A practical guide to self-care and community care, written for helpers—the caregivers, activists, community leaders, mental health and medical professionals who are the first to help others, but the last to seek help themselves. As an activist, community organizer and social worker, Farzana Doctor has preached self-care to hundreds of people struggling with burnout and exhaustion. But for years she couldn’t manage to take her own advice. Many other helpers she knew were the same: they knew the signs of burnout, and they understood the science of self-care. Maybe they’d taken workshops on vicarious trauma; maybe they’d even taught them. But still they struggled to escape the cycle of overwork, overwhelm and recovery. 52 Weeks to a Sweeter Life is a workbook that speaks directly to these people—and anyone who struggles to pause, set boundaries and centre their own needs.. The workbook contains fifty-two lessons, one for each week of the year. Each week, readers will find a simple new idea and an experiment for trying it out, with deeper dives into the material provided, but every level of participation celebrated. Throughout, Doctor embraces both community care and self-care at the same time, showing readers the overlap between the two. Beautifully written, direct and insightful, this workbook is a gentle and practical guide to a more balanced life, written for those who need it most.

The colors of Hispaniola burst into life in this striking, evocative debut picture book that celebrates the joy of being Dominican. If Dominican were a color, it would be the sunset in the sky, blazing red and burning bright. If Dominican were a color, it’d be the roar of the ocean in the deep of the night, With the moon beaming down rays of sheer delight. The palette of the Dominican Republic is exuberant and unlimited. Maiz comes up amarillo, the blue-black of dreams washes over sandy shores, and people’s skin can be the shade of cinnamon in cocoa or of mahogany. This exuberantly colorful, softly rhyming picture book is a gentle reminder that a nation’s hues are as wide as nature itself.

Learn how to process your own grief--as well as family, community, and global grief--with this fierce and openhearted guide to healing in an unjust world. In unsettling and uncertain times, the individual and collective heartbreak that lives in our bodies and communities can feel insurmountable. Many of us have been conditioned by the dominant culture to not name, focus on, or wade through the difficulties of our lives. But in order to heal, we must make space for grief and prioritize our wholeness, our humanity, and our inherent divinity. In Finding Refuge, social justice activist, social worker, and yoga teacher Michelle Cassandra Johnson offers those who feel brokenhearted, helpless, confused, powerless, and desperate the tools they need to be present with their grief while also remaining openhearted. Through powerful personal narrative and meditation and journaling practices at the end of each chapter that explore being present with your heart, Michelle empowers us to see that each of us has a role to play in building enough momentum to take intentional action and shift what is unsettled and unjust in the world. Finding Refuge is an invitation to pick up the shattered parts of yourself and remember your strength, wholeness, and sacredness through this practice of presence and attending to your grief.

FINALIST FOR THE 2021 TRILLIUM AWARD • FINALIST FOR THE 2021 EVERGREEN AWARD • AN INDIGO BEST BOOK OF 2020 • A GLOBE AND MAIL BEST INDEPENDENT READ FOR FALL 2020 • AN APPLE BOOKS BEST BOOK OF 2020 • A CBC BOOKS BEST CANADIAN FICTION BOOK OF 2020 • A NOW MAGAZINE TOP TEN BOOK OF 2020 "Be prepared for this novel to stay with you for a long time, especially its ending."—GLOBE AND MAIL "[An] extraordinary book... packed with discovery and jarring emotional arcs."—TORONTO STAR "Penetrating and subtle ... [An] immersive, absorbing portrait."—EDEN ROBINSON "Explores with courage and storytelling finesse the harsh truths within the ideals of kinship and community." —DAVID CHARIANDY "An urgent and passionate read." —VIVEK SHRAYA "Visceral and emotional... a courageous feat."—QUILL & QUIRE (starred review) A brave, soulfully written feminist novel about inheritance and resistance that tests the balance between kinship and the fight against customs that harm us. When Sharifa accompanies her husband on a marriage-saving trip to India in 2016, she thinks that she’s going to research her great-great-grandfather, a wealthy business leader and philanthropist. What captures her imagination is not his rags-to-riches story, but the mystery of his four wives, missing from the family lore. She ends up excavating much more than she had imagined. Sharifa’s trip coincides with a time of unrest within her insular and conservative religious community, and there is no escaping its politics. A group of feminists is speaking out against khatna, an age-old ritual they insist is female genital cutting. Sharifa’s two favourite cousins are on opposite sides of the debate and she seeks a middle ground. As the issue heats up, Sharifa discovers an unexpected truth and is forced to take a position.

