Because fear can transform into confidence, recklessness, the kind of power you can't imagine until you're inside it. And then, once you've felt it, you can't feel alive when it's gone. Sophrosyne. You understood this feeling. I know you did, though you never said it. I saw it, instead, on your face when you danced.

Sophrosyne is one of only four …

From celebrated Quebecois author Bertrand Laverdure comes Universal Bureau of Copyrights , a bold, strange and addictive story that envisions a world where free will doesn't exist, and an enigmatic global corporation buys and sells the copyrights for all things on Earth, including real and fictional characters. Through this novel, which is part po …

As students at the University of British Colombia, Syliva and Lydie met a year ago when the younger woman agreed to be Lydie’s tutor. Lydie’s warmth and irrepressible charm have worked their way past all of Sylvia’s boundaries. Struggling with guilt and loss after a terrible event in her childhood, Sylvia finds in Lydie a compassion and joy f …

In the late 1960s Penny is the youngest of four kids, known on her street as the girl with the mean brothers. She spends all year looking forward to her summers spent at Go Home Lake, where she passes the days in a soaked bathing suit, catching frogs, and getting her daily fill of fresh air.

Yet Penny's summers are far from pleasant. Her father’s …

In 1955, two fifteen-year-olds with immeasurable optimism shared a summer working as waitresses in the small town of Franklin's flourishing Britannia Hotel. Forty years later, Hannah, now a successful teacher with a younger lover, rushes home from Toronto to find her mother in hospital while Colleen, still living in Franklin and married with five c …

Montreal was the literary centre of Canada in the 1940s, a hotbed of literary activity in both English and French crowned by the international success of Hugh MacLennan's Two Solitudes and Gabrielle Roy's The Tin Flute. With the rise of nationalism in both English Canada and Quebec, Toronto emerged as the literary centre of English Canada, with Mon …

Longlisted for the 2013 Scotiabank Giller Prize

A sharply original debut collection, How To Get Along With Women showcases Elisabeth de Mariaffi’s keen eye and inventive voice. Infused with a close and present danger, these stories tighten the knot around power, identity, and sexuality, and draw the reader into the pivotal moments where-for better …

The junction of Highways 20 and 97 forms a rough right angle around which lies the city of Williams Lake. These are the coordinates by which Christian Petersen’s fiction can be charted. From the building of the Gaol at Soda Creek to ruminations on the origins of the Barkerville fire, All Those Drawn to Me explores the unpredictable, romantic and …

Voluptuous Pleasure is a collection of non-fiction whose title states that non-fiction does not exist. Sensuous and smart, ambiguous but incisive in their truths-these stories take you into brothels and bedrooms, kitchens and consciousness; they seduce you along the limits of non-fiction, making you question the veracity of anything you've ever rea …

From Franz Boas to Alice Munro: welcome to an unprecedented panorama of the most significant authors and books of British Columbia culled from Alan Twigg's unrivalled knowledge of more than two centuries of B.C. literary history. The Essentials is the new bible of who wrote what, and why, in B.C., produced with the cooperation of Simon Fraser Unive …

Tell It Slant is a bold, luscious first novel by Beth Follett, publisher of one of Canada's most exciting and respected small presses, Pedlar Press.

Out of the pages of Djuna Barnes's Nightwood and into a blustery Montreal weekend steps a modern-day Nora Flood, plundering vivid memories across three Canadian cities – Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal â …

In Sarah Sheard's celebrated novel Almost Japanese, a young girl's obsession with a famous Japanese musician blossoms into personal transformation. In spare, lyrical prose, Sheard documents Emma's discovery of her new next door neighbour, a dazzling Japanese symphony conductor. Things Japanese soon begin to transform Emma's world. Several years lat …

André Alexis brings a modern sensibility and a new liveliness to an age-old genre, the pastoral.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE WRITERS' TRUST OF CANADA FICTION PRIZE

ONE OF THE GLOBE AND MAIL'S GLOBE 100: BEST BOOKS OF 2014

There were plans for an official welcome. It was to take place the following Sunday. But those who came to the rectory on Father Pennant's …

In the town of Lake Wachannabee, Ontario, lies the Winter Garden, home to matron Giggy Andrewes and her brood: her strung-out nephew Jem Waferly, his friend Cora, Chappy the whippet, two peacocks, and Jem's lover Rob, who lies convalescing after having had most of his flesh stripped away.

