Fiction

“The map of the land is in our blood.”

A woman trawls the bottom of a riverbed with a makeshift plough, hoping to dislodge something—anything. The world has drastically changed: rivers run dry, rampant bushfires leave little left to burn. Still she persists searching for the stories of her loved ones, maybe even her own. She is not alone—an ancestor watches nearby. This desolate landscape is about to unearth its long-held secrets.

Inspired by the grassroots organization Drag the Red, which searches for evidence of missing Indigenous women, girls, and 2 Spirit people in the Red River of Treaty One Territory, this ethereal and engrossing drama is a profound offering to those who persevere in spite of sorrow. Told in Anishinaabemowin, English, and French, Tara Beagan’s prophetic play draws a direct connection between the treatment of Indigenous peoples and the abuse inflicted on the land. Fluid and majestic like the river itself, Rise, Red River is an invocation, a revelation, and a call to action.

Educator Information
Told in Anishinaabemowin, English, and French.

Additional Information
112 pages | 5.37" x 8.38" | Paperback

For fans of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic and Ramona Emerson’s Shutter: a gripping retelling of Persephone and Demeter in the Mexicali borderlands

At the edge of the Salton Sea, in the blistering borderlands, something is out hunting. . .

Malamar Veracruz has never left the dust-choked town of El Valle. Here, Mal has done her best to build a good life: She’s raised two children, worked hard, and tried to forget the painful, unexplained disappearance of her sister, Elena. When another local girl goes missing, Mal plunges into a fresh yet familiar nightmare. As a desperate Mal hunts for answers, her search becomes increasingly tangled with inscrutable visions of a horse-headed woman, a local legend who Mal feels compelled to follow. Mal’s perspective is joined by the voices of her two daughters, all three of whom must work to uncover the truth about the missing girls in their community before it's too late.

Combining elements of Latina and Indigenous culture, family drama, mystery, horror, and magical realism in a spellbinding mix, Salt Bones lays bare the realities of environmental catastrophe, family secrets, and the unrelenting bond between mothers and daughters.

Reviews
“Salt Bones is an intense, lyrical journey of twisted family ties, long kept secrets, and haunted women— in short, it’s a wonder.”—Erika T. Wurth, author of White Horse

“Visceral and compelling, Jennifer Givhan’s Salt Bones beautifully explores the dark complexities of mother-daughter relationships. Satisfyingly saturated with mystery and mythology, Salt Bones is a book that stays with you. Readers will be haunted long after the final page.”—Erin E. Adams, author of Jackal

“In a world of Mexicali myth and post-industrial ruin, a mother-daughter bond drives an engaging thriller about missing and murdered women. Jennifer Givhan's Salt Bones is the perfect blend of political horror and other-worldly nightmares.”—Deborah Jackson Taffa, author of Whiskey Tender

“A beautifully woven tale of three strong women and the family ties that support, and those that strangle. Rooted in myth, this emotionally powerful magical realist mystery has an atmosphere so thick and richly drawn you’d swear you can taste the grit of dust on your tongue. Masterful."—Ann Dávila Cardinal, author of We Need No Wings and The Storyteller’s Death

“A poetic mystery deftly carved from the sinews of our flawed humanity. Salt Bones’ Mal may mean ‘bad,’ but she is as good as a protagonist gets. Magical and messy, fierce but flawed, tough yet tender, you’ll find yourself rooting for her from the first page to the last, and you will not forget her story.”—Rudy Ruiz, author of The Border Between U

“As haunting as it is gorgeous, Salt Bones is a mystery about monsters who lurk among us—and something even fiercer: motherlove. With threads of horror, folklore, and mythology, Jennifer Givhan weaves together an obsession-worthy story so gripping and intoxicating it’s impossible to shake.”—Megan Co

Additional Information
384 pages | 6.00" x 9.25" | Hardcover 

"Never let anything or anyone stop you from following where your Spirit says it belongs. . ."

