Bøger udgivet af NeWest Press

>Third Place in the Prose Category at the 2019 Alcuin Society Awards for Excellence in Book Design in Canada! All Lit Up Book Club SelectionIn this provocative collection of short stories, Karen Hofmann creates characters who struggle to connect or disconnect from entanglements and relationships. With ironic accuracy and sensuous imagery, Hofmann considers a range of human foibles: a newlywed couple who transform into feral beasts during the hardships of a remote research expedition; backbiting faculty members who strip down during a post-conference BBQ; an heretical nun who explores the possibility of a new life by imaginatively excavating the fossils of BC's Burgess Shale; and an ambitious bylaw officer determined to make her mark on the city's streets.In Echolocation, Karen Hofmann has found new ways to sound the depths of the human heart.

Shortlisted for the Sixth Annual Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize - Literary Fiction Category!Niall Howell's Only Pretty Damned is a taut noir that takes you behind the big top, revealing rough and tumble characters, murderous plots, and crooked schemes designed to keep Rowland's World Class Circus afloat for another season. When Toby, former trapeze artist turned disgruntled clown, begins seeing Gloria, a young and beautiful dancer longing for a bigger role under the spotlight, his hardboiled past resurfaces. Can he live without Genevieve, his ex-trapeze partner and lover? What ruthless actions will he take to regain his position as the headlining act? And will Toby's past repeat itself as he tries to untangle the ropes that bind him and take a leap to roaring applause?

Shortlisted for the Sixth Annual Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize--Literary Fiction Category!Shortlisted for Best Speculative Fiction at the 2020 Alberta Book Publishing Awards!Shortlisted for Best Book Design at the 2020 Alberta Book Publishing Awards!Second Place in the Prose Category at the 2019 Alcuin Society Awards for Excellence in Book Design in Canada!Every year since 1904, when the ice breaks up on the North Saskatchewan River, Edmonton has crowned a Melting Queen--a woman who presides over the Melting Day spring carnival and who must keep the city's spirits up over the following winter. But this year, something has changed: a genderfluid ex-frat brother called River Runson is named as Melting Queen. As River's reign upends the city's century-old traditions, Edmonton tears itself in two, with progressive and reactionary factions fighting a war for Edmonton's soul. Ultimately, River must uncover the hidden history of Melting Day, forcing Edmonton to confront the dark underbelly of its traditions and leading the city into a new chapter in its history.Balancing satire with compassion, Bruce Cinnamon's debut novel combines history and magic to weave a splendid future-looking tale.

Three years into the second millennium, Majestic, Alberta is a farm town dealing with depressed crop prices, international borders closing to Canadian beef, and a severe drought. Older farmers worry about their way of life changing while young people concoct ways to escape: drugs, partying, moving away. Even the church is on the brink of closing.When local woman Annie Gallagher is struck by lightning while divining water for a well, stories of the town's past, including that of Annie and the grandmother who taught her water witching, slowly pour forth as everyone gathers for her funeral.Told through the varied voices of the townspeople and Annie herself, The Death of Annie the Water Witcher by Lightning reveals Majestic to be a complex character in its own right, both haunted and haunting. Here, Audrey J. Whitson has written a novel of hard choices and magical necessity.

That Light Feeling Under Your Feet plunges headfirst into the surreal and slogging world of cruise ship workers.

Putting a chokehold on crime. Ex-pro-wrestler gets pulled back into the wrestling world to solve a crime.

An allegorical reckoning of the physical and psychic wounds inflicted by the oil sands.

Welcome to Eldorado, a small mountain town in the Kootenays, chock-a-block with pot-smoking hippies, eccentrics, loggers, and protestors. When Roy Breen moves to Eldorado after over a decade of working as a journalist in Vancouver, he is impressed by the soaring vistas and the friendliness of the townsfolk, as well as the quality of the coffee they pour. Unfortunately the threat of cutbacks is looming over the local hospital and Roy must choose whether to keep his journalistic integrity intact or to join his new neighbours in fighting to keep the hospital open.