A mystery? Well, yes, it would be if only the characters were …

Through ten incendiary and mercurial stories, Cosmo will take you on a wild ride over the churning waters of pop culture and the malaise of our solitary existence.

WINNER OF THE 2013 CBC OVERLOOKIE BOOKIE AWARD FOR MOST UNDERRATED CANADIAN BOOK

An admirer of Miley Cyrus performs a three-thousand word sentence in defence of his passion. Actor Matthew …

Nominated for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award

Eugenia Ledoux, nine years old, wakes to a note from her father: ‘gone to save the world. sorry. yours, sheb wooly ledoux. asshole.’ Eugenia is left behind with her mother, the sharp-edged B-movie actress Mink, and her sister, the death-obsessed and hauntingly beautiful Immaculata. When Mink climbs i …

The 2012 One Book Toronto title
Shortlisted for the Toronto Book Award

A girl faints in the Toronto subway. Her friends are taken to the hospital with unexplained rashes; they complain about a funny smell in the subway. Swarms of police arrive, and then the hazmat team. Panic ripples through the city, and words like poisoning and terrorism become ai …

Beside me, on the stone steps of this quiet courtyard, there is a lame man – the sweeper. He is so thin that the end of his belt comes back around to its buckle. He’s trying to feed a puppy the rest of his lunch. He reminds me that we all need something to need us, and that maybe that’s why we Westerners, who are so independent, mostly fail t …

Robert James, a private detective more interested in chronicling his cases than solving them, gets a midnight call from a young woman whose older husband has been found with a knife in his chest. Murder, corruption, and betrayal ensue as he's drawn into the dark underworld of his client, but hapless Robert and his sidekick, a flower-delivery guy, c …

Brian Lembeck – ‘Pulpy’ – takes life slow and steady. He likes his office job, and he likes his gentle, figurine-collecting boss, Al. He even likes the bitter receptionist, though he’s the only one who does. He likes his wife, Midge, too, and their ice-dancing lessons. Midge works as a candle-party hostess – she quit her office job when …

A body is found on the side of a highway. Naked, throat slashed, no identification. It disappears from the back of a police van and begins a strange odyssey, making its way, over the course of one early winter night, all around the northern town of Sudbury and through the lives and dreams of eleven very different people.

These eleven people Â? from …

Hoping to erase her unhappy old life, Hazel jumps in her beat-up old car and speeds away. When she pulls up to the Evening and Morning Star Trailer Park, where nothing turns into even more of nothing, she decides it just might be the new life she's looking for.

At the centre of this new life is King, a motorcycle-riding, hard-drinking, guitar-playin …

From the author and translator of And the Birds Rained Down, a 2015 CBC Canada Reads selection

Winner of the 2015 Governor General's Literary Award for French-to-English Translation

An abandoned mine. A large family driven by honour. And a source of pain, buried deep in the ground.

We’re nothing like other families. We are self-made. We are an essen …

It all started with a black rose and a rich young man. And a house with a creek running through it. And then there she was, Kip Flynn, standing beside her dead boyfriend and agreeing to take a large sum of money from the young man's father to keep quiet. As if she could have done anything else, she was so scared and grief-stricken and maybe pregnan …

Two novels, two young women at the frontiers of sex.

Like a series of Penthouse letters penned by Kathy Acker, Lie With Me recounts a woman's sexual escapades, picking up random men in bars for a series of increasingly extreme encounters, hoping to understand love from the far side of sluttiness.

