NeWest Press – förlag

Bruce Flynn has long been overwhelmed by his unruly and alarming fear of death. His wife, Pilar, distracts him by telling him drawn-out and convoluted stories, hiding him behind so many twists and turns that even Death itself will not be able to find him. During one such story, while the couple is on holiday in Macon, France, Bruce becomes entirely engrossed in the tabletop as he listens to Pilar. When he looks up, she’s gone . Bruce looks for her, waits for her, interrogates the waiter, but she’s nowhere to be found. Her bags, her clothes, and her toiletries are all gone. Bruce asks himself if this could be an elaborate prank – it’s the kind of trick Pilar loves – and he begins to see clues in the story she told. The next morning Bruce sets out on a journey to follow these clues and to find Pilar.

Saudade is the sixth novel from award-winning writer Thomas Trofimuk. It is a sweeping literary thriller, moving across Europe and North America, from France to Italy, to Palm Springs, and Lake Louise, showing a world on the cusp of a global pandemic. It is a love story, a story of stories, of loss, and of discovery.

Robert Kroetsch captures the beauty of this province in this endearing documentation of his Alberta experience—from the dinosaur digs in the Badlands to the Calgary Stampede to the site of Big Bear’s prophetic vision of kd lang’s hometown, Stettler.

This collection chronicles Phyllis Webb’s struggle with the creative process and her intense need to probe beneath the surface of things.

Finalist for the Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize at the 2021 Alberta Literary Awards!Finalist for the High Plains Book Awards in the Nonfiction CategoryFinalist for Trade Non-Fiction Book of the Year at the 2021 Alberta Book Publishing Awards!

Laced with humour and revelation, Anne Wheeler’s creative non-fiction stories tell of her serendipitous journey in the seventies, when she broke with tradition and found her own way to becoming a filmmaker and raconteur.

Join this celebrated screenwriter and director as she travels south of Mombasa after calling off her wedding; attempts to gain acceptance in a male-dominated film collective; travels to India to visit friends who are devoted to a radical Master, and ultimately discovers her sense of purpose and passion close to home, sharing stories that would otherwise be lost about ordinary people living extraordinary lives.

Taken by the Muse: On the Path to Becoming a Filmmaker is a must-read for anyone open to exploring the possibilities of who they are and what they might do with their lives—and for those who love a good story told with integrity and warmth.

Includes Author-Curated Discussion Questions!The reunited Lund siblings, separated as children by Social Services, find that family, whether held together by blood or by choice, can be both a curse and a blessing, an obstacle and a point of connection.

Set in Vancouver during the economically turbulent year of 2008, A Brief View from the Coastal Suite explores the Lunds' differing values in respect to relationships, money, and environment – all markers for a materialistic society that is becoming increasingly inhospitable. Cleo struggles to find time for her challenging job as an architectural designer and for the demands of her family; Mandalay, an artist and single parent, tries to raise her twin sons uncontaminated by the materialistic values of their lawyer father; and Cliff attempts to run a landscape company with his spoiled younger brother, Ben, and to accommodate the ever-increasing demands of his Estonian mail-order bride.

Karen Hofmann’s brilliant sequel to her novel What is Going to Happen Next skillfully explores societal attitudes and the instability of personal and public lives in a world that values money above all else.

Edinburgh, 1917: Headstrong Highland lass Mary Stewart is a vibrant woman forced into the world’s oldest profession in order to provide for her ailing father and younger sister in the city’s Old Town. When her uncle, a well-to-do solicitor with political aspirations, thinks that her presence might impede his lofty ambitions he gives her a way out with dignity: a one-way ticket to the frontier town of Anyox, British Columbia, where nurses are needed to care for injured soldiers returning from the war.

Mary agrees to depart Scotland and leaves her sister in the care of her uncle, but finds that a past like hers is not easy to escape, and that living on the frontier has more challenges than even the darkest streets of Old Town. She must survive by her quick intelligence, but that is a quality that few women were allowed to reveal.