Accustomed to being an only child, adoptee Brian Gumbo Guillemots teenage hobby was searching for his birth parents. But when he finally finds his birth mother, Kim, hes unprepared for the boisterous instant family that comes with her. Besides Kim, no one knows anything about Brians birth father. With Kim refusing to answer any questions about him, Brian must choose whether to continue the search, even if it means alienating his few friends and both his families. But the more he learns, the more he wonders whether some things are better left unknown. A late-bloomers coming of age story, The Home For Wayward Parrots explores friendship, romance, modern families and geek pop culture with wit, compassion and extremely foul-mouthed birds.

When social attitudes researcher Bill Harcourt puts an advertisement in the newspaper for 'listeners' to work on an unconventional project, he anticipates that his team of eavesdroppers will discover previously untapped insights into public opinion.But as five eager listeners begin eavesdropping in the cafes, dentist waiting rooms, public toilets, tube trains and launderettes of London, discreetly noting the details of unguarded conversations, Bill starts to notice subtle changes in their behaviour and realises he has underestimated the compulsive nature of his group. His anxiety is compounded after he receives a series of anonymous letters warning him of the dangers of his experiment.As the group becomes increasingly intertwined in their subjects' lives, eavesdropping descends into obsession and Bill has to find a way to rein in his increasingly unruly team before they are beyond help.Informed by conversations collected over three years, The Eavesdroppers, by award-winning author Rosie Chard, is a dark, yet wryly humorous tale of present-day Londoners, living in a constant state of noise and crowds and eavesdroppers.

Finalist for Trade Fiction at the 2019 Alberta Book Publishing Awards!Twenty-nine-year-old Natasha Bell went for an evening jog, just like any other night - except now no one knows where she is. Not her sister, Abby - eighteen, eight months pregnant, and without a game plan. Not her childhood sweetheart, now ex-boyfriend, Greg, an introverted academic who could never bring himself to commit. Not her best friend Josie, a newlywed, born-again Christian, with whom Natasha recently had a falling out. And not detective Reuben Blake, who thought this case would be open 'n shut - a quick way to prove himself and move up the ranks. Missing person's statistics suggest Natasha's ex is the primary suspect, but what about the possibility of a stranger abduction? Or the possibility that Natasha left voluntarily or took her own life? What about Natasha's mother, who took off eighteen years before her daughter's disappearance? As days stretch into months and months stretch into years, the evidence that emerges seems only to complicate the picture more. What secrets might Natasha have been keeping? - and, for that matter, her friends and family.

"Award-winning playwright Collin Doyle has crafted three gripping plays that display a keen understanding of human relationships, both functional and dysfunctional. In The Mighty Carlins, an irascible father reunites with his two sons - one a naèive idealist, the other a compulsive manipulative liar - to commemorate the anniversary of their mother's death. In the dynamic Let the Light of Day Through, a couple in their thirties reimage their relationship and their future, in order to leave behind the memory of their dead teenage son. And in Routes, a lonely teenager rides the Mill Woods bus almost every night to escape the violence of his home life, only to find that violence cannot be avoided with the purchase of a bus ticket."--

After a series of assassinations rocks Calgary's underworld, Detective Lane is conscripted along with his husband Arthur into working undercover to seek out links in the Mexico-Canada drug connection and stop the violence.As tensions mount back in Canada and outright war on the streets seems imminent, the laconic detective and his allies must use some unorthodox tactics to avert disaster in the Gulf of California and dismantle the cartel.

"Emilia Danielewska's debut book of prose-poetry reveals the dead. Divided into four parts, Paper Caskets proposes a poetics of the box--as coffin, as prose parameters of the page, as photograph, and as state of mind and body in the face of death. From the act of photographing the dead, to mourning the dead, and to preparing for death that is coming, here is work startling in its clarity, which exposes, as a photograph does, the complicated relationship humans have with mortality. As if Mary Roach's Stiff was a poetry book with the precise eye and steady voice of Robyn Sarah, Paper Caskets looks beyond grief to see the dead as dynamic places where memory and body collide, where flesh rots and fluid seeps and we de/compose prose-poetry."--

"Wild Daisies in the Sand" is a series of diary entries beginning in 1941 when the author was imprisoned in concentration camps first in Petawawa and then Angler Ontario a young Japanese Canadian like many others deemed dangerous by the Canadian government because of his race

