NeWest Press

Can 14-year-old Janey disentangle her time-hopping dilemma and save not just her own life, but the past lives of others, before it's too late? Rescue in the Rockies follows Janey as she is forced to spend the holidays with her grandma - and her grandma's new beau, Charlie, who has invited along his German grandson, Max - in Banff, Alberta. Janey can't believe her parents might potentially miss one of the most important holidays of the year and resigns herself to spending her time away from home wandering around the hotel with, of all people, Max, who she bickers with constantly. Getting frustrated with their constant fighting, Janey turns to run away and finds herself, all of a sudden, standing in snow drifts; the hotel has disappeared, and in its place is, well... nothing. As Janey travels back and forth in time - first to 1883, then, with an unwitting Max along, to an internment camp during World War I and finally the Banff area after the war - she struggles to not only escape the chaotic situations she finds herself in, but to try and figure out what is causing her mysterious disappearances. What do the three places have in common, and can she solve the mystery before the enemy she's made in the past captures her and Max for good?

Every year since 1904, when the ice breaks up on the North Saskatchewan River, Edmonton has crowned a Melting Queen-a woman who presides over the Melting Day spring carnival and who must keep the city's spirits up over the following winter. But this year, something has changed: a genderfluid ex-frat brother called River Runson is named as Melting Queen. As River's reign upends the city's century-old traditions, Edmonton tears itself in two, with progressive and reactionary factions fighting a war for Edmonton's soul. Ultimately, River must uncover the hidden history of Melting Day, forcing Edmonton to confront the dark underbelly of its traditions and leading the city into a new chapter in its history.Balancing satire with compassion, Bruce Cinnamon's debut novel combines history and magic to weave a splendid future-looking tale.

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.

Philippine-born Vancouverite Sophia is most grateful for two things: her modest hair salon and Adrian, her mild-mannered fiancé. She is eager to get married, move away from her highly educated but career-frustrated parents, who believe that their daughter can be so much more than a beautician.Then Sophia's estranged friend reaches out from Manila, desperate for help. After a dubious accident, her fiery Auntie Rosy is on the verge of losing the Cine Star Salon-the place where Sophia first felt the call to become a hairstylist and salon owner. Coming to her auntie's aid is not so easy though. Sophia worries helping might reopen old wounds and threaten the bright future she has planned.Leah Ranada's debut novel is a graphic and engaging depiction of the importance of women's work and the loyalties that connect friends across oceans. The Cine Star Salon marks the entry of a vital new voice in Canadian literature.

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 grew up under the wide Winnipeg sky. Her poems have been published in the poetry anthology Another Dysfunctional Cancer Poem Anthology, and literary magazines including Room, Prairie Fire, FreeFall, untethered, Contemporary Verse 2, and CAROUSEL. Her work was featured in Winnipeg Transit's "Poetry in Motion" program and tootled around town on buses. Twice she was a finalist in FreeFall's annual poetry contest. As a young-adult survivor of melanoma she has been a guest on CBC Radio-Manitoba speaking about the therapeutic benefits of writing through disease. She lives in Toronto with her husband and daughter, working in corporate communications. rump + flank is her debut poetry collection. Visit her website: carolharveysteski.com. Connect with her on Twitter: @charveysteski and Instagram: @carolharveysteski.

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.

In his evocative debut novel, Light on a Part of the Field, Kevin Holowack introduces us to a family grappling with artistic ambition, mental illness, and rifts that may not be possible to mend. Set in BC and Alberta in the 1960s and 1970s, this is a novel of finely observed vignettes offering a refracted look at art and family in the modern West.A young artist, Ruth, and her obsessive husband, an aspiring poet, are struck by lightning, an experience that throws their lives into a universe of intense beauty and angst. Years later, Ruth lives on a farm her husband bought before his mysterious disappearance, and she creates idyllic but naïve paintings to cope with her confusion and loss. Then, without warning, her eldest daughter Gayle is love-struck by a travelling stranger and runs off to Edmonton where she too must contend with poverty, sickness, and her father's upsetting legacy. Meanwhile, farm-bound Ruth becomes more frantic in her work and begins longing for human contact as her house and animals disintegrate around her.As Gayle and Ruth seek new ways of connecting in order to remedy their unsettling family legacy, they begin a complicated process of renewal and must decide whether they can reconcile despite all the pain they have caused one another.

