Xavier Bird, her sole living relation, is gravely wounded and addicted to morphine. As Niska slowly paddles her canoe on the three-day journey to bring Xavier home, travelling through the stark but stunning landscape of Northern Ontario, their respective stories emerge—stories of Niska’s life among her kin and of Xavier’s horrifying experiences in the killing fields of Ypres and the Somme.

    A college student visiting her brassy, unconventional aunt stumbles on an astonishing secret and its meaning in her own life. An incorrigible philanderer responds with unexpected grace to his wife’s nursing-home romance. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage is Munro at her best, tirelessly observant, serenely free of illusion, deeply and gloriously humane.

    There is a disagreement over a loan, and rumours of violence in the ensuing quarrel begin to spread throughout the northern New Brunswick mill town in which they live, setting in motion a series of events and misunderstandings. As Ivan struggles to reconcile with Cindi, the community turns against him, fuelled by his father’s self-deluded lies and misguided attempts to set things right, exposing the other side of good intentions and leading to the novel’s powerful conclusion. Disturbing, tender-hearted, and at times darkly humorous, Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace reveals the strange unrecognized power in us all to shape one another’s destinies.From the Hardcover edition.

    While her almost-but-not-quite ex-boyfriend Adam is on a work assignment in Europe, Anna finds herself tricked into a ditch-the-loser intervention by her supportive yet meddling girlfriends. More frustrated than ever, Anna starts to smoke, asks Buddy, the backyard squirrel, for advice, and finally seeks out the help of a caring but fashion-challenged therapist. Adding to the emotional overload, Anna's beautiful but rash sister decides to move to the Middle East. Luckily, Anna has a resource even better than Buddy or the therapist: her devoted grandmother, who tells it like it is, refuses to conform to anyone's expectations, and who continues to live on her prairie farm all alone, half-blind, and completely happy. In her richly rewarding debut novel, Daria Salamon explores the bonds that make and break family, friendship, and love with warmth and good humor.

    When he refuses to back down from a contrary but principled stand regarding the West Bank settlements, his political opponents expose his affair with a mistress decades his junior. He and the fierce young Leora flee the scandal for Yalta, where, in an unexpected turn of events, he comes face-to-face with the former friend who denounced him to the KGB almost 40 years earlier.In a mere 24 hours, Kotler must face the ultimate reckoning, both with those who have betrayed him and with those whom he has betrayed, including a teenage daughter, a son facing his own ethical dilemmas in the Israeli army, and the wife who stood by his side through so much.In prose that is elegant, sly, precise, and devastating, David Bezmozgis has rendered a story for the ages, an inquest into the nature of fate and consequence, love and forgiveness.

    The Single Guy is a popular new reality series, where dozens of women are trying to woo bachelor veterinarian Austin Hawke. As the filming gets underway, though, accident-prone Chloe finds herself in one predicament after another: a wayward puck hits her in the face during a hockey game, she sprains her ankle at a dude ranch, and she falls out of a boat at high speed. But Chloe has bigger problems. The stress of her home life with her nutty but loveable Gramps and Aunt Ollie is getting to her, her job is consuming her, and painful memories from her past threaten to overwhelm her. To top it off, her co-worker Amanda is pressuring her to find a boyfriend. It doesn't take long before Chloe realizes that not having all her wishes come true might not be such a bad idea.

    Situated on the edge of the Little Snake sand hills, Juliet and its inhabitants are caught in limbo between a century — old promise of prosperity and whatever lies ahead.But the heart of the town beats in the rich and overlapping stories of its people: the foundling who now owns the farm his adoptive family left him; the pregnant teenager and her mother, planning a fairytale wedding; a shy couple, well beyond middle age, struggling with the recognition of their feelings for one another; a camel named Antoinette; and the ubiquitous wind and sand that forever shift the landscape. Their stories bring the prairie desert and the town of Juliet to vivid and enduring life.This wonderfully entertaining, witty and deeply felt novel brims with forgiveness as its flawed people stumble towards the future.

    For readers of Alice Munro, Elizabeth Hay, and Marina Endicott. In a drought-ridden Saskatchewan of the 1930s, self-possessed, enigmatic Elena Huhtala finds her self living alone, a young Finnish woman in a community of Swedes in the small village of Trevna. Her mother has been dead for many years, and her father, burdened by the hardships of drought, has disappeared, and the eighteen-year-old is an object of pity and charity in her community. But when a stranger shows up at a country dance, Elena needs only one look and one dance before jumping into his Lincoln Roadster, leaving the town and its shocked inhabitants behind. What follows is a trip through the prairie towns, their dusty streets, shabby hotel rooms, surrounded by dry fields that stretch out vastly, waiting for rain. Elena's journey uncovers the individual stories of an unforgettable group of people, all of whom are in one way or another affected by her seductive yet innocent presence. At the centre is Ruth, a girl whose life becomes changed in unexpected ways. She and the girl Elena, distanced and apart, form a strange bond that will come to haunt the decades for them both. Written in luminous prose, threaded through with a sardonic wit and deep wisdoms, A Beauty is at one time lyrical and tough, moving and mysterious, a captivating tale of a woman who, without intending to, touches many lives, and sometimes alters them forever.

