Carol Matthews set out to discover what bereavement meant to her after the loss of her husband. In Bereavement Days she explores bereavement within the context of their larger relationship, from the courtship and on through the marriage. This examination not only helped her endure terrible grief and develop a new appreciation of her marriage, it also helped her to accept and integrate his death into the story of their life together. Her account includes literary references, letters, conversations and reflections in five sections: grieving, longing, belonging, mourning and cleaving.

Minerva's Owl: The Bereavement Phase of My Marriage

Matthews, Carol

Parenting & Relationships

Freehand Books

What do you do when your outspoken, passionate, and quick-witted mother starts fading into a forgetful, fearful woman? In this powerful graphic memoir, Sarah Leavitt reveals how Alzheimer’s disease transformed her mother Midge―and her family―forever. In spare black and white drawings and clear, candid prose, Sarah shares her family’s journey through a harrowing range of emotions―shock, denial, hope, anger, frustration―all the while learning to cope with a devastating diagnosis, and managing to find moments of happiness. Tangles confronts the complexity of Alzheimer’s disease, and gradually opens a knot of moments, memories, and dreams to reveal a bond between a mother and a daughter that will never come apart.

Tangles: A story about Alzheimer's, my mother, and me

Comics & Graphic Novels

Leavitt, Sarah

Graphic Novels

A high school math teacher drifts from a moored boat to a downtown trance club, while negotiating her problematic relationship with an alcoholic older brother. A displaced Toronto book designer deliberates dreams, daydreams and delusions that result from a lone encounter with philosopher Mark Kingwell. A dissatisfied nomad traverses the globe, from Vancouver to Persepolis, chasing fleeting intimacies of her own as she tries to conjure confessions for the dead.   In these six stories Anik See meticulously deconstructs love, art, and identity, blurring the distinctions between momentary lust and long-term intimacy, and loss and fulfillment. Throughout these explorations of somewhat muddled lives, See demonstrates an uncanny ability to distill often unsettling truths in prose that is intelligent, subtle, and unerringly cool. Intricate yet precise, postcard and other stories offers the reader a lucid perspective on the blurry, bewildering business of being human.

postcard and other stories

Literature & Fiction

See, Anik

Contemporary

In this, her fourth book of poetry, one of Canada’s best-loved poets takes on one of the most compelling divas of our time. In sixty-one audacious poems, Jeanette Lynes re-imagines and reanimates the peripatetic art, life, and times of Dusty Springfield. Alternating between playful irreverence and profound compassion, It’s Hard Being Queen paints a compulsively readable portrait of an extraordinary life. Each page is infused with wit, drama, and, of course, music. Jeanette Lynes not only steps into the icon’s shoes―she lives in her skin.

It's Hard Being Queen: The Dusty Springfield Poems

Lynes, Jeanette

Humor & Entertainment

In 1976, Ben Martini was diagnosed with schizophrenia. A decade later, his brother Olivier was told he had the same disease. For the past thirty years the Martini family has struggled to comprehend and cope with a devastating illness, frustrated by a health care system lacking in resources and empathy, the imperfect science of medication, and the strain of mental illness on familial relationships.
Throughout it all, Olivier, an accomplished visual artist, drew. His sketches, comic strips, and portraits document his experience with, and capture the essence of, this all too frequently misunderstood disease. In Bitter Medicine, Olivier's poignant graphic narrative runs alongside and communicates with a written account of the past three decades by his younger brother, award-winning author and playwright Clem Martini. The result is a layered family memoir that faces head-on the stigma attached to mental illness.
Shot through with wry humour and unapologetic in its politics, Bitter Medicine is the story of the Martini family, a polemical and poetic portrait of illness, and a vital and timely call for action.

