With a voice as Canadian as winter, David Adams Richards reflects on the place of hockey in the Canadian soul.
The lyrical narrative of Hockey Dreams flows from Richards' boyhood games on the Miramichi to heated debates with university professors who dare to back the wrong team. It examines the globalization of hockey, and how Canadians react to the threat of foreigners beating us at "our" game.
Part memoir, part essay on national identity, part hockey history, Hockey Dreams is a meditation by one of Canada's finest writers on the essence of the game that helps define our nation.
It may not be great literature -- but at least it's handy.
From the mastermind of the hugely successful The Red Green Show comes a book that is going to change your life, or at least make you laugh -- a lot -- whenever you pick it up. And people are going to be picking it up for many years to come, because -- like the long-rerunning TV shows -- there's not a topical gag in the book anywhere, so it's going to be funny for the forseeable future. And as its title suggests, this is also a terribly useful book. Among its very many gems of advice, it shows how to cook with acetylene, take revenge on a lawn mower, measure your hat size with a two-by-four, reduce your carbon footprint (it involves moving into a fruit tree located next to a liquor store) and make your own alternative fuel (which involves an empty propane tank and a full septic one).
From the Hardcover edition.
@20@A@18@ Globe and Mail @19@Best Book@21@@16@@16@It would take many lifetimes, it was said to me during my first visit, to see all of India. The desperation must have shown on my face to absorb and digest all I possibly could. This was not something I had articulated or resolved; and yet I recall an anxiety as I travelled the length and breadth of the country, senses raw to every new experience, that even in the distraction of a blink I might miss something profoundly significant.@16@@16@I was not born in India, nor were my parents; that might explain much in my expectation of that visit. Yet how many people go to the homeland of their grandparents with such a heartload of expectation and momentousness; such a desire to find themselves in everything they see? Is it only India that clings thus, to those who@95@#8217;ve forsaken it; is this why Indians in a foreign land seem always so desperate to seek each other out? What was India to me?@16@@16@The inimitable M.G. Vassanji turns his eye to India, the homeland of his ancestors, in this powerfully moving tale of family and country. Part travelogue, part history, @20@A Place Within@21@ is M.G. Vassanji@95@#8217;s intelligent and beautifully written journey to explore where he belongs.@16@@16@@16@@18@From the Hardcover edition.@19@
Set against the vividly described Prairies in the heart of a cloistered religious sect, this is a gripping novel from a beloved Canadian author.
Fifteen-year-old Jim Hobbs, alienated from life in Toronto, hitchhikes to the Prairies on a whim, where he finds shelter in an abandoned farmhouse. There, he encounters his neighbours, members of Majestic Farm, a group that abides by an old-fashioned, ultra-conservative set of rules enforced by their ruthless pastor. When Miriam, one of the pastor's daughters, secretly befriends Jim, they must hide their blossoming love for one another -- or face terrifying consequences.
In helping Miriam to escape her religious imprisonment on the farm, Jim must risk everything.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
Apple is the opposite of her outspoken mother and gossipy, chatty best friends; she's always been the cool, calm, and collected one. But her life is about to spiral out of control. Apple's super-sized, secret crush on her friend Zen leads her into major trouble. And she's realizing it might not have been such a good idea to pose as her mother-the famous talk show host and self-help guru, Dr. Bee Berg-and send out fake advice emails to keep her (devastatingly beautiful) friend Happy away from Zen. Before she knows it, her best friend hates her, the whole school knows about her crush, and she is humiliated on national TV. How much more will it take for Apple to learn that taking advice is just as important as giving it?
National Bestseller
The definitive history of the Montreal Canadiens - to coincide with their Centenary in 2009.
Before there were slapshots, Foster Hewitt, or even an NHL, there were the Canadiens. Founded on December 4, 1909, the team won its first Stanley Cup in 1916. Since then, the Canadiens have won 23 more championships, making them the most successful hockey team in the world. The team has survived two wars, the Great Depression, NHL expansion, and countless other upheavals, thanks largely to the loyalty of fans and an extraordinary cast of players, coaches, owners, and managers.
