Betsy Trumpener’s raw fiction hits quickly, cuts deeply and lingers on in the imagination. Her urgent, unique voice pushes fiction north of what’s real. The Butcher of Penetang carves up rare slices of savory stories that are both tough and delicious. A child missing in a dangerous part of town; a draft dodger with bloody hands; a robber armed …

Corvus welcomes readers to a dystopian future not unlike our own where the illusions of an ideal society have been destroyed and rebuilt using technology and class warfare. By joining classical elements of speculative fiction including surveillance, forbidden relationships, and political dissent, to the traditions of aboriginal storytelling and the …

Historian Tanis and high school teacher Neil just purchased their dream home on Saskatoon’s west side: a fixer-upper with plenty of character and an abundance of history to uncover. The house, however, also comes with a crumbling ruin of a garage tagged with gang symbols, a basement filled with mouse droppings, a mysteriously boarded up attic wit …

Dorothy Graham writes unsent letters to people she admires, and to a few she despises. As well, in her retirement she has time to pursue her other hobby -- interfering in the lives of others. With no children of her own, she ‘helps’ the offspring of her friend and her cousin. But this still isn’t enough. Seeing the mess that the world is in, …

Nondescript Rambunctious is a genre-busting thriller with a beating, human heart. More than a simple story of a killer and his victims, the novel takes the reader into the life of a family, the days of a community, and the very real possibility that evil is everywhere—maybe even inside us. Woven through this dark tapestry are the glittering threa …

Imagine a new life. Maxine Carter suddenly finds herself searching for a fresh start—a way around her own gnawing fear of an untimely death and a wasted life. What she discovers is her neighbour’s nine-year-old son, Kyle.As Maxine becomes the boy’s constant companion and as Kyle deals with his parents’ increasing absence and with life as an …

Immediately before his tragic death, stuttering mechanic Dave visits his younger brother Denny with a note for their sister Dianne. “D-don’t r-read it. D-don’t open it. D-don’t n-nothing it,” Dave commands before taking off one last time for the abandoned family cabin at Mahihkan Lake, a place where disputes are settled with shotguns and …

Following the coast on their summer vacation, the Henrys stop at the beach to break up the monotony of their road trip. Matty and Nat build castles in the sand as Anne and David take turns minding the children. A moment of distraction, a blink of the eye, and the life they know is swept away forever.

Like shipwrecks lost at sea, each member of the …

Michelle Berry has one of the most darkly playful and unique voices in Canadian literature and her second collection of short stories, Margaret Lives in the Basement, is no exception. At its heart are characters full of longing, trapped by circumstance and unable to reach out or connect with one another. Whether it's Margaret in the basement and he …

Things are not well with the Wittenbergs. Alice has given birth to her second child with a genetic disorder. Millicent has withdrawn into a depression. Joseph must choose between being principal of George Sutton Collegiate and the new English teacher who's caught his eye. And Mia finds herself at the mercy of an unsympathetic teacher while her attr …

Welcome to Blind Crescent, where everyone is watching, but nobody sees a thing. In this fictitious slice of suburban life, Michelle Berry peels back the pretensions of manicured lawns and the rictus smiles of "friendly" neighbours. With a deft hand, she paints a picture of suburbia so absurdly real that every suburbanite reader can't help but feel …

Michelle Berry's brilliant first novel is as touching as it is mirthful. Siblings Hilary, Thomas, and Billy have been thrown together after a long estrangement to plan their mother's funeral. For Thomas and Billy, the prospect of being back in their childhood home is far from ideal. Even more unsettling is their sister, who has developed a few dist …

In 1922 a lone woman arrives in a filthy frontier mining town in the Pacific Northwest. Her goal: to resurrect her dead uncle’s newspaper. Within two days a naked man is shot dead, a famous man is rumoured to be heading their way and the only man capable of fixing her broken-down press so that she might spread this news is a Chinese printer from …

The Trillium Award-winning autobiographical novel "La mauvaise mere" by Marguerite Andersen is now in English. Prolific author Marguerite Andersen traces the important moments of her life in this honest and harrowing examination of motherhood. She gives an unflinching account of her relationship with her three children and her years spent following …

Today, almost two decades after her death, Margaret Laurence remains one of Canada's best-known and most beloved writers. Twice winner of the Governor General's Award for fiction, she was, as the late William French wrote, "more profoundly admired than any other Canadian novelist of her generation."

Lyall Powers is both a respected scholar of l …

The Arms of the Infinite takes the reader inside the minds of author Christopher Barker’s parents, writer Elizabeth Smart (By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept) and poet George Barker. From their first fateful meeting and subsequent elopement, Barker candidly reveals their obsessive, passionate, and volatile love affair.

