Staff Picks
At FriesenPress, we celebrate each and every book we help our authors publish. Here are some of our team’s recent favourites – happy reading!
The Rural Ontario Landscape
A Study of its Evolution and Management by
Michael Moss
The broad, global perspectives of environmental management, sustainability, and stewardship provide the context for this book. Within this broad framework, a location in the Township of Centre Wellington, southern Ontario, serves as a case study to illustrate the evolution of its landscape, as well as the significance of landscape to various aspects of land planning and management. It is at this local government level that policy initiatives from regional and governmental bodies are actually implemented. The term ‘landscape’ is used to reflect the interrelationships between the physical, natural, and human characteristics of a location; this interaction produces the evolving land features and properties of an area. Increasingly, this recognition forms the basis of many local land management procedures and strategies. The book derives information and data from a wide range of sources. Throughout, each source is examined for its local availability, relevance, and veracity, with critical gaps and omissions noted. Through the various stages of the landscape’s development, the related management initiatives are discussed as they are reflected in the changing features of the local environment. The book demonstrates the application of landscape ecology principles and provides a case to illustrate emerging ideas in integrated landscape management.
Boris and Baba
by
Janet Berezowecki
One of Boris’ favourite things is when Baba comes to visit. His grandmother is always ready with a hug, a smile… and a fun recipe they can make together! Today, Baba is here to make pyrohy, a traditional Ukrainian food. Boris can’t wait to join her in the kitchen…but as excited as he is to spend time with Baba, Boris is worried. What if he can’t make the pyrohy as well as he'd like to? Baba is there to comfort him, and to remind him that none of us are good at something the first time we do it. It’s only with practice that we get where we most want to be. The act of cooking for and eating with family is a special and timeless tale. Boris and Baba captures that magic, sharing with readers the joy of spending time with grandparents. It encourages kids to try out new experiences, learn the family recipes that might otherwise be lost over time, and cherish the warm and loving memories that are cooked up in the kitchen.
Her Face of Autism
A Guide for Late-Diagnosed Women Exploring Identity, Sexuality, and Well-Being by
Michelle Labine
“You spent a lifetime sensing something was different, but no one saw it. Not even you. Until one day, everything clicked. Now there’s no going back.” Her Face of Autism is a guide for women who have always felt different, misjudged, or like they were constantly working twice as hard to hold it together. Whether you’re self-identifying, newly diagnosed, or still untangling questions, this book offers clarity, context, and a grounded path forward. Written by an Autistic and ADHD psychotherapist this book doesn’t speak about you, it speaks with you. It’s for women who masked their way through school, work, parenting, relationships—without realizing what they were doing was survival. It walks through the doubt, grief, and revelation that often follow late diagnosis or self-recognition. Chapters blend personal narrative, clinical insight, and client stories to explore this experience’s many layers: masking and burnout, misdiagnosis, trauma, identity, psychosexual development, intimacy, and neurodivergent relationships. You’ll also find reflective prompts to help make sense of your story—and rewrite it in your own words. This isn’t a clinical checklist. It’s a neurodiversity-affirming, trauma-informed, real-talk resource for women who are finally seeing themselves clearly—often for the first time. If you’ve ever thought, Why has this always been so hard? Why did no one see me?—this book is for you. You weren’t missed because you were fine. You were missed because you were masking. You were always Autistic. You’ve always been enough. Now you get to understand why—and what’s next.