Janey doesn't want to spend the summer away from her friends in Toronto--and certainly not in Edmonton with the grandmother she hardly knows. But her parents will be away--her mother in Turkey designing housing for earthquake victims, her dad on business trips. Her first surprise is her feisty grandma, who meets her at the airport in her vintage Cadillac, Marilyn. The second comes when she visits the Fort Edmonton historic park and time travels to 1907. The third is learning the real reason she's in Edmonton. Her grandma is going through cancer treatment and needs someone to be with her. Janey makes four trips, each to a different period of Fort Edmonton's history. What draws her into the past? Only on the last trip does she discover the meaning of her adventures--and their crucial connection to her own family. Rita Feutl's first novel features a deftly handled plot and a wealth of fascinating characters from prairie history.

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.

In her debut collection, Canadian National Slam Champion Nisha Patel commands her formidable insight and youthful, engaged voice to relay experiences of racism, sexuality, empowerment, grief, and love. These are vitally political, feminist poems for young women of colour, with bold portrayals of confession, hurt, and healing.Coconut rises fiercely like the sun. These poems bestow light and warmth and the ability to witness the world, but they ask for more than basking; they ask readers to grow and warn that they can be burnt. Above all, Nisha Patel's work questions and challenges propriety and what it means to be a good woman, second-generation immigrant, daughter, consumer, and lover.

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.

Shortlisted for a 2021 ReLit Award in the short fiction category! Finalist for Trade Fiction Book of the Year at the 2021 Alberta Book Publishing Awards! 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.

Shortlisted for the Brass Knuckles Award for Best Nonfiction Crime Book at the Crime Writers of Canada Awards of Excellence! Finalist for Book Cover Design at the 2021 Alberta Book Publishing Awards! 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 barroom observer's seat, 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.

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.

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 murder scene of a local ice cream truck driver. When Chris is called in to learn what he can about Marvin, he finds that the weight of blood might just be too much for him to bear.Complicating matters are Chris' strained relationship with his father; the vicious actions of his half-brother, Ray; the blinding spotlight of the media; and the aftereffects of trauma. In The Weight of Blood, D.B. Carew has given us a protagonist who is trying to hold everything together while staunching blood that both spills and connects.

Finalist for the Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize at the 2021 Alberta Literary Awards! Finalist for the High Plains Book Awards in the Nonfiction Category Laced with humour and revelation, Anne Wheeler's 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.Rolling Thunder continues A.J. Devlin's hard-hitting, award-winning mystery series with its unbeatable one-two punch of over-the-top-rope humour and elbow-to-the-face adventure.

"Things that are and are not, she thinks, and the dog is a snake."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.

Traci Skuce's Hunger Moon is a collection of stories that echo with the yearning to be replenished, to be made full. Here are characters at cusp-points in their lives, attempting to shift their trajectories: to cease wrapping up the heart's desire in a pink bubble by launching it into the universe. Some turn to ESP, some to a belief in ghosts, some to the future caught inside a glass bottle, each character taking the hackneyed adage "Follow Your Bliss" too literally to blissfully follow their own storyline.Emotionally charged, evocative, and lush, Hunger Moon's thirteen short stories each set out on profound quests to satisfy an emotional hunger.

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.

Winner of the 2021 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award! Finalist for the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry and The 2020 City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize at the 2021 Alberta Literary Awards! A 2020 CBC Poetry Book of the Year! Finalist for the 2021 High Plains Book Awards in the Poetry and First Book categories 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.

South Away follows Meaghan Marie Hackinen and her sister in the adventure of a lifetime: bicycling from Terrace, BC down the West Coast to (almost) the tip of the Baja Peninsula. Along the way Hackinen battles with the elements in Vancouver Island's dense northern forests and frigid Mexican deserts; encounters strange men, suicidal highways and monster trucks; and makes some emergency repairs as tires and spokes succumb to the ravages of the journey. Luckily, the pair meet some good people along the way and glean some insight about the kindness of strangers.A rare road-trip story with two female leads, this travel memoir also chronicles an inner journey, as the author begins to better understand her relationship with her adventurous (and not-so-adventurous) family. South Away tells an engaging and personable tale, with imaginative and memorable depictions of land and sea along the ever-winding coast.