Robert Pepper Smith''s trilogy of novels chronicling the lives of those with deep roots in the orchard lands of British Columbia comes full circle with this volume, collecting newly revised editions of The Wheel Keeper and House of Spells with Sanctuary. The Wheel Keeper introduced readers to Michael Guzzo, raised in one of the many immigrant families who flocked to the vineyards and orchards of the Kootenays. When the government plans to flood his village for a hydroelectric project, young Michael seeks escape with his rebellious cousin Maren, who is experiencing her own story of displacement. In House of Spells, Rose and Lacey are two teenagers from the region who share a vital connection to Michael. When Rose becomes pregnant, the wealthy Mr Giacomo offers to raise the child, but can this mysterious benefactor be trusted? Or is there something sinister going on behind the local entrepreneurs offer? Finally, in the never-before-published Sanctuary, the stories of Michael, Rose and Lacey merge after Lacey goes in search of Michael in Central America. These two seekers, estranged from their homeland, must face down the forces of industry and politics that threaten their life-sustaining connections to land, identity and memory.

Part family memoir, part poetry, part love letter to Newfoundland and its people this is a lyrical exploration of how we are fortified by the places of our foremothers and forefathers and by how they endured. Like ''ballycater'', the ice that gathers in harbours along the coast, Jennifer Bowering Delisle gathers fragments of history, family lore, and poetry -- both her own and that of her great-grandparents -- to tell stories of shipwrecks, war, resettlement, and men and women''s labour in early twentieth-century Newfoundland. With the deftness and haunting imagery of Michael Crummey''s Hard Light, The Bosun Chair reveals the inherent gaps in ancestral history and the drive to understand a story that can never fully be told.

This is a highly-charged collection of personal essays, haunted by loss, evoking turbulent physical and emotional Canadian landscapes. Sarah de Leeuw''s creative non-fiction captures strange inconsistencies and aberrations of human behaviour, urging us to be observant and aware. The essays are wide in scope and exposing what -- and who -- goes missing. With staggering insight, Sarah de Leeuw reflects on missing geographies and people, including missing women, both those she has know and those whom she will never get to know. The writing is courageously focused, juxtaposing places and things that can be touched and known -- emotionally, physically, psychologically -- with what has become intangible, unnoticed, or actively ignored. Throughout these essays, de Leeuw''s imagistic memories are layered with meaning, providing a survival guide for the present, including a survival that comes with the profound responsibility to bear witness.

An unnamed narrator travels through a maze that is at once mutable and immutable: walls fall to vine-filled forests, hallways to rivers, bridges to lamp-lit boats. What remains is the desire to escape. He is led along his harrowing path by Willow, a mysterious figure who cajoles him and responds to questions in a winking sphinx-like manner, with answers that are often more baffling than clear. Interspersed are the memories of the narrator, of his childhood and adolescence, and of his grandmother, a wise artist who at once pushes his creativity, while leaving him the freedom to craft his own journey. Playing with the imagery and landscapes of Dante Alighieri''s Divine Comedy and Italo Calvino''s Invisible Cities, Steven Peters'' debut reveals how pivotal moments in our lives give substance and shape to the labyrinths in our minds.

The problem with writer longevity can be a complicating, even contradictory oeuvre. Hopefully". This book collects forty years of essays and speeches that Rudy Wiebe crafted over his many years as an author. In this illuminating and wide-ranging selection, Wiebe provides a look behind the curtain, revealing his thought processes as he worked on many of his great books. Throughout this selection, he dissects controversies that arose after publication of his early novels, meditates on words and their inherent power, explores the great Canadian North and the Canadian body politic, reckons with his family history and Mennonite faith, all while providing an engaging and enlightening commentary. This is a vital compilation of a writing life.

RCMP Inspector Coswell is back. A university professor is murdered and his corpse is revealed to a first year anatomy class in spectacular fashion -- nude on a slab alongside shrouded medical cadavers. He begins his investigation with Corporal James, his long time assistant, but is abruptly assigned a new partner, a female officer who arrives under a political cloud. Already depressed by his perceived plunge into senility, Coswell struggles to stifle his own gender biases and work effectively with this woman. Their list of suspects grows: failed students, a jealous colleague, an intriguing ex-wife and a criminal cartel. Clues emerge that send them all over the city of Vancouver from UBC campus to downtown and its gourmet restaurants.