Winner of the 2012 LAMBDA Literary Award for Best Lesbian Fiction and of the 2011 Rainbow Awards Ismail Boxwala made the worst mistake of his life one summer morning twenty years ago: he forgot his baby daughter in the back seat of his car. After his daughter’s tragic death, he struggles to continue living. A divorce, years of heavy drinking, and sex with strangers only leave him more alone and isolated. But Ismail’s story begins to change after he reluctantly befriends two women: Fatima, a young queer activist kicked out of her parents’ home; and Celia, his grieving Portuguese-Canadian neighbour who lives just six metres away. A slow-simmering romance develops between Ismail and Celia. Meanwhile, dangers lead Fatima to his doorstep. Each makes complicated demands of him, ones he is uncertain he can meet.

Mark Zuehlke is an expert at narrating the history of life on the battlefield for the Canadian army during World War II. In Terrible Victory, he provides a soldiers-eye-view account of Canada's bloody liberation of western Holland. Readers are there as soldiers fight in the muddy quagmire, enduring a battle that lasted three weeks and in which 6,000 soldiers perished. Terrible Victory is a powerful story of courage, survival, and skill.

"Scouring the history of Native American boarding schools, nineteenth-century reformatories, and programs to Americanize immigrants, Glenn brilliantly reveals the role of coercion in caregiving. An important read for us all."---Arlie Hochschild, author of The Time Bind --

How have Black women elders managed stress? In Black Women's Yoga History, Stephanie Y. Evans uses primary sources to answer that question and to show how meditation and yoga from eras of enslavement, segregation, and migration to the Civil Rights, Black Power, and New Age movements have been in existence all along. Life writings by Harriet Jacobs, Sadie and Bessie Delany, Eartha Kitt, Rosa Parks, Jan Willis, and Tina Turner are only a few examples of personal case studies that are included here, illustrating how these women managed traumatic stress, anxiety, and depression. In more than fifty yoga memoirs, Black women discuss practices of reflection, exercise, movement, stretching, visualization, and chanting for self-care. By unveiling the depth of a struggle for wellness, memoirs offer lessons for those who also struggle to heal from personal, cultural, and structural violence. This intellectual history expands conceptions of yoga and defines inner peace as mental health, healing, and wellness that is both compassionate and political.

Winner of the Lieutenant-Governor's Medal for Historical Writing, the BC Book Prizes' Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize, the Bill Duthie Booksellers' Choice Award, and the Basil Stuart-Stubbs Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Book on British Columbia. Over 900 maps tell the story of the planners, schemers, gold seekers and fur traders who built Canada's westernmost province. When gold was discovered in quantity in 1858, leading to the gold rush that created British Columbia, the interior of the province was mostly unknown except for the routes blazed by fur traders. Thirteen years later, British Columbia became a province of Canada, and a transcontinental railway was built to connect the land west of the Rocky Mountains with the rest of the country. The efforts of these explorers, fur traders, gold seekers and railway builders involved the production of maps that showed what they had found and what they proposed to do -- the plans and the strategies that created the province we know today. Master map historian Derek Hayes continues his renowned Historical Atlas Series with a richly rewarding treasure trove, bringing to light the dramatic history of British Columbia. Ranging from maps by early Aboriginal inhabitants and by the Europeans who arrived to explore and exploit the province's vast resource wealth -- to the maps drawn by those who, decades later, prepared for war, built dams and tracked murders -- the over 900 maps in this collection, two-thirds of which are published for the first time, reveal the thoughts and plans of the dreamers, explorers and dynasty makers who built today's British Columbia. This is a history of both the dreams that came true and those that didn't -- yet all are part of the dramatic tale of the forging of Canada's western frontier.

First published in 1997, this hilarious book launched satirist Will Ferguson's career. Challenging the notion that Canadians are "nice," the book asks, "Do we as Canadians deserve a country so great?" Tackling subjects from Canada's favorite inbred royals to the mighty beaver as national icon, from sex in a canoe to all-Canadian "superhero" Captain Canuck, Ferguson rampages across the cultural landscape. The book also provides a fast-paced, opinionated overview of telling moments in Canadian history, including its run-amok Mounties and "fun-loving days" of the country's (unacknowledged) slave trade.