Fiction

In this darkly hilarious satire by the inimitable Will Aitken, class war erupts aboard a luxury cruise ship.

 A boatload of white privilege, The Emerald Tranquility is the most luxurious cruise liner afloat, its passengers some of the richest people in the world. Meanwhile the ship’s crew, overworked and underpaid, live packed tightly together in airless below-deck cabins. The passengers encounter a great number of cataclysms at sea, but no matter the catastrophe, the great ship always sails on.

Briony, a globetrotting luxury travel writer, emulates the rich — though homeless and penniless herself — as she hops from gig to all-expenses-paid gig. On her own personal voyage, she encounters Mrs. Moore, an enigmatic woman of advanced age clandestinely fomenting a mutiny on this bountiful ship.

With the captain overthrown, roles quickly reverse: the crew become the ship’s new leisure class and the aged passengers learn how to mop floors and scrub toilets. Confused and terrified by the resultant chaos, Briony must decide which lot to cast her fate with in this savage satire of the way we live now.

Does true love have supernatural power?

Where Did You Sleep Last Night is a love story about a teenage girl who embarks on a relationship with Kurt Cobain.

Evelyn Gray is a sad and lonely sixteen-year-old from Carnation, Washington who is terrorized by her classmates at school. She spends most of her time in her room reading, writing letters to dead people, listening to old records and talking to the poster of Kurt Cobain above her bed.

Her mother is an alcoholic grunge relic from Seattle, whose recollections, books and music help ignite Evelyn’s love for Cobain—a love so painfully strong that it summons the deceased singer to her side.

When Evelyn is taken to the hospital after an overdose, she awakens to find Cobain—who has little to no memory of his former life—convalescing in the bed beside her.

Once united, they quickly become addicted to drugs and each other.

Cobain—renamed Celine Black—and Evelyn escape the hospital and run off together, determined to have everything they want. Inevitably, they become infamous musicians, but despite their mutual devotion, the couple is tormented by strong passion and jealousy. As their celebrity grows, their relationship becomes more excessive, and an episode of sexual violence explodes, shockingly, into murder.

A highly original work of haute fan fiction, written in Crosbie’s poetic and emotionally evocative prose, Where Did You Sleep Last Night is an imaginative, surprisingly funny, and touching novel about the adamant persistence of love.

A beguiling coming of age novel set in Uganda in which a young woman grapples with the truth about her sister in a country that punishes gay people.

Eighteen-year-old Aine Kamara has been anticipating a reunion with her older sister, Mbabazi, for months. But when Mbabazi shows up with an unexpected guest, Aine must confront an old fear: her beloved sister is gay in a country with tight anti-homosexuality laws.

Over a weekend at Aine’s all girls’ boarding school, sisterly bonds strengthen, and a new friendship emerges between Aine and her sister’s partner, Achen. Later, a sudden death in the family brings Achen to Mbabazi’s and Aine’s village, resulting in tensions that put Mrs. Kamara’s Christian beliefs to the test. Aine runs away to Mbabazi’s and Achen’s home in Kampala, where she reconnects with her crush, Elia, a sophomore at Makerere University.

In acclaimed writer Iryn Tushabe’s dazzling debut novel, Aine must make hard choices, with inevitable and harrowing results.

Winner of the Amazon.ca First Novel Award and a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award, The Break is a stunning and heartbreaking debut novel about a multigenerational Métis–Anishnaabe family dealing with the fallout of a shocking crime in Winnipeg’s North End.

When Stella, a young Métis mother, looks out her window one evening and spots someone in trouble on the Break — a barren field on an isolated strip of land outside her house — she calls the police to alert them to a possible crime.

In a series of shifting narratives, people who are connected, both directly and indirectly, with the victim — police, family, and friends — tell their personal stories leading up to that fateful night. Lou, a social worker, grapples with the departure of her live-in boyfriend. Cheryl, an artist, mourns the premature death of her sister Rain. Paulina, a single mother, struggles to trust her new partner. Phoenix, a homeless teenager, is released from a youth detention centre. Officer Scott, a Métis policeman, feels caught between two worlds as he patrols the city. Through their various perspectives a larger, more comprehensive story about lives of the residents in Winnipeg’s North End is exposed.

A powerful intergenerational family saga, The Break showcases Vermette’s abundant writing talent and positions her as an exciting new voice in Canadian literature.

Finalist, 2023 Trillium Book Award
Finalist, Writers Union of Canada 2023 Daunta Gleed Literary Award
Finalist, 2023 ReLit Award for Short Fiction

Twelve exquisitely written stories depicting the search for human connection and the attempt to fit in far from home.

All the Shining People explores migration, diaspora, and belonging within Toronto’s Jewish South African community, as individuals come to terms with the oppressive hierarchies that separate, and the connections that bind. Seeking a place to belong, the book’s characters — including a life-drawing model searching the streets for her lover; a woman confronting secrets from her past in the new South Africa; and a man grappling with the legacy of his father, a former political prisoner — crave authentic relationships that replicate the lost feeling of home. With its focus on family, culture, and identity, All the Shining People captures the experiences of immigrants and outsiders with honesty, subtlety, and deep sympathy. 

A groundbreaking anthology of haunting stories by Black Canadian writers

Edited by esteemed poet Terese Mason Pierre, this bold and innovative anthology of speculative short fiction reveals and uplifts the spectacular imaginings, reveries, reflections, experiments, and hopes of Black writers in Canada. A masseuse attends her mother’s fourth funeral, only to encounter family she’s never met. A postdoc instructor navigates an almost-life in an Elsewhere realm of safety and comfort. After societal collapse, an immigrant leaves her precarious station, and her memories, behind. A woman isolating from a new virus starts hallucinating. A young nanny accepts a job with a peculiar employer in search of immortality. A medium is tasked with summoning a spirit that hits too close to home. And two teenagers test a friendship over magic carpet flying practice.

These ten breathtaking stories explore natural and urban landscapes, living and dead relationships, economic catastrophe, love, and desire—all while celebrating the persistent and ever-changing self, and envisioning beautiful Black futures.

Featuring stories by:
Trynne Delaney
francesca ekwuyasi
Whitney French
Aline-Mwezi Niyonsenga
Chimedum Ohaegbu
Suyi Davies Okungbowa
Chinelo Onwualu
Lue Palmer
Terese Mason Pierre
Zalika Reid-Benta

From the international bestselling author of The Book of Fate comes the story, based on real events, of a four-year-old boy who cannot speak and the shame it brings upon his family in modern-day Iran.

Four-year-old Shahaab has not started talking. The family doctor believes there is no cause for concern; nevertheless, Shahaab is ridiculed by others who call him “dumb.” Young Shahaab doesn’t understand what the word means and thinks it is a compliment, until one day his cousin plays a trick on him to prove to everyone that the boy truly is the neighbourhood idiot.

When his mother recounts the incident to her husband, Shahaab is crushed to learn that his father also thinks the boy’s speech impediment indicates that his son is an idiot and thus brings shame on the family. He begins to lash out, taking childish revenge on those around him, encouraged by his two imaginary friends, Esi and Bibi. No one in the family can understand Shahaab’s wild behaviour except his maternal grandmother, who seems to possess the understanding and the kindness he so desperately craves. Their growing bond leads to a deep friendship in which Shahaab is able to experience some happiness and finally find his voice.

East-end Montreal in the mid-1920s. A popular restaurant is razed by an arsonist. Seventy-five people perish in the inferno. While strolling with his wheelchair-ridden father, a man furtively salvages a charred icon from the ruins. He is Remouald Tremblay, a self-effacing bank clerk whose pocket holds a treasured rabbit's foot and whose memory contains an unspeakable hell.

Originally published in 1994 as L'Immaculee conception, this is the novel that established Gaetan Soucy as a powerful new literary force in Quebec. In it, he echoes the writing of Edgar Allan Poe and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Immaculate Conception was shortlisted for the Giller Prize in 2006.

A delectable satirical novel about celebrity culture, journalism, truth, lies, consequences — about the fictions we tell ourselves and the fictions we tell others.

Augusta Price (not her real name) is famous in England for playing a slatternly barmaid on a nighttime soap opera and for falling down drunk in public. Now, she has no job, no relationship with her long-lost son, and a sad shortage of tranquilizers — but she has had an improbable hit with her memoir (which is based on a true story, but only very loosely).

But when Frances Bleeker — an insecure and not very successful American tabloid journalist — tells Augusta that a man she once loved has written a book, Augusta becomes terrified that her life story will be revealed as the web of lies it really is. She sets out on a trans-Atlantic journey from London to California to seek revenge on her former lover — a journey that will require the reluctant help of Frances.

A genre-bending speculative look at a dark future, Valid shares the story of one trans woman leading a revolution.

This is a mutiny.

If our mutiny is to succeed, I must name things well, without diversion. Lacking this, you will not deviate from your certainties.

Here it is: I am trans.

As in transgression. I have broken genres. I have removed myself from the rules. 

I am trans.

As in translation. I have dragged the elements that make up my person from one state to another. My geometry is variable.

And tonight, I am a revolution.

/warning: code red… fetch-query protocol enabled… transmission failed… standby/

Set in a disturbingly transfigured Montreal in the year 2050, Valid is a monologue delivered over the span of eight hours by Christelle, a seventy-year-old trans woman forced to live as a man in order to survive. Speaking to her captor, an ever–more powerful AI, she turns the tables and mounts her own revolution by showing her truest self. Part autofiction, part dystopic speculation on an all-too-possible future characterized by corporate power, ecological collapse, and political havoc, Valid is an ambitious work that is as much philosophical as it is confessional.

The brilliant debut novel by Helen Weinzweig, one of the first feminist writers in Canada and the award-winning author of Basic Black With Pearls.

In Helen Weinzweig’s brilliant debut novel, a wedding reception becomes a gothic dream. The bride is not all she seems and there is something ambiguous about the groom — and just about everyone else at the surreal and strangely moving wedding.

Like a piece of music, Passing Ceremony is composed of brief, suggestive fragments that grow into a tightly integrated whole. There are bits of real and imagined conversation; polite dialogues that slide into mad comic banality; and scenes that could be quiet nightmares out of Borges. A satire and a rueful meditation on the ways people hurt one another, Weinzweig gives us a world suspended in time, an uneasy territory of the soul, which we all inhabit.

