What’s in Print?
Our titles, distributed through IngramGroup, are available through direct orders on this site – depending on our office stock – at all online retailers, or as special orders through bookstores. (By default we have included Amazon links.) Scroll to the bottom to see reviews. For Robert Faulk titles (aimed at a wider readership), see here.
The Boulevard, an ambitious novel featuring Ernest Hemingway, Vincent van Gogh, Satan, and a train ride through Hell.
For the first time since Satan’s banishment, God plans a visit to the lower world, and Satan is in a bind. In defiance, he has built Hell in the image of Heaven, but now he must destroy its beauty or face God’s wrath. Singed with dark humour, packed with historical detail and written in Edson’s straightforward style, with themes that include the search for happiness and the importance of staying true to oneself, The Boulevard is first and foremost a testament to the undeniable power of art.
Jerrod Edson was born in Saint John, NB, in 1974. He lives in Mississauga, ON, with his wife Leigh and daughters Hadley and Harper. The Boulevard is his sixth novel.
270 pages, Paperback / ISBN 978-1778078156
Nick, a young physician disillusioned with clinical work, moves from small province New Brunswick to big city Vancouver to take a research position with a medical startup, A.I. Plus Womxn’s Health Solutions. Nick quickly finds himself working in the company of “Grantrepreneurs” – rogues of the business world who have created a financing model based entirely on the exploitation of public grant and subsidy programs.
When they seek to secure Fisheries and Oceans financing for a koi fountain in their lobby, Nick and his new friends rub elbows with Chinese-Canadian gangsters, famous Canadian authors, and even the prime minister himself (in the midst of a cough-syrup-induced existential crisis).
It’s a lot of fun until someone shows up dead in a decorative water feature.
With scalpel-sharp wit, hilarious schemes and generous injections of heart, Jake Swan has written a page-turning, laugh-out-loud, idol-skewering misadventure.
176 pages, Paperback / ISBN 978-1778078170
Nominated for the 2024 Margaret and John Savage First Book Award
The year is 1982.
Jackie O’Connor is true to his word and expects one thing from others: to be true to theirs. Growing up in rural New Brunswick on the banks of the mystical Miramichi River, leading a straightforward life and working at the sawmill, Jackie doesn’t demand much else from anyone.
But everything takes an unforeseen turn when he inherits a large sum of money. The world around him spins upside down – the dead come back to haunt him, and others seek to deceive him.
Navigating this new reality with his dog Ruby at his side, beset by urgent requests and shadowy friendships, Jackie paddles his canoe through spiraling circumstances and an ever-changing world, attempting to keep both his vessel afloat and his moral compass straight.
Boom Road is a wild ride, a page-turning mix of hilarity, tenderness, and violence.
Shawn Lawlor is originally from Miramichi, New Brunswick, and currently lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia with his wonderful family. Boom Road is his first novel.
229 pages, Paperback / ISBN 978-1998122073
Winner of the 2024 NB Book Award, Fiction
Nachzehrer is the life story of Gerald Kurt Paine, a self-confessed ‘eater of souls,’ as told to his friend, the teacher. It is the story of a young Canadian man who loved to fly bi-planes, and who at the outbreak of WWII convinces the Royal Air Force to let him fly a Hurricane, to shoot down Nazis.
It is also the story of his capture and bizarre subjugation to a cruel Kommandant at the Plotzensee Prison.
Nelson Keane’s small novel is haunting and strange, and dark, yet it doesn’t lack moments of levity and throughout exhibits a thorough understanding of the best and worst of human nature.
176 pages / ISBN 978-1998122097
The Art of Forgiveness is a collection of 8 linked short stories about 3 boys growing up in the suburban outskirts of Halifax. As the book blurb says:
“The one with his indecipherable gibberish and long-in-the-back black hockey hair, who looked like he belonged in detention or the trailer park or both, who claimed soccer was the most popular sport, who during roll call called their teacher sir. And this American, wearing his stained Ralph Lauren sweater and yellow rubber boots, smelling like Drew’s ma’s Avon trunk, whacko enough to start a fight over Paul McCartney, smart enough to use big words and a lot of dirty ones too, yet too stupid to defer to Drew’s natural authority. The truth of these new kids was, they were a savage northbound monsoon that hit Drew at least as hard as he hit them.”
