Bøger udgivet af Now or Never Publishing Company

She can picture it already: Alex, laughing as he tells her how no one believes his mother invented Pep Talk Paul, the app that saved the world. And she'll assure him that it's true, but she won't tell him it's also the reason she gets to be his mother, because by then he won't remember that there was a time when someone else was.Set on a Newfoundland ferry and written by the narrator Pauline from an imagined future perspective where she is wealthy and successful-and a good mother-No Wake Zone is the story of a young woman and an old man realizing a deep affinity for one another, and a timely exploration of the nature of guilt and hope, of responsibility and tenacity, and of connection with self, others, and technology. In the end it reminds us that we're all flawed, but that we're also all heroic.

The twelve stories featured in Customer Service and Other Stories range in time and place from the turn of the American century to some time in the near future; from California to Arizona to Stratford, Ontario. At their core, they examine the human struggle for meaning in relationships and societies over time. Ambitious though this task is, each of these stories is focused with clear prose and a concise style, with plenty of twists and turns to keep the reader fully engaged and entertained. Wry and insightful, Customer Service and Other Stories holds a mirror up for the reader to examine their own life in a unique way.

The Forgotten is the story of nineteen-year-old Charlie Black who, in 1950, desperate to prove himself to his father, joins the Canadian Army's Special Force as part of the United Nations forces defending South Korea from an attack by the North. Leaving his family and girlfriend behind, Charlie trains hard, but is soon separated from his battalion, the 2nd Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry. He manages to catch up with the Patricias at the last minute as they prepare to ship out, but not before witnessing the aftermath of a fatal rail disaster. Onboard, Charlie is relegated to 13 Platoon, a group of misfits and adventure-seekers under the leadership of Frenchy, their menacing corporal. Charlie's comrades are young, only partly trained, but eager to get into battle. When the battalion arrives in Korea, however, their role has changed significantly. China has entered the war on the other side, and allied forces are struggling to survive. What the Canadian government conceived as a semi-peacekeeping role for their troops has changed into an all-out war, and after a brief period of additional training, the Special Force-including Charlie's battalion-goes on the offensive against terrible odds. A harrowing story of war and survival, The Forgotten helps shed a light on a brutal conflict in our nation's history, and those brave souls willing to step into the breach.

Boundary Territory finds its locus in British Columbia's sparsely populated interior valleys-on greyhound buses, in motel rooms paid for by social services, and in the unsettled body of its speaker. This collection of poems offers a dual perspective, exploring geographic location from the vantage point of a transient teenager navigating small towns and the immediacy of trauma, as well as that of an adult interrogating the language of academia and examining landscape through the lens of ecocritical theory, situating themselves within geographic and emotional landscapes and a family lineage of failed settlements. With precision and care, the poems of Boundary Territory offer meditations on homelessness, trauma and resilience as they find their footing in the sensory details of geographic space.

"Logan Macnair's Troll showcases a bravura writing performance." Vancouver SunWhen aspiring actor Peter Riley is given the assignment in his drama class to perform in a YouTube-style video, he creates the character of 'Petrol Riley, ' a satire of a politically extreme right-wing conspiracy theorist. Peter is soon surprised to learn that the video he has uploaded has gone unexpectedly viral, with thousands of viewers misinterpreting his satirical performance as genuine. Seeing this as his path toward fame, Peter commits to portraying the hatemongering character of Petrol full-time, building a devout and rabid fanbase of online supporters that only grow more loyal and extreme the more hateful Petrol's rhetoric becomes. As his reach grows, Peter must reconcile with his notoriety and decide whether this newfound fame is worth the influence he is having on his legions of impressionable online admirers. Striking and timely, Troll offers a meditation and authentic critique on the unique conditions and occasional ugliness of modern online communication.

"Quietly absorbing stories with a superlative cast of characters." Kirkus Reviews"Quietly absorbing stories with a superlative cast of characters." - Kirkus ReviewsAge is the great divider. One side fused of fire and lust, the other undetected like fallout. The characters in this collection have been plucked and blown through time like pollen on the wind, often rooting themselves in foreign landscapes both beautiful and adverse, sometimes altered, yet always unyielding, ripe for transformation. Nothing Comes Back is a deeply captivating collection by a major literary talent working at the top of her craft.

By turns funny, savage, poetic and heartbreaking, Safety in Bear Country follows Serena, a recent graduate from art school who thought she'd have it all figured out and be making a comfortable living as an artist, but instead finds herself dumped by her boyfriend and back in her parents' basement in the backwater town she couldn't wait to leave. The year is 1994: miserable and lost in the dark forest of her early twenties, Serena takes a job with her small town's main employer, an institution for people with developmental disabilities. When one of the residents dies in her care, Serena flees the trauma, ultimately embarking on a journey that pushes and pulls her between constraint and freedom, despair and hope. Set in small-town Ontario, Australia, northern British Columbia and Miami, Safety in Bear Country pulls the reader with gorgeous and inventive prose though a world of inequity, spirituality, activism and psychedelics as Serena labours to make sense of her place in the world.

After snorting up his first-overall pick money and wrapping his Ferrari around a telephone pole, Casey's baseball days are unambiguously over before they've even begun. That is, until the general manager of his hometown Toronto Blue Birds pays him a surprise visit, making an unlikely offer. The team is eager for Casey to sign, but on one condition: he is to be the personal catcher for the team's star closer, Phil Reardon, a seven-foot-tall lumberjack of a man with a bad attitude and even worse manners. The two form a pact: Reardon will help Casey stick with the team if Casey promises unwavering loyalty. Uneasy with the terms but ultimately agreeable, Casey shakes on it, figuring no harm could come of it. But as he settles into his role on the team, it becomes clear that Reardon is hiding a secret that threatens to derail both Casey's career and the team's championship ambitions. Bawdy and brawling, comical and crude, The Closer offers a gritty, uncensored glimpse into the grind of professional baseball.