This edition features a new introduction by Jim Polk.

A big-city journalist joins the staff of a small-town paper in cottage country and finds a community full of secrets … and murder.

Cat Conway has recently returned to Port Ellis to work as a reporter at the Quill & Packet. She’s fled the tattered remains of her high-profile career and bad divorce for the holiday town of her childhood, famous for its butter tarts, theatre, and a century-old feud.

One of Cat’s first assignments is to interview legendary actor Eliot Fraser, the lead in the theatre’s season opener of Inherit the Wind. When Eliot ends up dead onstage on opening night, the curtain rises on the sleepy town’s secrets. The suspects include the actor whose career Eliot ruined, the ex-wife he betrayed, the women he abused, and even the baker he wronged. With the attention of the world on Port Ellis, this story could be Cat’s chance to restore her reputation. But the police think she’s a suspect, and the murderer wants to kill the story—and her too. Can Cat solve the mystery before she loses her job or becomes the next victim of a killer with a theatrical bent for vengeance?

In the latest installment of the Ava Lee novels, Ava becomes embroiled in a violent war between feuding gangs vying for control of the Wanchai territory in Hong Kong.

Ava is in Shanghai visiting her ailing friend, the Mountain Master Xu, when a triad war breaks out in Hong Kong. Sammy Wing, an old enemy of Ava’s who has twice tried to kill her, has enlisted the aid of his nephew Carter — the new Mountain Master of Sha Tin — to reclaim control of his old territory, Wanchai, from Xu’s men.

There is nothing subtle about the Wings’ methods. Xu’s most trusted enforcer, Lop, has been shot, and six of his street soldiers kidnapped. The Wings threaten to execute them unless Xu’s men vacate Wanchai immediately. Ava steps in to broker a settlement, and the Wings respond by sending her a box containing six fingers — and a twelve-hour deadline.

As the violence and tension mount, Ava is driven to the edge, and she is forced to devise a plan that will bring her face-to-face with Sammy and Carter Wing. The only question is who will pull the trigger first?

The second volume in the beloved novelist Marie-Claire Blais’s prize-winning novel cycle — acclaimed as one of the greatest undertakings in modern Quebec fiction — reissued in a handsome A List edition.

Originally published in 2001, Thunder and Light is the second volume in Marie-Claire Blais’s prize-winning Soifs series, hailed as one of the greatest undertakings in modern Quebec fiction. Powered by its characters’ gripping exploration of the world’s dark corners, the novel is a teeming microcosm in which boundaries collapse and the extremes and contradictions that animate our times are reconciled.

Blais locks us directly into the consciousness of her characters, many of whom we met in her previous novel, These Festive Nights, and many that she derives from actual news stories: Jessica, a seven-year-old attempting to beat the world record as the youngest pilot to cross the continent; Nathanaël, a teenager on death row for killing his favourite teacher; Our Lady of the Bags, a modern-day Joan of Arc who lives among Manhattan’s skyscrapers and follows the voices in her head; and Caroline and Jean-Mathieu, aging artists who are fighting to come together again. One character’s thoughts or actions have consequences for another 3,000 miles away who is a complete stranger to the first.

This is an intricate house of cards, delicately but expertly constructed, that shocks us in its perversity and familiarity, ultimately finding hope and redemption in the most human and basic forms of art.

Ava Lee squares off against the Chinese government over a controversial film depicting the infamous Tiananmen Square Massacre in the latest thriller from bestselling author Ian Hamilton.

Ava Lee is in the French Riviera with Pang Fai and Lau Lau for the long-awaited premiere of Tiananmen at the Cannes Film Festival. As the film collects numerous awards and international acclaim, a distribution deal with a major American firm is arranged by the film’s producer, Chen.

When several months go by with no word from the Americans, Chen decides to travel to Los Angeles to determine what is preventing the film’s release. En route from his home in Bangkok, Chen goes missing. Ava is called in to investigate and soon learns that Chen is being held by the Thai immigration services on orders of the Chinese government, which is unhappy with the film’s depiction of the infamous massacre at Tiananmen Square and seeks to punish those responsible for its production.

To protect her investment, Ava must find a way for Tiananmen to be released, while keeping secret her own involvement in the film’s creation and ensuring her friends are kept safe from retribution. It's a difficult balancing act, perhaps the most difficult of her life — the stakes have never been higher nor has failure been more costly.

A spellbinding, spirited tale of two men exploring masculinity, race, and belonging in a desperate search to feel at home in their own skins.

An enthralling nautical epic, River Meets the Sea traces the dual timelines of a white-passing Indigenous foster child in 1940s Vancouver and a teenage immigrant in the suburbs of Nanaimo in the 1970s. 

A natural-born storyteller, Ronny is a left-handed “alley mutt” without a birth certificate who searches for his mother everywhere — most powerfully, he hears her voice in the surging Stó:lō River. Born in the middle of the ocean on a merchant ship departing Sri Lanka, Chandra is a Tamil boy with “skin like a charred eggplant” who finds his haven from the pressure to assimilate by swimming and surfing in the Salish Sea. 

Moving gracefully between these parallel stories like a wave, the novel traces the seemingly separate lives of these sensitive young men and their everlasting connections to water. When their troubled paths inevitably cross, they form a sacred bond based on the mutual understanding of what it means to be othered, illuminating the interconnectedness of humanity and our innate relationship with the natural world.

For Sure is among other things a labyrinth, a maze, an exploration of the folly of numbers, a repository, a defense and an illustration of the Chiac language. Written in dazzling prose — which is occasionally interrupted by surprising bits of information, biography, and definitions that appear on the page — Daigle perfectly captures the essence of a place and offers us a reflection on minority cultures and their obsession with language.

It is also the continuing story of Terry and Carmen, familiar to us from previous works, their children Etienne and Marianne, and all those who gravitate around the Babar, the local bar in Moncton — the Zablonskis, Zed, Pomme — artists and ordinary people who question their place in the world from a distinct point of view that is informed by their geography, and by their history, politics, and culture.

Masterfully translated from French by award-winning translator Robert Majzels, For Sure is the moving story of a family and a surprising, staggeringly original work that represents a corner of our country.

The fifth installment in the wildly popular Ava Lee series exposes the dark world of money laundering and the Italian mob.

Ava begins an investigation into what she thinks is a Ponzi scheme. The trail leads her to a bank in Indonesia that is run by a Scot, but in actuality is a front for an elaborate money-laundering operation for Italian mobsters. The relationship between Ava and the Scotsman turns nasty and personal. Meanwhile, Uncle’s health problems become apparent…

Winner, 2023 Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction

Finalist, 2023 McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award

A compassionate and funny novel about defining yourself, the communities that support us, and the journeys that secrets propel.

Charlie Minkoff, a thirteen-year-old boy born with intersex traits, would be happy to be left alone. Living with his artist mother in a derelict loft in downtown Winnipeg, perpetually wondering about the father who abandoned him, and tormented in school because of his differences, Charlie navigates the assorted catastrophes of his life. He’s helped along by the love of his beloved grandfather, Oscar, and the makeshift family who surround him: his mother’s best friend; a couple of elderly shut-in neighbours; a mysterious girl in his class who has secrets of her own; and his desperately needy and perpetually hungry dog, Gellman.

When a school project leads him to discover that Oscar never had a bar mitzvah, Charlie decides to right the historical wrong and arrange a belated ceremony. But this quest will be more than he bargained for, and meanwhile everyone from his doctor to his Ancestry Studies teacher keeps insisting that Charlie needs to learn to tell his own story.

Margaret Laurence Award winner Méira Cook’s The Full Catastrophe is a story of psychological complexity, tenderness, and humour.

Ava Lee uncovers the secret world of art fraud in the third book in the wildly popular and bestselling Ava Lee series.

Uncle and Ava are summoned by Wong Changxing, “The Emperor of Hubei” and one of the most powerful men in China, when he discovers that the Fauvist paintings he recently acquired are in fact forgeries.

Ava uncovers a ring of fraudulent art dealers and follows their twisted trail to Denmark, the Faroe Islands, Dublin, London, and New York. But the job is further complicated by Wong’s second wife, the cunning and seductive May Ling, who threatens to interfere in Ava’s investigation.

Will Ava find the perpetrators and retrieve the Wongs’ money? Or will May Ling get to them first…

The first book in a gripping new Ava Lee spin-off series featuring fan-favourite Uncle Chow Tung and his ascendancy to the head of the Triad gang in Fanling.

Hong Kong, 1969. The Dragon Head of the Fanling Triad has died and there is a struggle to replace him among senior members of the gang. Normally, the Deputy Mountain Master is next in line, but this one is weak and ineffectual and has only survived because of the protection of the Dragon Head. Up to this point, the Fanling Triad has operated in relative isolation from neighbouring gangs, but the Dragon Head’s death has drawn attention to the area — and to its wealth. Other gangs start to make threatening moves and it’s obvious to the senior members of the Fanling Triad that they need a leader who can fend off the threats, unite the membership, and maintain their prosperity. There are several candidates. The least conspicuous is the White Paper Fan, their young administrator. His name is Chow Tung, but many of those who work with him already refer to him as “Uncle”…

Inspired by J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, El Niño tracks the survival of one woman and a young, undocumented migrant as they journey through the no-man’s-land of a remote southwestern desert.

Honey hasn’t seen her mother, Marianne, in more than two years. She drives deep into the once-prosperous border region of the Oro Desert for a surprise visit, only to discover that Marianne has vanished.

Alone in an unforgiving environment populated with hostile locals, she meets Chávez, a young “coyote” or human trafficker, who convinces Honey he knows her mother’s whereabouts and agrees to take her there — for a price. As they make their way through the Oro’s brutal no-man’s-land they are tracked by Ocho, a teenage bounty hunter determined to recruit Chávez. And then there is Baez, Marianne’s wizened Shepherd-coyote mix, whose death and life intimately intersect with Honey and Chávez's search for Marianne and who tells the story of the Oro Desert as it slowly comes apart.

Told in three distinct voices, El Niño is an intricately constructed and starkly written novel from a bold and inventive new writer.

In the tenth and final instalment of the legendary Soifs cycle, Marie-Claire Blais invites all the agonies and joys of humanity to a party by the sea.

