He makes a deal with a crusty old Scot, Angus McLintock — an engineering professor who will do anything, anything, to avoid teaching English to engineers — to let his name stand in the election. No need to campaign, certain to lose - or is he?

    I've never seen the water, so I've gone there. I will try to remember to come back.Etta's greatest unfulfilled wish, living in the rolling farmland of Saskatchewan, is to see the sea. And so, at the age of eighty-two she gets up very early one morning, takes a rifle, some chocolate, and her best boots, and begins walking the 2,000 miles to water. Meanwhile her husband Otto waits patiently at home, left only with his memories. Their neighbour Russell remembers too, but differently - and he still loves Etta as much as he did more than fifty years ago, before she married Otto.

    When Christie Blatchford wandered into a Toronto courtroom in 1978 for the start of the first criminal trial she would cover as a newspaper reporter, little did she know she was also at the start of a self-imposed life sentence. In this book, Christie Blatchford revisits trials from throughout her career and asks the hard questions--about judges playing with the truth--through editing of criminal records, whitewashing of criminal records, pre-trial rulings that kick out evidence the jury can't hear. She discusses bad or troubled judges--how and why they get picked, and what can be done about them. And shows how judges are handmaidens to the state, as in the Bernardo trial when a small-town lawyer and an intellectual writer were pursued with more vigor than Karla Homolka. For anyone interested in the political and judicial fabric of this country, Life Sentence is a remarkable, argumentative, insightful and hugely important book.

    For twenty years, Edna escaped the world by devoting herself to the health and welfare of her husband and home, so when she learns he’s been having an affair, her sense of betrayal is devastating and literally maddening. And so she sits, silently filling notebooks, trying to find where and how her life went wrong. Dancing in the Dark is a tightly woven psychological novel, which explores the idea that madness is not necessarily self-destructive, and may lead to a kind of wisdom.

    With the glaciers gone, the province's oil and gas pipelines are being converted to water pipelines. Tensions are high as "water terrorists" threaten to violently cut off the water supply. Against this precarious backdrop, Willa desperately tries to keep her family's failing goat farm afloat.But when her son, Daniel, goes to work for the water corporation whose high-priced commodity is putting the farm out of business, Willa is stunned. A string of betrayals fractures the family, potentially beyond repair. Willa feels herself losing everything that she values most - her farm, her son, her past, even her very grip on reality. Is there any way to put the pieces back together?Watershed is a fast-paced, page-turner of a novel that cleverly explores the shattering effects of climate change on one ordinary family.

    Along the way, he meets an unforgettable generation of boy soldiers, brigands, street toughs and charming, willful girls—all struggling for survival in the aftermath of natural catastrophe magnified by political callousness and brutal neglect.Peter Behrens transports the reader to another time and place for a deeply-moving and resonant experience. The Law of Dreams is gorgeously written in incandescent language that unleashes the sexual and psychological energies of a lost world while plunging the reader directly into a vein of history that haunts the ancestral memory of millions in a new millennium.

    A librarian is called to a remote Canadian island to inventory the estate of a secretive Colonel whose most surprising secret is a bear who keeps the librarian company--shocking company.

    Another overfilled, ill-equipped, dilapidated ship has sunk under the weight of its too many passengers: Syrians, Ethiopians, Egyptians, Lebanese, Palestinians, all of them desperate to escape untenable lives back in their homelands. But miraculously, someone has survived the passage: nine-year-old Amir, a Syrian boy who is soon rescued by Vanna. Vanna is a teenage girl, who, despite being native to the island, experiences her own sense of homelessness in a place and among people she has come to disdain. And though Vanna and Amir are complete strangers, though they don't speak a common language, Vanna is determined to do whatever it takes to save the boy.In alternating chapters, we learn about Amir's life and how he came to be on the boat, and we follow him and the girl as they make their way toward safety. What Strange Paradise is the story of two children finding their way through a hostile world. But it is also a story of empathy and indifference, of hope and despair--and about the way each of those things can blind us to reality.

    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 in the days after hisfather has a startling accident, Toby makes a series of terrible, wincing choices. As a result, he is fired from his job as an etiquette commentator and loses his superb condo, his beautiful girlfriend and his beloved BMW. Worse still, he must move back to the grey Montreal suburb of Dollard-des-Ormeaux and live in his parents’ basement.With his silent BlackBerry and a sudden absence of friends or saviours, Toby feels he has reached the limits of misery and humiliation. But his father’s increasingly frightening behaviour is where the real trouble—and risk—lies. Who is this man? What can Toby do? Then, in a moment of misplaced gallantry, Toby encounters an unstable francophone mother who disappears and abandons her two-year-old son, Hugo, to his care. Trapped with a toddler and forced to deal with his father’s tragedies, Toby emerges from the basement bungalow of his life—muddy, broke, bruised, heartbroken—but, finally, a man.

    Revolving around three interlocking lives, it offers, among other things, a detailed inside look at the work of paramedics, and entertaining celebrity gossip.

    Follow the flailing escapades of maverick music manager Campbell Ouiniette at the Calgary Folk Festival, as he leaves a trail of empty liquor bottles, cigarette butts, bruised egos, and obliterated relationships behind him. His top headlining act has abandoned him for the Big Time. In a fit of self-delusion or pure genius (or perhaps a bit of both), Ouiniette devises an intricate scam, a last hurrah in an attempt to redeem himself in the eyes of his girlfriend, the music industry, and the rest of the world. He reveals his path of destruction in his own transparently self-justifying, explosive, profane words, with digressions into the Edmonton hardcore punk rock scene, the Yugoslavian Civil War, and other epicentres of chaos.

    All eighty-four men aboard died. February is the story of Helen O'Mara, one of those left behind when her husband, Cal, drowns on the rig. It begins in the present-day, more than twenty-five years later, but spirals back again and again to the "February" that persists in Helen's mind and heart.Writing at the peak of her form, her steadfast refusal to sentimentalize coupled with an almost shocking ability to render the precise details of her characters' physical and emotional worlds, Lisa Moore gives us her strongest work yet. Here is a novel about complex love and cauterizing grief, about past and present and how memory knits them together, about a fiercely close community and its universal struggles, and finally about our need to imagine a future, no matter how fragile, before we truly come home. This is a profound, gorgeous, heart-stopping work from one of our best writers.

    The move fulfilled a Tory campaign promise to deliver greater government transparency and accountability. He was later denounced by the same people who appointed him to scrutinize their spending. When he challenged the government on several issues--most notably about the true costs of the F-35 fighter planes--and publicly claimed the government was misleading Canadians, Page was vilified. He was called "unbelievable, unreliable and incredible" by then-Finance Minister Jim Flaherty. Page's term was not extended and he retired from the civil service.     Page's assessment of the F-35 procurement was proven right, a major embarrassment to the Harper government. But Page's overriding concern is that Parliament does not get the information and analysis it needs to hold the executive (the prime minister and cabinet) to account. Parliament, he argues, is broken, with power centralized in the PMO. The civil service appears cowed, and members of parliament almost never see enough financial analysis to support the policy decisions they make. That was true at various times on the tough-on-crime legislation, new military procurement as well as changes to the Canada Health Transfer and Old Age Security.      In this shocking insider's account, Page argues that democracy is being undermined by an increasingly autocratic government that does not respect facts that run counter to its political agenda. Elected officials need accurate, independently verified data to support the implementation of policies and programs. In Unaccountable, Page tells all Canadians why we should be concerned.

    The book manages to be both harsh and sympathetic. It welds humour, tragedy and the personal embarrassments we all live through in a colourful and memorable way.