Thistledown Press: 96 books

In the 1870s, a teenage thief from New York, in search of his show business mother, gets collared by a keen-eyed cop from Canada’s newly created national police force — the North West Mounted Police. Following the encounter, he unwillingly finds himself hired on, with a cantankerous wagon master,...

Devin Krukoff’s delicate balancing of hyperbole and psychological realism is the book’s greatest achievement. Flyways is thematically reminiscent of Zsuzsi Gartner’s All the Anxious Girls on Earth, but without the moral didacticism. While Krukoff’s stories share Gartner’s sense of humour,...

Donald Ward’s stories are written in a straight-ahead narrative style that offers conceptual and philosophical underpinnings. Despite this intentional layering, he maintains the kind of economy of description and simplicity of exposition that is perfectly suited to the short story genre. Throughout...

When avalanching glaciers thrust a massive Antarctic ice sheet into the open ocean, the captain of an atomic submarine must risk his vessel to rescue the survivors of a smashed polar research station; in Washington the President’s top advisor scrambles to spin the disaster to suit his master’s...

Perhaps because the single bequest a writer can hope to give her characters is eternal life and because Susan Musgrave’s creations from her previous publication A Cargo of Orchids intend to take her up on it, they are back with a new story in a brilliantly engaging novel, Given. Rainy, the Mexican-American...

The stories in this collection represent the coming of age of a young writer. His earliest published work is here along with his later more sophisticated literary efforts. Perry’s fiction explores contemporary life mostly in urban centres like Toronto, though they are not bound by this parameter...

Ben Robe is a retired political science professor who has returned to his reserve at Moccasin Lake, Saskatchewan, to live out his life in relative peace and solitude. But the complications of a sudden and intense US annexation of Canada change his plans. Cued into a Canadian resistance movement by...

After You’ve Gone is the story of two generations of musicians, a jazz grandmother and a punk granddaughter, who each struggle with balancing life, love, and art in their respective eras. The novel opens in 2007 with Elsa Taggart and her ex-husband watching their son’s convocation from Seattle...

The gluttonous, jazz-loving character of Neil Connelly in John Lent’s So It Won’t Go Away can never get enough out of life, no matter how much he over-indulges his desires: “Drinking, smoking, sex: a man’s hands twittering, eyes bugged out in a desperate longing to be held, fondled, stuffed,...

The stories in Sandy Bonny’s collection take place in settings from the Arctic Circle to Alberta’s badlands, and from the waters of the Georgia Straight to the grasslands of the prairies, and the characters that we meet in these places will be oddly familiar or perhaps familiarly odd. There are...

Runaway teen Annabel, nicknamed Ghost, doesn’t speak. Her interaction with her world is limited to how well she can convey her wants and feelings to others, and how intuitive others are in interpreting her expressions and gestures. Confused by her mother’s addictions, and the loss of the guidance...

In his third novel, Richard Scarsbrook returns to the fictional Faireville of his previous novels Cheeseburger Subversive (2003) and Featherless Bipeds (2006) to present Philip Skyler in a three part chronicle: his eighth-grade introduction to public school, his twelfth-grade challenges, and his recovery...

"This novel is every high school boy's wet dream: drummer Dak Sifter's adventures forming the rock and roll band Featherless Bipeds, touring, drinking beer, being discovered by the Big Plastic Record Co. and Billy VandenHammer, cutting an album and becoming famous, not to mention dealing with...

Bertrand Smith’s father, Alex, thinks he’s making the world a better place by developing a breed of super-intelligent canines. But SMART dogs turn out not to be such a smart idea when a global arms dealer decides to “dognap” the experimental litter to use as his next secret weapon. Bertrand,...