A Noise Downstairs

A Novel

by Linwood Barclay

Regular Price $24.00

Our Price $19.99

Paul Davis is hearing some very strange noises in the night. He hears the clickety-click of a manual typewriter--as if someone is vigorously tapping the keys. The eerie sounds began soon after his wife, Charlotte, bought him a classic antique Underwood. But only Paul can hear the noise coming from downstairs; Charlotte doesn't hear anything unusual.
 
Is Paul losing his mind? Maybe. Or is something really there? Eight months ago, he stumbled upon Connecticut's infamous "Apology Killer"--a psychopath who forced his victims to typewrite personal apologies to him before he cut their throats--disposing of two mutilated bodies on Milford's Post Road. Most shocking of all, the killer was his colleague, someone he thought he knew. Paul's been seeing a therapist for months to recover from the nearly fatal encounter, but his nerves and short-term memory have suffered since the traumatic event.
 
There's only one way to learn if the noises are real or a figment of his hyper-imagination. One night, Paul rolls a sheet of paper into the machine. The next morning, when he checks the page, there is a chilling message:
"We typed our apologies like he asked but he killed us anyway."
 
As he desperately searches to find a rational explanation for the note and the noises, Paul slowly begins to consider the unthinkable: The message is authentic, and the women butchered by his colleague are reaching out to him from beyond the grave.

Tailspin

by Sandra Brown

Regular Price $35.00

Our Price $28.99

Rye Mallett, a fearless "freight dog" pilot charged with flying cargo to far-flung locations, is often rough-spoken and all business, but soft on regulations when they get in the way of meeting a deadline. But he does have a rock-solid reputation: he will fly in the foulest weather, day or night, and deliver the goods safely to their destination. So when Rye is asked to fly into a completely fogbound northern Georgia town and deliver a mysterious black box to a Dr. Lambert, he doesn't ask questions.
 
As Rye's plane nears the isolated landing strip, more trouble than inclement weather awaits him. He is greeted first by a sabotage attempt on his plane that causes him to crash land, and then by Dr. Brynn O'Neal, who claims she was sent for the box in Dr. Lambert's stead. Despite Rye's "no-involvement" policy when it comes to other people's problems, he finds himself irresistibly drawn to the intrigue surrounding his cargo . . . and to the mysterious and alluring Brynn.
 
Soon Rye and Brynn are in a treacherous forty-eight-hour race to deliver the box before time runs out. With everyone from law enforcement officials to hired thugs hot on their heels, they must learn to trust each other so they can protect their valuable cargo from those who would kill for it.

Washington Black
A Novel

by Esi Edugyan

Regular Price $33.99

Our Price $27.99

When two English brothers arrive at a Barbados sugar plantation, they bring with them a darkness beyond what the slaves have already known. Washington Black – an eleven year-old field slave – is horrified to find himself chosen to live in the quarters of one of these men. But the man is not as Washington expects him to be. His new master is the eccentric Christopher Wilde – naturalist, explorer, inventor and abolitionist – whose obsession to perfect a winged flying machine disturbs all who know him. Washington is initiated into a world of wonder: a world where the night sea is set alight with fields of jellyfish, where a simple cloth canopy can propel a man across the sky, where even a boy born in chains may embrace a life of dignity and meaning – and where two people, separated by an impossible divide, can begin to see each other as human.
 
But when a man is killed one fateful night, Washington is left to the mercy of his new masters. Christopher Wilde must choose between family ties and young Washington's life. What follows is a flight along the eastern coast of America, as the men attempt to elude the bounty that has been placed on Washington's head. Their journey opens them up to the extraordinary: to a dark encounter with a necropsicist, a scholar of the flesh; to a voyage aboard a vessel captained by a hunter of a different kind; to a glimpse through an unexpected portal into the Underground Railroad. This is a novel of fraught bonds and betrayal. What brings Wilde and Washington together ultimately tears them apart, leaving Washington to seek his true self in a world that denies his very existence.
 
From the blistering cane fields of Barbados to the icy plains of the Canadian Arctic, from the mud-drowned streets of London to the eerie deserts of Morocco, Washington Black teems with all the strangeness of life. This inventive, electrifying novel asks, What is Freedom? And can a life salvaged from the ashes ever be made whole? 

Serpentine

An Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Novel

by Laurel K. Hamilton

Regular Price $37.00

Our Price $29.99

Vampire hunter Anita Blake has managed to overcome everything she faces. But this time there's a monster that even she doesn't know how to fight...
 
