A finalist for the Best First Novel Award at the Arthur Ellis Awards

“Sins don’t destroy people here. Dreams do.”

Enter the premier’s old friend Harry Asher—lawyer, former hockey star, self-styled intellectual, and recent divorcé—who is hired to dig into the incident. And it isn’t long before Asher’s investigation threatens to expose …

Shortlisted for the 2016 O’Reilly Insurance and the Co-Operators First Book Award!

As a long, hot Saskatchewan summer dawns, Darby Swank’s life is forever changed when she finds her beloved aunt floating dead in a lake. All at once, her blinders are lifted and she sees the country lifestyle she’s always known in a whole new way, with hidden pa …

When her family’s car goes through the ice on Rainy Lake one cold March day in 1962, six-year-old Rebecca Archer is the only person her father is able to pull from the sinking vehicle. But as Rebecca grows up in a farmhouse haunted by the absence of her mother and baby brother, raised by a man left nearly paralyzed with grief, she wonders if her …

Everyone deals with grief in their own personal way. Take Carrie, for example. Getting over her mother’s death from ovarian cancer takes the form of ramping up passive-aggressive office warfare, continuing her campaign to show her ex-husband she’s over him (further increasing the distance between herself and her teenage daughter, natch), riddin …

“No one should ever work at a gas station long enough to get good at it,” observes Brendan, the narrator of the debut novel from Sean Trinder.

Brendan is 20. He’s been pumping gas for three years, working the evening shift at the CountryGas station in a small town outside of Winnipeg. He’s gotten good at it. Which is sad. And Brendan knows t …

When the young daughter of popular radio talk show host Bobbie Reddie disappears along with Bobbie’s ex-husband, Detectives Lane and Harper are on the case. Haunted by flashbacks from a previous missing child case, Lane once again takes to the streets of Calgary looking for answers.

Meanwhile, university student Jay Krocker befriends the mysteriou …

“Some days I wish something truly bad would happen so that I would have something genuine to worry about.”

When his parents’ car is hit by a train, Luke, a failed actor, returns to his Edmonton hometown to attend their funeral, wrap up their affairs, and prepare their house to be sold off. But while all others around him grieve, Luke remains d …

The fires of the Second World War are beginning to burn down, but legendary Canadian aviatrix Sharon Lacey is not out of danger just yet. Complications enter the young ace's life as deep-seated racial and class prejudice, potential fifth columnists and even her own killer code of honour threaten her hard-fought reputation, while a new and wonderful …

After retiring from the heady world of academia, Sidonie von Täler has returned to the small Okanagan Valley town she escaped in her youth for the lights of the big city. The family orchard has since gone to seed, and ever decades later Sidonie still finds herself living in the shadow of her deceased older sister Alice.

As she gets down to work sif …

“Three weeks it’s been raining, but no puddles…”

Author Sara Pierce is slowly drowning in Windsor, a city where water will seemingly not stay put long enough to form puddles. While living with her germophobic best friend Angie and dealing with her online gaming-addicted boyfriend Dan, Sara finds herself obsessively writing and rewriting her …

Finalist for the 2014 LAMBDA Literary Award for Best Gay Mystery!

After a long series of professional and personal upheavals, Detective Lane begins his latest adventure happy, at peace, and enjoying life with his partner Arthur, their children Christine and Matt, and his able new co-worker, RCMP officer Keely Saliba.

But when the body of a young boy …

"So I have always walked alleys alone, with my monster face, listening through a wall for the words that might cultivate me, that are contained within the homes of ex-lovers, the ones who caught a glimpse and ran away."

In the neon-slick streets of Thea Bowering's imagination, monster girls and femme flâneurs roam, anthropologist's eyes on barroom …

Winner of the 2014 Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction at the Manitoba Book Prizes!
Finalist for Best Book Cover / Jacket Design at the 2014 Alberta Book Design Awards!

Edith Stoker's father is building a wall in their backyard. A very, very high wall--a brick bulwark in his obsessive war against their hated neighbour Edward Black.

It is 1969, and fa …

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Edith Stoker’s father is building a wall in their backyard. A very, very high wall—a brick bulwark in his obsessive war against their hated neighbour Edward Black.

