Though a stroke has left her mute, the story Hazel MacPherson has to share is unforgettable. As a talented nurse in the early 1950s, she went north to Moose Factory to help fight the epidemic of tuberculosis that was ravaging the Cree and Inuit peoples. Each week the boat brought new patients from the James Bay, Hudson Bay, and Nunavik communities to the little hospital. It was a desperate undertaking, fraught with cultural and language difficulties that hampered the urgent, sometimes reckless, efforts of the medical staff. But Hazel is soon distracted from the tensions of the hospital by an enigmatic drifter named Gideon Judge, an itinerant umbrella mender searching for the Northwest Passage. From her own hospital bed, the older Hazel struggles to pass on to her grandniece the harrowing tale of her past in the North, including the fate of Gideon and the heartbreaking secrets she left behind.

Umbrella Mender, The

Literature & Fiction

Fischer Guy, Christine

British & Irish

Buckrider Books

Legendary war photographer Vivienne Pink has five days to photograph servicemen about to deploy for active combat. Racing to meet her deadline, she heads to Las Vegas, where she’ll capture images of men who may die the next day – and where she’ll confront an abuser from her past to force a reckoning. Accompanied by her husband, a celebrated novelist, and her best friend, a former CIA spook, Vivienne heads out into the Nevada desert in search of adrenaline, vengeance and the perfect shot. Told in a vivid, hallucinogenic realism, Death Valley is a sexy, fast-paced tale that’s part Pynchon, part Tarantino.

Death Valley (Vivienne Pink)

Perly, Susan

Literary

Winner of: 2017 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry Elegiac, bittersweet and generous of spirit – a major poet’s most beautiful work to date. Always willing to take aesthetic and artistic risks, Stuart Ross is the author of some of Canada’s most daring, and also most rewarding, poetry. Long celebrated for his surreal narratives and humorous wordplay, here Ross focuses more intensely on intimate subject matter – investigating the often complex, often absurd, but always powerful connections between loved ones. The care and delicacy with which he renders these portraits of family members, friends, mentors – and even himself – is nothing short of arresting. And readers – both those familiar with his work and those new to it – will admire the dexterity with which he juxtaposes such pieces with more audacious inventions.

Sparrow Came Down Resplendent, A

Ross, Stuart

Poetry

Guy thinks he’s God’s gift to women. But then again, so do women. Guy is a successful talent agent who dates models, pop stars and women he meets on the beach. He’s a narcissistic, judgmental snob who rates women’s looks from one to ten; a racist, homophobic megalomaniac who makes fun of people’s weight; a cheating, lying, manipulative jerk who sees his older girlfriend as nothing more than an adornment. His only real friend, besides his dog, is a loser who belongs to a pick-up artist group. Guy is completely oblivious to his own lack of empathy, and his greatest talent is hiding it all…until he meets someone who challenges him in a way he’s never been challenged before. Darkly funny and utterly offensive, Guy is a brilliant and insightful character study that exposes the twisted thoughts of the misogynist bro next door.

Bydlowska, Jowita

Contemporary

What happens when a respectable middle-aged father, teacher and writer decides one day to abandon his ordinary routine and embark on an unexpected journey toward an unknowable fate, following the ghost of Buster Keaton and a vision of a bear? In Tim Bowling’s fifth novel, The Heavy Bear, the main character – a sort of contemporary version of Joyce’s Leopold Bloom who just happens to be named Tim Bowling – spends an intense late-summer day in downtown Edmonton. Haunted by “the slender sadness” of the world, and unable to face his afternoon class, Tim Bowling finds himself pulled into an escapade revolving around an antique toy, a capuchin monkey and a young student our narrator likens to Pippi Longstocking. Accompanied by the shade of the silent-film star Buster Keaton, and the bear-shaped spirit of the American poet Delmore Schwartz, Bowling’s Tim Bowling must confront, with equal parts humour and sincerity, a fundamental problem of our age: how to make and maintain human connections in a world that seems intent on destroying them?

