Books published by NeWest Press

"In this challenging memoir about her formative years in Yellowknife in the '60s and '70s, author Margaret Macpherson lays bare her own white privilege, her multitude of unexamined microaggressions, and how her childhood was shaped by the colonialism and systemic racism that continues today. Macpherson's father, first a principal and later a federal government administrator, oversaw education in the NWT, including the high school Margaret attended with its attached hostel: a residential facility mostly housing Indigenous children. Ringing with damning and painful truths, this bittersweet telling invites white readers to examine their own personal histories in order to begin to right relations with the Indigenous Peoples on whose land they live. live"--

"John O'Neill's gothic short stories, set in the Canadian Rockies, are haunted by the violence inherent in nature and humans. The mountains are majestic and impassive. The characters are surprising, bent, but also empathetic. Their survival is tenuous. A two-sister team of goth tour guides offers guided excursions up switchback mountain trails; a paroled convict thumbs his way into the life of a family driving west; and an animal pathologist, while performing a necropsy on a grizzly bear, has an unusual encounter with both technology and humanity. Goth Girls of Banff is a superb collection, sharply written, with plot turns as consequence-laden as those on an iced-over mountain road."--

Includes author-curated discussion questions!Mark Lisac's Image Decay returns to the pugnacious world of backroom politics laid out in his award-nominated Where the Bodies Lie. Set again in that "unnamed capital city east of the Rockies," where the Brutalist architecture of the downtown core reflects the body politic laid bare.When a cantankerous ex-government photographer seeks ownership of his prints, the powers-that-be are determined to prevent the release of certain sensitive photos. Set in the 1990s, this political thriller delves into questions of identity and memory, established power and its fears and secrets, old stock versus newcomers, belonging and alienation.Image Decay investigates the intricacies of political manipulation, personal anxieties, and how history must be seen to be confronted.

Laced with humour and revelation, Anne Wheelers creative non-fiction stories tell of her serendipitous journey in the seventies, when she broke with tradition and found her own way to becoming a filmmaker and raconteur. Join this celebrated screenwriter and director as she travels south of Mombasa after calling off her wedding; attempts to gain acceptance in a male-dominated film collective; travels to India to visit friends who are devoted to a radical Master, and ultimately discovers her sense of purpose and passion close to home, sharing stories that would otherwise be lost about ordinary people living extraordinary lives. Taken by the Muse: On the Path to Becoming a Filmmaker is a must-read for anyone open to exploring the possibilities of who they are and what they might do with their lives and for those who love a good story told with integrity and warmth.

"Former pro wrestler 'Hammerhead' Jed Ounstead, now a fully-fledged private investigator, is riding high after his first successful case. In this second episode, Jed leaves the wrestling realm to enter a new arena: women's flat-track roller derby. When old acquaintance Stormy Daze seeks his help finding her team's missing coach, Jed discovers that the turnbuckle-and-metal-chair mayhem of the wrestling ring pales in comparison to roller derby's four-wheeled ferocity. As his search intensifies, Jed is drawn into the criminal orbit of a shady entrepreneur who doubles as a late-night TV personality, a high-class bookmaker with a yen for racing dachshunds, and a kinky painter with a special technique for producing art. When the thunder rolls, Jed finds he needs more than a few of his beloved banana milkshakes to solve this case"--Provided by publisher.

"Bertrand Bickersteth's debut poetry collection explores what it means to be black and Albertan through a variety of prisms: historical, biographical, and essentially, geographical. The Response of Weeds offers a much-needed window on often overlooked contributions to the province's character and provides personal perspectives on the question of black identity on the prairies. Through these rousing and evocative poems, Bickersteth uses language to call up the contours of the land itself, land that is at once mesmerizing as it is dismissively effacing. Such is black identity here on this paradoxical land, too."--

Long-listed for the 2021 Raymond Souster Award!Finalist for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Poetry at the 2021 Alberta Book Publishing Awards!Meredith Quartermain's Lullabies in the Real World is a sequence of poems about a train journey from West Coast to East Coast that invokes a patchwork of regions, voices and histories. Her language zings with train rhythms as she unfolds a complex conversation with poets such as bpNichol and Robin Blaser.This collection reflects and refracts Canada from diverse angles, and challenges colonizing literatures such as the Odyssey and various canonical British and US voices. As it moves from west to east, the book journeys back in time to interrogate historical events such as the Battle of the Plains of Abraham and the exclusion of Acadians. It ends by imagining a time before or outside colonization.Rich, playful and confrontational, Lullabies in the Real World widens the poetic lens of poetry to investigate the place of a colonial nation in history, and the place of a poet vis-à-vis the voices of other poets.

