Download or read book The Marriage of Rose Camilleri written by Robert Hough and published by Douglas & McIntyre. This book was released on 2021-10-23 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An illuminating portrait of an unconventional marriage by bestselling and critically acclaimed author Robert Hough. When Rose Camilleri and Scotty Larkin meet, neither expects to spend a lifetime together, navigating a sometimes turbulent marriage and scraping through the process of raising a family. When he first enters the bakery where she works, she is a new arrival from the tiny island nation of Malta, fond of rabbit stew and Hollywood cinema. He is a thoughtful printer’s assistant recently released from juvenile detention after stealing and swiftly totalling a stranger’s car. Even after years of marriage and two children together, Rose struggles to shake the idea that perhaps she should have held out for someone as voluble and optimistic as herself. But while some marriages are weakened by trauma, Rose and Scotty's union is strengthened by the act of survival, and they find their own kind of happiness along the way. In The Marriage of Rose Camilleri, Robert Hough writes his larger-than-life characters with warmth, insight and humour, displaying the masterful approach to storytelling that gained his previous novels acclaim and several prestigious award nominations. Hough transports the reader into the epicentre of an unconventional love story, where he draws out captivating details from the fabric of an ordinary shared lifetime to create a story that lives in the moment and takes seriously the small but vital details of everyday life.
Download or read book The Stowaway written by Robert Hough and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2011-03-04 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Stowaway is at once a thrilling maritime adventure and a thought-provoking morality tale based on real-life events. The novel begins in the spring of 1996 when Rodolfo Miguel, a bosun on the Taiwanese container ship Maersk Dubai, discovers a hungry and frightened pair of Romanian stowaways. He presents them to his officers, fully expecting that they’ll be put to work or else dropped off at the nearest port. Instead, he and his fellow Filipino crewmen watch in silent horror as the Romanians are cast overboard in a flimsy raft only to disappear beneath the ship’s wake. The Stowaway moves seamlessly between two storylines. Aboard the Maersk Dubai, Rodolfo and his crewmen must deal with the emotional trauma of what they’ve seen – as well as grapple with how to act on what they know. The atmosphere on the ship grows increasingly tense as fear, anxiety and paranoia grip the Filipino sailors. Trapped witnesses to a crime, they wonder whom they can trust and whether they themselves will meet with the same fate as the stowaways. Meanwhile, a nineteen-year-old Romanian named Daniel Pacepa heads out on a nail-biting adventure from Bucharest to Algeciras. Poor, brave and full of youthful indiscretion, Daniel is desperate to stow away on a ship and head to a better life in America. Along the way, he meets another Romanian named Gheorghe and together they perform cheap labour, pose as evangelical Christians and do whatever it takes to find their way to the Spanish port of Algeciras. Eventually the two stories merge when Daniel and Gheorghe sneak onto the ill-fated Maersk Dubai. One man is killed, the other discovered by Rodolfo. Once again, the Filipino crewmen find themselves faced with an excruciating moral dilemma. Do they risk their own personal safety to save the life of a complete stranger? All of the scenes involving the Filipino sailors are as close to the truth as Robert Hough could manage based on exhaustive interviews with the crewmen as well as on their letters and journals. Though Hough invented the Romanians’ land adventure, he based the story on considerable research, including interviews with Romanian-Canadians who had lived under the Ceausescu regime. Hough was widely praised for the deft way in which he mixes fact and fiction in The Stowaway. The critics were also unanimous in their admiration for the novel’s ability to seduce with suspense while at the same time posing profound issues for the reader to ponder. “This is a powerful novel that artfully combines the vivid, breathless pacing of the best adventure stories with the moral and metaphysical depth of the best literary fiction,” said Quill & Quire. And from the Vancouver Sun: “Harnessing the force of fiction and the weight of history, Hough has created a powerful, deeply human masterpiece out of tragedy and inhumanity.”
Download or read book The Final Confession of Mabel Stark written by Robert Hough and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2013-04-23 with total page 491 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1910s and 1920s, when circus was the most popular form of entertainment in North America, Mabel Stark made her name in a man’s world as the greatest female tiger trainer in history, the centre-ring finale act for the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus. Brazen, courageous, obsessed with tigers and sexually eccentric, Stark survived a dozen severe maulings — and five husbands. Now, at age 80 and about to lose her job, she decides that there is one last thing she needs to do: Mabel Stark wants to confess.
Download or read book A Rose for Emily written by Faulkner William and published by . This book was released on 2022-02-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The short tale A Rose for Emily was first published on April 30, 1930, by American author William Faulkner. This narrative is set in Faulkner's fictional city of Jefferson, Mississippi, in his fictional county of Yoknapatawpha County. It was the first time Faulkner's short tale had been published in a national magazine. Emily Grierson, an eccentric spinster, is the subject of A Rose for Emily. The peculiar circumstances of Emily's existence are described by a nameless narrator, as are her strange interactions with her father and her lover, Yankee road worker Homer Barron.