It is 1969, and far away, preparations are being made for man to walk upon the moon. Meanwhile, in the Stokers’ shabby home in the East Midlands, Edith remains a virtual prisoner, …

At the height of the Great Depression, two Prairie children struggle with poverty and uncertainty. Surrounded by religion, law, and her authoritarian father, Cora Wagoner daydreams about what it would be like to abandon society altogether and join one of the Indian tribes she's read so much about. Saddened by struggles with Indian Agent restriction …

Half-Asian teenager Grace (but she'd prefer it if you called her "Gray" instead) is not a perfect little supermom-in-the-making like her older sister Jessica, and would rather become a marine biologist than a mother--although she does understand how to take care of her special-needs kid brother Squid better than anyone else in her family. When her …

When young Sharon Lacey travels from Canada to England in the spring of 1940 in search of the father she never knew, she finds herself called upon to participate in a much larger and more dangerous mission. For at eighteen, she is a gifted flier in an England desperate for pilots to fend off the impending attack from Hitler’s Luftwaffe. In the mo …

p>You wake up, and your sister is dead.

With an absent father and their mother constantly ill, sisters Darcy and Carly Nolan were forced to rely on each other growing up. While unpredictable Carly bounced around, her life’s direction uncertain, Darcy fell in love, went to University, and moved to another province. When nineteen-year-old Carly unex …

Rebee Shore’s life is fragmented. She’s forever on the move, ricocheting around Alberta, guided less than capably by her dysfunctional mother Elizabeth.

The Shore Girl follows Rebee from her toddler to her teen years as she grapples with her mother’s fears and addictions, and her own desire for a normal life. Through a series of narrators—fa …

Winner of the 2013 Leacock Memorial Medal for Canadian Humour Writing!
Long Listed for Canada Reads 2018!
Nominated for the First Book Award at the 2013 Saskatchewan Book Awards!
Twenty-seven-year-old Frieda Zweig is at an impasse. Behind her is a string of failed relationships and half-forgotten ambitions of being a painter; in front of her lies t …

Digger, an 85-kilo wrestler, and Sadie, a 26-year-old speed swimmer, stand on the verge of realizing every athlete’s dream – winning a gold medal at the Olympics. Both athletes are nearing the end of their careers, and are forced to confront the question: what happens to athletes when their bodies are too worn to compete? The blossoming relatio …

After a severe winter storm and extended power failure, thousands become trapped in their homes during one of the coldest weeks of the year. For one small group of people, thrown together by catastrophe, a state of anxiety and claustrophobia follows as they discover no precautions have been made for a disaster of this magnitude. When the darkness a …

After her mother's death, Liz Thomas inherits the key to a bank lockbox containing the official government documents of Camp 10, a prisoner-of-war camp located in the sleepy town of Willow Creek, AB during World War II. As Liz desperately attempts to piece together reports on a life she never knew her mother had, she discovers a family secret so tr …

Cole Blackwater’s life isn’t what it used to be. Once a political superstar within Ottawa’s environmental movement, he now runs a nearly defunct conservation strategy consulting firm that distinctly lacks a paying client. His ex-wife loathes him for a scandalous affair that ended their marriage, he feels he’s failing his eight-year-old daug …

Peigan elders Joe and Josephine Crowshoe belonged to a generation still bright with the traditional knowledge and deep memories of their grandparents. They lived under a paternalistic government system that denied them their language, culture, and religion. They reclaimed their heritage and shared it with the larger community receiving honours for …

The Alberta government is looking to the private sector – and in particular to private health insurance – to solve health care problems. However, private health insurance is mired in myth and misunderstanding. The Bottom Line summarizes a huge body of evidence to get to the truth: private health insurance is more expensive and actually reduces …

Anna Gareau has a secret. Unwanted visions of strangers' lives haunt her when she touches certain objects. What she wants most is a normal life but Anna is far from normal. Travelling through Victoria, BC, Anna gets an unwelcome glimpse into a murderer's mind. She meets Colette Kostyna and senses Colette may be the next victim. Caught between her d …

Winner of the 1997 Howard O’Hagan Short Fiction Award!

“In the Diamond, at the end of a long green vinyl aisle between two booths of chrome, Naugahyde, and Formica, are two large swinging wooden doors, each with a round hatch of face-sized window. Those kitchen doors can be kicked with such a slap they’re heard all the way up to the soda fount …

On an expedition in the Canadian Rockies at the end of the nineteenth century, Dr Edward Byrne slips and falls almost 60 feet into a crevasse on the Arcturus Glacier. While trapped, hanging upside down and wary that the slightest movement could send him plunging deeper into the abyss, Byrne notices a mysterious winged figure embedded in the ice wal …