Last Night of the World
On a hot Ottawa night in August 1945, Soviet agent Freda Linton’s world is about to fall apart. She’s spent the war infiltrating the highest levels of the Canadian government as an undercover operative for the fledging Canadian Communist Party and for Moscow’s military police. As the global conflict nears its conclusion, her Soviet embassy handler and darling of the diplomatic scene Nikolai Zabotin sends her to retrieve atomic secrets from the Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories. When Freda discovers that Soviet cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko plans to turn over top secret files to the RCMP that will expose Freda and the others in her spy ring, she is faced with an impossible decision and must determine who is on her side. Should she risk everything to smuggle out nuclear secrets that will kick off the Cold War? Joyce Wayne's Last Night of the World brings a high-energy creativeness and emotional tension to a story that is rooted in a generation's defining incident.
A National Awakening: Robin Mathews & the Struggle for Canadian Identity
Edited by Joyce Wayne
From the late 1960s to the early 1990s, Robin Mathews was at the forefront of public discourse, sparking debates and provoking controversies about U.S. corporate takeovers of Canada’s business and industry, foreign control of Canadian unions, the news media, book and magazine publishing as well as university hiring practices and curricula.
Mathews was a force to be reckoned with as he criss-crossed the country, talking to students, professors, politicians and artists about the need to support a unique Canada identity. Mathews argued that the U.S. was a growing danger to Canadian sovereignty and that it was incumbent on Canadians to establish a public movement to transform the country into an economically and culturally sovereign nation that eschewed dependence on the United States. In light of today’s threats from Donald Trump, Mathews’ predictions have materialized in ways so few anticipated.
In these eight essays, public intellectuals including Duncan Cameron, Pat Smart and Daniel Drache explore Mathews’ prescient ideas about Canadian independence and how they apply to the current existential threat to Canada’s sovereignty.
The Cook’s Temptation
Joyce Wayne brings to life the complexities of Victorian life, first in County Devon and then in London’s East End. The ‘big picture’ is about one woman’s life, class conflict, religious intolerance, suspicion and betrayal. The central figure is Cordelia, a strong-minded Jewish woman who is caught between her desire to be true to herself and her need to be accepted by English society. Cordelia Tilley is the daughter of a Jewish mother and an Anglican father. Her mother has groomed her for a life in English society while her father, a tough publican, has shown no tolerance for his wife’s social climbing or the conceits of their perspicacious daughter. Cordelia’s mother dies from typhoid fever, she tries to run the family ‘s establishment, she falls prey to a local industrialist, she gives birth to a son, she is tormented by her husband and his family. Finally, she is rescued by suffragette friends and sets off to start a new life in London.The Cook’s Temptation is about a woman who is unpredictable, both strong and weak willed, both kind and heinous, victim and criminal. It is a genuine Victorian saga, full of detail, twists and turns, memorable scenes, full of drama and pathos.
