Robert's Hill (or The Time I Pooped My Snowsuit) and Other Christmas Stories


Book Description

This humorous and heartfelt collection of Christmas tales reflects on the best of the holiday: family, tradition, binge drinking, divorce, and poop. Robert’s Hill (or The Time I Pooped My Snowsuit) and Other Christmas Stories is the perfect collection for Christmas in the real world. No talking snowman or cute woodland animal who saves Christmas (actually, there is a pigeon who steps in and saves the big day). This selection of heart-warming tales is about the true magic of the season: receiving the ultimate gift only to break it immediately; playing drinking games while watching a holiday special; getting divorced over what seemed like the perfect present. Robert’s Hill even settles the debate on which is the greatest Christmas movie ever made (that’s not it) and finally explains how the candy cane was invented (no one really knows, so why not make it up?). This collection will be enjoyed by everyone or, at least, anyone who still loves Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, missess the toys they had as a kid, and thinks pooping your snowsuit is funny.




The Death Swing at Falcon Lake


Book Description

A hilarious, heartwarming, and sometimes bone-chilling collection of summer stories to share around a campfire, in a tent, or on the dock. Time to hit the road: the minivan is packed, the cooler is chock full, and the lake beckons. Summer is the perfect setting for sharing short stories at the cottage, around the campfire, in the tent, or on the long ride to camp. The Death Swing at Falcon Lake has a story for every occasion. There are epic tales of neighbourhood battles over the best fort, harrowing myths of the bravery it takes to walk to the outhouse in the dark, embarrassing accounts of first love at summer camp, and maybe even a legend about the monster watching you from the shadows while you read this very book. Raconteur Jeremy John delivers another hilarious, heartwarming, and sometimes bone-chilling collection of short stories ideal for summer reading.




Uncle Wally's Old Brown Shoe


Book Description

Uncle Wally is a tiger. His missing shoe has all the fun in this story, as it passes through the possession of a menagerie of animals, and eventually circles back to the opening image.




Stardust Dads


Book Description

The e-mail Danny and Allison read on their new computer in 1996 looks no different from the millions of others received by Web users around the world, with one glaring exception--it was sent by their dads who died during the 1970s. While residing in the afterworld at an amenity-laden paradise called Midway Manor, guitar-strumming Mickey Parks and piano-playing Lloyd Wallace monitor and manipulate the lives of their adult children on earth from the mid-'70s through the 1990s. Tampering with the facility's sophisticated computer, the dads thrust Mickey's daughter Allison and Lloyd's son Danny into a passionate but sometimes stormy relationship-a relationship steeped in Danny's heavy drinking and entangled in the often-zany world of men's adventure magazine publishing. After carefully implementing a plan to send their son and daughter a gift of knowledge that could enrich their lives forever, the dads' brief contact is cut short. They are banished to another destination in the afterworld, but not before they impart indisputable proof of life after death--and unwittingly put Danny's and Allison's earthbound lives on the line.




What Disturbs Our Blood


Book Description

A rich, unmined piece of Canadian history, an intense psychological drama, a mystery to be solved . . . and a hardwon escape from a family curse. Like his friends Banting and Best, Dr. John FitzGerald was a Canadian hero. He founded Connaught Labs, saved untold lives with his vaccines and transformed the idea of public health in Canada and the world. What so darkened his reputation that his memory has been all but erased? A sensitive, withdrawn boy is born into the gothic house of his long dead grandfather, a brilliant yet tormented pathologist of Irish blood and epic accomplishment whose memory has been mysteriously erased from public consciousness. As the boy watches his own father—also an eminent doctor—plunge into a suicidal psychosis, he intuits, as the psychiatrists do not, some unspeakable secret buried like a tumour deep in the multi-generational layers of the family unconscious. Growing into manhood, he knows in his bones that he must stalk an ancient curse before it stalks him. To set himself free, he must break the silence and put words to the page. His future lies in the past.




White Walls


Book Description

Judy Batalion grew up in a house filled with endless piles of junk, obsessively gathered and stored by her hoarder mother. The first chance she had, she escaped the clutter to create a new identity - one made of order, regimen and clean white walls. Until, one day, she found herself enmeshed in life's biggest chaos: motherhood. Told with heartbreaking honesty and humour, this is Judy's poignant account of her trials negotiating the messiness of motherhood and the indelible marks that mothers and daughters make on each other's lives.




Stone Butch Blues


Book Description

Published in 1993, this brave, original novel is considered to be the finest account ever written of the complexities of a transgendered existence. Woman or man? Thats the question that rages like a storm around Jess Goldberg, clouding her life and her identity. Growing up differently gendered in a blue--collar town in the 1950s, coming out as a butch in the bars and factories of the prefeminist 60s, deciding to pass as a man in order to survive when she is left without work or a community in the early 70s. This powerful, provocative and deeply moving novel sees Jess coming full circle, she learns to accept the complexities of being a transgendered person in a world demanding simple explanations: a he-she emerging whole, weathering the turbulence.




Buddy the Bluenose Reindeer


Book Description

The riotous third installment of the bestselling Buddy the Bluenose Reindeer series. This time, the East Coast reindeer is out to save the Christmas Lobsterpalooza! Everyone's favourite blue-nosed reindeer is back with another uniquely Nova Scotian Christmas adventure! It's Christmas Eve on Nova Scotia's South Shore, and a community is preparing for their annual Lobsterpalooza -- a festive evening of fun, food, and family. But a storm is gathering off the coast, and the lobster fishers haven't returned home with their haul yet. When the community's lighthouse goes out, the fishers have nothing to guide them home....and nothing to warn them of the big, jagged Jingle Bell Rock that looms between them and safe harbour. If only there were a brave, bright-nosed reindeer who could save the fleet, save Lobsterpalooza, and save Christmas. The third installment in the bestselling series of illustrated early readers, this thrilling seasonal romp will instantly become a holiday tradition. Features bold, vibrant artwork by celebrated artist Brenda Jones (Skunks for Breakfast, Sid the Kid and the Dryer).




Deception Point


Book Description

On the eve of a presidential race in which NASA's budget is a pivotal issue, the space agency announces the discovery of an ancient meteorite filled with fossils deep in the Arctic ice.




The Journals of Sylvia Plath


Book Description

The electrifying diaries that are essential reading for anyone moved and fascinated by the life and work of one of America's most acclaimed poets. Sylvia Plath began keeping a diary as a young child. By the time she was at Smith College, when this book begins, she had settled into a nearly daily routine with her journal, which was also a sourcebook for her writing. Plath once called her journal her “Sargasso,” her repository of imagination, “a litany of dreams, directives, and imperatives,” and in fact these pages contain the germs of most of her work. Plath’s ambitions as a writer were urgent and ultimately all-consuming, requiring of her a heat, a fantastic chaos, even a violence that burned straight through her. The intensity of this struggle is rendered in her journal with an unsparing clarity, revealing both the frequent desperation of her situation and the bravery with which she faced down her demons.