Böcker utgivna av NeWest Press

"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. live"--

Spilt blood whets the appetite of a ravine at the heart of Haddington Springs, a bedroom community with a closet full of bones.It's 1997, and Robin and his two best friends, Steph and Dylan, are ready to dive into their first summer as teenagers. But when Catherine, a classmate's younger sister, disappears, Robin finds his carefree life of mall arcades, soccer, and slasher movies swapped out for one of paranoia, guilt, and confusion. While parents form search parties and police chase vaporous leads, Robin becomes convinced that there is a darker element at play, one that he might have accidentally set loose. All the while, he is trying to figure out his changing relationships, growing closer to Steph as his friendship with Dylan is increasingly marred by mercurial moods and secrets. Delving into the most awkward and bewildering time of adolescence, Niall Howell's There Are Wolves Here Too blends coming of age with noir and horror elements as we move with Robin through the difficulties of learning who to trust and when to trust yourself.

In Ghosts in a Photograph, award-winning nonfiction writer Myrna Kostash delves into the lives of her grandparents, all of whom moved from Galicia, now present-day Ukraine, to Alberta at the turn of the twentieth century. Discovering a packet of family mementos, Kostash begins questioning what she knows about her extended families' pasts and whose narrative is allowed to prevail in Canada.This memoir, however, is not just a personal story, but a public one of immigration, partisan allegiance, and the stark differences in how two sets of families survive in a new country: one as homesteaders, the other as working-class Edmontonians. Working within the gaps in history--including the unsolved murder in Ukraine of her great uncle--Kostash uses her remarkable acumen as writer and researcher to interrogate the idea of straightforward and singular-voiced pasts and the stories we tell ourselves about where we come from.Rich in detail and propelled by vital curiosity, Ghosts in a Photograph is a determined, compelling, and multifaceted family chronicle.

"Hired by local mixed martial arts trainer Elijah Lennox to find a missing UFC Championship belt, "Hammerhead" Jed must extract answers from the tight-knit MMA community. Still consuming his weight in banana milkshakes, Jed leaves the theatrical confines of the wrestling ring for a world of jewel thieves, bodybuilders, eccentric yoga practitioners, and adorable baby goats. As he infiltrates an exclusive and unique no-holds-barred fight club, Jed might just find himself down for the count... Five Moves of Doom is a high-altitude and high-attitude entry in A.J. Devlin's award-winning mystery series, one that finds its hero pushed to his absolute limit, relying on his closest allies to survive, and making choices he never thought he'd have to make."--

"How do we scale up our imagination of the human? How does one live one's life in the Anthropocene? How to Hold a Pebble--Jaspreet Singh's second collection of poems--locates humans in the Anthropocene, while also warning against the danger of a single story. These pages present intimate engagements with memory, place, language, migration; with enchantment, uncanniness, uneven climate change and everyday decolonization; with entangled human-non-human relationships and deep anxieties about essential-non-essential economic activities. The poems explore strategies for survival and action by way of a playful return to the quotidian and its manifold interactions with the global and planetary."--

Kathryn Willcock and her sisters grew up in logging camps on the coast of B.C. in the 1960s when children were set loose to play in the wilderness, women kept rifles next to the wood stove, and loggers risked their lives every single day. The author's tales of grizzly bears, American tourists, and a couple of terrified gangsters, along with the wisdom of Indigenous elders, pour off the page like warm syrup on a stack of cookhouse hotcakes.

"This book holds four stories that span the pre-pandemic timeframe and beyond. Within these pages an old man grows wings; a researcher is mysteriously stricken; skin wars change the global landscape with holographic facades cloaking landmarks; reality and virtual are in flux; a murder investigation is viewed from an unearthly lens; an island floats mid-air; and resurrections are possible. Binding the stories together is an intersect of arrival and departure--a quiet prairie town called Ezra."--

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.

"Struggling with mental illness and PTSD, ex-cop Sloane Donovan has been pursuing a life of quiet stability--until she finds a close friend murdered. Obsessive demons triggered, she teams up with Wayne Capson, a PI who plays on both sides of the law. The search to find the killer leads them from the city's wealthiest enclave to the darkest corners of street life and prostitution, ultimately connecting the case back to high-ranking members of the force she once served. Lightning-paced and unputdownable, To Those Who Killed Me is a debut thriller by J.T. Siemens that provides a heavy hit of hard-boiled suspense and introduces a new hero in crime fiction."--

Shortlisted for 2023 Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize and a Globe and Mail Best Book of 2022! Vancouver. A day like any other. Kyle, a successful cosmetic surgeon, is punishing himself with a sprint up a mountain. Charlotte, wife of a tech tycoon, is combing the farm belt for local cheese and a sense of purpose. Back in the city their families go about their business: landscaping, negotiating deals, skipping school. It's a day like any other--until suddenly it's not.When the earthquake hits, the city erupts in chaos and fear. Kyle's and Charlotte's families, along with two passersby, are thrown together in an oceanfront mansion. The conflicts that beset these wildly different people expose the fault lines beneath their relationships, as they question everything in an effort to survive and reunite with their loved ones stranded outside the city.Frances Peck's debut novel examines the unpredictable ways in which disaster can shake up lives and test personal resilience.

