In the wake of the 2004 tsunami, Emily, a young Canadian woman living in Spain, embarks on an effort to understand a tragedy involving two friends, Gavin and Marcus, along the Santiago de Compostela pilgrims’ trail. Determined to understand their thoughts and motivations and her own role in the incident, Emily recreates her friends’ actions […]
Daphne Baird impulsively leaves behind her boyfriend, her family, her whole life, for a new start in Montreal. Losing herself in the rhythmic roar of a copy shop by day, and haunting the sweltering, vibrant streets of the city by night, she collects fragments of histories and reconstructs other peoples’ lives. Out of My Skin explores […]
In her most powerful and resonant novel to date, the acclaimed writer Tessa McWatt explores the ways in which people find love in desperately uncertain times. Against a backdrop of 21st-century east London, where cuts and job crunches and unemployment are ugly, unrelenting realities, three very different love stories bloom.
Over the course of the evening following the burial of his older brother, David, Simon and his partner, Faye, struggle to reconcile their pasts through the prism of the brother who brought them together, but who also drove them apart. A flood of memory — of childhoods in Canada and the Caribbean, of youthful hopes […]
Cecil Foster tells the tale of an estranged mother and daughter caught in the web of a crushing poverty and the immigration bureaucracy. Moving from the warm spiritual life of Jamaica to the cold isolation of Toronto, Sleep On, Beloved follows Ona Morgan she leaves her Jamaican home and her newborn daughter Suzanne to pave the […]
Rich with the details of Bajan culture—from food preparation to political and financial affairs, from sexuality to spirituality—Independence is a fascinating window onto a little-known world and a touching portrait of a journey to adulthood and the women who guide it.
With protean virtuosity, Cecil Foster is back on the Canadian publishing scene with an extraordinary novel of love and risk, of loss and redemption. As Dry Bone Memories opens, Edmund, the narrator, is flying away from Barbados and into an American witness protection program. He is driven by guilt and grief to try to understand […]
The settlement of African peoples in Nova Scotia is a richly layered story encompassing many waves of settlement and diverse circumstances from captives to ‘freedom runners’ who sailed north from the United States with hopes of establishing a new life. The poems in And I Alone Escaped to Tell You endeavour to give these historical events a […]