In The Way of the Whore, Mira, an introverted Jewish g …

Toronto's CN Tower has fallen into the lake. The city is crowded with refugees from the US. Michael and Ruth Racco's dad has, in a rash of road rage, perpetrated the Backhoe Massacre. And, in the middle of it all, little Jimmy Hardcastle has, in the fountain of a suburban mall, walked on water.

As helicopters chop the air over Toronto and a paranoid …

Nominated for a Commonwealth Writers Prize (Canada and Caribbean region), a Toronto Book Award and a Books in Canada/Amazon.ca First Novel Award.

March 6, 1934. Hundreds gather outside City Hall to celebrate the Toronto Centenary. In the crowd, pickpocket Mona Kantor and her partner, Chesler, are ‘in the tip,’ finding easy pickings among the j …

Isabel Norris has never left the ice. Her father was a hockey legend who died before she was born, and her grandparents have raised her in his skates.

When Iz leaves her grandmother behind to play for the Winnipeg University Scarlets, she struggles to fit in on this team of hard-hitting, tough-talking women with a penchant for buffets, beer bongs an …

Welcome to Crooked River, Ontario. Population 2,851 and falling. Eli has lived in Crooked River his whole life, and he knows better than anyone about that sinking number. His father, uncle and grandmother are dead; he didn't know his mother, and his grandfather Clarence, an eccentric builder of hotels and a now-underwater castle, walked to the rive …

While researching why Freud failed to win a Nobel Prize at the Nobel Archives in Sweden, a psychiatrist makes an unusual discovery. Among the piles of papers in the 'Crackpot' file are letters addressed to the executor of Alfred Nobel's will, written by several notable Nobel laureates – including Rudyard Kipling and Marie Curie — each offering …

Invited to a quiet Swiss château by the enigmatic Tatiana Beaujeu Lehmann, Anne begins to slowly write a novel in a language that is not hers, a language that makes meaning foreign and keeps her alert to the world and its fiery horizon. Will the strange intoxication that takes hold of her and her characters – sculptor Charles; his sister Kim, …

David spends his days as an underworked copy writer for an ad agency and his nights lost in old war movies, fantasizing about his strange teenage cousin and revisiting his father's suicide.

His dreary life is upended when he finds himself at the mysterious Chaos Farm, a lavish wilderness retreat populated by those seeking to right their lives' imbal …

A spaceship hurtles towards the moon, hippies gather at Woodstock, Charles Manson leads a cult into murder and a Kennedy drives off a Chappaquiddick dock: it’s the summer of 1969. And as mankind takes its giant leap, Jordan May March, disabled bastard and genius, age fourteen, limps and schemes her way towards adulthood. Trapped at the March fami …

Can a breakup break you apart?

In Self-Titled, Geoffrey Brown stares into a mirror and writes what he sees, what he thinks, what he feels. The result? A self-portrait that's at once comic and psychotic, a complex consciousness captured in crystalline prose. Memories, manias, miasmas – Brown morphs the machinery of his mind into an utterly original …

Winner of the The Believer Book Award (2012)

Shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award (2013)

Myra, naive and curious, is on a family vacation to the southernmost tip of Florida – a mangy Key West full of Spring Breakers. Here, suffering through the embarrassments of a family on the verge of splitting up, she meets Elijah, a charismatic Tanzanian mus …

A former lover becomes an uninvited houseguest in Ted and Marjory’s quiet abode, adversely affecting investigations into the history of the semicolon. A judge must compulsively narrate his neighbour into ignominy. A market analyst’s visit to a stripper goes awry, leading to a compulsory leave from work and an intervention from loved ones. An En …

Globe and Mail Best 100 Book of 2015
The secret world of Mauritian street-gangs is not for the faint of heart. Fraught with peril and mischief, its inner workings are a mystery to the daughter of one of its most valued members: Serge, the Grand Menteur. A liar of exceptional caliber whose sole responsibility is to purposefully confuse police with …

On the afternoon that two tonnes of explosives are set to dismember Toronto's Metropolitan Library, poet Henry Black hides himself away in his favourite wing; when his mangled body is uncovered, there's a book lodged in his chest.