"COCONUT is an exploration of my place in the universe as told through stories of the author's experiences of racism, sexuality, empowerment, grief, and love. It tells girls like her that their origins live within themselves, and that their stories of the mundane and profound alike make up who they are. The book is written in an unrestricted confessional style, confronting notions of propriety and form, to touch on themes that matter to the author as a woman and second-generation immigrant in a capitalist, exploitative, and degrading world."--

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.

Ana and Win find themselves stuck, lifting the weight of their pasts, while frustrated by their present jobs: photographing vacant lots and decayed industrial sites, cataloguing the decline of capitalist excess to digitally scrub away humanity, making way for more gentrification.When the pair is sent by their employers to a rustic island in the Pacific Northwest--home to hippies, runaways, and survivalist preppers--they meet Lena, an oceanographer and climate scientist, who has moved to the island in search of "the big one," the cataclysmic earthquake and tsunami that she knows is the island and the West Coast's due; and Kitt, an athleisure clothing mogul, who is overseeing the construction of a vacation home that will serve as his apocalypse-shelter.These four people's lives intertwine as a police investigation throws life on the island into disarray, as activists and agents provocateurs take action, as dormant fault lines begin to tremble.Andy Zuliani's Last Tide is a vital debut novel is an edgy glimpse at a world just beyond tomorrow, and a sharp reminder of what society deems valuable.

Saved from certain death on the Whistler-Vancouver highway after his luxury car malfunctions, Mark Morata feels honour-bound to reward his rescuer, Geoff Pybus, with a token of his undying gratitude. Geoff, a frustratingly humble university professor, happy with his family's lot in life, only wants the impossible: for his modest, straightforward wife to get tenure at her university.Luckily, Mark is a man for whom impossible is just another word. As a sophisticated importer-exporter of certain recreational substances ("drug lord" is such a cliché), Mark gets to work on the academic world with the same relentless nature that helped him climb to the top of the cartel. However, the hallowed campus halls reveal an environment that is vicious and corrupt beyond anything he has ever encountered in the drug business...

Carol Harvey Steski's tenacious and unapologetic debut, rump + flank, explores the body in nature's many incarnations: human, animal, plant, microbe, even chemical. The result is a fantastical poetic work that sheds light on what bodies--especially female ones--endure, probing the full range of experiences from pleasure and hope to deep loss and trauma.These poems are piercingly humorous, sexy, and peppered with startling absurdities, but are grounded by an undercurrent of nostalgia (and a soupçon of feminist rage): mercury reproduces like funhouse mirrors, oysters are whole notes dropped into eternal song, cancer is a surly character taking and discarding lovers, a domestic chore turns dark as a mother channels her inner Lady Macbeth. Lush imagery melds with organic rhythms to spawn a visceral experience, a tendon-and-muscle-driven engine that readers can feel racing within their own bodies.

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.

Includes Author-Curated Discussion Questions!From small-town Alberta, Curtis comes to Edmonton to obtain a teaching degree. There he forms a close friendship with his elderly, blind Aunt Harriet, considered a family pariah due to her eccentric enthusiasm for a lost world of artists and musicians.When Curtis begins reading aloud to Harriet the diary her intended husband Phillip kept before his death during World War One, an obsessed Curtis examines parallels to his own life: his desire to become a skillful artist and to find fulfilling love.Timeless and essential, award-winning author Glen Huser's Burning the Night spans across generations and distance, traversing from Vancouver to Halifax, as it bears down on the history of Canadian painting and Curtis's awakening as a gay man.

"Lightning-struck and pregnant, Ruth feels her husband slipping away after they and unborn Gayle miraculously survive the bolt out of the blue. Nineteen years later and stuck on the farm her husband bought before abandoning the family, painting is the only activity invigorating Ruth as the days slowly pass. That is until without warning Gayle finds herself love-struck and runs off to Edmonton, where she contends with poverty, illness, her shattered childhood, and the longstanding mystery of her fathers disappearance. Meanwhile, farm-bound Ruth frantically paints through her increasing loneliness and disarray. In his stormy and evocative debut novel, Kevin Holowack introduces us to a family grappling with artistic ambition, mental illness, and rifts that may not be possible to mend."--

"In his first true crime memoir, undercover operator Norm Boucher recounts eight months spent infiltrating Vancouver's heroin scene, a world of paranoia, ripoffs, and violence. It is 1983 and the War on Drugs is intensifying. From his observer's seat in barrooms, Boucher candidly reveals the lives of heroin addicts who spend each day looking for their next hit. Their dangerous subculture, centred around three gritty hotels on the Granville Strip, becomes Boucher's domain as he attempts both to gain acceptance in a world far removed from his own and to keep himself safe. With Horseplay, decorated RCMP officer Norm Boucher takes readers back to the assignment that shaped his outlook on the role of criminal law enforcement and the human side of addiction as it collides with the ruthlessness of the drug business."--

