a friend of Sara's begins work on a documentary about the circus, unsettling charges begin to float to the surface, disturbing tales of sexual and physical abuse at the hands of Raymond. Accounts and anecdotes mount, denunciations fly, and while Sara tries to untangle the narrative knots and determine what to believe, the concept of a singular (truth) becomes slippery. Her present search is simultaneously haunted by her past. Moving between Canada, Ethiopia, and Australia, Accusation follows a network of lives that intersect with life-altering consequence, painfully revealing that the best of intentions can still lead to disaster, yet from disaster spring seeds of renewal and hope.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by BUSH, Catherine. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by BUSH, Catherine

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by BUSH, Catherine. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Minus time

Rules Of Engagement

Minus Time

Rules Of Engagement

Minus Time

The Rules of Engagement

The Rules of Engagement

Claire's Head

Accusation

Accusation