10 Alberta Books with Beautiful Covers
If you’re like us and sometimes judge a book by its cover, you’ll be suitably impressed with the list we have compiled. Eye grabbing colours, clever image placements, and unique typography come together to create attention-grabbing book covers. And we promise that the content will keep you just as captivated…
Shout Kill Revel by Jarret Hartnell
The Undrowned Order rules the land. Their horrific plans dance to the whims of ancient cosmic entities, fuelled by the fears forced upon every soul in sight. It is believed that the young woman Helmina is their messiah, that the darkness lurking within her will one day unleash an unimaginable horror upon the earth. As that day approaches, Helmina, after a lifetime of wrestling with her cosmic affliction, must do more than run and hide from the cultists, her own mind, and the world itself to put an end to the madness.
Hartnell Jarret 
Published: Apr 17, 2024 by Renegade Arts Entertainment
ISBN: 9781988903910
Northerny by Dawn Macdonald
Fresh, funny, and imbued with infectious energy, Northerny tells a much-needed and compelling story of growing up and living in the North. Here are no tidy tales of aurora borealis and adventures in snow. For Dawn Macdonald, the North is not an escape, a pathway to enlightenment, or a lifestyle choice. It’s a messy, beautiful, and painful point of origin. Expertly balancing lyric reflection and ferocious realism, Macdonald busts up the cultural myths of self-interest and superiority that have long dominated conversations about both Northern spaces and working-class identities.
Dawn Macdonald 
Published: Feb 02, 2024 by University of Alberta Press
ISBN: 9781772127379
Homing by Alice Irene Whittaker
Alice Irene Whittaker was addicted to productivity, perfectionism, and discipline. She was used to rushing between multiple jobs, her demanding ballet training, and volunteering for social justice causes, making sure that every single moment of her day was accounted for. But then she finds herself as a new mother, commuting four hours a day into the city and exhausted by the state of the world and paralyzed by climate guilt and anxiety. Something has got to give. Homing is a memoir about Whittaker’s experience abandoning an exhausting commuter lifestyle to move to a cabin in the woods, embracing imperfection while cultivating a life of care for self and nature.
Alice Irene Whittaker 
Published: Sep 17, 2024 by Freehand Books
ISBN: 9781990601743
Beyond the Park ed. Angel Mota Berriozábal
There are more immigrant voices added daily to our conversation on the environment and climate change in this country, and yet, there are lots more to add. Editor Angel Mota has expertly curated each of the pieces in the Beyond the Park anthology, into a compelling whole about the authors’ connection to natural spaces through olfactory experiences. Written in English and French, the eleven stories in the collection focus on the theme of green spaces, ecology, and the scent memories associated with those places.
Diego Creimer
, Antonio D'Alfonso
, Marie-Denise Douyon 
Published: by Laberinto Press
ISBN: 9781777085957
Muster Points by Lucas Crawford
Muster Points is a frank discussion of desire, nostalgia, mental illness, and health from a professor with one foot kicking the ivory tower and both feet sloshing in all the sundry fluids of queer sex and depression. These poems bring us on a trans boy’s trips through the shard-sharp ruins of heterosexual marriages, into weird rural masculinities and their fraught survival, into regret and recovery, durability and desire.
Lucas Crawford 
Published: Jun 15, 2023 by University of Calgary Press
ISBN: 9781773854533
The Tongue Trade by Michael J. Martineck
In the not-too-distant future, humanity’s ability to communicate has fractured, creating a labyrinth of professional jargons so dense that only specialists like William Kirst, Private Interpreter, can unravel them. Kirst is a linchpin in a society where understanding is a luxury, and secrets are the norm, but his routine existence is shattered when he becomes entangled in a murder investigation. The Tongue Trade is a riveting exploration of language, loyalty, and the lethal power of secrets.
The Tongue Trade
Michael J. Martineck
Published: July 6, 2024 by EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing
ISBN: 9781770532403
It Begins in Salt by Natalie Meisner
It Begins in Salt, a book of poems, wanders the halls of an ocean blue-collar life while rummaging the heart spaces of growing up, and evolves into mothering, labours, and loves. The poems explore the ways the heart grows, and the tentacles of complexity grow and evolve “to infinity”. This book of poems is a love letter to those that share the tides of life. It urges us to love harder and give homage to those loved.
Natalie Meisner 
Published: Apr 15, 2023 by Frontenac House Ltd.
ISBN: 9781989466476
Laser Quit Smoking Massage by Cole Nowicki
A series of short nonfiction pieces, Laser Quit Smoking Massage explores the peculiarities of the urban and rural centres of the Canadian West. From prairie towns to sprawling cities, Cole Nowicki’s witty, insightful, and ever curious reportage explores the evolving states of community, family, and belonging.
Cole Nowicki 
Published: Apr 01, 2024 by NeWest Press
ISBN: 9781774390900
Memory and Landscape ed. Kenneth L. Pratt, Scott A. Heyes
The North is changing at an unprecedented rate as industrial development and the climate crisis disrupt not only the environment but also long-standing relationships to the land and traditional means of livelihood. Memory and Landscape: Indigenous Responses to a Changing North explores the ways in which Indigenous peoples in the Arctic have adapted to challenging circumstances, including past cultural and environmental changes. In this beautifully illustrated volume, contributors document how Indigenous communities in Alaska, northern Canada, Greenland, and Siberia are seeking ways to maintain and strengthen their cultural identity while also embracing forces of disruption.
Published: Oct 31, 2022 by Athabasca University Press
ISBN: 9781771993159
Whistle at Night and They Will Come by Alex Soop
Whistle at Night and They Will Come is Blackfoot storyteller Alex Soop’s second collection, following the triumph of his first horrifying volume Midnight Storm Moonless Sky. Prepare to be yanked again into the abyss of his tales of apparitions, curses and hauntings, monstrous entities, survival desperation, and chilling acts of vengeance. Teaming up with actor Eugene Brave Rock and enigmatic filmmaker Cary Thomas Cody, these tales weave the threads of Indigenous ways of knowledge into the fabric of fear, etching an indelible mark upon the landscape of Indigenous horror.
Alex Soop 
Published: Oct 01, 2023 by Durvile Publications Ltd.
ISBN: 9781990735301
“No Definition of Alberta Culture is complete without recognizing the herculean efforts of Alberta publishers to bring the prodigious talents of Canadian writers to eager readers everywhere.”
~ Steve Budnarchuk, Audreys Books