Download or read book Field Notes from an Unintentional Birder written by Julia Zarankin and published by Douglas & McIntyre. This book was released on 2020-09-12 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Julia Zarankin saw her first red-winged blackbird at the age of thirty-five, she didn’t expect that it would change her life. Recently divorced and auditioning hobbies during a stressful career transition, she stumbled on birdwatching, initially out of curiosity for the strange breed of humans who wear multi-pocketed vests, carry spotting scopes and discuss the finer points of optics with disturbing fervour. What she never could have predicted was that she would become one of them. Not only would she come to identify proudly as a birder, but birding would ultimately lead her to find love, uncover a new language and lay down her roots. Field Notes from an Unintentional Birder tells the story of finding meaning in midlife through birds. The book follows the peregrinations of a narrator who learns more from birds than she ever anticipated, as she begins to realize that she herself is a migratory species: born in the former Soviet Union, growing up in Vancouver and Toronto, studying and working in the United States and living in Paris. Coming from a Russian immigrant family of concert pianists who believed that the outdoors were for “other people,” Julia Zarankin recounts the challenges and joys of unexpectedly discovering one’s wild side and finding one’s tribe in the unlikeliest of places. Zarankin’s thoughtful and witty anecdotes illuminate the joyful experience of a new discovery and the surprising pleasure to be found while standing still on the edge of a lake at six a.m. In addition to confirmed nature enthusiasts, this book will appeal to readers of literary memoir, offering keen insight on what it takes to find one’s place in the world.
Download or read book Well Aged written by Ralph Milton and published by Douglas & McIntyre. This book was released on 2021-10-30 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finding happiness at 80+, from the perspective of an octogenarian. Author Ralph Milton wants readers to know that old age is not a disease circling the world ready to pounce on anyone over eighty. Many, maybe even most, old people, say they are happier and more contented than they have ever been. And that’s good news because Canadians are living much, much longer. In fact, octogenarians are the county’s fastest growing demographic. To quote the author, "Society has never had to deal with such a huge bunch of old people." To address this societal shift, Well Aged offers a candid, useful and entertaining insider’s take on life among the old, old. Not the recently retired who are enjoying Arizona winters and unlimited golf, but those in their last years, usually in the eighty- to one- hundred-year-old bracket. While there is good material written by health-care professionals for other professionals, and popular non-fiction to inspire the recently retired, there is virtually nothing written at the non-professional level for the oldest of the old. Or for their families and care givers. This book is a free wheeling, down to earth, inside look at what it’s really like to be old, written by an insider and sprinkled liberally with humour. Topics include: Identity and independence Choosing a retirement location among the options of independent living, retirement residences and nursing homes Personal health needs and priorities Community support, friendships and recreation Spirituality and religion Intimacy, companionship, sexuality, homosexuality Loneliness, depression and frailty Leaving a legacy and end of life arrangements When the situation of elderly Canadians does get public attention, as it has during the Covid-19 pandemic, the focus is on what can go wrong. Well Aged is intended to expand the conversation around aging, and it is a must-read for anyone who needs to put out their birthday cake with a fire extinguisher—as well as those who love and care for them.
Download or read book Vile Spirits written by John MacLachlan Gray and published by Douglas & McIntyre. This book was released on 2021-09-03 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exhilarating page-turner set in 1920s Vancouver post prohibition, when liquor was the fuel driving big business, big government—and major crime. In this spellbinding follow-up to his mystery The White Angel, John MacLachlan Gray captures the spirit of Vancouver in those gritty, gin-soaked days, as the city was remaking itself between wars. Alcohol is once again legal in Vancouver after the failed experiment of prohibition, but pro-temperance sentiments remain strong. Politicians like Attorney-General Gordon Cunning attempt appeasement by establishing the Liquor Control Board, which oversees supply, from the lofty circles of power down to bleak public drinking factories called “beer parlours.” But when Cunning is found deceased, an empty martini glass at his side, quickly followed by Mrs. Harlan Crombie, the wife of a prominent bureaucrat, who falls dead after an afternoon book club meeting, suspicions are raised. Is it pure coincidence that the deceased were both drinking the same brand of “tonic”? Or is it a spillover from American prohibition, where deliberately tainted booze is killing thousands? Fans of The White Angel will be delighted by the return of straight-shooting constable Calvin Hook, frustrated poet-cum-reporter Ed McCurdy and unpredictable, eavesdropping telephone operator Mildred Wickstram, as they pool their skills in order to get to the truth. The result is a clash between temperance activists, the Klu Klux Klan, the Liquor Control Board and global events on the mean streets of Vancouver—a rough little city on the edge of empire.
