Non-Fiction Books
Wrestling with Cadence
by Dennis Lee
2025 • Essays
A career-spanning collection of critical and personal essays from a titan of Canadian literature.
Building and expanding on his previous volume of essays, Body Music, Dennis Lee looks back on what has driven him as a poet: the mysterious germinating force he calls “cadence.” At once a stealth memoir and an essential study of how a poet writes, Wrestling With Cadence is the definitive history of a beloved Canadian poet in his own words.
“Unmissable speculations.”—Margaret Atwood
"One of the finest poets in the English language."—Quill & Quire
To Linger With You
by Donna Nebenzahl
2025 • Memoir
Donna Nebenzahl grew up in the 1950s amid a large, close-knit Portuguese family in the colony of British Guiana. Nurtured by her loving grandparents, she never inquired why her mother lived a continent away nor asked about her father’s early death. Nor did she know why, as a devout young Catholic, she had a Jewish family name. After the colony headed toward independence and she had moved to Canada, Nebenzahl began to explore the difficult issues that her family history raised. The answers emerge gradually in this luminous, compelling memoir that explores the aftermath of loss and the true meaning of home.
A "riveting memoir... recounted in lush and gorgeous, vivid prose."—Susan Schwartz, Montreal Gazette
Unorganized Territory
by David Gurr
2025 • Memoir
David Gurr, best known for his spy thrillers, recalls his own youth in vivid prose. First, an unusual World War II boyhood in rural England, under the care of two aristocratic Victorian aunts who seem to have stepped out of a Trollope novel. Then, in 1948, he is relocated to the bush on Vancouver Island with his mother and father. The Island, in the 1950s, presents a hardscrabble life in a crowded cottage with a wood stove. On the surface, it's an ideal setting for a restless adolescent hungry for adventure, but hovering over it all, unseen but not unfelt, is a dark family secret guarded closely by the author’s parents. Gurr tells the story of his topsy-turvy early life with great panache, an exceptional memory for colourful detail, and a wry sense of humour.
“One of Canada’s most formidable writers.”—The Toronto Star
Conversations with a Dead Man
by Mark Abley
2024 • Biography
REVISED AND EXPANDED WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR
When he died, Duncan Campbell Scott was known as a first-rate poet and devoted civil servant. Today, because of his work in the Department of Indian Affairs, he's considered one of history's worst Canadians. When word of this reaches Scott's ghost, he returns to the land of the living, asking poet and journalist Mark Abley to clear his name. In this book of imaginative non-fiction, Abley evokes a man who wrote vibrant poems about Indigenous people while also instituting policies designed to destroy Indigenous culture.
“Abley has produced something seemingly inconceivable: an intelligent, absorbing and, yes, entertaining book about an infamous Canadian villain” — Andrew Stobo Sniderman in Maclean’s
The Death of Tony
by Antanas Sileika
2024 • Memoir
The acclaimed novelist who wrote this book wasn’t always Antanas. Growing up in the immigrant hub of Weston, Ontario — a childhood of Lithuanian summer camp, folk dancing, and booze-soaked Christmases — Sileika was known to friends and teachers as Tony. It wasn’t until he entered university and began to understand his deep attachment to his heritage that he shed the anglicized name and became Antanas Sileika, the writer who straddles two worlds.
“Intelligent and observant... illuminates the experiences of a little-discussed ethnic group while probing the meanings of real and imagined homelands. A thoughtful reading experience.” — Kirkus Reviews