When an accident jeopardizing the family farm draws Amiah Williams back to Kingsley, Alberta, population 1431, she doesn't expect her homecoming to make front-page news. But there she is in The Inquirer, the mysterious tabloid that is airing her hometown's dirty laundry. Alongside stories of high school rivalries and truck-bed love affairs, disturbing revelations about Amiah's past and present are selling papers and fuelling small-town gossip. As the stakes get higher, Amiah must either expose the twisted truth behind The Inquirer or watch her life fall apart again.Jaclyn Dawn's debut novel provides an incisive look at the lingering consequences of past relationships and the price of both staying silent and speaking up. Praise for The Inquirer: "A clever novel that reveals both the anxieties and strengths woven into tight-knit communities. The Inquirer is a thoroughly enjoyable read." ~ Lisa Guenther, author of Friendly Fire "In The Inquirer, Jaclyn Dawn has crafted something so rare-a great story full of fascinating characters, sly humour, and understated intelligence-that news of its appearance might just get reported in the tabloids her novel so lovingly satirizes. Amiah Williams's journey back to her hometown of Kingsley, Alberta, is funny and winning, neither of which factors obscure the troubling realities young women too often face." ~ Curtis Gillespie, author of Almost There "A bildungsroman that never drags, Dawn's debut novel is appealing both in its innovation-it intersperses newspaper articles from the Inquirer throughout-and its unexpected insights from Amiah, its well-drawn narrator." ~ Kirkus Reviews

Shortlisted for Best Cover Design at the 2020 Alberta Book Publishing Awards! On the eve of his thirtieth birthday, ageing punk Lor Kowalski is unsure of his sanity. He is haunted by hallucinogens and harbingers, strung out on broken stories that he cannot piece together into a lucid whole. Forced to join his old band from a life he'd rather forget, he is dragged north under the spell of a mysterious ad for an Arctic festival tour. As the band members unspool across the surreal snowscapes and frozen wastelands, rogue CSIS agents are hot on their increasingly iced-over heels. But what are ageing punks to rogue agents? Subversive and irredeemable, spectres from a past that must be erased with extreme prejudice. Randy Nikkel Schroeder's Arctic Smoke combines coked-up magic realism with a wound-up cyberpunk style.

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.

Finalist for the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry at the 2020 Alberta Literary Awards! Peter Midgley's let us not think of them as barbarians is a bold narrative of love, migration, and war hewn from the stones of Namibia. Sensual and intimate, these evocative poems fold into each other to renew and undermine multiple poetic traditions. Gradually, the poems assemble an ombindi-an ancestral cairn-from a history of violent disruption. Underlying the intense language is an exploration of African philosophy and its potential for changing our view of the world. Even as the poems look to the past, they push the reader towards a future that is as relevant to contemporary Canada as it is to the Namibian earth that bled them. Praise for let us not think of them as barbarians: "These poems do double work: they challenge what we think we know about the relationship between history and the present and ask us to consider what else would be going on. The poems demand that we reflect on how we come to knowledge, especially that which is not hegemonic but is definitely central to another world." ~ Juliane Okot Bitek, author of 100 Days

WINNER of the 2020 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour! Aspiring novelist Molly MacGregor's life is strikingly different from a literary heroine's. Named for one of literature's least romantic protagonists, Moll Flanders, Molly lives in Edmonton, a city she finds irredeemably unromantic, where she writes university term papers instead of novels, and sells shoes in the Largest Mall on Earth. There she seeks the other half of her young life's own matched pair. Delightfully whimsical, Heidi L.M. Jacobs's Molly of the Mall: Literary Lass and Purveyor of Fine Footwear explores its namesake's love for the written word, love for the wrong men (and the right one), and her complicated love for her city.

