After ten years of marriage, Sue and Jerry would say they know everything about each other. But each harbours a significant secret. When Jerry becomes ill and it’s apparent he’s dying, Sue visits a psychic, Hans, who tells her there is someone like a son in her life. She dismisses this, but at Jerry’s funeral his son turns up—a son Sue didn …

Esa Withrod is a young woman struggling over recent events in her personal life—a failed first relationship and resulting pregnancy—as well as the legacy of her desolate upbringing. Eccentric and enigmatic, Esa’s childhood has prepared her to deal with the world with endurance and resilience, but not with joy. She remains “mystified by kind …

Emotionally battered and bruised, 29-year-old Australian immigrant Benny is looking for escape, not redemption. Escape from herself and the dismal failures of her life: her first solo art exhibition is panned by critics and her husband left her for an Andy Warhol look-alike. Isolated from her family, her career as an abstract artist in ruins, she c …

When Elizabeth Thiessen embarks on an expedition to study the cave murals of Baja California, Mexico, she is catapulted onto a mythical, existential journey into the unknown. Within days of landing in the Baja, Elizabeth discovers that her daughter, Patricia—posted in Afghanistan with the Canadian armed forces—is taken hostage by the Taliban. E …

Alastair Luce is a dreamer, one of three who tell this tale. A Canadian expat in the 1950s, he lives in a New York City suburb with his wife, Nora, a passionate American who misses the excitement of wartime life and finds an outlet — and a lover — during the Red scare. Alastair's an artist, a quiet man who paints houses for a living, fears atom …

Evie Troy, an impulsive and funny young Jewish woman, has a tendency to overcomplicate things. And that can get her into trouble. When her dying friend Jean-Gabriel, a successful and controversial francophone writer, cons her into carrying out his last wish, delivering a monetary mea-culpa to his ex-wife Amélie, Evie decides she knows better. In a …

Over the years Trish and Ray have forged a stable family life, despite a rocky beginning almost twenty years earlier — living with their friends on a communal farm that ended badly. Now they are all coming to terms with life in their forties, but Trish has turned angry and insecure. She suddenly finds herself faced with an ailing marriage, a teen …

Mohammed is an aggressive, dominant character who bullies his wife and four children and wages paranoiac diatribes against his sister and her family. It is only when Mohammed leaves for work every morning that the house relaxes into the rich interconnectivity of familial relationships: between Mohammed’s gentle wife Fatima and his sister Rana, wh …

Only by Blood is a novel of search for roots, mother-daughter love and family reconciliation. A Polish woman receives puzzling news from her mother just before she dies. She wants to fulfill her mother's last wishes, but has little idea of where to start. Never does she suspect that her search will take her across Poland, back in time and over the …

Patricia Watson’s My Husband’s Wedding is an astonishing record of the lives of three women in Toronto in the 1980s. All three have to deal with marital problems, adolescent children, and finding their own professional and personal identities outside of the traditional family model. In the process they come to know and love one another, to rely …

Butterfly Tears is a collection of short fiction that depicts the experiences of Chinese immigrant women facing the challenges of life in a new country. The stories are set in different parts of China, Canada, and the United States and examine Chinese women’s cross-cultural experiences in North America as well as women’s issues and political di …

Johanna Bergen is a park warden in a Rocky Mountain National Park whose time is spent on such tasks as bear patrol, locating tourists who are lost or in other physical danger and policing park rules. She has a particular affinity for grizzly bears largely stemming from an experience she had in a Neolithic cave in Spain. She comes to view the bears …

One Day It Happens is an eclectic collection of short stories by Mary Lou Dickinson, which deal in myriad forms with communication or lack thereof in the lives of the characters. One of the universal factors in human existence is the need to connect with one another. When these characters fail to do so, it is the result of fear, of loneliness, of v …

Having lost her husband through divorce, and her daughter who has left home to go to university, Claire, at midlife, finds herself bereft; she is aging and she feels she has never really been sufficiently engaged in her own life. A perhaps largely-unconscious part of her has wisely chosen to put herself out of her comfort zone by accepting a teachi …

The Hungry Mirror is the fictional tale of a young woman overwhelmed. Lured by false promise and seeking fickle social acceptability, she starves herself and fast becomes trapped when seeming-sanctuary proves a cage of addictions walled by self-hatred and filled with doubt. Increasingly ill, her marriage cold, her family well-intentioned enablers o …

God-fearing Nara Lee carries a painful secret and a corrosive guilt. Set against an historical backdrop when Korea was a colony and citizenry was rendered impotent, Nara’s life is forged in the 1919 March First Movement. Her journey takes her from her ancestral home to an insidious orphanage to a forced-labour factory during the Japanese Occupati …

This vibrant collection of short fictions explores how families work, how they are torn apart, and, in spite of differences and struggles, brought back together. Darcie Friesen Hossack’s stories in Mennonites Don’t Dance offer an honest, detailed look into the experiences of children—both young and adult — and their parents and grandparents …

