MiroLand Series

Seeker: A Sea Odyssey is the story of two people who meet in Mexico and fall in love. Rita is an American part-time English language teacher and freelance reporter for an English language tourist magazine struggling to raise two young boys on her own. Bernard is a French geologist under contract to the Mexican government to search for underground thermal springs. She dreams of finding Shangri-la after witnessing a bloody government crackdown from which she barely escapes. He dreams of having a yacht and sailing the world. Their dreams mesh, and they immigrate to Canada to earn the money to build their boat.

Higher Teaching is a practical manual designed for the new teacher in college or university. It is divided into two sections: Practice, which addresses what to when you get your first course outline to teach, how to choose strategies and plan lessons, and how to manage your classroom so it is a safe and positive place in which students learn. There are chapters on instructional media, teaching online assessment and evaluation, dealing with difficult students and academic integrity issues, and how to improve your teaching. The second part “Theory and Background,” focuses on the theories that inform current higher education teaching and curriculum, adult education, and a very useful chapter of advices extracted from experienced teachers responding to the question “What's the advice you would give to a brand new teacher?” Also useful to a new teacher are the glossary of academic jargon and a lesson plan template.

Almost daily scientists are sounding dire warnings about the effects of climate change. Our young will bear an unprecedented burden. They are eager to discover what can be done, as time slips away. But few of them or us are aware that global warming is but one facet of a looming planetary catastrophe. Most of the natural and social systems humans depend on for survival are also in various stages of collapse. Each failure will impact the other systems, including climate, in a series of feedback loops that can unleash a virtual tsunami of destruction, and do so far sooner than climate scientists, looking only at their own discipline, predict. The corona virus pandemic has shown how unprepared we are. Multiply its effects times 10, times 50, to get an idea of what's coming. We have entered what scientists term a “critical state,” at the brink of an unstable precipice. The smallest push or pull, from any direction, could suddenly topple us. Despite the global scale of the emergency, its root causes are predominantly human and surprisingly simple. With courage to act, we can slow the devastating cascade and, perhaps, even reverse some of the worst impacts.

The Butcher of Park Ex is a humorous collection of personal stories inspired by the author's life growing up in Montreal's Park Extension neighbourhood, with Greek immigrant parents who never quite adapted to life in their new country. Never really fitting in with his ethnic community, and never feeling like part of mainstream Quebec or Canadian society, he sets out on an over forty-year search for answers, encountering amazingly interesting people and unique misadventures while trying to navigate a world where he is constantly the odd man out.

Most Anticipated Fall Fiction from 49th ShelfYour basic damsel-in-distress gig sounds perfect to private investigator Ashley Smeeton, who's got her own personal and professional struggles in Montreal. Against the backdrop of the winter Carnaval, the job first takes her to Paris where she's drawn into an unsettling world of mirages and masks, not to mention the murderous Bortnik brothers. When she returns to Montreal, a city rife with its own unreasonable facsimiles, the case incomprehensibly picks up again. Convinced she's being played, Ashley embarks on an even more dangerous journey into duplicity. In a world of masks behind masks, it's hard to say where the truth lies.

And Along Came Alexis is a book about choices and consequences. The author's youngest daughter, Alexis, was born in 1978 with multiple disabilities, including blindness, an intractable seizure disorder and spastic quadriplegia. The choice to keep her at home despite medical advice resulted in a limiting of career opportunities for her parents and educational and other enrichment opportunities for her siblings. However, it also introduced the family to a whole community of earnest and interesting people dealing with similar challenges that they would never have known otherwise, and it provided rich perspectives on a different way of living. As for Alexis, she thrived far better than had been predicted and developed into a sweet, trusting person with a clear sense of self and an appreciation for the people in her life. The book describes the story of her life to date from her mother's viewpoint: its victories and setbacks, its grim moments and its funny moments. Overall, it is a positive story, demonstrating what is possible, even under very challenging circumstances.

The memoir My Theatre of Memory: A Life in Words traces Adriana Davies’s life in Canada from her arrival in Edmonton as a a child immigrant with her mother, older sister and younger brother in the early 1950s, to the present as she deals with the challenges of Covid. Successive chapters tell not only the family’s immigration story including accounts of her school days, university in Canada and then the UK, but also the beginning of her life as a young married woman and mother in London, England. Destined for a job in academe, cutbacks in the university sector in the UK meant that she began work as a freelance researcher and writer in the area of museums and galleries. This set the tone for a rich and varied career in museums and as a historian.

Venera Dreams is a mosaic novel, a surreal history of a fictional and fantastical European city-state, inspired in part by Venice, The Arabian Nights, and the architecture of Antoni Gaud. It is divided in three sections. The first, The Lure of Vermilion, describes the impact of Venera's lure on various characters. The second section, Adventures in Times Past, ranges from the Roman Empire's invasion of Venera and an intrigue involving a Veneran spy at the court of the Chinese Zhengde Emperor during the Renaissance to a tale of Salvador Dal's ties to Venera and a metafictional exploration of Scheherazade's relationship to Venera. The final section, The Secret Histories of Magus Amore, returns to the present to resolve the mysteries of Venera.

Drawing on her own experiences as a woman of Iranian and British Isle descent, writer Hollay Ghadery dives into conflicts and uncertainty surrounding the bi-racial female body and identity, especially as it butts up against the disparate expectations of each culture. Painfully and at times, reluctantly, Fuse probes and explores the documented prevalence of mental health issues in bi-racial women.

