Fiction

In this gripping, horror-laced debut, a young Cree woman’s dreams lead her on a perilous journey of self-discovery that ultimately forces her to confront the toll of a legacy of violence on her family, her community and the land they call home.

Mackenzie, a Cree millennial, wakes up in her one-bedroom Vancouver apartment clutching a pine bough she had been holding in her dream just moments earlier. When she blinks, it disappears. But she can still smell the sharp pine scent in the air, the nearest pine tree a thousand kilometres away in the far reaches of Treaty 8.

Mackenzie continues to accidentally bring back items from her dreams, dreams that are eerily similar to real memories of her older sister and Kokum before their untimely deaths. As Mackenzie’s life spirals into a living nightmare—crows are following her around and she’s getting texts from her dead sister on the other side—it becomes clear that these dreams have terrifying, real-life consequences. Desperate for help, Mackenzie returns to her mother, sister, cousin, and aunties in her small Alberta hometown. Together, they try to uncover what is haunting Mackenzie before something irrevocable happens to anyone else around her.

Haunting, fierce, an ode to female relations and the strength found in kinship, Bad Cree is a gripping, arresting debut by an unforgettable voice.

Reviews
"With creeps that are ever-creepy and love flowing like beer at a bush party, Bad Cree is a book about the power of dreams, home and family. It reads like a tribute to the ones who came before us Lee Maracle, Jeanette Armstrong, Eden Robinson. This book is tough iskwew in flannel shirts with long unbrushed hair, just looking good. It’s tea rings on Formica tables, cigarette smoke wafting through windows, and an eerie magical realism that only belongs to the bush. Full of Auntie power, Jessica Johns is really coming into her own immense storytelling ways." — Katherena Vermette, author of The Break and The Strangers

"Bad Cree is a masterwork of creeping tension. Wry, moody and subversive, Johns explores the power of connections, both the harm and the healing, with characters rich and warm, tangled in each other, to the land and to the supernatural. Couldn't put it down." — Eden Robinson, author of the Trickster trilogy

Additional Information
304 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | Paperback

Imbued with passion, creativity and insight, Brandon Reid’s debut novel is a wonderfully creative coming-of-age story exploring indigeneity, masculinity and cultural tradition.

Twelve-year-old Derik Mormin travels with his father and a family friend to Bella Bella for his grandfather’s funeral. Along the way, he uncovers the traumatic history of his ancestors, considers his relationship to masculinity and explores the contrast between rural and urban lifestyles in hopes of reconciling the seemingly unreconcilable, the beauty of each the Indigenous and “Western” way of life—hence beautiful beautiful.

He travails a storm, meets long-lost relatives, discovers his ancestral homeland; he suffers through catching fish, gains and loses companions, learns to heal trauma. In Beautiful Beautiful we delve into the mind of a gifted boy who struggles to find his role and persona through elusive circumstance, and—

All right, that’s quite enough third-person pandering; you’re not fooling anyone. Redbird here, Derik’s babysitter, and narrator of this here story. Make sure to smash that like button. We’re here to bring light to an otherwise grave subject, friends. It’s only natural to laugh while crying. I bring story to life. One minute I’m a songbird singing from a bough, the next, I’m rapture. I connect you to the realm of spirit… Well, as best I can, given your mundane allocation.

Follow us through primordial visions, dance with a cannibal (don’t worry, they’re friendly once tamed) and discover what it takes to be united. Together, we’ll have fun. Together, we are one. So tuck in, and believe what you’ll believe, for who knows what yesterday brings. Amen and all my relations, all my relations and amen.

Reviews
“Beautiful Beautiful is a fitting title for Brandon Reid's novel, for it describes the work itself—it's simply beautiful. Reid manages to capture hypnotic traditional storytelling in written form—by stretching, manipulating and breaking traditional rules and conventions of the English language. Reid draws us into the tormentous but stunning world of a boy who, while young in years, is an ancient soul. Through brilliant description, mind-blowing shifting of perspective and a brilliant use of the boy's internal voice, we join the daily toils of a Heiltsuk family as they struggle to live off the capricious bounty of the Pacific Ocean. Like Omar El Akkad’s What Strange Paradise, Beautiful Beautiful stakes out new ground in the literary scene.”— Darrel J. McLeod, author of A Season in Chezgh’un

Additional Information
336 pages | 5.50" x 8.50" | Paperback

Being in Being contains three masterpieces by legendary Haida mythteller Skaay of the Qquuna Qiighawaay. The shortest recounts the high points of the legend of his family. The second, Raven Travelling, is the longest and most complex version of the story of the Raven ever recorded on the Northwest Coast. The third is The Qquuna Cycle, a narrative poem of nearly 5,500 lines, one of the true masterpieces of North American literature. Robert Bringhurst’s eloquent and vivid translations of these works are supplemented by explanatory notes that supply the needed background information.

