BOOK LAUNCH: THE SECRETS OF RUE ST ROCH
By Scotland's Janet Morgan

For four years, James Bartleman mixed with all the biggest names - Clinton, Blair, Yeltsin, Mitterrand, Castro, Kohl, Chirac, and on and on, as Chrétien's Henry Kissinger figure.

POETRY CABARET
presented in collaboration with PLAN 99
Simon Armitage and Ken Babstock

STEP INTO STORIES:
Ottawa's Festival for Young Readers
Presented by Raise a Reader

Join writer, actor and director Don McKellar for an unforgettable evening with Portugal's José Saramago, one of the world's most acclaimed and respected authors.

Don't miss this special fundraiser for the Writers Festival! The Ottawa Premiere of a film that Salman Rushdie has praised as "A magnificent film ... unforgettably touching."

From one of this country's best and most controversial political writers, a searing blueprint for the Next Canada. In this compelling, and ultimately hopeful book, John Ibbitson dismantles the old ways of thinking about Canada's immigration, free trade, social, and defence policies. His ideas for the future of this country are daring - a devolution of power and dollars from the federal to the provincial level, a revamping of medicare, a refashioning of the electoral system. They amount to no less than a revolutionary plan for the creation and defence of a new national dream.

Celebrate the acclaimed new book from the bestselling author of Sand Dance with a multi-media presentation by Bruce Kirkby. In a fit of rebellion, Bruce quits his job to bicycle the Karakoram Highway in northern Pakistan. He is twenty-two and absolutely clueless. Miraculously, hilariously, he survives - and discovers his life's passion. Whether it's gun fights and crocodile attacks while running Africa's Blue Nile Gorge, the rescue of a fallen sherpa on Mount Everest, evading capture in Myanmar's forbidden tropical paradise, or learning to embrace the wilderness on the Tatshenshini River of Canada's Arctic, Kirkby shares the excitement, doubts, insights, and even the uncomfortable self-knowledge that a life lived on the edge brings.

Can we be conscious of our consciousness? What does consciousness feel like? Is it really a stream of steadily flowing thoughts, images and feelings, or something else altogether? What happens in those lapses during highway driving, in which you have no memory of the last 10 kilometres? How is it that most of what goes on in our brains is actually unconscious? And, in the end, do we even need our brain?

With violence, antisocial behavior, bullying, and aggression among young children escalating at a frightening rate, it is clear that we need to develop a new understanding of childhood. Mary Gordon, an educator who has worked for more than two decades with children from all kinds of backgrounds, has discovered that the solution to bullying and other anti-social behaviour lies within children's innate sense of caring and compassion.

On Sunday, December 17, 2000, Canadian engineer William Sampson stepped outside his house in Riyadh only to be hauled into a car and beaten by two Saudi men he didn't know. Within an hour, he was incarcerated in one of the city's most notorious jails. Within two months, he was tortured into a confession of responsibility for a wave of car bombings he did not commit. Sometime in that first year, he was sentenced to death in a secret trial. For two and a half years, Sampson was continually subjected to beatings and torture, convinced his death was just around the corner. Inept diplomacy failed him but human rights groups took up his cause and on August 8, 2003, he was finally freed in a controversial prisoner exchange. It wasn't until February 2005 that Sampson's name was officially cleared when a British inquest exonerated him of the crimes.

The New Canon: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry offers a controversial guide to the last two decades of contemporary Canadian poetry. Critic and poet Carmine Starnino has collected fifty of the most interesting Canadian poets born between 1955 and 1975, many of whom have never made an appearance in a major anthology.