She has one deadbeat dad, one young cancer-riddled protégé, and two friends, the school tramp and a depressed poet.Figuring the numbers are against her, Lemon just can’t be bothered trying to fit in. She spurns fashion, television, and even the mall. She reads Mary Wollstonecraft and gets pissed off that Jane Eyre is such a wimp. Meanwhile, the adults in her life are all mired in self-centredness, and the other kids are getting high, beating each other up in parks, and trying to outsex one another. High school is misery, a trial run for an unhappy adulthood of bloated waistlines, bad sex, contradictions, and inequities, and nothing guidance counsellor Blecher can say will convince Lemon otherwise.But making the choice to opt out of sex and violence and cancer and disappointment doesn’t mean that these things don’t find you. It will be up to Lemon if she can survive them with her usual cavalier aplomb.

    wound up at a garage sale in small-town Saskatchewan almost one hundred years later. As Arabella sifts through caches of long-forgotten letters and unearths long-buried memories, she pieces together the heartbreaking truth of her family history and resolves a nearly century-old murder. In her debut novel, Myrna Dey skillfully moves back and forth between two time periods and two memorably resourceful heroines.

    From out of a stubborn, desolate landscape studded with tree stumps, the settlers of Portuguese Creek have built a new life for themselves. But when an encroaching forest fire threatens this fledgling settlement, it also intensifies the remembered horrors of war. The story of Portuguese Creek is told by several of its citizens, including a boy trying to recover from the sudden loss of his father, and a former teacher haunted by what happened to the soldiers he led in France. With a memorable cast of characters, and by turns heart-rending and tragic, humorous and humane, Broken Ground is a powerful novel that immerses us in the lives of an entire community.

    She's content, mostly, with the life she's built: a semi-successful career as a ceramics artist, a close collection of women friends (if you ignore the terrible falling out she had with Cheryl all those years ago), a comfortable marriage with a kind if otherwise unextraordinary man. And then Jean sees her mother go through the final devastating months of cancer, and realizes that her fondest wish is to protect her dearest friends from the indignities of aging and illness. That's when she decides to kill them... This eagerly awaited new novel from Trevor Cole combines the humour and sharp observations of contemporary life that he is known for with an irresistibly twisted premise, for fans of the quirkily macabre Six Feet Under and Dexter, and readers of Paul Quarrington, Miriam Toews, Jonathan Franzen, and, of course, Trevor Cole.In his first two, GG-shortlisted novels, Trevor Cole proved himself a master of drawing us into the shadowy side of human nature with sharp observation and warm wit.

    Gripping and emotional." —David Nicholls, bestselling author of One Day"Both tender and truthful in its evoking of the canyon that lies between the openness of youth and the dangerous restraint of middle age, this is a luminous, quiet storm of a novel that resounds long after its heartbreaking coda." —Diana Evans, The Guardian"De Vries's final confrontation with Dirk is a tragic, Gatsby-like meditation on the impossibility of reliving the past, however much we cling to our memories." —Financial TimesA wrenching and spare novel about an electric friendship that slowly reveals itself as a deep and lifelong love.Jan de Vries is a virtuoso pianist who would be in the prime of his career but for the crippling auditory hallucinations that have plundered his performances and mind. As the disorder reaches its devastating peak the walls Jan has built around himself start to crumble, and he's unable to repress the trove of memories and unspoken words that linger between him and his childhood best friend, Dirk Noosen, with whom he lost touch long ago. He is faced with only one recourse: to head home and confront Dirk.With a masterful balance of emotional resonance and restraint, Eric Beck Rubin tells the story of Jan's obsessive friendship with the charismatic, irreverent Dirk as the reader breathlessly awaits their reunion. This is a story about music, repression and regret; about adolescence, sex and friendship; and, ultimately, about the kind of love that lasts a lifetime.

    After her hippie British parents are murdered, Lilly is raised at a Sufi shrine in Morocco. As a young woman she goes on pilgrimage to Harar, Ethiopia, where she teaches Qur'an to children and falls in love with an idealistic doctor. But even swathed in a traditional headscarf, Lilly can't escape being marked as a foreigner. Forced to flee Ethiopia for England, she must once again confront the riddle of who she is and where she belongs.

    To the small fishing community into which the foundling is adopted, Aurora, as they name her – with her shock of white hair, one blue eye and one brown – is clearly enchanted. But it is not until Aurora is herself an old woman that she learns the heart-wrenching story behind her miraculous survival on the ice.