Download or read book When I Hit You written by Meena Kandasamy and published by Europa Editions. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The widely acclaimed novel of an abused woman in India and her fight for freedom: “A triumph.” —The Guardian Named a Best Book of the Year by the Financial Times, the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, and the Observer Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction Longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize Shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize Based on the author’s own experience, When I Hit You follows the narrator as she falls in love with a university professor and agrees to be his wife. Soon, the newlywed experiences extreme violence at her husband’s hands and finds herself socially isolated. Yet hope keeps her alive. Writing becomes her salvation, a supreme act of defiance, in a harrowing yet fierce and funny novel that not only examines one woman’s battle against terror and loneliness but reminds us how fiction and stories can help us escape.
Download or read book A Race for Real Sailors written by Keith McLaren and published by Douglas & McIntyre. This book was released on 2021-03-26 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the summer of 1920, the public following the latest America’s Cup series were frustrated to find that every time the wind got up, the organizers called off the race. There was muttering in the taverns of Halifax and Lunenburg: why not show these fancy yachtsmen what real sailors can do? A Nova Scotia newspaper donated a trophy and put out a challenge to their rivals in New England, inviting them to meet the Maritimes’ best in a “race for real sailors.” A Race for Real Sailors is a vibrant history of the Fishermen’s Cup series, which dominated sporting headlines between the two world wars. The salt spray practically blows off the page as the author’s arresting style captures the drama of each race and the personalities of the ships that contested them: the Delawana and the Esperanto, the Columbia and the Gertrude L. Thebaud, and dominating them all the Bluenose, the big brute from Lunenburg whose image shines on the Canadian dime to this day. Vying for the spotlight are the boats’ larger-than-life skippers, among them Marty Welch, the hard-charging American who first took the cup; Ben Pine, the Gloucester scrap dealer whose passion kept the races afloat when they seemed destined to fade away; and the irascible, impossible Angus Walters, master of the Bluenose, who repeatedly broke American hearts but whose own heart was broken by Canada’s refusal to come to the rescue of his beloved vessel. This stirring and poignant tale is illustrated with 51 historical photographs and five maps, and rounded out by a glossary of sailing terms and an appendix of the ever-changing race rules. This is a story that will keep even confirmed landlubbers pegged to their seats, a tale of iron men and wooden ships whose time will never come again.
Download or read book Through Blood and Sweat written by Mark Zuehlke and published by D & M Publishers. This book was released on 2015-10-24 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As part of Operation Husky 2013, a group of Canadians walked this route to honour the memory of the nation’s soldiers who fought in Sicily seventy years earlier and whose sacrifice has been largely forgotten. Under a searing sun, with Mount Etna’s soaring heights always in the distance, a small contingent of marchers trekked each day along winding country roads for between 15 and 35 kilometres to reach the outskirts of a small town or village. Here they were joined by a pipe band, which led them to the skirl of bagpipes in a parade into the community’s heart to be met by hundreds of cheering and applauding Sicilians. Before each community’s war memorial a service of remembrance for both the Canadian and Sicilian war dead followed. Each day also brought the marchers closer to their final destination—Agira Canadian War Cemetery where 490 of the 562 Canadian soldiers who fell during the course of Operation Husky in 1943 are buried. On July 30—after twenty gruelling days—the marchers were joined here by almost a thousand Canadians and Italians. All joined to conduct a profoundly emotional ceremony of remembrance that ended with one person standing before each headstone and answering the roll call on that soldier’s behalf. Mark Zuehlke, author of the award-winning Canadian Battle Series, was one of the Operation Husky 2013 marchers. He uses this arduous and poignant task as a focal point for a contemplative look at the culture of remembrance and the experience of war.
Download or read book Operation Husky written by Mark Zuehlke and published by D & M Publishers. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On July 10, 1943, two great Allied armadas of over 2,000 ships readied to invade Sicily. This was Operation Husky, the first step toward winning a toehold in fascist-occupied Europe. Among the invaders were 20,000 Canadian troops serving in the First Canadian Infantry Division and First Canadian Tank Brigade — in their first combat experience. Over the next 28 days, the Allied troops carved a path through the rugged land, despite fierce German opposition. Drawing on firsthand accounts of veterans and official military records, Operation Husky offers a gripping, meticulous account of this seminal operation and the young men who fought, died, and survived it.
