An Atlantic Books Today Editor's Pick

Marcello Di Cintio first visited Palestine in 1999. Like most outsiders, the Palestinian narrative that he knew had been simplified by a seemingly unending struggle, a near-Sisyphean curse of stories of oppression, exile, and occupation told over and over again.

In Pay No Heed to the Rockets, he reveals a more complex story, the Palestinian experience as seen through the lens of authors, books, and literature. Using the form of a political-literary travelogue, he explores what literature means to modern Palestinians and how Palestinians make sense of the conflict between a rich imaginative life and the daily tedium and violence of survival.

Di Cintio begins his journey on the Allenby Bridge that links Jordan to Palestine. He visits the towns and villages of the West Bank, passes into Jerusalem, and then travels through Israel before crossing into Gaza. En route, he meets with poets, authors, librarians, and booksellers. He begins to see Palestine through their eyes, through their stories.

In the company of literary giants like Mahmoud Darwish and Ghassan Kanafani, and the contemporary authors whom they continue to inspire, Di Cintio travels through the rich cultural and literary heritage of Palestine. It's there that he uncovers a humanity, and a beauty, often unnoticed by news media. At the seventieth anniversary of the Arab-Israeli War, Pay No Heed to the Rockets tells a fresh story about Palestine, one that begins with art rather than war.

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When Annie Pootoogook won the Sobey Art Award in 2006, she cracked the glass ceiling for Inuit art, securing its place in contemporary Canadian art discourse and establishing herself as an artist of international importance. Her achievement sparked critical discussion around contemporary art as well as the absence, and growing presence, of Inuit art: an important conversation that continues to this day.

The life and death of Annie Pootoogook is a story of national significance. The complex narratives weaving through her short life speak to possibility and heartbreak, truth and reconciliation, the richness of community, and the depths of tragedy. These complexities are recorded in her arresting pencil crayon compositions. Her frank, sometimes challenging, sometimes amusing images of everyday life, acutely observed and marked by a linear control as taut as a wire, declare her as a major contributor to the landscape of contemporary Inuit art.

Annie Pootoogook: Cutting Ice accompanies an exhibition organized by the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, the gallery of record for works on paper from Annie Pootoogook’s Inuit community of Kinngait (Cape Dorset). Under the direction of Nancy Campbell, this publication and the exhibition serve to commemorate the life and work of a remarkable artist a year after her tragically early death.

Nancy Campbell is a curator of contemporary Inuit art and has a doctorate from York University. She has produced numerous exhibitions, including the landmark Annie Pootoogook at the Power Plant in Toronto in 2006.

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Nova Scotia is blessed with numerous must-see waterfalls, and this volume from self-described “waterfall addict” Benoit Lalonde brings together 100 of the province’s best.

Conveniently categorized by the government of Nova Scotia scenic route system, this rich compendium includes famous waterfalls such as Garden of Eden Fall, Wentworth Falls, Cuties Hollow, Annandale Falls and Butcher Hill Falls, as well as lesser-known but easy to locate gems. In addition to providing useful information on the height, type, and hiking distance of each waterfall, their degree of difficulty to reach is also assessed for the convenience of both novice and advanced hikers alike.

Featuring gorgeous colour photographs and individual maps of each location, Waterfalls of Nova Scotia offers an invaluable reference as well as a tribute to the beauty of the falls and the natural splendour waiting to be discovered.

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New Brunswick offers a dizzying array of hiking challenges, spectacular views, and amazing wildlife. In this expanded and updated fourth edition of Hiking Trails of New Brunswick, veteran trail enthusiasts Marianne and H.A. Eiselt lead hikers from one end of the province to the other, along river valleys, through provincial and national parks, along the coasts, and up and down mountains.

Newly illustrated in full colour with striking photographs and maps, this comprehensive guide includes more than 100 trails, with detailed trail descriptions, tips, and sidebars on natural and historical features. Featuring up-to-the-minute information, the essential guide to hiking in New Brunswick has just become even better.

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Longlisted, 2018 International DUBLIN Literary Award

Long-shortlisted, 2017 ReLit Awards

"Complex, lyrical, and with a profound sense of a world long passed and humanity’s eternal motivations." — Quill & Quire

"In Butler Hallett’s hands, Kit comes off as a fascinating and contradictory figure, part martyred freethinker and part unscrupulous opportunist." — Winnipeg Review

"Perfectly paced and gracefully wrought." — Toronto Star

1593. Queen Elizabeth still reigns but grows old. Two rival spymasters — Sir Robert Cecil and the Earl of Essex — plot from the shadows. Their goal: to control succession upon the aged queen’s death. The man on which their schemes depend: Christopher Marlowe ("Kit" to his friends), a cobbler’s son from Canterbury who has defied expectations and become an accomplished poet and playwright.

And spy.

As the novel opens, Kit Marlowe, fresh from betraying the target of his espionage, is himself betrayed. Fighting to stay one step ahead in a dizzying game that threatens the lives of those he holds most dear, including his beloved Tom Kyd, he comes to question his allegiances and nearly everything he once believed.

In this psychological thriller, Michelle Butler Hallett fleshes out the historical record with insight and the rigor of authenticity. Her 16th-century England, surprising and fresh, offers historical figures both famous and obscure, casual descriptions of quotidian life, and vivid representations of cruelty and violence that reverberate with echoes of our own time.