The Montreal Canadiens captures the full glory of this saga. It weaves the personalities, triumphs, heartaches, and hysteria into a compelling narrative with a surprise on every page. It sheds new light on old questions - how the team colours were chosen, how the Canadiens came to be known as the Habitants - and goes behind the scenes of tumultuous recent events still awaiting thorough examination: why Scotty Bowman was passed over as general manager after Sam Pollock resigned; why Pollock's successor, Irving Grunman, failed; why Serge Savard was dumped as GM so hastily despite his record.
Colourful and controversial, The Montreal Canadiens is the history of a team that has been making news for 100 years - and continues to do so with the return of legendary player Bob Gainey as general manager, determined to bring the Stanley Cup back to Montreal.
From the Hardcover edition.
National Bestseller
From the #1 bestselling author - a cornucopia of mind-expanding insights into the science of the real world.
Dr. Joe - as he is affectionately known to millions of readers, listeners, viewers, and students - brings his magic formula to Doubleday Canada with Brain Fuel.
As with Dr. Joe's previous best-selling books, Brain Fuel informs and entertains on a wild assortment of science-based topics. But this is not "science trivia." If you are looking for serious scientific discussions, you'll find them here. If you are looking for practical consumer information, that's here too. If you are searching for ways to stimulate interest in science, look no further, Mom. And if you are simply wondering why the birth of Prince Leopold was so different from Queen Victoria's previous seven; or why an iron rod that went through a man's head is now on display in a museum in Boston; or why white chocolate has such a short shelf life; or why eggs terrified Alfred Hitchcock - and what all of this means for the rest of us, and why - then bingo.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
Four chronically homeless people-Amelia One Sky, Timber, Double Dick and Digger-seek refuge in a warm movie theatre when a severe Arctic Front descends on the city. During what is supposed to be a one-time event, this temporary refuge transfixes them. They fall in love with this new world, and once the weather clears, continue their trips to the cinema. On one of these outings they meet Granite, a jaded and lonely journalist who has turned his back on writing "the same story over and over again" in favour of the escapist qualities of film, and an unlikely friendship is struck.
A found cigarette package (contents: some unsmoked cigarettes, three $20 bills, and a lottery ticket) changes the fortune of this struggling set. The ragged company discovers they have won $13.5 million, but none of them can claim the money for lack proper identification. Enlisting the help of Granite, their lives, and fortunes, become forever changed.
Ragged Company is a journey into both the future and the past. Richard Wagamese deftly explores the nature of the comforts these friends find in their ideas of "home," as he reconnects them to their histories.
In the 1920s, Janie McLeary and George King run one of the first movie theatres in the Maritimes. The marriage of the young Irish Catholic woman to an older English man is thought scandalous, but they work happily together, playing music to accompany the films. When George succumbs to illness and dies, leaving Janie with one young child and another on the way, the unscrupulous Joey Elias tries to take over the business. But Janie guards the theatre with a shotgun, and still in mourning, re-opens it herself. "If there was no real bliss in Janie's life," recounts her grandson, "there were moments of triumph."
One night, deceived by the bank manager and Elias into believing she will lose her mortgage, Janie resolves to go and ask for money from the Catholic houses. Elias has sent out men to stop her, so she leaps out the back window and with a broken rib she swims in the dark across the icy Miramichi River, doubting her own sanity. Yet, seeing these people swayed into immoral actions because of their desire to please others and their fear of being outcast, she thinks to herself that "...all her life she had been forced to act in a way uncommon with others... Was sanity doing what they did? And if it was, was it moral or justified to be sane?"
Astonishingly, she finds herself face to face that night with influential Lord Beaverbrook, who sees in her tremendous character and saves her business. Not only does she survive, she prospers; she becomes wealthy, but ostracized. Even her own father helps Elias plot against her. Yet Janie McLeary King thwarts them and brings first-run talking pictures to the town.
