The first full-scale biography of Canada's first prime minister in half a century by one of our best-known and most highly regarded political writers.

The first volume of Richard Gwyn's definitive biography of John A. Macdonald follows his life from his birth in Scotland in 1815 to his emigration with his family to Kingston, Ontario, to his days as a young, rising lawyer, to his tragedy-ridden first marriage, to the birth of his political ambitions, to his commitment to the all-but-impossible challenge of achieving Confederation, to his presiding, with his second wife Agnes, over the first Canada Day of the new Dominion in 1867.

Colourful, intensely human and with a full measure of human frailties, Macdonald was beyond question Canada's most important prime minister. This volume describes how Macdonald developed Canada's first true national political party, encompassing French and English and occupying the centre of the political spectrum. To perpetuate this party, Macdonald made systematic use of patronage to recruit talent and to bond supporters, a system of politics that continues to this day.

Gwyn judges that Macdonald, if operating on a small stage, possessed political skills-of manipulation and deception as well as an extraordinary grasp of human nature-of the same calibre as the greats of his time, such as Disraeli and Lincoln. Confederation is the centerpiece here, and Gywn's commentary on Macdonald's pivotal role is original and provocative. But his most striking analysis is that the greatest accomplishment of nineteenth-century Canadians was not Confederation, but rather to decide not to become Americans. Macdonald saw Confederation as a means to an end, its purpose being to serve as a loud and clear demonstration of the existence of a national will to survive. The two threats Macdonald had to contend with were those of annexation by the United States, perhaps by force, perhaps by osmosis, and equally that Britain just might let that annexation happen to avoid a conflict with the continent's new and unbeatable power.
Gwyn describes Macdonald as "Canada's first anti-American." And in pages brimming with anecdote, insight, detail and originality, he has created an indelible portrait of "the irreplaceable man,"-the man who made us.


"Macdonald hadn't so much created a nation as manipulated and seduced and connived and bullied it into existence against the wishes of most of its own citizens. Now that Confederation was done, Macdonald would have to do it all over again: having conjured up a child-nation he would have to nurture it through adolescence towards adulthood. How he did this is, however, another story."

"He never made the least attempt to hide his "vice," unlike, say, his contemporary, William Gladstone, with his sallies across London to save prostitutes, or Mackenzie King with his crystal-ball gazing. Not only was Macdonald entirely unashamed of his behaviour, he often actually drew attention to it, as in his famous response to a heckler who accused him of being drunk at a public meeting: "Yes, but the people would prefer John A. drunk to George Brown sober." There was no hypocrisy in Macdonald's make-up, nor any fear.
-from John A. Macdonald


From the Hardcover edition.

Foran''s book is IT: the definitive, detailed, intimate portrait of Mordecai Richler, the lion of Canadian literature, and the turbulent, changing times that nurtured him. It is also an extraordinary love story that lasted half a century.

The first major biography with access to family letters and archives. Mordecai Richler was an outsized and outrageous novelist whose life reads like fiction.

Mordecai Richler won multiple Governor General''s Literary Awards, the Giller Prize, the Commonwealth Writers'' Prize, among others, as well as many awards for his children''s books. He also wrote Oscar-nominated screenplays. His influence was larger than life in Canada and abroad. In Mordecai, award-winning novelist and journalist Charlie Foran brings to the page the richness of Mordecai''s life as young bohemian, irreverent writer, passionate and controversial Canadian, loyal friend and deeply romantic lover. He explores Mordecai''s distraught childhood, and gives us the "portrait of a marriage" - the lifelong love affair with Florence, with Mordecai as beloved father of five. The portrait is alive and intimate - warts and all.


From the Hardcover edition.

Walker Brown was born with a genetic mutation so rare that doctors call it an orphan syndrome: perhaps 300 people around the world also live with it. Walker turns twelve in 2008, but he weighs only 54 pounds, is still in diapers, can't speak and needs to wear special cuffs on his arms so that he can't continually hit himself. "Sometimes watching him," Brown writes, "is like looking at the man in the moon - but you know there is actually no man there. But if Walker is so insubstantial, why does he feel so important? What is he trying to show me?"

