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 …

In Reading Alice Munro, 1973-2013, the world's leading Munro scholar offers a critical overview of Alice Munro and her writing spanning forty years. Beginning with a newly written overarching introduction, featuring directive interleaved commentaries addressing chronology and contexts, ending with encompassing afterword, this collection provides a …

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 …

On a visit to Gabon, an American sociologist couple purchase an infant ape in order to study its development in an “enriched environment” — taking it back to California and raising it as a human being — and gain insight into human behaviour. The ape, named Silver, displays a remarkable aptitude for human skills, like using a toilet and brus …

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 …

One of Reader's Digest Best Summer Reads (US).

Set against the backdrop of the Sri Lankan civil war, Ru Freeman’s epic novel explores the lives of the diverse families that live on Sal Mal Lane and the heartbreaking ways this once harmonious community turns on one another with the country on the brink of war.

On the day the Herath family moves in, …

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and selected as a New York Times Notable Book, Swimming Home is a sexy psychological thriller from a highly acclaimed writer.

Poet Joe and his war-correspondent wife Isabel arrive with their daughter and another couple to a rented villa in the south of France to discover a body floating face down in the swimming …

A vivid and powerful novel set in post-WWII Japan, Fireflies chronicles the lives of four interweaving characters navigating the war-torn streets of Tokyo during the American occupation.

August 1945. Japan has been defeated in the Second World War. The country lies in ruins.

Satsuko Takara and her teenage brother, Hiroshi, have lost their parents, an …

Twenty-five-year-old Holocaust survivor Miklós is being shipped from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp to Gotland, Sweden, to receive treatment at the Larbro Hospital. Here he is sentenced to death again: he is diagnosed with tuberculosis and his doctors inform him that he has six months to live. But Miklós decides to wage war on his own fate: …

On the surface, the Paul family are living the liberal, middle-class Scandinavian dream. Max Paul is a renowned sociologist and his wife Katriina has a well-paid job in the public sector. They live in an airy apartment in the centre of Helsinki. But look closer and the cracks start to show.

As he approaches his sixtieth birthday, the certainties of …

Andreas lives his whole life in the Austrian Alps, where he arrives as a young boy taken in by a farming family. He is a man of very few words and so, when he falls in love with Marie, he doesn't ask for her hand in marriage, but instead has some of his friends light her name at dusk across the mountain. When Marie dies in an avalanche, pregnant wi …

Anne Jaccob is coming of age in late eighteenth-century London, the daughter of a wealthy merchant. When she is taken advantage of by her tutor — a great friend of her father’s — and is set up to marry a squeamish snob named Simeon Onions, she begins to realize just how powerless she is in Victorian society. Anne is watchful, cunning, and bor …

How do you make God laugh? Tell him your plans.
Globe-trotting photojournalist Angela Thomas has spent all thirty-two years of her life dreaming of far-off places. Nothing that has happened to her thus far -- the dysfunction of her family, the failure of her marriage -- can convince her that "home" is where she belongs. Though she won?t admit it, …

Julia is in limbo. Her mother has just died and her married lover, Nicholas, has gone missing in Morocco. Thirsting for love, for sex, for connection, she grasps at the trailing threads of those who have left her behind: a birth certificate, issued two years before she was born and kept secret from her; and memories of Nicholas, his touch, his scen …

From one of Denmark’s rising stars, a powerful and profound novel about a young boy and his father who live at the margins of society, until one day their adventure takes an unpredictable turn.

1986. Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme has been assassinated, and a young boy and his father are on the move again.Travelling from Sweden to the outskirts …

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

A bestseller in Scandinavia -- Doppler is the enchanting, subversive, and very unusual story about one man and his moose.

This beguiling modern fable tells the story of a man who, after the death of his father, abandons his home, his family, his career, and the trappings of civilization for a …

Through the braided narratives of three spirited characters, this novel bears witness to the infamous “American” crime that metastasized uber-civilized Montreal. Everyone wants a Marin at her party. Bohemian and beautiful, this engineering student is as passionate about constructing sets for theater and opera as she is about Trey, the one man s …

Claude Tremblay works as a political analyst at the International Criminal Court at The Hague. But when the Congolese warlord Kabanga, accused of crimes against humanity, is released from trial due to a procedural error, Claude resigns his post and follows the accused back to his home country in search of justice. In The World, the Lizard, and Me, …

Shunned as an outsider and mistreated due to an undiagnosed learning disability, the young and imaginative Mari-Jen Delene retreats into silence. Around her, the fictional community of Ste. Noire, Cape Breton, hosts a vividly drawn cast of characters: the uncompromising and bitter Mother Superior; the dangerous Uncle Jule; the kind-hearted holocaus …

At the end of the Second World War nearly 50,000 women emigrated to Canada from Britain and the continent, scarred from the bomb-rutted fields of Europe. For them that Atlantic crossing marked the beginning of a great adventure: a new country, a new life and a new husband. For many children of these unions came a dual heritage, a cultural divide th …

Patrick Wiseman moved his wife and son back to Newfoundland to start a new Pentecostal church, but when his wife Anne leaves him for a man she meets on Facebook and his son Hab moves in with his girlfriend Natalie—a burgeoning alcoholic with a fiery past—Patrick takes a suicidal leap of faith that brings him face to face with his estranged fath …

In the 1920s, Jim, Bert and Rose Evans all move from Newfoundland to Brooklyn, New York, in search of work and a better life, leaving their sister Annie back home in St. John’s. By the Rivers of Brooklyn traces the story of the Evans family across two countries and three generations, exploring the hopes, passions and heartbreaks of those who went …

All We Want is Everything, Andrew F. Sullivan’s exceptional debut collection of short stories, finds the misused and forgotten, the places in between, the borderlands on the edge of town where dead fields alternate with empty warehouses—places where men and women clutch tightly at whatever fragments remain. Motels are packed with human cargo, w …

Glorifying consumerism as the de facto religion of our time, Shopping Cart Pantheism offers a preposterous yet challenging invitation to participate in commodity worship. As our narrator meanders the Las Vegas Strip, its sites and monuments become examples of Christian sainthood, miracles, worship, and dogma now transformed into icons of consumeris …

A new collection of short fiction from the Governor General’s Literary Award-winning author and Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist Greg Hollingshead.

