His Precious Cargo

NATIONAL BESTSELLER For readers of Kristine Barnett's The Spark, Andrew Solomon's Far From the Tree and Ian Brown's The Boy in the Moon, here is a heartfelt, funny and surprising memoir about one year spent driving a bus full of children with special needs. With his last novel, Cataract City, Craig Davidson established himself as one of our most talented novelists. But before writing that novel and before his previous work, Rust and Bone, was made into a Golden Globe-nominated film, Davidson experienced a period of poverty, apparent failure and despair. In this new work of riveting and timely non-fiction, Davidson tells the unvarnished story of one transformative year in his life and of his unlikely relationships with a handful of unique and vibrant children who were, to his initial astonishment and bewilderment, and eventual delight, placed in his care for a couple of hours each day--the kids on school bus 3077. One morning in 2008, desperate and impoverished while trying unsuccessfully to write, Davidson plucked a flyer out of his mailbox that read, "Bus Drivers Wanted." That was the first step towards an unlikely new career: driving a school bus full of special-needs kids for a year. Armed only with a sense of humour akin to that of his charges, a creative approach to the challenge of driving a large, awkward vehicle while corralling a rowdy gang of kids, and unexpected reserves of empathy, Davidson takes us along for the ride. He shows us how his evolving relationship with the kids on that bus, each of them struggling physically as well as emotionally and socially, slowly but surely changed his life along with the lives of the "precious cargo" in his care. This is the extraordinary story of that year and those relationships. It is also a moving, important and universal story about how we see and treat people with special needs in our society.

Charlie Noble, former coast-guard-officer-turned-marine-PI, is back. This time, he is hot on the trail of a human trafficking scheme that begins in Mexicoand ends in murder.Still reeling from the untimely death of his wife, Charlie begins to warm to the idea of a second chance at true love with new girlfriend Kate Sullivan. These plans are quickly docked when boating friends Marvin and Angela Baynes come to him with a horrifying discovery - the body of an unidentified young woman impaled on the flukes of their boat anchor. The Bayneses themselves lost a child years ago. No stranger to loss, Charlie finds it impossible not to help them - even though it could mean putting his new romance in jeopardy. Charlie enlists a friend, Raven, a Native American salvage diver. Together, the pair plunge beneath the waters of Puget Sound to seek out any clues about the identity of the dead woman and how she wound up there. But they find more bodies instead - all young, all female, all Hispanic. Soon Charlie finds himself navigating a course that leads him through the choppy waters of transporting human cargo, and right into the seedy underworld of the Northwest's sex trade.With its fresh, nautical flavor, riveting mystery, and incredible depth of humanity, Precious Cargo is a winner from Clyde Ford that is truly unique - and compulsively readable.

One illicit lap dance becomes a flight for their lives. A stripper with dreams of being a princess. An intergalactic thief with a freighter of stolen cargo. At the outskirts of space and away from the rigid control of Central Command, Granger entices Kaedi to break her strict no-lap dance policy. The repercussions force her to pack up and hitch a ride off-world in the same freighter he has hired. They discover a passion hotter than a super nova, but their plans are shattered by the untimely death of the ship’s captain and the duplicity of the co-pilot. The two lovers crash headlong into the clutches of Granger’s best-friend-turned-torture-happy-enemy. When Granger’s heritage is revealed, Kaedi relinquishes the pleasure she finds in his arms, believing herself unworthy. Granger chases after her, determined to convince her she is more precious to him than stolen cargo. This book contains explicit language, vivid relations, and the word "moist." Intended for a mature audience. Like its interstellar namesake, The Heart Nebula Series is a loosely-connected cluster of stand-alone Romantic Sci-fi stories with sassy heroines, gutsy heroes, passion, and adventure set in a galaxy far, far away. In essence, it's the stuff of stars.