Winner of Best Cover Design at the 2020 Alberta Book Publishing Awards! Third Place in the Prose Category at the 2019 Alcuin Society Awards for Excellence in Book Design in Canada! All Lit Up Book Club Selection!In this provocative collection of short stories, Karen Hofmann creates characters who struggle to connect or disconnect from entanglements and relationships. With ironic accuracy and sensuous imagery, Hofmann considers a range of human foibles: a newlywed couple who transform into feral beasts during the hardships of a remote research expedition; backbiting faculty members who strip down during a post-conference BBQ; an heretical nun who explores the possibility of a new life by imaginatively excavating the fossils of BC's Burgess Shale; and an ambitious bylaw officer determined to make her mark on the city's streets.In Echolocation, Karen Hofmann has found new ways to sound the depths of the human heart.

Niall Howell's Only Pretty Damned is a taut noir that takes you behind the big top, revealing rough and tumble characters, murderous plots, and crooked schemes designed to keep Rowland's World Class Circus afloat for another season. When Toby, former trapeze artist turned disgruntled clown, begins seeing Gloria, a young and beautiful dancer longing for a bigger role under the spotlight, his hardboiled past resurfaces. Can he live without Genevieve, his ex-trapeze partner and lover? What ruthless actions will he take to regain his position as the headlining act? And will Toby's past repeat itself as he tries to untangle the ropes that bind him and take a leap to roaring applause?

Finalist for the 2020 Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize! Three years into the second millennium, Majestic, Alberta is a farm town dealing with depressed crop prices, international borders closing to Canadian beef, and a severe drought. Older farmers worry about their way of life changing while young people concoct ways to escape: drugs, partying, moving away. Even the church is on the brink of closing.When local woman Annie Gallagher is struck by lightning while divining water for a well, stories of the town's past, including that of Annie and the grandmother who taught her water witching, slowly pour forth as everyone gathers for her funeral.Told through the varied voices of the townspeople and Annie herself, The Death of Annie the Water Witcher by Lightning reveals Majestic to be a complex character in its own right, both haunted and haunting. Here, Audrey J. Whitson has written a novel of hard choices and magical necessity. Praise for The Death of Annie the Water Witcher by Lightning: "Despite the lemon squares and the familiar agri-business headlines, this is not a domestic novel. Rather, The Death of Annie the Water Witcher by Lightning reads as if it has come out of translation, out of a language created and shared within a community formed by geography, memory, and its own expedient, indefinable spirituality. It's a funeral story told in forks of lightning, dozen of voices, flashing in and out of transfiguration. Like a good translation, it's unafraid to leave in shadows what it can assume everyone already knows, rushing instead to throw light on what-until now-has been unknowable." ~ Jennifer Quist, author of The Apocalypse of Morgan Turner "With humour and heart, Whitson peels back the small-town preoccupations of a winning cast of characters, laying bare the mysterious undercurrents of their world and beyond. Annie the water diviner is a force to be reckoned with, even after her death. This book is lyrical and lovely, a stunning achievement." ~ Fran Kimmel, author of No Good Asking and The Shore Girl "Majestic is depicted with poetic complexity. Annie's friends have a salt-of-the-earth goodness, and Annie herself is a faceted, compelling woman who emerges from personal darkness to find her own peace." ~ Meg Nola, Foreword Reviews "Whitson's novel is, by the end, a reckoning with the past, both personal and communal, but also a tale of joy-the earthy preparations for the dead and a divining born of the body." ~ Bryn Evans, Alberta Views "It's tricky business, allowing so many voices to create the narrative in a story, but Audrey Whitson has linked these people together not only as people who loved Annie, but as community. Relationships with Annie emerge, and so too do the intimate details of the lives of her neighbours." ~ Betty Jane Hegerat, author of The Boy and Delivery "[a] stunningly written novel...." ~ All Lit Up

Accustomed to being an only child, adoptee Brian "Gumbo" Guillemot's teenage hobby was searching for his birth parents. After years without a lead, when he finally finds his birth mother, Kim, he's unprepared for the boisterous instant family that comes with her. No one, besides Kim, knows anything about Gumbo's birth father. With Kim refusing to answer any questions, Gumbo must choose whether to continue the search, even if it means alienating his few friends and both his families. And the more he learns, the more he wonders whether some things are better left unknown. Captivating and playful, The Home For Wayward Parrots explores friendship, romance, modern families, and geek pop culture with wit, compassion, and extremely foul-mouthed birds.