Ruby Ruby is a soft-boiled murder mystery that follows the trail of our expatriate Canuck as he tries to sleuth out the answers to a puzzling series of pointless and apparently motiveless murders: Who’d want to kill a sixtyish night watchman guarding an abandoned pie factory?

In English, to rue is to regret; in French, la rue is the street – Rue’s poems provide the venue for moments of both recollection and motion. Punctuated with neologisms and the bilingual dialogue of Montreal, the collection explores the author’s upbringing in the working-class neighbourhood of St. Henri with her artist mother, follows her travels, friendships, and loves across North America, Europe, and Russia, and recounts her journalist father’s struggles with terminal brain cancer.

First published in 1997 to much critical acclaim, Salvage King, Ya! is a novel firmly rooted in Canada’s favourite national pastime—hockey. Critics have called Salvage King, Ya! “the great Canadian novel,” and a “postmodern Canadian classic.” Drinkwater, Jarman’s narrator, is the “heir reluctant” of the family business (the salvage company of the book’s title) and an aspiring NHL defenceman. His life hurtles between the hockey rink, the junkyard, the road, and the three women in his life: The Intended, the mesmerizing Waitress X, and ex-wife Kathy.

Savage 1986-2011 chronicles the middle-class implosion of Nate’s nuclear family, bracketed by July 1986 — when he first saw Randy Savage in person — and the wrestler’s sudden death in May 2011. When Savage dies, Nate is freed from beliefs — once a source of beauty and escape — that had come to constrict him, fusing him to a moribund past.

Savour is the follow-up to Bateman’s award-winning debut novel, Nondescript Rambunctious, and the second book in a trilogy about a dark, suspected serial killer named Oliver. Savour retains the dark threads of sociopathic depravity that ran through the debut novel, but is once again tempered with a tender ray of humanity. Lizzy is streetwise, yet fragile, and her desperate journey is both uplifting and heartbreaking.

In these pages you will encounter gamblers and adventurers, conmen and conwomen, rodomontades and ragamuffins, outright fools and outrageous liars. Scalawags, the lot of them.

Seep limns the tension between land development and landscape, trauma and nostalgia, dysfunction and intimacy in a narrative of twenty-first century Canada.

Sensational Vancouver is a fully illustrated popular history book about Vancouver’s famous and infamous, the ordinary and the extraordinary, filtered through the houses in which they lived. Sensational Vancouver covers legendary women including Elsie MacGill, Phyllis Munday, Nellie Yip Quong and Joy Kogawa; high-end brothels, unsolved murders, and the homes and buildings of artists, architects and entertainers including Frederick Varley, Arthur Erickson, Bryan Adams, and Michael Bublé. Includes a Walking Tour map of historic Strathcona and Chinatown.

The follow-up to Eve Lazarus’s successful At Home with History: The Untold Secrets of Greater Vancouver’s Heritage Homes, Sensational Victoria gives us a glimpse into aspects of Victoria rarely talked about in the tourist brochures or flowery garden guidebooks.

Writers, like skaters, score the blank sheet and test the edge of inclusion and exclusion. Most of these poems begin with a word from skating and push off to another topic. Others revisit ideas of femininity, control, and language as pattern, or visit the past through movement, or enact principles from the rink such as symmetry, joy, endurance, crescendo and accent, revolution, response.