By turns quirky and hard-edged, these are the stories of three boys growing up in the suburbs outside Halifax. Frustrated with their parents’ inadequacies, unaware they possess the same ones, and inexplicably drawn to one other like a rudderless family lacking the necessary moral role models, they struggle to overcome their own weaknesses and most toxic traits. From one another they draw strength to survive schoolyard bullying, racism, domestic abuse, first love, the local drug economy, and even the loss of their parents. But they are never despondent, and will leave readers with hope that people—men in this case—can grow and become better.”
128 pages / ISBN 978-1998122103
What’s in a subtitle you say? How about this: A BURLESQUE OF THE IMAGINATION ON TOTALITARIAN THEMES IN THE MANNER OF ÉMILE COHL AND LES ARTS INCOHÉRENTS HARRY EVERETT SMITH, AND HANNA-BARBERA
A stylish, mordant, propulsive academic satire and burlesque of the imagination in which “spiritual entrepreneurism” passes for higher education, and an unexpected hero (an adjunct writing instructor), finding he is “powerless to stop the relentless slaughter of well-being,” battles deceit and hypocrisy within the Creative Industrial Complex. Unlike anything else, The Creative Writers is a commedia dell’arte performance wrapped in a comic book. Written in lavish, exquisite prose, it is misanthropic, hallucinatory, and side-splittingly funny. A Norman Mailer or a Anthony Burgess would love this novel. Others may find it not at all nice
“Amdahl is one whose gifts are staggering and hard won. The stories [in I Am Death and The Intimidator Still Lives In Our Hearts] relate, by the way of guts through grace, the wholeness of a novel too good for mere philosophy. Gary Amdahl knows sports, men, women, and dogs, thank God, so thoroughly as to make them myth. Camus comes to mind, thought with great muscle.”
—Barry Hannah
202 pages / ISBN 9781-998122127
Midway, Brent Mason
From above, the carnival burns bright. Double-looping neon-sequined roller coasters, Ferris wheels, and dozens of other rides spin wild screams into the ink–black sky. A labyrinth of games branches out onto the asphalt, and barkers beckon the river of passers-by with whirling wheels and bouncing balls, promising a quick buck or a giant stuffed bear. They come from miles.
On the ground, behind the curtain, a different world exists: the sugar-high promise of the Midway has an underside, where unwritten rules are applied without concern for causality or casualty. The impossible can be dreamed here.
When Wyatt finds himself pulled into the carnival, time loosens its hold. He becomes magnetized by the Midway. The frenetic 24/7 physical and mental demands force him to become a part of the fabric, whatever form it takes. It’s an unrelenting, unforgiving realm where all who enter are either abandoned or consumed.
236 pages / ISBN 978-1998122-14-1
Oliver Bell & the Infinite Multiverse, Jake Swan
Math whiz and bumbling pragmatist Oliver Bell never planned on ending existence as we know it.
Fine-tuning his PhD thesis requires nothing more than peace, order and tranquility…
During a late-night problem-solving session at the university library, chaos erupts when a campus protest turns violent. Fleeing, Oliver stumbles into a cosmic showdown between the powers of good and evil, and he must learn to navigate a reality infinitely more complex than the one he thought he knew.
Oliver’s world is one of kidnappers-cum-demon-hunters, sentient, non-verbal dogs, a cardiologist who moonlights as Death, a tiki bar in the underworld, a fishing pier in heaven with really good coffee, and a three-foot-tall immortal beast who seeks to return all existence to nothingness.