He writes evoca …

Ten short and engaging biographies of First Nations/Native writers complete with photographs, sidebars, and a complete catalog of their work. These writers draw on their cultural history to create novels, poetry, and plays, and are an inspiration to any aspiring writer or avid reader. Includes Sherman Alexie, Louise Erdrich, Joseph Boyden, N. Scott …

Yichang municipality, Hubei province, China, early 1970s. High-school student Jingqiu is one of many educated urban youth sent to the countryside to be "re-educated" under a dictate from Chairman Mao. Jing's father is a political prisoner somewhere in China, and her mother, a former teacher branded as a "capitalist," is now reduced to menial work t …

In 1939, Alfred Day had wanted war. And when he got it, he found purpose in its turmoil: he found his proper role as tail-gunner in a Lancaster bomber; he found the wild, dark fellowship of his crew; and -- most extraordinary of all -- he found Joyce, a woman to love. But now, that's all gone: the war took it away. And maybe the war has taken him a …

Longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction

July, 1830. On the ten-hour sail west from the Hebrides to the islands of St. Kilda, everything lies ahead for Lizzie and Neil McKenzie. Neil is to become the minister to the small community of islanders, and Lizzie, his new wife, is pregnant with their first child. As the two adjust to life on an exposed …

The year was 1989 the year everything unexpected happened: the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the massacre at Tiananmen Square, the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was the beginning of the end of an era, but Professor Hamilton West had the notion it was the end of much more – the end of history itself.

A dozen stories: a dozen ways of looking at love, or the lack of love. Over five previous collections, A. L. Kennedy has shown herself to be a master of the short form, with a perfect way with sentences and a voice so distinct as to be instantly recognizable.

Here, as before, lies the battlefield of the heart, where characters who have suffered disa …

A funny, compelling novel about love, family, and the precarious business of being a man.

Michael O’Dell is hit by a car. When he doesn’t die, he is surprised and pleased. But he can’t seem to move from the crash position. In fact, the accident is just the first in a series of family crises: His wife Wendy is heroically supportive, but when hi …

Set in the Orthodox Jewish community in North West London, The Marrying of Chani Kaufman is the poignant and humorous story of nineteen-year-old Chani Kaufman and the lead-up to her wedding night.

Nineteen-year-old Chani lives in the ultra-orthodox Jewish community of North West London. She has never had physical contact with a man, but is bound to …

Literary legend Jim Harrison's collection of novellas, The Farmer's Daughter, finds him writing at the height of his powers, and in fresh and audacious new directions.

The three stories in The Farmer's Daughter are as different as they are unforgettable. Written in the voice of a home-schooled fifteen-year-old girl in rural Montana, the title novell …

A. L. Kennedy's remarkable new collection of stories shows us exactly what becomes of the broken-hearted. She reveals the sadness, violence, hurt, and terror, but also the redemption of love, and she does so with enormous human compassion, wild leaps of humour, and the brilliantly original linguistic skill that distinguishes her as one of the world …

Longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize

In February 1940, the Nazis established what would become the second-largest Jewish ghetto in the Polish city of Lódz. Its chosen leader: Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, a sixty-three-year-old Jewish businessman and orphanage director -- and the elusive, authoritarian power sustaining the ghetto’s v …

India, 1995. Charlotte Bridgwater lives with her father, a former British general, and just one loyal servant in a stately old mansion in the town of Rampur. Money is scarce and the once grand estate is crumbling.

In a desperate bid to generate income, Charlotte rents a room to Madan, an Indian tailor with an astonishing talent for making beautiful …

She came walking out of the desert, just as the famous poet Rimbaud had centuries before. Now the nameless woman lies horribly scarred and close to death in an asylum deep in the North African desert. An Australian official, a man code-named John Devlin, has come to question her. It is clear that the woman and Devlin share some kind of past, and al …

"Pigeon English is a triumph." -- Emma Donoghue, author of Room

Shortlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize and the 2011 Guardian First Book Award

Eleven-year-old Harrison Opoku is the second best runner in the whole of Year 7. Harri races through his new life in England in his Adidas trainers - blissfully unaware of the threats around him. With equal …

Literary legend Jim Harrison gives us a brilliant new work that finds him writing at the height of his powers, and in fresh and audacious new directions. The Great Leader is the story of Detective Sunderson, a northern Michigan police detective who has recently retired and has one case he can’t quite shake -- the investigation of a cult leader wh …

Toronto is not a place Daniel Foster wants to be for very long. If not for his daughter Mary being in financial trouble, he would not be here at all. What he really wants is to be back in the Arabian Peninsula or, better yet, on a plane leading to retirement in Thailand. But when the bank that holds his million-dollar savings crashes, he realizes h …

Elizabeth Barber is crossing the Atlantic by liner with her perfectly adequate boyfriend, Derek, who might be planning to propose. In fleeing the UK — temporarily — Elizabeth may also be in flight from her past and the charismatic Arthur, once her partner in what she came to see as a series of crimes. Together they acted as fake mediums, perfec …

