Nunatak First Fiction – serie

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.

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 .

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.

Set in the mid-1980s between Canada and Thailand, The Two Faces of Paradise rockets Ted Smith onto into the scene with this skillful debut. After being conscripted into service by his older brother, Robert Percy reluctantly agrees to return to South-East Asia to find his missing niece-by-marriage, Edith Weston. Armed with little more than grave misgivings and an unruly collection of skeletons in his backpack, Robert sets out for Thailand in search of Edith: daughter of privilege, spurious deserter, one-time confidant and clandestine lover. The Two Faces of Paradise is a treatise on travel and the internal journey of the traveller. It is a redemption story of family, devastating loss, and love.

Before her death, Rubis Caillou Morin sends her son west to help her brothers settle new land. Raoul carries with him a shadowy understanding of why his mother died, and a red book filled with her wisdom and love. The book sees Raoul through life, and helps his great-granddaughter find the truth about healers, Rubis, and the loyalty, responsibility, and consequence that rules her family.

Whipstock is a humorous tall tale exploring the literal, metaphorical and narrative links between pregnancy and Alberta’s petroleum industry.

Anna Gareau arrives in Victoria, BC, with two things to hide—an illegal pistol, and the ability to read people’s pasts by touching certain objects.

After a woman is drowned in the pool at her hotel,Anna must lie to protect her secrets and is dragged into a terrifying murder investigation. Colette Kostyna, the victim’s best friend, joins forces with Anna to expose the murderer. While the events surrounding the drowning are mysterious, the events occurring at The Rail—the local news magazine where the victim worked—are horrifying. There is a powerful creature with a grudge stalking those at The Rail, and Anna and Colette have become its new prey.

Frances, a manager for a large corporation, appears to be very successful. But Frances finds her piece of mind unravelling as she becomes overwhelmed by the destructive bureaucratic nature of the work world she lives in. Frances starts to lose small body parts, hears mysterious Leider music booming throughout her workplace at random times during the day, and obsesses over the caymans that guard her office building. Meanwhile, her alter-ego has regular conversations with the ghost of Kafka, who is writing the manuscript which Frances appears in. Written halfway between poetry and prose, Paper Trail questions the rat race work ethic many of us adhere to, more often out of necessity than choice. Through the thoughts and deeds of Frances and her alter-ego, author Arleen Paré demonstrates the stress and loneliness of modern society, and the profound impact this can have on a person’s sanity.

Cleavage tracks the patchwork musings of Leah, who, at twenty-four years old and two years into a relationship, discovers she has breast cancer. Told in fragments reminiscent of A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews, Cleavage details Leah’s struggles with her illness and treatments, the conflict between her disease and her boyfriend, her ambivalence toward her job, and a long-standing feud with her mother and only sister.

After a severe winter storm and extended power failure, thousands become trapped in their homes during one of the coldest weeks of the year. For one small group of people, thrown together by catastrophe, a state of anxiety and claustrophobia follows as they discover no precautions have been made for a disaster of this magnitude. When the dark and cold continues, endurance turns to despair and plans for survival begin to emerge as Fred, a fifteen-year-old boy from England, is forced to take charge in unpredictable ways. Alongside its bleak portrayal of social instability during economic collapse, Seal Intestine Raincoat unearths the powerful human instincts that convert helpless fear into the desire to adapt.

Crisp confronts the unspeakable parts of memory, meditating on characters caught in isolation and struggling to make sense of grief, disappointment, and the occasional dinner party gone wrong. The characters in Crisp’s stories don’t always make sound decisions: a grieving widow pursues a priest, an unhappy wife whittles her husband to bits, and a nostalgic man has a one-night stand with a whale trainer. Ranging from the mystical to the eccentric, Gray masterfully uncovers human reactions to loneliness and unrest through tales about relationships, secrets, and a longing to connect.

When she makes the chance discovery of a framed sepia photograph of her grandmother and her twin sister, RCMP Constable Arabella Dryvynsydes decides to investigate how a picture taken in 1914 in the mining town of Extension, B.C. wound up at a garage sale in small-town Saskatchewan almost one hundred years later. As Arabella sifts through caches of long-forgotten letters and unearths long-buried memories, she pieces together the heartbreaking truth of her family history and resolves a nearly century-old murder. In her debut novel, Myrna Dey skillfully moves back and forth between two time periods and two memorably resourceful heroines.