A remote Florida island is the perfect wedding destination for the upcoming nuptials of Anita's fellow U.S. Marshal and best friend Edward. For Anita, the vacation is a welcome break, as it's the first trip she gets to take with just wereleopards Micah and Nathaniel. But it's not all fun and games and bachelor parties...
 
In this tropical paradise Micah discovers a horrific new form of lycanthropy, one that has afflicted a single family for generations. Believed to be the result of an ancient Greek curse, it turns human bodies into a mass of snakes.
 
When long-simmering resentment leads to a big blowout within the wedding party, the last thing Anita needs is more drama. But it finds her anyway when women start disappearing from the hotel, and worse--her own friends and lovers are considered the prime suspects. There's a strange power afoot that Anita has never confronted before, a force that's rendering those around her helpless in its thrall. Unable to face it on her own, Anita is willing to accept help from even the deadliest places. Help that she will most certainly regret--if she survives at all, that is...

Resilient

How to Grow an Unshakable Core of Calm, Strength, and Happiness

by Rick Hanson, Ph.D.

Regular Price $35.00

Our Price $28.99

These days it’s hard to count on the world outside. So it’s vital to grow strengths inside like grit, gratitude, and compassion—the key to resilience, and to lasting well-being in a changing world. 
 
True resilience is much more than enduring terrible conditions. We need resilience every day to raise a family, work at a job, cope with stress, deal with health problems, navigate issues with others, heal from old pain, and simply keep on going. 
 
With his trademark blend of neuroscience, mindfulness, and positive psychology, New York Times bestselling author Dr. Rick Hanson shows you how to develop twelve vital inner strengths hardwired into your own nervous system. Then no matter what life throws at you, you’ll be able to feel less stressed, pursue opportunities with confidence, and stay calm and centered in the face of adversity. 
 
This practical guide is full of concrete suggestions, experiential practices, personal examples, and insights into the brain. It includes effective ways to interact with others and to repair and deepen important relationships.
 
Warm, encouraging, and down-to-earth, Dr. Hanson’s step-by-step approach is grounded in the science of positive neuroplasticity. He explains how to overcome the brain’s negativity bias, release painful thoughts and feelings, and replace them with self-compassion, self-worth, joy, and inner peace. 

Stygian

A Dark-Hunter Novel

by Sherrilyn Kenyon
 

Regular Price $36.50

Our Price $29.99

#1 New York Times bestselling author Sherrilyn Kenyon brings us back to the astonishing world of the Dark-Hunters in Stygian, with a hero misunderstood by many…but most of all by himself.
 
Born before man recorded time, I lived for thousands of years believing myself to be something I’m not.
Someone I’m not.
 
Lied to and betrayed by gods, Daimons and Dark-Hunters, I’ve struggled to find my way in a world where I’ve been cursed since the moment I was prematurely ripped from my mother and planted into the womb of an innocent woman who thought me her son.
 
Trained as a slayer and predator, I learned to fit in and stay low. To become a tool for evil. Until I was sent to kill the one woman I couldn’t. My hesitation cost her her life.
Or so I thought. In an act of betrayal that makes all the others pale in comparison, I’ve learned that this world is an illusion and that my Phoebe still lives.
 
Now I will have to travel into the very pits of Hades to try and save her, even as everyone around me attempts to steal what little soul I have left. There’s only one person at my back and I’m not sure I can trust her either, for she was born of an enemy race. Yet sometimes the road to redemption is one that singes us to our very core. And if I fail to find the answers I need to save Phoebe, more than just my wife will die.
 
We will lose the world. Both human and Daimon.

The Outsider

A Novel

by Stephen King
 

Regular Price $39.99

Our Price $29.99

An unspeakable crime. A confounding investigation. At a time when the King brand has never been stronger, he has delivered one of his most unsettling and compulsively readable stories.
 
An eleven-year-old boy’s violated corpse is found in a town park. Eyewitnesses and fingerprints point unmistakably to one of Flint City’s most popular citizens. He is Terry Maitland, Little League coach, English teacher, husband, and father of two girls. Detective Ralph Anderson, whose son Maitland once coached, orders a quick and very public arrest. Maitland has an alibi, but Anderson and the district attorney soon add DNA evidence to go with the fingerprints and witnesses. Their case seems ironclad.
 
As the investigation expands and horrifying answers begin to emerge, King’s propulsive story kicks into high gear, generating strong tension and almost unbearable suspense. Terry Maitland seems like a nice guy, but is he wearing another face? When the answer comes, it will shock you as only Stephen King can.