The multiverse, it turns out, is real, and to Oliver’s horror and disappointment, he is at the center of it. Equal parts Douglas Adams and H.P. Lovecraft, Oliver Bell and the Infinite Multiverse is an endlessly inventive, hilarious, hair-raising adventure for those who would boldly go where only a half dozen strawberry daiquiris can take them
343 pages / ISBN 978-1-998122-134
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Indigo
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Swinging Between Water and Stone, Steven Mayoff
“Some will say we are monkeying around with the grieving process
when we swing between water and stone.
Some will say love is only courageous when we can let go.”
Swinging Between Water and Stone is divided into four sections that, respectively, loosely represent Birth, Life, Death and Rebirth. Reincarnation, seen as lacking empirical evidence, is often taken on faith. And yet something as commonplace as the cycles of the seasons can provide clues to the mysteries that may lie beyond our mortality, offering a way to make sense of the end of one cycle and the beginning of the next. These poems are meant to celebrate the wheels within wheels that are constantly in motion throughout the natural world and in our imagined landscapes.
Steven Mayoff is a novelist, poet and lyricist. Born in Montreal, he has made rural Prince Edward Island his home since 2001.
102 pages / ISBN 978-1-998122-15-8
The Secret Lives of Public Servants, Anne Lévesque
Decades after leaving the public service, Lee Gaik Wah, Stephen Higdon, and Caroline Melançon are now Lost Annuitants. Art school graduate Del Charbonneau is the pension clerk obsessed with tracking them down. Wry, warm, and wonderfully strange, The Secret Lives of Public Servants interweaves the past and present of four unforgettable characters with a humorous, richly detailed depiction of life inside a large government office.
A meditation on work, the power of the creative imagination, and the bonds that sustain us.
“Darkly hilarious and unexpectedly poignant, The Secret Lives of Public Servants skewers bureaucracy while unearthing the tangled lives behind the paperwork. With sharp wit and keen insight, Anne Lévesque shines a compassionate and often hilarious light on her cast of disaffected functionaries and aging idealists as they navigate career, regret, and reinvention. A wickedly smart, slyly subversive read.” Tom Ryan, author The Treasure Hunters Club
254 Pages / ISBN 978-1998122-16-5
Direct Order
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Indigo
Undertow, Beverley Shaw
In Undertow, Beverley Shaw’s lyrical novel, we experience how the undertow moves through our lives always, taking the form of crisis and opportunity. A chance rescue on a Nova Scotia beach braids together the lives of three strangers, compelling each to surrender their beliefs about success, normalcy, identity, borders, and above all, control. Moving between New York and Nova Scotia, Shaw writes with wisdom and knowing intimacy about loss and illness. Yet this is also a novel about birth, including the birth of friendships integral to surviving and thriving catastrophic times, both personal and political. Above all, Undertow urges us to consider how we must let go to transform, and how we’re capable of more creativity, generosity, and heart than we ever thought possible. – Sharon English
300 Pages / ISBN 978-1998122-25-7
Animals, Jerrod Edson
A woman flees with her children to the safety of her childhood farm, only to find danger has followed her across the country. An old man bleeds out in the woods, trying to survive long enough to deliver a final message. A quiet office worker hides beneath his desk as gunshots ring out in the building.
Across three seemingly unconnected crises, ordinary lives are thrown into extraordinary peril.
In Animals, Jerrod Edson weaves a taut, startling novella that begins in realism and gradually tips into something far stranger. Told with urgency, dark humour, and a deep empathy for the broken and the overlooked, this is a story about what it means to be hunted—and what it might mean to fight back.
Nothing is quite what it seems. And by the time the forest closes in, you’ll understand why.
106 Pages / ISBN 978-1-998122-21-9
Direct Order (limited edition)
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Indigo
Happenstance, Thomas Chamberlain
Darby Saunders has a plan. Two years in the making, every detail rehearsed, every goodbye disguised. At sixteen, she’s learned to survive the unthinkable behind closed doors, but survival isn’t living, and she’s ready to end the rule of the “monster” who made her home a place of terror.