27-year-old Frieda Zweig is at an impasse. Behind her is a string of failed relationships and half-forgotten ambitions of being a painter; in front of her lies the dreary task of finding a real job and figuring out what “normal” people do with their lives. Then, a classified ad in the local paper introduces Frieda to Gladys, an elderly woman who long ago gave up on her dreams of being a dancer.The catch? Gladys is a ghost.In Dance, Gladys, Dance, Cassie Stocks tells the uplifting story of a woman whose uncanny connection with a kindred spirit causes her to see her life in a new way—as anything but ordinary.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2016 O'REILLY INSURANCE AND THE CO-OPERATORS FIRST BOOK AWARD AT THE SASKATCHEWAN BOOK AWARDS

As a long, hot Saskatchewan summer dawns, Darby Swank’s life is forever changed when she finds her beloved aunt floating dead in a lake. All at once, her blinders are lifted and she sees the country lifestyle she’s always known in a whole new way, with hidden pain and anguish lurking behind familiar faces, and violence forever threatening to burst forth, like brushfire smouldering and dormant under the muskeg.

With her first novel, Lisa Guenther lays bare familial bonds, secret histories and the healing potential of art. Friendly Fire recalls the work of Ann-Marie MacDonald and Lynn Coady as it eviscerates small-town platitudes and brings important issues to light.

Praise for Friendly Fire:

"Friendly Fire is a remarkably honest and self-critical look at life in rural Saskatchewan."--Tom Ingram, The Winnipeg Review"It's clear Guenther knows rural small-town life, and in this novel she paints a vivid picture of both its foibles and its merits."--Sharon Chisvin, Winnipeg Free Press"A well-paced character study with a strong sense of place."--LeoRobillard, Backwater Review

Winner of the Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize!Shortlisted for the 2017 Alberta Readers' Choice Award!Finalist for the Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction at the 2017 Alberta Literary Awards!Shortlisted for Trade Fiction Book of the Year at the 2017 Alberta Book Publishing Awards!

Lauralyn Chow's debut, Paper Teeth, follows the lives of the Lees, a Canadian-Chinese family and their friends who reside in Edmonton, Alberta. While playing with time and place, from Edmonton in the 1960s and 70s up to present-day Calgary, Lauralyn Chow creates a world of walking dolls, family car trips, fashion and frosty makeup, home renovations inspired by pop culture, and moving up to big, new houses. The interconnected stories found in Paper Teeth are fun, funny, and heart-warming journeys about the pursuit of identity and the crafting of home.

With domestic tomfoolery and through deft observation and prismatic-voiced humour—including ironic asides—Lauralyn Chow reveals how family nourishes hope.

Shortlisted for the Cover Design Award at the 2016 Alberta Book Publishing Awards!

After the accidental death of a teenaged friend, the Lansing family has split along fault lines previously hidden under a patina of suburban banality. Every family has secrets, but for the Lansings those secrets end up propelling them in different directions away from their border town to foreign shores and to prison.

Told in thirty-three flash fiction narratives, Border Markers is fractured like the psyches of its characters, all keen edges and tough language. It’s a slice of prairie noir that straddles the line between magical and gritty realism. Jenny Ferguson’s debut is a compelling collection of commonplace tragedies and surprising insights.

In 59 Glass Bridges, 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 reminiscent of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, Steven Peters’ debut reveals how pivotal moments in our lives give substance and shape to the labyrinths in our minds.

Rebee Shore’s life is fragmented. She’s forever on the move, ricocheting around Alberta, guided less than capably by her dysfunctional mother Elizabeth.

The Shore Girl follows Rebee from her toddler to her teen years as she grapples with her mother’s fears and addictions, and her own desire for a normal life. Through a series of narrators—family, friends, teachers, strangers, and Rebee herself—her family’s dark past, and the core of her mother’s despair, are slowly revealed.

The Shore Girl is a mosaic of Rebee: of her origins, of her past and present; from darkness and grief, to understanding and hope for a brighter future.