Throughout human history, great and free nations have been built on noble dreams. Recently, in some once promising nations, dreams of betterment and possibility, have been effectively compromised. The current political landscape, featuring cold partisan interest, calculated distraction, divisive fear mongering, negativity, and voter disillusionment, has enabled a perfect storm of toxic dysfunction. To make matters worse, personal integrity and accountability have become almost non-existent in political leaders. In such an environment, dreams of social, economic and ecological justice can easily be thwarted. Progress can become much more selective, favouring power and privilege. This handbook integrates critical thinking and media literacy to refocus democratic dreams on more constructive collective pursuits, to re-energize dreamers, and to help hold elected leaders more accountable for their actions and omissions. It is important to speak truth to power, and justice to privilege, in order to empower dreamers.

French journalist Marc Taragon is at the apex of his career in 2007. A tenacious idealist, Taragon has spent the last thirty years attempting to bring to readers the truths about the wars and political intrigues of the region. He is unsparing in his criticism of extremists and has earned many enemies. He agrees to be interviewed in Cyprus, by a young Canadian journalist, Marie Boivin, not knowing that Marie has a hidden agenda: to discover through Taragon the truth about her childhood. Before Marie finds the answers she seeks, she is enmeshed in Taragon's plan to broker peace negotiations between a left-wing Israeli politician and a dissident Palestinian leader. Taragon succeeds in persuading the two adversaries to agree to an ambitious peace plan. The action then moves quickly through Europe and the Middle East as Taragon and his associates try to stay one step ahead of deadly opponents of their initiative. Parallel to the main plot is the narrative of Taragon's early years as a journalist in war-torn Lebano

For 11 months Calvin White worked for Doctors Without Borders as a mental health specialist in the off-the-radar region of Karakalpakstan in western Uzbekistan. Unlike the higher profile emergency situations which draw that international humanitarian organization's attention, the milieu for White's mission was the quiet, slow death in an epidemic of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis. As White's forward says: "This is a small story about small people written by a small person so maybe there is no interest in it. On the other hand, since most of us on the planet are also small, maybe there is." White takes the reader inside the daily heartbeat of humans we've never heard of but come to see as sharing the same pulse. It is a remarkable journey of intimacy and hope, one that reconfigures our understanding of sadness and, ultimately, reaffirms the common spirit of humanity.

A child survivor, a child of survivors and a grandchild of a survivor, Sidney Zoltak is all these things. His story about a family that struggled and endured, the generosity of those who saved them against all odds, and a vow never to forget is a remarkable journey through the Holocaust into a rich and full life. At eight, Sidney loses a middle class home and goes from the slow death of the ghetto into the terror of hiding in forests, barns and finally, a hole in the ground provided by a Polish farm family. But when war ends, there is no going back. We follow the Zoltak family, amazingly intact, as they make their way to Italy where young Sidney encounters a generosity of spirit that helps to heal war's wounds and prepares him for life in Canada. Sidney Zoltak's chronicle is a lesson in the importance of honouring your story for the generations to come.

Attempting to make sense of her life, and change her sad disposition to a happy one, the author of In the Backyard: Relearning the Art of Aging, Dying and Making Love seeks out the help of her in-house therapist/husband, Dr. George Nemeth. The accredited psychologist's answers to the big questions provide a compassionate and humorous backdrop on to how to seize the day and not give up hope when faced with the nasty realities of poor health and unrealized aspirations.

Philipovna: The Daughter of Sorrow is a creative non-fiction based on my mother's surviving the holodomor [the Ukrainian starvation] in the early 1930's. It is the story of an orphan who goes to live with her aunt in a rural village in the Ukrainian countryside. The aunt swears on her dead sister's Bible that Vera Philipovna, the daughter of a cobbler and seamstress from a small village in Chercassy, Ukraine will survive no matter what might befall the family. No one foresees the horrors that they will have to face between the fall of 1930 and the spring of 1933. In the end, out of a healthy extended family, only Philipovna, a cousin and the aunt survive. The acts of real savagery that are perpetrated on the village are unflinchingly narrated by a pre-pubescent girl, who also gives us a good grasp of the beauty and richness of the Ukrainian culture with its superstitions, customs and celebrations.

How do we make sense of our relationships—successes and failures, preferences and challenges, past and present. And after we make sense of them all—what do we do to increase the successes that we are striving to attain. In It's Attachment Kussin offers us a comprehensive overview of this dominant theory of human development and relationships in a way that gives us both understanding and practical ideas for constructive changes. She shows us the central features of the main attachment patterns that are present throughout childhood and adulthood as well as clear suggestions for how we might identify what pattern characterizes our own life. From there, her book provides practical insights into how our attachment pattern is central in our choosing a partner and being a parent. It also explores how we might change our pattern toward one that provides the greatest likelihood for developing an autonomous sense of self and satisfying reciprocal relationships.

The Expo Affair is a narrative memoir of international intrigue and romance that took place in the exotic setting of Expo '70 in Osaka, Japan. As a host at the Ontario Pavilion, the author, Geza Tatrallyay, was approached by three Czechoslovak hostesses who wanted to defect to Canada. Notables such as former Prime Minister Trudeau, External Affairs Minister Mitchell Sharp and General George Kitching play a role, as do individuals who have since become prominent in Canada as businessmen, artists and ambassadors.

This is a novel about passions - a passion for movies, a passion for sex, and a passion for one's country. Sarah Fielding wants to turn the great Canadian novel into a ?uality' movie but everyone else (the sex-mad producer, the psycho Hollywood star and the avaricious distributor) has their own idea of what it should be. Will Sarah pull it together? Not likely.