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.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.

    A solitary child, she spends her spare time learning the art of taxidermy, completely fascinated by the act of bringing new and eternal life to the bodies of the dead. At fourteen, her parents marry her off to Erastus Hammer, a polygamous horse breeder and renowned hunter, who does not want to bed her. The role he has in mind for his fourth and youngest wife is creator of trophies of his most impressive kills, an urgent desire in him as he is slowly going blind. Happy to be given this work, Dorrie secludes herself in her workshop, away from Mother Hammer’s watchful eyes and the rivalry between the elder wives.But as the novel opens, Hammer has brought Dorrie his latest kills, a family of wolves, and for the first time in her short life she struggles with her craft, dreaming each night of crows and strange scenes of violence. The new hand, Bendy Drown, is the only one to see her dilemma and to offer her help, a dangerous game in a Mormon household. Outside, a lone wolf prowls the grounds looking for his lost pack, and his nighttime searching will unearth the tensions and secrets of this complicated and conflicted family.Inspired by the real events of the Mountain Meadows Massacre in 1857, Alissa York blends fact with fiction in a haunting story of a family separated by secrets and united by faith.

    Accident or suicide?On the other side of the world, a young woman walks out of a sandstorm in sub-Saharan Africa. In the labyrinth of the Niger Delta, a young boy learns to survive by navigating through the gas flares and oil spills of a ruined landscape. In the seething heat of Lagos City, a criminal cartel scours the internet looking for victims.Lives intersect, worlds collide, a family falls apart. And it all begins with a single email: “Dear Sir, I am the son of an exiled Nigerian diplomat, and I need your help ...”419 takes readers behind the scene of the world’s most insidious internet scam. When Laura’s father gets caught up in one such swindle and pays with his life, she is forced to leave the comfort of North America to make a journey deep into the dangerous back streets and alleyways of the Lagos underworld to confront her father’s killer. What she finds there will change her life forever...

    Growing up a tough, wild tomboy, swimming, fighting, and fishing in a remote village where the land slips into the green ocean on the edge of the world, Lisamarie has always been different. Visited by ghosts and shapeshifters, tormented by premonitions, she can't escape the sense that something terrible is waiting for her. She recounts her enchanted yet scarred life as she journeys in her speedboat up the frigid waters of the Douglas Channel. She is searching for her brother, dead by drowning, and in her own way running as fast as she can toward danger. Circling her brother's tragic death are the remarkable characters that make up her family: Lisamarie's parents, struggling to join their Haisla heritage with Western ways; Uncle Mick, a Native rights activist and devoted Elvis fan; and the headstrong Ma-ma-oo (Haisla for "grandmother"), a guardian of tradition. Haunting, funny, and vividly poignant, Monkey Beach gives full scope to Robinson's startling ability to make bedfellows of comedy and the dark underside of life. Informed as much by its lush living wilderness as by the humanity of its colorful characters, Monkey Beach is a profoundly moving story about childhood and the pain of growing older--a multilayered tale of family grief and redemption.

    He shoots his first film, surreptitiously capturing his neighbors having sex on their back porch and discovering that through representations of sexual activity he can comment on what he finds both painful and confusing. In the films that follow, the narrator imagines in positions of dominance those who are disadvantaged in their everyday lives, now sexually belittling those who have once held them down. Nettie, an idealistic poet and the one person with whom the narrator genuinely connects, sees in pornography the opportunity to do something artistic, liberating, and socially relevant. She pushes him to make even more subversive films but, ultimately, despite his radical intentions, the narrator falls into a world of greed, delusion, and hypocrisy, the same world he once rebelled against. Investigating the ways in which lives are remembered and reconstructed, Turner works backwards and forwards in time with unerring attention to subtle shifts in voice and experience. But this is not a wistful recounting, for the retelling of the protagonist’s story is at the behest of an authoritative, unforgiving tribunal of interrogators.

    These punchy, sharply observed stories blur the lines between longing and choosing, exploring the narrator's experience as an involuntary one. Tinged with pathos and humour, they interrogate the moments in which femininity, womanness, and identity are not only questioned but also imposed.Shut Up You're Pretty is the first book to be published under the imprint VS. Books, a series of books curated and edited by writer-musician Vivek Shraya featuring work by new and emerging Indigenous or Black writers, or writers of colour.

    It was to take place the following Sunday. But those who came to the rectory on Father Pennant's second day were the ones who could not resist seeing him sooner. Here was the man to whom they would confess the darkest things. It was important to feel him out. Mrs Young, for instance, after she had seen him eat a piece of her macaroni pie, quietly asked what he thought of adultery.André Alexis brings a modern sensibility and a new liveliness to an age-old genre, the pastoral.For his very first parish, Father Christopher Pennant is sent to the sleepy town of Barrow. With more sheep than people, it's very bucolic—too much Barrow Brew on Barrow Day is the rowdiest it gets. But things aren't so idyllic for Liz Denny, whose fiancé doesn't want to decide between Liz and his more worldly mistress Jane, and for Father Pennant himself, who greets some miracles of nature—mayors walking on water, talking sheep—with a profound crisis of faith.

    But, also like his father, Octavio has never mastered the art of reading and his only knowledge of the world beyond the bakery door comes from his own imagination. Just a few streets away, Isabeau works out of sight in the basement of the Louvre, trying to forget her disfigured beauty by losing herself in the paintings she restores and the stories she reads. The two might never have met, but for a curious chain of coincidences involving a mysterious traveller, an impoverished painter, a jaded bookseller, and a book of fairytales, lost and found . . .

