Ken McGoogan has done it againwritten a vivid, real-life adventure that restores an extraordinary yet forgotten figure to his rightful place in exploration history. Among fur-trade experts, Samuel Hearne is grudgingly recognized as the eighteenth-century British adventurer who, during a remarkable three-year odyssey, became the first European to reach the Arctic coast of North America. In Ancient Mariner, McGoogan demonstrates that Hearne was far more complex, accomplished and influential than the history books suggest.
Beginning with Hearne’s entry into the Royal Navy at twelve years of age, McGoogan paints an authentic portrait of eighteenth-century British life, both on and off the wooden sailing ships. After serving as a midshipman during the tumultuous Seven Years’ War, Hearne moved to London and, in 1766, just twenty-one, joined the Hudson’s Bay Company. Based at the company’s northernmost fort, an ambitious Hearne embarked on an overland quest for rich veins of copper supposedly located “far to the northward where the sun don’t set”and also to discover the Northwest Passage.
In his posthumously published journal, Hearne described the three-year odysseya harrowing journey marked by hardship, hunger and disappointment, and mitigated only by his friendship with the legendary Dene leader Matonabbee. Hearne trekked more than 3,500 miles. His epic adventure culminated in the infamous and still-controversial massacre at “Bloody Falls”an event that, as McGoogan shows, changed him forever.
Drawing on naval history, fur-trade history and literary history, McGoogan portrays Hearne as a skilled navigator, a pioneering anthropologist, a ground-breaking naturalist and a gifted natural artist. He fell in love with a native woman and never fully recovered after she died tragically.
 In a fascinating bit of literary detective work, McGoogan also determines that, having returned to London to live out his final days, Hearne met Samuel Taylor Coleridge and inspired the poet to write “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Suffused with McGoogan’s inimitable passion and insight, sparkling with discoveries and reinterpretations, Ancient Mariner is destined to become the non-fiction book of the fall season.

Ancient Mariner

McGoogan, Ken

History

Phyllis Bruce Books

The author of the bestseller The Lost Garden returnswith a luminous novel of intertwining stories that meet in a haunting, movingclimax. 
Each evening at dusk, six people gather at the edge of thewoods, calling their dogs to come back to them, dogs that have turned wild andvanished from their lives. Drawn together by need, the group forms its own smallcommunity—until violence strikes unexpectedly.
Humphreys’ graceful writing, her superb eye for detail, hersensitivity and intelligence combine to produce an unforgettable story about thewild in all of us.

Wild Dogs

Literature & Fiction

Humphreys, Helen

Literary

Diane Schoemperlen has been described variously as “one of the most vibrant and original voices in our literature,” “incredibly intelligent and observant,” “funny,” and “creatively innovative.”She was the 1998 winner of the Governor General’s Award for Fiction for Forms of Devotion, her collection of short stories and pictures. And her most recent novel, the bestselling Our Lady of the Lost and Found, is being simultaneously released in trade paperback as this newest collection appears on the shelves. With Red Plaid Shirt, Schoemperlen shows that she is a writer at the top of her form an intriguing, wonderfully shape-shifting one, at that. Red Plaid Shirt presents 21 perfectly formed stories, a blend of favorites, out-of-print pieces and new work, all displaying Schoemperlen’s trademark wit, subtle irony and gift for turning everyday domesticities into dynamic, provocative prose. “Losing Ground”is a coming-of-age story in which a teenage girl starts to see herself as separate from her family. In “This Town,” Schoemperlen creates a witty newcomers’ guidebook to an ordinary town complete with handy cross-references. In “A Simple Story,” a tale of a man and his mistress is gradually uncovered, as a seemingly simple car accident unravels an epic tangle of lives and loves. As always, these are compulsively readable stories, deliciously difficult to resist, proving once again that Schoemperlen’s voice is as fresh, funny, and electric as ever.

Red Plaid Shirt

SCHOEMPERLEN, Diane

Award-winning writer Dennis Bock returns with an unforgettable novel about a man whose life has touched millions. In The Communist’s Daughter, the legendary Canadian doctor Norman Bethunevisionary, radical, martyrcomes vividly to life. Amidst the death and chaos of the Japanese army’s advance into the northern hills of China, Bethune composes a wrenching letter to his daughter, a small child he has never seen. Her mother, the mysterious Swede named Kajsa he abandoned in war-torn Spain, haunts him. Now, faced with imminent death, the only trained doctor in 100,000 square miles, Bethune must confront the sum of his life.
Set against the tumult of the late 1930s, when ideologies clashed in Spain and China and the world stood poised for global conflict, The Communist’s Daughter is a remarkable depiction of the moral ambiguities of war, political idealism and personal responsibility. Bock’s Bethune is a man of fierce conviction and intense, often unreasoning, loyalty; yet, in the end, will he summon the courage to confess to his daughter the true reason he left her to come to the heart of this life-and-death struggle in the hills of China?
 This is storytelling at its bestan elegant, passionate novel that unfolds against the sweep of history as the world, once again, turns towards war.