Spirit exists in everything on Mother Earth. If we are open to it, Spirit may guide us through even the darkest of moments.

In this genre-defying blend of poetry and story, Ojibway and Mohawk Elder Dawn Smoke shares all that lives within her heart, mind, and soul. As a young girl confronted with the anger and pain of being scooped from her birth family, Dawn bravely discovers her truth and a path towards healing. She is unwavering in her honesty, a protector of Mother Earth, and a fierce advocate against the oppression of Indigenous people.

Reclaiming what was taken is not an easy feat, yet in doing so, Dawn illuminates the Spirit all around us. This striking memoir, told in spoken word, speaks to the devastating realities of colonization and radiates with the resilience found within culture and community.

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

For readers of N.K. Jemisin and Rebecca Roanhorse, a fast-paced, anti-colonial action-adventure fantasy that explores twisted power dynamics and the effects of settler colonialism

After the murder of T’Rayles’s adopted son, the infamous warrior and daughter of the Indigenous Ibinnas returns to the colonized city of Seventhblade, ready to tear the streets asunder in search of her son’s killer. T’Rayles must lean into the dangerous power of her inherited sword and ally herself with questionable forces, including the Broken Fangs, an alliance her mother founded, now fallen into greed and corruption, and the immortal Elraiche, a powerful and manipulative deity exiled from a faraway land. Navigating the power shifts in a colonized city on the edge and contending with a deadly new power emerging from within, T’Rayles must risk everything to find the answers, and the justice, she so desperately desires.

Loaded with complex characters and intricately staged action, and set in a fragmented, fascinating world of dangerous magics and cryptic gods, Seventhblade is a masterful new fantasy adventure from a bright, emerging Indigenous voice.

Reviews
“Tonia [Laird] is a powerhouse.” — Katherena Vermette, award-winning author of The Break and The Strangers

“Tonia Laird tells a gripping story of grief, magic, and revenge while exploring the impact of generational trauma on a colonized people. At times brutal, nuanced, and compassionate, Laird writes with confidence and gives us a fantastic hero in T’Rayles.” — Trick Weekes, author of The Palace Job

“At its core, Seventhblade is a story of a mother’s love, her need for justice, and the discovery of her roots. Drawing on her Indigenous heritage, Tonia Laird weaves the tale of T’Rayles, a half-soul with a mysterious past, set in a world where gods roam freely. Deftly written with intricate worldbuilding and vivid characters, Seventhblade is fantasy at its finest ... and I need a sequel!” — Allison Pang, writer of the Abby Sinclair urban fantasy series

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

Cedar Sigo's latest poetry collection, Siren of Atlantis, is an introspective odyssey of remarkable poetic and personal resonance.

Here are poems that speak to Sigo's profound experience of learning to write again after suffering a stroke in 2022. In creating this work, the author retraces poetic sources and reexamines style and tone, using a variety of compositional techniques to renegotiate what is at stake in the work. There is a joy in this collection, as Sigo allows us to bear witness to the rediscovery of language, imparting the work with a new and dramatic clarity, for the poet and ultimately for the reader as well.

Additional Information
80 pages | 7.00" x 9.00" | Paperback

Part coming-of-age novel, part searing examination of a community finding itself, Small Ceremonies is a tantalizing and heartbreaking debut.

“I fear for our friendship, for the day it will end, wondering when that day will be . . .”

Tomahawk Shields (a.k.a. Tommy) and Clinton Whiteway are on the cusp of adulthood, imagining a future rife with possibility and greatness. The two friends play for their high school’s poor-performing hockey team, the Tigers, who learn at the start of the new season that the league wants them out. Their annual goal is now more important than ever: to win their first game in years and break the curse.

