Stalking Geraldine

Ray Wood

 

446 Pages, Illustrated Trade Paperback, 6"x9" (Cover artwork by Martin Squires)

ISBN: 978-0-9952778-0-9

$24.95

 

A valuable Land Rover disappears - and with it, Sarah Oakes - the enigmatic woman behind the wheel. Freelance journalist Giles Jackson is given the assignment of a lifetime: find the 42-year old Land Rover named Geraldine and purchase the vehicle in time for an exhibit at the Detroit Motor Show.

Tracking down Geraldine proves difficult. After seeking out and speaking with Sarah’s friends and former colleagues in England, Giles pieces together tantalizing facts not only about the Land Rover, but also the adventurous woman doing the driving. The more he learns, the more he wants to know about Sarah’s motivation, her destination, her current whereabouts, and why he’s not the only one trying to find her. He follows Sarah’s route down Africa, mindful of his mission, but increasingly intrigued by this mysterious woman, the reasons why she has chosen to disappear and why she may be at risk.

Geraldine changes hands but a condition of the purchase is that Giles throw in an elephant...

 

 

Gold Mad

Michael Maser

 

296 Pages, Trade Paperback, 6"x9"

ISBN: 978-0-9868776-5-0

$24.95

 

Gold Mad is a new novel from educator, journalist and former prospector Michael Maser. Set in the late 1800s, Gold Mad accurately retells the story of the discovery of gold in the Klondike, an event triggering the largest gold rush in history. The story shifts to San Francisco and then back to the BC coast for a cliffhanging conclusion. In this story, a first novel from Maser, he draws not only on some of his own experiences prospecting for gold in the Yukon, British Columbia and California, but also his encounters with some of the world’s most notorious gold-obsessing pariahs.

In the words of award-winning author, Gary Geddes (Sailing Home, Swimming Ginger), “Gold Mad is a parable for our times,” and to author Ron Smith (What Men Know About Women) “a damn good yarn.”

On Love and War

Avivi Y. Yavin

 

162 Pages, Trade Paperback, 6"x9"

ISBN: 978-0-9812476-9-4

$19.95

 

In the 1940s, Ehud, an idealistic young man from Eretz Yisrael (Palestine) naively believes in the infallibility of his political ideals. He joins the Palmach (Jewish military force in Palestine), eventually forming a collective rural community – a kibbutz. But then Ehud becomes skeptical. His doubts make him leave the Palmach. He enters Hebrew University in Jerusalem intending to study philosophy. In November 1947, a war between the Jews and the Arabs breaks out. Ehud realizes that the weak Jewish community in Jerusalem can be slaughtered. Reluctantly, he joins the Jewish defenders of the city.

The book tells the story of this idealistic young man, of his struggles in search of the truth, his actual fighting in the battle for Jerusalem, and his grappling with adolescent love.

Unknown Soldier

George Payerle

 

264 Pages, Trade Paperback, 6"x9"

ISBN: 978-0-9812476-8-7

$19.95

 

“Unknown Soldier addresses a subject far too many of us have forgotten: what becomes of the men who fought our wars when the wars are over? The Unknown Soldier here is Sam Collister, and George Payerle deserves a standing ovation for having made him thoroughly unforgettable."

Timothy Findley

 

“Unknown Soldier reads as if Payerle has laid end to end the essences of all Remembrance Days since the Second World War, so that those who weren’t there might understand what it’s like for those of us who went to carry with us the weight of the dead, as well as the anger and sorrow and guilt of having arrived at the war’s end and found ourselves alive. Payerle’s Sam Collister is a fine protagonist and a great character. What he is about is unique in our literature.”

Robert Harlow, D.F.C

The Old Man and His Intelligent Animals

Avivi Y. Yavin

 

104 Pages, Trade Paperback, full colour, 8.5"x11"

ISBN: 978-0-9812476-6-3

$29.50

 

This is a story about three animals with human-like intelligence: a deer, a bear and an eagle, and about a mysterious, wise old man who befriended them. Together with a group of teenagers, carefully selected for their sensitivity to animals, we journey to a mountaintop above the clouds. There, over the course of several days, we are immersed in the old man’s magical stories about the animal kingdom and about his incredible journey to build deep bonds with his three intelligent animals.

Along with the children in the story, we are drawn into a world where the boundaries separating man and animal fade.