The Communist's Daughter

Bock, Dennis

Contemporary

Deafening

Deaf since she was five years old, Grania has learned that watching is not always enough to survive in the world of the hearing. She has learned that words can often be impossible to see, their shape disappearing into a place where she cannot decipher their skittery ways. Sent to the Ontario School for the Deaf in Belleville, Grania must learn to live away from her loving family, lonely for the company of her sister and the secret language they shared. When Grania falls in love with Jim, a young hearing man from the east coast, her life seems complete, but the First World War soon tears them apart and sweeps him into the worst of experiences—trench warfare. At the Western Front, Jim is tested to his limit as he and his buddy Irish—both stretcher bearers—retrieve the shattered bodies of their comrades.
Fueled by tremendous word-of-mouth excitement at the Frankfurt Book Fair, Deafening has already become an international publishing phenomenon, with rights sold in over 12 countries so far. Author Frances Itani, the source of this unprecedented attention for a debut novel, has steadily been gaining a stellar reputation for her short fiction collections, her most recent, Leaning, Leaning Over Water, receiving ecstatic reviews. Touted as “writer to watch,” Itani has lived up to her accolades with Deafening.
Her depiction of a world where sound exists only in the margins is a singular feat in literary fiction, a place difficult to leave and even harder to forget. Elegantly written, with grace and precision, Deafening is, above all, a deeply moving journey through the strands of strength and vulnerability that weave heart and spirit together.

ITANI, Frances

A Blade Of Grass

DESOTO, Lewis

Bedlam, Greg Hollingshead’s new novel, tells a dramatic and compelling story of three ordinary people caught up in the turmoil of the late-18th century, their lives inexorably intertwined in a world where nothing is as it seems. 
Europe, reeling from the French Revolution, is about explode. Conspiracies, plots and paranoia sweep across the country, landing James Tilly Matthews in Bethlem Hospital, a notorious, crumbling home for the insane. Although he is delusionalconvinced that a gang of villains is controlling unsuspecting minds by means of a diabolical machine called an “Air Loom” Matthews appears to be incarcerated for political reasons. Margaret, his beloved wife, spends years trying to free her often lucid husband, but she is repeatedly blocked by her chief adversary, John Haslam, Bethlem’s apothecary and chief administrator. Haslam, torn between his conscience and a desire to further his career through studying his famous patient, becomes another puppet in a game governed by shifting rules and shadowy players. 
Bedlam creates an indelible portrait of 18th-century London, a city teetering between darkness and light, struggling to find its way to a more just and humane future. In its darkest corners, where noblemen, pickpockets, royalists and republicans jostle one another, where corruption is all in a day’s work, Matthews, Margaret and Haslam must contrive their own destinies. 
Enlivened with wit and intellectual daring, Bedlam is a novel that pulses with insight and compassion, in which imagination bridges the chasm between fantasy and reality, love and hate.

Bedlam

Hollingshead, Greg

Deaf since she was five years old, Grania has learned that watching is not always enough to survive in the world of the hearing. Sent to the Ontario School for the Deaf in Belleville, Ontario, Grania must learn to live away from her loving family. When Grania falls in love with Jim, a young hearing man from the East Coast, her life seems complete, but the First World War soon tears them apart and sweeps him into the worst of experiencestrench warfare. Deafening is a deeply poignant love story set against the horrors of the First World War. At the same time, Itani’s depiction of a world where sound exists only in the margins is a singular feat in literary fiction, a place difficult to leave and even harder to forget.

Deafening Large Print Ed

You read about these things in the newspapers, Daniel Fielding thought when Denise did not return to the car. A moment of brief pity for those whose ordinary lives are shattered by a sniper’s bullet, a burning house, a kidnapped child. He had often wondered how people moved past these tragedies.Some, he supposed, never did. From Adultery
DANIEL FIELDING, a quiet, middle-aged editor at a Toronto book-publishing house, has it all. An attractive wife, a charming daughter who excels at her private school, and a desirable house in a nice neighbourhood all add up to a successful life. If his job is becoming a little tedious and his boss a little too supercilious, then so be it. But when Fielding and a pretty, very assertive young colleague travel together to the Frankfurt Book Fair, what begins as an indiscretion unexpectedly explodes into abduction and murder. Now Fielding must navigate the devastation of the lives left behind. 
Adultery is a subtle, powerful story of a man’s fall from grace and his search for forgiveness, even in the unlikeliest of places.

Adultery

Wright, Richard B.

It is 1989 and Naiko is working in the Undeliverable MailOffice, a cavernous space that resembles a giant, congested pawnshop. Immersedin things lost and missing, she searches for clues to match undeliverable mailwith addresses, a job that allows her to achieve a semblance of order in adisorderly world. It is a shock, then, when Naiko’s co-worker Andrei, anenigmatic Romanian refugee who has become the unlikely object of Naiko’sfascination, suddenly vanishes.As the novel reveals itself in exquisitely wrought layers thatdrift through time from the Second World War to the fall of communism, Andrei’sstory of his past life in communist Romania becomes an opaque reflection ofNaiko’s own existence, and objectsfrom the pens hoarded by Naiko’s motherin her retirement home to the personal effects of Jewish women that Andrei’sgrandmother sorts through at Birkenaubecome touchstones for memories andmeaning, loss and love. A luminous debut novel from a rising talent of the newgeneration of Canadian writers, The Letter Opener is a compelling work ofliterary fiction that glows with truth.

The Letter Opener

MacLear, Kyo

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