Tidewater Press – förlag

Women have been playing hockey since the beginning—but their fights took place off the ice.

Hockey wasn’t meant to include girls. Women attracted to the speed, finesse and physicality of the game had to overcome condescending attitudes, lack of resources, legal barriers and even sexual assault in their quest for legitimacy and ice time. For more than 150 years, their gender was questioned, monitored, hidden, disparaged and trivialized. Even so, teams were formed and stars emerged. Early tournaments were catalysts, inspiring pioneers with visions of what could be. From “the miracle maid” of the early 20th century to members of today’s Professional Women's Hockey League, these are the stories of women who truly had ice in their veins.

A powerful novel of redemption and revenge inspired by a real American Civil War mystery.

For Clayton Monroe, the last hope for refuge is a struggling settlement at the far northwest corner of Vancouver Island. San Josef is his sanctuary from the imagined demons and real enemies who have pursued him for three decades, from the Civil War battlefields of Virginia and across the plains of Kansas to the gold rush gateway of Seattle.

For Anika Frederickson, San Josef is her new home and her dream, a now failing community built on the promises of provincial government officials. The future of her colony, carved from the coastal wilderness by the tenacity of her fellow Danish idealists, is as uncertain as the storms that batter their farms.

A man like Monroe leaves a burning trail behind him, and the autumn winds of 1899 bring a new arrival to Cape Scott, sparking an inevitable challenge to Clayton's safety and Anika's family.

At San Josef, the rainforest and the river will bear witness.

A funny and poignant story about coming of age after you've already grown up.

Sloane Sawyer had it all planned—she and her best friend Stephie would graduate from high school, get out of Tippett Valley and have dazzling complementary careers. Sloane would become an award-winning graphic designer, creating band posters using Stephie's artwork. She would also have a loving husband, the requisite two kids and a house with a white picket fence. As she turns thirty, Sloane has a boring job and a boss who ignores her. She has no children, doesn't own a house, has gained fifteen pounds and questions how her video game-playing husband could possibly love her. And Stephie, working in a bar and living in Tippett Valley with the disreputable Randy, is increasingly distant. Even as Sloane clings to her dream, she comes to realize that she and Stephie won't be able to move forward until they finally confront an old tragedy.

Finalist, Indigenous Voices Awards 2021

On the edge of normal, the everyday can be an adventure and the ordinary a triumph.

In the tradition of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Room and If I Fall, If I Die, this uplifting collection explores the world through the eyes of protagonists whose perspectives are informed by their unique circumstances. Some are struggling with physical challenges while others seek to overcome psychological barriers.

Far from being defined by their limitations, these characters revel in achievements others take for granted and find wonder in unexpected places. By celebrating the private triumphs of people who are all too often dismissed, Ashton reminds us all of our own humanity.

When civil war broke out in his home country in 2011, Hassan Al Kontar was a young Syrian living and working in the UAE. After a series of setbacks, he was arrested in 2017 and deported in 2018. Unable to obtain a visa for any other country, he became trapped in the arrivals zone at Kuala Lumpur Airport. Exiled by war and trapped by geopolitics, Al Kontar used social media and humour to tell his story to the world, becoming an international celebrity and ultimately finding refuge in Canada.

Man at the Airport explores what it means to be a Syrian, an "illegal" and a refugee. More broadly, it examines the power of social media to amplify individual voices and facilitate political dissent.

The story of an ordinary family’s descent into the dark world of white supremacy, and how love ultimately triumphed over hate.

As a troubled teen, Lauren Manning sought refuge online in the angry world of black metal music. When she met a recruiter who offered her the acceptance she craved, the doctrine of white supremacy supplanted the values of her middle-class upbringing, and Lauren traded suburbia for a life of violence and criminality on the streets of Toronto.

Told from the viewpoint of both mother and daughter, Walking Away from Hate chronicles Lauren’s descent into extremism, her life within the movement and her ultimate reconnection with the family she once denounced and the mother who refused to give up on her.

At a time when white supremacy and other forms of extremism are resurgent around the world, Walking Away from Hate provides a candid insider’s view from a uniquely female perspective.

Shortlisted for the 2022 Hamilton Literary Awards

What would you risk to save your children?

Jolie Phuong Hoang grew up as one of ten children, part of a loving, prosperous Vietnamese family. All that changed after the communists took over in 1975. Identified as a potential “bad element,” the family lived in constant fear of being sent to the dreaded new economic zone.

