Finalist, Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize (BC Book Prizes)Finalist, City of Vancouver Book PrizeLong listed for CBC Canada Reads 2015The Door Is Open is a compassionate, reflective, and informative memoir about three-and-a-half years spent volunteering at a skid row drop-in centre in Vancouver’s downtown eastside. In an area most renowned for its shocking social ills, and the notorious distinction of holding the country‘s “very poorest forward sortation area...

A young Native American woman remembers her volatile childhood as she searches for her lost brother in the Canadian wilds in an extraordinary, critically acclaimed debut novelAs she races along Canada's Douglas Channel in her speedboat—heading toward the place where her younger brother Jimmy, presumed drowned, was last seen—twenty-year-old Lisamarie Hill recalls her younger days. A volatile and precocious Native girl growing up in Kitamaat, the Haisla Indian reserva...

Deep in a Northern Ontario forest live Tom and Charlie, two octogenarians determined to live out the rest of their lives on their own terms: free of all ties and responsibilities, their only connection to civilization two pot farmers who bring them whatever they can't eke out for themselves. But their solitude is disrupted by the arrival of two women. The first is a photographer searching for survivors of a series of catastrophic fires nearly a century earlier; the second is an elderly esc...

Monkey Beach meets Green Grass, Running Water meets The Beachcombers in this wise and funny novel by a debut Cree authorBirdie is a darkly comic and moving first novel about the universal experience of recovering from wounds of the past, informed by the lore and knowledge of Cree traditions. Bernice Meetoos, a Cree woman, leaves her home in Northern Alberta following tragedy and travels to Gibsons, BC. She is on something of a vi...

The view 16-year-old Thomas Osborne first had of Muskoka was at night, trudging alone with his even younger brother along unmarked primitive roads to find their luckless father who, in 1875, had decided to make a new start for his beleaguered family on some "free land" in the bush east of the pioneer village of Huntsville, Ontario. The miracle is that Thomas lived to tell the tale.For the next five years Thomas endured starvation, falling through the ice and freezing, accidents wit...

'Like Angela Carter, she is relentlessly inventive' Sunday Times'Entrancing and antic and sensual as a dream' GuardianThe second novel by the author of The Lonely Hearts HotelLonglisted for the Baileys Prize 2015At birth, Nouschka forms a bond with her twin that can never be broken.At six, she's the child star daughter of Quebec's most famous musician.At sixteen, she's a high-school d...

Combining fable, story telling and the grubbiness of harsh reality, Marisa Labozzetta tells the story of Fatma, a young woman from a storied family in Somalia. Brought to the United States as part of an arranged marriage, Fatma must undergo losing her child, drug addiction, abuse and prison before coming out the other side. A tale of someone who never gives up, no matter how bleak her prospects. A novel that allows hope to shine even in the darkest hour.

Marc Lewis's relationship with drugs began in a New England boarding school where, as a bullied and homesick fifteen-year-old, he made brief escapes from reality by way of cough medicine, alcohol, and marijuana. In Berkeley, California, in its hippie heyday, he found methamphetamine and LSD and heroin. He sniffed nitrous oxide in Malaysia and frequented Calcutta's opium dens. Ultimately, though, his journey took him where it takes most addicts: into a life of addiction, desperation, decept...

Henry Hayward has been living life the way he's wanted—working hard, playing hard—but when his girlfriend tells him she's leaving, it destroys him. In a quest to recover, he joins an army-affiliated contracting crew that takes him overseas to a Canadian base in Afghanistan. In the company of friends, he begins to mend: having laughs and being rebellious, blithely unaware of all he's left behind. But everything changes during a roadside incursion when a routine patrol turns fatal. And Henry...

Bestselling author Tish Cohen returns with a story of one woman’s love for her child and the courage it gives her to face her biggest fearAs the owner of the upscale children’s boutique Pretty Baby, Eleanor Sweet is surrounded by gleaming strollers, organic cotton onesies and roundbellied expectant mothers. It’s a serene atmosphere of new beginnings—but for the graffiti-splattered record shop next door and Eleanor’s fierce desire for a baby of her own. Her wish is ...

Josie told me she was murdered. When you're a lonely six-year-old, you don't really understand what that means. All you know is you're happy to have a friend to play with.Patsy Whyte caught glimpses of an invisible world growing up in a children's home in Aberdeen. One of a family of ten traveller children, torn apart by the state in the 1950's, Patsy recalls a childhood scarred by years of mental and emotional abuse, prejudice and hatred.Patsy left the home at the age of 1...

Ru: In Vietnamese it means lullaby; in French it is a small stream, but also signifies a flow - of tears, blood, money. Kim Thúy's Ru is literature at its most crystalline: the flow of a life on the tides of unrest and on to more peaceful waters. In vignettes of exquisite clarity, sharp observation and sly wit, we are carried along on an unforgettable journey from a palatial residence in Saigon to a crowded and muddy Malaysian refugee camp, and onward to a new life in Quebec. Ther...