In a book that owes its beginnings to Brown's original Globe and Mail series, he sets out to answer that question, a journey that takes him into deeply touching and troubling territory. "All I really want to know is what goes on inside his off-shaped head," he writes, "But every time I ask, he somehow persuades me to look into my own."


From the Hardcover edition.

The fascinating new book by the author of Brunelleschi's Dome and Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling: a saga of artistic rivalry and cultural upheaval in the decade leading to the birth of Impressionism.

If there were two men who were absolutely central to artistic life in France in the second half of the nineteenth century, they were Edouard Manet and Ernest Meissonier. While the former has been labelled the "Father of Impressionism" and is today a household name, the latter has sunk into obscurity. It is difficult now to believe that in 1864, when this story begins, it was Meissonier who was considered the greatest French artist alive and who received astronomical sums for his work, while Manet was derided for his messy paintings of ordinary people and had great difficulty getting any of his work accepted at the all-important annual Paris Salon.

Manet and Meissonier were the Mozart and Salieri of their day, one a dangerous challenge to the establishment, the other beloved by rulers and the public alike for his painstakingly meticulous oil paintings of historical subjects. Out of the fascinating story of their parallel careers, Ross King creates a lens through which to view the political tensions that dogged Louis-Napoleon during the Second Empire, his ignominious downfall, and the bloody Paris Commune of 1871. At the same time, King paints a wonderfully detailed and vivid portrait of life in an era of radical social change: on the streets of Paris, at the new seaside resorts of Boulogne and Trouville, and at the race courses and picnic spots where the new bourgeoisie relaxed. When Manet painted Dejeuner sur l'herbe or Olympia, he shocked not only with his casual brushstrokes (described by some as applied by a 'floor mop') but with his subject matter: top-hatted white-collar workers (and their mistresses) were not considered suitable subjects for 'Art'. Ross King shows how, benign as they might seem today, these paintings changed the course of history. The struggle between Meissonier and Manet to see their paintings achieve pride of place at the Salon was not just about artistic competitiveness, it was about how to see the world.

Full of fantastic tidbits of information (such as the use of carrier pigeons and hot-air balloons during the siege of Paris), and a colourful cast of characters that includes Baudelaire, Courbet, and Zola, with walk-on parts for Monet, Renoir, Degas, and Cezanne, The Judgment of Paris casts new light on the birth of Impressionism and takes us to the heart of a time in which the modern French identity was being forged.


From the Hardcover edition.

Baltimore''s Mansion introduces us to the Johnstons of Ferryland, a Catholic colony founded by Lord Baltimore in the 1620s on the Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland, and centres on three generations of fathers and sons. Filled with heart-stopping description and a cast of stubborn, acerbic, yet utterly irresistible family members, it is an evocation of a time and a place reminiscent of Wayne Johnston''s best fiction.

A beautiful, moving memoir of a boy's coming of age, infused with a deep love of the land, from one of Canada's most cherished and acclaimed writers.

In Of This Earth, Rudy Wiebe gives vivid life again to the vanished world of Speedwell, Saskatchewan, an isolated, poplar-forested, mostly Mennonite community - and Rudy's first home. Too young to do heavy work, Rudy witnessed a way of life that was soon to disappear. And we experience with him the hard labour of clearing the stony, silty bushland; the digging out of precious wells one bucket of dirt at a time; sorrow at the death of a beloved sister; the disorienting searches for grazing cattle in the vast wilderness sloughs and the sweet discovery of the power of reading.

Rare personal photographs (reproduced throughout the book) and the fragile memories of those who are left give shape to the story of Mennonite immigrants building a life in Canada, the growth and decline of the small Speedwell community, the sway of religion, and a young boy's growing love of the extreme beauty of the aspen forests - as well as how all these elements came to inform his destiny as a writer.

A hymn to a lost place and a distant time, Of This Earth follows the best of memoirs in the tradition of Sharon Butala's The Perfection of the Morning and W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz. It is an evocation of the Canadian west that only a writer of Rudy Wiebe's powers could summon.