Set during the height of World War II, a powerful and unsettling tale about a woodcutter and his wife, who finds a mysterious parcel thrown from a passing train. Once upon a time in an enormous forest lived a woodcutter and his wife. The woodcutter is very poor and a war rages around them, making it difficult for them to put food on the table. Yet every night, his wife prays for a child. A Jewish father rides on a train holding twin babies. His wife no longer has enough milk to feed both children. In hopes of saving them both, he wraps his daughter in a shawl and throws her into the forest. While foraging for food, the wife finds a bundle, a baby girl wrapped in a shawl. Although she knows harboring this baby could lead to her death, she takes the child home. Set against the horrors of the Holocaust and told with a fairytale-like lyricism, The Most Precious of Cargoes is a fable about family and redemption which reminds us that humanity can be found in the most inhumane of places. Translated from the French by Frank Wynne

2020 Space Hipsters Prize for Best Book in Astronomy, Space Exploration, or Space History Come Fly with Us is the story of an elite group of space travelers who flew as members of many space shuttle crews from pre-Challenger days to Columbia in 2003. Not part of the regular NASA astronaut corps, these professionals known as "payload specialists" came from a wide variety of backgrounds and were chosen for an equally wide variety of scientific, political, and national security reasons. Melvin Croft and John Youskauskas focus on this special fraternity of spacefarers and their individual reflections on living and working in space. Relatively unknown to the public and often flying only single missions, these payload specialists give the reader an unusual perspective on the experience of human spaceflight. The authors also bring to light NASA's struggle to integrate the wide-ranging personalities and professions of these men and women into the professional astronaut ranks. While Come Fly with Us relates the experiences of the payload specialists up to and including the Challenger tragedy, the authors also detail the later high-profile flights of a select few, including Barbara Morgan, John Glenn (who returned to space at the age of seventy-seven), and Ilan Ramon of Israel aboard Columbia on its final, fatal flight, STS-107.

Precious Cargo tells the fascinating story of how western hemisphere foods conquered the globe and saved it from not only mass starvation, but culinary as well. Focusing heavily American foods—specifically the lowly crops that became commodities, plus one gobbling protein source, the turkey—Dewitt describes how these foreign and often suspect temptations were transported around the world, transforming cuisines and the very fabric of life on the planet. Organized thematically by foodstuff, Precious Cargo delves into the botany, zoology and anthropology connected to new world foods, often uncovering those surprising individuals who were responsible for their spread and influence, including same traders, brutish conquerors, a Scottish millionaire obsessed with a single fruit and a British lord and colonial governor with a passion for peppers, to name a few. Precious Cargo is a must read for foodies and historians alike.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE ROGERS WRITERS' TRUST FICTION PRIZE: An infectious and heartbreaking novel from "one of this country's great kinetic writers" (Globe and Mail)--Craig Davidson's first new literary fiction since his bestselling, Giller-shortlisted Cataract City When neurosurgeon Jake Baker operates, he knows he's handling more than a patient's delicate brain tissue--he's altering their seat of consciousness, their golden vault of memory. And memory, Jake knows well, can be a tricky thing. When growing up in 1980s Niagara Falls, a.k.a. Cataract City--a seedy but magical, slightly haunted place--one of Jake's closest confidantes was his uncle Calvin, a sweet but eccentric misfit enamored of occult artefacts and outlandish conspiracy theories. The summer Jake turned twelve, Calvin invited him to join the "Saturday Night Ghost Club"--a seemingly light-hearted project to investigate some of Cataract City's more macabre urban myths. Over the course of that life-altering summer, Jake not only fell in love and began to imagine his future, he slowly, painfully came to realize that his uncle's preoccupation with chilling legends sprang from something buried so deep in his past that Calvin himself was unaware of it. By turns heartwarming and devastating, written with the skill and cinematic immediacy that has made Craig Davidson a star, The Saturday Night Ghost Club is a bravura performance from one of our most remarkable literary talents: a note-perfect novel that poignantly examines the fragility and resilience of mind, body and human spirit, as well as the haunting mutability of memory and story.

Back Matter Kevin Sweeley's Precious Cargo is a Bearded Dragon Lizard, Jenny, who is with him constantly at the forefront of his mind. She helps him make decisions and listens to his daily outpouring of thoughts and feelings. Kevin is diagnosed Paranoid Schizophrenic and swims through his troubles like a fish. He is given incredible powers by God to create anything at will. His soul mate, Katrina, also has Paranoid Schizophrenia, and goes walking on moonlit waters with him as they hold hands, make love, and Katrina is impregnated. They marry and leave the world behind. The philosophies of the double vice and twin mercy are discussed as well, flavoring the book with the condition of truth versus law.