Desperate to ensure the family’s safety and to provide a future for his children, Jolie’s father arranged three separate escapes. The first was a failure that cost most of their fortune, but the second was successful—six of his children reached Indonesia and ultimately settled in Canada. He and his youngest daughter drowned during the disastrous third attempt. Told from the author’s perspective and that of her father’s ghost, Three Funerals for My Father is a poignant story of love, grief and resilience that spans three countries and fifty years.

In an era when anti-Asian racism is on the rise and the issue of human migration is front-page news, Three Funerals for My Father provides a vivid and timely first-hand account of what it is like to risk everything for a chance at freedom. It is at once an intimate story of one family, a testament to the collective experience of the “boat people” who escaped communist Vietnam, and a plea on behalf of the millions of refugees currently seeking asylum across the globe.

Richard Lemm grew up in 1950s Seattle, raised by alcoholic grandparents, with an absent mother and a fabled father who died shortly after he was born. To avoid the draft, he left the land of opportunity and moved to Canada in 1967. Now, more than fifty years later, he uses his poet’s sensibility to examine his cultural heritage, including the optimism that characterized the early years of the “counterculture” and the darker days that followed the murders of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. Turning his lens inward, he focuses on what he believed to be true about his family and society at the time, how that perception has evolved and how the stories we tell ourselves inform our personal, cultural and national identities.

Familiar myths—the wild west, the “greatest country on earth,” the “true north strong and free,” the red-blooded male and others—strongly influenced Lemm’s generation on both sides of the border. Revisiting these tropes in light of his later experiences, Lemm explores the ways in which we use imagined truths to justify our place in the world.

A rewarding mixture of personal recollection and social commentary, this is a story about growing up in a family and country you didn’t choose and coming of age in the country and with the people you did.

History is the story an individual or nation tells itself, in an ongoing process of reinvention, and that story is one of imagined truths.

Two unlikely friends navigate a world of saints and sinners, and crimes both real and imagined.

Spence is lost—the brief optimism of his early retirement and bold move from Vancouver to Montréal has devolved into a lonely round of French classes, winter cycling and watering his absent daughter’s houseplants. When Thierry, une petite souris, moves into his apartment uninvited, Spence welcomes the company.

Thierry is a petty thief with strong opinions and a foul mouth who draws the former drama teacher into an unexpected theatre of conspiracies. He becomes Spence’s little brother, helping him learn French, confront painful memories and reaffirm his Catholic faith.

A darkly comic storythat is both poignant et amusant, sacred et sacrebleu.

For marginalized athletes past and present, achievement can bring celebrity without equality and recognition without opportunity.

In many ways, Ontario’s Chatham-Kent region is a microcosm of Canadian multiculturalism. As a terminus of the Underground Railroad, it has long been home to a large Black community. Walpole Island and Delaware First Nations are nearby and many interned Japanese Canadians worked on local farms during World War II. The history of sport in the region is emblematic of the challenges that have confronted generations of non-white athletes nationwide. Each chapter uses the story of a local athlete—some famous, others more obscure—to illuminate one aspect of the evolving relationship between race and sport in North America. Combining tales of personal triumph with sports history and social commentary, On Account of Darkness examines systemic racism and ambivalent attitudes that persist to this day.

Fall 2022 Young Adult Selection - Top Grade: Canlit for the Classroom

Winner of the PMC Indigenous Literature Award 2023

Three kohkums, a man named Crow, two best friends, and a drug dealer . . . twelve-year-old Hunter may be getting out of Red Rock sooner than he hoped.

For Hunter Frank, the summer of ’79 begins with his mother returning home only to collect the last two months’ welfare cheques, leaving her three “fucking half-breeds” to fend for themselves. When his older sister escapes their northern BC town and his brother goes to fight forest fires, Hunter is on his own, with occasional care coming from a trio of elders—his kohkums—and companionship from his two best friends.

It’s been a good summer for the young entrepreneur, but the cash in the purple Crown Royal bag hidden in his mattress still isn’t enough to fund his escape from his monstrous mother and the town of Red Rock. As the Labour Day weekend arrives, so does a new friend with old wisdom and a business opportunity that might be just a boy at the crossroads needs. My Indian Summer is the story of a journey to understanding that some villains are also victims, and that while reconciliation may not be possible, survival is.

Is delivering a swift death really a higher calling? Or is it just government-sanctioned murder?