As we follow these two Indigenous boys over the course of a year, we are given a panoptic view of Tommy and Clinton’s Winnipeg, where a university student with grand ambitions chooses to bottle her anger when confronted with numerous micro- (and not so micro-) aggressions; an ex-convict must choose between protecting or exploiting his younger brother as he’s dragged deeper into the city’s criminal underbelly; a lonely rink attendant is haunted by the memory of a past lover and contemplates rekindling this old flame; and an aspiring journalist does everything she can to uncover why the league is threatening to remove the Tigers. These are a sampling of the chorus of voices that depicts a community filled with individuals searching for purpose, leading them all to one fateful and tragic night.

Ferociously piercing the heart of an Indigenous city, Kyle Edwards's sparkling debut is a heartbreaking yet humour-flecked portrayal of navigating identity and place, trauma and recovery, and growing up in a land that doesn't love you.

Reviews
“The geographical and familial landscape of the ironically named Whiteway clan yields a subtle and fascinating portrait of growing up Native in Manitoba. The understatement underscores the intensity and contradictions of outgrowing your home and self. This is a truly fine novel.”—Percival Everett, author of James

“Small Ceremonies dropped my jaw with the glittering precision of its detail, and the life-affirming humanity of its characters. Kyle Edwards knows this world of frozen hockey rinks and fishing shacks just as intimately as he knows the warm and broken hearts of this Winnipeg community that he writes about. I haven’t been this excited about a debut in years.”—Michael Christie, author of Greenwood

"Small Ceremonies flattens the grass for us all. A power play of wit, grit, and generational spirit, phenom Kyle Edwards has you rooting for the Tigers when few will. With its scars, scores, and hard-won triumphs, this polyphony of neechies carries us through overtime into glory. A dignified, accomplished, and suave figure-eight of a novel."—Cody Caetano, author of Half-Bads in White Regalia

"In this compelling, multi-voiced first novel, Kyle Edwards carries us north to the landscape of Winnipeg, Manitoba, and into the geography of youth itself. This book—bracing, kaleidoscopic—made me relive those gritty, tender, fragile years before you are fully grown, when you still believe you can do both—stay rooted and fly free."—Danzy Senna, author of Caucasia and Colored Television

"Such a chorus of compelling voices here! I would find myself growing attached to one character only to find the next equally engaging. Edwards is, at once, bracingly honest about and deeply tender towards everyone in this novel. A stunning debut."—Aimee Bender, author of The Butterfly Lampshade

Additional Information
368 pages | 5.50" x 8.25" | Hardcover 

Something for the Dark centres Indigenous knowledge to probe the limits of what we know, confront the unknown, and reckon with our place in the world.

Randy Lundy’s newest collection of poetry—the final in a trilogy that began with Blackbird Song and continued with Field Notes for the Self—turns the poem to our relationships with the land, animals, and people, showing how our failures to see and live by the personhood of all other beings in the world, human and non-, leads inevitably to heartbreak.

As Lundy’s poems accumulate like snow on cedar, his recounting of experiences that transcend language invites the reader to bend their understanding and notice what was once unseen—how a red-winged blackbird clings to a swaying reed, how mist rises after rainfall, how dogs keen and howl, how fingers taste bitter after lighting sage, how hunger smarts, how liquor burns, and how the pain survivors carry is not merely their own.

Reviews
“Such longing! ‘These days I wrestle no angels. I wrestle / with words. And no one is saved.’ writes Randy Lundy. In Something for the Dark, he presents tâpwêwina—truths drawn from the hand dealt and the life lived. ‘Nothing is hidden,’ he suggests, if we take the time to observe from a distance and wait in silence.” — Rita Bouvier, author of a beautiful rebellion

Additional Information
96 pages | 5.51" x 8.50" | Paperback

In their second poetry collection, Tawahum Bige explores belonging and voice of a Two-Spirit Dene youth.

These poems are a stark plunge—an answer to how voice emerges for a young Two Spirit growing up in so-called “Surrey, BC,” far from his Łutselk'e Dene territories. The fundamental thrum in which vocal cords produce sound to whisper, cry, holler and laugh—these inner workings are made corporeal through moments of growth from childhood to young adulthood to show how the seeds sprouted for someone who needed to learn to express to find their path.