    Girl, the oldest daughter, is coming of age and her family is determined to travel to the meeting place to find her a mate. But the unforgiving landscape takes its toll, and Girl is left alone to care for Runt, a foundling. As Girl and Runt face the coming winter, Girl realizes she has one chance to save her people, at great cost to herself.In the present, archaeologist Rosamund Gale works well into her pregnancy, racing to excavate newly found Neanderthal artifacts before her baby arrives. Linked across the ages by the shared experience of birth and early motherhood, and inspired by the recent discovery that many modern humans have inherited DNA from Neanderthals, Girl's story and Rosamund's story examines the often taboo corners of women's lives.

    A formidable debut, it is a profound and unforgettable depiction of today’s doctors, patients, and hospitals.Provocative, heartbreaking, and darkly humorous, Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures introduces readers to a masterful new voice in fiction. A practicing ER physician, Vincent Lam delivers a precise and intimate portrait of the medical profession in his fiction debut. These twelve interwoven stories follow a group of young doctors as they move from the challenges of medical school to the intense world of emergency rooms, evacuation missions, and terrifying new viruses. Winner of the prestigious Giller Prize, Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures marks the arrival of a deeply humane and preternaturally gifted writer. Fitz, Ming, Chen, and Sri are the four ambitious protagonists of Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures. They fall in love as they study for their exams, face moral dilemmas as they split open cadavers, confront police who rough up their patients, and treat schizophrenics with pathologies similar to their own. In one harrowing story set amidst the 2003 SARS crisis, which the author witnessed firsthand, two of these doctors suddenly become the patients. Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures invites us into a world where the ordinary becomes the critical in a matter of seconds. A formidable debut, it is a profound and unforgettable depiction of today’s doctors, patients, and hospitals.

    The Gage family had been travelling to a new life in Fort McMurray, but bruises on the mother, Lorraine, prove to be late-stage cancer rather than remnants of the accident. Recognizing their need as her responsibility, Clara tries to do the right thing and moves the children, husband and horrible grandmother into her own house--then has to cope with the consequences of practical goodness.As Lorraine walks the borders of death, Clara expands into life, finding purpose, energy and unexpected love amidst the hard, unaccustomed work of sharing her days. But the burden is not Clara's alone: Lorraine's children must cope with divided loyalties and Lorraine must live with her growing, unpayable debt to Clara--and the feeling that Clara has taken her place.What, exactly, does it mean to be good? When is sacrifice merely selfishness? What do we owe in this life and what do we deserve? Marina Endicott looks at life and death through the compassionate lens of a born novelist: being good, being at fault, and finding some balance on the precipice.

    Ranging from an island holiday gone wrong to a dive bar on the upswing to a yuppie mother in a pricey subdivision seeing her worst fears come true, these deftly written stories are populated by barkeeps, good men down on their luck, rebellious teens, lonely immigrants, dreamers and realists, fools and quiet heroes. In author Kerry-Lee Powell’s skillful hands, each character, no matter what their choices, is deeply human in their search for connection. Powell holds us in her grasp, exploring with a black humour themes of belonging, the simmering potential for violence and the meaning of art no matter where it is found, and revealing with each story something essential about the way we see the world.A selection of these stories have won significant awards including the Boston Review fiction contest and The Malahat Review’s Far Horizons award for short fiction. For readers of Lorrie Moore, Denis Johnson and Michael Christie.

    Sexless. Deathless. Timeless. Pilgrim is a man who cannot die, an astounding character in a novel of the cataclysmic contest between creation and destruction. Pilgrim is Timothy Findley’s latest masterwork, a finalist for the Giller Prize, and a national bestseller that has smashed the author’s own impressive sales records. Recently published in the US, Pilgrim is gathering rave reviews, and will be released in the UK this spring.It is 1912 and Pilgrim has been admitted to the Burghölzli Psychiatric Clinic in Zürich, Switzerland, having failed—once again—to commit suicide. Over the next two years, it is up to Carl Jung, self-professed mystical scientist of the mind, to help Pilgrim unlock his unconsciousness, etched as it is with myriad sufferings and hopes of history. Is Pilgrim mad, or is he condemned to live forever, witness to the terrible tragedy and beauty of the human condition? Both intimate and expansive in its scope, with an absorbing parade of characters—mythic, fictional and historical—Pilgrim is a fiercely original and powerful story from one of our most distinguished artists.

    Their complicated family dynamic—as dramatic as Puccini’s legendary opera, Tosca—will propel their rise, and fall, and take them around the world . . . until they finally confront the secrets of their complicated pasts.Born on Christmas, Louis Lamontagne, the family’s patriarch, is a larger-than-life lothario and raconteur who inherits his mother’s teal eyes and his father’s brutish good looks and whose charms travel beyond Quebec, across the state of New York where he wins at county fairs as a larger-than-life strongman, and even in Europe, where he is deployed for the US Army during World War II. We meet his daughter, Madeleine, who opens a successful chain of diners using the recipes from her grandmother, the original American Fiancée, and vows never to return to her hometown. And we end with her son Gabriel, another ladies’ man in the family, who falls in love with a woman he follows to Berlin and discovers unexpected connections there to the Lamontagne family that re-frame the entire course of the events in the book.An unholy marriage of John Irving and Gary Shteyngart with the irresistible whimsy of Elizabeth McCracken, The American Fiancée is a big, bold, wildly ambitious novel that introduces a dynamic new voice to contemporary literature.Published in Canada as Songs for the Cold of Heart by QC Fiction.

    This extraordinary life meanders through a rich, complicated, bittersweet world. The discoveries of childhood give way to the thousand pangs of adolescence, culminating in the sudden shocking news of an accident abroad. And as adulthood begins, indecisively, boundaries are crossed between countries, languages and people . . .