A groundbreaking meditation on pain, painkillers, and dependence from a prescription opioid user.

Her writing has been described as "measured," "sensuous," and "compelling." In 2016, Carlyn Zwarenstein’s short narrative on pain made the Globe and Mail’s Top 100 Books. Now, she returns with a seductive dive into opioids and the nature of dependence.

North Americans are the world’s most prolific users of opioid painkillers. In On Opium, Zwarenstein describes her own use of opioid-inspired medicines to cope with a painful disease. Evoking both Thomas De Quincey and Frida Kahlo, she travels from the decadence of recreational drug use in past eras to the misery and privation of the overdose crisis today.

Speaking with users of prescribed morphine, illicit fentanyl, and smoked opium, Zwarenstein investigates uncomfortable questions about why people use substances and when substance use becomes addiction. And she exposes causes of drug-related harms: the debilitating effects of poverty, isolation, and trauma; the role of race, class, and gender in addressing pain; and a system of prohibition that has converted age-old medicines into taboo substances.

Through all of this, Zwarenstein finds hope. Drawing on solidarity between illicit drug users and people in pain; in a wise understanding of what humans need to be well; and in radical drug policies like legalization and safe supply, she lays out a vision of a world where suffering is no longer lauded, and opioids are no longer demonized.

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• Co-op Available 

Finalist, Balsillie Prize for Public Policy and Victoria Butler Book Prize
A Globe and Mail Top 100 Book
The Big One and what we can do to get ready for it.

Mention the word earthquake and most people think of California. But while the Golden State shakes on a regular basis, Washington State, Oregon, and British Columbia are located in a zone that can produce the world’s biggest earthquakes and tsunamis. In the eastern part of the continent, small cities and large, from Ottawa to Montréal to New York City, sit in active earthquake zones. In fact, more than 100-million North Americans live in active seismic zones, many of whom do not realize the risk to their community.

For more than a decade, Gregor Craigie interviewed scientists, engineers, and emergency planners about earthquakes, disaster response, and resilience. He has also collected vivid first-hand accounts from people who have survived deadly earthquakes. His fascinating and deeply researched book dives headfirst into explaining the science behind The Big One — and asks what we can do now to prepare ourselves for events geologists say aren't a matter of if, but when.

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• Co-op Available 

Film is the art form of our times. It has formed the background of our lives, informed visual arts practices, and formed our culture’s stories, its memory.

Moments of Perception is a landmark book. The first history of twentieth and early-twenty-first-century Canadian experimental filmmaking, it maps avant-garde film across the country from the 1950s to the present day, including its contradictions and complexities.

Experimental film is political in its very existence, critical of the status quo by definition. In Canada, some of the country’s best-known artists took up the moving image as a form of artistic expression, allowing them to explore explicitly political themes. Mike Hoolboom’s exposure of the horror of AIDS, Josephine Massarella’s concern for the environment, and Joyce Wieland’s satiric look at US patriotism are just a few examples of work that contributed to social movements and provided a means to explore issues of race and gender and 2SLGBTQ+ and Indigenous identities.

Featuring a major essay on the history of the movement by Michael Zryd and profiles of key filmmakers by Stephen Broomer and editors Jim Shedden and Barbara Sternberg, Moments of Perception offers a fresh perspective on the ever-evolving history of Canada’s experimental film and moving image media arts.

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• Co-op available

From inspiration to conception and all the trials in-between.

Inked is a collection of cartoons from one of the New Yorker’s most beloved cartoonists.

Filled with more than 150 of Dator’s single-panel cartoons, this lively, quick-witted book betrays a deadpan sense of humour.

But Inked is more than a book of cartoons. Dator also dives into the creative process, offering bonus commentary on how ideas have come to fruition, how one idea has led to another, and the various attempts to get an idea right. Along the way, he shows how a spark of imagination has turned into a laugh-out-loud moment with only a single image and caption, and how other attempts have found themselves on the cutting-room floor.

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From the author of the bestselling Waterfalls of Nova Scotia.

Benoit Lalonde travels to the bountiful sights of Nova Scotia’s most fabled island in Waterfalls of Cape Breton Island.

What Cape Breton Island lacks in size, it makes up for in the number, diversity, and sheer drama of its waterfalls. Bringing together one hundred of the Island’s greatest waterfalls and hidden gems from the Fleur de Lys, Marconi, Bras d’Or Ceilidh, and Cabot trails, this new guide explores iconic and little-known falls from all parts of the Island, including Uisge Bàn Falls and the tallest waterfall in Nova Scotia, Rocky Brook Falls. And yes, each entry includes useful information on the hiking distance to each waterfall, the best seasons to visit, the source, and the height of the fall itself.