Over a single weekend, as a storm lashes her small New Brunswick town, Darby’s carefully plotted escape collides with the unpredictable—the unexpected kindness of a teacher, a loyal dog, and a best friend who doesn’t know the truth
Told with honesty and restraint, Happenstance traces the final days of a young woman’s attempt to reclaim her power from the man who stole it. It’s a story of courage, and friendship, and the desperate hope that even in darkness, there might still be a way out.
170 Pages / ISBN 978-1998122-27-1
Recarving the Chrysoprase Bowl, Volume I,
The Book of Gates
Tom McGauley,
with an Afterword by Luke Franklin
Only now is the scope and breadth of McGauley’s work in poetry visible in published form … Recarving the Chrysoprase Bowl is a work of poems in sequence, each with its morning that is neither poised in apartness, nor self-entangled in the verbal undergrowth of the others. The sequence is cumulative, building up its images, landscapes, names, sites, and settings, one at a time. Though there is no plot to follow, there is a dense fabric of reiterated language-actions and verbal patterns to take in and move through, whether one reads deeply, for motifs and allusions, or for the surface effects in which the poetry has its profoundest life: its rhythms, sound-textures, derangements of syntax, and acoustic concretions.
— from the Afterword
344 Pages / ISBN 978-1-998122-08-0
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Indigo PB / Indigo HC
Sweatshirt, Jordan Stewart
Observational, conversational, and rooted in domesticity, Jordan Stewart’s Sweatshirt somehow tilts the world with a half-degree of strangeness, helping us see the cosmic, the tender, the comedic.
Divided into ‘Tired Eyes’, ‘Other Worlds Than These’, and ‘Love, or Something Like It’, Sweatshirt is a book of narrative poems that blur the line between the mundane and the surreal.
It’s about love, parenthood, aging, and wanting, told in a voice that is self-deprecating but sincere.
This is Jordan Stewart’s third book of poetry and fourth published work of writing. Jordan lives in Grand Bay-Westfield, New Brunswick, with his beautiful wife and two energetic daughters
80 Pages / ISBN 978-1998122-29-5
Reviews
“Edson’s novel is hugely satisfying and thoroughly engaging. Satan is a master yarn-spinner, and even though he cannot be trusted to tell the whole truth, the facts behind his fall and his coercive tactics to enlist Van Gogh in the Boulevard project gradually come to light. Is The Boulevard speculative fiction? Possibly. But it is also a visionary work that turns popular myth on its head, and its weirdness is essential to the singular fictional world it convincingly evokes. Jerrod Edson, writing with great confidence, proves there is nothing beyond the scope of his imaginative powers. The Boulevard, his sixth novel, is an irreverent triumph.”
Ian Colford, Goodreads
“It takes a light touch to make this kind of thing work, and author Jake Swan has it, indeed: in Grantrepreneurs he has given us a book that continually surprises, by playing by its own rules, creating the aesthetic by which it wishes to be judged, not by following any a priori notions of what a novel “should” be.”
W.D. Clarke, Goodreads
Reviews
“Edson’s novel is hugely satisfying and thoroughly engaging. Satan is a master yarn-spinner, and even though he cannot be trusted to tell the whole truth, the facts behind his fall and his coercive tactics to enlist Van Gogh in the Boulevard project gradually come to light. Is The Boulevard speculative fiction? Possibly. But it is also a visionary work that turns popular myth on its head, and its weirdness is essential to the singular fictional world it convincingly evokes. Jerrod Edson, writing with great confidence, proves there is nothing beyond the scope of his imaginative powers. The Boulevard, his sixth novel, is an irreverent triumph.”
Ian Colford, Goodreads
“It takes a light touch to make this kind of thing work, and author Jake Swan has it, indeed: in Grantrepreneurs he has given us a book that continually surprises, by playing by its own rules, creating the aesthetic by which it wishes to be judged, not by following any a priori notions of what a novel “should” be.”
Galleon Books 