Additional Information
384 pages | 5.50" x 8.50" | Paperback

A visceral and compelling mystery about a Cherokee archeologist for the Bureau of Indian Affairs who is summoned to rural Oklahoma to investigate the disappearance of two women…one of them her sister.

There are secrets in the land.

As an archeologist for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Syd Walker spends her days in Rhode Island trying to protect the land's indigenous past, even as she’s escaping her own.

While Syd is dedicated to her job, she’s haunted by a night of violence she barely escaped in her Oklahoma hometown fifteen years ago. Though she swore she’d never go back, the past comes calling.

When a skull is found near the crime scene of her youth, just as her sister, Emma Lou, vanishes, Syd knows she must return home. She refuses to let her sister's disappearance, or the remains, go ignored—as so often happens in cases of missing Native women.

But not everyone is glad to have Syd home, and she can feel the crosshairs on her. Still, the deeper Syd digs, the more she uncovers about a string of missing indigenous women cases going back decades. To save her sister, she must expose a darkness in the town that no one wants to face—not even Syd.

The truth will be unearthed.

Reviews
“Blood Sisters sets its hooks on page one and then pulls relentlessly and colorfully through buried secrets and rediscovered Native heritage.”— C. J. Box, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Storm Front

"Vanessa Lillie’s riveting thriller explores the elusiveness of truth, and the history that binds people together—and to a place—no matter the time or the distance. At once captivating and illuminating, surprising and powerful, Blood Sisters is a story that resonates."—Megan Miranda, New York Times bestselling author of All the Missing Girls

“Combines pulse-pounding action with Cherokee myth and customs. I loved Syd Walker, a compelling new character who’s dealing with her own disturbing family history while trying to unravel the disappearance of several Native women. I hope we’ll see more of Syd Walker soon!” —David Heska Wanbli Weiden, award-winning author of Winter Counts

“This suspenseful mystery will not only captivate you, but it may just teach you something about Cherokee history, land rights and the plague of missing and murdered Indigenous women. Including queer and Two-Spirit characters, Blood Sisters is a meaningful and compelling thriller.” —Ms. Magazine

Additional Information
384 pages | 6.21" x 9.29" | Hardcover

Krie Redsky is an extraordinary Indigenous child who has both a curse and blessing that allows him to walk between this world and the Spirit Realm. He is also at an age where he is learning to cope with the twists and turns of friendships, the awkwardness of first love, and the self-doubt that must be overcome following loss and betrayal. But, nurtured by Knowledge Keepers as “one who is without fear, and with the ability to cross realities,” he is soon recognized as an individual who can – and will – battle the terrifying ancient spirit stealers known as Bonewalkers. But is he strong enough for what is to come?

Additional Information
236 pages | 5.50" x 8.50" | Paperback

Cash Blackbear, a young Ojibwe woman and occasional sleuth, is back on the case after a man is found dead on a rural Minnesota farm in the next installment of the acclaimed Native crime series.

Minnesota, 1970s: It’s spring in the Red River Valley and Cash Blackbear is doing fieldwork for a local farmer—until she finds him dead on the kitchen floor of the property’s rented farmhouse. The tenant, a Native field laborer, and his wife are nowhere to be found, but Cash discovers their young daughter, Shawnee, cowering under a bed. The girl, a possible witness to the killing, is too terrified to speak.

In the wake of the murder, Cash can’t deny her intuitive abilities: she is suspicious of the farmer’s grieving widow, who offers to take in Shawnee temporarily. While Cash is scouring White Earth Reservation for Shawnee’s missing mother—whom Cash wants to find before the girl is put in the foster system—another body turns up. Concerned by the escalating threat, Cash races against the clock to figure out the truth of what happened in the farmhouse.

Broken Fields is a compelling, atmospheric read woven with details of American Indian life in northern Minnesota, abusive farm labor practices and women’s liberation.