Complimented by gorgeous colour photographs, full-colour maps, and bonus features, Waterfalls of Cape Breton Island is an invaluable reference for explorers and outdoor enthusiasts.

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A botanical garden should be more than a repository of plants: it should be a place for people to enjoy the natural world and to participate in learning and research. The creators of the K.C. Irving Environmental Science Centre and Harriet Irving Botanical Gardens at Acadia University understood this, giving students a building and gardens for both quiet relaxation and study. The Centre and Gardens took nearly three years to research and design, and a further two years to build. Now, twenty years after completion, the Centre and Gardens are maturing, and being nurtured by a dedicated team for the enjoyment of generations to come.

Landscape architect Alex Novell and architectural historian John Leroux tell the story of the design, construction, and features of the Centre and Gardens at Acadia. Lavishly illustrated with full-colour images, A Natural Balance is both an indispensable book for anyone interested in the plants and trees of the Acadian forest and a visual record of a spectacular instance of North American collegiate architecture.

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Finalist, First Nations Communities READ

Christi Belcourt is a Métis visual artist whose ancestry originates from the historic Métis community of Mânitou Sâkhigan (Lac Ste. Anne) in Alberta. She has a deep respect for Mother Earth and the traditions and knowledge of her people. She is also known for her work as a community-based artist, environmentalist, and advocate for the lands, waters, and rights of Indigenous peoples.

Christi Belcourt is the first book devoted exclusively to Belcourt’s life and work: her early paintings showcasing the natural world’s beauty and interconnectedness, her monumental "flower beadwork" paintings, and her recent collaborations with Isaac Murdoch, an Anishinaabe knowledge keeper. Drawn from a national touring exhibition, these works of art inspire reflection, provoke conversation, and call for action.

The book, with text in English and Anishinaabemowin, features a powerful artist’s statement by Christi Belcourt, and illuminating essays written by scholars Sherry Farrell Racette, Dylan Miner, and exhibition curator Nadia Kurd.

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• Co-op available

Moving the Museum documents the reopening of the J.S. McLean Centre for Indigenous & Canadian Art with a renewed focus on the AGO’s Indigenous art collection. The volume reflects the nation-to-nation treaty relationship that is the foundation of Canada, asking questions, discovering truths, and leading conversations that address the weight of history and colonialism.

Lavishly illustrated with more than 100 reproductions, Moving the Museum: Indigenous + Canadian Art at the AGO features the work of First Nations artists — including Carl Beam, Rebecca Belmore, and Kent Monkman — along with work by Inuit artists like Shuvinai Ashoona and Annie Pootoogook. Canadian artists include Lawren Harris, Kazuo Nakamura, Joyce Wieland, and many others. Drawing from stories about our origins and identities, the featured artists and essayists invite readers to engage with issues of land, water, transformation, and sovereignty and to contemplate the historic and future representation of Indigenous and Canadian art in museums.

Digital ARCs
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Gallery tie-in
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Qummut Qukiria! celebrates art and culture within and beyond traditional Inuit and Sámi homelands in the Circumpolar Arctic — from the continuance of longstanding practices such as storytelling and skin sewing to the development of innovative new art forms such as throatboxing (a hybrid of traditional Inuit throat singing and beatboxing). In this illuminating book, curators, scholars, artists, and activists from Inuit Nunangat, Kalaallit Nunaat, Sápmi, Canada, and Scandinavia address topics as diverse as Sámi rematriation and the revival of the ládjogahpir (a Sámi woman’s headgear), the experience of bringing Inuit stone carving to a workshop for inner-city youth, and the decolonizing potential of Traditional Knowledge and its role in contemporary design and beyond.

Qummut Qukiria! showcases the thriving art and culture of the Indigenous Circumpolar peoples in the present and demonstrates its importance for the revitalization of language, social wellbeing, and cultural identity.

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"In each image of Headlighting, a single vehicle’s side view is centred in the foreground, its long horizontal shape reinforced by the geometry of the 8x20-inch frame. ... The principal allusion is that relationships develop between humans and technology. Each image’s long exposure, shallow depth of field, and tonal range confer a kind of atmosphere poetics to the mis-en-scène." — Robert Tombs

In 1974, the distinguished graphic designer Allan Fleming encouraged Holownia to use a large-format view camera — a conversation that proved instrumental in shaping Holownia’s aesthetic. Shortly after, Holownia set out from Toronto on a trip that took him into the U.S. Midwest and then east into Atlantic Canada. Each day, Holownia captured images of cars and their owners in their everyday settings, developing the exposures in makeshift darkrooms at night.

An encapsulation of the everyday life and fashions of the mid-70s and a tribute to classic vehicles of all shapes and sizes, Headlighting 1974-1978 is a compelling document of a time and a place when car culture was at its peak.

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• Photo excerpts for select regional and art/photography media