But it’s Kit, the fascinating Marlowe, an endless source of brilliance, passion and defiance, that brings the novel to life. Writes playwright Robert Chafe, "History’s Marlowe becomes [Butler Hallet’s] own, offering us his wit and wisdom and seemingly new lessons about faith, ambition, loyalty, and yes, love."

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For a guy who mugs people for their laptops, Tommy Marlo isn’t such a bad guy. He can’t help trying to make the people he meets — even those he mugs — feel better about their situation. Unfortunately for Tommy, he rips off the daughter of a psychotic, high-ranking member of a notorious motorcycle gang. Even worse, the laptop that he pilfered contains proof of a few gruesome murders and the location of a huge stash of money. Flat broke and marked for death, his only shot at surviving is to rob the motorcycle gang, use the cash to get out of town, and hide out on the small island where his mother now lives.

What follows is a revisionist crime thriller, a page-turning hybrid of literary and genre fiction for fans of Elmore Leonard or Patrick deWitt. But Battershill writes with a voice all his own. Deftly combining crackling dialogue with biting wit, MARRY, BANG, KILL hums with the thrill of chaos as Tommy runs to a quiet island to escape a swelling cast of characters who are trying to arrest, rob, kill, or save him. The island won’t be quiet for long.

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Winner, City of Victoria Butler Book Prize

Shortlisted, Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize

A National Post Best Book of 2015

"The Hunter and the Wild Girl is powerful, almost elemental storytelling, an achievement not only of craft but of raw emotion. It pulses with vitality, building to a stunning, shattering conclusion." — Robert Weirsema, Vancouver Sun

"A rich, immersive experience. Pauline Holdstock’s is the kind of prose you get lost in.” — National Post

The story begins with the crack of splintered boards and bones as a feral girl crashes out of the hut where she’s been held against her will and into the scrubland of southern France. Townsfolk chase her to the edge of a deep gorge. She leaps and vanishes into legend — and into the territory of Peyre Rouff, a once-renowned hunter who spends his days fending off his own demons in an abandoned château.

Pauline Holdstock sets this absorbing novel in the blurry territory between myth and reality. The girl and the hunter inhabit radically different worlds. The wild girl’s is rooted in the physical, a source of food and danger, Rouff’s in the cerebral, an existence patterned to prevent him from the destruction of despair.

When their two worlds unexpectedly collide, this odd pair of outsiders forms an unlikely bond. The girl’s untamed spirit and volatility shakes the hunter from his solitude. The hunter’s unexpected kindness provides the girl with a sense of connection. But when the wider world learns of the girl's presence, Rouff is forced to confront both his choices and their consequences.

Wild and unpredictable, lush and sensually evocative, The Hunter and the Wild Girl courses with mythical life blood, resonant, disquieting, and fathoms deep.

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An Atlantic Books Today Editor's Pick

Lorna always wanted to stand out, but her career as a competitive swimmer was cut short by a knee injury. Cara, her daughter, tries hard to blend in, but when she has to fill in for her brother at a school pageant, she is overwhelmed by terror. Lorna is vain about her ability to shut out distractions. Cara can’t control her scary thoughts. And while Lorna tries her best to move past life’s early disappointments, Cara picks at the cracks in her family’s story. Spanning two decades, Catch My Drift follows mother and daughter through life changes big and small, and reveals that despite our shared experiences, we each live a private story.

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First published in 1974, Mourir à Scoudouc emerged out of a period of cultural awakening. Chiasson's poems denounced the narrow limitations of the past and traced the lines of a fresh collective vision. The poems were lyrical, referentially modern, and steeped in the rhythms and forms that had emerged from the Americas, Europe, and India.

Now, more than 40 years later, Herménégilde Chiasson is considered to be the father of Acadian modernism, and Mourir à Scoudouc is widely regarded as one of the foundational works of modern Acadian literature. Several of the poems, including the oft-anthologized long poem, "Eugénie Melanson," have now achieved iconic status, appearing frequently in books, magazines, and films — in French and in English.

To Live and Die in Scoudouc is the first English edition of this seminal collection. It replicates Chiasson's design of the 2017 edition and features his own photographs as well as his new introductory essay.

Although several of the poems have been previously translated, To Live and Die in Scoudouc features fresh renditions by Jo-Anne Elder, who worked closely with Chiasson on the translations.

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On "A Girl Like This Might Have Loved Glenn Gould":

"The poem sits up at its greasy-spoon counter and recounts its tale, a kind of cryptic plain-speech, an inverted code, all the more puzzling for what it plainly says: 'Under a spell so the wrong ones can’t find it, / So can’t get saved,’ as Robert Frost said." — Jeffery Donaldson

Absorbed in the small, everyday rituals of existence, this remarkable collection of poems tears open the fruit of life and scoops out beauty and joy, pain and suffering, in equal measure. Ritual Lights takes the reader on a journey through an underworld that is both familiar and uncanny, a space between death and life where one nourishes the other. Shadowed by the aftermath of sexual assault, Joelle Barron places candles in the darkest alcoves, illuminates mysteries, and rises again to an abundant Earth where the darkness is transformed into rich loam.

These poems follow the speaker through grieving and loss, heartbreak, repression, and discovery, seeking, never finding an answer, but finding meaning in the work of continuing. A meditation on trauma and identity, deeply vulnerable and reserved, funny and full of rage, Ritual Lights explores the sometimes messy and ugly, but always necessary, nature of survival.

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