Broke City, the final book in Wendy McGrath's Santa Rosa trilogy, follows young Christine as she edges into self-awareness in the now-vanished Edmonton neighbourhood of Santa Rosa.Budding with creativity that her working-class parents do not understand, Christine questions her parents' fraught relationship, with alcoholism and implicit violence bubbling just under the surface of their marriage. Her insight turns beyond her family to her neighbourhood, nicknamed Packingtown, a community built on meat-packing plants and abattoirs, on death.Written with tight lyricism, Broke City is a brimming working-class gothic novel that reveals Christine's deepening knowledge of the adult world around her and of her own complicated place in that world.

"When an accident jeopardizing the family farm draws Amiah Williams back to Kingsley, Alberta, population 1431, she doesn't expect her homecoming to make front-page news. But there she is in The Inquirer, the mysterious tabloid that is airing her hometown's dirty laundry. Alongside stories of high school rivalries and truck-bed love affairs, disturbing revelations about Amiah's past and present are selling papers and fuelling small-town gossip. As the stakes get higher, Amiah must either expose the twisted truth behind The Inquirer or watch her life fall apart again."--

"South Away is an adventure story of the author's bicycle trip with her sister from Terrace, BC along the West coast to (almost) the tip of the Baja Peninsula. Meaghan Marie Hackinen experiences apprehension and determination as she camps in the dense forests of northern Vancouver Island and in frigid Mexican deserts; encounters strange men, suicidal highways and monster trucks; strong winds and violent storms; flat ties and broken spokes. Her couch-surfacing adventures provide an insight into the "kindness of strangers" en route. Accompanying the travel memoir is an inner journey, related through flashbacks and memories, as the author begins to better understand her relationship with her parents, grandmother, and sister. In attempting to balance risk with safety, she arrives at a minimalist philosophy of living, which requires "physical stamina and mental ingenuity." The style is engaging and personable; the images of landscape and seascape are imaginative and memorable. South Away is a rare roadtrip story--with a female lead and a female companion, a Canadian Hobbit tale of adventure and miraculous events."--

"Aspiring novelist Molly MacGregor laments she will never be like the literary heroines she reads about. Not only does she live in what she thinks the most unromantic region in the world, she is named after one of literature's least romantic heroines, Moll Flanders. Set partly at a shoe store at the world's largest shopping mall in Edmonton where Molly works and partly in an English department where she is a student, Molly of the Mall: Literary Lass and Purveyor of Fine Footwear is a story about love and a story about place. This novel explores Molly's love for the written word, love for the wrong men and the right one, and finally, her hard-won love for her city."--

>Third Place in the Prose Category at the 2019 Alcuin Society Awards for Excellence in Book Design in Canada! All Lit Up Book Club SelectionIn this provocative collection of short stories, Karen Hofmann creates characters who struggle to connect or disconnect from entanglements and relationships. With ironic accuracy and sensuous imagery, Hofmann considers a range of human foibles: a newlywed couple who transform into feral beasts during the hardships of a remote research expedition; backbiting faculty members who strip down during a post-conference BBQ; an heretical nun who explores the possibility of a new life by imaginatively excavating the fossils of BC's Burgess Shale; and an ambitious bylaw officer determined to make her mark on the city's streets.In Echolocation, Karen Hofmann has found new ways to sound the depths of the human heart.

Three years into the second millennium, Majestic, Alberta is a farm town dealing with depressed crop prices, international borders closing to Canadian beef, and a severe drought. Older farmers worry about their way of life changing while young people concoct ways to escape: drugs, partying, moving away. Even the church is on the brink of closing.When local woman Annie Gallagher is struck by lightning while divining water for a well, stories of the town's past, including that of Annie and the grandmother who taught her water witching, slowly pour forth as everyone gathers for her funeral.Told through the varied voices of the townspeople and Annie herself, The Death of Annie the Water Witcher by Lightning reveals Majestic to be a complex character in its own right, both haunted and haunting. Here, Audrey J. Whitson has written a novel of hard choices and magical necessity.

That Light Feeling Under Your Feet plunges headfirst into the surreal and slogging world of cruise ship workers.

Putting a chokehold on crime. Ex-pro-wrestler gets pulled back into the wrestling world to solve a crime.

An allegorical reckoning of the physical and psychic wounds inflicted by the oil sands.

Accustomed to being an only child, adoptee Brian Gumbo Guillemots teenage hobby was searching for his birth parents. But when he finally finds his birth mother, Kim, hes unprepared for the boisterous instant family that comes with her. Besides Kim, no one knows anything about Brians birth father. With Kim refusing to answer any questions about him, Brian must choose whether to continue the search, even if it means alienating his few friends and both his families. But the more he learns, the more he wonders whether some things are better left unknown. A late-bloomers coming of age story, The Home For Wayward Parrots explores friendship, romance, modern families and geek pop culture with wit, compassion and extremely foul-mouthed birds.