Additional Information
96 pages | 5.50" x 8.00" | 25 colour and b&w photographs | Paperback 

Stolen Sisters is a first-of-its-kind play that gives voice to the lives and legacies of three Beothuk women and girls whose names have survived in historical record.

These are stories that have been mis-told, misrepresented, and mythologized by colonial interference. By shifting the lens of history to reflect Indigenous perspective and experience, the women brought to life in Stolen Sisters set the record straight, telling their own stories with both humour and unflinching honestly. Based on the oral and written Indigenous histories of colonization locally and worldwide, the voices of Stolen Sisters shine a light on the global experience of Indigenous women and girls and, in particular, Newfoundland's part in that legacy.

Additional Information
96 pages | 5.57" x 8.37" | Paperback 

This new collection of horror short fiction weaves together contemporary Arctic settings with ancient monsters and mysterious beings that have been said to stalk the tundra for centuries.

Featuring authors from across the Canadian Arctic, this new volume of Taaqtumi—an Inuktitut word that means “In the Dark”—reveals just how horrifying the dark can be.

Featuring new fiction from award-winning authors Aviaq Johnston, Rachel and Sean Qitsualik-Tinsley and Jamesie Fournier, as well as new voices in the genre, this collection is perfect for any horror lover.

Educator & Series Information
Includes stories from Indigenous authors across the Canadian Arctic.

This book is part of the Taaqtumi series.

Additional Information
184 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | b&w illustrations | Paperback

In 1912 a strange confession is given, over several nights, to a Lutheran priest who transcribes the life of a vampire who haunted the fields of the Blackfeet reservation, looking for justice.

A diary, written in 1912 by a Lutheran Pastor is discovered within a wall and what it unveils is a slow massacre, a chain of events that go back to two hundred and seventeen Blackfeet dead in the snow. Told in transcribed confessions by a Blackfeet named Good Stab, who shared the narrative of his peculiar life over a series of confessional visits, this is a bloody history of the American West that has remained untold until now.

Reviews
“Stephen Graham Jones has lit a slow-burning candle that grows into a forest fire, illuminating the life of a Pikuni vampire and everyone he has touched, the pain of being a victim and perpetrator of violent history, and how memory serves to keep us who we are despite it all. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is beautiful, terrifying, sad, funny, and grotesque — everything I want in a novel.”—Jessica Johns

“A master at blending horror, suspense, and culturally rich stories that are as thought-provoking as they are spine-tingling. Jones’s singular voice and exploration of identity, of trauma and survival, make every page pulse with kinetic urgency.”—David A. Robertson

“For me and vampires, there is Stoker, there is Rice, and now there is Jones. It's harrowing, agonizing, nuanced, and downright philosophical. Very likely Jones's masterpiece.”—Daniel Kraus, New York Times bestselling author of Whalefall

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

Bestselling author of Birdie, Tracey Lindberg, and renowned artist George Littlechild join together in a stunning collaboration of story and art to explore love in all its forms—romantic, familial, community and kin—in the Cree experience.

In The Cree Word for Love, author Tracey Lindberg and artist George Littlechild consider a teaching from an Elder that in their culture, the notion of love as constructed in Western society does not exist. Here, through original fiction and select iconic paintings, Lindberg and Littlechild respond.

Together they have created and curated this collaboration which travels, season by season, mirroring the four rounds in ceremony, through the themes of the love within a family, ties of kinship, desire for romantic love and connection, strength in the face of loss and violence, and importance of self-love, as well as, crucially, a deeper exploration of the meaning of “all my relations.”

Together, art and story inspire and move readers to recall our responsibilities to our human and more than human relations, to think about the obligation that is love, and to imagine what it could possibly mean to have no Cree word for love. The result is a powerful story about where we find connection, strength, and the many forms of what it means to live lovingly.

