Ragged Company

Four chronically homeless people–Amelia One Sky, Timber, Double Dick and Digger–seek refuge in a warm movie theatre when a severe Arctic Front descends on the city. During what is supposed to be a one-time event, this temporary refuge transfixes them. They fall in love with this new world, and once the weather clears, continue their trips to the cinema. On one of these outings they meet Granite, a jaded and lonely journalist who has turned his back on writing “the same story over and over again” in favour of the escapist qualities of film, and an unlikely friendship is struck. A found cigarette package (contents: some unsmoked cigarettes, three $20 bills, and a lottery ticket) changes the fortune of this struggling set. The ragged company discovers they have won $13.5 million, but none of them can claim the money for lack proper identification. Enlisting the help of Granite, their lives, and fortunes, become forever changed. Ragged Company is a journey into both the future and the past. Richard Wagamese deftly explores the nature of the comforts these friends find in their ideas of “home,” as he reconnects them to their histories.

Four homeless persons befriended by a journalist while taking shelter in a movie theater enlist his help after finding a winning lottery ticket.

From the acclaimed author of Keeper’n Me and For Joshua, Dream Wheels is a vital and unsparing novel from one of the most fascinating voices in Canadian writing. Joe Willie Wolfchild is on the verge of becoming a World Champion rodeo cowboy when a legendary bull cripples him. At the same time, in the same city, Claire Hartley is brutally assaulted and her 14-year-old son, Aiden, is critically injured during a burglary. The young Ojibway-Sioux man, the black single mother and her mulatto son find their lives irrevocably changed. Joe Willie, a rodeo cowboy since he was a child, smolders in angry silence over a deformed left arm and a limp that make it impossible for him to compete. Claire, a victim of numerous bad relationships, withdraws from men and swears a bitter celibacy. Aiden gains notoriety among his criminal peers and slips into a self-destructive spiral of drugs and violence. Eager to find a place for her son to channel his explosive energies, Claire brings Aiden to a rodeo camp run by the Wolfchild family, where he is drawn to bull riding and proves to be a stunning natural. But Joe Willie refuses to have anything to do with the camp, remaining an aloof, mysterious presence to Claire and the boy. Birch Wolfchild, Joe Willie’s father, sees the potential for Aiden to become a champion and for his son to heal himself, if they can move beyond anger to forge a partnership. Claire’s and Joe Willie’s wounds bring them together in a surprising romance, and beneath it all is Birch Wolfchild’s tale of the changing of the life of the Indian cowboy. Dream Wheels is a story about change. Moving from the Wild West Shows of the late 1880s to the National Finals Rodeo in Las Vegas to a lush valley in the mountains, it tells the story of a people’s journey, a family’s vision, a man’s reawakening, a woman’s recovery, and a boy’s emergence to manhood.

When Garnet Raven was three years old, he was taken from his home on an Ojibway Indian reserve and placed in a series of foster homes. Having reached his mid-teens, he escapes at the first available opportunity, only to find himself cast adrift on the streets of the big city. Having skirted the urban underbelly once too often by age 20, he finds himself thrown in jail. While there, he gets a surprise letter from his long-forgotten native family. The sudden communication from his past spurs him to return to the reserve following his release from jail. Deciding to stay awhile, his life is changed completely as he comes to discover his sense of place, and of self. While on the reserve, Garnet is initiated into the ways of the Ojibway--both ancient and modern--by Keeper, a friend of his grandfather, and last fount of history about his people's ways. By turns funny, poignant and mystical, Keeper'n Me reflects a positive view of Native life and philosophy--as well as casting fresh light on the redemptive power of one's community and traditions.

Reproduction of the original: Ragged Dick by Horatio Alger

In 2005, award-winning writer Richard Wagamese moved with his partner to a cabin outside Kamloops, B.C. In the crisp mountain air Wagamese felt a peace he'd seldom known before. Abused and abandoned as a kid, he'd grown up feeling there was nowhere he belonged. For years, only alcohol and moves from town to town seemed to ease the pain. In One Native Life, Wagamese looks back down the road he has travelled in reclaiming his identity and talks about the things he has learned as a human being, a man and an Ojibway in his fifty-two years. Whether he's writing about playing baseball, running away with the circus, attending a sacred bundle ceremony or meeting Pierre Trudeau, he tells these stories in a healing spirit. Through them, Wagamese celebrates the learning journey his life has been. Free of rhetoric and anger despite the horrors he has faced, Wagamese's prose resonates with a peace that has come from acceptance. Acceptance is an Aboriginal principle, and he has come to see that we are all neighbours here. One Native Life is his tribute to the people, the places and the events that have allowed him to stand in the sunshine and celebrate being alive.

“Dark, nothing but darkness, thick and deep, and it wasn’t home, she could sense that, it was somewhere else. Susan Ann was trying to think, trying to remember the last thing she remembered — what day was this?” (p. 2) It is September 11, 2001, and eighty-five-year-old Susan Ann Roberts is coming to the end of her life. In and out of consciousness, she is bedridden in a Toronto hospital, confused as to what has brought her to this place. Her daughter, Lorraine, and beloved granddaughter, Meg, are by her side but they seem unable (or unwilling) to take her home. Susan Ann isn’t exactly sure where home is anymore. Lorraine had insisted her mother move to Toronto, worried about her living alone in the big house back east. Ever since, Susan Ann has been trapped—stuck in an unfamiliar city in a too-small apartment where things are so cramped that the dresser drawers in her bedroom open only partway. Susan Ann resolves that she will return home to the Maritimes one last time. Her journey begins at the bottom of the laneway of the New Brunswick farm where she spent her summers, and takes her to the town where she grew up, and then across the ponds and rivers of the Tantramar Marshes, all the way to Nova Scotia and Ragged Islands, where she had made her home with her devoted husband and children. As she travels on foot along old roads and visits the lost houses of her memory, Susan Ann is kept company by a dog from her distant past. Her unlikely guide propels Susan Ann forward, leading her ever closer to the place where she hopes to reunite with her husband. Along the way, they meet various people from Susan Ann’s life: a neighbour who died in a fire with her four siblings; the man who was her brother in all the most important ways; and a young woman who may hold the key to one of the great mysteries of Susan Ann’s life: why did her mother give her away to relatives to raise, despite the fact that she kept children who were born both before and after her? Meanwhile, Susan Ann’s son, Carl, is at his mother’s Toronto apartment sorting through her belongings. He comes across an envelope labelled TO BE SAVED. In it, he discovers assorted papers, letters, and pictures that reveal his mother’s life as a woman and a wife, not just a mother. Old wounds are opened, unanswerable questions are asked, and mysteries are both solved and created. In Ragged Islands, Don Hannah has given us a moving, witty, and tender portrait of a remarkably modern old woman at the end of a life bound by tradition and family secrets, blessed with great love, and rocked by events in the outside world. Coloured with intimate portraits of a family that seems almost familiar, Susan Ann’s journey suggests an answer to the question of what happens to the soul when the body begins to die. The final pages lead us to question what parts of a life remain behind for others to discover, how a family remembers those who have died, and where life’s final journey will take us.

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is a classic representation of the impoverished and politically powerless underclass of British society in Edwardian England, ruthlessly exploited by the institutionalized corruption of their employers and the civic and religious authorities. Epic in scale, the novel charts the ruinous effects of the laissez-faire mercantilist ethics on the men, women, and children of the working classes, and through its emblematic characters, argues for a socialist politics as the only hope for a civilized and humane life for all. It is a timeless work whose political message is as relevant today as it was in Tressell's time. For this it has long been honoured by the Trade Union movement and thinkers across the political spectrum.