Books published by NeWest Press

Finalist for Trade Fiction at the 2019 Alberta Book Publishing Awards!Twenty-nine-year-old Natasha Bell went for an evening jog, just like any other night - except now no one knows where she is. Not her sister, Abby - eighteen, eight months pregnant, and without a game plan. Not her childhood sweetheart, now ex-boyfriend, Greg, an introverted academic who could never bring himself to commit. Not her best friend Josie, a newlywed, born-again Christian, with whom Natasha recently had a falling out. And not detective Reuben Blake, who thought this case would be open 'n shut - a quick way to prove himself and move up the ranks. Missing person's statistics suggest Natasha's ex is the primary suspect, but what about the possibility of a stranger abduction? Or the possibility that Natasha left voluntarily or took her own life? What about Natasha's mother, who took off eighteen years before her daughter's disappearance? As days stretch into months and months stretch into years, the evidence that emerges seems only to complicate the picture more. What secrets might Natasha have been keeping? - and, for that matter, her friends and family.

After a series of assassinations rocks Calgary's underworld, Detective Lane is conscripted along with his husband Arthur into working undercover to seek out links in the Mexico-Canada drug connection and stop the violence.As tensions mount back in Canada and outright war on the streets seems imminent, the laconic detective and his allies must use some unorthodox tactics to avert disaster in the Gulf of California and dismantle the cartel.

"Wild Daisies in the Sand" is a series of diary entries beginning in 1941 when the author was imprisoned in concentration camps first in Petawawa and then Angler Ontario a young Japanese Canadian like many others deemed dangerous by the Canadian government because of his race

Robert Pepper Smith''s trilogy of novels chronicling the lives of those with deep roots in the orchard lands of British Columbia comes full circle with this volume, collecting newly revised editions of The Wheel Keeper and House of Spells with Sanctuary. The Wheel Keeper introduced readers to Michael Guzzo, raised in one of the many immigrant families who flocked to the vineyards and orchards of the Kootenays. When the government plans to flood his village for a hydroelectric project, young Michael seeks escape with his rebellious cousin Maren, who is experiencing her own story of displacement. In House of Spells, Rose and Lacey are two teenagers from the region who share a vital connection to Michael. When Rose becomes pregnant, the wealthy Mr Giacomo offers to raise the child, but can this mysterious benefactor be trusted? Or is there something sinister going on behind the local entrepreneurs offer? Finally, in the never-before-published Sanctuary, the stories of Michael, Rose and Lacey merge after Lacey goes in search of Michael in Central America. These two seekers, estranged from their homeland, must face down the forces of industry and politics that threaten their life-sustaining connections to land, identity and memory.

This is a highly-charged collection of personal essays, haunted by loss, evoking turbulent physical and emotional Canadian landscapes. Sarah de Leeuw''s creative non-fiction captures strange inconsistencies and aberrations of human behaviour, urging us to be observant and aware. The essays are wide in scope and exposing what -- and who -- goes missing. With staggering insight, Sarah de Leeuw reflects on missing geographies and people, including missing women, both those she has know and those whom she will never get to know. The writing is courageously focused, juxtaposing places and things that can be touched and known -- emotionally, physically, psychologically -- with what has become intangible, unnoticed, or actively ignored. Throughout these essays, de Leeuw''s imagistic memories are layered with meaning, providing a survival guide for the present, including a survival that comes with the profound responsibility to bear witness.

An unnamed narrator travels through a maze that is at once mutable and immutable: walls fall to vine-filled forests, hallways to rivers, bridges to lamp-lit boats. What remains is the desire to escape. He is led along his harrowing path by Willow, a mysterious figure who cajoles him and responds to questions in a winking sphinx-like manner, with answers that are often more baffling than clear. Interspersed are the memories of the narrator, of his childhood and adolescence, and of his grandmother, a wise artist who at once pushes his creativity, while leaving him the freedom to craft his own journey. Playing with the imagery and landscapes of Dante Alighieri''s Divine Comedy and Italo Calvino''s Invisible Cities, Steven Peters'' debut reveals how pivotal moments in our lives give substance and shape to the labyrinths in our minds.

The problem with writer longevity can be a complicating, even contradictory oeuvre. Hopefully". This book collects forty years of essays and speeches that Rudy Wiebe crafted over his many years as an author. In this illuminating and wide-ranging selection, Wiebe provides a look behind the curtain, revealing his thought processes as he worked on many of his great books. Throughout this selection, he dissects controversies that arose after publication of his early novels, meditates on words and their inherent power, explores the great Canadian North and the Canadian body politic, reckons with his family history and Mennonite faith, all while providing an engaging and enlightening commentary. This is a vital compilation of a writing life.

RCMP Inspector Coswell is back. A university professor is murdered and his corpse is revealed to a first year anatomy class in spectacular fashion -- nude on a slab alongside shrouded medical cadavers. He begins his investigation with Corporal James, his long time assistant, but is abruptly assigned a new partner, a female officer who arrives under a political cloud. Already depressed by his perceived plunge into senility, Coswell struggles to stifle his own gender biases and work effectively with this woman. Their list of suspects grows: failed students, a jealous colleague, an intriguing ex-wife and a criminal cartel. Clues emerge that send them all over the city of Vancouver from UBC campus to downtown and its gourmet restaurants.