A Guardian Book of the Year and Chapters/Indigo Best Book

In the foothills of a mountain range in northern Pakistan is a beautiful orchard. Swallows wheel and dive silently over the branches, and the scent of jasmine threads through the air. Pomegranates hang heavy, their skins darkening to a deep crimson. Neglected now, the trees are beginning to g …

YouTube suicides, possible pregnancies, drug comedowns, and getting straight A's -- meet Jasper: a seventeen-year-old with his hands full. Weekdays are packed with visits to the psychologist, mounting parental pressure to achieve in school, scouring the Internet for porn, and trying to figure out whether his stepfather murdered his ex-wife. Weekend …

The intimate portraits in Britt Holmström’s first collection of short fiction at times have a strong journalistic sense while at other times evoke the intimacy of a diary. The stories employ underlying humour — particularly irony, incongruity, paradox, and derision. They move fluidly through time operating in the present tense while creating t …

Ben Robe is a retired political science professor who has returned to his reserve at Moccasin Lake, Saskatchewan, to live out his life in relative peace and solitude. But the complications of a sudden and intense US annexation of Canada change his plans. Cued into a Canadian resistance movement by his former student and lover, Monica, Ben soon lear …

This is a story of family, of death, and of the art of living. It is also the story of the ties that bind a mother to a daughter and the dynamics that govern their love. Shaped as a memoir, shared by Sarah Flett and her daughter Rhegan, the narrative begins with the death of Sarah's husband and builds in complexity with the untimely and sudden deat …

Acclaimed literary critic Hugh Kenner examines Western culture's insatiable need for stimulation encountered elsewhere - from the eighteenth century's Grand Tour, to the self-imposed exile of modernist writers, to the disembodied global journeys the Internet avails us today. Kenner brings to this fascinating study knowledge of a wide array of disci …

Winner of several prestigious prizes, The Spare Room is extraordinary writer Helen Garner's intense, moving investigation of the boundaries and limits of a lifelong friendship.As the novel opens, Helen lovingly prepares the spare room in her home for her dear friend Nicola, who is coming to visit for three weeks while receiving controversial treatm …

Winner of the Desmond Elliott Prize for Best First Novel

"Both shocking and subtle, brilliant and beautiful, a poised and elegant work that recalls the early work of Ian McEwan in the delicacy of its prose and the way that this is combined with some very dark undertones." — Desmond Elliott Prize Jury

In the tradition of Winter’s Bone and The Outl …

John is a poet. Only John almost never writes poems, because he is also unemployed. He lives with four friends, and they squat in a loft in New York New York, a fantastical city that resembles the Big Apple, but also any other city where artists live. They throw fabulous parties and practice group sodomy. That is, until John meets Andy.

Andy is an …

When Halland is found murdered almost right outside his door, his widow, Bess, is of course the prime suspect. She isn't worried about that, though, but about the daughter she abandoned years ago. As the police investigate, the slightly cantankerous Bess instead follows a trail of her own regrets and misapprehensions.

Atmospheric and haunted by the …

A masterful depiction of a life driven off the rails by tragedy and sin — a man now summoned by the legacy of a beloved, lost brother to embark on a journey in search of understanding, happiness, and redemption.

Haunted by the disappearance of his older brother Tommy in the first Gulf War, the tragic deaths of his parents, and the felony convictio …

The new collection from the New York Times bestselling author of The Leftovers and Little Children, featuring stories focusing on Perrotta's familiar suburban nuclear families.

Tom Perrotta’s first book, Bad Haircut, consisted of linked stories featuring a shared protagonist. Now, nineteen years later, he has written and compiled his first true s …

Told from the points of view of a mother and daughter, Fire and Air tells the story of a Belgian and Dutch family who flee to Canada to escape the Second World War, only to have the past catch up to them.

Ten-year-old Elly Verkest is a first-generation immigrant to Canada. Her father, Gaston, is one of the many Belgians who moved to the country afte …

Jackfish, The Vanishing Village tells the story of a woman unravelling from a traumatic past and her yearning for redemption. When her sister dies prematurely, Clemance-Marie Nadeau leaves her family and village behind, boarding a train bound for Sault Ste. Marie, where she falls under the spell of a charming stranger who promises her a life of adv …

When Zoe's two best friends suggest they get matching tattoos, she agrees. Inexplicably, her tattoo comes out bigger and prettier, and her friends accuse her of disloyalty. Abandoned and alone, Zoe must discover why her tattoo, which began as a small rose, is mysteriously spreading over her body like a living rose bush. She travels the world in a …

From the internationally acclaimed author of Purge comes a chillingly suspenseful, deftly woven new novel that opens up a little-known yet still controversial chapter of history: the occupation, resistance, and collaboration in Estonia during and after World War II.

1941: In Communist-ruled, war-ravaged Estonia, two men are fleeing from the Red Army …