Bøker utgitt av NeWest Press

"In this fantastic and fantastical debut, C.J. Lavigne concocts a wondrous realm overlaying a city that brims with civic workers and pigeons. Led by her synesthesia, Verity Richards discovers a hidden world inside an old Ottawa theatre. Within the timeworn walls live people who should not exist--people whose very survival is threatened by science, technology, and natural law. Verity must submerge herself in this impossible reality to help save the last traces of their broken community. Her guides: a magician, his shadow-dog, a dying angel, and a knife-edged woman who is more than half ghost. With great empathy and imagination, In Veritas explores the nature of truth and the complexities of human communication."--

"Bertrand Bickersteth's debut poetry collection explores what it means to be black and Albertan through a variety of prisms: historical, biographical, and essentially, geographical. The Response of Weeds offers a much-needed window on often overlooked contributions to the province's character and provides personal perspectives on the question of black identity on the prairies. Through these rousing and evocative poems, Bickersteth uses language to call up the contours of the land itself, land that is at once mesmerizing as it is dismissively effacing. Such is black identity here on this paradoxical land, too."--

Long-listed for the 2021 Raymond Souster Award!Finalist for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Poetry at the 2021 Alberta Book Publishing Awards!Meredith Quartermain's Lullabies in the Real World is a sequence of poems about a train journey from West Coast to East Coast that invokes a patchwork of regions, voices and histories. Her language zings with train rhythms as she unfolds a complex conversation with poets such as bpNichol and Robin Blaser.This collection reflects and refracts Canada from diverse angles, and challenges colonizing literatures such as the Odyssey and various canonical British and US voices. As it moves from west to east, the book journeys back in time to interrogate historical events such as the Battle of the Plains of Abraham and the exclusion of Acadians. It ends by imagining a time before or outside colonization.Rich, playful and confrontational, Lullabies in the Real World widens the poetic lens of poetry to investigate the place of a colonial nation in history, and the place of a poet vis-à-vis the voices of other poets.

Broke City, the final book in Wendy McGrath's Santa Rosa trilogy, follows young Christine as she edges into self-awareness in the now-vanished Edmonton neighbourhood of Santa Rosa.Budding with creativity that her working-class parents do not understand, Christine questions her parents' fraught relationship, with alcoholism and implicit violence bubbling just under the surface of their marriage. Her insight turns beyond her family to her neighbourhood, nicknamed Packingtown, a community built on meat-packing plants and abattoirs, on death.Written with tight lyricism, Broke City is a brimming working-class gothic novel that reveals Christine's deepening knowledge of the adult world around her and of her own complicated place in that world.

Shortlisted for Best Cover Design at the 2020 Alberta Book Publishing Awards!On the eve of his thirtieth birthday, ageing punk Lor Kowalski is unsure of his sanity. He is haunted by hallucinogens and harbingers, strung out on broken stories that he cannot piece together into a lucid whole. Forced to join his old band from a life he'd rather forget, he is dragged north under the spell of a mysterious ad for an Arctic festival tour. As the band members unspool across the surreal snowscapes and frozen wastelands, rogue CSIS agents are hot on their increasingly iced-over heels. But what are ageing punks to rogue agents? Subversive and irredeemable, spectres from a past that must be erased with extreme prejudice. Randy Nikkel Schroeder's Arctic Smoke combines coked-up magic realism with a wound-up cyberpunk style.

"When an accident jeopardizing the family farm draws Amiah Williams back to Kingsley, Alberta, population 1431, she doesn't expect her homecoming to make front-page news. But there she is in The Inquirer, the mysterious tabloid that is airing her hometown's dirty laundry. Alongside stories of high school rivalries and truck-bed love affairs, disturbing revelations about Amiah's past and present are selling papers and fuelling small-town gossip. As the stakes get higher, Amiah must either expose the twisted truth behind The Inquirer or watch her life fall apart again."--

"Peter Midgley's let us not think of them as barbarians is a bold narrative of love, migration, and war hewn from the stones of Namibia. Sensual and intimate, these evocative poems fold into each other to renew and undermine multiple poetic traditions. Gradually, the poems assemble an ombindi--an ancestral cairn--from a history of violent disruption. Underlying the intense language is an exploration of African philosophy and its potential for changing our view of the world. Even as the poems look to the past, they push the reader towards a future that is as relevant to contemporary Canada as it is to the Namibian earth that bled them."--

"South Away is an adventure story of the author's bicycle trip with her sister from Terrace, BC along the West coast to (almost) the tip of the Baja Peninsula. Meaghan Marie Hackinen experiences apprehension and determination as she camps in the dense forests of northern Vancouver Island and in frigid Mexican deserts; encounters strange men, suicidal highways and monster trucks; strong winds and violent storms; flat ties and broken spokes. Her couch-surfacing adventures provide an insight into the "kindness of strangers" en route. Accompanying the travel memoir is an inner journey, related through flashbacks and memories, as the author begins to better understand her relationship with her parents, grandmother, and sister. In attempting to balance risk with safety, she arrives at a minimalist philosophy of living, which requires "physical stamina and mental ingenuity." The style is engaging and personable; the images of landscape and seascape are imaginative and memorable. South Away is a rare roadtrip story--with a female lead and a female companion, a Canadian Hobbit tale of adventure and miraculous events."--

"Aspiring novelist Molly MacGregor laments she will never be like the literary heroines she reads about. Not only does she live in what she thinks the most unromantic region in the world, she is named after one of literature's least romantic heroines, Moll Flanders. Set partly at a shoe store at the world's largest shopping mall in Edmonton where Molly works and partly in an English department where she is a student, Molly of the Mall: Literary Lass and Purveyor of Fine Footwear is a story about love and a story about place. This novel explores Molly's love for the written word, love for the wrong men and the right one, and finally, her hard-won love for her city."--

>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.