Reviews
“A tragic, unforgiving crime novel that emphasizes the perils of the foster care system for Indigenous children.”—Library Journal, Starred Review

“Peyton Place meets Fargo in this clipped tale of misdoings in the Red River Valley . . . Rendon explor[es] the ways the deck is stacked against Cash because she’s a woman, an Ojibwe, and a maverick with limited respect for white men’s rules.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Rendon excels at balancing plot and character, taking time to probe Cash’s psychology while orchestrating a deliciously complicated mystery for her to solve. Readers will be rapt.”—Publishers Weekly

“Outstanding . . . Rendon delivers lots of suspense; a resourceful, rural community-smart heroine in Cash; and wrenching insights into the overt and covert racism endured by Indigenous people.”—Booklist

Series Information
This is the fourth book in the Cash Blackbear Mystery series from author Marcie Rendon. 

Additional Information
272 pages | 5.83" x 8.60" | Hardcover 

Motherhood, trauma, and familial history are woven together into a powerful collection from the award-winning author of What Became My Grieving Ceremony. Beginning with a revelation of familial sexual abuse, Building a Nest from the Bones of My People charts the impact of this revelation on the speaker. From the pain of estrangement to navigating first-time motherhood in the midst of a family crisis, Morgan explores the complexities of generational and secondary abuse, intertwined as they are with the impacts of colonization.

Reviews
"Cara-Lyn Morgan offers not only loss, grief, and anger in this powerful collection, but also resolve, resistance, and reckoning—with the past, with what we bequeath our children, and the intentionality of those decisions. A brilliant and resonant meditation on becoming a mother and what it takes to build a new nest from the salvage of what’s been given to us. 'Burn the sage. / we’re done.'"—Lisa Bird-Wilson, author of Probably Ruby

"With her new collection, Cara-Lyn Morgan, demonstrates the lyrical alchemy of transforming ancestral pain into poetic gold through the unflinching art of truth-telling. These poems are raw as nerve endings, encapsulating wisdom enduring as teeth and bones. They are tender, well-crafted, and fearless—reminding us how speaking out into stifling silence can create muscle strong enough to move a woman from fearful mourning to courageous motherhood. Through Building a Nest from the Bones of My People, the pain of the past is excavated like an aching, crooked bone—rebroken to set the future on firm footing. Smoldering embers of generational trauma are doused, ghosts are set to rest and the seeds of hope begin to blossom. We can all heal. With this hauntingly beautiful collection, Morgan shows us how."—Andrea Thompson, author of A Selected History of Soul Speak

Additional Information
80 pages | 5.13" x 8.03" | Paperback

To celebrate the fifth anniversary of the Indigenous Voices Awards, an anthology consisting of selected works by finalists over the past five years, edited by Jordan Abel, Carleigh Baker, and Madeleine Reddon.

For five years, the Indigenous Voices Awards have nurtured the work of Indigenous writers in lands claimed by Canada. Established in 2017 initially through a crowd-funded campaign by lawyer Robin Parker and author Silvia Moreno-Garcia that set an initial fundraising goal of $10,000, the initiative raised over $116,000 in just four months.

Through generous support from organizations such as Penguin Random House Canada, CELA, and others, the award has grown and have helped usher in a new and dynamic generation of Indigenous writers. Past IVA recipients include Billy-Ray Belcourt, Tanya Tagaq, and Jesse Thistle. The IVAs also help promote the works of unpublished writers, helping launch the careers of Smokii Sumac, Cody Caetano, and Samantha Martin-Bird.

For the first time, a selection of standout works over the past five years of the Indigenous Voices Award will be collected in an anthology that will highlight some of the most groundbreaking Indigenous writing across poetry, prose, and theatre in English, French, and in an Indigenous language. Curated by award-winning and critically acclaimed writers Carleigh Baker, Jordan Abel, and Indigenous scholar Madeleine Reddon, this anthology will be a true celebration of Indigenous storytelling that will both introduce readers to emerging luminaries as well as return them to treasured favourites.

Educator Information
Carving Space: The Indigenous Voices Awards Anthology: A collection of prose and poetry from emerging Indigenous writers in lands claimed by Canada includes a selection of standout work from the first five years of the Indigenous Voices Awards.

Additional Information
400 pages | 5.50" x 8.25" | Paperback

Crushed Wild Mint is a collection of poems embodying land love and ancestral wisdom, deeply rooted to the poet’s motherland and their experience as a parent, herbalist and careful observer of the patterns and power of their territory. Jess Housty grapples with the natural and the supernatural, transformation and the hard work of living that our bodies are doing—held by mountains, by oceans, by ancestors and by the grief and love that come with communing.

Housty’s poems are textural—blossoms, feathers, stubborn blots of snow—and reading them is a sensory offering that invites the reader’s whole body to be transported in the experience. Their writing converses with mountains, animals and all our kin beyond the human realm as they sit beside their ancestors’ bones and move throughout the geography of their homeland. Housty’s exploration of history and futurity, ceremony and sexuality, grieving and thriving invites us to look both inward and outward to redefine our sense of community.