The Girl Who Was Born That Way is the story of the Berk family, not exactly an ordinary Jewish family, trying to bury its Holocaust past while starting over in post-war USA. The novel centers on the dynamics between the family’s four daughters, the two oldest girls who grew up in the Lodz Ghetto and he two youngest who came of age in an idyllic A …

At twenty-five, kindergarten teacher Priya must accept the loss of her parents in a plane crash. Her grief plunges her into an eating disorder. While her friends recognize that she is crying out for help, Priya denies it all as she strives to make peace with Renita, her father’s sister—a woman who appears chronically depressed. Unbeknownst to P …

The Wondrous Woo tells the story of Miramar Woo who is the quintessential Chinese girl: nice, quiet, and reserved. The eldest of the three Woo children, Miramar is ever the obedient sister and daughter ... on the outside. On the inside, she’s a kick-ass kung fu heroine with rock star flash, sassy attitude, and an insatiable appetite for adventure …

The Artificial Newfoundlander is a witty, playful, tale of contemporary St. John’s. Hugh Norman, a middle-aged English prof researching an eccentric novelist priest, is faced with the unexpected arrivals of his mysteriously unhappy daughter, her clueless husband, and an old flame ready for rekindling. Relationships morph, lines are crossed, and H …

Leaving Dublin: Writing My Way from Ireland to Canada is an engaging and entertaining exploration of a man’s life that begins in middle-class Dublin, includes stints as a travelling musician and broadcaster in Canada, and culminates in a career as an award-winning journalist and bestselling author. With passion, candour, humour and vivid stories, …

Families who would want to honour a parent’s request to not die in hospital, encounter obstacles that can defeat even accomplished health professionals. Autumns’ Grace is a story that spans a ten-month period as the Campbell family comes to terms with the father’s diagnosis of cancer. The diagnosis seems a particularly unfair blow to a veteri …

Paardeberg, South Africa is far from the Canadian prairies. In 1899, best friends from the small town of Portage la Prairie, Will and Mason, sign up with the Winnipeg Rifles” “A” Company to fight in the Second Boer War. Here they meet Robert, the silent anthropologist from Alberta with a mystery he isn—t revealing; Claire, an Australian nur …

Winner, 2015 Archambault Prize

The year is 1996, and small-town life for 14-year-old Catherine is made up of punk rock, skaters, shoplifting, drugs, and the ghost of Kurt Cobain. Her parents are too busy divorcing to pay her headful of unspent angst much attention. But after she tries a PCP variant called mesc for the first time, her budding rebelli …

Demonic to Divine: The Double Life of Shulamis Yelin is a weaving of the Montreal writer’s stories and selected diary excerpts and family photographs revealing a far-reaching creative personality who is haunted from the age of ten by the “moods taking over”.

This book poignantly illuminates the dramatic duality of a public and private literar …

Short story writer, novelist and essayist Josip Novakovich returns with his first collection of stories since being named a finalist for the prestigious 2013 Man Booker International prize. In Ex-Yu, he explores the major themes of war and exile, of religiosity and existentialism, that have defined his fiction and earned him a place among the panth …

Jean-Claude Germain’s second volume of Montreal memoirs chronicles his coming of age: his draconian Jesuit education on the fringes of the city’s Red Light District, followed by his liberating discovery of the city’s fevered bohemian community in the dying days of the Duplessis regime and Quebec’s “grande noirceur.” Here, on the cusp be …

In a Mist explores longing, loss and isolation. This debut collection of short stories examines the lives of socially isolated individuals with obsessive interests and desires. These lonely protagonists find solace in emotionally evocative forms of cultural expression such as early jazz, classic cinema and renaissance motets. The transcendent poten …

Loyalties collide with long-buried love, a man builds a nuclear bomb in his garage, and children walk up walls. The stories in What You Need beautifully recount the rawness of human experience. Andrew Forbes’s characters struggle to escape the things that hold them in their all-too-ordinary lives, falling victim to fate, to one another, and to se …

Shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award

The innocence and clarity of Teri Vlassopoulos’s narrative voice reveals new and unexpected layers. The characters in these stories look for signs and omens as they attempt to understand events in their lives by framing them in abstract superstitions. The stories in Bats and Swallows are sharp, accur …

Winner of the Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction

Lansing Meadows has one last shot to get it right. With the clock ticking, he sets out on the road one last time, to sing his songs to anyone who’ll listen, and to try to right his wrongs, before it’s too late.

