Essential Prose
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Count on Me
by Ann Cavlovic
Part of the Essential Prose series
Count on Me exposes how a family can fracture when aging parents grow frail and debts from the past resurface. Tia is raising a baby when her older brother Tristan gradually takes over their ailing parents' bank account, house, and medical decisions. Through a web of complex family dynamics, Tia uncovers the disaster left by Tristan's meddling in their parents' lives. As Tia tries to set things straight, she confronts how money and love were entangled in her family, and whether her own mothering now goes to opposite extremes. Told in an intelligent and hopeful voice, this is a story about sibling rivalry, elder abuse, how life can become transactional, and how we come to feel entitled to someone else's money.
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Against the Machine
Evolution
by Brian Norman
Part of the Essential Prose series
Earth, 2212: The novel, third in the Against The Machine trilogy, yet free standing on its own, tells of a dystopian society in the midst of catastrophic climate change. Billions have died. The minority of people remaining inhabit the MEGs, former cities transformed by technology into huge protective domes; outside is the MASS living by subsistence. All seems well for those in the CORPORATE. It is not. With worsening climate, the MASS increasingly restive and their AI Silicons becoming sentient, those at the top have concocted a final solution: to leave Earth for Alpha Centauri, destroying the planet in their wake. Four protagonists, each from separate segments of this world, come together to attempt to prevent the plan. By the end they have managed to alter the human/machine interface, so changing human evolution.
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Catinat Boulevard
by Caroline Vu
Part of the Essential Prose series
Beginning in Saigon during the Vietnam War and ending in present day New York, Catinat Boulevard tells the story of two friends Mai and Mai Ly. While Mai flirts with American GIs in rowdy bars along Catinat Boulevard, Mai Ly joins the communist resistance in the jungle. The story also follows Nat, Mai's half Vietnamese-half African-American son abandoned in a Saigon orphanage.
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Allegiance
by Michael Springate
Part of the Essential Prose series
Victor makes an ethical commitment. The reverberations of that choice surface in Canada, Egypt and Greece. Moving from a lecture hall in Montreal to a detention centre in Alexandria, from a descent into the catacombs of Kom el-Shoqafa to a vista high over the ports of Piraeus, from tequila blurred moments of ecstatic dance to the rigours of contemporary musical composition, an overlapping narrative emerges to question current allegiances and the history of rational law.
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Winners and Losers
Tales Of Life, Law, Love And Loss
by Darlene Madott
Part of the Essential Prose series
Winners And Losers: Tales of Life, Law, Love and Loss is a collection of linked short stories that turns a dazzling searchlight on the inner workings of the legal profession, told from the viewpoint of a feisty narrator finding her way through a hostile and competitive law environment. By the end, the reader will have undergone a sprawling journey through a lifetime in practice, where the pit-bull litigator is tenderized through the clients, the work, the failure of her own marriage, by single mothering. Because the protagonist doesn't judge, because she lays out the evidence in her search for the truth in a circling, coyote-like fashion, the reader lives that tracking inquiry along with her.
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Magnetic Dogs
by Bruce Meyer
Part of the Essential Prose series
Magnetic Dogs is a collection of short stories that examines how displaced individuals – those who have been snatched out of their time and place – struggle to adapt and reinvent themselves in an entirely new context or re-establish themselves in their former situations. In stories that are factual fiction, Meyer examines the composition of Gabriel Fauré's haunting "Cantique de Jean Racine," the 1960s 'scoop' of Indigenous children from Manitoulin Island, the missing diaries of Lewis Carroll that save that author from the charges of child molestation that ruined his career as an academic, the true story of a shade of red and Seventh Century Chinese exploration of the North Atlantic, and the origins and ramifications of a haunting Aztec form of music, borrowed by J.S. Bach, the 'chaconne.' In these stories Meyer constantly questions the ways our perceptions of the past might have been different had small events transpired to make them so.
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Cut Road
by Brent van Staalduinen
Part of the Essential Prose series
A rich mix of acclaimed and award-winning stories.