Act Normal is a collection of sharp, new comic stories about sex, art, and the daily risk of having accidents. Highly original, occasionally dark, but always endearing, these stories are filled with ch …

The long-awaited follow up to Annabel and Kathleen Winter’s first work of narrative nonfiction.

In 2010, bestselling author Kathleen Winter took a journey across the storied Northwest Passage, among marine scientists, historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, and curious passengers. From Greenland to Baffin Island and all along the passage, Win …

Shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Governor General's Award for Fiction, and the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize

In 1968, into the beautiful, spare environment of remote coastal Labrador, a mysterious child is born: a baby who appears to be neither fully boy nor girl, but both at once.

Only three people are privy to the secret — t …

A lost feminist classic — and winner of the Toronto Book Award — reissued to coincide with the 35th anniversary of publication.

In her yearning, elusive search for a lover, Shirley Kaszenbowski sheds her drab “basic black” existence together with torturous memories of guilt and loss as a Jewish immigrant in Toronto.

Shirley Kaszenbowski, née …

Three men race against time to take possession of a sacred 5,000-year-old Buddhist sculpture: Khalid, a leading Pakistani antiquities dealer, arranges for the illegal importation of the statue from neighbouring Afghanistan. Ghalib, a wealthy art collector with political aspirations, has purchased the statue for his private collection. Adeel, a high …

After You’ve Gone vibrates with authenticity: two eras, two young women caught up in the giddy thrall of love and music and feckless men. — Lee Kvern, author of The Matter of Sylvie and Seven Ways to Sunday After You’ve Gone is a thoughtful, offbeat story about two guitarists from two different generations. Through the linked lives of Lita an …

This Ramshackle Tabernacle is a collection of short stories set in and around the fictional villages of St. Lola and St. Olga in northeastern Ontario. Whether reflecting on the broken lives of others in the community or mourning the death of a friend who drowned in a freak fishing accident, the characters in this collection face tragedy with grace, …

Prissy Montgomery goes to great lengths to avoid having sex with her husband, Howie. So when he confesses to having an affair, and requests a divorce, she shouldn’t be all that surprised.

With her fourteen-year-old son in tow she leaves the comfort of her Toronto home and heads back to Paradise Bay, her childhood home in Newfoundland. But Prissy� …

Shortlisted for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, and selected as an Amazon.ca Best Book.

With all the wonder of a small-scale The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay comes this moving and unforgettable novel about childhood, love, and magic.

Growing up in a Jewish neighbourhood in the 1930s, young Benjamin Kleeman falls in love, first wit …

Young readers may be amazed to learn that Canada's bestselling author (30 million books so far) started off in Pennsylvania and struggled in school. A solitary daydreamer, raised in a large, boisterous family, he found solace in books at an early age. Considered a slow learner by the nuns who taught him, his creative gifts were eventually recognize …

In 1913 Dr. Louis Thomas and his family settle on the French islands of St. Pierre and Michelon. Enchanted by how this French land navigates the harsh climate of the Atlantic Ocean, he immerses himself in his passion for photography and captures the soul of the place. Yet despite his love for St. Pierre and its people, he leaves one day, abandoning …

Winner of Canada Reads 2013 and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize

In 1982, the oil rig Ocean Ranger sank off the coast of Newfoundland during a Valentine's Day storm. All eighty-four men aboard died. February is the story of Helen O'Mara, one of those left behind when her husband, Cal, drowns on the rig. It begins in the present-day, more than twe …

Shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award: Fiction and selected as a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book

Juliet Friesen is ten years old when her family moves to Nicaragua. It is 1984, the height of Nicaragua's post-revolutionary war, and the peace-activist Friesens have come to protest American involvement. In the midst of this tumult, Juliet's …

Amity provides a window to the wreckage caused by war and conflict that leave behind destruction, displacement, pain and struggle resulting in life-long and irreparable psychological disorders. It is a story about the lives of various people who are dealing with the devastation of war and conflict, here specifically within the contexts of Yugoslavi …

There is an epidemic of violence against women in Canada and the world. For many women physical and sexual assault, or the threat of such violence, is a daily reality. Walk Myself Home is an anthology of poetry, fiction, nonfiction and oral interviews on the subject of violence against women including contributions by Kate Braid, Yasuko Thahn and S …

Cally is a twenty-five year old business graduate. Her mother, who was born in Crete but has always refused to talk about it, has died, leaving one instruction: before starting her first job, Cally should visit Crete. There she meets Oliver, a reticent, very attractive US Army deserter. A night of love awakens in Cally feelings she has never known. …

Just three months after his wife’s death to breast cancer, Jon packs up his infant son, Myles, and they set off on a six-week “Healing Tour” through Canada and the United States. Their journey, set to the soundtrack of the music Jon loves, sees them negotiating rolling mid-western hills, exploring a cave, losing confidence in the prairies, an …

A man, nameless, wakes up in Manhattan in a stranger's apartment with few memories of who he is. He remembers a life in California and the love of a girl named Sarah—memories that don’t match the life he now finds himself in.

Losing hold of what he can say for certain about his life, he turns to a doctor who claims he can help recover more memor …