In his historical epic Dominion of Mercy, Danial Neil gives vivid life to the gritty world of an early twentieth-century mining town and a radiant protagonist who illuminates its dark corners with her insight, empathy, and bold spirit.

In her debut collection, Canadian National Slam Champion Nisha Patel commands her formidable insight and youthful, engaged voice to relay experiences of racism, sexuality, empowerment, grief, and love. These are vitally political, feminist poems for young women of colour, with bold portrayals of confession, hurt, and healing.

Coconut rises fiercely like the sun. These poems bestow light and warmth and the ability to witness the world, but they ask for more than basking; they ask readers to grow and warn that they can be burnt. Above all, Nisha Patel’s work questions and challenges propriety and what it means to be a good woman, second-generation immigrant, daughter, consumer, and lover.

In 1898, Doctor Edward Byrne slips on the ice of the Arcturus glacier in the Canadian Rockies and slides into a crevasse, wedged upside down nearly sixty feet below the surface. As he fights losing consciousness, a stray beam of sunlight illuminates the ice in front of him and Byrne sees something in the blue-green radiance that will forever link him to the ancient glacier. In this moment, his life’s purpose becomes uncovering the mystery of the icefield that almost was his tomb. Along the way, he encounters similarly fixated individuals, each immersed in their own quest: the healer and storyteller Sara; the bohemian travel writer Freya Becker; the entrepreneur Trask; the poet Hal Rowan; and Elspeth, greenhouse keeper and Byrne's lover.

First published in 1995, Wharton’s Icefields is an astonishing historical novel set in a mesmerizing literary landscape, one that is constantly being altered by the surging and retreating glacier and unpredictable weather. Here—where characters are pulled into deep chasms of ice as well as the stories and histories they tell one another—is a vivid, daring, and crisply written book that reveals the human spirit, loss, myth, and elusive truths.

This updated Landmark Edition includes an author interview with Smaro Kamboureli and an Afterword by award-winning writer Suzette Mayr.

Can 14-year-old Janey disentangle her time-hopping dilemma and save not just her own life, but the past lives of others, before it’s too late?

Rescue in the Rockies follows Janey as she is forced to spend the holidays with her grandma – and her grandma’s new beau, Charlie, who has invited along his German grandson, Max – in Banff, Alberta. Janey can’t believe her parents might potentially miss one of the most important holidays of the year and resigns herself to spending her time away from home wandering around the hotel with, of all people, Max, who she bickers with constantly. Getting frustrated with their constant fighting, Janey turns to run away and finds herself, all of a sudden, standing in snow drifts; the hotel has disappeared, and in its place is, well… nothing.

As Janey travels back and forth in time - first to 1883, then, with an unwitting Max along, to an internment camp during World War I and finally the Banff area after the war - she struggles to not only escape the chaotic situations she finds herself in, but to try and figure out what is causing her mysterious disappearances. What do the three places have in common, and can she solve the mystery before the enemy she’s made in the past captures her and Max for good?

Disgraced ex-cop Sloane Donovan has relied on her job as a fitness instructor to keep her mental illness and PTSD in check—until she finds a close friend dead, apparently by her own hand. Obsessive demons triggered and doubtful of the official narrative, she teams up with Wayne Capson, a PI willing to bend the law, to find out who really killed her friend. The search leads Sloane from Vancouver's wealthiest enclaves to the street's darkest corners, questioning millionaires, tennis instructors, sex workers, former police colleagues—anyone who might provide answers.

J.T. Siemens’s To Those Who Killed Me is a debut that provides a heavy dose of hardboiled suspense and introduces a fiery new heroine in crime fiction.

Fifteen-year-old Gale is desperate to get out of Whitehorse, a fact that is immediately clear to counsellor Helen Cotillard when Gale walks into her office with her reluctant stepmother. It’s 1995, and one counselling agency for kids and families serves all of the Yukon. Gale has been having anxiety attacks, the last one so severe it landed her in the hospital.