In his debut story collection, Kevin A Couture creates a world where the veneer of humanness stretches thin and often cracks, while burdened characters take on a variety of beast-like traits. In his desperate survival plan, a pre-teen "rescues" dogs in order to sell them back to their well-off owners. A hare-like marathon pacesetter reflects on the pace she sets, for others and for herself, both on and off the race route. A man confronts his drive for alcohol and the deadly and isolating consequences that leave him to risk his last scrap of control. And two kids, for different reasons, execute their plan to capture a bear cub. The book combines the murky sensibilities of Lynn Coady''s Hellgoing with the finely rendered, precise prose of R W Gray''s Crisp and Alexander McLeod''s Light Lifting. The writing is gripping, with metaphors and similes that are as startling as the harsh choices the characters make.

In this coming-of-age story, Benjie Gabai is convinced he''s been the victim of a terrible cosmic hoax. Instead of being born in the 18th century as a French-Canadian voyageur, God has plunked him down in present-day Montreal, into a family that views his fur trade obsession as proof that their Benjie, once so bursting with promise, has well and truly lost it. Benjie serves out his days as caretaker of The Bay''s poky in-store fur trade museum, dusting and polishing the artifacts that fuel his imagination. When he learns his museum is about to be closed down, scattering his precious collection to the four winds, he hatches a plan that risks bringing his voyageur illusions lapping dangerously up against reality. This book melds Canadian frontier history with the madcap adventures of a young man who is not ready to meet adulthood head on.

His psyche still reeling from having to kill a criminal in the line of duty, Calgarys Detective Lane flies to Cuba to celebrate the wedding of his beloved niece. While there, though, he finds himself drafted by the local police into investigating the murder of a Canadian tourist. Upon his return to Calgary, links between this incident and the deaths of local elderly pensioners start to make themselves known, drawing Lane and his partner Nigel Li further into a web of conspiracy, politics and big money. Garry Ryans award-winning, best-selling mystery series continues with all the intrigue, good humour and mochaccinos that fans have come to expect.

After the accidental death of a high school-aged friend, the Lansing family has split along fault lines previously hidden under a patina of suburban banality. Every family''s got secrets, but for the Lansings those secrets end up propelling them away from the border town of Lloydminster to foreign shores, prison, and beyond. Told via thirty-three flash fiction narratives, fractured like the psyches of its characters, Border Markers is a collection with keen edges and tough language. It''s a slice of prairie noir that straddles the line between magic and gritty realism. Recalling Tania Hershman''s The White Road & Other Stories, as well as Robert Oren Butler''s Severance, Jenny Ferguson''s debut is an essential collection of commonplace tragedies and the ghosts of failures past.

Karen Hofmanns empathetic and cathartic novel pieces together the lives of five members of the Lund family following their enforced dispersal after the death of the father and the hospitalisation of the mother in the remote West Coast community of Butterfly Lake. It explores their self-doubts and aspirations in the ways they cope with their separation and reunion through their work and personal relationships, and reveals the ways in which their past is filtered through memory and desire. It also skillfully exposes a Vancouver class system from the perspectives of diverse socio-economic conditions and lifestyles. The book is character-driven and well-wrought, with a tenderness that propels the reader forward alongside the Lunds who are learning to fuse together as a chosen family.

This book introduces readers to the colourful characters who populate the furniture moving trade, a male-dominated world of labour with relatively high pay and no need for education of any sort. Movers have a unique window into the private spaces of the city as they perform their difficult and delicate job inside all manner of homes, from government-subsidised housing developments to multi-million dollar McMansions. Taylor Lambert intriguingly explores class and work in a city that would rather focus on the wealth and prosperity brought to it by the oil and gas industry. Darwins Moving shows us the Other Calgary, a world populated by transient men and women struggling to survive in a boomtowns shadow.

Its 1994 and Pete Curtis cant wait to get out of Thunder Bay, Ontario. Already, he is playing drums in a band whose songs belong on mix-tapes everywhere. Even though his new girlfriend seems underwhelmed, he knows its just a matter of time before he and his pals break big. Ten years later, Pete is stuck teaching high school in the hometown he longed to escape, while his former best friend and bandmate is a bona fide rock star. In his debut novel, with its compelling hook and realistically flawed characters, Greg Rhyno remembers the time signatures of mid-nineties. Told in two alternating decades, this is a raucous and evocative story about the difficulties of living in the present when you cant escape your past.