Collected Short Stories
2nd Edition by
Sinai C. Hamada
No doubt the verdant mountain ranges, the mist and the cold are majestic backdrop providing much of the mystic for Hamada’s Collected Short Stories. But it is the hardy women and men, their refusal to be mere victims of nature or supposed ‘progress’, their stoic, down-to-earth decency in the face of all adversity that is the beating heart of Hamada’s fiction. Sinai’s stories are a window to a place and time long gone. The highlanders he speaks of survive but through his tales. Hamada transforms tribal myth and personal memory into lasting art. Many of Sinai’s stories were written when he was a young man and betray the longings and passions of the young: unrequited love, the desire for intimacy that unfulfilled may result in solitude, loneliness, and the abiding melancholy underlying some of his best work. Still, Hamada does not romanticize the native. His highlanders are neither innocent nor naïve to the ways of the world. They are the children, after all, of warriors who took heads and slaves and survived by their peculiar code. In the later stories we can hear the grievances and aspirations of locals whose livelihoods have been upturned by lowlanders as well as by the larger colonial and global forces at play. We see their own pretenses and machinations as they navigate the new realities. The melancholy of the earlier stories replaced it seems by a knowing, satirical tone. The contemporary reader may question certain word choices of the author, no doubt influenced by the literature and orthodoxies of his day, that sound inappropriate in our age of cultural sensitivity and ‘political correctness,’ but these too are part of the journey of Hamada’s tales from past to present, from mountain fastness to city street and academe. In the end he sings of the nobility of forebears, the triumph of family and of a love as old as the mountains. - Charlson Ong, Award winning writer, fictionist, scriptwriter
The Beings That Haunt
by
Z.I. Rhodes
A would-be artist accepts a mysterious man’s lavish patronage in exchange for a very ordinary used car and gets a far stranger bargain than he expected. An embittered young woman wakes in a weird liminal world, watched over by a “guardian” who knows her every thought. A man gets ready for a wedding to the love of his life but can’t quite remember how he knows his soon-to-be husband. A cynical teen with a disturbing secret who resents sharing a seat on his first plane trip with a peculiar old gentleman gets schooled on much more than good manners. A disillusioned teacher struggles to control her classroom of prepubescent deities with contrasting views of the kind of world they intend, one day, to create. In the aftermath of his mother’s death, a serial killer remembers his murderous infancy. Frogs exact grisly vengeance on their oblivious human oppressors. The richly layered, unsettling, thought-provoking stories and poems in The Beings That Haunt tackle themes of mortality, destiny, the nature of time, and the far-reaching or uncanny consequences of even the smallest of our actions with insight, honesty, and vivid, dark humour. Adults and mature teens who enjoy dark fantasy, literary sci-fi, and speculative fiction will be spellbound by this stylish, fascinating collection.
Porn Tales & Sex Demons
Eavesdropping on Therapy by
Barbara Morris
What do we learn about sex if our teacher is porn? What is the difference between entering and being entered? What haunts us in the wake of childhood abuse? Porn Tales & Sex Demons eavesdrops on a psychotherapist’s consulting room as 23-year-old Evan—raised in an abusive, hyper-sexualized environment and stuck in self-punishing behaviours—and Seb, nearing 30—babied and coddled by his parents and tortured by a numbing dread that he might be “gay”—struggle with their sexual concerns. Both have been watching porn since they were preteens. Bailey, their queer therapist, worries that porn distorts erotic fantasies, dilutes confidence, and blocks them from seeing others as more than just body parts. Bailey attempts to make sense of the distressing stories of childhood sexual abuse, shame, rape, and porn use, but doubts their competence to work in this tricky area. By facing their own sexual demons, Bailey steers Evan and Seb back towards their genuine sexual impulses, helping them frame their gender identities and own their desires. Written entirely in dialogue, notes, and journal entries, this daring and unusual “novel-of-voices” explores, frankly and sensitively, the mess of sexuality that we all participate in and the joy-crushing trauma that so many of us carry with us.
Leah
by
Donald Granatstein
What happens when a family’s secret reveals a broader story of Jewish survival and loss? In Leah, a forgotten chapter of Toronto’s Jewish immigrant history comes to life. Nineteen-year-old Leah Granatstein arrived in Canada from Poland in the 1920s, seeking safety and new opportunities. But Leah’s strong independence and struggles with mental health set her apart in a community still dealing with tradition, poverty, and prejudice. When her behaviour was seen as unacceptable, she was placed in an asylum and eventually deported back to Poland. Her disappearance reflects more than a family tragedy: it sheds light on the challenges faced by Jewish immigrants in preserving their culture and faith in a city marked by both opportunity and discrimination; it foreshadows the devastation faced by European Jewry during the Holocaust; and it raises enduring questions about how families navigate differences, secrecy, and shame. Drawing on archival records, family testimony, and historically rooted storytelling, Leah explores the intersections of Jewish culture, Canadian immigration, and the misunderstood realities of mental illness in the early twentieth century.
Shed Your Dragon Scales
by
Suzanne Yost
Jasper isn’t like the other dragons in the Land of the Grey Dragons; something about him is different. What could it be? The other dragons tease him. He dreads going to school. One day Jasper makes an amazing discovery. Can he rise to the challenge and meet his destiny? Read the book to discover Jasper’s special power. Shed Your Dragon Scales is an early reader chapter book filled with high-interest adventure and easy-to-read vocabulary. It explores themes of bullying and climate change. This fantasy story will captivate young readers with its colourful characters and imaginative setting. Readers will learn that it’s okay to be different, and that everyone has the power to make a difference in the world.