Half-Asian teenager Grace (but she’d prefer it if you called her “Gray” instead) is not a perfect little supermom-in-the-making like her older sister Jessica, and would rather become a marine biologist than a mother—although she does understand how to take care of her special-needs kid brother Squid better than anyone else in her family. When her mother Belinda abruptly runs out on her family and flies across the Atlantic in order to study crop circles in the English countryside, Grace is left alone to puzzle out her life, the world, and her unique place within it.

With a warmth and a boisterous sense of humour reminiscent of Miriam Toews’ A Complicated Kindness and Peter Hedges’ What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? author Corinna Chong introduces us to two lovable and thoroughly original female characters: persnickety, precocious Grace, and her impractical, impulsive mother Belinda—very different women who nevertheless persistently circle back into each other’s hearts.

“So I have always walked alleys alone, with my monster face, listening through a wall for the words that might cultivate me, that are contained within the homes of ex-lovers, the ones who caught a glimpse and ran away.”

In the neon-slick streets of Thea Bowering’s imagination, monster girls and femme flâneurs roam, anthropologist’s eyes on barroom denizens, disguising themselves in men’s clothing and embarking on doomed love affairs. Old World meets New World as the cafés and piazzas of Europe’s capitals intermingle with the dust and desolation of the 21st Century modern West.

Strikingly modern while also filled with fin de siècle regret, Thea Bowering’s first story collection is shot through with allusion and timeless themes given new life.

“Three weeks it’s been raining, but no puddles…”

Author Sara Pierce is slowly drowning in Windsor, a city where rain will seemingly not stay put long enough to form puddles. While living with her germophobic best friend Angie and dealing with her online gaming-addicted boyfriend Dan, Sara finds herself compulsively writing and rewriting her own story in order to gain some sense of control over her own life.

Shallow Enough to Walk Through is a portrait of an artist as a young woman confined to a world she wouldn’t have written for herself. Marissa Reaume’s playful debut is a novel in the process of its own creation, taking us into the mind of Sara, a young writer struggling to construct her own happy ending.

Shortlisted for the Cover Design Award at the 2016 Alberta Book Publishing Awards!

Everyone deals with grief in their own personal way. Take Carrie, for example. To get over her mother’s death from ovarian cancer, she launches a passive-aggressive war with her fellow office workers, embarks on a campaign designed to let her ex-husband know she’s over him (which naturally only pushes her teenage daughter farther away), and plots to rid herself of her mother’s overweight cat, all the while consuming heroic quantities of red wine, spiked coffee, and coffin nails. Nobody’s perfect.

Situated at the midpoint between booze-soaked mayhem and middle-aged ennui, Things You’ve Inherited from Your Mother is a riotous assemblage of found objects, Choose Your Own Adventure-style in-jokes and useful facts about mice. In her startlingly funny first novel, Hollie Adams takes the conventional wisdom about “likeable” literary heroines and shoves it down an elevator shaft.

It’s 1994 and Pete Curtis is pretty much done with Thunder Bay, Ontario. He’s graduating high school and playing drums in a band that’s ready to hit the road. Even though his parents, teachers, and new girlfriend seem a little underwhelmed, Pete knows he’s on the verge of indie rock greatness.

Fast-forward ten years, Pete finds himself stuck teaching high school in the hometown he longed to escape, while his best friend and former bandmate is a bona fide rock star.

Greg Rhyno's debut novel is full of catchy hooks, compelling voices, and duelling time signatures. Told in two alternating decades, To Me You Seem Giant is a raucous and evocative story about trying to live in the present when you can’t escape your past.

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.

Winner of the 2020 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour!

Aspiring novelist Molly MacGregor’s life is strikingly different from a literary heroine's. Named for one of literature’s least romantic protagonists, Moll Flanders, Molly lives in Edmonton, a city she finds irredeemably unromantic, where she writes university term papers instead of novels, and sells shoes in the Largest Mall on Earth. There she seeks the other half of her young life's own matched pair. Delightfully whimsical, Heidi L.M. Jacobs’ Molly of the Mall: Literary Lass and Purveyor of Fine Footwear explores its namesake's love for the written word, love for the wrong men (and the right one), and her complicated love for her city.

Shortlisted for Best Trade Fiction at the 2020 Alberta Book Publishing Awards!

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.

Jaclyn Dawn's debut novel provides an incisive look at the lingering consequences of past relationships and the price of both staying silent and speaking up.