For her eighteenth birthday, Mai hosts a party on the unnamed island where her family lives, on the edge of the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. But Mai's guests are not the only ones in attendance; Marie-Claire Blais has invited all of humanity here to consider what it means to be alive in this moment.

With the completion of the Soifs cycle, its architecture is revealed: Daniel, Mai's father and a writer; the children of Bahama Street who sing in Pastor Jeremy’s church; the wealthy artists and famous poets; the refugees and ex-cons; the trans performers of the Porte du Baiser Saloon. From this core, vast circles emerge, examining in one breath the horrors of fascist regimes and the beauty of queer nightlife, embracing the America of mass shooters and the struggles for civil rights, and laying bare the tragedies that shook the 20th century and laid the foundation for the years to come.

Poetic and meditative, with language that rolls and crashes like the ocean itself, Together by the Sea sings with the complexity of all beings, good and evil, past and present, here and elsewhere, connecting us all in the same unique, pitiful, and grandiose humanity.

Finalist, 2025 Ontario Trillium Book Award
A Boston Globe Best Book of 2024
Brittle Paper 100 Notable African Books of 2024

Intimate stories about Zimbabweans in moments of transition that force them to decide who they really are and choose the people they call their own.

Set in Toronto and Zimbabwe, the twelve elegant stories in Who Will Bury You? touch on themes of loss, identity, and inequality as they follow the lives of Zimbabweans who often feel like they are on the outside looking in. A mother and daughter navigate new relationship dynamics when the daughter comes out as a lesbian. Two sisters wonder what will hold them together after their grandmother’s death. A daughter tries to tell her father she loves him as she prepares to leave home for the first time. A journalist takes her grieving mother on a trip to report on girls who are allegedly being abducted by mermaids. A girl born to be the river god’s wife becomes a hero when chaos breaks out in the mighty Zambezi. A group of mothers discover just how far they are willing to go to protect their children during wartime.

Ephemeral yet beautifully satisfying, the stories in Chido Muchemwa's debut collection ask what makes people leave home, what makes them come back, and what keeps them there.

From the celebrated author of February and Caught comes an exhilarating new novel that asks: What makes a family? How does it shape us? And can we ever really choose who we love? 

As the snowstorm of the century rages, twenty-one-year-old Xavier is beaten and stabbed in a vicious attack. His mother, Jules, must fight her way through the shuttered streets of St. John’s to reach the hospital where Xavier lies unconscious. When a video of the attack surfaces, Jules struggles to make sense of what she sees in the footage—and of what she can’t quite make out. 

While Xavier’s story unfolds, so, too, do the stories that brought him there. Here, across families and generations, are stories of mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers; of children cared for, neglected, lost, and re-found; of selfless generosity and reluctant debt. Above all, Moore, in the inimitable largesse of her art, paints a shimmering portrait of the sacrifice, pain, and wild joy of loving. 

A tour de force of storytelling and craft, This Is How We Love brings us a cast of characters so rich and true they could only have been written by Lisa Moore. 

The sixth installment in the wildly popular Ava Lee series from Arthur Ellis Award winner Ian Hamilton.

Ava has been in Hong Kong looking after Uncle. She has also set up an investment company with May Ling Wong and her sister-in-law, Amanda Yee. One of their first investments — a furniture company owned by two sisters in Kota Kinabalu, Borneo — runs into immediate problems with a Dutch customer. Ava goes to the Netherlands to investigate, but her life is threatened when she is confronted by a gang of local thugs in Borneo. Out of the shadows comes a mysterious man from Shanghai…

In the latest installment in her award-winning series, Marie-Claire Blais reintroduces us to Petites Cendres, familiar from other books in the cycle, and lets us into the lives of two other unforgettable characters. She shows us, once again, how creativity and hope and suffering and exclusion intersect.

There is the writer who is stranded in an airport of the South Island, he is held captive because of a delayed flight. And a teenage musician, a former child prodigy living on the streets with his dog, wonders where he will get his next meal. Then there is Petites Cendres, who no longer dances or sings and refuses to get out of bed to attend the coronation of the new Queen of Night.

By superimposing these three worlds, Blais continues her ambitious, compelling exploration of life in contemporary North America

International bestselling author Ian Hamilton returns with a riveting new novel featuring fan-favourite Uncle Chow Tung, who is called upon to end a violent turf war between rival gangs and stop Chinese authorities from eliminating the triad societies once and for all.

Hong Kong, 1995. Two years before Hong Kong is to be returned to the People’s Republic of China, the Communist government has its eye on the New Territories, and tensions are running high among the triads. At the root of the tensions is a fear of what will become of Hong Kong after the Communists take over. Seeking to strengthen their positions, several triad gangs begin a violent turf war in Macau that quickly spreads to Hong Kong. Uncle realizes that prolonged violence will result in a crackdown by the organized crime bureau of the Hong Kong police, and steps in to mediate a ceasefire. His efforts are met with resistance, and soon his own territory of Fanling is attacked by a neighbouring gang.

Meanwhile, Uncle expresses his concerns about the future to his partners in China. Their response comes as a surprise and leads to an unexpected outcome that will have a lasting effect on the triad societies for decades to come.

The A List edition of Harold Sonny Ladoo’s enduring novel, a raw, unsentimental story of life in a small Caribbean community. Featuring a new introduction by David Chariandy

Set in the Eastern Caribbean at the beginning of the twentieth century, No Pain Like this Body describes the perilous existence of a poor rice-growing family during the August rainy season. Their struggles to cope with illness, a drunken and unpredictable father, and the violence of the elements end in unbearable loss.

Through vivid, vertiginous prose, and with brilliant economy and originality, Ladoo creates a fearful world of violation and grief, in the face of which even the most despairing efforts to endure stand out as acts of courage.

The A List edition of Michael Winter’s brilliant fictional memoir, This All Happened depicts one man’s descent from love to fury over a calendar year. Featuring an introduction by Lisa Moore.

In this journal-a-clef, we are exposed to the kernel of truth that exists in each day. Told from the viewpoint of Gabriel English, This All Happened opens windows onto a richly textured, fast-paced filmic compilation of daily vignettes over one year. Gabriel’s promises and actions early in the year have their repercussions by the end.

Gabriel’s passion for Lydia Murphy leads him into paroxysms of jealousy — but he never abandons his shrewdly witty perspective on the vagaries of modern love.

Winner, 2016 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for Fiction

Finalist, 2016 Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize

The stories in Specimen are a unique exploration of science and the human heart; the place where physical reality collides with our spiritual and emotional lives.

In “The Blood Keeper,” a young academic travels to North Korea to work on her dissertation and embarks on a dangerous affair. In “Mamochka,” which was nominated for the 2012 Journey Prize, an archivist at the Institute for Physics in Minsk, must come to terms with her daughter’s marriage to a Chinese man in Vancouver. In “Peptide P,” scientists study a disease that seems to affect children after they eat hotdogs. In “Side Effects,” a woman’s personality is altered, and not necessarily for the better, by botox injections. In “The Big One,” a woman and her daughter find themselves trapped in the rubble of an underground parking garage after an earthquake.

Stylistically varied and with settings that range from North Korea and Minsk to Vancouver and Gdansk, Kovalyova is daring and confident new voice in Canadian fiction.

The Sisters Brothers meets Master and Commander in Robert Hough’s rollicking and raucous new historical novel.

The year is 1664, and Benny Wand, a young thief and board game hustler, is arrested in London for illegal gaming. Deported to the city of Port Royal, Jamaica, known as “the wickedest city on earth,” Wand is forced by his depleted circumstances to join a raid on the Spanish city of Villahermosa. The mission is a perilous success, and Wand attracts the attention of the mission’s leader, an up-and-coming Welsh seaman, Captain Henry Morgan, whose raids on Spanish strongholds are funded by the British government.

While embarking on a campaign in the Caribbean, Wand and Morgan develop an unlikely friendship through a shared love of chess. As Morgan is corrupted by his increasingly sordid attacks on Spanish cities, he slowly becomes Wand’s greatest enemy. To defeat his former ally, Wand embarks on a strategic battle of wits and must help Morgan in the most savage and unexpected way possible. This is blistering and bawdy storytelling at its best.

In Scotiabank Giller Prize–longlisted author Andrée A. Michaud’s genre-defying, ethereal mystery, a writer encounters her double and must grapple with an undetermined crime — and her own identity.

In the dubious sanctuary of a wintry forest, a writer encounters a woman who she suspects may be her double. So begins a journey of inquiry in which nothing, not even the author’s own identity, is certain. Who is Heather Thorne? Is she a stranger dangerously out of place in the woods, the victim of an accident or of a crime? Who is the author? Is her own name not in fact Heather Thorne?

Brimming with the snowy menace and mystery of the boreal woods, where nothing is ever entirely known, the celebrated and prize-winning Quebec noir novelist Andrée A. Michaud once again defies categorization in an ethereal story that is also a meditation on the very process of literary creation.

Finalist for the 2022 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize

Elegant, surprising stories about Palestinian immigrants in Canada navigating their identities in circumstances that push them to the emotional brink.

Saeed Teebi’s intense, engrossing stories plunge into the lives of characters grappling with their experiences as Palestinian immigrants to Canada. A doctor teaches his girlfriend about his country, only for her to fall into a consuming obsession with the Middle East conflict. A math professor risks his family’s destruction by slandering the king of a despotic, oil-rich country. A university student invents an imaginary girlfriend to fit in with his callous, womanizing roommates. A lawyer takes on the impossible mission of becoming a body smuggler. A lonely widower travels to Russia in search of a movie starlet he met in his youth in historical Jaffa. A refugee who escaped violent circumstances rebels against the kindness of his sponsor. These taut and compelling stories engage the immigrant experience and reflect the Palestinian diaspora with grace and insight.

Now available in a new edition with a cover designed by the author, Douglas Coupland’s CBC Massey Lectures is an innovative exploration of the modern crises of our time.

Five disparate people are trapped inside an airport cocktail lounge during a global disaster: Karen, a single mother waiting for her online date; Rick, a down-on-his-luck bartender; Luke, a pastor on the run; Rachel, a cool Hitchcockian blonde incapable of true human contact; and finally a mysterious voice known as Player One. Slowly, over the course of the five-hour story, each reveals the truth about themselves while the world as they know it comes to an end.

