David Suzuki

Wayne Grady

"Only God can make a tree," wrote Joyce Kilmer in one of the most celebrated of poems. In Tree: A Life Story, authors David Suzuki and Wayne Grady extend that celebration in a "biography" of this extraordinary—and extraordinarily important—organism. A story that spans a millennium and includes a cast of millions but focuses on a single tree, a Douglas fir, Tree describes in poetic detail the organism's modest origins that begin with a dramatic burst of millions of microscopic grains of pollen. The authors recount the amazing characteristics of the species, how they reproduce and how they receive from and offer nourishment to generations of other plants and animals. The tree's pivotal role in making life possible for the creatures around it—including human beings—is lovingly explored. The richly detailed text and Robert Bateman's original art pay tribute to this ubiquitous organism that is too often taken for granted. Also available in hardcover. Published in partnership with the David Suzuki Foundation.

A Life Story

Tree

How far would a son go to belong? And how far would a father go to protect him? With his curly black hair and his wicked grin, everyone swoons and thinks of Frank Sinatra when Navy musician Jackson Lewis takes the stage. It's World War II, and while stationed in St. John's, Newfoundland, Jack meets the well-heeled, romantic Vivian Clift, a local girl who has never stepped off the Rock and is desperate to see the world. They marry against Vivian's family's wishes--hard to say what it is, but there's something about Jack that they just don't like--and as the war draws to a close, the new couple travels to Windsor to meet Jack's family. But when Vivian meets Jack's mother and brother, everything she thought she knew about her new husband gets called into question. They don't live in the dream home that Jack depicted, they all look different from one another--and different from anyone Vivian has ever seen--and after weeks of waiting to meet Jack's father, William Henry, he never materializes. Steeped in jazz and big-band music, spanning pre- and post-war Windsor-Detroit, St. John's, Newfoundland, and 1950s Toronto, this is an arresting, heartwrenching novel about fathers and sons, love and sacrifice, race relations and a time in our history when the world was on the cusp of momentous change.

A Novel

Emancipation Day

From award-winning, bestselling author Wayne Grady comes The Good Father, his first contemporary novel, which comically and tragically reckons with a father and daughter's estrangement, the failures brought on by hubris, the limits of perception and the price we pay for second chances. Every story has two sides, two perspectives. And when it comes to a relationship between a daughter and her father, separated first by divorce and then by both generational gaps and physical and emotional distance, those perspectives can colossally diverge. Such is the case with Harry Bowes and his only daughter, Daphne. Harry is a mild mannered journalist turned teacher turned wine merchant who is content to putter around his home in Toronto eating things straight out of the fridge that both his doctor and his second wife, Elinor, would disapprove of, and procrastinate calling his daughter even though he senses something is amiss. Meanwhile, in Vancouver, Daphne seems intent on a course of nihilism, having gone from being a loving girl to a top student to a hostile young woman who is determined to destroy her life and relationships by self-medicating with drugs and alcohol. When a catastrophic event wrenches them out of their states, one of stasis and one of chaos, Harry and Daphne are forced to examine the ways in which their self-absorption has eroded their connection and discover whether a family's bond is truly ironclad or if their damage is irreparable. Told in alternating perspectives, The Good Father delivers a deeply satisfying and layered novel of love, perception, family and domesticity. Propelled by regret, compassion, frustration and comfort, this novel gives us Wayne Grady at the height of his powers.

The Good Father

David T. Suzuki

"Updated and revised to reflect the effects of climate change on forests. Now with a new foreword by Peter Wohlleben, the international bestselling author of The Hidden Life of Trees and The Inner Life of Animals. The story of a single tree, from the moment the seed is released from its cone until, more than five hundred years later, it lies on the forest floor as a nurse log, giving life to ferns, mosses, and hemlocks, even as its own life is ending."--

Daniel Poliquin

The Straw Man

Birth - Taking root - Growth - Maturity - Death.

A Biography

"This is a strikingly thought-provoking book about how the forces of evolution and extinction have shaped the living world, and the part that humans play therein. These elegant and penetrating essays speak to some of our most fundamental questions about the human and animal worlds, and confirm Grady’s standing as one of our foremost literary science writers."--pub. desc.

Lessons in Natural and Unnatural History

Bringing Back the Dodo

Louis Hamelin

Grady Louis Hamelin and Wayne

Longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. October 1970. Two kidnappings. One dead. A crisis unlike anything the country had ever seen - - here is the story behind history... Thirty years after the October Crisis, Sam Nihilo, a freelance writer whose career is in a slump, is drawn to the conspiracy theories that have proliferated in the wake of the events. While investigating the death of on of the FLQ hostages, Nihilo sees his life consumed by an inquiry that leads him further into a flurry of facts, both known and newly discovered. Soon, secret agents, corrupt police officers, politicians, and former terrorists of the Front of Liberation du Quebec form a mysterious constellation around him, and at the centre lies a complicated and dangerous truth. In the tradition of Don DeLillo's Libra, October 1970 is a thrilling fictional account of the events that shaped one of the most volatile moments in recent history.