Additional Information
224 pages | 6.00" x 8.00" | 20 full-color photos of paintings | Hardcover 

From the co-editor of the bestselling anthology Never Whistle at Night, a semi-autobiographical novel that follows a group of teenage gang members as they trek across Chicago to a momentous meeting, inspired by the cult classic The Warriors

“Cool and real as hell.” —Tommy Orange, bestselling author of There There

An ordinary day in August 1979 dawns hot and humid in Chicago. Teenager Teddy is living with his dad after being kicked out of his mom’s house due to his gang activity. But Teddy has thrived in the Simon City Royals, and today, he'll be helping to lead a posse of the group's younger members south across the city to Roosevelt High School to attend a gathering of gangs forming “the Nation”—a bold new attempt at joining forces across racial lines. This holds particular importance for Teddy, as his branch’s only Indigenous member.

But when the meeting breaks up in gunshots and police sirens, Teddy must guide the Royals back across hostile territory, along secret routes and back alleys, and stop by stop on the thundering tracks of the El. In the face of violence from rival gangs and a secret Judas in the Royals’ ranks, Teddy is armed only with a potent combination of book smarts and street smarts, and by the guiding spirit of Coyote, who has granted him the power to glimpse a future only he may survive to see.

Immersed in the sights, sounds, and smells of the author’s beloved city, The El will transport you to that singular sun- and blood-soaked day in Chicago. It is a love letter to another time, to a city, and to a group of friends trying to find their place and make their way in a world that doesn’t want them.

Reviews
“[Van Alst] is so off-handedly smart, and cool and real as hell. He writes the city beautifully, the way it chokes and breathes out the lives of its people, in too many ways to track, on one of its trains say, crowded and loud. Van Alst writes exactly like himself, a true original, writing about Native people in Chicago, about Native people involved with gangs, and with relationships to the city. He writes about the internal lives of what we have to call criminals, but that term itself is a misunderstanding in a stolen country, where laws made to benefit its thieves only make sense justice-wise in the same way that America called itself the land of the free even while it was led by leaders who owned slaves. Everything he writes is beautifully wrought, mean and bright, and surprisingly tender.”—Tommy Orange, bestselling author of There There

"Chicago is built on stolen land, but its writers remain free to build their own cities of words, to reclaim their collective past and assert their individual present. In The El, [however your long-ass name will be used in this sort of copy!] constructs a new edifice for Chicago’s collective textual city. No obscure gang-banger graffiti tag symbolically claiming territory the powerful think they own, his contemporary indigenous, working-class, and poetic voice develops a whole new neighborhood. Read The El, and you will understand the El, and Chicago, from a vital new perspective."—Bill Savage, editor of Chicago by Day and Night

Additional Information
192 pages | 5.18" x 8.00" | Paperback 

Emma LaRocque was born in 1949 in Lac La Biche into a Cree-speaking Métis family. She grew up in a one-room, kerosene-lit log cabin built by her father. At the age of nine, she fought her parents to attend school, where she encountered English and the colonizer’s harmful stereotypes of Indigenous peoples. Confronting the contradictions of colonialism sparked her journey as a writer and scholar, as she sought to understand the dissonance between her identity and the world around her.

The Emma LaRocque Reader is a comprehensive collection of her most significant writings, poetry and prose, offering an intimate window into the mind of one of Canada’s foremost Indigenous scholars. Through her work, LaRocque provides profound insights into the intersections of colonialism, sexism, and racism in Canada, while also critically celebrating the beauty of her community and culture. In the afterword, she reflects on fifty years of challenging the colonial enterprise. A vital contribution to postcolonial literature, The Emma LaRocque Reader intertwines the personal and the political to explore what it means to be human, offering a powerful testament to Indigenous resistance, resilience, and vision.

This collection brings together the works of Métis scholar Emma LaRocque, offering a half-century of her poetry and prose, and shedding new light on Canada, colonialism, and Indigenous resistance.