Containing a rich mix of acclaimed and award-winning stories, Cut Road is a masterful exploration of the loss and scars that conflict always leaves behind. Where soldiers abandon too much of themselves in war zones, parents relinquish control of their children, and friends struggle with change and tragedy. From the working soul struggling with grief to the wounded veteran seeking redemption in a coffee shop to the sweaty tree-planter fleeing a burning forest, in this collection no one-least of all the reader-is left unscathed.
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The Boy's Marble
by Nataša Nuhanovic
Part of the Essential Prose series
The Boy's Marble tells the story of experiencing a war through the eyes of a child. Separated as children during the Sarajevo Siege, the narrator meeets someone who reminds her of the boy even twenty years later in Montreal, Canada. They were supposed to run away together, only he never came. She has not seen him since and wonders whether this person she met could really be him. Amongst the many books that can be classified as war-fiction, this novel is different as it looks at this difficult tragedy through the eyes of a child in a, one could say, healthy way. The narrator does not sweep the painful and tragic memories under the rug, but she also does not place them onto her primary radar. The story unfolds in a way that does not burden the reader even more, but wakes in him hope, love and helps understand just how useless, meaningless and absurd war is. The story helps the reader find the strength and meaning to live without hate and recover a lost innocence. In essence, the novel is a brilliant anti-war story, very timely and necessary exactly now.
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Darkness at the Edge of Town
by Stan Rogal
Part of the Essential Prose series
A ghostly tale of family ties and madness.
A young man, Ray, returns to where he was born, Weyburn, SK, after several years traveling anonymously around the country. He's recently been suffering from frightening nightmares and he feels they may have something to do with his past, especially within the walls of the abandoned former mental asylum where his father had worked and his mother had been a patient. Old loves, old wounds and old grievances are rekindled, made especially difficult by the fact that his brother is the town sheriff and is also married to Ray's former girlfriend. The presence of an older, mute, indigenous woman adds to the mystery
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Momma's Got the Blues
by David Sherman
Part of the Essential Prose series
Celebrating the joys of pop music and the musicians who live to play it; while taking an insider's look at what the digital age has done to the artist, the business and the sound.
The golden days of MaryAnne's singing career, of sold-out concert halls and hit records have given way to shabby rooms and paltry CD sales, battered by YouTube and streaming. But, MaryAnne, nearing 60, refuses to retire. When her party-animal single daughter becomes pregnant, MaryAnne rebels against becoming a grandmother and putting her dwindling career aside to help her daughter raise an infant. It's left to her live-in lover to try and sew the family back together while MaryAnne clutches her six-string for dear life.
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Catch and Release
by Liana Cusmano
Part of the Essential Prose series
About coming out and coming of age.
In Catch and Release, twenty-one-year-old Lucca looks back on her childhood and adolescence as she comes to terms with both her sexual orientation and her mental illness. When she falls in love with the brilliant and beautiful Adèle, Lucca is forced to acknowledge not only that she is not and never has been straight, but also that her relationship with a teacher in high school was not as harmless as she might have thought.
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Call Me Stan
A Tragedy In Three Millennia
by K. R. Wilson
Part of the Essential Prose series
When King Priam's pregnant daughter was fleeing the sack of Troy, Stan was there. When Jesus of Nazareth was beaten and crucified, Stan was there - one cross over. Stan has been a Hittite warrior, a Roman legionnaire, a mercenary for the caravans of the Silk Road and a Great War German grunt. He's been a toymaker in a time of plague, a reluctant rebel in the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, and an information peddler in the cabarets of post-war Berlin. Stan doesn't die, and he doesn't know why. And now he's being investigated for a horrific crime. As Stan tells his story, from his origins as an Anatolian sheep farmer to his custody in a Toronto police interview room, he brings a wry, anachronistic perspective to three thousand years of Eurasian history. Call Me Stan is the story of a man endlessly struggling to adjust as the world keeps changing around him. It is a Biblical epic from the bleachers, a gender fluid operatic love quadrangle, and a touching exploration of what it is to outlive everyone you love. Or almost everyone.