In this stark and unsparing coming-of-age story, the shy and intelligent Joel watches helplessly as his alcoholic and abusive paramedic father spirals ever downward and out of control. Joel's life crumbles further when his older brother, disturbed by the drunken violence inflicted on their mother, flees their home seemingly for good. Convinced he must track down his brother and bring him back home if he is to survive in this lonely and frightening new reality, Joel's awareness of his father's workplace experiences gradually begins to expand as he starts to appreciate the many issues faced by first responders, even as he begins to doubt that he himself will escape the chaos of his recently shattered world. In Somewhere There's Music, the reader is immersed in a young man's struggle and desperate search to find what's left of his family.

The Seagull and the Barnacle are good friends even though they're very different. The Seagull flies over the ocean to wonderful places that the Barnacle can't even imagine, because he's spent his whole life stuck on a rock. When the Seagull tells the Barnacle about his adventures, does it make the Barnacle feel jealous, or sad? Or is the Barnacle happy, in his own way? Maybe there is enough beauty even in one small corner of this world to fill a whole life - but maybe it takes a barnacle to know it.

When Annika Torrey is diagnosed with cancer, she has no one in her life she can turn to. Divorced and estranged from her fundamentalist family, she sells her life insurance policy for cash, hoping to live out her final days in peace. But then Annika is given a rare second chance. Meanwhile, struggling real-estate agent Matt Campbell is drowning in debt. Desperate to save his career and marriage, he lets an old friend invest his money, but the big payout he's promised never materializes. Suspecting fraud, his search for answers leads him to the mysterious Annika, and soon both characters are trapped in a web of deception and desire, their hopes for redemption threatened by the contract that binds them. Viaticum is a taut psychological drama about two people fighting to maintain their dignity in a world that objectifies them. Thematically rich and morally-fraught, this intelligent and finely-crafted novel is timely and relevant.

Her name is Vanessa and she's pissed off with getting old. Forced out of her high fashion job in Toronto, Vanessa freewheels into the rapid destruction of her long and comfortable marriage which in turn sends her on a comical retreat to a holistic campus on a far-flung island. There she grapples with being a single, childless woman closing in on sixty who only now realizes that she never finished breaking up with the wild bass player she met in Victoria decades earlier. Forced to confront her past, we see Vanessa as a twelve-year-old playing with crayfish in the ravine while her parents' marriage breaks up and she secretly crushes on the only kid of colour at school, and again as a young teacher in training smitten with one of her students. Then, when she's sixty, Vanessa dates a black man, but has no clue how to be about it, while her ex, in his stained windbreaker and soiled sneakers, is happy to find his match in a Melissa McCarthy double who wears T-shirts with smutty slogans. And finally we meet Vanessa's Aunt Marion who, at 103, still has tricks to make her life more interesting. Intelligent and funny, timeless and tragic, See You Later Maybe Never gets to the heart of what it means to be seen as old in a strange new world.

Facing the Sweating Horse is a collection of poems written from the perspective that the foundation of life is connection and, thus, the purpose of life is to recognize that connection. Our connectedness resides in how we share each moment, whether we notice that moment or not. 'We' means not only our fellow humans-all with the same bodies and emotions and dreams-but all of our fellow species, and the rocks and the water, the air and the light, that grace our finite days. Both lithe and wise, Facing the Sweating Horse is to face life in its most trembling, revealing form.

Adopted by a family in Vancouver as a Vietnam War orphan, Dannie Cooper dreams of finding her biological parents. Days after 9/11, she receives an email from a Vietnam veteran in Port Angeles, Washington, who claims to be her father. With the lure of a genetic father overwhelming, Dannie drops everything to go in search of him in an America reeling from a terrorist attack and on the brink of a new, undefined war. There she finds Bruce Huckman, a stoic ex-logger dying from cancer caused by Agent Orange exposure in Vietnam. Dannie wants to believe Bruce is her father and stays to help nurse him, even if her family back home is unconvinced of Bruce's legitimacy. When she falls in love with Ryan, a local man who wants to enlist for Afghanistan, Dannie finds herself caught between the legacy of the Vietnam War and the possibility of a new war destroying someone she loves. Straightforward, honest and intimate, The Strait of Anian is a compelling tale of personal discovery that reveals that being a daughter has nothing to do with one's DNA.

In a city where everything is recorded by data-from the coffee you drink to your most intimate secrets-Data Detective Frank Southwood, down on his luck and saddled with a gambling addiction, faces jail time if he can't pay his debts. Working for an elite body of detectives who use big data for police work, Frank gets the case that might make his career when he begins investigating a high-profile money laundering ring. Meanwhile, he meets and falls for Jenny, a political activist with ties to the criminal underworld. Desperate to pay his debts, Frank makes a dirty bribery deal with Jenny's fellow criminals, but soon his investigation leads him back to the criminals he himself works for. Forced to choose between putting Jenny in jail or else an innocent man in her place, Frank pushes the limits of morality in a world in which justice can seem preordained. Thoughtful and eerily prophetic, City of Sensors shines a light on a digital future rapidly becoming our reality.