    In the basement, she makes a shocking discovery — two dead girls curled into the bottom of her mother’s chest freezers. She remembers a pair of foster children who lived with the family in 1988: Casey and Jamie Cheng — troubled, beautiful, and wild teenaged sisters from Vancouver’s Chinatown. After six weeks, they disappeared; social workers, police officers, and Jessica herself assumed they had run away.As Jessica learns more about Casey, Jamie, and their troubled immigrant Chinese parents, she also unearths dark stories about Donna, whom she had always thought of as the perfect mother. The complicated truths she uncovers force her to take stock of own life.Moving between present and past, this riveting novel unflinchingly examines the myth of social heroism and traces the often-hidden fractures that divide our diverse cities.

    Diane takes the charge to heart and undertakes an often ribald, highly entertaining journey to restoring trust in herself and others that is at the same time an astute commentary on women and girls, gender differences, and the curious institution of marriage in the twenty-first century. All the details are up for scrutiny in this tender, brisk story of the path to recovery. Autopsy of a Boring Wife is a wonderfully fresh and engaging novel of the pitfalls and missteps of an apparently “boring” life that could be any of ours.

    Now, she is coming to understand that life is determined as much by chance as by careful control. If only she can be assured of loving and of being loved. But the love she finds is more than the romance she dreamed about as a girl. It is the guilty but savored passion of an affair with a married man, the poignant caring for an aging father, the visceral bonding between mother and child. Held in an intricate web of emotion, she must understand and encompass it as a woman, a lover, a wife and a mother. Diane Schoemperlen has written an astonishing and inventive first novel of a young woman's progress of love, from childhood to adulthood. Employing the 100 stimulus words from the Standard Word Association Test as her narrative framework, Schoemperlen interweaves, in a series of short but brilliant chapters, the defining moments of Joanna's life.

    Throughout Toronto, a murderer strikes randomly, leaving bodies mutilated and dismembered, and taunting the police with cryptic notes. The group reads each other their own dark, unsettling tales. Angela tells of child-stealer Sandman. Patrick, though, finds fantasy and reality blurring. Is the maniac at large the Sandman? What does Angela really know? And does the killer stalk his pursuer? Only when his son is snatched does Patrick journey toward the elusive figure.

    of Speculation is a portrait of a marriage. It is also a beguiling rumination on the mysteries of intimacy, trust, faith, knowledge, and the condition of universal shipwreck that unites us all. Jenny Offill's heroine, referred to in these pages as simply "the wife," once exchanged love letters with her husband postmarked Dept. of Speculation, their code name for all the uncertainty that inheres in life and in the strangely fluid confines of a long relationship. As they confront an array of common catastrophes - a colicky baby, a faltering marriage, stalled ambitions - the wife analyzes her predicament, invoking everything from Keats and Kafka to the thought experiments of the Stoics to the lessons of doomed Russian cosmonauts. She muses on the consuming, capacious experience of maternal love, and the near total destruction of the self that ensues from it as she confronts the friction between domestic life and the seductions and demands of art. With cool precision, in language that shimmers with rage and wit and fierce longing, Jenny Offill has crafted an exquisitely suspenseful love story that has the velocity of a train hurtling through the night at top speed. Exceptionally lean and compact, Dept. of Speculation is a novel to be devoured in a single sitting, though its bracing emotional insights and piercing meditations on despair and love will linger long after the last page.

    Together, they share a single, magical week before Hannah leaves for Jerusalem, where she is to spend nine months at an orthodox yeshiva learning Torah among students who disapprove of intermarriage. Raymond, a graduate student researching love in Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, struggles with his loneliness and Hannah’s increasing religiosity.As their separation comes to an end, Hannah questions whether she can live with a man who is not of her people, and Raymond’s hunger for human intimacy reaches a crisis point. He cheats on her; she begins to practice the Commandments. Still, neither can tolerate the other’s absence. Unable to make a clean break, they’re forced to try their insoluble problems in the city without solution, Jerusalem.Acute and closely observed, Raymond and Hannah captures with gripping precision the thrill of new romance, the bitter doubt of longing, the inescapable urgings of love.Excerpt from Raymond and HannahPreliminaries“What are you here for?” Hannah asks Raymond.“What am I here for? I was invited.”“You know Paul.”He nods. “And you?”Hannah sips her champagne. “I’m here to meet men.”A moment’s pause, while he casts a critical gaze across the offerings of the room. “What about Jim?”“Which one’s Jim?”He points to a hippie leaning on the radiator across the room, a large-bearded man in jeans and a check flannel shirt whose laughter drunkenly booms like dropped tympani over the light chatter. “I realize that I’ve just ruined it by pointing, but maybe it’s all for the best. It wouldn’t have worked out with Jim anyway. He’s married or something. How about Roger?” He bugs his eyes in the direction of a man in overalls. Hannah looks, arching her elegant neck to see the scruffy poseur affecting boredom beside the refrigerator. “The one in overalls. His name’s Roger. Actually I have no idea who he is. I made up the name.”She frowns. “That one’s not bad. Excuse me.” She reaches over to the table for the champagne and refills their cups.“My name’s Raymond,” he says.“Hannah,” she replies.They touch cups, and Raymond again scans the room, apparently displeased with its contents. “The pickings here really are a bit slim. I suggest we inspect the other rooms to see if this is all the night has to offer.”From the Hardcover edition.

    With pathos and pageantry, desperation and hope, magic and mythology, this acclaimed novel weaves its unforgettable spell.