Acclaimed novelist and visual artist Douglas Coupland probes human identity, society, religion, macroeconomics, and the afterlife in the inventive 2010 CBC Massey Lectures. Asking as many questions as it answers, Player One will leave readers with no doubt that we are in a new phase of existence as a species — and that there is no turning back.

Here is the best of Bill Gaston's stories since the publication of his Giller Prize nominated collection, Mount Appetite (2002). In this extraordinary work, Gaston crafts his fiction around the idea of the gargoyle -- the concrete representation of extremes of human emotions.

In Gaston's marvellous, riotous, Rabelaisian world, Gargoyles are physical manifestations of the disfigurements and contortions to which we human beings subject ourselves. Indeed, as Gaston wrote each story, he sketched out a distinct gargoyle to look down over it. For that reason, each story in this collection has a strange and unique guardian spirit whose sometimes benevolent, and sometimes malevolent, presence informs the characters and their actions. Gargoyles shows one of our best writers at the top of his form.

The mayor of Copenhagen is found murdered in his luxury apartment. Detective Lars Winkler is put on this sensitive case, which is further complicated by the fact that the victim’s mother is the leader of the country’s most radical political party and the current minister of finance. Lars notices the minister and her husband are strangely untouched by their son’s death. When he begins to dig into the mayor’s past, he slowly uncovers the dark story of a young, idealistic man who had only one wish: to free himself of his family and live his own life.

Dark and chilling, The Scream of the Butterfly is Scandinavian crime at its best.

In the most explosive novel in the Ava Lee series to date, Ava partners with a CIA agent to investigate a college on a Philippine island that is suspected of training terrorists — what she discovers is brutal and shocking.

Ava has spent two nights luxuriating in a hotel in Yunnan Province with the actress Pang Fai, with whom she has begun a secret relationship. She receives an urgent phone call from Chang Wang, the right hand to the billionaire Tommy Ordonez and one of Uncle’s oldest friends.

Chang asks Ava to fly to Manila to meet with his friend, Senator Miguel Ramirez. Ramirez asks Ava to investigate a college in Tawi-Tawi, an island province in the Philippines, which he suspects is training terrorists. Ava’s investigation leads to a partnership with a CIA agent, and together they attempt to stop an international plot so horrific in size and that Ava’s judgement and morals are tested like never before.

Set in East Africa, the Middle East, Canada, and the U.S., Things Are Good Now examines the weight of the migrant experience on the human psyche. In these pages, women, men, and children who’ve crossed continents in search of a better life find themselves struggling with the chaos of displacement and the religious and cultural clashes they face in their new homes. A maid who travelled to the Middle East lured by the prospect of a well-paying job is trapped in the Syrian war. A female ex-freedom fighter immigrates to Canada only to be relegated to cleaning public washrooms and hospital sheets. A disillusioned civil servant struggles to come to grips with his lover’s imminent departure. A young Muslim woman who’d married her way to California to escape her devout family’s demands realizes she’s made a mistake.

The collection is about remorse and the power of memory, about the hardships of a post-9/11 reality that labels many as suspicious or dangerous because of their names or skin colour alone, but it’s also about hope and friendship and the intricacies of human relationships. Most importantly, it’s about the compromises we make to belong.

Finalist, Crime Writers of Canada 2024 Awards of Excellence, Best Crime Novel category

When a killing spree threatens Dundurn, MacNeice risks everything to protect his team and put an end to it.

Detective Superintendent MacNeice returns to Dundurn following a month-long suspension and is immediately thrown into the mysterious case of a wounded runner named Jack and a blood trail that spans over forty miles. At the trail’s source in a Carolinian forest, MacNeice and DI Fiza Aziz find evidence of two homicides, but no bodies.

Two days later, Mac is called to a torn-up orchard set ablaze by lightning. A body has been found lying next to a stack of burnt fruit trees. There’s no evidence to suggest the killings are related, and yet MacNeice suspects they are. Buy why disappear the bodies in the forest and leave the orchard corpse to be discovered?

As the case develops, the team is confronted by the daylight abduction of a Brant University professor—Mac is convinced it’s a killing about to happen. Going on the offensive, he employs the provincial alert system, in part, to let the kidnappers know the net is closing.

Winner, 2023 Governor General's Literary Award
Winner, 2023 Writers Trust Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2+ Emerging Writers
Shortlisted for the 2024 Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize
Longlisted for the 2024 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction

Genre-blending stories of transformation and belonging that centre women of colour and explore queerness, family, and community.

A couple in a crumbling marriage faces divine intervention. A woman dies in her dreams again and again until she finds salvation in an unexpected source. A teenage misfit discovers a darkness lurking just beyond the borders of her suburban home.

The stories in Chrysalis, Anuja Varghese’s debut collection, are by turns poignant and chilling, blurring the lines between the real world and worlds beyond. Varghese delves fearlessly into complex intersections of family, community, sexuality, and cultural expectation, taking aim at the ways in which racialized women are robbed of power and revelling in the strange and dangerous journeys they undertake to reclaim it.

A bold and innovative novel, I Am Ariel Sharon dives into the tortured mind of the controversial Israeli prime minister as he lies comatose and faces an ultimate reckoning.

Award-winning Palestinian Canadian novelist Yara El-Ghadban imagines the confrontation at death’s door between Ariel Sharon, the “King of Israel,” and the women closest to him — his mother, his wives, and the mysterious nurse Rita. Like latter-day Greek furies, they lament the brutality of his life and maltreatment of the Palestinian people and demand he face up to his part in the bloodshed of Israel’s wars.

Here is an extraordinary, magical, and impassioned story of nearly impossible empathy, the singular work of a novelist in full flight.

Finalist, 2024 Amazon Canada First Novel Award

Dear grandmother, I am writing this song, over and over again, for you. I am a stranger in this place, he tauhou ahau, reintroducing myself to your land. 

Tauhou is an inventive exploration of Indigenous families, womanhood, and alternate post-colonial realities by Kōtuku Titihuia Nuttall, a writer of Māori and Coast Salish descent. This innovative hybrid novel envisions a shared past between two Indigenous cultures, set on reimagined versions of Vancouver Island and Aotearoa New Zealand that sit side by side in the ocean.

Each chapter is a fable, an autobiographical memory, a poem. A monster guards cultural objects in a museum, a woman uncovers her own grave, another woman remembers her estranged father. On rainforest beaches and grassy dunes, sisters and cousins contend with the ghosts of the past — all the way back to when the first foreign ships arrived on their shores.

In a testament to the resilience of Indigenous women, the two sides of this family, Coast Salish and Māori, must work together in understanding and forgiveness to heal that which has been forced upon them by colonialism. Tauhou is an ardent search for answers, for ways to live with truth. It is a longing for home, to return to the land and sea.

A sweeping, tragic romance and feminist adventure about translator and resistance fighter Milena Jesenská’s torrid love affair with Franz Kafka.

In 1919, Milena Jesenská, a clever and spirited twenty-three-year-old, is trapped in an unhappy marriage to literary critic Ernst Pollak. Since Pollak is unable to support the pair in Vienna’s post-war economy, Jesenská must supplement their income by working as a translator. Having previously met her compatriot Franz Kafka in the literary salons of Prague, she writes to him to ask for permission to translate his story “The Stoker” from German to Czech, becoming Kafka’s first translator. The letter launches an intense and increasingly passionate correspondence. Jesenská is captivated by Kafka’s energy, intensity, and burning ambition to write. Kafka is fascinated by Jesenská’s wit, rebellious spirit, and intelligence.

Jesenská and Kafka meet twice for lovers’ trysts, but can such an intense connection endure beyond a fleeting affair? In her remarkable debut novel, Christine Estima weaves little-known facts and fiction into a rich tapestry, powerfully portraying the struggles of a woman forced to choose between the roles of wife, lover, and intellectual.

A haunting, magical novel about joy, grief, courage and transformation from the international bestselling author of The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart.

‘On the afternoon that Esther Wilding drove homeward along the coast, a year after her sister had walked into the sea and disappeared, the light was painfully golden.’

The last time Esther Wilding’s beloved older sister Aura was seen, she was walking along the shore towards the sea. In the wake of Aura’s disappearance, Esther’s family struggles to live with their loss. To seek the truth about her sister’s death, Esther reluctantly travels from Lutruwita/Tasmania, to Copenhagen, and then to the Faroe Islands, following the trail of the stories Aura left behind: seven fairy tales about selkies, swans and women, alongside cryptic verses Aura wrote and had secretly tattooed on her body. The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding is a sweeping, deeply beautiful and profoundly moving novel about the far reaches of sisterly love, the power of wearing your heart on your skin and the ways life can transform when we find the courage to feel the fullness of both grief and joy.

A knife-sharp new collection of stories and songs from award-winning Nishnaabeg storyteller and writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson that rebirths a decolonized reality, one that circles in and out of time and resists dominant narratives or comfortable categorization.

This Accident of Being Lost is the knife-sharp new collection of stories and songs from award-winning Nishnaabeg storyteller and writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. These visionary pieces build upon Simpson's powerful use of the fragment as a tool for intervention in her critically acclaimed collection Islands of Decolonial Love.

A crow watches over a deer addicted to road salt; Lake Ontario floods Toronto to remake the world while texting “ARE THEY GETTING IT?”; lovers visit the last remaining corner of the boreal forest; three comrades guerrilla-tap maples in an upper middle-class neighbourhood; and Kwe gets her firearms license in rural Ontario. Blending elements of Nishnaabeg storytelling, science fiction, contemporary realism, and the lyric voice, This Accident of Being Lost burns with a quiet intensity, like a campfire in your backyard, challenging you to reconsider the world you thought you knew.

Disturbing and sensuous, Audrée Wilhelmy’s tale of a hermetic family minding a lighthouse in willed isolation is reminiscent of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.

The Body of Beasts is a startling, gorgeously written novel that tells the story of the Borya family living in isolation. Their lives are altered when young Osip, peering from the lighthouse gallery sees a woman, Noé, arrive — her dress scant, her skin curiously scarred, and her manner mysterious and wild.

Noé bears a child, Mie, to the eldest son on whose hunter-gathering the Borya family depends. She lives in a cabin on her own and covers the walls with drawings that allude to her mysterious life. The family’s entrenchment in nature is enthrallingly conveyed in young Mie’s sensuous ability to borrow at will the body of mammals, birds, fish, and insects. Her shape-shifting allows her to know the ways of the natural world, though only to a point. When her own awakening body starts to intrigue her, she asks her uncle Osip to “teach me human sex.”