Meanwhile, she employs Rebecca from the rival Druken family to look after her children. Jealous, and a protégé of Elias, Rebecca mistreats her young charges. The boy Miles longs to be a performer, but Rebecca convinces him he is hated, and he inherits his mother's enemies. The only person who truly loves her, he is kept under his mother's influence until, eventually, he takes a job as the theatre's projectionist. He drinks heavily all his life, tends his flowers, and talks of things no-one believes, until the mystery at the heart of the novel finally unravels.
"At six I began to realize that my father was somewhat different," says Miles King's son Wendell, who narrates the saga in an attempt to find answers in the past and understand "how I was damned." It is a many-layered epic of rivalries, misunderstandings, rumours; the abuse of power, what weak people will do for love, and the true power of doing right; of a pioneer and her legacy in the lives of her son and grandchildren.
"David Adams Richards is perhaps the greatest Canadian writer alive," wrote Lynn Coady in the Vancouver Sun. From this winner of the Giller Prize and the Governor General's Award comes a story of a woman's determined struggle against small town prejudice, and her son's long battle against deceit. Richards' own family ran Newcastle's Uptown Theatre from 1911 to 1980, and Janie is based on his grandmother. Cast upon this history is a drama that explores morality and "the question of how one should live," as The Atlantic Monthly said of Mercy Among the Children, his previous novel.
Reviewers agree that Richards' fiction sits firmly in the tradition of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky by concerning itself explicitly with good and evil and the human freedom to choose between them. Once again, in River of the Brokenhearted, his twelfth novel, Richards has created a work of compassion and assured, poetic sophistication which finds in the hearts of its characters venality and goodwill, cruelty and love.
From the Hardcover edition.
Memory, Ji Bai would say, is this old sack here, this poor dear that nobody has any use for any more.
As the novel begins, Salim Juma, in exile from Tanzania, opens up a gunny sack bequeathed to him by a beloved great-aunt. Inside it he discovers the past -- his own family's history and the story of the Asian experience in East Africa. Its relics and artefacts bring with them the lives of Salim's Indian great-grandfather, Dhanji Govindji, his extensive family, and all their loves and betrayals.
Dhanji Govindji arrives in Matamu -- from Zanzibar, Porbander, and ultimately Junapur -- and has a son with an African slave named Bibi Taratibu. Later, growing in prosperity, he marries Fatima, the woman who will bear his other children. But when his half-African son Husein disappears, Dhanji Govindji pays out his fortune in trying to find him again. As the tentacles of the First World War reach into Africa, with the local German colonists fighting British invaders, he spends more and more time searching. One morning he is suddenly murdered: he had spent not just his own money but embezzled that of others to finance the quest for his lost son.
"Well, listen, son of Juma, you listen to me and I shall give you your father Juma and his father Husein and his father..."
Part II of the novel is named for Kulsum, who marries Juma, Husein's son; she is the mother of the narrator, Salim. We learn of Juma's childhood as a second-class member of his stepmother's family after his mother, Moti, dies. After his wedding to Kulsum there is a long wait in the unloving bosom of his stepfamily for their first child, Begum. It is the 1950s, and whispers are beginning of the Mau Mau rebellion.
Among the stories tumbling from the gunny sack comes the tailor Edward bin Hadith's story of the naming of Dar es Salaam, the city Kulsum moves to with her children after her husband's death. And gradually her son takes over the telling, recalling his own childhood. His life guides the narrative from here on. He remembers his mother's store and neighbours' intrigues, the beauty of his pristine English teacher at primary school, cricket matches, and attempts to commune with the ghost of his father. It is a vibrantly described, deeply felt childhood. The nation, meanwhile, is racked by political tensions on its road to independence, which comes about as Salim Juma reaches adolescence. With the surge in racial tension and nationalist rioting, several members of his close-knit community leave the country for England, America, and Canada.