Helen soon begins to realize that Gale’s distress at being separated from her little sister Buddie too closely parallels a calamity from her own past. This tragic similarity leaves Helen uneasy about her profession and her ability to help her clients. When Gale does escape back to her home in Cobalt, Ontario, to protect Buddie from their brutal mother, she risks her own future.

Through arresting, compelling images, Jill Frayne shows both the fierce beauty of the Yukon, and the damaged, enduring landscapes of two human hearts.

In this challenging memoir about her formative years in Yellowknife in the ’60s and ’70s, author Margaret Macpherson lays bare her own white privilege, her multitude of unexamined microaggressions, and how her childhood was shaped by the colonialism and systemic racism that continues today. Macpherson’s father, first a principal and later a federal government administrator, oversaw education in the NWT, including the high school Margaret attended with its attached hostel: a residential facility mostly housing Indigenous children.

Ringing with damning and painful truths, this bittersweet telling invites white readers to examine their own personal histories in order to begin to right relations with the Indigenous Peoples on whose land they live. Tracking the Caribou Queen is beautifully crafted to a purpose: poetic language and narrative threads dissect the trope that persisted through her girlhood, that of the Caribou Queen, a woman who seemed to embody extreme and contradictory stereotypes of Indigeneity. Here, Macpherson is not striving for a tidy ideal of “reconciliation”; what she is working towards is much messier, more complex and ambivalent and, ultimately, more equitable.

Sid Mary is a voice to be reckoned with.

Beloved for his intimate, lyrical poetry, Marty’s depiction of selfhood, connection to place and to landscape have proven him a unique and dissenting voice in Canadian literature as well as a consistent presence in the Canadian environmental movement. These are poems, often strongly resonant of western speech, that celebrate all the vicissitudes of rural life, the loves and losses, the valleys and peaks of life on the prairies, foothills and in the mountains of Alberta and British Columbia.

Wildfire season in the British Columbia Interior. Experienced firefighting pilot Rafe Mackie loses control of his airplane while doing a routine drop and plummets to his death.

The investigation that follows unleashes revelations that forever change the lives of three people: Will, the pilot who watched his mentor crash; Sharon, the widow struggling to come to terms with her loss; and Nathalie, an accident investigator with shadowy connections to the incident. As a form of the truth emerges, these three are drawn into a tangle of secrets and lies, passion and grief, blame and forgiveness that forces them to confront the actions that brought one man’s life crashing to an end.

In her second novel, Frances Peck creates another explosive literary page-turner, one that probes love, loyalty, and the ways we try to conceal and redeem our lives.

In his second book of poems, David Martin digs deep into an examination of the world using the lens of geology. With lyrically experimental poems expanding and retracting, this collection finds sonic and conceptual energy from the perspective of deep time and the geological forces that have shaped and continue to shape the Earth. Enacting seismic shifts, catastrophes, and erosions throughout the natural and cultural worlds, Martin’s poetic practice pushes forward to contend with the contemporary environmental changes and the structure of the Anthropocene that affect how we live in the twenty-first century. The collection veers from the Rocky Mountains and explorations of “fossilized” towns to family histories and myth-soaked theories, all while seeking a balance between disruptive poetic techniques and the centred lyrical voice.

At a crumbling zoo, an elephant keeper, a security guard, and a newly hired media consultant have differing views over what should be done about the zoo’s main attraction, the aging Sri Lankan elephant Matara. Matara is deteriorating by the day following the loss of her companion elephant Cheerio and a petition is circulating to try to force the zoo’s management to move her to a sanctuary. Karen, Matara’s keeper, argues adamantly that the zoo is Matara’s home and family, and that she is not strong enough to travel. Romney, the enthusiastic but increasingly stressed media consultant, thinks more about donations and galas than Matara’s life, while Marcel the security guard and an international graduate student struggling in the last stages of his thesis, understands the perspective of the protestors even as he seeks to protect the zoo’s employees.