Runic Alphabet and Other Stories

Marina Sonkina

 

176 Pages, Trade Paperback, 6"x9"

ISBN: 978-0-9812476-0-1

$19.95

 

These four stories display a masterly range of emotional tones, from ice-hard brilliance to mordant wit to sheer lyricism. Marina Sonkina's characters rise from the page to become people we know and understand, although they live at widely distant points of the compass, spiritual and geographical. It's clear that she loves them all, with a passion that forgives their weaknesses.

In the title story a painter plants a tree that, as it grows, awakens memories of a lost love . In “Christmas Tango” a chance encounter with a drunk in a Montreal bar sparks a new meaning in a man’s life. “Carmelita” takes us to a small Mexican town where a Canadian expatriate becomes a victim of his newly acquired wealth. The tragic lives of a family during the Stalin era in the Soviet Union are followed through the story of a suitcase in “Bird’s Milk”.

 

 

Tractorina's Travels and Other Stories

Marina Sonkina

 

206 Pages, Trade Paperback, 6"x9"

ISBN: 978-0-9812476-1-8

$19.95

 

Marina Sonkina's stories give us unexpected characters in surreal situations presented with unflinching verisimilitude in prose that is at once forceful, lyrical and filled with  skepticism. We follow an old woman through the Gorbachev days of perestroika in Moscow into a rose-tinted abyss. A philandering Parisian American linguist married to a Belgian tapestry weaver conducts an affair on the Pacific Coast of America and discovers that the only human being he can love is a blind boy. A Californian flower-child swings her mini-skirted hips through an island ashram in the Bahamas – because she can, to demonstrate the healing power of (free) love, and without the slightest idea of the upheaval she causes. In Stalinist Moscow, a woman gives birth in a hospital Franz Kafka and George Orwell would both sadly recognize as all too real.

 

The Silver Cord

Oswald De Vere

 

42 Pages, Trade Paperback, 6"x9"

$19.95

 

 The title, and the title poem, were inspired by the passage from Book of Ecclesiastes:

 

"Before the silver cord is severed, or the golden bowl is cracked, or the pitcher shattered at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the well: the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it. Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, all is vanity!”

 

In De Vere poem, it is the silver cord that had tied us all to life on earth at one time, the silver cord we rejected in exchange for the "self assigned" role of the apex of creation.  Only too late did we realize that there is no going back in time once the link was severed. The prose style of  the poems, especially in “The Children of the Grave” bears some similarity to Thomas De Quincey's Suspiria de Prfundis. And like De Quincey, De Vere’s writing is more spiritual than religious. De Vere’s God,  is not the Judeo-Christian God, but rather the all permeating spirit of the Universe. Thus, despite the lost connection, the silver cord might still be  within our reach.

 

In Flagrante

Bartosz Mieczysławski

 

48 Pages, Trade Paperback, 6"x9"

$19.95

 

Bartosz Mieczysławski, a Polish-Canadian poet, chooses an unusual subject matter for his first  collection of poetry.  His characters are books, burned or banned during the centuries and across continents. They range from Ovid’s Art of Love to Boccaccio’s Decameron to Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass to Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. In the poet’s imagination, books become people with their distinct lives and destinies.   With an inimitable sense of humour, Mieczysławski catalogues the imagined ‘faults’ of these people as they get into the hands of their owners. One of the most powerful poems in the collection is dedicated to books in Yiddish, exterminated together with Jewish culture of Poland , during the German occupation.

Bartosz  Mieczysławski, born in Poland , witnessed the ideological persecution of art first-hand.  It is these impressions of his adolescence cast into a perfect poetic form that inspired In Flagrante.

 

Comrade Stalin's Baby Tooth

Marina Sonkina

 

74 Pages, Hardcover, full colour, 8.5"x11"

ISBN: 978-0-9868776-2-9

$34.95

 

In the village of Merry Limp, Aunt Zina runs a butcher shop. On Sinew Monday, only sinews are sold. On Bone Tuesday, the populace can buy bones; and so on for the rest of the week. Thus Marina Sonkina lays the groundwork for a surreal satire on Stalin’s USSR. Seen through the eyes of the eleven year old Natasha, the story unfolds in a mad procession of events, incongruous characters, party meetings and slogans. We encounter railway workers, officials and party leaders all the way to characters like Beria and Stalin himself. Audaciously using grotesque as her method of description, Sonkina resurrects the fears, the cruelty and the absurdity of people’s lives under Stalin. As all good satire, “Comrade Stalin’s Baby Tooth” puts a reflective mirror to the past, warning us about the future. The book, illustrated with colour propaganda posters of the period, is presented in the manner of an official document from the KGB files.