I see this comedy now as an attempt to foil the workings of fate: how else to explain, what else to call, the irrevocable relentless chain of events that unfolded...
The title of Part III, Amina, is the name of Salim's great unfulfilled love, and will also be the name of his daughter. He meets the first Amina while doing his National Service at Camp Uhuru, a place he feels he has been sent to in error. Amina is African, and their relationship inevitably causes his family anxiety, until the increasingly militant Amina leaves for New York. Salim becomes a teacher at his old school, and marries, but keeps a place for Amina in his heart. When she returns and is arrested by the more and more repressive government, Salim is hurriedly exiled abroad. He leaves his wife and daughter with the promise that he will send for them, knowing that he will not. The novel ends with Salim alone, the last memories coming out of the gunny sack, hoping that he will be his family's last runaway.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
Apple is back for another story filled with plenty of drama, boys, gossip -- and, of course, angst.
Things in Apple's life are slowly getting back to normal: her friendship with Happy seems to have survived her Crazy Girl Moment (i.e. sabotaging Happy's relationship with Zen), she has a new sort of-boyfriend, Lyon (cute and very sweet, but no pitter-patters in her heart), and she's landed a gig interning for Angst magazine (hottest teen magazine around). But, as it usually happens for Apple, life is never this perfect. Just add into the mix a snarky co-worker, an ever-annoying famous talk-show mother, and a major secret crush on her best friend's boyfriend that just won't go away, and things are about to get a lot more complicated . . .
From the Trade Paperback edition.
An inspiring story of courage, adaptation and determinaton -- a year in the life of 11 refugee students entering universities across Canada.
"Most journalists have stories they never forget. This is mine."
When Debi Goodwin travelled to the Dadaab Refugee Camp in 2007 to shoot a documentary on young Somali refugees soon coming to Canada, she did not anticipate the impact the journey would have on her. A year later, in August of 2008, she decided to embark upon a new journey, starting in the overcrowded refugee camps in Kenya, and ending in university campuses across Canada. For a year, she recorded the lives of eleven very lucky refugee students who had received coveted scholarships from Canadian universities, guaranteeing them both a spot in the student body and permanent residency in Canada. We meet them in the overcrowded confines of a Kenyan refugee camp and track them all the way through a year of dramatic and sometimes traumatic adjustments to new life in a foreign country called Canada. This is a snapshot of a refugee's first year in Canada, in particular a snapshot of young men and women lucky and smart enough to earn their passage from refugee camp to Canadian campus.
From the Hardcover edition.
Prepare to be amazed once again.
Did you know what when you shake a ketchup bottle you're practicing thixotropy? That the ancient Greeks made themselves look less ancient by inventing moisturizer? That the mysterious drug obecalp* is as effective as homeopathy and many herbal cures? From the bestselling author of An Apple a Day, Brain Fuel, and Science, Sense and Nonsense comes a fresh batch of inquiries into the science of everyday life. Dr. Joe, as he is affectionately known to millions of readers, listeners, viewers, and students, presents his third book in the Doubleday Canada series he launched with Brain Fuel.
Using a Q&A format, it explains the world through science, and science through our common experience. There are sections on diet and nutrition, new drugs, and the dubious claims made for alternative remedies and beauty potions. There is a profusion of inspiring, enlightening, sometime just downright bizarre information drawn from the laboratory, from history, from our medicine cabinets and the bottles under our sinks. Science is everywhere, and Dr. Joe is keeping track - and doing it in a marvelously warm, eminently readable style. Let the brain sparks fly!
*Try reading this word backwards.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
In the tradition of the Paris Review, The Notebooks is an exciting collection of original short fiction and in-depth interviews from Canada's most celebrated and innovative young writers.
