Spring 2026 Catalogue

A Message from the Publisher

Welcome to Spring 2026 from Thistledown! We’re very excited about the three new titles we have on offer this season.

Chelsea Coupal’s poetry collection U ALIVE confronts the big questions of contemporary life with clear-eyed courage and insight. How to find hope for the future in these difficult and uncertain times? How to reconcile oneself to the
mistakes of one’s past? How to memorialize and mourn the loss of a way of life on a family farm on the prairies? These poems are moving, honest, and deftly inventive.

A Study in Red by Connie Gault is both a mystery and a highly literary meditation on identity, desire, and the human need for connection and love. Two very distinct characters, Amy and Carol, revisit and wrestle with memories of a violent event in the past, each one narrating her own skewed version of what actually happened. It all adds up to a novel that is both suspenseful and wise, attuned to the hard questions about life’s complexities.

The Peace Thieves by Brent van Staalduinen takes the reader inside the world of Canadian peacekeepers during the 1990s Balkan war, and then into the broken lives of such men thirty years after the conflict has ended. The author creates a microcosm of life in the rougher parts of Hamilton, Ontario, and introduces the reader to an array of colourful and complicated characters in search of meaning, and of peace. The novel suggests that family can be found anywhere, for those willing to open their hearts.

JoAnn McCaig
Publisher