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Call Me Stan
A Tragedy In Three Millennia
by K. R. Wilson
Part of the Essential Prose series
When King Priam's pregnant daughter was fleeing the sack of Troy, Stan was there. When Jesus of Nazareth was beaten and crucified, Stan was there - one cross over. Stan has been a Hittite warrior, a Roman legionnaire, a mercenary for the caravans of the Silk Road and a Great War German grunt. He's been a toymaker in a time of plague, a reluctant rebel in the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, and an information peddler in the cabarets of post-war Berlin. Stan doesn't die, and he doesn't know why. And now he's being investigated for a horrific crime. As Stan tells his story, from his origins as an Anatolian sheep farmer to his custody in a Toronto police interview room, he brings a wry, anachronistic perspective to three thousand years of Eurasian history. Call Me Stan is the story of a man endlessly struggling to adjust as the world keeps changing around him. It is a Biblical epic from the bleachers, a gender fluid operatic love quadrangle, and a touching exploration of what it is to outlive everyone you love. Or almost everyone.
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Raccoon
A Wondertale
by Sean Kane
Part of the Essential Prose series
The dream of an urban paradise comes true for the Raccoons of a small suburban city when they rise up, throw out their government, and create an ecological commonwealth. Touchwit, Clutch and Bandit are prepared to die for a free, healthy, and diverse city. But to earn their self-respect as citizens they must overcome their father Meatbreath, an autocrat obsessed with multiplying himself in a host of weaponised children. And to join a community of kinship they must find their future mates. Will the three cubs use the powers they have inherited from their father without being claimed by his evil? In this sometimes sentimental, sometimes heroic adventure story full of echoes of current issues and political personalities, Raccoons are the leading experts at survival, engaging the struggle for a better Earth with wonder, joy, and laughter.
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The Donkey Cutter
by Gregory Koop
Part of the Essential Prose series
Years after the death of her mother, Mareika Doerksen moves through her adolescence with feelings of loss, confusion, and isolation as she seems somewhere between not being a child and not being a complete woman. Her father, a Mennonite only ethnically and socially, and a long-time atheist, has always been distant but pragmatic as he prepared her for the day he expects her to abandon their homestead on the Canadian Prairies for an education once impossible for women of their time. They move day to day avoiding the tragedies, traumas, and social expectations they rebel against in their Mennonite community during the infancy of Canada. But with the looming arrival of the 1910 Halley's Comet, so too comes a handsome, charismatic Doomsday preacher. He captivates Mareika as he offers her solace and his ear. Meanwhile the local Bishop with a troubling and violent past sewn to the Doerksens, too, becomes obsessed with the maturing Mareika and sets out with the goal of saving her from the chiliast stranger and her atheist father.
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The Family Code
by Wayne Ng
Part of the Essential Prose series
Every family has rituals and routines holding them together. But sometimes they are the very things that tear them apart. The Family Code is a gritty family drama featuring the troubled life of Hannah Belenko, a young single mother dogged by the brutality of past traumas and a code of silence that she must crack in order to be free-or else lose everything.
Hannah was raised by this code and rules her own family by it. When she loses her daughter to the state and her boyfriend threatens her, she flees from Ottawa to Halifax with her remaining son, six-year-old Axel. While she bulldozes her way through everything and schemes to protect him, Axel flounders in the chaos. He begins to doubt his mother and her dream of a way out. With her life crashing down, Hannah is driven by desperation to survive yet hangs on to elusive hope.
With unvarnished and high-voltage prose, The Family Code unabashedly reveals the power and perils of parenting, but also the longing and vulnerability of children.
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The B-Side of Daniel Garneau
by David Kingston Yeh
Part of the Essential Prose series
The B-Side of Daniel Garneau concludes a rollicking three-book series set in Toronto featuring the misadventures of boyfriends Daniel and David, their eccentric family and friends. As Daniel prepares to graduate from med school and propose marriage, David sets out to donate his sperm so his brother can have a baby. But as his celebrity ex, Marcus, launches his boldest exhibit yet, an unexpected crisis forces Daniel to re-evaluate his priorities in life.
The B-Side of Daniel Garneau is the inspirational follow-up to A Boy at the Edge of the World (2018) and Tales from the Bottom of My Sole (2020). At turns both comic and tragic, it is a celebration of queer identities and non-traditional families, as Daniel struggles to discover himself and his path in the world. At its heart, it is a philosophical reflection on acceptance and living with courage and love.