Weaving between the perspectives of public relations, zoos as unique spaces of human animal interaction, and the question of whether or not zoos should exist at all, Conni Massing’s latest play takes inspiration from real life debates that surround Lucy, the lone elephant at the Edmonton Valley Zoo, asking poignant questions about our relationships with animals, and the power dynamics and instability that surround them.

In the third and final novel in the Lund sibling series, Where We Live continues the story of four siblings, separated in childhood, reunited and now middle-aged, as they navigate urban Vancouver life, work, relationships, and parenting in the late 2010s. With their familial bond shaped by their divergent adult experiences as well as their shared early childhood in a rural West Coast community, the lives of these siblings cross, separate, and rejoin yet again, in paths informed by nature and by nurture. Subject to the pressures of their environment and remembered or forgotten family history each sibling struggles to realize their aspirations in their search for a true home.

When she was twenty-four years old, Ellen Anderson Penno lost her partner in a climbing accident while they were ascending Mount Baker in Washington’s Cascade Range. The avalanche hid his body in a crevasse just weeks before Anderson Penno was slated to begin medical school, and she soon found herself torn between deferring her studies for a year, or starting right away with a full course load.

Rather than succumbing to grief and risk never beginning her medical education at all, she plunged deep into her studies, surrounded by death on all sides, struggling to maintain her way through her turbulent emotions and a rigorous med school schedule.

In this stirring and often mordantly funny new memoir, Ellen Anderson Penno structures a story of mourning, loss, despair and love through the lens of the classic medical text Gray’s Anatomy, showing readers what becomes of those who must rebuild their lives after tragedy strikes.

Darby Swank’s entire life changed when her Aunt Bea was brutally murdered one summer in their rural Saskatchewan community.

Following her gripping debut Friendly Fire, Lisa Guenther skillfully picks up Darby’s story a few weeks after the dramatic finale. Building her life anew, Darby makes new and lasting friendships and connections with recently found family members, including her charismatic cousin Brynny, a young woman leading an exciting and inclusive church in rural Alberta. Darby begins to make a name for herself on the Canadian music scene. Landing a sought after gig with an established Toronto band, Darby is thrust into the life of a working musician on the road. Still haunted by the violence hidden in her past, Darby must find a way to live at least partially in the public eye, as her music career takes off, and her Aunt Bea’s art and story become more and more well known.

—Deep time is time / that can not be erased“With empathy and playfulness, with startle and delight, Jaspreet Singh explores the fragility, beauty, and sorrow of the dreaming and waking worlds… a work of remarkable intellect,” wrote the poet Donna Kane about How to Hold a Pebble. In Dreams of the Epoch & the Rock, Singh deepens his exploration of climate, language, migration, decolonization, and the Anthropocene with an energy both acrobatic and intimate. Interweaving the personal, local, global, and geologic with hidden histories, these poems invite possibilities and defy neat closures, leaving readers with an indelible view of deep time. An ancestor’s words in a diary, a child’s chalk drawing, solar panels that smile like an ancient god, the Great Oxygenation Event: the gaze of these poems is vast, eclectic, and awestruck, while also remaining clear-eyed about the futures that await our planet. Her unironed face / smiling on behalf of the earth… You don’t have such words in your language / You don’t have such words in your language

Robert lost his father before he’d even been born, and was quickly abandoned by his young mother to be raised by his grandparents in small-town Saskatchewan. In another sense, though, Robert never lost his father, whose ghostly presence lingers in the young boy’s life over the years by means of spectral “advice letters” on how to be a man.

When Robert finds an old pump organ in a derelict farmhouse, he discovers a deep love of and talent for performing music. He also begins to discover secrets from his past, including his grandfather’s Communist ties, and the familial cover-up of his father’s sudden death. Along the way, Robert embraces his budding bisexuality, discovers his Métis identity and harnesses the power of his wild imagination.

Recalling the work of Jamie Fitzpatrick and Greg Rhyno, The Boy Who Was Saved By Jazz is a coming-of-age story and meditation on belonging.