From the Hardcover edition.

In 1892, the Bishop of Tasmania set sail for Melanesia with the intent of rescuing islanders from lives of fear, black magic and cannibalism. Over 100 years later, his great grandson, Charles Montgomery, followed the bishop''s route through the South Pacific, seeking out the spirits and myths his missionary forebear had sought to destroy.

Montgomery explored remote shores where gospel and empire never took hold. He rubbed shoulders with barefoot preachers, witch doctors and gun-toting rebels, only to discover that the pagan spirits were more tenacious than the missionaries had imagined. Melanesians had stirred Jesus and Mary into an already spicy broth of ancestor worship, ghosts, shark gods and magic. Through confrontations with a bizarre cast of characters -- the randy ethnographer, the soft-talking assassin, the leper prophet -- the journey becomes a debate on the nature of magic, myth and faith, and a metaphor for the transforming power of story.

The Last Heathen marks the debut of an exciting young writer who charts his adventures with passion, insight and grace.

Shock Troops follows the Canadian fighting forces during the titanic battles of Vimy Ridge, Hill 70, Passchendaele, and the Hundred Days campaign. Through the eyes of the soldiers who fought and died in the trenches on the Western Front, and based on newly uncovered Canadian, British, and German archival sources, Cook builds on Volume I of his national bestseller, At the Sharp End. The Canadian fighting forces never lost a battle during the final 2 years of the war, and although they paid a terrible price in the killing fields of the Great War, they were indeed, as British Prime Minister David Lloyd George exclaimed, the shock troops of the Empire.

Foran''s book is IT: the definitive, detailed, intimate portrait of Mordecai Richler, the lion of Canadian literature, and the turbulent, changing times that nurtured him. It is also an extraordinary love story that lasted half a century.

The first major biography with access to family letters and archives. Mordecai Richler was an outsized and outrageous novelist whose life reads like fiction.

Mordecai Richler won multiple Governor General''s Literary Awards, the Giller Prize, the Commonwealth Writers'' Prize, among others, as well as many awards for his children''s books. He also wrote Oscar-nominated screenplays. His influence was larger than life in Canada and abroad. In Mordecai, award-winning novelist and journalist Charlie Foran brings to the page the richness of Mordecai''s life as young bohemian, irreverent writer, passionate and controversial Canadian, loyal friend and deeply romantic lover. He explores Mordecai''s distraught childhood, and gives us the "portrait of a marriage" - the lifelong love affair with Florence, with Mordecai as beloved father of five. The portrait is alive and intimate - warts and all.

The acclaimed author of The Colony of Unrequited Dreams introduces us to the Johnstons of Newfoundland in an intimate, captivating memoir of three generations of fathers and sons.

The New York Times called Wayne Johnston''s The Colony of Unrequited Dreams "an eventful, character-rich book...a brilliant and bravura literary performance."  His marvelous new memoir, Baltimore''s Mansion, is equally impressive, filled with heart-stopping descriptions, a cast of stubborn, acerbic, yet entirely irresistible family members, and an evocation of time and place reminiscent of his best fiction.

Charlie Johnston is the famed blacksmith of Ferryland, a Catholic colony founded by Lord Baltimore in the 1620s on the Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland.  For his prowess at the forge, he is considered as necessary as a parish priest at local weddings.  But he must spend the first cold hours of every workday fishing at sea with his sons, one of whom, the author''s father, Arthur, vows that as an adult he will never look to the sea for his livelihood.

In the heady months leading to the referendum that results in Newfoundland being "inducted" into Canada, Art leaves the island for college and an eventual career with Canadian Fisheries, studying and regulating a livelihood he and his father once pursued.  He parts on mysterious terms with Charlie, who dies while he''s away, and Art is plunged into a lifelong battle with the personal demons that haunted the end of their relationship.  Years later, Wayne prepares to leave at the same age Art was when he said good-bye to Charlie, and old patterns threaten to repeat themselves.