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Bernini's Elephant
by Jane Callen
Part of the Essential Prose series
Albert Einstein noted that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only changed from one form to another. Kat, a middle-aged marketing executive from Vancouver, ponders the truth behind Einstein's law as she tours the antiquities of Italy. In Pompeii, volcanic ash remains in the shape of a woman bear witness to her futile escape of the rage of Mount Vesuvius. Kat, a widow with blood on her hands, contemplates the ancient woman's destiny and her own. To escape the consequences of past choices, Kat abandons her travel companion and sometime accomplice. She links up instead with Franco, a street artist painting in the Roman twilight near Bernini's sculpture of an elephant. Becoming Franco's patron is the easy part. Kat learns that Einstein's theory holds in everyday life. She cannot escape past decisions. Murder undetected remains murder after all.
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A Good Name
by Yejide Kilanko
Part of the Essential Prose series
Twelve years in America and Eziafa Okereke has nothing to show for it. Desperate to re-write his story, Eziafa returns to Nigeria to find a woman he can mold to his taste. Eighteen-year-old Zina has big dreams. An arranged marriage to a much older man isn't one of them. Trapped by family expectations, Zina marries Eziafa, moves to Houston, and trains as a nurse. Buffeted by a series of disillusions, the couple stagger through a turbulent marriage until Zina decides to change the rules of engagement.
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Against the Machine
Manifesto
by Brian Van Norman
Part of the Essential Prose series
Mel Buckworth, dependable family man, loses his manufacturing job through recession. Having lost his sense of purpose his pride sidelines him as he discerns his lack of digital skills so apparent in his children's generation. He is galled by his daughter Dani's university friend, Stanley Best, who is about to achieve fame in the fields of nano technology and artificial intelligence. As Mel desperately attempts to find equilibrium he estranges his family, leaves his wife and enlists the help of a greedy grad student. Will Baker teaches Mel the skills he will need to wreak revenge on a system seemingly discarding him. As his aptitudes grow he begins to use the internet, the very thing he despised, as a weapon to inflict his reprisals. Slowly he turns terrorist to deliver his message: that humans will succumb to machines and the social system controlling them. As his acts grow more lethal, Mel knows he must make an indelible declaration. A "manifesto" to be remembered.
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Against the Machine
Manifesto
by Brian Van Norman
Part of the Essential Prose series
Mel Buckworth, dependable family man, loses his manufacturing job through recession. Having lost his sense of purpose his pride sidelines him as he discerns his lack of digital skills so apparent in his children's generation. He is galled by his daughter Dani's university friend, Stanley Best, who is about to achieve fame in the fields of nano technology and artificial intelligence. As Mel desperately attempts to find equilibrium he estranges his family, leaves his wife and enlists the help of a greedy grad student. Will Baker teaches Mel the skills he will need to wreak revenge on a system seemingly discarding him. As his aptitudes grow he begins to use the internet, the very thing he despised, as a weapon to inflict his reprisals. Slowly he turns terrorist to deliver his message: that humans will succumb to machines and the social system controlling them. As his acts grow more lethal, Mel knows he must make an indelible declaration. A "manifesto" to be remembered.
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Unca Dave's Wilderness
by David Sapin
Part of the Essential Prose series
Adversity is a sweet gift wrapped in soiled newsprint. Pain is a reminder that we are still alive. Anxiety is fear of tomorrow, and guilt is fear of yesterday. At the bottom end, it's about scrutinizing the tiny stuff that nobody cares about. Rocks, dead leaves, dirt, lint, dust, bugs, mice, and pocket change. At the top end, it's about the miracle of life itself, of being alive and being surrounded by amazing, surprising, astounding living things. Both ends get seriously taken for granted. We live our lives in the safe middle ground, midway between the micro and the macro. Unca Dave's Wilderness let's us take a moment to ponder on how ducks learn how to count, or why trees talk to each other, or how a repulsive worm can become a butterfly. And how we, lowly humans, can also metamorphize.