John Radclive hates being called Hangman. He is no murderous thug; he is a highly trained executioner who relies on science to bring God’s mercy to condemned criminals. As Canada's first official executioner, he revels in the salary, status and perks that come with the job. In his off hours, he enjoys masquerading as Thomas Ratley, steward at Toronto's prestigious Sunnyside Rowing Club where he secretly sneers at the hypocrisy of the Canadian elite. But dispensing mercy presumes that the condemned are guilty. The more convicted felons he meets, the more Radclive begins to question the Canadian justice system and his role within it—perhaps he is a hangman after all.

When nineteen-year-old Aki throws her first punch, the respectable ‘good girl’ discovers she’s a fighter.

Good girl, good student, good daughter: Aki has always done what her loving but demanding multiracial family expects. Far from her Vancouver home, she adjusts to life in London­—studies, friends and a relationship with a wealthy but closeted Asian woman. Life is demanding, but Aki is coping until a violent incident triggers an unexpected response in the young Japanese-Latina-Canadian woman. She discovers that brutal bar-fighting relieves her stress and she begins a dangerous dual existence—obedient and accommodating by day and brawling by night.

This is a novel about the need to reconcile competing cultures, traditions and values that also explores issues of sexual identity and violence.

When Lizzy is forced to move to the Adventist commune of Stillwater, she is sure the end times have begun. She’s not wrong.

Sixteen-year-old Lizzy is trapped, caught between her passion for science and the teachings of her Seventh-day Adventist father and Mennonite mother. But she isn’t the only one with problems: her mother, Marie, is increasingly reliant on prescription medication to recover from a car accident that might – or might not – have been deliberately caused by her husband, Daniel.

In a bid to regain his social standing and self-esteem, Daniel moves the family to an Adventist commune in BC’s Okanagan Valley, where Lizzy meets another recent arrival with secrets of his own. He helps her establish a clandestine connection to the outside world that she hopes will help her curb her tongue and retain her sanity long enough to finish high school, but her plans change when her younger brother, Zach, is threatened. Lizzy and Zach flee to Marie’s childhood home with their reluctant mother in tow. When her father arrives to take his family back to Stillwater, old resentments collide with new, forcing everyone to face a day of judgement.

Eva’s dad is dead. Her mother isn’t, but ought to be, says Aunt Mathilde. Time to move on . . .

Moving from Nova Scotia, Eva tries not to care. She’s already dropped out of school and is washing dishes for a living. Despite her aunt’s encouragement, she can’t speak French, the mother tongue of her Acadian family, but Mathilde insists they have to go to Montreal—now.

Mathilde has provided reluctant care for her niece for more than a decade, despite the fact that she hates her sister so much, even her name is banned in her presence. Mathilde spends her evenings painting, drinking and writing love letters to a long-gone man, dreaming of what might have been.

An old photograph of a happy toddler with dimples is taped to the wall by Gaby’s bunk in the Nova Institute for Women. With her parole hearing weeks away, Gaby doesn’t have any plans or hopes for a future outside of prison beyond one: to find her daughter.

Whether it is on the French Shore, Halifax or Montreal, all three women can’t escape the spectre of Adam, Eva’s charming, dead father, and the unspoken memories of blood and loss.

A Danuta Gleed finalist and shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize, this collection of short stories breaks through the surface of authoritarian religion and families, and into the lives of the women and children often trapped within its constraints.

Set on the Canadian prairies, one story follows a young girl into a labyrinth of frozen meat lockers where she becomes trapped by more than just the ice. In another, a son cares for the dying father who ground his childhood to dust.

Threaded with moments of both dark humour and unexpected grace, this second edition of Mennonites Don’t Dance also contains a new story, not included in the original.

Christmas is trumpeted as a time of peace, joy, bounty and goodwill. Believers and non-believers alike covet the spirit of the holidays even when circumstances are screwed up.

Recollections from acclaimed Canadian authors combine with emerging voices from across the country in an anthology that debunks the popular depiction of Christmas while delivering its messages of hope and renewal.

Writers marginalized by personal circumstance, faith, and race share memories of surviving bleak Christmases past: holidays spent in shelters, or on the streets; families marred by alcohol and violence; personal struggles with addiction, poverty or grief; isolation and loneliness. Despite these and other obstacles, contributors strive to salvage the spirit of the season.

With contributions from:

Canada’s longest war (2001-2014) pushed military, diplomatic, judicial and humanitarian organizations to their limits. Was it all in vain?

Based on interviews with twenty-one key decision-makers and participants, many of whom are speaking publicly for the first time, Unwinnable Peace recounts the personal and professional challenges faced by individuals deeply committed to securing and rebuilding Kandahar province.

These are the men and women who are still struggling to reconcile their sacrifices with the eventual Taliban victory.