Warlight

by Michael Ondaatje

Regular Price $34.00

Our Price $26.99

From the internationally acclaimed, bestselling author of The English Patient: a mesmerizing new novel that tells a dramatic story set in the decade after World War II through the lives of a small group of unexpected characters and two teenagers whose lives are indelibly shaped by their unwitting involvement.
 
In a narrative as beguiling and mysterious as memory itself--shadowed and luminous at once--we read the story of fourteen-year-old Nathaniel, and his older sister, Rachel. In 1945, just after World War II, they stay behind in London when their parents move to Singapore, leaving them in the care of a mysterious figure named The Moth. They suspect he might be a criminal, and they grow both more convinced and less concerned as they come to know his eccentric crew of friends: men and women joined by a shared history of unspecified service during the war, all of whom seem, in some way, determined now to protect, and educate (in rather unusual ways) Rachel and Nathaniel. But are they really what and who they claim to be? And what does it mean when the siblings' mother returns after months of silence without their father, explaining nothing, excusing nothing? A dozen years later, Nathaniel begins to uncover all that he didn't know and understand in that time, and it is this journey--through facts, recollection, and imagination--that he narrates in this masterwork from one of the great writers of our time.
 

Foe

A Novel

by Iain Reid

Regular Price $26.99

Our Price $19.99

A taut, psychological mind-bender from the bestselling author of I’m Thinking of Ending Things.
We don’t get visitors. Not out here. We never have.
 
Junior and Hen are a quiet married couple. They live a comfortable, solitary life on their farm, far from the city lights, but in close quarters with each other. One day, a stranger from the city arrives with surprising news: Junior has been randomly selected to travel far away from the farm...very far away. The most unusual part? Arrangements have already been made so that when he leaves, Hen won’t have a chance to miss him at all, because she won’t be left alone—not even for a moment. Hen will have company. Familiar company.
 
Foe examines the nature of domestic relationships, self-determination, and what it means to be (or not to be) a person. An eerily entrancing page-turner, it churns with unease and suspense from the first words to its shocking finale.

Women Talking

A Novel

by Miriam Toews

Regular Price $29.95

Our Price $24.99

A transformative and necessary work--as completely unexpected as it is inspired--by the award-winning author of the bestselling novels All My Puny Sorrows and A Complicated Kindness.
 
The sun rises on a quiet June morning in 2009. August Epp sits alone in the hayloft of a barn, anxiously bent over his notebook. He writes quickly, aware that his solitude will soon be broken. Eight women--ordinary grandmothers, mothers and teenagers; yet to August, each one extraordinary-- will climb the ladder into the loft, and the day's true task will begin. This task will be both simple and subversive: August, like the women, is a traditional Mennonite, and he has been asked to record a secret conversation.
  
Thus begins Miriam Toews' spellbinding novel. Gradually, as we hear the women's vivid voices console, tease, admonish, regale and debate each other, we piece together the reason for the gathering: they have forty-eight hours to make a life-altering choice on behalf of all the women and children in the colony. And like a vast night sky coming into view behind the bright sparks of their voices, we learn of the devastating events that have led to this moment.
  
Acerbic, funny, tender, sorrowful and wise, Women Talking is composed of equal parts humane love and deep anger. It is award-winning writer Miriam Toews' most astonishing novel to date, containing within its two short days and hayloft setting an expansive, timeless universe of thinking and feeling about women--and men--in our contemporary world.

Starlight

by Richard Wagamese

Regular Price $29.99

Our Price $24.99

The final novel from Richard Wagamese, the bestselling and beloved author of Indian Horse and Medicine Walk, centres on an abused woman on the run who finds refuge on a farm owned by an Indigenous man with wounds of his own. A profoundly moving novel about the redemptive power of love, mercy, and compassion--and the land's ability to heal us.
  
Frank Starlight has long settled into a quiet life working his remote farm, but his contemplative existence comes to an abrupt end with the arrival of Emmy, who has committed a desperate act so she and her child can escape a harrowing life of violence. Starlight takes in Emmy and her daughter to help them get back on their feet, and this accidental family eventually grows into a real one. But Emmy's abusive ex isn't content to just let her go. He wants revenge and is determined to hunt her down.
   
     Starlight was unfinished at the time of Richard Wagamese's death, yet every page radiates with his masterful storytelling, intense humanism, and insights that are as hard-earned as they are beautiful. With astonishing scenes set in the rugged backcountry of the B.C. Interior, and characters whose scars cut deep even as their journey toward healing and forgiveness lifts us, Starlight is a last gift to readers from a writer who believed in the power of stories to save us.