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I'll Be
by Claudio Gaudio
Part of the Essential Prose series
At the heart of I'll Be resides a highly unreliable narrator. As he fumbles through his days, he breaks boundaries that are larger than the seemingly insignificant tasks at hand: the concept of space is uncertain, language is broken, history is rewritten, identity itself remains a question. The futility of language is a theme that surfaces continually. In a commentary on the nature of political systems, for example, the narrator points out its inadequacy in facilitating truthful communication: "To be fair, this country is safe, no one I know has fallen from a sniper's rifle, and not since 1970 have tanks roamed the streets. But that was in another province, another language, so it may not have happened." Between sentences strife with comma splices, existentialist questions, and other deconstructionist strategies, the novel is peppered with poetic metaphor and laugh-out-loud humor that is sometimes dark, and always searching. By working to unravel every strand of our understanding of the external world, the novel, in turn, reveals the frailty of our thought process, inner constitution, and essentially our humanity.
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Ukrainian Portraits
Diaries From The Border
by Marina Sonkina
Part of the Essential Prose series
At the outbreak of the war in Ukraine in February 2022, Canadian author Marina Sonkina flew to the Ukrainian-Polish border to volunteer in a refugee camp using her knowledge of Russian and some Ukrainian. The suffering on a massive scale was beyond what she could possibly expect. "Putin's destruction of Ukraine left me with dismay and utter helplessness. The world order as we knew it, after WWII, was unraveling in Europe in front of my eyes, and I could do nothing about it. Evil always shouts loud; goodness is quiet. But when I came as a volunteer to a transition refugees centre at the Polish-Ukrainian border, I saw an outpour of good will on an unprecedented scale. This book is a celebration of magnanimity that lives in the heart of each of us and comes forth when called upon. It is also a homage to the millions of destitute Ukrainian women, faced with the daunting task of rebuilding their lives and the lives of their children with patient courage, moral grace, and faith in the ultimate victory of goodness over evil."
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Statue
by Marianne Micros
Part of the Essential Prose series
The devil, a ghost, a doppelganger, a selkie, a hobgoblin – these creatures appear in Marianne Micros's Statue, a collection of tales which combine traditional and ancient elements with contemporary issues and experiences. These fifteen stories show that the boundaries between fantasy and reality, art and life, life and death are fragile and inconstant. Micros seamlessly combines magic with the realities of daily life, showing the interrelationship of the natural and the supernatural and the significance of those interactions.
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Things That Cause Inappropriate Happiness
by Danila Botha
Part of the Essential Prose series
Things that Cause Inappropriate Happiness is Danila Botha's third collection of short fiction. In these brilliant stories she observes with her signature vulnerability and humour what it's like to struggle to find your place in the world. From the bullied twelve-year-old (Born, Not Made) to the musician saved from sleeping in doorways (Blasting Molly Rockets), to the sculptor who builds a golem and fulfills her Holocaust survivor grandmother's wish to protect her sister (Able to Pass) to a student who overdoses on opiates and meets an adult Anne Frank (Like An Alligator Eyeing a Small Fish), these stories pulse with Botha's signature empathy and originality. Botha also addresses what it means to be Jewish, with characters who rethink their whole identity (Soulmates) to those who hold on at all costs (Dark and Lilac Fairies). As in her previous collection, the Trillium and Vine nominated For All the Men (and Some of the Women) I've Known, Things that Cause Inappropriate Happiness will make you laugh and cry, but above all it will make you feel less alone.
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In Sickness and in Health / Yom Kippur in a Gym
by Nora Gold
Part of the Essential Prose series
This flip book is comprised of two novellas:
In Sickness and In Health - Lily had epilepsy as a child, so her most cherished goal has always been to be "normal". By age 45 she has a "normal" life, including a family, friends, and an artistic career, and no one, not even her husband, knows the truth about her past. But now some cartoons she drew threaten to reveal her childhood secret and destroy her marriage and everything she has worked so hard for. A moving novella about shame, secrets, disabilities, and the limits and power of love.