The Heavy Bear

Bowling, Tim

Humor & Satire

Voodoo Hypothesis is a subversion of the imperial construct of "blackness" and a rejection of the contemporary and historical systems that paint black people as inferior, through constant parallel representations of "evil" and "savagery." Pulling from pop culture, science, pseudo-science and contemporary news stories about race, Lubrin asks: What happens if the systems of belief that give science, religion and culture their importance were actually applied to the contemporary "black experience"? With its irreverence toward colonialism, and the related obsession with post-colonialism and anti-colonialism, and her wide-ranging lines, deftly touched with an intermingling of Caribbean Creole, English patois and baroque language, Lubrin has created a book that holds up a torch to the narratives of the ruling class, and shows us the restorative possibilities that exist in language itself.

Voodoo Hypothesis

Lubrin, Canisia

Has the World Ended Yet? starts with retired superheroes living in a soulless suburbia where everyone gets lost trying to get home. Then the angels start to fall from the sky. Is it Armageddon? Do we want the world to end? In a series of linked nineteen short stories Peter Darbyshire weaves together superheroes, ghosts, the undead, a hired hitman, the Cold War, the Rapture and avenging angels in a Twilight Zone–style collection that is riveting and human. We follow characters that are identifiable through situations that are unreal, through a technicolour landscape we are all familiar with. The end of the world is not what we expect, what any of Darbyshire’s characters expect and may not really be happening at all. But should it?

Has the World Ended Yet?: Stories

Darbyshire, Peter

Today is a new day but yesterday was the same day. A man awakens with no memory in a strange, rundown institution. Struggling to make sense of his surroundings, he begins to piece together the story of his life from clues someone has left for him—drawings that line the walls of his room and fragments of letters hidden in the lining of his jacket. When he leaves his room to venture into the surrounding Compound, he encounters a group of oddly familiar people that urge him to undertake a desperate mission. In dreamlike prose, award-winning novelist Rabindranath Maharaj weaves a story of fragments in which our narrator comes to believe he was once a comic book writer who warned against humanity’s reliance on artificial intelligence. Meanwhile, his caretakers try to convince him he’s insane. Soon he uncovers more clues that suggest memory is stored outside the body, and he learns of Adjacentland, a primitive land of outsiders where human imagination still survives. Together with a motley group of inmates from the Compound, he decides he must make his way there. In this brilliant, unsettling novel, Maharaj asks us, “What happens to the soul when all minds are tied together?”

Adjacentland

Maharaj, Rabindranath

"Davis confidently paints a magical world rich in detail where human trials unfold against a fairy-tale tapestry. Weaving a fresh legend from a mosaic of ancient stories, she creates a bold new world where wit equals witchery and kindness is as valued as courage." - John C. Foster, author of Mister White The downtown core of Toronto is being consumed by Elysium, a drug that allows its users to slip through the permeable edges of this world into the next, before consuming them utterly. Peddled by the icy Srebrenka, few have managed to escape the drug and its dealer. But Maggie has. Inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen," and woven through with northern folk tales, The Grimoire of Kensington Market is the story of Maggie, proprietor of the Grimoire bookstore, the cosmic nexus of all the world's tales. Years after beating her addiction, Maggie is dismayed by the reappearance of Srebrenka in her life. Although she resists temptation, she quickly learns that her brother, Kyle, has been ensnared by Srebrenka's beguiling. Driven by guilt and love, Maggie sets off on a quest to rescue Kyle from the Silver World, where robbers stalk the woods, tavern keepers weave clouds to hide mountains and caribou race along the northern lights. There, she must discover what strengths lie within her.

The Grimoire of Kensington Market

Davis, Lauren B.

A treaty is a contract. A treaty is enduring. A treaty is an act of faith. A treaty at its best is justice. It is a document and an undertaking. It is connected to place, people and self. It is built on the past, but it also indicates how the future may unfold. Armand Garnet Ruffo's TREATY # is all of these. In this far-ranging work, Ruffo documents his observations on life – and in the process, his own life – as he sets out to restructure relationships and address obligations nation-to-nation, human to human, human to nature. Now, he undertakes a new phase in its restoration. He has written his TREATY # like a palimpsest over past representations of Indigenous bodies and beliefs, built powerful connections to his predecessors, and discovered new ways to bear witness and build a place for them, and all of us, in his poems. This is a major new work from an important, original voice.

TREATY #

Ruffo, Armand Garnet

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

Books by Buckrider Books