A captivating search through one family’s history, All Wrong Horses on Fire that Go Away in the Rain is a stunning examination of intergenerational trauma and its effect on Indigenous voices. Aftershocks and fragmented memories ricochet through this collection, bringing with them strength, intensity and uninhibited beauty. Recalling pivotal work by Billy-Ray Belcourt, jaye simpson, Joshua Whitehead and Emily Riddle, Sarain Frank Soonias makes his poetic debut with a splash that ripples far outside his own work, and marks the entrance of a new, important voice in contemporary poetry.

When an accident upends their lives, fourteen-year-old Shiloh and her mother Ruth must leave their idyllic home to make a new life in the city. They find housing — through an evangelical church operating out of a strip mall — that backs onto the grounds of the abandoned Pacific Hospital for the Mind. Their lives begin to intersect with their new neighbours — Raymond, a handyman whose painful past is coming to a head; Dave, the disillusioned pastor looking for a new wife; and Madeleine, a 90-year-old former nurse who continues to make pilgrimages to the graves of the patients she once cared for. As Shiloh becomes involved with an undercurrent of teenagers who frequent the grounds of the ruined asylum, her rebellion and grief push her towards choices she can never take back.

With evocative, lyrical prose reminiscent of Emily Ruskovich and Marilynne Robinson, A Story Can Be Told About Pain is a profound meditation on loss and survival, a novel that reminds us why we tell each other stories—to revel in the beauty of language, to find solace, and to boldly confront the truth in order to heal .

The city of Edmonton, a large and growing Canadian metropolis, has a robust and thriving 2SLGBTQ+ community, with a too often unknown history. Extending the work of The Edmonton Queer History Project, Cruising the Downtown is a collaborative history and celebrates the people, places, and moments that have shaped and continue to shape the history of our city by moving through civic landmarks, sites of queer resistance, nightlife, celebration, and activist spaces.

Recalling collections such as Any Other Way: How Toronto Got Queer, Out North: An Archive of Queer Activism and Kinship in Canada, and similar projects, Cruising the Downtown and The Edmonton Queer History Project continue the important work of recognition, space-making, and community building as we move together into a less certain future than any of us could have hoped for.

Award-winning novelist C.J. Lavigne returns with a strange and startling new vision of the future…

Naia never wanted to be a goddess. But the legend of her as the miracle child of the ocean and a drowned man who washed up on the shore has overtaken her life, forcing her to lie to survive. Desperate to escape from the stalwart adoration of the people she loves, Naia longs to leave the island. But the ocean, filled with deadly mer, and the mainland, filled with noxious moss that drives anyone it touches to madness, block her way on either side.

There’s nowhere for Naia to go. She can’t keep pretending, and soon she is going to be found out…

Danica Klewchuk’s debut memoir-in-essays presents a frank view of what it’s like to be a woman and have a body, marking her as an impressive new voice in creative non-fiction from the Prairies. Standing in the Footprints of Beasts is part trauma and recovery memoir, part travel diary of an artist coming into her own power. With startling clarity and a surprising sense of humour, Klewchuk takes readers behind the curtain of a difficult upbringing and all-encompassing religious environment in Northern Alberta, then shines a light on challenges she faced as a new recruit into a nightlife industry rife with abuse. This portrait of an artist-in-waiting continues as the author travels through Europe, Australia and Southeast Asia, adapting her still-malleable identity on the fly as she begins to take hold of her creativity and voice. Standing in the Footprints of Beasts is a striking work of non-fiction that seeks to give readers company in their pain.

Annie Jalmer stands uneasily between opposing Communists and Fascist forces in her 1930s Rocky Mountain town. As the radical politics of her family inflame tensions throughout the town, Annie becomes an unwilling double agent until a violent strike forces her to take a stand. Revolution Songs is the electrifying debut novel by award-winning writer Carissa Halton, inspired by the little-known story of a Communist union, the rise of the Canadian Ku Klux Klan, and the women who fought on both sides. Set against the charged backdrop of Depression-era politics, Halton weaves a thrilling and timely story that echoes the rising polarization of our own era.