Books published by Palimpsest Press

In The Sunday Book, Michael Trussler uses memoir to excavate and explore a range of inner lives, all lived at different speeds. With essays touching on the meaning of the Holocaust in the twenty-first century to confronting the complexities of being a parent in the Anthropocene, Trussler's interconnected essays are united by his lived experience with a rare learning disability. The Sunday Book freshly engages with fundamental existential problems such as free will and contingency, all the while providing an original take on our contemporary moment.

In the early 1990's, Caitlin Maharg, grieving the loss of her parents, leaves everything she knows in Canada for Northern Ireland to pursue her love of poetry while living in a cottage by the Irish Sea. Feeling like a child again in a distant land still affected by the Troubles, she is haunted by the secrets her parents' deaths unearthed. In her longing for emotional closeness, she befriends Andy Evans, a well-known poet with a roguish charm. Their attraction soon leads to a love affair. Flouting the paisley headscarf of respectability, she plunges into a relationship that gives her an entry to the literary world, but at a price. Filled with insights into grief, longing and creativity, The Most Cunning Heart is a novel about how a quiet heroine learns to navigate deception, love and loss.

Do you believe in angels? When Xaviere is tasked with transcribing taped interviews her deceased friend Daphne left to her in her will, she begins to piece together the story of the photographer Irene Guernsey, a moderately well known but elusive photographer Daphne was interviewing. Irene's mysterious images captivate Xaviere as they had Daphne. Irene had never given interviews or talked about her work publicly, but near the end of her life, she reveals the magic hidden in plain sight in her mysterious and ethereal photographs and her attempt to capture angel wings on film. And once the angels appear, the reader is taken on a journey that spans decades and changes the lives of multiple women along the way. Everything Affects Everyone, is a novel about listening, about how women speak to one another, and about the power of the question.

In this wide-ranging collection, Andrew DuBois rounds up some 200 reviews of contemporary Canadian poets (from Jordan Abel to Jan Zwicky); American poets, memoirists, and novelists; and twenty-first century literary critics. With an approach that balances careful attention to aesthetics and style with an over-arching commitment to the crucial role of the arts in our personal and social lives, DuBois describes the objects under his discussion with a clarity and precision that aims to be both fair to the artists and enlightening for the reader. Eschewing obscurity, exiling jargon, and resisting political boilerplate, Start to Figure is a compelling record of over twenty years of critical response, from a lover of genuine art, meant to educate and entertain.

Multilingually inflected, Klara du Plessis' first collection of poetry explores the multiplicity of self through language, occupying a liminal space between South Africa and Canada. A sequence of visceral, essay-like long poems, du Plessis' writing straddles the lyrical and intellectual, traversing landscapes and fine arts canvases. Ekke is a watershed debut from one of Canada's most exciting young voices.

Blomer takes you into Southeast Asia by bicycle with her husband Rupert, their two companion-like bikes and her experiences cycling over 4000km through 4 countries over three months with the little devil she takes everywhere, her type 1 diabetes. A travel memoir, Sugar Ride explores the love of cycling and the roads it can pull you up, down and along while detailing the experience of having type 1 diabetes and the literal ride of sugar that daily injections of insulin, food and exercise create. Part loves story, part true cycling adventure and part dance with the body's strengths and weaknesses, Sugar Ride is an exploration of past adventures and how to feel about those experiences in the present.

Rumi and the Red Handbag follows the lives of Shaya and Ingrid-Simone, working together one winter at a second-hand clothing shop. Theodora's Fine Consignment Clothing shop becomes a small world where Shaya, an academic who abandoned studying the secrets of women writers, finds in Ingrid-Simone a reason to begin writing again, on scraps of paper and post-its. Fresh, unique and intelligent, Rumi and The Red Handbag is a journey to the Museum of Bags and Purses in Amsterdam, a journey to find Rumi, the soul, and the secret hidden in a red handbag.