Showing results by publisher "ECW Press" in All Categories

This is both a single novel and three separate novels in one. In the first, Mauve Desert, 15-year-old Mélanie drives across the Arizona desert in a white Meteor chasing fear and desire, cutting loose from her mother and her mother's lover, Lorna, in their roadside Mauve Motel. In the second book, Maudes Laures reads Mauve Desert, becomes obsessed with it, and embarks on an extraordinary quest for its mysterious author, characters and meaning. The third book - Mauve, the Horizon - is Laures's eventual translation of Mauve Desert.

Everyone talks about falling in love, but falling in friendship can be just as captivating. When Neela Devaki's song is covered by internet-famous artist Rukmini, the two musicians meet and a transformative friendship begins. But as Rukmini's star rises and Neela's stagnates, jealousy and self-doubt creep in. With a single tweet, their friendship implodes, one career is destroyed, and the two women find themselves at the center of an internet firestorm.

Living Skies is producing Sisters and Strangers, a six-part TV series about the tangled relationships between the families of Douglas Ellard, the father who raised Joanne, and Desmond Love, her biological father. Joanne is working on the script with Roy Brodnitz, a brilliant writer and friend. The project’s future seems assured, but before the script is completed, Brodnitz disappears while scouting locations in Northern Saskatchewan. Hours later, he’s found - sweat-drenched, clawing at the ground, and muttering gibberish. He dies in a state of mortal terror.

Dr. Tim Dare is a forensic psychiatrist whose life is in a mess: his wife has just left him to find herself; his mother is being sued for libel by a small-town mayor over a mystery novel; he’s been made the monitor of a man just out of psychiatric hospital, a man he considers a psychopathic murderer; he’s being hauled before a disciplinary committee for “misplacing” a file; one of his patients is “transferring” feelings to him rather too romantically; and now someone’s threatening to kill him. He thinks he needs to see a shrink himself.

He spent 40 years at the Bank of Montreal, was the CEO and a part of the key group of people that developed the first ATM machine. He always had a willingness to share technology and systems in order to bring about larger change. Full of leadership lessons from the financial world, technology world, and philanthropy world.

Kateiko Rin lives a quiet life with her parents and her people in the coastal rainforest. Everything changes when her estranged uncle washes up on their shores, harried and half-dead, trailed by two blue-eyed children no one knew existed. To protect her family, Kateiko secrets away her young cousins. Caring for them includes hiding their ties to the Rúonbattai, a warlike cult trying to claim the land for themselves along with as many lives as they can.

A writer friend once pointed out that whenever Stuart Ross got close to something heavy and “real” in a poem, a hamburger would inevitably appear for comic relief. In this hybrid essay/memoir/poetic meditation, Ross shoves aside the heaping plate of burgers to wrestle with what it means to grieve the people one loves and what it means to go on living in the face of an enormous accumulation of loss.

The story begins from nine-year-old Nate's point of view, etching the details of an unbalanced mind struggling to make sense of rampant thought patterns and heightened paranoia. Enter Ashley, Nate's mother and a hardworking advertising executive concerned that she's not giving her family enough of her time - especially now that she senses something might be wrong with her son. As the story moves deftly back and forth between the two perspectives, the narrative converges to reveal one family's journey of discovery as they strive to find balance in their lives.

What is a careergasm? Does it feel as good as it sounds? You bet your ass it does. A careergasm happens when your work feels good. Really good. Like a groovin' Marvin Gaye song. Like you and your work belong together, and you can't help coming back for more. But how do you get your mojo back when you're in a passionless relationship with your job? In Careergasm, Sarah Vermunt leads the way.

Epidemic investigator Dr. Zol Szabo hopes an extended cruise on the Indian Ocean with his girlfriend and his son will salve the wounds of the rough times they’ve been weathering at home. As they set sail coddled in unaccustomed luxury on the Coral Dynasty, things below deck are a little less sunny for the ship’s physician.

