Wolsak and Wynn Acquire Four Titles from Coteau Books!

We are happy to announce that we have acquired four titles from Coteau books!

Armand Garnet Ruffo’s Grey Owl: The Mystery of Archie Belaney is a compelling study of an intriguing character – a white man who assumed a First Nations “voice” to promote his ideas and ideals to an international audience. In turn, the book raises difficult questions about identity and voice, Indigenous culture, human rights and the environment.

Ruffo draws on extensive archival research and family memories – Grey Owl lived for three years with Ruffo's grandmother’s family in the small northern Ontario community of Biscotasing – to offer new insights about the man and his mission. With clear, direct and evocative language, Ruffo writes from Grey Owl’s own perspective as well as from the viewpoints of women he loved and men with whom he worked. The poems detail both his professional achievements and his personal failures.

Ruffo brings a deep understanding of Indigenous thought, excellent research skills and a mature craft to this collection. Grey Owl: The Mystery of Archie Belaney marks a significant contribution to Indigenous writing and to Canadian literature.

Grey Owl is followed by Armand’s collection of powerful, touching poems about indigenous realities and consciousness, At Geronimo’s Grave.

Geronimo is probably the second-best-known Native American name, after Pocahontas. But the reality of the great Apache warrior's ulitmate fate is little remembered. In At Geronimo's Grave, Amand Ruffo uses the Apache warrior's life as a metaphor for the lives of many of the abandoned indigenous people on this continent.

Feared for his once-great prowess, the warrior horseman was reduced, as the cover shows, to wearing a top hat and riding in an early Ford Model T car, a grim caricature of assimilation into the dominant culture. The bitter irony of this fate echoes through the personal poems in At Geronimo's Grave as well. With affection and concern, Armand Ruffo uses blunt, direct, language to examine the lives and experiences of people who struggle to make their way in a world that has no place for them. Or who have already given up that struggle. At Geronimo's Grave is a love letter to a people trapped in the slow-moving vehicle of another culture which is taking them nowhere.

Rhea Tregebov’s The Knife Sharpener’s Bell follows Annette Gershon and her family try to escape the economic chaos of the Great Depression in 1930s Winnipeg by returning "home" to the Soviet Union. But there they find themselves on a runaway train of tumultuous events as Stalinist Russia plunges into the horrors of World War II. This story of remarkable breadth and extraordinary prose is the seldom-told tale of those who undertook that odyssey, of loyalty and betrayal, heroism and fear.

Rue des Rosiers is about Sarah, the youngest of the three Levine sisters. At twenty-five, she is rudderless, caught in a paralysis that keeps her from seizing her own life.

When Sarah is fired from her Toronto job, a chance stay in Paris opens her up to new direction and purpose. But when she reads the writing on the wall above her local Métro subway station, death to the Jews, shadows from childhood rise again. And as her path crosses that of Laila, a young woman living in an exile remote from the luxuries of 1980s Paris, Sarah stumbles towards to an act of terrorism that may realize her childhood fears.

In this new novel by the author of The Knife Sharpener’s Bell, writing that is both sensual and taut creates a tightly woven, compelling