October 1970

Travels in the Lost World of Dinosaurs and Birds

The Bone Museum

The story of a single tree, from the moment the seed is released from its cone until, more than five hundred years later, it lies on the forest floor as a nurse log, giving life to ferns, mosses, and hemlocks, even as its own life is ending. In this unique biography, David Suzuki and Wayne Grady tell story that spans a millennium and includes a cast of millions but focuses on a single tree, a Douglas fir, Tree describes in poetic detail the organism’s modest origins that begin with a dramatic burst of millions of microscopic grains of pollen. The authors recount the amazing characteristics of the species, how they reproduce and how they receive from and offer nourishment to generations of other plants and animals. The tree’s pivotal role in making life possible for the creatures around it — including human beings — is lovingly explored. The richly detailed text and Robert Bateman’s original art pay tribute to this ubiquitous organism that is too often taken for granted. Revised edition with a foreword by Peter Wohlleben, author of The Hidden Life of Trees.

From the bald, scarlet-headed turkey vulture to the colorful king vulture with its red-rimmed eyes to the giant California condor, vultures have been reviled as disgusting, hideous scavengers that greedily feast on rotting carcasses. Here VULTURE combines a fascinating, authoritative text with 60 dramatic color photos to examine the myth and reality of this unique creature.

Nature's Ghastly Gourmet

Vulture

Francine D'Amour

"In Return from Africa, Francine d'Amour explores the parallel worlds of interior and exterior travel. Charlotte and Julien, a middle-class Quebecois couple, plan an extended trip to Egypt. After an argument, Charlotte tears up her ticket and refuses to go. Julien calls her bluff and leaves anyway, while Charlotte - too ashamed to remain among her friends - awaits his return in a rented bungalow on the outskirts of Montreal. In a long, rambling monologue to her departed lover, she imagines Julien's progress through the Middle East, recalls previous trips they have made together and examines not only their complex relationship but also the foundation of her own need for perpetual motion." "Return from Africa is a penetrating look at our contemporary compulsion for isolation and alienation. It is also a depiction of one woman's agonized descent into the inferno of self-imposed exile."--BOOK JACKET.

Return from Africa

Merilyn Simonds

What begins as a road trip through America soon becomes a journey of discovery into themselves and into the heart of the next-door neighbour they thought they knew. For Wayne Grady, the thrill of landscape and history is tempered by memories of racism and his own family roots. Merilyn Simonds, her ear tuned for the offbeat, finds curious echoes of the ex-pat promised land she grew up with. Together they travel against the tide of American history, following in the literary tire tracks of John Steinbeck, William Least Heat Moon, and Francis Trollope. Grady and Simonds experience the splendors of the Mojave Desert, the Grand Canyon, the Mississippi River, and the bayou’s of Louisiana and the Outer Banks and contemplate the impact of geography on culture and of culture on landscape. They observe America from the outside, yet feel strangely at home. Part travelogue, part exploration, part mid-winter love story told with wit and acuity by one of Canada’s most engaging literary couples, Breakfast at the Exit Cafe is a journey into the reality behind the cultural myth that is America.

Travels Through America

Breakfast at the Exit Café

"Grady's novel reads with the velvety tempo of the jazz music of its day. . . . Grady fearlessly explores heated race relations and the masks we all assume." Chatelaine With his curly black hair and his wicked grin, everyone swoons and thinks of Frank Sinatra when Navy musician Jackson Lewis takes the stage. It's World War II, and while stationed in St. John's, Newfoundland, Jack meets the well-heeled Vivian Clift, a local girl who has never stepped off the Rock and longs to see the world. They marry against Vivian's family's wishes--there's something about Jack that they just don't like--and as the war draws to a close, the couple travels to Windsor to meet Jack's family. But when Vivian meets Jack's mother and brother, everything she thought she knew about her husband gets called into question. They don't live in the dream home Jack depicted, they all look different from one another--different from anyone Vivian has ever seen--and after weeks of waiting to meet Jack's father, he never materializes. Steeped in jazz and big-band music, spanning pre- and post-war Windsor-Detroit, St. John's, Newfoundland, and 1950s Toronto, this is an arresting, heartwrenching novel about fathers and sons, love and sacrifice, race relations and a time in our history when the world was on the cusp of momentous change.

Wayne Grady

Books

Your next favorite book is out there