Jay Post, a hapless filmmaker, is hired to chronicle the life, death and writings of the poet. In the process of making …

Nicole Brossard's lucid, subversive and innovative work on language has influenced an entire generation of readers and writers. But three of her seminal works of postmodernism and feminism have been lost to us for years. The Blue Books brings them back.

A Book: A novel about a novel; five characters in 'search of a narrative, a narrative in search o …

Night is falling, and so is the snow. As the blizzard buries the ground, it uncovers the resentments, hopes, and aches of a small town in northeastern Arkansas, where, like in any Southern small town, there are unwanted pregnancies to agonize over, surgeries to be paid for and love to be made. Julie's two daughters have just run off to Hollywood to …

A welfare cheque floats down the river, a cowboy spreads the Word of the Lord and crotches tick like clocks: the world of Spare Parts is unpredictable, evocative and vividly distorted. Its initial appearance, in 1981, caused a stir; at a time when linear narrative was the m.o. of feminist writing, Gail Scott had the nerve to fracture and dislocate …

Winner of the W.O. Mitchell Book Prize

Winner of the 2012 Relit Award for Best Novel
Longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize
Shortlisted for the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction
Shortlisted for the Alberta Literary Award for Best Fiction
A Globe and Mail Best Novel of 2011

A seventeen-year-old boy, bullied and heartbroken, hangs himself. And a …

Lemon has three mothers: a biological one she's never met, her adopted father's suicidal ex, and Drew, a school principal who hasn’t left the house since she was stabbed by a student. She has one deadbeat dad, one young cancer-riddled protege, and two friends, the school tramp and a depressed poet. Figuring the numbers are against her, Lemon just …

Nominated for an Alberta Book Award.

Time you had a haircut. Look like a mop.
Not that skinny.
Skin and bloody bone, boy.
Jacob breaks the point of his pencil but makes it look like an accident. And away Dad goes out the door and thump thump down the stairs.
Jacob eyes the hole at the end of his pencil. Listens till he can’t hear the Torin …

This is the story of Isobel and Emile. They wake up beside each other one morning, and they slowly get out of bed. It is the last time that they will sleep together. They know it. They do not want it to be the last time but they know that it is. They get out of bed and they go to a train station. Emile gets onto a train. Isobel does not. She stands …

CBC Radio 3 Book Club pick for August 2012!

It is the summer of 1999, and the Sweltham family leads an ordinary suburban existence. Former high school volleyball champ Parker crisscrosses the continent as a sales rep for DynaFlex Sporting Goods, while his wife Trixie serves as the managing editor of Record of Truth, an unsuccessful genocide studies …

A CBC Canada Reads 2015 Selection

Finalist for the 2013 Governor General's Literary Award for French-to-English Translation

Deep in a Northern Ontario forest live Tom and Charlie, two octogenarians determined to live out the rest of their lives on their own terms: free of all ties and responsibilities, their only connection to civilization two pot f …

First published in 1987, Nicole Brossard's classic novel returns to Coach House in a new edition. A seminal text in Canadian and feminist literature, Mauve Desert is a must-read for readers and writers alike.

This is both a single novel and three separate novels in one. In the first, Mauve Desert, fifteen-year-old Mélanie drives across the Arizona …

Winner of the 2009 ReLit Award!

He saw it. Like one dead eye filmed over. Like a tunnel that would kill you. Like a star coming to explode you. He saw it. Closer and closer. It was morning. It was daylight. He shouldn't be thinking this. This was a nighttime thing. Stop. Stop. Stop thinking. He felt it. Like black oil on his spine. Like night inside …

Nominated for a 2005 Governor General's Award

Alice Charles has just moved to Montreal to go to McGill University. She’s never had a boyfriend and doesn’t know how to do laundry. She joins the Film Society and hangs out in the library. She drifts away from boring Bethany, her best friend from high school, and starts to trail after Allegra, the c …