One afternoon, in an old house in an abandoned village on the outskirts of Perimeter, in the place they call Pacifica, Bramah and the beggar boy find fragments of an ancient text in an oak box. Hunched over scraps of parchment and broken computer disks, they blow the dust off a cover, and so our story begins. Steeped in the tradition of fairy tales, The Heart of This Journey Bears All Patterns (THOT J BAP) features a world in which a small band of resisters and survivors meet heartbreak and destruction with rhymes and resourceful skills such as soap and glass making, and a belief in the supernatural. Many things happen—some good, but most bad—including five eco-catastrophes and a viral bio-contagion. Shapeshifting in and out of it all is the nimble Bramah, a female locksmith, part human, part goddess—brown, brave and beautiful. Ten years in the making and described as “truly ambitious” by Stephen Collis, this work by award-winning poet Renée Sarojini Saklikar spans continents and centuries. Bramah and the Beggar Boy is the first instalment of the multi-part series.

“Deep in the thickest part of a cedar forest there lived a young Sasquatch. He was over nine feet tall and his feet were about size twenty. He had long brown hair that covered all of his body. His hands were so big and his arms so long he could wrap them around the biggest of the cedar trees. He had been born here many years ago and he did not know his parents, as they had been scared away by a great fire. He was left on his own and he had survived by eating berries and he had grown into the Sasquatch he now was...” So begins this charming story for children by Kwantlen storyteller Joseph Dandurand. The Sasquatch, spirit of the great cedar forest, eludes human hunters, falls in love, fathers a lovely daughter and saves his little family from a forest fire by dousing the flames with water stored in baskets carefully woven by his mate. The story is told with grace and simplicity by a master storyteller in the great tradition of the Kwantlen people. Accompanied by whimsical illustrations from Kwakwaka’wakw artist Simon Daniel James, The Sasquatch, the Fire and the Cedar Baskets follows a similar style to popular Nightwood titles such as Salmon Boy, Mayuk the Grizzly Bear and How the Robin Got Its Red Breast.

A captivating new thriller in the Wakeland detective series that explores the depths of Vancouver’s criminal underworld. Caught between the grimy and glittering sides of Vancouver’s streets, private investigator Dave Wakeland tries to keep his head down at the elite security firm he owns with partner Jeff Chen. But when masked men and women storm an ordinary-looking office building in Chinatown, leaving a trail of carnage, Wakeland finds himself caught up in a mystery that won’t let him go, as hard as he tries to elude it. The police have a vested interest in finding the shooters, and so does the leader of the Exiles motorcycle gang. Both want Wakeland’s help. The deeper he investigates, the more connections he uncovers: to a reclusive millionaire with ties to organized crime, an international security company with a sinister reputation, and a high-ranking police officer who seems to have a personal connection to the case. When the shooters themselves start turning up dead, Wakeland realizes the only way to guarantee his own safety, and that of the people he loves, is by finding out who hired the shooters and why. What Wakeland uncovers are secrets no one wants known—a botched undercover operation, an ambitious gangster and a double-crossing killer who used the shooting to cover up another crime. With a setup like this, anything can go wrong, and does. Skill and luck are needed for Wakeland and Chen to emerge with the killers, the money and their own lives.

Listening to the Bees is a collaborative exploration by two writers to illuminate the most profound human questions: Who are we? Who do we want to be in the world? Through the distinct but complementary lenses of science and poetry, Mark Winston and Renée Saklikar reflect on the tension of being an individual living in a society, and about the devastation wrought by overly intensive management of agricultural and urban habitats. Listening to the Bees takes readers into the laboratory and out to the field, into the worlds of scientists and beekeepers, and to meetings where the research community intersects with government policy and business. The result is an insiders’ view of the way research is conducted—its brilliant potential and its flaws—along with the personal insights and remarkable personalities experienced over a forty-year career that parallels the rise of industrial agriculture.

The poems in Anthropy fuse the scope of classical traditions to the disturbing agility of the moderns. Hsu artfully presents the fierce rigour of the philosophical mind engaged with the survival of histories. Anthropy, Ray Hsu's first book-length collection, is a work of extraordinary range and precision. Excavating sites of human cruelty and endurance, intimacy and experience, Hsu puts forth the language to lead us into the inferno of our time. He brings us to a place where the living, the dead, and the imaginary cross paths. Odysseus meets Fernando Pessoa, James Dean meets Walter Benjamin. All struggle with the same problem: their pasts, visceral and desperate, continue to burn with the intensity of the present.

A secret organization of upper class dissenters, called The League, is not happy with their weak government and wants to overthrow it. In a clever plan they bring about a civil war in Britain by manipulating the coal strike with foreign help and plant a fascist regime in its place. What comes about is a total breakdown giving an accurate prediction of the rise of Fascism, as George Orwell famously noted. Superficially the novel (also alternately known as What Might Have Been) seems like it is promoting the cause of The League but it is in fact a bleary take on what might end up happening if such a thing comes to pass when the government is overtaken by the conservatives. Who becomes a hero and who becomes a villain is only a matter of seizing absolute power! In fact Orwell credited this novel as his inspiration behind his own successful dystopian classic 1984. Ernest Bramah (1868–1942) was an English author and a recluse who wrote the famous Kai Lung and Max Carrados series. Interestingly Bramah's humorous works were ranked with Jerome K Jerome and W. W. Jacobs, his detective stories with Conan Doyle, his politico-science fiction with H. G. Wells and his supernatural stories with Algernon Blackwood.

children of air india is a series of elegiac sequences exploring the nature of individual loss, situated within public trauma. The work is animated by a proposition: that violence, both personal and collective, produces continuing sonar, an echolocation that finds us, even when we choose to be unaware or indifferent. This collection breaks new ground in its approach to the saga that is Canada/Air India, an event and its aftermath that is both over-reported and under-represented in our national psyche. 329 deaths. 82 Children. Canada's worst mass murder. The accused acquitted. What does it mean to be Canadian and lose someone in Air India Flight 182? Why does 9/11 resonate more strongly with Canadians than June 23, 1985? The poems in this book search out answers in the "everything/ness and nothing/ness" of an act and its aftermath, revealing a voice that re-defines and re-visions. Air India never happened. Air India always happens.

The ambitious second instalment of Renée Sarojini Saklikar’s epic fantasy saga in verse, The Heart of This Journey Bears All Patterns (THOT J BAP). This book-length poem features the time-travelling demigoddess Bramah, a locksmith and the saga’s hero. In Bramah’s Quest, the year is 2087 and Bramah is back on a planet Earth ravaged by climate change and global inequality. Bramah is on a quest to find her people, including the little boy Raphael, last seen at the end of Bramah and the Beggar Boy (2021). Hailed as “brilliant and masterful, timely” (Kerry Gilbert), this long poem reclaims poetry forms such as blank verse, the sonnet, the ballad and the madrigal. Each page is a portal, connecting readers to the resistance of seed savers, craftspeople, scientists and orphans, all banded together to help save their world from eco-catastrophe and injustice. Ten years in the making, Bramah’s Quest weaves poetry with politics to create an epic family saga that is also a meditation on good and evil and a “real page turner” (Meredith Quartermain). Bramah, “brown, brave and beautiful,” is determined to conquer the odds and deal with what fate and chance throw in her path. Each twist and turn tests her ability to live up to the motto “Let all evil die and the good endure.”