Educator Information
Chapters
Foreword by Armand Ruffo
Preface by Elaine Coburn
Acknowledgments by Emma LaRocque
Acknowledgments of Permissions to Reprint
Introduction by Elaine Coburn
1975 A Personal Essay on Poverty (Excerpt from Defeathering the Indian)
1983 The Métis in English Canadian Literature
1988 On the Ethics of Publishing Historical Documents
1989 Racism Runs through Canadian Society
1990 Preface: Here Are Our Voices: Who Will Hear?
1990 Geese (poem)
1990 Nostalgia (poem)
1990 “Progress” (poem)
1990 The Red in Winter (poem)
1990 Incongruence (poem)
1990 Loneliness (poem)
1990 Beggar (poem)
1990 Tides, Towns, and Trains
1992 My Hometown, Northern Canada, South Africa (poem)
1993 Violence in Aboriginal Communities
1994 Long Way from Home (poem)
1996 The Colonization of a Native Woman Scholar
1996 When the Other Is Me: Native Writers Confronting Canadian Literature
2001 Native Identity and the Métis: Otehpayimsuak Peoples
2001 From the Land to the Classroom
2004 When the Wild West Is Me
2006 Sweeping (poem)
2006 Sources of Inspiration: The Birth of "For the Love of Words": Aboriginal Writers of Canada
2007 Métis and Feminist
2009 Reflections on Cultural Continuity through Aboriginal Women’s Writings
2010 Native Writers Reconstruct: Pushing Paradigms
2013 For the Love of Place – Not Just Any Place: Selected Métis Writings
2015 “Resist No Longer”: Reflections on Resistance Writing and Teaching
2016 Contemporary Métis Literature: Resistance, Roots, Innovation
2016 Colonialism Lived
2017 Powerlines (poem)
2022 Wehsakehcha, Comics, Shakespeare, and the Dictionary
2023 Afterword
Index

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

From the author of White Horse (“Twisty and electric.” —The New York Times Book Review) comes a terrifying and resonant novel about a woman who uses her unique gift to learn the truth about her sister’s death.

Olivia Becente was never supposed to have the gift. The ability to commune with the dead was the specialty of her sister, Naiche. But when Naiche dies unexpectedly and under strange circumstances, somehow Olivia suddenly can’t stop seeing and hearing from spirits.

A few years later, she’s the most in-demand paranormal investigator in Denver. She’s good at her job, but the loss of Naiche haunts her. That’s when she hears from the Brown Palace, a landmark Denver hotel. The owner can’t explain it, but every few years, a girl is found dead in room 904, no matter what room she checked into the night before. As Olivia tries to understand these disturbing deaths, the past and the present collide as Olivia’s investigation forces her to confront a mysterious and possibly dangerous cult, a vindictive journalist, betrayal by her friends, and shocking revelations about her sister’s secret life.

The Haunting of Room 904 is a paranormal thriller that is as edgy as it is heartfelt and simmers with intensity and longing. Erika T. Wurth lives up to her reputation as “a gritty new punkish outsider voice in American horror.”

Reviews
“The Haunting of Room 904 deftly mixes humor, scares, and the weight of personal and generational grief. The book is a heady, haunting, righteous, and spiritual exploration of our political mess through the lens of paranormal exploration and, sometimes even scarier, interpersonal relationships. You’ll want to follow Erika and her Olivia into any dark, creaky room.” —Paul Tremblay, New York Times bestselling author of Horror Movie and A Head Full of Ghosts

“The Haunting Of Room 904 is an electric terrifying journey into the world beyond the veil. Erika T. Wurth has created a mind bending tale of loss and love and the devastating cost of grief. You don't want to miss this!” —S. A. Cosby, author of All the Sinners Bleed and Razorblade Tears

Additional Information
320 pages | 6.12" x 9.25" | Hardcover