In this coming-of-age story, Benjie Gabai is convinced he''s been the victim of a terrible cosmic hoax. Instead of being born in the 18th century as a French-Canadian voyageur, God has plunked him down in present-day Montreal, into a family that views his fur trade obsession as proof that their Benjie, once so bursting with promise, has well and truly lost it. Benjie serves out his days as caretaker of The Bay''s poky in-store fur trade museum, dusting and polishing the artifacts that fuel his imagination. When he learns his museum is about to be closed down, scattering his precious collection to the four winds, he hatches a plan that risks bringing his voyageur illusions lapping dangerously up against reality. This book melds Canadian frontier history with the madcap adventures of a young man who is not ready to meet adulthood head on.

His psyche still reeling from having to kill a criminal in the line of duty, Calgarys Detective Lane flies to Cuba to celebrate the wedding of his beloved niece. While there, though, he finds himself drafted by the local police into investigating the murder of a Canadian tourist. Upon his return to Calgary, links between this incident and the deaths of local elderly pensioners start to make themselves known, drawing Lane and his partner Nigel Li further into a web of conspiracy, politics and big money. Garry Ryans award-winning, best-selling mystery series continues with all the intrigue, good humour and mochaccinos that fans have come to expect.

After the accidental death of a high school-aged friend, the Lansing family has split along fault lines previously hidden under a patina of suburban banality. Every family''s got secrets, but for the Lansings those secrets end up propelling them away from the border town of Lloydminster to foreign shores, prison, and beyond. Told via thirty-three flash fiction narratives, fractured like the psyches of its characters, Border Markers is a collection with keen edges and tough language. It''s a slice of prairie noir that straddles the line between magic and gritty realism. Recalling Tania Hershman''s The White Road & Other Stories, as well as Robert Oren Butler''s Severance, Jenny Ferguson''s debut is an essential collection of commonplace tragedies and the ghosts of failures past.

Karen Hofmanns empathetic and cathartic novel pieces together the lives of five members of the Lund family following their enforced dispersal after the death of the father and the hospitalisation of the mother in the remote West Coast community of Butterfly Lake. It explores their self-doubts and aspirations in the ways they cope with their separation and reunion through their work and personal relationships, and reveals the ways in which their past is filtered through memory and desire. It also skillfully exposes a Vancouver class system from the perspectives of diverse socio-economic conditions and lifestyles. The book is character-driven and well-wrought, with a tenderness that propels the reader forward alongside the Lunds who are learning to fuse together as a chosen family.

Its 1994 and Pete Curtis cant wait to get out of Thunder Bay, Ontario. Already, he is playing drums in a band whose songs belong on mix-tapes everywhere. Even though his new girlfriend seems underwhelmed, he knows its just a matter of time before he and his pals break big. Ten years later, Pete is stuck teaching high school in the hometown he longed to escape, while his former best friend and bandmate is a bona fide rock star. In his debut novel, with its compelling hook and realistically flawed characters, Greg Rhyno remembers the time signatures of mid-nineties. Told in two alternating decades, this is a raucous and evocative story about the difficulties of living in the present when you cant escape your past.

"When he met her she was a beauty queen, Who wanted something more. Now she's hanging out with him In front of the liquor store." It's hard enough for Johnny and his wife Caroline to keep their farm afloat when the banks, the government, technology, and nature itself all seem in collusion against them. But when an old high school classmate -- now a handsome land speculator -- returns to town, Johnny and Caroline's marriage is at stake as well. In the short time since its premiere at the Blyth Festival in 2012, Ken Cameron's "Dear Johnny Deere" has established itself as a new Canadian musical-theatre classic. With more than a dozen songs by alt-country singer/songwriter Fred Eaglesmith woven through the action, Dear Johnny Deere is a warm-hearted, tough-minded piece of entertainment that will appeal to theatregoers and Fredheads alike.

In this new collection, two-time winner of the Saskatchewan Book Award for Poetry Gerald Hill fuses verse, prose, history, photography, and his own life's story to create a uniquely personal document of mid-century life in Regina's suburbs, one that peels back placid suburban archetypes to expose the messy, challenging systems churning underneath.

The fires of the Second World War are beginning to burn down, but legendary Canadian aviatrix Sharon Lacey is not out of danger just yet. Complications enter the young ace's life as deep-seated racial and class prejudice, potential fifth columnists and even her own killer code of honour threaten her hard-fought reputation, while a new and wonderful secret might just prove to be her undoing.Meanwhile, across the Channel in Fortress Europe, new weapons have started rolling off Nazi production lines, and the characteristic buzz of the deadly V-1 flying bomb fills the air.In the second act of his Calgary Herald-bestselling Blackbirds trilogy, Garry Ryan pits his intrepid heroine against an array of deadly new foes and challenges, proving that in war the enemy may wear the same uniform as your own.