The Body of the Beasts is an imaginative tour de force, a beautifully described portrait of a world that exists outside of words; an uninhibited and erotic novel that, in the singular tradition of Québécois Boreal Gothic, explores our humanity — and animal nature.

From Robert Seethaler, the International Booker Prize finalist for A Whole Life and bestselling author of The Tobacconist, comes a tale of life and death and human connection, told through the voices of those who have passed on.

The Field is the oldest part of the cemetery in Paulstadt, where some of the small town’s most outspoken residents can be found. From their graves, they tell stories. Some recall just a moment — perhaps the one in which they left this world, perhaps the one they now realize changed the course of their life forever. Some remember all the people they’ve been with, or the only person they ever loved. This chorus of voices — young, old, rich, poor — builds a picture of a community, seen from below ground. The streets of the sleepy provincial town are given shape and meaning by those who lived, loved, worked, mourned, and died there.

The Field is a constellation of human lives — each one different yet connected to countless others — that shows how existence, for all its fleetingness, still has profound meaning.

Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize Winner

Scotiabank Giller Prize Finalist

Part literary Western and part historical mystery, Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize winner Ridgerunner is now available as a paperback.

November 1917. William Moreland is in mid-flight. After nearly twenty years, the notorious thief, known as the Ridgerunner, has returned. Moving through the Rocky Mountains and across the border to Montana, the solitary drifter, impoverished in means and aged beyond his years, is also a widower and a father. And he is determined to steal enough money to secure his son’s future.

Twelve-year-old Jack Boulton has been left in the care of Sister Beatrice, a formidable nun who keeps him in cloistered seclusion in her grand old house. Though he knows his father is coming for him, the boy longs to return to his family’s cabin, deep in the woods. When Jack finally breaks free, he takes with him something the nun is determined to get back — at any cost.

Set against the backdrop of a distant war raging in Europe and a rapidly changing landscape in the West, Gil Adamson’s follow-up to her award-winning debut, The Outlander, is a vivid historical novel that draws from the epic tradition and a literary Western brimming with a cast of unforgettable characters touched with humour and loss, and steeped in the wild of the natural world.

Set over the course of twenty-four exhilarating hours, Undercard is the story of four childhood friends, now in their early thirties, unexpectedly reunited by a high-profile prizefight in a Las Vegas casino . . . and an even higher-profile murder.

When Tyron Shaw returns to his hometown of Las Vegas after eleven years in the Marines, he’s surprised to discover that two of his best friends from childhood are all anyone is talking about: Antoine Deco, three years out of prison, hasn’t lost a boxing match since his release, and tonight is fighting in the undercard to the fight of the decade; and Keenan Quinn, a police officer who killed an unarmed teenager and escaped punishment from the courts, is the subject of a protest tomorrow morning.

Tyron has trouble reconciling either story with his memory of these men, and the situation escalates when he runs into the love of his life, Naomi Wilks, a retired WNBA player, basketball coach, and estranged wife of Keenan. As Tyron reconnects with his old community, he will learn over the next twenty-four hours that much has changed since he left Las Vegas . . . and there is much more that he never understood.

The Reef, an aquarium-themed casino and the hottest resort on the Strip, is the backdrop for this bullet-paced narrative, where loyalty to one’s friends, one’s family, and one’s community are ever at odds, and every choice has deadly repercussions.

#1 National Bestseller
Finalist, CBC Canada Reads
Finalist, Scotiabank Giller Prize

By turns savage, biting, funny, poetic, and heartbreaking, Megan Gail Coles’s debut novel rips into the inner lives of a wicked cast of characters, exposing class, gender, and racial tensions over the course of one Valentine’s Day in the dead of a winter storm.

Valentine’s Day, the longest day of the year.

A fierce blizzard is threatening to tear a strip off the city, while inside The Hazel restaurant a storm system of sex, betrayal, addiction, and hurt is breaking overhead. Iris, a young hostess, is forced to pull a double despite resolving to avoid the charming chef and his wealthy restaurateur wife. Just tables over, Damian, a hungover and self-loathing server, is trying to navigate a potential punch-up with a pair of lit customers who remain oblivious to the rising temperature in the dining room. Meanwhile Olive, a young woman far from her northern home, watches it all unfurl from the fast and frozen street.

Through rolling blackouts, we glimpse the truth behind the shroud of scathing lies and unrelenting abuse, and discover that resilience proves most enduring in the dead of this winter’s tale.

A young woman’s coming-of-age through a toxic relationship, isolation, and betrayal—set against the stark landscape of the far north

Millicent is a shy twenty-four-year-old reporter who moves to Whitehorse to work for a failing daily newspaper. With winter looming and the Yukon descending into darkness, Millicent begins a relationship with Pascal, an eccentric and charming middle-aged filmmaker who lives on a converted school bus in a Walmart parking lot. What begins as a romantic adventure soon turns toxic, and Millicent finds herself struggling not to lose herself and her voice.

Events come to a head at Thaw di Gras, a celebration in faraway Dawson City marking the return of light to the north. It’s here, in a frontier mining town filled with drunken tourists, eclectic locals, and sparkling burlesque dancers, that Millicent must choose between staying with Pascal or finally standing up to her abuser.

In the style of Ottessa Moshfegh’s honest exploration of dysfunctional relationships, and with the warmth and energy of Heather O’Neill, Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit illuminates what it’s like to be young, impulsive, and in love in one of the harshest environments in the world.

Award–winning author Jen Currin presents remarkable and sometimes magical new stories of queer friendship and love, against the backdrop of city life.

The stories in Disembark feature queer characters navigating new worlds, new circumstances, and new methods of relating to the people around them. With resonant imagery and clear, lyrical prose, Jen Currin weaves vibrant narratives showcasing queer relationships—be they platonic, romantic, or somewhere in between. A banshee shacks up with a lesbian couple in a rocky relationship, a lonely teen is gifted a knife by their mother’s boyfriend, a queer woman finds herself heartbroken when her best friend fails her at a crucial moment, and a young alcoholic hashes things out with their mother in the afterlife. In modes both realist and fantastic, the profound and eloquent stories in Disembark provide a glimpse into the unexpected, offering insight into the ways we relate in this world and in worlds beyond.

Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize Winner

Scotiabank Giller Prize Finalist

Part literary Western and part historical mystery, Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize winner Ridgerunner is now available as a paperback.

November 1917. William Moreland is in mid-flight. After nearly twenty years, the notorious thief, known as the Ridgerunner, has returned. Moving through the Rocky Mountains and across the border to Montana, the solitary drifter, impoverished in means and aged beyond his years, is also a widower and a father. And he is determined to steal enough money to secure his son’s future.

Twelve-year-old Jack Boulton has been left in the care of Sister Beatrice, a formidable nun who keeps him in cloistered seclusion in her grand old house. Though he knows his father is coming for him, the boy longs to return to his family’s cabin, deep in the woods. When Jack finally breaks free, he takes with him something the nun is determined to get back — at any cost.

Set against the backdrop of a distant war raging in Europe and a rapidly changing landscape in the West, Gil Adamson’s follow-up to her award-winning debut, The Outlander, is a vivid historical novel that draws from the epic tradition and a literary Western brimming with a cast of unforgettable characters touched with humour and loss, and steeped in the wild of the natural world.

In the third suspense-filled instalment of the critically acclaimed MacNeice Mysteries, Detective Superintendent MacNeice finds himself in the line of fire when two seemingly random acts of violence lead him deep into Dundurn’s seedy underbelly.

On a cold morning in early spring, the body of a young woman is found trapped in the ice of Dundurn Bay. The next day at dawn, a homeless man discovers a school teacher in a public park. Gagged and bound with duct tape, the man is rigged to an elaborate grenade that’s been set to blow if anyone attempts to free him.

Detective Superintendent MacNeice and his team are called in to investigate the two seemingly unrelated crimes, and quickly find themselves venturing into the dive bars and rooming houses of Dundurn, where Irish immigrants rub elbows with mercenaries and the city’s criminal underclass….

A genre-bending collection of dramatic monologues shining a light on the anxious, self-directed gaze that defines contemporary consciousness.

Borrowing stylistic elements from the prose poem, faux memoir, online diatribe, and philosophical investigation, the twenty-five dramatic monologues in Spencer Gordon’s genre-bending collection shine a light on the anxious, self-directed gaze that defines contemporary consciousness. CEOs lose their obscene wealth in lurid hellrealms; an aspiring writer reassembles a personal history out of fragments from the 2000s; police cadets receive a curious crash course in transduction and ethics; the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and Deepwater Horizon oil spill reveal the immanent sublime.

Ranging from ironic and furious to pleading and melancholic, Gordon’s speakers exist in a world of social media think pieces, hot takes and take downs, fake news and distorted facts, steeped in pop culture and its discontents. They are real people, intimate as kin. But they’re also pseudonyms, ghosts, and playbacks, echoing from insubstantial handles drifting on the web. They lie and lurk and love online, channelling the morphemes of digital language and filtering the concerns of self, performance, digital identity, and complicity through the irreverence, non-rationality, and surprising beauty of Zen.

AVA LEE IS OUT FOR REVENGE IN THE LATEST INSTALLMENT OF IAN HAMILTON’S BESTSELLING THRILLER SERIES

Still reeling from the brutal murder of her close associates Lau Lau and Chen, Ava Lee embarks on a quest for revenge that takes her from Toronto to Los Angeles to Beijing. Along the way, Ava is aided by some familiar faces and old comrades-in-arms, including Sonny Kwon, Jimmy Li, Lop, and Xu, the mountain master of Shanghai.

The search leads first to Ava’s old opponent, Mo, the chairman of the China Movie Syndicate, and then to a shadowy figure at the very top of the Chinese Security Service—the man who gave the order to kill her friends. Events reach a deadly climax in front of the Tianqiao Theatre in Beijing, but exacting her revenge is only half the battle—getting out of China alive is another matter entirely …

In Augustino and the Choir of Destruction literary legend and three-time winner of the Governor General's Literary Award Marie-Claire Blais delivers the third volume in the prize-winning series (These Festive Nights, Thunder and Light, Augustino and the Choir of Destruction, and Rebecca, Born in the Maelstrom) acclaimed as one of the greatest undertakings in modern Quebec fiction.