Through these poems we can explore living and loving as a practice, and placemaking as an essential part of exploring our humanity and relationality.

Awards

• 2024 Bill Duthie Booksellers’ Choice Award winner
• 2024 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Award winner

Reviews
"When the mountains of your territory are your ancestors, you paint the landscapes as Jess Housty does in this evocative, powerful collection of poetry: in the language of ceremony as taut as the inner surface of a mussel shell when the meat is stripped away. Their hyperlocality is precise medicine, an expansive, generous meditation on the mutual care of mountains, the forgiving veins of rivers, all the liminal territories and beings soaked in the verdant magic of the Pacific Northwest Coast." — Eden Robinson

"I return to read and then stop to wonder, return to read and still wonder: How is this so true? Let these words love you. They’ll sing." — Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas

Additional Information
132 pages | 5.50" x 8.00" | Paperback

December 12th, 2019, Jade returns to the rural lake town of Proofrock the same day as convicted Indigenous serial killer Dark Mill South escapes into town to complete his revenge killings, in this riveting sequel to My Heart Is a Chainsaw from New York Times bestselling author, Stephen Graham Jones.

Four years after her tumultuous senior year, Jade Daniels is released from prison right before Christmas when her conviction is overturned. But life beyond bars takes a dangerous turn as soon as she returns to Proofrock. Convicted Serial Killer, Dark Mill South, seeking revenge for thirty-eight Dakota men hanged in 1862, escapes from his prison transfer due to a blizzard, just outside of Proofrock, Idaho.

Dark Mill South’s Reunion Tour began on December 12th, 2019, a Thursday.

Thirty-six hours and twenty bodies later, on Friday the 13th, it would be over.

Don’t Fear the Reaper is the page-turning sequel to My Heart Is a Chainsaw from New York Times bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones.

Series Information
This is the second book in The Indian Lake Trilogy.

Additional Information
464 pages | 5.50" x 8.37" | Hardcover

Buffalo Mountain is set to host a gold coin exhibition with dealers coming from all over, and Thumps DreadfulWater winds up with the task of making sure the event goes off without a hitch. As if he didn’t already have enough to do.

For starters, he and Claire Merchant are trying to work out their relationship. Should they move in together or should they continue on as they have in the past? And there’s Sheriff Duke Hockney, who wants Thumps to give up landscape photography and return to law enforcement. And last but not least, Cisco Cruz, the ninja assassin, shows up in town with a fiancée in tow.

Can things get any more complicated for our hero?

Yes, they can.

When one of the dealers at the exhibition winds up dead, Cruz’s fiancée is revealed to be an FBI agent responsible for his protection. And Claire’s adoption of Ivory hits a major snag. Like it or not, Thumps is going to have to help Claire as best he can, discover why Cruz is really back in town and try to unravel the murder of the coin dealer—before anyone else dies.

In this new DreadfulWater instalment, our favourite reluctant investigator returns with his signature wit and wry humour to solve a mystery that only Thomas King could create.

Series Information
This book is from the DreadfulWater Mystery series, a mystery/detective series from Thomas King.

Books in this series include:
- Dreadful Water
- The Red Power Murders
- Cold Skies
- A Matter of Malice
- The Obsidian Murders
- Deep House 
- Double Eagle
- Black Ice

Additional Information
304 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | Paperback

The New York Times–bestselling author of The Only Good Indians and My Heart Is a Chainsaw makes his comics debut with this time-hopping horror thriller about far-future Indigenous outcasts on a mission to kill Christopher Columbus.

The year is 2112, and it’s the apocalypse exactly as expected: rivers receding, oceans rising, civilization crumbling. Humanity has given up hope, except for a group of Indigenous outcasts who have discovered a time travel portal in a cave in the desert and figured out where everything took a turn for the worst: America.

Convinced that the only way to save the world is to rewrite its past, they send one of their own—a reluctant linguist named Tad—on a bloody, one-way mission to 1492 to kill Christopher Columbus before he reaches the so-called New World. But there are steep costs to disrupting the timeline, and taking down an icon isn’t an easy task for an academic with no tactical training and only a wavering moral compass to guide him. As the horror of the task ahead unfolds and Tad’s commitment is tested, his actions could trigger a devastating new fate for his friends and the future.

Join Stephen Graham Jones and artist Davide Gianfelice for Earthdivers, Vol. 1 (collecting Earthdivers issues #1-6), the beginning of an unforgettable ongoing sci-fi slasher spanning centuries of America’s Colonial past to explore the staggering forces of history and the individual choices we make to survive it.