A provocative examination of the writer's life in the twenty-first century, The Notebooks charts a new direction in Canadian literature. It brings together a unique collection of accomplished fiction, ranging from the classic storytelling of Michael Redhill to the more experimental style of Lynn Crosbie. In his keenly observed story "Seratonin," Russell Smith captures the sensuous pleasures and dizzying energy of the rave scene. "Big Trash Day," a hybrid of fiction and poetry by Esta Spalding, is a devastating commentary on poverty and a striking portrait of the shorthand that develops within intimate relationships. In a sample from a novel-in-progress, Yann Martel shares the process through which rough sketches become realized characters, and disparate moments become fleshed-out scenes.
The interviews, remarkable for their honesty and insight, bring us into the writer's world, revealing the passion and inspiration that motivates these young writers, as well as the hardships they endure in pursuit of their art. By asking thoughtful and probing questions, Michelle Berry and Natalee Caple elicit frank and intriguing details of how writers work, structure their days, and order their physical space to facilitate the act of writing. Many of the authors here explore the impact of technological innovation and mass culture on contemporary fiction, as well as the influence of various art forms on the way they imagine stories. The writers in The Notebooks speak candidly about their political engagement, their passion for writing, and their desire to produce art that will last.
Contributors: Catherine Bush, Eliza Clark, Lynn Coady, Lynn Crosbie, Steven Heighton, Yann Martel, Derek McCormack, Hal Niedzviecki, Andrew Pyper, Michael Redhill, Eden Robinson, Russell Smith, Esta Spalding, Michael Turner, R.M. Vaughan, Michael Winter, Marnie Woodrow
"These seventeen writers come from different backgrounds, different parts of the country, have different lifestyles, and write very different kinds of fiction, yet the connections between them are still plentiful. As a group they are highly engaged with the world around them, politically sophisticated, intelligent, modest about their potential success, and passionate about the act of writing. We hope that The Notebooks inspires an ongoing discussion with young writers at work and answers some of the silent questions that readers have longed to ask." -- From the Introduction
Part Sex & the City, part Bridget Jones's Diary, Playing with Matches will make you laugh, cry, and thank the dating goddess that at least it didn't happen to you.
Playing with Matches is the answer to every single woman's wail of "Why does this happen to me?"
Honey, it happens to everyone. Women from all over the world have contributed to Playing with Matches, answering the call for tragic dating tales in all their nasty and delicious detail. And as a survivor of countless terrible evenings, Cameron is an expert. She's dated an overweight manic eater who picked fights and an anaesthesiologist twenty years her senior who really did put her to sleep. Each new bad date made her swear off men forever. Until, of course, another hopeful possibility presented himself.
Bad dates happen. Every night, another woman returns home reeling from a missed match. But each evening spent with Mr. Wrong teaches us something about our own love limits. Can I cuddle with a man who blows his nose in a cloth napkin? Do I like to spank my lover? Do I have something in common with the director of a funeral home? Does a pierced nipple bother me? How about a pierced scrotum? We need to embrace our misadventures, share the pain, and find the humour. Playing with Matches will remind us all that no matter how awful a date was, there is always someone else with a worse story.
Four of us -- the single women at the baby shower -- are hunched in a corner drinking bloody Marys and ignoring a chorus of cooing over a Winnie the Pooh breastfeeding pillow. "All night long he talked to me through the bloody cat," Julie complains. "'Does Mummy like to snuggle? Isn't Mummy funny?'" I snort my drink all over her winter white skirt. She brushes it off without thinking and continues, "I bought leather knee-high boots for this guy? "
. . .
Everyone knows the recipe for an ideal date: one nice guy plus great hair day, a cup of good lighting, remove five pounds, a sprinkle of new perfume and a liberal splash of Stoli vodka. That someone actually manages to cook up a date like this is rare.
Playing with Matches is for women who, let's face it, have much more experience with recipes of disaster than recipes for romance. We know that there are more bad dates out there than good ones. Intellectually, we also know that these misadventures build character. As Mom says, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, right?
--from Playing with Matches
From the Trade Paperback edition.