Augustino and the Choir of Destruction is set on an island in the Gulf of Mexico that is home to the full spectrum of humanity: the rich, the poor, the powerful, the humble, artists, criminals. With her unique, signature use of punctuation, Marie-Claire Blais manages to brilliantly show in one flashing stroke men and women; victims and tormentors; child kamikaze pilots and petty thieves from Bahama Street; Charles, a great poet cut down by AIDS; Cinderella, a transvestite prostituting himself to a customer at the Porte du Baiser saloon; Caroline, an artist and photographer who has seen all the hidden treasures of the world; and Augustino, a clairvoyant child-writer. These individual destinies combine in Blais' vision to form a single harmonic texture.

August 1979: twelve-year-old Michael Saint-Pierre disappears in the woods near Rivière-aux-Trembles when he and his friend Marnie Duchamp encounter a sudden storm. After an extensive search, only a muddy sneaker is found.

Thirty years later, in a neighboring town, little Billie Richard, who is about to celebrate her ninth birthday, fails to return home after school. Again, it's as if she's vanished into thin air.

Just like Marnie, who is haunted by the trauma of Michael's disappearance, Billie’s father is consumed by mourning and grief. As tehy come to terms with the inconceivable disappearances that have marked their lives, neither suspects that another tragedy will soon strike close to home...

An atmospheric mystery and a sharp exploration of guilt and sorrow, Trembling River is a powerful work from internationally renowned novelist Andrée A. Michaud and translated by J. C. Sutcliffe.

International award–winning stories of life and love in the midst of planetary decline

In Planet Earth, Nicholas Ruddock moves nimbly through a range of styles—from conventional to flash-fiction to his unique mastery of the long sentence—in stories exploring themes of love and passion, all with an awareness of our species-specific carelessness burning up the world.

This collection showcases a gifted writer at the top of his game, each story fresh and unexpected: the time Mario Vargas Llosa sucker-punched Gabriel García Márquez at a theatre in Mexico City inspires a young Marxist couple’s violent act of revenge in Toronto years later; an anxious young man finds solace in the employ of Prince, the musician; we get a haunting glimpse of Toronto’s polio epidemic at its peak in 1953; a young Canadian student bears witness to the Algerian protests and police violence in 1961 Paris; a pair of naive young women find themselves involved with a mysterious circus troupe in Nice. These provocative but contemplative stories are paradoxically positive and quick-witted, with a humorous fondness for humans and all our failings.

With this astounding fourth novel in her ongoing series of contemporary masterpieces (These Festive Nights, Thunder and Light, Augustino and the Choir of Destruction, and Rebecca, Born in the Maelstrom), Marie-Claire Blais invites us again to enter a complex circle of unforgettable characters. But this time, the tone is different: Blais' writing has acquired a new, buoyant, electrifying rhythm -- a rhythm some critics have described as the heartbeat of the world.

As we follow a central character named Rebecca, the voice in the novel becomes the voice of the world inventing itself, and the future playing itself out. As the GG jury wrote, this breathtaking paroxysm of a novel turns any commonly held vision of the world upside down. Blais' transcendent prose illuminates her characters with an extraordinary light.

Nigel Spencer is Marie-Claire Blais' long-time translator and a Governor General's Award winner for his work on this series of books. He gives us Blais' singular vision in supple English prose that is as transcendent and nuanced as the original French.

After twenty years Max Binder is still in love with his fiery wife, Maggie, and is determined to get her the perfect fortieth birthday gift. But Max’s singular desire — to make his wife happy — leads to an unexpected event that changes the course of his family’s life and touches the people who make up their western prairie city.

Set over the course of a single year, Once More With Feeling tells the story of this city that is bisected by railway lines and rivers, and connected by boulevards and back alleys, through intersecting moments and interconnected lives. The colourful citizens who make up the community are marked by transformation, upheaval, and loss: the worker at a downtown soup kitchen who recognizes a kindred spirit amongst the homeless; the aging sisters who everywhere see the fleeting ghosts of two missing neighbourhood children; a communal voice of mothers anxious for the future of their children in the discomfiting world they inhabit — this place of memory and amnesia, longing and belonging.

Featuring a cast of eclectic characters, Once More With Feeling is about a community, about a family, and about the way time makes fond fools of us all. Award-winning author Méira Cook has crafted a novel that is at once funny, poignant, and yes, full of feeling.

From the acclaimed author of the internationally bestselling Ava Lee novels, a bold and captivating new novel about a search for lost family and the cost of keeping secrets.

As a boy, Jack Anderson was abandoned by his mother in a Glasgow movie theatre. Now living in the United States and facing his impending retirement, Jack and his wife Anne travel to Scotland to track down his long-lost sister. Their journey takes them from their home in a quiet Boston suburb to the impoverished mill towns of Ayrshire, the gray cobbled streets of Glasgow, and the majestic Scottish Highlands. Along the way, Jack gets entangled in local affairs and must confront uncomfortable truths about family, legacy, and the wife he thought he knew.

Bonnie Jack, the first stand-alone novel by acclaimed author Ian Hamilton, is a compelling story about the importance of family, self-discovery, and the lengths we go to protect the ones we love.

Jason Bourne meets John McClane in this electrifying thriller about a special-forces sniper and a seasoned homicide detective who get caught up in a criminal conspiracy that involves the highest levels of power. 

Twelve days before retirement, Taipei police detective Wu is handed a curious case: a naval officer has been found dead in his hotel room. While it is immediately apparent to Wu that the officer has been murdered, the military insist it was suicide and want the case closed with no questions asked. Soon, however, more high-ranking officers turn up dead, and Wu realizes he has a full-blown conspiracy on his hands. 

Meanwhile in Italy, Alex, a young Taiwanese sniper, ex-Marine, ex–French Foreign Legion, and currently a fried-rice chef in Manarola, is called back into service. Ordered by his handler to assassinate a high-level Taiwanese government advisor in Rome, he soon finds himself on the run, hunted across Europe by his old brothers-in-arms. 

Now available after over four decades, the first collection of short fiction from bestselling author and Barbadian-born Canadian luminary Austin Clarke — winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and the Trillium Book Award for his novel The Polished Hoe — is a vital, lyrical, and provocative exploration of the Black immigrant experience in Canada.

Originally issued in 1971, Austin Clarke’s first published collection of eleven remarkable stories showcases his groundbreaking approach to chronicling the Caribbean diaspora experience in Canada. Characters move through the mire of working life, of establishing a home for themselves, of reconciling with what and who they left behind — all the while contending with a place in which their bone-chilling reception is both social and atmospheric. In lyrical, often racy, and wholly unforgettable prose, Clarke portrays a set of provocative, scintillating portraits of the psychological realities faced by people of colour in a society so often lauded for its geniality and openness.

The eagerly anticipated sequel to the critically beloved and bestselling Autopsy of a Boring Wife finds the saucy and ever-appealing Diane, now turning fifty and with the wreckage of her marriage behind her, setting off on a new hilarious journey for romance.

A Boring Wife Settles the Score marks the return of Diane, the raunchy and entertaining heroine of the prize-winning and bestselling Autopsy of a Boring Wife. Despite the end of her marriage, Diane still has plenty of love to give. Determined not to waste her days — that’s just not her style — she finds a job in a daycare and solace in cocktails with her best friend, Claudine, who convinces Diane her love life is not over. Diane wants romance and sees no reason why she shouldn’t have it, but she soon discovers, in her typically chaotic and hilarious manner, that for a woman approaching her fifties the task is not so simple as it is for a man.

Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies meets Rachel Cusk’s The Lucky Ones in this astounding debut novel about a woman on the verge of infidelity.

Tessa is a thirty-seven-year-old real estate agent living in Montreal. She adores her husband and three young sons, but she’s deeply unhappy and questioning the set of choices that have led to her present life.

After a surprising run-in with Francis, her ex-boyfriend and first love, Tessa arranges to see him. During the three days before their meeting, she goes about her daily life — there’s swimming lessons, science projects, and dirty dishes. As the day of her meeting with Francis draws closer she has to decide if she is willing to disrupt her stable, loving family life for an uncertain future with him.

With startling clarity and emotional force, Fanny Britt gives us a complex portrait of a woman and a marriage from the inside out.

The eighth novel in the Ava Lee series finds Ava caught in a labyrinth of high-level political corruption. 

Ava is in Shanghai for the launch of the PÖ clothing line. She has invited Xu, and over the course of the glitzy event and a late-night dinner, she detects a certain hesitancy in him. He later confides that the Tsai family, headed by Tsai Lian, the governor of Jiangsu Province and a “princeling” — he is the son of a general who was on the Long March with Mao and a member of China’s power elite — is trying to force him and his triad organization back into the drug business. Xu is already paying millions of dollars a year to various Tsai businesses, but the family wants more and thinks the new venture can deliver it. Xu believes this move would lead to his eventual destruction and feels he has nowhere to turn. If he opposes them, they will crush him. If he goes along with them, he thinks that inevitably the police and military will hunt him down.

Ava sets out to help Xu deter the Tsai family. As she digs into the breadth and depth of the family’s wealth and corruption, she gets caught up in a huge tangled web, extending all the way to the U.S. and the U.K., where it reaches the top echelons of political power.

White Resin is an ethereal love story of the almost-impossible reconciliation between the manufactured world and the haunting and feminine nature that envelops it.  

In this impassioned and wildly imagined story of creation, a girl named Dãa, is born to “twenty-four mothers,” the sisters of a convent at the edge of the Quebec taiga. Nearby, at the Kohle mining company, a woman dies giving birth to Laure, a child with albinism, in the workers’ canteen. What follows is a dream-like recounting of their love affair and the family they bear, a captivating magic-realist tale of origins and opposites, that would be fantastical if it did not ring so true to the boreal north. White Resin is at once a dream-like romance and an homage to gorgeous, feral, and fecund nature as it both stands against and entwined with the industrial world.

In the tradition of Gillian Flynn and Paula Hawkins, The Substitute is a deliciously creepy psychological thriller that will keep you guessing until the very last page.

Warren Botts is a disillusioned Ph.D. taking a break from his lab to teach middle-school science. Gentle, soft-spoken, and introverted, Warren befriends thirteen-year-old Amanda, a lonely student looking for guidance.

