Bøger udgivet af Vagrant Press

A darkly humorous family saga set in Nova Scotia about a young woman coming of age in a family that believes it's cursed, for fans of Emma Straub and Lesley Crewe. Kitten Love's family is haunted by the memory of her teenaged aunt, Nerida, who died just days before Kitten's birth in 1970. Her mother, Queena, believes the family is cursed, and she's determined not to let disaster strike again. She won't let Kitten out of her sight--especially to visit the beaches that surround the town. She's built a bomb shelter to protect against Soviet attack, and she's desperate to protect her husband, Stubby, from the fatal and mysterious Love Heart. Kitten thinks she knows how to defeat their curse: magic. But when protection spells and clues from tarot cards aren't enough to save Stubby, Kitten turns her back on the things that make her life magical, and Queena turns her back on reality. She preserves everything as it was the day Stubby died in 1987--from the gold shag rug in the bathroom to the Duran Duran posters in Kitten's room. Kitten, herself, is forbidden to change. Kitten tastes freedom when she falls in love and moves to British Columbia, but reinventing herself without the curse is harder than she expects. Tragedy and her own reliance on magical thinking eventually lead her back home to Queena, her brother Thom, and Aunt Bunny, who are equally stuck in their pasts. When tarot cards begin mysteriously showing up in her room, warning of a betrayal and encouraging an unlikely romance, she's certain someone is watching her. Could the heartbreak that almost destroyed Kitten's family be the very thing that helps them move on? A darkly humorous family saga woven around tarot cards and a mixtape of '80s songs, Every Little Thing She Does is Magic is a heady mix of music, ghosts, love, and nostalgia.

Well, Dick's dead. Now what?Margo, his widow, is trying to dodge the tsunami of paperwork and other tasks coming her way. She doesn't deal with details-why do you think she was married in the first place? Dick always handled the drudgery. Not terribly well, it turns out.Margo's ex-husband (the first one, not the dead one) and their two adult children are trying to support Margo-who seems to be finally entering adulthood at the tender age of sixty-two. Dead Dick's ex-wife and their daughter consider Margo a maneater, so the funeral is a nightmare. Life in New Brunswick lately is a tornado of siblings, children, pets, marriages, health issues, and endless bureaucracy.And at the centre of it all is Margo, living alone for the very first time, going back to work as a drugstore cashier to make ends meet, and trying to endure everyone else's judgements about the woman she is when she barely knows herself.How old do you have to be to come of age?...and has anyone seen Dick's will?With humour and heart, national bestseller Lesley Crewe walks readers through the incredibly disruptive domino effects of the death of one unremarkable man-and the evolution of the flibbertigibbet wife he's left behind.

A novel inspired by the original screenplay for the award-winning feature film Dawn, Her Dad & the Tractor, about a young trans woman who returns to her family farm in the wake of her mother's death, written by celebrated actor and screenwriter Shelley Thompson. The MacInnes family is grieving. The loss of Miranda has devastated her husband, John Andrew, her eldest daughter, Tammy, and her youngest child, Dawn. Not Donnie anymore but Dawn, like sunrise, who transitioned while her mother received cancer treatment -- without the rest of the family knowing. Now, when Dawn leaves Halifax for rural Nova Scotia to attend her mother's funeral, she knows she'll be meeting her sister and father for the first time as herself. With Dawn's revelation, John Andrew and Tammy find themselves grieving for the son and brother they once knew, while Tammy's fiancé, Byron, becomes an unexpected ally. Between the complicated reaction from her family, unwanted attention from local bigots, and whispers from curious neighbours, Dawn wonders if she can ever really come home. A work of fierce allyship, of enduring love, and of gentle hope, ROAR follows a family through grief and estrangement as they become catalysts for change in their rural community. Told from multiple points of view, with confidence and tenderness, actor and screenwriter Shelley Thompson's debut novel is profoundly authentic, drawing on her own experience as the mother of a trans child and a fierce activist for the trans community.

Beloved and bestselling Cape Breton author Lesley Crewe's novels are now available in bright and bold, smaller-format editions. The story begins with Nell, the "spinster on the hill" near St. Peter's, Cape Breton. Scarred by her own childhood, she swears she could never love a child and that she will never marry, denying herself a life with the man she loves. She's proven wrong when a baby is born just down the road from her. Her love of little Jane, despite herself, propels us forward through generations trying to untangle their own traumas and secrets. Eventually, we meet Bridie--joyful, kind, capable Bridie--and see her struggling through the echoing pain of those who came before her. Her choices, her bravery, her "nest of wonderful women," and her ultimate refusal to settle for anything less than love, eventually redeem her and everyone around her--even the spinster on the hill. As real as our own family dramas, Beholden is full of Lesley Crewe's trademark wit, heartbreaking losses, incredible women with unbreakable friendships, and the sweet wildness of Cape Breton.