Reviews
"Earthdivers is why I read comics–a timely concept told boldly; a strong debut by Stephen Graham Jones who proves a voice to watch with something to say; and career work by Davide Gianfelice, a veteran artist who was already light years ahead of his peers." –Pornsak Pichetshote, author of The Good Asian

“A time-twisting trip you don't want to miss! Myths, mayhem and history-altering murders ahoy!” –Cavan Scott, author of Dead Seas

“Earthdivers feels fresh, compelling, and bold…It’s a comic that stands head and shoulders apart from the rest of the pack on the shelves. Don’t wait for the trade – this is an urgent comic that begs to be read.” –Comic Watch

“Stephen Graham Jones enters the comics scene with a dense but fascinating and well-paced comic with a tasty dash of political commentary, as every great science fiction story should have. The visuals from Davide Gianfelice and Joana Lafuente are well-directed and stunningly detailed, making for a wholly immersive reading experience.” –Monkeys Fighting Robots

Series Information
This is the first book in the Earthdivers series.

Additional Information
176 pages | 6.69" x 10.19" | Paperback

In this complex, at times dark, poetry collection from Inuk author Jamesie Fournier, readers are taken through the recesses of a character struggling with inner demons whispering into his mind.

As he attempts to overcome his inner turmoil within a Colonial and contemporary system that oppresses him, the speaker guides readers through verse both ethereal and imagistic. Echoing artists as varied as Margaret Laurence and The Velvet Underground, this sweeping collection of bilingual verse deals with erasure, resilience, and—above all—resistance through the voice of one complex protagonist.

Educator Information
Bilingual Verse in English and Inuktitut 

Additional Information
132 pages | 7.00" x 9.25" | 10 b&w Photos | Paperback

From the acclaimed, boundary-breaking author of NISHGA comes a hypnotic and mystifying exploration of land and legacy.

Reimagining James Fenimore Cooper’s nineteenth-century text The Last of the Mohicans from the contemporary perspective of an urban Nisga’a person whose relationship to land and traditional knowledge was severed by colonial violence, Jordan Abel explores what it means to be Indigenous without access to familial territory and complicates popular understandings about Indigenous storytelling. Engaging the land through fiction and metaphor, the successive chapters of Empty Spaces move toward an eerie, looping, and atmospheric rendering of place that evolves despite the violent and reckless histories of North America. The result is a bold and profound new vision of history that decenters human perception and forgoes Westernized ways of seeing.

Jordan Abel’s extraordinary debut work of fiction grows out of his groundbreaking visual compositions in NISHGA, which integrated descriptions of the landscape from Cooper’s settler classic into his father's traditional Nisga'a artwork. In Empty Spaces, Abel reinscribes those words on the page itself, subjecting them to bold rewritings and inviting us to come to a crucial understanding: that the land knows everything that can and will happen, even as our world lurches toward uncertainty.

Additional Information
224 pages | 6.24" x 8.27" | B&W illustrations throughout | Hardcover

'These are troubling times. The world is a dangerous place,' the voice of the Chairman said. 'I can continue to assure you of this: within the Wall you are perfectly safe.'

Christine could not sleep, she could not wake, she could not think. She stared, half-blind, at the cold screen of her smartphone. She was told the Agency was keeping them safe from the dangers outside, an outside world she would never see.

She never imagined questioning what she was told, what she was allowed to know, what she was permitted to think. She never even thought there were questions to ask.

The enclave was the only world she knew, the world outside was not safe. Staying or leaving was not a choice she had the power to make. But then Christine dared start thinking . . . and from that moment, danger was everywhere.

In our turbulent times, Claire G. Coleman's Enclave is a powerful dystopian allegory that confronts the ugly realities of racism, homophobia, surveillance, greed and privilege and the self-destructive distortions that occur when we ignore our shared humanity.

Reviews
'A brilliant, engrossing, necessary read' - Courier Mail

'If you liked Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale or Charlotte Woods' The Natural Way of Things, this one is clearly for you' - Sydney Morning Herald

'Coleman offers an urgent critique of bigotry and, implicitly, of colonialism, writing with conviction about the ways technology can be misused by those in power, but also how it might be deployed for good. Indeed, despite its dystopian tenor, Enclave is ultimately a hopeful novel, and one which suggests it is far from futile to aspire to a better future' -Manjimup-Bridgetown Times 

Additional Information
320 pages | 6.00" x 9.25"