An epic adventure of love, trust, magic, and a very special friendship between a brave young girl and a remarkable horse.
Syeira lives in Haysele, a land of horses and horse-sensitives. Fate pairs her with the wild mare Arwin when Arwin's two colts are taken from her, and Syeira decides to help Arwin rescue the colts. Their mission proves harder than they imagined, for the fearsome Lord Ran has taken the colts far away to Thruckport, his fortified city by the sea.
But despite his power, Lord Ran's empire is less secure than he thinks. Rebel forces are gathering against him, and a few brave souls are ready to risk their lives to help Syeira and Arwin. Even so, it will take all their courage to save the colts.
Like Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy and J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, Jamieson Findlay's The Blue Roan Child is an enchanting story for readers young and old.
From the Hardcover edition.
In 1871, a tiny nation, just four years old -- it's population well below the 4 million mark -- determined that it would build the world's longest railroad across empty country, much of it unexplored. This decision -- bold to the point of recklessness -- was to change the lives of every man, woman and child in Canada and alter the shape of the nation.
Using primary sources -- diaries, letters, unpublished manuscripts, public documents and newspapers -- Pierre Berton has reconstructed the incredible decade of the 1870s, when Canadians of every stripe -- contractors, politicians, financiers, surveyors, workingmen, journalists and entrepreneurs -- fought for the railway, or against it.
The National Dream is above all else the story of people. It is the story of George McMullen, the brash young promoter who tried to blackmail the Prime Minister; of Marcus Smith, the crusty surveyor, so suspicious of authority he thought the Governor General was speculating in railway lands; of Sanford Fleming, the great engineer who invented Standard Time but who couldn't make up his mind about the best route for the railway. All these figures, and dozens more, including the political leaders of the era, come to life with all their human ambitions and failings.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
The Canada-U.S. border was in flames as the War of 1812 continued. York's parliament buildings were on fire, Niagara-on-the-Lake burned to the ground and Buffalo lay in ashes. Even the American capital of Washington, far to the south, was put to the torch. The War of 1812 had become one of the nineteenth century's bloodiest struggles.
Flames Across the Border is a compelling evocation of war at its most primeval level -- the muddy fields, the frozen forests and the ominous waters where men fought and died. Pierre Berton skilfully captures the courage, determination and terror of the universal soldier, giving new dimension and fresh perspective to this early conflict between the two emerging nations of North America.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
The true story of Canada's greatest sailor, the first to sail around the world single-handedly.
When Joshua Slocum sailed into port in Massachusetts on June 27, 1898, he was the first man ever to have completed a voyage around the world without technology, money or companion. It took him three years to cover the 46,000 miles, and along the way he was chased by pirates, buffeted by storms, and narrowly escaped death by sharks. When a goat ate his charts, he managed to navigate through the Caribbean by memory and intuition.
This is the true-life adventure story of an extraordinary man, who ran away to sea at sixteen and never looked back. Born on a farm in Nova Scotia, he apprenticed on voyages to China, Hong Kong and Indonesia; met and married his wife in Sydney, Australia, and raised his family aboard sailing vessels in ports around the world. He survived mutinies, lost cargoes, terrible storms, and treacheries at sea before resolving on his voyage around the world in a dilapidated oyster sloop he named The Spray. After settling down and writing his memoirs, he set sail on November 14, 1909, and was never seen again.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
When Garnet Raven was three years old, he was taken from his home on an Ojibway Indian reserve and placed in a series of foster homes. Having reached his mid-teens, he escapes at the first available opportunity, only to find himself cast adrift on the streets of the big city.
Having skirted the urban underbelly once too often by age 20, he finds himself thrown in jail. While there, he gets a surprise letter from his long-forgotten native family.
The sudden communication from his past spurs him to return to the reserve following his release from jail. Deciding to stay awhile, his life is changed completely as he comes to discover his sense of place, and of self. While on the reserve, Garnet is initiated into the ways of the Ojibway--both ancient and modern--by Keeper, a friend of his grandfather, and last fount of history about his people's ways.