It’s springtime in rural Manitoba, and the snow has finally left the exotic animal farm when an ostrich finds and swallows a shiny object. (Because this is what ostriches do.) Cue veterinarian and amateur sleuth Dr. Peter Bannerman, who surgically removes the object, which looks like an ancient Viking artifact. Soon after, people around are horrified by a series of animal mutilations. This sets Peter, and his talented sniffer dog, Pippin, on the hunt for answers. Peter begins to suspect a link between the Viking artifact, the mutilations, and a shadowy group of white supremacists.

Austin Clarke is a distinguished and celebrated novelist and short-story writer. His works often center around the immigrant experience, of which he writes with humor and compassion, happiness and sorrow. In ’Membering, Clarke shares his own experiences growing up in Barbados and moving to Toronto to attend university in 1955 before becoming a journalist. With vivid realism he describes Harlem of the ’60s, meeting and interviewing Malcolm X and writers Chinua Achebe and LeRoi Jones.

On a sunny May morning, social worker Jessica Campbell sorts through her mother's belongings after her recent funeral. In the basement she makes a shocking discovery - two dead girls curled into the bottom of her mother's chest freezers. She remembers a pair of foster children who lived with the family in 1988: Casey and Jamie Cheng - troubled, beautiful, and wild teenage sisters from Vancouver's Chinatown.

A lifetime of finding punchlines in his heartache comes to a shuddering stop when comedian and writer Shawn Hitchins loses two great loves, five months apart, to sudden death. In this deeply poignant memoir that combines sober self-portrait with tender elegy, Hitchins explores the messiness of being alive: the longing and desire, scorching-earth anger, raw grief - and the pathway of healing he discovers when he lets his heart remain open.

After his father returns from treatment for addiction, highschooler Vish—lover of metal music and literature—is uncertain what the future holds. It doesn’t help that everyone seems to know about the family’s troubles, and they stand out doubly as one of the only brown families in town. When Vish is mistaken for a relative of the weird local bookseller and attacked by an unsettling pale man who seems to be decaying, he is pulled into the world of the occult, where witches live in television sets, undead creatures can burn with a touch, and magic is mathematical.

Douglas Gibson, one of Canada's premier editors and storytellers, brings new stories about Robertson Davies, Jack Hodgins, W.O. Mitchell, Alistair MacLeod, and Alice Munro, and adds lively portraits of Al Purdy, Marshall McLuhan, Margaret Laurence, Guy Vanderhaeghe, Margaret Atwood, Wayne Johnston, Linwood Barclay, Michael Ondaatje, and many, many others. Whether fly fishing in Haida Gwaii or sailing off Labrador, Douglas Gibson is a first-rate ambassador for Canada and the power of great stories.

As a new initiate with the Alchemists’ Council, Jaden is trained to maintain the elemental balance of the world, while fending off interference by the malevolent Rebel Branch. Jaden navigates alchemy’s complexities, but the more she learns, the more she begins to question Council practices. Erasure - a procedure designed not only to remove individuals from Council dimension but also from the memories of other alchemists - troubles Jaden, and she uses her ingenuity to remember one of the erased people.

In the spirit of the diaries of Antarctic explorers Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton, McNeil mixes travelogue, popular science, and memoir to examine the history of our fascination with ice. In entering this world, McNeil unexpectedly finds herself confronting her own upbringing in the Maritimes, the lifelong effects of growing up in a cold place, and how the climates of childhood frame our emotional thermodynamics for life.

Gord Stewart, 40 years old, single, moved back into his sub­urban childhood home to care for his widowed father. But his father no longer needs care, and Gord is stuck in limbo. He’s been working in the movie business as a location scout for years, and when there isn’t much filming, as a private eye for a security company run by ex-cops, OBC. When a fellow crew member asks him to find her missing uncle, Gord reluctantly takes the job. The police say the uncle walked into some dense woods in Northern Ontario and shot himself, but the man’s wife thinks he’s still alive.

Sent away for the summer, the Ivyweather sisters were promised a family vacation by their wealthy, indifferent parents. Two at-odds opposites—Constance an anxious society sweetheart and Ivory an adventure-struck rebel—the sisters aren’t sure what to make of the dangerously decayed town of Quixx and its creeping fog that never seems to lift. When Ivory disappears after a spat with her sister, Constance tracks her to the mountain, where the Ivyweathers learn the town’s hushed talk of monsters is more than just a rumor.