The Gynesaurs: What Happens Between the Stirrups, Stays Betwen the Stirrups

by Cambridge author Pat Oliver

Nominated for the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal of Humour

Dr. Anthea Brock, gynecologist extraordinaire, was perfectly content to be a single woman past her reproductive prime—or Gynesaur, as she and her coworkers termed it. Her decision to remain childless, after all, was why she’d divorced her ex-husband, Ian, and left Britain to start a new practice in Ontario.
Usually one to lead with her head and not her heart, Anthea is surprised when a return trip to Wales results in a heated romp with Ian. Even more unexpected is the pregnancy that results from it. Conflicted, Anthea turns to her fellow Gynesaurs for guidance. But they’ve got troubles of their own.
Carolina Stiletto, daughter of a murdered mafia member, is unraveling her family legacy. Molly McGilvery—widow, mother, and sister to a special needs brother—is ready for romance. Glynda Wicksteed, left penniless by her gay ex-husband, struggles to pursue her dreams after a devastating diagnosis.
Amid personal strife, the Gynesaurs must also juggle a roster of eccentric patients and plan the upcoming (boring but important) hospital fundraiser. Trusting in the unbreakable bonds of love and friendship, will these four extraordinary women find the courage to evolve or risk becoming extinct?

$20.00 Trade paper
 

Dreams Unleashed

by Claudette Snow

Dreams Unleashed is a compilation of real-life inspirational stories written by those who have focused on expanding their minds and transforming their lives. Their experiences are a result of working in harmony with the laws of the universe. There are tales of motivation, inspiration, limiting beliefs, self-discovery, and realizations. These pages hold proof that time spent studying yourself, accompanied with proper use of your mental faculties, can dramatically impact your life in a positive manner. It explains the value of having a trained mentor and the benefits of surrounding yourself with like-minded individuals. There are programs, people, and companies that specialize in guiding you through the goal-achieving process, enabling you to build the life you’ve always wanted. Most of the population isn’t aware that they already hold the key to unlocking their own future. Whether it be health, wealth, relationships, corporate, or individual, you can truly have anything you desire.

$20.00 Trade paper

Walking Home

by Lynda L. Wilson

Walking Home is an intimate ramble through the lush Ontario countryside as Lynda and husband Doug set out to become the first to walk the 127-km Guelph to Goderich Rail Trail. Laugh-out-loud funny and poignant in turn, Walking Home is a love story amidst deer flies, detours and the sweltering heat of an Ontario summer. Untangling the rich history of the trail and towns along the way, the two aging hikers discover the meaning of home and just how difficult it can be to let go.

Praise for Walking Home:

"Funny, touching, heart-wrenching and true-blue.  I enjoyed the read every single step of the way.  It is a tremendous story — well penned — engaging and well worth the read. Peter Smith — Writer/Producer/Playwright/Actor; Project Director, Blyth Arts & Cultural Initiative 14/19

"This is Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods Canadian style.” Valerie Hill, Waterloo Region Record (January 4, 2016 article)

$19.95 trade paper

Celebrating Cambridge: People - Place - Prosperity

by City of Cambridge Archives

In celebration of Canada's 150th birthday, the City of Cambridge Archives and Records Centre has complied a book to commemorate the people, places and prosperity that have made Cambridge the city it is today.

$40.00 hard cover

Our Cambridge: A Gift to the World

Photography by Richard Bain
Foreword by Jeff Hutcheson

Richard Bain, one of Canada's top landscape photographers, has put together images of Cambridge from Business to Architecture to Landscape with unprecedented visual quality for the Cambridge Chamber of Commerce. He has published numerous high quality tabletop books for colleges, universities, Chambers and municipalities.

Greg Durocher, President and CEO of the Cambridge Chamber enthusiastically said about the project, "I am excited the Chamber had the opportunity to put this amazing publication together and I know our Members are going to be proud to share it with the world."

Richard Bain has been photographing the Cambridge area since last July. He says that "of all the projects that I have been involved with, Cambridge is one of the most diverse and challenging. Showcasing Galt, Preston and Hespeler with their rivers, incredible historic architecture and hi-tech companies, has made for a wonderful project...a collection of images and a gift book that corporations, residents and visitors will simply love."

Jeff Hutcheson, a native of Cambridge and star of Canada's #1 morning television program, Canada AM, has lent his words for the forward of this book. Jeff was raised in Cambridge, but is always first to say he is from Preston.

$50.00 hard cover