By turns funny, poignant and mystical, Keeper'n Me reflects a positive view of Native life and philosophy--as well as casting fresh light on the redemptive power of one's community and traditions.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
Set in Vancouver's Chinatown in the 1930s and 1940s, Choy continues the story of the Chen family household, this time narrated by First Son, Kiam-Kim. We first meet Kiam-Kim at the age of eight, staring at the yellowed photograph of his mother, who died in China when he was just a baby. Kiam-Kim, Poh-Poh (his larger-than-life grandmother) and Mr. Chen, his demure and honest father, journey to a new life in Vancouver's Old Chinatown. Following the dream of finding gold and then one day returning to China -- wealthy -- they, like many Chinese families around them, find themselves in a country on the brink of the Second World War, struggling to survive in a foreign land and keep alive the traditions of an older world.
Finely crafted, and rich in historical detail, All That Matters depicts 1930s Vancouver in the haunting hues of memory, and sees in the Chen family a fragile miniature of a larger world. Dwelling on Kiam-Kim's sense of responsibility to his community, Choy unfolds the Chen family's secrets in thoughtful and luminous prose, leading the reader to a breathtaking conclusion that far transcends the limits of its time and place, and gestures towards all humanity.
Has Max's quest for the truth led to an answer for which he'll pay the ultimate price?
Deep in the London underground, a train shudders across an unseen body. Days later, on the bleakness of Dartmoor, Max Gordon learns of a fellow student's death in the capital. Danny Maguire was carrying an envelope with Max's name on it--containing the secret of Max's mother's death. The clues take Max into the endangered rainforest of Central America where, hunted down by a ruthless killer, he must also escape the jaws of deadly crocodiles and flesh-eating piranhas. The truth Max is desperately trying to uncover lies deep within the dangerous forest's heart . . . if only he can stay alive to reach it. The third and final novel in David Gilman's supercharged, sophisticated adventure series, perfect for fans of Anthony Horowitz, James Patterson, and the Jason Bourne movies.
David Adams Richards takes us behind his gun and into the Canadian forest for his most powerful work of non-fiction yet.
In his brilliant non-fiction, David Adams Richards - first and foremost one of Canada's greatest and best-beloved novelists - has been writing a kind of memoir by other means. Like his previous titles Lines On Water, about his pursuit of angling, and Hockey Dreams, about the game his disabled body prevented him from playing, Facing the Hunter explores the meaning of a sport and the way in which it touches lives, not least that of the author. And as with God Is, his recent book about his faith, it is also an impassioned defence of a set of values and a way of life that Richards believes are under attack.
Lovers of David Adams Richards' novels will be fascinated and enlightened to note the interplay between his former life as a keen hunter - he hunts less and less these days, as he explains - and the narratives and characters of his fiction. But this is also a perfect starting point for anyone coming new to Richards. The storytelling in this book, the evocation of the Canadian wild and those who venture into it, the sheer power of the prose, show a great writer at the height of his powers.
From the Hardcover edition.
Many people have predicted that she'll never eat lunch in this town again. But as "Lunch With" proves each week, there's always another unsuspecting celebrity ready to break bread with columnist Jan Wong.
Now's your chance to dine with her while she dishes, disses and dissects the likes of Suzanne Somers, Jeffrey Archer, Margaret Trudeau, Dr. Ruth, Preston Manning, Atom Egoyan, Don Cherry, Margaret Atwood, Mordecai Richler, Bryan Adams, Sarah Polley, Eartha Kitt, Helen Gurley Brown and many more, in sixty of her funniest, most trenchant, often barbed and occasionally moving "Lunch With" columns.
With an introduction on the lunching phenomenon, some appetizing background on arranging the interviews, and (for dessert) some reactions from readers and guests, this compilation is a deliciously wicked treat from start to finish.
From the Hardcover edition.