Download or read book Come from the Shadows written by Terry Glavin and published by D & M Publishers. This book was released on 2011-09-16 with total page 1 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Come from the Shadows is not about the Afghanistan we may think we know. It is not about the country depicted in urgent dispatches from embedded reporters; it isn't about the country evoked by anti-war protestors or the one that figures in heated political controversies over the treatment of prisoners. Instead, this is a book about the Afghanistan that lies "outside the wire," far from the Taliban's grim desert strongholds. The country we visit with award-winning author Terry Glavin is a surprisingly welcoming place, hidden away in alleys and narrow streets that bustle with blacksmiths, seamstresses, gem hawkers, cobblers and spice merchants. This Afghanistan is reawakening from decades of savagery and bloodletting, and its people are deeply thankful for the aid from foreign soldiers. In the voices of the people he meets on his journey, Glavin reveals how events have unfolded in Afghanistan since September 11, 2001. In the life story of his friend and travel companion—writer, translator and activist Abdulrahim Parwani -- we learn of Afghanistan's agonies over the past thirty years. Come from the Shadows is a passionate challenge to the usual depiction of the war in Afghanistan.
Download or read book Tragedy at Dieppe written by Mark Zuehlke and published by D & M Publishers. This book was released on 2012-10-05 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With its trademark "you are there" style, Mark Zuehlke's tenth Canadian Battle Series volume tells the story of the 1942 Dieppe raid. Nicknamed "The Poor Man's Monte Carlo," Dieppe had no strategic importance, but with the Soviet Union thrown on the ropes by German invasion and America having just entered the war, Britain was under intense pressure to launch a major cross-Channel attack against France. Since 1939, Canadian troops had massed in Britain and trained for the inevitable day of the mass invasion of Europe that would finally occur in 1944. But the Canadian public and many politicians were impatient to see Canadian soldiers fight sooner. The first major rehearsal proved such a shambles the raid was pushed back to the end of July only to be cancelled by poor weather. Later, in a decision still shrouded in controversy, the operation was reborn. Dieppe however did not go smoothly. Drawing on rare archival documents and personal interviews, Mark Zuehlke examines how the raid came to be and why it went so tragically wrong. Ultimately, Tragedy at Dieppe honors the bravery and sacrifice of those who fought and died that fateful day on the beaches of Dieppe.
Download or read book The Sacco Gang written by Andrea Camilleri and published by Europa Editions. This book was released on 2018-07-17 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The award-winning author’s “vivid historical novel based on the true story of the five Sacco brothers” who fought fascism and the mafia in 1920s Sicily (Publishers Weekly). Sicily, 1920s. As socialists who run successful farms and businesses, the Sacco brothers are a prime target of the local Mafia’s extortion racket. When their father receives an anonymous letter demanding protection money, he goes to the police. But what can they do with such a complaint? No one in the village has ever dared denounce the Mafia before. From that moment on, the Sacco brothers must defend themselves as they face an escalating war against the Mafia, corrupt police, and fascist leaders who declare the Saccos a gang of bandits. Facing violent attacks and false accusations, they become fugitives who can trust no one in their battle for freedom. “A twisted morality tale worthy of the wild west.” —The Guardian
Download or read book The Light Between Oceans written by M.L. Stedman and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A cloth bag containing ten copies of the title.
Download or read book The Cinderella Campaign written by Mark Zuehlke and published by Douglas & McIntyre. This book was released on 2017-11-11 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: They thought of themselves as the "Cinderella Army," and international correspondents agreed. This was because First Canadian Army had been relegated to the left flank of the Allied advance toward Germany from the Normandy beaches and given the tough, thankless task of opening the Channel ports from Le Havre to Ostend in Belgium. Then suddenly in early September 1944, securing these ports became an Allied priority, as this would allow Field Marshal Montgomery to drive to the Rhine with Operation Market Garden and win the war before Christmas. Given only scant access to the Allied supply chain, the Canadians and their British partners in I Corps tackled the task assigned. Just getting to the ports proved a terrific undertaking fought against brutal German resistance. And once there, they faced fortresses that had been prepared for years to defeat an attack. "Lost outposts," the Allies called them, but the Germans within were not going to give up easily. And so over the month of September, the Canadians set about fighting for control of each port, scrambling for supplies while under constant military pressure to get those ports open now. For Canada this was the Cinderella Campaign, the battle for the Channel ports. For those who fought it, the sacrifice of comrades dead and wounded would never be forgotten.
Download or read book The View from Castle Rock written by Alice Munro and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2006-11-07 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE® IN LITERATURE 2013 Alice Munro mines her rich family background, melding it with her own experiences and the transforming power of her brilliant imagination, to create perhaps her most powerful and personal collection yet. A young boy, taken to Edinburgh’s Castle Rock to look across the sea to America, catches a glimpse of his father’s dream. Scottish immigrants experience love and loss on a journey that leads them to rural Ontario. Wives, mothers, fathers, and children move through uncertainty, ambivalence, and contemplation in these stories of hopes, adversity, and wonder. The View from Castle Rock reveals what is most essential in Munro’s art: her compassionate understanding of ordinary lives.
