Award-winning poet and novelist Gwendolyn MacEwen explores her strongly personal responses to the landscape, culture, and people of Greece in this exquisitely written travel diary, which was originally published in 1978.

Originally published in 1978, beloved poet and novelist Gwendolyn MacEwen’s first work of nonfiction explores her strongly personal responses to a complex civilization. Partly written during a trip to Greece in 1971, MacEwen moves from the urban tumult of Athens to the radiant simplicity of an island in the Aegean. In this intimate and exquisitely written travel diary, she evokes the very spirit of Greece — the exuberance of the people, the sun-drenched landscape, and the shaping power of ancient traditions and myths in modern Mediterranean life.

A sweeping historical romance inspired by the real-life daughter of Miguel de Cervantes, celebrated author of Don Quixote

Madrid, 1599. Following her mother’s sudden death, fifteen-year-old Isabel goes to live in the family home of her father, the poet and war hero Miguel de Cervantes, a man she has never met. Forced to pose as a maid to conceal her illegitimate status, Isabel must adapt to a new way of life with her jealous cousin and protective aunts while she waits for her father to return from Seville. Meanwhile, in the nearby town of Esquivias, Miguel’s pious and faithful wife Catalina similarly awaits his return, blissfully unaware of Isabel’s existence.

As Miguel works on the manuscript that will become his masterpiece, Don Quixote, the years pass and Isabel grows into womanhood, falling in and out love, uncovering family secrets, and yearning for the legitimacy denied her by a rigid and callous society. Capturing two tumultuous decades of Golden Age Spain in rich historical detail, Martha Bátiz paints a compassionate portrait of a family on the precipice of great change—and the fiercely independent woman at its centre striving to make a life of her own.

“Profoundly moving and beautifully written . . . each story is its own universe that transports the reader through the characters’ joy and pain.” — Amy Stuart  

The nineteen stories in No Stars in the Sky feature strong but damaged female characters in crisis. Tormented by personal conflicts and oppressive regimes that treat the female body like a trophy of war, the women in No Stars in the Sky face life-altering circumstances that either shatter or make them stronger, albeit at a very high price. True to her Latin American roots, Bátiz shines a light on the crises that concern her most: the plight of migrant children along the Mexico–U.S. border, the tragedy of the disappeared in Mexico and Argentina, and the generalized racial and domestic violence that has turned life into a constant struggle for survival. With an unflinching hand, Bátiz explores the breadth of the human condition to expose silent tragedies too often ignored.

For readers of John Vaillant, Robert Macfarlane, and Helen Macdonald, a lyrical, panoramic exploration of extinction as it occurs and reoccurs in natural history, myth, and science.

It’s no secret we live in an age of extinction: our daily newsfeeds and disappearing wildlife make that abundantly clear. But what does extinction really mean for humanity? Naturalist and poet Neil Griffin seeks to answer that question.

The result is a globe-spanning, personal history of extinction: a grand tour of the dead, the nearly dead, and—against all odds—the still living. Griffin catches crocodiles in Belize, tracks bats on the Western plains, meets jaguars in Honduras, and, in Kenya, comes face to face with the northern white rhinoceros, the rarest mammal on Earth. Along the way, he connects our current moment to Earth’s deep history, exploring how mass extinctions occur and irreversibly shape life on our planet.

Written with curiosity, compassion, and a surprising humour, Endings is an eye-opening journey through extinction—from the fossil record to the field biologist’s notebook, from myth to memory. In bearing witness to what we’ve lost, Griffin discovers something unexpected: that even in an age of endings, wonder and hope remain defiantly alive.

Meditations on the beauty of an ordinary life

Meditating on the beauty of an ordinary life, Sanna Wani’s second poetry collection, Lantern, explores how we fall in love and make a home. What does it mean to belong to a city, or to truly enter adulthood? Imbued with a quiet queerness, this book is a guide for living in the aftermath of familial rifts, crises of faith, political struggle, and intergenerational grief—all while remaining devoted to an idea of goodness.

A love letter to Toronto, Lantern is grounded in subway stations and city parks yet textured like watercolour and linen. Wani writes with reverence for animals, trees and flowers, but does not avoid everyday difficulties—the burnout of a 9-5; her fraught homeland of Kashmir; or the reality of Islamophobia in Canada. Wani also addresses the craft and the limits of language. Lantern is kaleidoscopic in its queries: memory, mothering and morality refract through tarot, Sufism, and psychoanalysis.

A balm and an ode, this collection places Wani in the lineage of Mary Oliver while carving her own path as both theo- and ecopoet. Taking stock of one precious life, Lantern invites us to consider our responsibilities—to ourselves and each other—and to choose who we might become.