Split Tooth

Longlisted for the 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize Shortlisted for the 2019 Amazon First Novel Award Shortlisted for the 2019 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize Winner of the 2019 Indigenous Voices Award for Published Prose in English Winner of the 2018 Alcuin Society Awards for Excellence in Book Design – Prose Fiction Longlisted for the 2019 Sunburst Award From the internationally acclaimed Inuit throat singer who has dazzled and enthralled the world with music it had never heard before, a fierce, tender, heartbreaking story unlike anything you've ever read. Fact can be as strange as fiction. It can also be as dark, as violent, as rapturous. In the end, there may be no difference between them. A girl grows up in Nunavut in the 1970s. She knows joy, and friendship, and parents' love. She knows boredom, and listlessness, and bullying. She knows the tedium of the everyday world, and the raw, amoral power of the ice and sky, the seductive energy of the animal world. She knows the ravages of alcohol, and violence at the hands of those she should be able to trust. She sees the spirits that surround her, and the immense power that dwarfs all of us. When she becomes pregnant, she must navigate all this. Veering back and forth between the grittiest features of a small arctic town, the electrifying proximity of the world of animals, and ravishing world of myth, Tanya Tagaq explores a world where the distinctions between good and evil, animal and human, victim and transgressor, real and imagined lose their meaning, but the guiding power of love remains. Haunting, brooding, exhilarating, and tender all at once, Tagaq moves effortlessly between fiction and memoir, myth and reality, poetry and prose, and conjures a world and a heroine readers will never forget.

Inspired by history, Our Story is a beautifully illustrated collection of original stories from some of Canada’s most celebrated Aboriginal writers. Asked to explore seminal moments in Canadian history from an Aboriginal perspective, these ten acclaimed authors have travelled through our country’s past to discover the moments that shaped our nation and its people. Drawing on their skills as gifted storytellers and the unique perspectives their heritage affords, the contributors to this collection offer wonderfully imaginative accounts of what it’s like to participate in history. From a tale of Viking raiders to a story set during the Oka crisis, the authors tackle a wide range of issues and events, taking us into the unknown, while also bringing the familiar into sharper focus. Our Story brings together an impressive array of voices—Inuk, Cherokee, Ojibway, Cree, and Salish to name just a few—from across the country and across the spectrum of First Nations. These are the novelists, playwrights, journalists, activists, and artists whose work is both Aboriginal and uniquely Canadian. Brought together to explore and articulate their peoples’ experience of our country’s shared history, these authors’ grace, insight, and humour help all Canadians understand the forces and experiences that have made us who we are. Maria Campbell • Tantoo Cardinal • Tomson Highway • Drew Hayden Taylor • Basil Johnston • Thomas King • Brian Maracle • Lee Maracle • Jovette Marchessault • Rachel Qitsualik

Based on a 19th century unsolved murder, this “artfully constructed” historical novel explores family life and a mysterious death in the Maritime Provinces (Quill & Quire). Nova Scotia, 1876. Sixteen-year-old Mary Harney is a dreamer who wants more than anything to escape her family’s Cumberland County homestead. Terrorized by her alcoholic father, she receives cold comfort from her melancholy mother, Ann. But when Ann becomes ill, the already tenuous family life begins to unravel—until the September evening when Mary suddenly goes missing. Across the water on Prince Edward Island, Gilbert Bell’s son finds a body washed up on the beach below the family farm. Mary’s father quickly identifies the body as hers. As the community is visited first by the local coroner and then by investigators, a mysterious tale comes into focus. Found Drowned is both a riveting domestic thriller and a darkly fascinating picture of 19th century life, law, and criminal investigation in Nova Scotia. At once tightly plotted and pensive, the novel travels back to the circumstances that led to Mary’s disappearance and then back further to the circumstances of her parents’ marriage, all the while building toward a raucous courtroom finale.

Sanaaq is an intimate story of an Inuit family negotiating the changes brought into their community by the coming of the qallunaat, the white people, in the mid-nineteenth century. Composed in 48 episodes, it recounts the daily life of Sanaaq, a strong and outspoken young widow, her daughter Qumaq, and their small semi-nomadic community in northern Quebec. Here they live their lives hunting seal, repairing their kayak, and gathering mussels under blue sea ice before the tide comes in. These are ordinary extraordinary lives: marriages are made and unmade, children are born and named, violence appears in the form of a fearful husband or a hungry polar bear. Here the spirit world is alive and relations with non-humans are never taken lightly. And under it all, the growing intrusion of the qallunaat and the battle for souls between the Catholic and Anglican missionaries threatens to forever change the way of life of Sanaaq and her young family.

A tale of contention over love and money—among dragons Jo Walton burst onto the fantasy scene with The King's Peace, acclaimed by writers as diverse as Poul Anderson, Robin Hobb, and Ken MacLeod. In 2002, she was voted the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Now Walton returns with Tooth and Claw, a very different kind of fantasy story: the tale of a family dealing with the death of their father, of a son who goes to law for his inheritance, a son who agonizes over his father's deathbed confession, a daughter who falls in love, a daughter who becomes involved in the abolition movement, and a daughter sacrificing herself for her husband. Except that everyone in the story is a dragon, red in tooth and claw. Here is a world of politics and train stations, of churchmen and family retainers, of courtship and country houses...in which, on the death of an elder, family members gather to eat the body of the deceased. In which society's high-and-mighty members avail themselves of the privilege of killing and eating the weaker children, which they do with ceremony and relish, growing stronger thereby. You have never read a novel like Tooth and Claw. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Nia Centre for the Arts is a Toronto-based charity that supports, promotes, and showcases art from across the Afro-Diaspora. We build the creative capacity of our community and support the development of a healthy identity in young people through artistic development, mentorship and employment opportunities. We are a platform for the arts that is rooted in the diversity of Black-Canadian experiences. In 2021, we hand-selected six emerging writers to participate in the Black Pen writing intensive program. The writers in this program challenged themselves, honed into their craft, stepped into their greatness and dedicated themselves to their collective manuscript—GRIOT: Sojourn into the Dark. Follow the writers through a deep and authentic exploration of their literary voices as we ‘Sojourn into the Dark’; a collection of fiction and nonfiction that crosses borders, from Nigeria to Jamaica, explores themes of loss and connection, and embraces tradition while pushing the art of storytelling forward.

When her marriage suddenly ends, and a diary documenting her beloved Opa’s escape from Nazi-occupied Netherlands in the summer of 1942 is discovered, Naomi Lewis decides to retrace his journey to freedom. Travelling alone from Amsterdam to Lyon, she discovers family secrets and her own narrative as a second-generation Jewish Canadian. With vulnerability, humour, and wisdom, Lewis’s memoir asks tough questions about her identity as a secular Jew, the accuracy of family stories, and the impact of the Holocaust on subsequent generations.