At times a harrowing tale of trails in the darkness, of grand desolation and dangerous coasts, Baltimore''s Mansion speaks to us all about the hardships, blessings, and power of family relationships, of leaving home and returning.

One of the most important, exciting biographies of our time: the definitive, major two-volume biography of Pierre Elliott Trudeau - written with unprecedented, complete access to Trudeau's enormous cache of private letters and papers.

Bestselling biographer John English gets behind the public record and existing glancing portraits of Trudeau to reveal the real man and the multiple influences that shaped his life, providing the full context lacking in all previous biographies to-date.

As prime minister between 1968 and 1984, Trudeau, the brilliant, controversial figure, intrigued Canadians and attracted international attention as no other Canadian leader has ever done. Volume One takes us from his birth in 1919 to his election as leader in 1968.

Born into a wealthy family in Montreal, Trudeau excelled at the best schools, graduating as a lawyer with conservative, nationalist and traditional Catholic views. But always conscious of his French-English heritage, desperate to know the outside world, and an adventurer to boot, he embarked on a pilgrimage of discovery - first to Harvard and the Sorbonne, then to the London School of Economics and, finally, on a trip through Europe, the Middle East, India and China. He was a changed man when he returned - socialist in his politics, sympathetic to labour, a friend to activists and writers in radical causes. Suddenly and surprisingly, he went to Ottawa for two mostly unhappy years as a public servant in the Privy Council Office. He frequently shocked his colleagues when, on the brink of a Quebec election, for example, he departed for New York or Europe on an extended tour. Yet in the 1950s and 60s, he wrote the most important articles outlining his political philosophy.

And there were the remarkable relationships with friends, women and especially his mother (whom he lived with until he was middle-aged). He wrote to them always, exchanging ideas with the men, intimacies with the women, especially in these early years, and lively descriptions of his life. He even recorded his in-depth psychoanalysis in Paris. This personal side of Trudeau has never been revealed before - and it sheds light on the politician and statesman he became.

Volume One ends with his entry into politics, his appointment as Minister of Justice, his meeting Margaret and his election as leader of the Liberal Party and Prime Minister of Canada. There, his genius and charisma, his ambition and intellectual prowess, his ruthlessness and emotional character and his deliberate shaping of himself for leadership played out on the national stage and, when Lester B. Pearson announced his retirement as prime minister in 1968, there was but one obvious man for the job: Pierre Trudeau.

In 1938 Trudeau began a diary, which he continued for over two years. It is detailed, frank, and extraordinarily revealing. It is the only diary in Trudeau's papers, apart from less personal travel diaries and an agenda for 1937 that contains some commentary. His diary expresses Trudeau's own need to chronicle the moments of late adolescence as he tried to find his identity. It begins on New Year's Day 1938 with the intriguing advice: "If you want to know my thoughts, read between the lines!"
-from Citizen of the World

Rudy Wiebe has written award-winning fiction for decades. He is recognized as one of Canada''s finest literary treasures. Twice he has received Canada''s most prestigious prize for fiction writing: The Governor-General''s Award (equivalent to the Pulitzer Prize for fiction).

Now comes new recognition for Wiebe''s nonfiction writing. His recently released childhood memoir, Of This Earth: A Mennonite Boyhood in the Boreal Forest, has won the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Nonfiction (considered to be the country''s most prestigious literary nonfiction prize).

The book holds Rudy''s memoirs of growing up through age 12. His immigrant family cut a farm out of stony bushland in remote Saskatchewan. They hand-dug their well, climbed a ladder to their beds under the rafters, farmed with horses, and traveled by sleigh on the frontier.

Stories and singing and food from their native Ukraine and Poland held them and filled their bodies and souls.

Of This Earth is written with "spare and eloquent prose," say the jurors who chose the book for the Charles Taylor Prize.

Wiebe "conveys the riches of a hardscrabble inheritance; a love of words, reading and music, a sustaining yet unsentimental faith, and a bond with the natural world, all of which have provided a compass for his writing life."

One of the Taylor-Prize jurors reflected, "Rudy''s book haunts you; it stays with you."