One morning, Warren returns from a jog to find Amanda dead, hanging from a tree in his backyard. A police investigation follows, but Warren is unable — or unwilling — to answer the questions that swirl around him. Suspicions mount, and Warren’s peaceful neighbours quickly become hostile.

Meanwhile, an anonymous narrator who possesses a dangerous combination of extreme intelligence and emotional detachment offers insight into events past and present. As the tension builds, we gain an intimate understanding of the power of memories, secrets, and lies.

Atonement is Sheila Fischman's translation of Gaetan Soucy's brilliant novel, originally published in French as L'Acquittement.

Twenty years after leaving the tiny village of Saint Aldor, Louis Bapaume has come home to make amends. During that one blustery winter solstice day, between the railway station and the church where a funeral mass is underway, he meets old villagers, forgotten neighbours, and characters who are either imagined or real. But there's only one person he seeks: the von Croft twin he taught to read music and to whom he wants to atone.

Soucy creates a world where nothing is left to chance and the line between dream and reality is always shifting.

New York, at the end of the 1920s. Xavier X. Mortanse, a seventeen-year-old apprentice demolition man, who claims to be an immigrant from Hungary, falls into a hole -- the beginning of myriad bizarre humiliations he suffers, only to be shown mercy by a hairdresser named Peggy Sue who will later suffer a grotesque fate.

When Xavier loses his job, he and his singing frog are hired to perform in a vaudeville show, where freakish and sordid acts attempt to outdo each other. Violence and ugliness blend cartoonishly with comedy and music as Gaetan Soucy dares us to look into the darkest sides of human experience. No one in this fascinating tableau is who he or she appears including Xavier himself, who is, as his mother says, too many people and no one.

The seventh novel in the Ava Lee series finds Ava caught up in the election for the chairmanship of the Triad Societies.

It’s been three months since Uncle’s passing, and Ava is finally ready to begin her new life as a partner with May Ling Wong and her sister-in-law Amanda in their Three Sisters venture capital firm. Ava travels to Shanghai to hear a pitch on a new investment possibility: the creation of a fashion line by Clark and Gillian Po. She also meets with the mysterious Xu, a young man Uncle had been mentoring and who is the head of the triad in Shanghai. Xu makes an audacious business proposal that she and May Ling are compelled to consider. Meanwhile, separately and privately, he confides to Ava that he intends to run for the chairmanship of the Triad Societies and attempts to recruit her as his adviser.

Against her will, Ava becomes enmeshed in triad warfare and her future is threatened . . .

With her multiple-award-winning, bestselling, and critically acclaimed novel The Outlander, Gil Adamson established herself as one of our preeminent fiction writers. But ten years before The Outlander, when Adamson published another book of fiction with a small press, readers and critics immediately sat up and took note. Barbara Gowdy called Help Me, Jacques Cousteau "outstanding … smart, haunting, utterly original."

Help Me, Jacques Cousteau presents the life and times of Hazel and her brother Andrew, who are born into an extraordinary family who share only one thing: a penchant for eccentric behaviour. Adamson demonstrates her powerful prose style, uniquely combining a scientist's loving attention to detail, a comic's unerring delivery and a poet's sublime ear.

With this updated edition, Adamson's brilliant, fascinating, and funny portrait of a contemporary young woman's coming of age is ready for readers once again.

From the acclaimed author of Where Did You Sleep Last Night, an acidly funny, raw, and devastating love story of a decrepit, fallen film star and the young feminist filmmaker who revives his career.

Set in disparate parts of Los Angeles, Chicken uproariously, grievously, relates the collision and inevitably ruinous paths of two incendiary figures. One is the once beautiful and very famous Parnell Wilde, a maverick actor arrogant in his disastrous fall. The other is Annabel Wrath, a much younger, idiosyncratic cult filmmaker with contradictory motives for seeking the older man out.

The two are profoundly altered by their meeting and its harrowing denouement and manage to save each other from their paths of torment and dizzying spirals of decline. But when Parnell is offered the chance to perform in the sequel to Ultraviolence, the feature film that made him famous — and to work again with its brilliant but merciless director — he and Annabel are forced to wrestle with their fractured pasts as the extreme, fleeting, and dangerous world of fame threatens to divide them.

In his wildly ambitious and darkly funny debut novel, Jonathan Garfinkel probes the fractured nature of identity, the necessity of lies, and the bloody legacy of the Soviet Empire.  

Spanning generations, continents, and cultures, In a Land without Dogs the Cats Learn to Bark is an electric tale about a nation trying to emerge from the shadow of the Soviet Union to embrace Western democracy. Driven by a complexly plotted mystery that leads from Moscow to Toronto to Tbilisi, punctuated by wild car chases and drunken jazz reveries, and featuring an eccentric cast of characters including Georgian performance artists, Chechen warlords, and KGB spies, Garfinkel delivers a story that questions the price of freedom and laughs at the answer.  

With exhilarating prose reminiscent of Rachel Kushner and more twists than a John le Carré thriller, In a Land without Dogs the Cats Learn to Bark is a daring, nuanced, and spectacularly entertaining novel by an exceptional talent.

In Port Ellis, there’s no off-season for murder.

Journalist Cat Conway is looking forward to an easy assignment covering a major wellness and self-actualization summit at the Pinerock Resort, featuring Bliss Bondar and Bree Guthrie, creators of the Welcome, Goddess empire and widows with attitude. Cat’s mother, Marian Conway, bestselling author and defiantly mediocre parent, is on the agenda—and so is murder.

When one of the influencers turns up dead, suspicion falls on the high-profile guests. Could the killer be a jealous business partner? Or the Instagram-famous poet? The empowerment guru whose wife hates him? Or Cat’s mother, who has a reputation to protect and a shocking secret to hide?

Cat’s pulled into investigating another celebrity death, but this time while facing the possible demise of her livelihood: The Quill & Packet is struggling financially, and may be headed toward its final edition. A convoy of protesters, angry at Cat’s reporting, has besieged the Quill’s newsroom. Can Cat rescue her mother and her newspaper, or will the killer stalking Port Ellis beat her to the deadline?

The second novel in the Marko della Torre series, Killing Pilgrim is a propulsive political thriller following a complex plot hatched by members of the CIA and set against the backdrop of war-torn Yugoslavia.

Early autumn, 1991. Croatia and Slovenia officially declared independence from Yugoslavia, and war is imminent between the Croats and the Serbs. Department VI of the UDBA has been dismantled, while the Yugoslav government scrambles to protect the State. In the midst of the political maelstrom, secret policeman Marko della Torre gets caught in an intricate web woven by the CIA and members of the Croat nationalist movement. They enlist della Torre to make contact with a man living in the shadows: the ex-UDBA agent who assassinated Olof Palme, the former prime minister of Sweden…

A classic of Canadian literature by the great Quebecoise writer, Kamouraska is based on a real nineteenth-century love-triangle in rural Quebec. It paints a poetic and terrifying tableau of the life of Elisabeth d'Aulnieres: her marriage to Antoine Tassy, squire of Kamouraska; his violent murder; and her passion for George Nelson, an American doctor.

Passionate and evocative, Kamouraska is the timeless story of one woman's destructive commitment to an ideal love. Translated into seven languages, Kamouraska won the Paris book prize and was made into a landmark feature film by Claude Jutra. This edition features a brilliant new introduction by Noah Richler.

DI Mark Tartaglia investigates the murder of a bestselling novelist in the third novel in Elena Forbes’ bestselling mystery series.

Bestselling novelist Joe Logan walks out into a hot summer’s evening in central London. The next day his body is found dumped in a disused Victorian crypt at the Brompton Cemetery. He has been tied up, shot, and castrated. The killing has the hallmarks of a professional hit. But what had Logan done to deserve such a brutal end?

Detective Mark Tartaglia is convinced that Logan’s personal life holds the key, but unravelling the victim's recent past proves difficult. Then the body of a second man is found in an old boathouse on the Thames — killed in an identical fashion to Logan. A vicious and methodical killer is at work, but what does he want and how does he lure his victims to their death? If Tartaglia can find the link between the two dead men maybe he can find the killer before he strikes again.

Quietly atmospheric and darkly foreboding, A Plea for Constant Motion is an ominous, and occasionally unnerving, new work of fiction by award-winning author Paul Carlucci

Penetrating and visceral, yet always offset by small moments of tenderness and humour, A Plea for Constant Motion is a powerful examination of the innate desire in everyone to change their lives and strive for something better.

Two couples share a disastrous dinner after their children are killed in a botched kidnapping overseas. A teacher with a passion for cartography orchestrates a bizarre apology after intentionally hitting a student. Desperate to be friends, a man ignores his neighbour’s strange behaviour to the peril of himself and others. A young girl babysits for a family friend, dimly aware that her presence is required for more than just childcare.

Dexterously divided into two parts and a surreal intermission, the characters in these stories find themselves confronted by situations that leave them either struggling to escape or firmly rooted in place. Paul Carlucci’s formidable work is by turns familiar and disquieting, sober and surreal, a stark and carefully crafted examination of the human condition.

Terrible things happen side by side with the ordinary.

Dawn hasn't spoken to her brother, Cody, since he was sent to prison for a violent crime seven years ago. But when Dawn's seemingly perfect life in the big city implodes, she is forced to return to her childhood home and the prairie city that still holds so much pain for her and her fractured family. Cody is released from prison with a mysterious new friend by his side, and Dawn must follow increasingly sinister leads to uncover their nefarious plans to access a dangerous supernatural network. As the lines between right and wrong blur and dissolve, Dawn recons with trauma and violence, loss and reclamation in an unsettling world where spirit realms entwine with the living—and where it is humans who carry out the truly monstrous acts.

“Dark family secrets, the lore of the sea, and a tender, protective friendship between women all converge in The Speed of Mercy, an unusual and surprising story set in idyllic rural Nova Scotia. With subtle humour, Conlin picks the locks on the long-closed doors of two families and bares the ugly, painful skeletons everyone knew were there but chose to hide.” — Sylvia D. Hamilton, author of And I Alone Escaped To Tell You

The Speed of Mercy captures the unbearable cost of childhood betrayal and what happens when history is suppressed, our past is forgotten — yet finding the truth can change the future. Christy Ann Conlin rips into the myths and stereotypes about older women and those on the edge of conventional society to reveal the timeless gift of mercy in this feminist tour de force.

