Voyageur Classics – serie

A new edition of Philip Child’s great Canadian novel of the First World War.A horrifying description of war, specifically embodied in the vain and inglorious futility of the First World War, God’s Sparrows is a novel rich in compassion and firm in its faith in the human spirit. Philip Child created a Canadian family saga, a modern pilgrim’s progress in which individuals surmount the corrosive effects of brutality, maintaining their ability to love and endure under the most agonizing circumstances. His book, first published in 1937, remains as a stirring testimony to that ability. It offers profound insight into the experience of the First World War, not just as a catastrophe affecting his characters but as a crucible in which the whole of this nation found itself tried.

A beautiful new edition of Hugh Hood’s debut story collection.It all started toward the end of the 1930s, when the young Hugh Hood serviced a flourishing Saturday Evening Post delivery route with more than fifty weekly customers. That was where the author-to-be first encountered the short story, in the fiction of the famous magazine writers Damon Runyon, Guy Gilpatric, Arthur Train, and the master of them all, P.G. Wodehouse.Hood would go on to write several novels and short story collections. Perhaps more importantly, he would be a founding member of the now-legendary Montreal Story Tellers group. Reissued here on its 55th anniversary, Hood’s first collection of short fiction, Flying a Red Kite contains some of his most well-known short fiction, from the post-apocalyptic visions of “After the Sirens” to the Faulknerian portrait of rural Ontario in “Three Halves of a House.” Flying a Red Kite is an essential window into the work of a major and unique Canadian talent.

“In Flanders Fields,” the iconic poem which gives its title to this collection of poems and selected prose, is one of Canada’s — and the world’s — best known poems of the Great War. It was written in 1915 by Canadian John McCrae, an artillery man, poet, and medical doctor, upon the death of a friend and fellow soldier during the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915.This is a faithful reissue of the Canadian first edition of McCrae’s writings, originally issued by his friends in 1919 in his honour and memory. It includes the best of his poetry and selections of his letters from the front lines together with a thoughtful essay of appreciation by his friend and fellow medical officer, Sir Andrew Macphail.