Bitter Medicine: A Graphic Memoir of Mental Illness

Biographies & Memoirs

Olivier Martini

Clem Martini

Professionals & Academics

Good to a Fault

In a novel reminiscent of the work of Penelope Lively, Anne Tyler, and Alice Munro, acclaimed author Marina Endicott gives us one of the most satisfying, most profound, and most memorable reads of the year. Absorbed in her own failings, Clara Purdy crashes her life into a sharp left turn, taking the young family in the other car along with her. When bruises on the mother, Lorraine, prove to be late-stage cancer, Clara―against all habit and comfort―moves the three children and their terrible grandmother into her own house. We know what is good, but we don't do it. In Good to a Fault, Clara decides to give it a try, and then has to cope with the consequences: exhaustion, fury, hilarity, and unexpected love. But she must question her own motives. Is she acting out of true goodness, or out of guilt? Most shamefully, has she taken over simply because she wants the baby for her own? What do we owe in this life, and what do we deserve? This compassionate, funny, and fiercely intelligent novel looks at life and death through grocery-store reading glasses: being good, being at fault, and finding some balance on the precipice.

Good To A Fault

Endicott, Marina

Literary

“In simple terms, pathology is the scientific study of the way things go wrong.” In these fifteen searingly honest personal essays, debut author Susan Olding takes us on an unforgettable journey into the complex heart of being human. Each essay dissects an aspect of Olding’s life experience―from her vexed relationship with her father to her tricky dealings with her female peers; from her work as a counsellor and teacher to her persistent desire, despite struggles with infertility, to have children of her own. In a suite of essays forming the emotional climax of the book, Olding bravely recounts the adoption of her daughter, Maia, from an orphanage in China, and tells us the story of Maia’s difficult adaptation to the unfamiliar state of being loved. Written with as much lyricism, detail, and artfulness as the best short stories, the essays in Pathologies provide all the pleasures of fiction combined with the enrichment derived from the careful presentation of fact. Susan Olding is indisputably one of Canada’s finest new writers, one who has taken the challenging, much-underused form of the literary essay and made it her own.

Pathologies: A Life in Essays

Olding, Susan

Arts & Literature

Freehand Books is pleased to be bringing back to print the widely acclaimed first novel by the author of the Giller-shortlisted Good to a Fault, Marina Endicott. Open Arms is a contemporary quest story set in Saskatoon and featuring a protagonist whose spirit is as strong as her heart is broken. Seventeen-year-old Bessie Smith Connolly, the daughter of a rock-singer mother and absentee poet father, must navigate grief and betrayal, making her way through her exploded family and out into the world. Open Arms was a finalist for the 2002 Amazon-Books in Canada First Novel Award and broadcast on CBC Radio’s Between the Covers.

Open Arms

A poverty-stricken guitar virtuoso navigates the political landscape of nineteenth-century Parisian society as he comes out of retirement for one final concert. A sessional instructor competing for the prestigious Interdisciplinary Chair in Aretha Franklin studies gets sidetracked by her obsession with a mysterious student in a yellow hat. A dying doo-wop DJ and his wife try to bridge the estrangement wrought by illness as they travel in search of the horns, drums, and vocals of highlife. In the eleven stories that make up The Doctrine of Affections, Paul Headrick takes us on a fascinating journey into the heart of music. From the perfectly honed decrescendo of a symphony’s string section to the down-home chord progressions at a latenight kitchen party, Headrick’s stories question the subtle differences between hearing and listening, and communicating and understanding. The subjects of this collection are soloists, ensemble players, scholars, collectors, and lovers of music, but their experiences with risk, religion, relief, and often regret make their stories resonate for readers who are hearing their songs for the first time.

The Doctrine of Affections

Headrick, Paul

Ian Williams’s Not Anyone’s Anything is a trio of trios: three sets of three stories, with three of those stories further divided into thirds. Mathematical, musical, and meticulously crafted, these stories play profoundly with form, featuring flash cards and musical notations embedded in texts, literal basements, and dual narratives, semi-detached. Roaming through Toronto and its surrounding suburbia, Williams’s characters wittily and wryly draw attention to the angst and anxieties associated with being somewhere between adolescence and more-than-that. They are disastrously ambitious, cutting the flaps of skin between their fingers to play Chopin; they are restless and bored, breaking into units of new subdivisions hoping for a score; they continually test the ones they love, and, though every time feels like the last time, they might be up for one more game.

Not Anyone's Anything

Williams, Ian

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

Books by Freehand Books