NOW A PENGUIN MODERN CLASSIC: In this celebrated novel, Margaret Laurence writes with grace, power, and deep compassion about Rachel Cameron, a woman struggling to come to terms with love, with death, with herself and her world.\nLiving alone with only her aging mother for company, thirty-something retiring schoolteacher Rachel Cameron feels trapped in a milieu of deceit and pettiness--her own and that of others. She longs for love and contact with another human being who shares her rebellious spirit, and when she has a summer affair with former schoolmate Nick Kazlik, she learns at last to reach out to another person and to make herself vulnerable. Poignant and singular, A Jest of God is an enduring work by one of the world's most distinguished authors.

A Jest of God: Penguin Modern Classics Edition

Literature & Fiction

LAURENCE, Margaret

Literary

New Canadian Library

Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada

In 1836, Anna Jameson sailed from London, England, to join her husband in Upper Canada, where he was serving as attorney general. Shaking off the mud of Muddy York with mild disdain, young Mrs. Jameson swiftly sallied forth to discover the New World for herself.The best known of all nineteenth century Canadian travel books, Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada is Jameson’s wonderfully entertaining account of her adventures, ranging from gleeful observations about the pretensions of high society in the colonies to a “wild expedition” she took by canoe into Indian country.Jameson’s keen eye, intrepid spirit, irreverent sense of humour and staunch feminist perspective make this journal an invaluable record of life in pre-Confederation Canada.From the Paperback edition.

Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (New Canadian Library)

Biographies & Memoirs

Jameson, Anna Brownell

Historical

The ten stories in In the Village of Viger portray the life of a rural village as it faces the darkness of its own future. An established milliner, Madame Laroque, is upset by the advent of a younger, more popular rival. An innkeeper’s obsession with the Franco-Prussian War drives his descent into madness. A gardener longs to return to the village in France where his mother was born. At once comical, farcical, and tragic, this superb collection, first published in 1896, anticipates later collections of linked short stories including Alice Munro’s Who Do You Think You Are?and Margaret Laurence’s A Bird in the House.

In the Village of Viger (New Canadian Library)

Scott, Duncan Campbell

United States

In this unforgettable novel, Leonard Cohen boldly etches the youth and early manhood of Lawrence Breavman, only son of an old Jewish family in Montreal. Life for Breavman is made up of dazzling colour – a series of motion pictures fed through a high-speed projector: the half-understood death of his father; the adult games of love and war, with their infinite capacity for fantasy and cruelty; his secret experiments with hypnotism; the night-long adventures with Krantz, his beloved comrade and confidant. Later, achieving literary fame as a college student, Breavman does penance through manual labour, but ultimately flees to New York. And although he has loved the bodies of many women, it is only when he meets Shell, whom he awakens to her own beauty, that he discovers the totality of love and its demands, and comes to terms with the sacrifices he must make.

The Favourite Game

COHEN,LEONARD

This is the only anthology to present a full history of Canadian poetry – from the early 1600s through the expansiveness of poetic activity during the 18th and 19th centuries and into the flourishing first decades of the 20th century. The editors have compiled works from over 50 poets, including the verse of Isabella Valancy Crawford, Bliss Carman, Archibald Lampman and Duncan Campbell Scott, and several long narrative poems, including Oliver Goldsmith’s The Rising Village and Crawford’s Malcolm’s Katie.

Canadian Poetry from the Beginnings through the First World War (New Canadian Library)

Poetry

The Alley Cat (New Canadian Library)

First published in Quebec in 1981, Beauchemin’s highly acclaimed comic masterpiece of storytelling follows in the tradition of the great novels of the 19th century.When Florent Boissonneault comes to the aid of an accident victim, his life changes forever. One onlooker, the powerful and sinister Egon Ratablavasky, comes to haunt his ambitions and dreams, lurking behind his every opportunity, success, and failure. Finally, obsessed by a need to free himself, Florent discovers how to fight back.From the Trade Paperback edition.

Beauchemin, Yves

Written soon after the founding of the state of Israel, The Second Scroll is A.M. Klein’s most innovative and visionary work. The five “books” of the novel are a modern testament of Jewish experience to which are appended “glosses” or commentaries in the form of drama, epistle, poetry, and psalm. The action centres on a young writer from Montreal, whose search for his legendary Uncle Melech becomes a journey of revelation through Italy, Morocco, and the Holy Land. Dissident and exile, reformer and scholar, Melech is a messianic figure who enacts the destiny of his people and embodies the spiritual yearnings of everyman. The Second Scroll, Klein’s only novel, combines the lyric genius of his poetic works with compelling reportage to create one of the most eloquent and original works in Canadian fiction.

The Second Scroll (New Canadian Library)

Klein, Abraham Moses

The Temptations of Big Bear

“What can that mean, I and my family will have a ‘reserve of one square mile’?” So asks Big Bear of Governor Morris, come to impose a square treaty on the round, buffalo-covered world of the Plains Cree. As the buffalo vanish and the tension builds to the second Riel Rebellion, Big Bear alone of the prairie chiefs keeps up pressure for a better treaty by refusing to choose a reserve. He argues, “If any man has the right to put a rope around another man’s neck, some day someone will get choked.” It is Big Bear’s story – and the story of Wandering Spirit, of Kitty McLean and John McDougall–that is told in this novel with rare and penetrating power. Permeated with a sense of place and time, this eagerly awaited work by Rudy Wiebe reflects the author’s sensitivity to the Canadian prairies, their history, the minds and hearts of their diverse people. Exploring Big Bear’s isolated struggle, Wiebe has encompassed in one creative sweep not only his hero’s struggle for integrity, but the whole range and richness of the Plains culture. Here is the giant circle of the prairie horizon, and the joy, the sorrow, the pain and the triumph and the violence of unconquerable human beings faced with destruction.

Wiebe, Rudy

Contemporary

The Blue Mountains of China

For readers of Wiebe's Of This Earth: A Mennonite Boyhood in the Boreal Forest and Sandra Birdsell's The Russländer.An epic novel on the Mennonite experience, by a Governor General's Award-winning author.From the eBook edition.

The History of Emily Montague (New Canadian Library)

This charming love story captures the lives of Quebec City’s early English-speaking inhabitants, the Québécois, and the Native people, in the decade between Wolfe’s victory on the Plains of Abraham in 1759 and the American War of Independence in the 1770s. First published in 1769, The History of Emily Montague, which brings the 18th-century novel into a New World context, is rightly called Canada’s – indeed North America’s – first novel.

Brooke, Frances

World Literature

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