A poignant novel imbued with music from the Giller Prize -- shortlisted author of Like This and Twenty-Six that follows two social outcasts as they navigate through their traumatic pasts. The worst moment of Sam's life was captured on video and shared across the Internet for all to gawk at. This is something she has in common with Robot, who just wants to move past the mistakes he's made, if only his small town will let him. When the two meet in a high school music class, they start to find their way to each other. Music might offer a way not only forward, but forward together, if Sam and Robot can overcome the echoes of the moments that made them infamous. The past reverberates in ways we don't expect, in this new novel by Giller Prize -- shortlisted author Leo McKay, Jr. From family secrets and old relationships that resurface, to the tape loops that endlessly replay private moments of trauma and despair, What Comes Echoing Back travels back and forth in time to get to what's true, with humour, humanity, and the healing power of music.

A compelling contemporary novel set in Canada and Ukraine that follows a nuclear engineer obsessed with preventing disaster, from the author of One Who Has Been Here Before. Jessica Manchaky's life has been shaped by the threat of nuclear disaster. She's a child when she hears news of the Chernobyl nuclear accident, and the disappearance of Ukrainian relatives, growing up on a northern Alberta military base during the Cold War. From that moment on, all she wants is to keep danger at bay. But living in a household with a domineering and volatile mother and a rebellious older brother in isolated Cold Lake, Alberta, Jessica never feels fully safe. When she comes of age, she leaves her suffocating small town for Halifax, Nova Scotia, where she meets her future husband and eventually becomes a nuclear engineer in charge of risk assessment and management at nuclear power plants. But even as she shields the world from nuclear disaster, she is constantly facing personal tragedies -- like a strained marriage, a misogynistic workplace, and severe postpartum anxiety -- that she never quite manages to predict. When her young daughter is afflicted with a mysterious and potentially deadly illness, Jessica must learn to accept that not all risk can be managed. Beginning with the threat of the Cold War and the ripple effects of the Chernobyl nuclear accident, and punctuated by other disasters both natural and manmade, Some There Are Fearless is an intimate and vulnerable exploration of the thin line between control and chaos from the author of the "terrific debut" (Globe and Mail) One Who Has Been Here Before.

An extraordinary literary fiction debut from an award-winning writer and activist, set in the remote Labrador Innu community of Utshimassits, exploring grief, trauma, unlearning, and healing. One cold February morning in 1992, Anna receives a phone call, a request to work with the Utshimassiu Innu in Labrador to organize a people's inquiry, a self-examination into a house fire that killed six children. Eager to escape a complicated relationship and afraid to face the grief of losing her father, Anna accepts the invitation. She catches a plane, painfully aware that she doesn't have a clue what a people's inquiry might look like, and heads for Nitassinan. This world, with its own language and spirits, is where she's told children die because people do not care for the caribou bones. It is a world where an inquiry becomes a gathering of voices. As the community tells its story -- elders, men, women, and children -- Anna learns to listen deeply to their words, to the land, to the past and the present. Memories knit together to find meaning in a pain that cannot be named. She immerses herself and leans into her own grief. As she bears witness to the fiercely close community and the unexpected, tender, and courageous way they look after each other and carry on, she learns something about our collective need to imagine a future together, no matter how fragile and imperfect. Inspired by true events, and the Gathering Voices report, of which Fouillard served as editor, Precious Little is a unique enmeshing of the imagination with memories and experiences spanning decades of working and living with the Innu. At its core, it is a journey toward unlearning and unknowing. By turns harrowing and empowering, provocative and enlightening, this novel is a powerful act of reconciliation and resistance in the face of trauma, infused with love, humility, humour and joy.

The South End house where Elsie Brooks and her big, complicated family live is bursting with secrets. Elsie's banished husband lives in the basement. Her lonely sister lives in the attic. Her twenty-something daughters come and go as they please. And when the renegade ninety-one-year-old archaeologist they all know as Aunt Hildy comes home to die, the poor old place becomes impossibly full-of hidden meanings and hidden treasure, of murder and mystery. Shoot Me is a story about family, fortune, and figuring out who you are. Bestselling author Lesley Crewe has created a mixed-up, frantic, ultimately lovable East Coast family. But as Aunt Hildy would say, "Life is not something that needs to be tamed. It's messy. Always was, always will be."

In this bittersweet novel inspired by the life of Nova Scotia folk artist Maud Lewis, master storyteller Carol Bruneau gives voice to the artist, allowing her to speak from beyond the grave, freed from the stigmas of gender, poverty and disability that marked her life and shaped her art.

Marilla Cuthbert was fifty-two years old when the plucky red-headed Anne Shirley came to live with her and her brother, Matthew, at Green Gables farm on Prince Edward Island. A seemingly cold and dour spinster, her heart eventually softens to the loveable orphan girl. But for over a century readers have wondered, who was Marilla before Anne? In Louise Michalos's remarkable debut novel, readers are introduced to a spirited eighteen-year-old Marilla Cuthbert--a girl not unlike Anne herself--who is desperately in love, and whose whole life is spread before her. But when a moment of defiance brings life-changing consequences, a new Marilla begins to take shape, one who would learn to bear tragedy like a birthright, and loss as an inevitability, and who would hold steadfast to the secrets that could shatter the lives of everyone around her. Weaving its way from Marilla's early life in Avonlea to her coming-of-age in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and back, Marilla Before Anne is the story readers of Anne of Green Gables have longed for. Told with a refreshingly original East Coast voice, this exquisite, heartbreaking work of historical fiction takes readers on a journey back in time, to the Green Gables where Marilla Cuthbert lived, loved, and learned, long before Anne.