A veteran diplomat, the author combines his personal experiences with those of his colleagues (Afghan and Canadian) to examine Canada’s mission to Afghanistan at a human level.

No one believes Marta can get better—not her sister, not her father—and she doesn’t care. But when a troubled, enigmatic acquaintance from her therapy group goes missing, Marta discovers what she does care about: finding Thomas Zimmerman.

For twenty-six-year-old Marta, group counselling is just a distraction from her dead-end job as a janitor and her serious vocation of smoking weed. She’s been living with depression, numbness and apathy for years, but in a rare act of engagement, she helps Thomas, a fellow patient who can’t wash the dishes because of the man in his sink. When Thomas disappears shortly afterward, Marta feels compelled to find the person nobody else seems to care about.

Through a hard Nova Scotia winter, Marta embarks on a quest that takes her to doctors’ offices, psychiatric institutions and the darker side of Halifax, where the homeless—the “Crazytown people of Sanity City”—dwell.

Is Thomas alive or lying dead under the snow? And is Marta really living or forever lost in the hypozone?

Ready for romance and adventure, two sisters take summer jobs as live-in waitresses on the edge of the Arctic Circle. Hotel Beringia is a popular stop for truckers, highway workers, adventurous tourists and scientists, serviced by staff who are all trying to get away from something. It’s the late 1980s and everyone wants a piece of the Arctic, whether or not it’s theirs to take. The big-city girls soon learn that the Klondike still exists, and that everyone at the Hotel Beringia seems to have a hidden agenda.

Working in the busy restaurant under a sun that never sets, sisters Rumer and Charlotte each find romance in the midst of intrigue. When Charlotte vanishes with her unsuitable lover, Rumer is the only “Klondike geisha” around and begins to wonder whether her attractive scientist is as honourable as he appears.

Hotel Beringia is at once mystery and comedy, set in the Yukon during a pivotal time for the role of women in the North and the drive to exploit the riches of the Arctic and its peoples.

We are like the sash, woven together from different peoples and traditions, making something new, beautiful, and strong.

In 1869, the arrival of surveyors from the new Dominion of Canada sends ripples of anxiety through the people of Red River. As the Métis Nation begins negotiating terms for joining Confederation, each member of the Rougeau family adapts in their own way: Clément looks outward, trying to maintain his livelihood as a carter, while his wife, Marienne, looks inward, determined to hold their fracturing family together. Julien, the elder son, joins Louis Riel to confront the same intruders that so impress his sister, Charlotte. As the Red River Resistance unfolds, the consequences of each choice become heartbreakingly clear.

Red River Métis author Cheryl Parisien combines research, family history, and historical events in this story of a pivotal moment in the birth of a sovereign nation.

In this second volume of the Better Next Year collection of true stories, discover more dashed holiday hopes, Christmas catastrophes, and slender, heartbreaking shards of joy.

Upon A Midnight Clear brings together emerging authors from across the country who share their experiences of Christmases gone wrong. These tales—sometimes funny, sometimes sad, always poignant—celebrate the spirit of the season and will warm your heart on even the coldest night.

“Four drinks isn’t a binge. That’s après-ski on a Tuesday.”

Alcohol has informed every phase of Veronica Woodruff’s life. Growing up, her parents’ addiction took the family from wealth and privilege to destitution and eventual homelessness. Bartending provided the income she needed to complete her education and start her career as a scientist; drinking brought friendship, romance, and adventure. Booze lubricated the gears of her professional and personal life for decades.

Combining research with memoir, Veronica charts the evolution of drinking culture in North America, from the morality-based lens that led to Prohibition to the science-based approach that underlies today’s sober curious movement.

Fifteen murderers buried in the yard of the jail where they were hanged. A detective haunted by their crimes. The facts are true. Their stories might be.

Mysteries to be solved, lives to be imagined, crimes to be dissected.

From 1872 to 1930, fifteen murderers were buried in what had been the exercise yard of the old Toronto Don Jail. Their stories are interwoven with that of Detective George Porter, who sketches their faces in pen and ink as compulsively as he investigates their crimes.

Influenced by a childhood event that sparks a fascination with miscreants and the law, George Porter begins his career as an idealistic eighteen-year-old constable. Then he brushes the dirt from the face of a newborn babe, buried alive—how does that not change a man? The criminals he encounters might say he’s a hard case, but just. Except when he isn’t.

Speaking to the dead is no simple matter. From fads to frauds, our attempts to connect with the supernatural shape our past and present.