“Christy Ann Conlin is a conjurer: of place, people, and the haunting past. I was instantly caught up in the darkly mysterious world and indelible characters she has brought to life. Gripping, suspenseful, and lyrically written, The Speed of Mercy caught me by the throat and didn’t let go.” — Alix Ohlin, Scotiabank Giller Prize–shortlisted author of Dual Citizens

From the author of the wildly controversial books Liar and Paul's Case comes one of the most anticipated — and perhaps, in some quarters, feared — books of the year. This is author Lynn Crosbie at her most honest, most cutting, most hilarious, and most heartbreaking. The stories told here are at once a cache, a repository, of a seven-year period in the author's life; and, too, a gymnasium, a place where she can flex her prodigious wit and her dazzling stash of literary tricks

Deft with matters both low- and highbrow (here are stories about 80s big-hair bands and the lasting, theological value of the Rocky series; here, too are stories contemplating critical theory and fine art), Life Is About Losing Everything speaks with manic yet grave authority about risking and losing everything, and then sorting through the remains to discover what is beautiful, what is trash, and what, ultimately, belongs.

An enchanting and captivating novel about how our untold stories haunt us — and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive.

After her family suffers a tragedy, nine-year-old Alice Hart is forced to leave her idyllic seaside home. She is taken in by her grandmother, June, a flower farmer who raises Alice on the language of Australian native flowers, a way to say the things that are too hard to speak.

Under the watchful eye of June and the women who run the farm, Alice settles, but grows up increasingly frustrated by how little she knows of her family’s story. In her early twenties, Alice’s life is thrown into upheaval again when she suffers devastating betrayal and loss. Desperate to outrun grief, Alice flees to the dramatically beautiful central Australian desert. In this otherworldly landscape Alice thinks she has found solace, until she meets a charismatic and ultimately dangerous man.

Spanning two decades, set between sugar cane fields by the sea, a native Australian flower farm, and a celestial crater in the central desert, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart follows Alice’s unforgettable journey, as she learns that the most powerful story she will ever possess is her own.

Finalist for the 2022 Trillium Book Award

The intertwined story of a cougar and a man that portrays the strength, vulnerability, and consciousness of two top predators. Not since Life of Pi have we encountered such transcendence or walked so fully in the footsteps of a big cat.

The “Old Woman” lives in the wild, searching for food, raising her cubs, and avoiding the two-legged creatures who come into her territory. But she is more than an animal — she is a mythic creature who haunts the lives and the dreams of men. Joseph Brandt has been captivated by the mountain lion’s legend since childhood, and one day he steps into the forest to seek her out. A classic in the making, The Hunter and the Old Woman is a mesmerizing portrait of two animals united by a shared destiny.

From The Man Booker International Prize finalist Robert Seethaler comes a tender, heartbreaking story of one young man and his friendship with Sigmund Freud during the Nazi occupation of Vienna.

Seventeen-year-old Franz Huchel journeys to Vienna to apprentice at a tobacco shop. There he meets Sigmund Freud, a regular customer, and over time the two very different men form a singular friendship. When Franz falls desperately in love with the music hall dancer Anezka, he seeks advice from the renowned psychoanalyst, who admits that the female sex is as big a mystery to him as it is to Franz.

As political and social conditions in Austria dramatically worsen with the Nazis’ arrival in Vienna, Franz, Freud, and Anezka are swept into the maelstrom of events. Each has a big decision to make: to stay or to flee?

A classic of Canadian literature, here is the A List edition of Daphne Marlatt’s utterly original novel about rescuing a forgotten woman from obscurity. Featuring a new introduced by celebrated author Lynn Crosbie.

Ana Historic is the story of Mrs. Richards, a woman of no history, who appears briefly in 1873 in the civic archives of Vancouver. It is also the story of Annie, a contemporary, who becomes obsessed with the possibilities of Mrs. Richards’s life.

In May 1997, eighteen-year-old Laura McPherson left her house for a run and didn’t return …

Twenty years later, a reporter arrives in the small town of Griffiths to write an article about the unsolved murder of Laura McPherson. He is the most recent in a long line of journalists, podcasters, and amateur sleuths seeking new insights into what really happened to Laura.

Laura’s younger brother, David, a repressed and stuck thirty-something, is dealing with the recent death of his mother when the reporter comes knocking. The last surviving family member, David has lived a sheltered life, protected from the prying eyes of the media by his mother. But David cannot escape the past forever, and soon finds himself confronting the lasting impact of his sister’s death. As David learns more about his sister and the history of Griffiths, his eyes are opened to the casual violence, misogyny, and racism that lurk just below the surface of his seemingly placid community.

Provocative and haunting, Not That Kind of Place is a literary anti-mystery, a compelling exploration of our obsession with true-crime stories and the devastating effects of systemic violence on our most vulnerable populations.

Longlisted, 2025 Toronto Book Awards

A sweeping generational story of heartbreak, resilience, and yearning, revealing an insider’s view of the fractured lives of Chinese immigrants and those they leave behind. 

Lemei, once a student Red Guard leader in 1960s Shanghai and a journalist at a state newspaper, was involved in a brutal act of violence during the Tiananmen Square protests and lost all hope for her country. Her daughter, Lin, is a student at an American university on a mission to become a true Westerner. She tirelessly erases her birth identity, abandons her Chinese suitor, and pursues a white lover, all the while haunted by the scars of her upbringing. Following China’s meteoric rise, Lemei is slowly dragged into a nationalistic perspective that stuns Lin. Their final confrontation results in tragic consequences, but ultimately, offers hope for a better future. By turns wry and lyrical, The Immortal Woman reminds us to hold tight to our humanity at any cost.

The second book in the gripping Ava Lee spin-off series features fan-favourite Uncle Chow Tung and his ascendancy to the head of the Triad gang in Fanling.

1980: A pivotal year in modern Chinese history as Premier Deng Xiaoping begins what he intends to be the transformation of China into an economic superpower. The most visible evidence of Deng’s policy is the creation of Special Economic Zones, and one has been set up in Shenzhen, next door to Hong Kong and on Fanling’s doorstep. Among Triad leaders, Uncle is the only one who recognizes that Deng’s intentions could have profound repercussions on their organizations. To protect his gang and their interests, he acts to not only minimize the danger, but to turn events to his advantage.

An atmospheric and utterly compelling debut novel about a Jamaican immigrant living in postwar London, This Lovely City shows that new arrivals have always been the prime suspects — but that even in the face of anger and fear, there is always hope.

London, 1950. With the war over and London still rebuilding, jazz musician Lawrie Matthews has answered England’s call for labour. Arriving from Jamaica aboard the Empire Windrush, he’s rented a tiny room in south London and fallen in love with the girl next door.

Playing in Soho’s jazz clubs by night and pacing the streets as a postman by day, Lawrie has poured his heart into his new home — and it’s alive with possibility. Until one morning, while crossing a misty common, he makes a terrible discovery.

As the local community rallies, fingers of blame point at those who were recently welcomed with open arms. And before long, London’s newest arrivals become the prime suspects in a tragedy that threatens to tear the city apart. Immersive, poignant, and utterly compelling, Louise Hare’s debut examines the complexities of love and belonging, and teaches us that even in the face of anger and fear, there is always hope.

Home is where we love, suffer, and learn. Some homes we chose, others are inflicted upon us, and still others are bodies we are born into. In this astounding collection of stories, human and more-than-human worlds come together in places we call home.

Four sisters and their mother explore their fears while teeny ghost people dress up in fragments of their children’s clothes. A somewhat-ghost tends the family garden. Deep in the mountains, a shapeshifting mother must sift through her ancestors’ gifts and the complexities of love when one boy is born with a beautiful set of fox ears and another is not. In the wake of her elderly mother’s tragic death, a daughter tries to make sense of the online dating profile she left behind. And a man named Pooka finds new ways to weave new stories into his abode, in spite of his inherited suffering.

A startling and beguiling story collection, Glorious Frazzled Beings is a love song to the homes we make, keep, and break.

Selected as one of World Literature Today's 75 Notable Translations of 2013

Spanning five turbulent decades in Iranian history, from before the 1979 revolution, through the Islamic Republic, and up to the present, The Book of Fate is a powerful story of friendship and passion, fear and hope.

A teenager in pre-revolutionary Tehran, Massoumeh is an average girl, passionate about learning. On her way to school she meets a local man and falls in love, but when her family discovers his letters they accuse her of bringing them dishonour. She is badly beaten by her brother, and her parents hastily arrange for her to marry a man she’s never met. Facing a life without love, and the prospect of no education, Massoumeh is distraught, but a female neighbour urges her to comply: "We each have a destiny, and you can’t fight yours."

The years that follow Massoumeh’s wedding prove transformative for Iran. Hamid, Massoumeh’s husband, is a political dissident and a threat to the Shah’s regime. When the secret service arrive to arrest him, it is the start of a terrifying period for Massoumeh. Her fate, so long dictated by family loyalty and tradition, is now tied to the changing fortunes of her country.

Winner of the Quebec Writers' Federation Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction

Beena and Sadhana are sisters who share a bond that could only have been shaped by the most unusual of childhoods — and by shared tragedy. Orphaned as teenagers, they have grown up under the exasperated watch of their Sikh uncle, who runs a bagel shop in Montreal's Hasidic community of Mile End. Together, they try to make sense of the rich, confusing brew of values, rituals, and beliefs that form their inheritance. Yet as they grow towards adulthood, their paths begin to diverge. Beena catches the attention of one of the "bagel boys" and finds herself pregnant at sixteen, while Sadhana drives herself to perfectionism and anorexia.

When we first meet the adult Beena, she is grappling with a fresh grief: Sadhana has died suddenly and strangely, her body lying undiscovered for a week before anyone realizes what has happened. Beena is left with a burden of guilt and an unsettled feeling about the circumstances of her sister's death, which she sets about to uncover. Her search stirs memories and opens wounds, threatening to undo the safe, orderly existence she has painstakingly created for herself and her son.

Saleema Nawaz's characters compel us, intrigue us, and delight us with their raw, complicated humanity, and her sentences sing in the gorgeous cadences of a writer who chooses every word with the utmost care. Heralded across Canada for the power and promise of her debut collection, Mother Superior, Nawaz proves with Bone and Bread that she is one of our most talented and unique storytellers.