Fallsy Downsies is a novel about aging, art, celebrity and modern Canadian culture, told t …

Ghost Pine: All Stories True offers thirteen years worth of sparkling true stories from the life of author Jeff Miller, compiling the best of his long-running zine. From his youth in suburban Ottawa in the late 1990s, to travels across Canada and North America and his current home in Montreal, Miller’s stories are equal measures funny and sad, no …

The stories included in Andrew Hood’s sophomore collection are beautiful, gross, funny, and personal. The Cloaca is a train wreck of awesomeness. It’s your high school gym coach, drunk and dishing dirt on all the other teachers on the crosstown bus-a stomach-turning spectacle that’ll make you laugh out loud now, feel bad later. You won’t be …

Contributors explore the urban systems and structures that frame our everyday lives. The Art of Trespassing imagines networks, neighbourhoods, and relationships, exposing them as both confining and liberating.

Combining Stacey May Fowles’s humorous, biting prose with Marlena Zuber’s whimsical and raw illustrations, Fear of Fighting searches for meaning in the mundane. Set in the lonely, urban landscape of downtown Toronto, the story revolves around Marnie, a broken-hearted young woman fighting to find something more.

"Fowles navigates the devastating …

A small flat sits unoccupied above Henry’s café. When a woman comes to rent the room, Henry’s world begins an unusual transformation. As they grow closer the city itself is affected, changed, and slowly dismantled. Unsure if he is a victim of his own senility, the chaos inches closer and Henry suspects it may have something to do with the woma …

Low is a novel about family, identity, illness, love and loss. Lyrical, personal prose draws readers into the world of Adriana Song. We feel our way through Low with her as she navigates lopsided friendships, failed romances and tries to to weather the storm that is her life.

“An empathetic coming-of-age story about the redemptive power of love.� …

Ruby returns to the scene of a recent heartbreak, only to find the woman her lover left her for around every corner. A soap opera of gleeful rumours and turf wars ensues, and Ruby comes to wonder why a woman she’s never spoken to now embodies all of her problems.

My father drowned in the Aegean Sea, fifty nautical miles northeast of the port of Piraeus. When it happened, my mother and I were at home in Toronto. It was early evening in Greece, afternoon for us, and I was at school when she found out.

Niko Kiriakos, tentative heir to the ailing Calypso Shipping fleet, always suspected he was cursed. Following …

Ten emerging Canadian writers explore pace and place in stories where movement is central. Transits is about people who are mobile and things which are transient, (im)migrating, running away, coming home, waiting.

When fifteen-year-old Mutton is robbed at gunpoint while working in her mother’s Hamilton thrift store, the thief makes off with an item that she knows isn’t meant for him, hurling Mutton and her family into a summer of remarkable and heartbreaking events. From fighting unscrupulous developers to first loves to the anguish that comes from never …

One of the CBC’s Best Books of the Year.

A pregnancy test is taken at a wedding, a bad diagnosis leads a patient to a surprising outlook, and a civic holiday becomes a dystopian nightmare. By turns caustic, tender, and creepily hilarious, Sweet Affliction reveals the frailties, perversions, and resilience of Anna Leventhal’s cast of city-dweller …

No writer in Canada today is more in love with the English, and French, languages than John Lavery. That love is gloriously requited. In inventive, incantatory prose, Sandra Beck, his long-awaited first novel, paints a very unusual portrait of a lady. This is a book about many things: the struggling antics of adolescence, the banal delusions of sol …

The Mean Time is a work of literary fiction set in Corner Brook about how people allow their pasts to shape and define them – in holding on to dread, regret, and pain.

The death of Will Johnston shakes the community to its foundations, and Frank Doyle’s marriage is frayed by his involvement in the death. Torn by guilt and unable to let go, Frank …

When Erika Drake, of the Westmount Drakes, met and fell in love with Marc Reiser, a Jew from northern Ontario, their respective worlds were turned upside down. Set against the backdrop of the first three years of the Second World War, Earth and High Heaven captured the hearts and minds of its generation and helped to shape the more diverse and incl …

Mink is a witness, a shape shifter, compelled to follow the story that has ensnared Celia and her village, on the West coast of Vancouver Island in Nuu’Chahlnuth territory.

Celia is a seer who — despite being convinced she’s a little “off” — must heal her village with the assistance of her sister, her mother and father, and her nephews. …

You will never know what really happened to Lech or any of us. We mean nothing by it, darling. It is a silent agreement we all have with ourselves, that nothing will ever make us prisoners again, not even memory.?

Set primarily in the neighbourhood of fictional Copernicus Avenue, Andrew Borkowski's debut collection of short stories is a daring, mo …

Edmund was dying, but now he isn't. Granted a reprieve from the HIV that took everyone he loved away from him, Edmund decides-after a period of holing up in his Rosedale home-to jump-start his new lease on life by diving hard into the sex and drugs of the party scene.

Teresa is dying, and she's livid. Determined not to let her illness slow her down …

Doubting Yourself to the Bone is a story about the nature of grief, about what it means to be a parent in the face of great sorrow, the idea of re-invented love and hope. Set in Paris and a small town in the Canadian Rockies, the novel is propelled forward by a horrific car crash that reverberates for the victim’s husband and daughters. From a sc …