"John O'Neill's gothic short stories, set in the Canadian Rockies, are haunted by the violence inherent in nature and humans. The mountains are majestic and impassive. The characters are surprising, bent, but also empathetic. Their survival is tenuous. A two-sister team of goth tour guides offers guided excursions up switchback mountain trails; a paroled convict thumbs his way into the life of a family driving west; and an animal pathologist, while performing a necropsy on a grizzly bear, has an unusual encounter with both technology and humanity. Goth Girls of Banff is a superb collection, sharply written, with plot turns as consequence-laden as those on an iced-over mountain road."--

"After barely surviving the events of The Killer Trail, Vancouver psychiatric social worker Chris Ryder once again finds himself at the centre of a high-profile murder case: Marvin Goodwin, a young man who falls on the extreme end of the autism spectrum, is found covered with blood at the suspected murder scene of a local businessman. When Chris Ryder is called in to find out what he can about the young man, he finds that the weight of blood might just be too much for him to bear."--Publisher.

Includes author-curated discussion questions!Mark Lisac's Image Decay returns to the pugnacious world of backroom politics laid out in his award-nominated Where the Bodies Lie. Set again in that "unnamed capital city east of the Rockies," where the Brutalist architecture of the downtown core reflects the body politic laid bare.When a cantankerous ex-government photographer seeks ownership of his prints, the powers-that-be are determined to prevent the release of certain sensitive photos. Set in the 1990s, this political thriller delves into questions of identity and memory, established power and its fears and secrets, old stock versus newcomers, belonging and alienation.Image Decay investigates the intricacies of political manipulation, personal anxieties, and how history must be seen to be confronted.

Laced with humour and revelation, Anne Wheelers 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.

"Former pro wrestler 'Hammerhead' Jed Ounstead, now a fully-fledged private investigator, is riding high after his first successful case. In this second episode, Jed leaves the wrestling realm to enter a new arena: women's flat-track roller derby. When old acquaintance Stormy Daze seeks his help finding her team's missing coach, Jed discovers that the turnbuckle-and-metal-chair mayhem of the wrestling ring pales in comparison to roller derby's four-wheeled ferocity. As his search intensifies, Jed is drawn into the criminal orbit of a shady entrepreneur who doubles as a late-night TV personality, a high-class bookmaker with a yen for racing dachshunds, and a kinky painter with a special technique for producing art. When the thunder rolls, Jed finds he needs more than a few of his beloved banana milkshakes to solve this case"--Provided by publisher.

"In this fantastic and fantastical debut, C.J. Lavigne concocts a wondrous realm overlaying a city that brims with civic workers and pigeons. Led by her synesthesia, Verity Richards discovers a hidden world inside an old Ottawa theatre. Within the timeworn walls live people who should not exist--people whose very survival is threatened by science, technology, and natural law. Verity must submerge herself in this impossible reality to help save the last traces of their broken community. Her guides: a magician, his shadow-dog, a dying angel, and a knife-edged woman who is more than half ghost. With great empathy and imagination, In Veritas explores the nature of truth and the complexities of human communication."--

"Bertrand Bickersteth's debut poetry collection explores what it means to be black and Albertan through a variety of prisms: historical, biographical, and essentially, geographical. The Response of Weeds offers a much-needed window on often overlooked contributions to the province's character and provides personal perspectives on the question of black identity on the prairies. Through these rousing and evocative poems, Bickersteth uses language to call up the contours of the land itself, land that is at once mesmerizing as it is dismissively effacing. Such is black identity here on this paradoxical land, too."--

Long-listed for the 2021 Raymond Souster Award!Finalist for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Poetry at the 2021 Alberta Book Publishing Awards!Meredith Quartermain's Lullabies in the Real World is a sequence of poems about a train journey from West Coast to East Coast that invokes a patchwork of regions, voices and histories. Her language zings with train rhythms as she unfolds a complex conversation with poets such as bpNichol and Robin Blaser.This collection reflects and refracts Canada from diverse angles, and challenges colonizing literatures such as the Odyssey and various canonical British and US voices. As it moves from west to east, the book journeys back in time to interrogate historical events such as the Battle of the Plains of Abraham and the exclusion of Acadians. It ends by imagining a time before or outside colonization.Rich, playful and confrontational, Lullabies in the Real World widens the poetic lens of poetry to investigate the place of a colonial nation in history, and the place of a poet vis-à-vis the voices of other poets.

Broke City, the final book in Wendy McGrath's Santa Rosa trilogy, follows young Christine as she edges into self-awareness in the now-vanished Edmonton neighbourhood of Santa Rosa.Budding with creativity that her working-class parents do not understand, Christine questions her parents' fraught relationship, with alcoholism and implicit violence bubbling just under the surface of their marriage. Her insight turns beyond her family to her neighbourhood, nicknamed Packingtown, a community built on meat-packing plants and abattoirs, on death.Written with tight lyricism, Broke City is a brimming working-class gothic novel that reveals Christine's deepening knowledge of the adult world around her and of her own complicated place in that world.