Yom Kippur in a Gym – Five strangers at a Yom Kippur service in a gym are struggling with personal crises. Lucy can't accept her husband's Parkinson's diagnosis. Ira, rejected by his lover, is planning suicide. Rachel worries about losing her job. Ezra is tormented by a mistake that ruined his career. Tom contemplates severing contact with his sisters. Then a medical emergency unexpectedly throws these five strangers together, and in one hour all their lives are changed in ways they would never have believed possible.
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Love and Rain
by Carmela Circelli
Part of the Essential Prose series
Love and Rain is a novel whichexplores the nature of love, its pain, and the near impossibility of its enduring happiness. Moving back in space and time from Rome to Montreal in the sixties and seventies, it also traces the individual rebellion and social revolution that marked the FLQ movement in Quebec and the Red Brigades in Italy in the late 1970s. The power of love, music and politics intertwine in a tale that the spells the mysterious alchemy of fate and chance.
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Muskoka
by Julian Samuel
Part of the Essential Prose series
A young man down on his luck meets the woman of his dreams in an adult education course. But this is no ordinary male fantasy: the man is a Pakistani-Canadian artist with a treatable recurrent cancer; the young lady is an Indigenous princess just returned from art school in Europe to her father's glass summer palace in Muskoka. This romantic comedy, set in mid-Toronto and on Lake Rosseau, plays with the intersection of Indigenous, settler, and immigrant success stories against the background of mortality and the stars.
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Letters From Johnny
by Wayne Ng
Part of the Essential Prose series
Winner of BEST CRIME NOVELLA at The Crime Writers of Canada Awards of Excellence 2022
Set in Toronto 1970, just as the FLQ crisis emerges to shake an innocent country, eleven year old Johnny Wong uncovers an underbelly to his tight, downtown neighbourhood. He shares a room with his Chinese immigrant mother in an enclave with American draft dodgers and new Canadians. He is befriended by Rollie, one of the draft dodgers who takes on a fatherly and writing mentor role. Johnny's mother is threatened by the "children's warfare society." A neighbour is found murdered. He suspects the feline loving Catwoman next door and tries to break into her house. Ultimately he is betrayed but he must act to save his family. He discovers a distant kinship with Jean, the son of one of the hostages kidnapped by the FLQ who have sent Canada into a crisis. As his world spins out of control, his only solace are letters to Dave Keon, who "as Captain of the Toronto Maple Leafs, can be trusted."
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Easily Fooled
by H. Nigel Thomas
Part of the Essential Prose series
Less than an hour after Millington receives his permanent resident visa, he wonders if his husband Jay would now end their marriage. And Jay has multiple reasons to. Millington is an ex-Methodist minister, who once believed he could be celibate. When he fled Caribbean Methodism and came to Montreal, he thought he'd resolved the issues that made him leave, but he comes to understand that psychological trauma, childhood conditioning, parental and community expectations and his own need for community and family valorization are not easily exorcised. The third installment in the No Safeguards quartet of novels.
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Walking Leonard
And Other Stories
by Sophie Stocking
Part of the Essential Prose series
Walking Leonard and Other Stories, is a short story collection of roughly 30,000 words in the literary fiction genre. The stories depict unspoken pivot points in the lives of ordinary people. Themes include responsibility and violation between parent and child, nature as a protective force, and the shucking off of various selves in the process of a lifetime. The stories spring from the foothills of southern Alberta, specifically Calgary, and some even more specifically from the historic neighborhood of Bowness, once a small town in its own right.
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Kaidenberg's Best Sons
A Novel In Stories
by Jason Heit
Part of the Essential Prose series
Kaidenberg's Best Sons is an enthralling portrait of a community starting over in a new land. In a series of linked stories, author Jason Heit explores the lives and fortunes of people bound together by tradition, heritage, and history, yet riven by envy, greed, and lust. When a community of Eastern European settlers in North Dakota learn that there is promising farmland available in the newly established province of Saskatchewan, they load their wagons and head north. Along with their furnishings, they also pack up their resentments, desires, and ambitions and bring them to a new, unsettled land. Heit deftly captures both the promise of a new start in a new land and the long shadow of the past that is cast over the characters as they rebuild their lives.
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