Secure in the love of her beautiful mother, she is unaware that her father, Jack, is caught up in a web of secrets. When a very local murder intersects with global forces, Jack must decide where his loyalties lie, and Madeleine will be forced to learn a lesson about the ambiguity of human morality -- one she will only begin to understand when she carries her quest for the truth, and the killer, into adulthood twenty years later.

    Oddly) Flowers is living quietly in Oregon with Winnifred, her tortoise, when she finds out her dear father has been knocked into a coma back in Newfoundland. Despite her fear of flying, she goes to him, but not before she reluctantly dumps Winnifred with her unreliable friends. Poor Winnifred. When Audrey disarms an Air Marshal en route to St. John’s we begin to realize there’s something, well, odd about her. And we soon know that Audrey’s quest to discover who her father really was—and reunite with Winnifred—will be an adventure like no other.

    When his work captures the attention of an eccentric Slovakian count, Flood is summoned to a faraway castle -- a moving labyrinth that embodies the count's obsession with puzzles -- where he is commissioned to create the infinite book, the ultimate never-ending story. Probing the nature of books, the human thirst for knowledge, and the pursuit of immortality, Salamander careens through myth and metaphor as Flood travels the globe in search of materials for the elusive book without end.

    Pressured by a starving fellow poet, Will establishes The Poets' Preservation Society, a genteel organization to help poets in need. But when Will meets his muse, the enigmatic and athletic Lily White, he becomes inspired not only to write poetry, but to take guerrilla action in support of poets everywhere. Poetry meets parkour and culture clashes with commerce in this hilarious look at how we measure the value of art.

    Her ex, after all, has moved on to a new wardrobe, a new penchant for lattes--and worst of all, new adult friends. But in Claudia's house she's still finding bananas in the sock drawer and cigarettes taped to wrestling figures. Then Claudia receives the unexpected news that her mother has died.Shared through the hilarious, honest, and often poignant perspective of a single mother, Roost is the story of a woman learning about motherhood while grieving the loss of her own mother. And as she begins to mend, she's also learning that she might be able to accept her home--as it is.

    This year they're all going to turn fifty, so they decide to take a trip to New York together (courtesy of Linda's philandering husband's Visa Platinum). But at the LaGuardia airport washroom, Bette accidentally switches bags with a young mother who's actually smuggling diamonds for the mob, and things start going terribly wrong. When they kill an aggressive cab driver with pepper spray, the four friends know this is not going to be the trip of shopping and Broadway shows they'd expected.A series of miscommunications and mishaps entangles the friends even further into the criminal underworld of New York. But out of all the bad luck (Linda's husband is staying at the same hotel as the friends, with his new girlfriend) and bad people (mobsters, drug addicts, and Linda's husband) emerge four fifty-year-old avengers of truth and justice. In the style of Crewe's Shoot Me, Hit and Mrs. is a wildly entertaining comedic romp.

    Turned out on the street by his fully employed, entirely fed up girlfriend, he goes on the hunt for cheap shared accommodation and stumbles upon the ideal set-up—a bedroom in the home of Amy, an attractive psychology student who has been abandoned by her condo-buying roommate. Not only does Amy have a surprisingly affordable penthouse apartment with rooftop patio and a fridge full of high-quality comestibles, but she also has a mysterious across-the-hall neighbour, Eldrich, who appears to be home all day, smoking weed and receiving an odd assortment of visitors. Before long, John is availing himself of Eldrich's pot, food and wine. He notices that these staples are provided gratis to Eldrich by friends and acquaintances who rely on him for spiritual guidance. That's when John, atheist and misanthrope, decides to start a New Age cult with Eldrich as guru. And so, as half art project, half money-making scheme, the Answer Institute is born. With Amy as a partner in the enterprise, the cult flourishes and grows exponentially, attracting a wide range of broken, strange and spiritually hungry individuals, including an obscenely wealthy Singaporean expat, a psilocybin-dealing hippie, a conservative mom mourning the death of her only child, and the star of a popular sci-fi TV show. Eldrich begins to embrace his role as Leader with a little too much zeal and introduces his followers to increasingly peculiar rituals. Amy becomes progressively more enamoured of the funds pouring into the coffers, and John lets sexual jealousy get the better of him. The more successful the Institute gets, the more it spirals out of control, culminating in a bizarre ayahuasca ceremony that ends in a way nobody could have expected. With humour and pathos, The Answer to Everything examines the gap between reason and faith, and the human need for connection, love and transcendence.

    Orchard, owns that home. Around the time of Rose's disappearance, Mrs. Orchard was sent for a short stay in hospital, and Clara promised to keep an eye on the house and its remaining occupant, Mrs. Orchard's cat, Moses. As the novel unfolds, so does the mystery of what has transpired between Mrs Orchard and the newly arrived stranger.Told through three distinct, compelling points of view--Clara's, Mrs. Orchard's, and Liam Kane's--the novel cuts back and forth among these unforgettable characters to uncover the layers of grief, remorse, and love that connect families, both the ones we're born into and the ones we choose. A Town Called Solace is a masterful, suspenseful and deeply humane novel by one of our great storytellers.

    

    Surrounded by the strip clubs, bars and body rub parlors of Yonge Street, Emanuel was lured away from his friends by a man who promised some easy money. Four days later the boy's body was discovered. He had been brutally raped and murdered, and Toronto the Good would never be the same. The murder of the Shoeshine Boy had particularly tragic resonance for the city's Portuguese community. The loss of one of their own symbolized for many how far they were from realizing their immigrant dreams. Kicking the Sky is told from the perspective of one of these children, Antonio Rebelo, a character first introduced in Barnacle Love. Twelve-year-old Antonio prizes his life of freedom and adventure. He and his best friends, Manny and Ricky, spend their days on their bikes exploring the labyrinth of laneways that link their Portuguese neighborhood to the rest of the city. But as the details of Emanuel's death expose Toronto's seedier underbelly, the boys are pulled into an adult world of danger and cruelty, secrets and lies much closer to home. Kicking the Sky is a novel driven by dramatic events, taking hold of readers from its opening pages, intensifying its force towards an ending of huge emotional impact.

    "We're all just one bad decision away from disaster." At fourteen, Robin Fisher is doing her best to ignore her insurance salesman father’s credo, cataloging his tales of calamity under Bad Things that Happen to Other People. But life in 1970s Golden, California, doesn’t prove so golden after her father deserts the family, setting in motion a series of events that results in Robin accidentally setting fire to an abandoned party house. As Robin struggles to keep an eye on her fixation with Bic lighters and her newly independent mother’s own growing pains, she is drawn into the orbit of Carol “Jesus Freak” Closter, a vulnerable yet charismatic classmate whose friendship will challenge Robin in ways she could never have imagined. When Carol finally crosses a line, it’s Robin who must make a dangerous decision of her own. Sharply comic and deeply moving, Please Proceed to the Nearest Exit illuminates those unforgettable moments in life when everything changes, whether we want it to or not.

    Her attempt to live out her life as Lily Azerov shatters as she disappears, leaving a new husband and baby daughter, and a host of unanswered questions. Who is she really and what happened to the young woman whose identity she has stolen? Why has she left and where did she go? It is left to the daughter she abandoned to find the answers to these questions as she searches for the mother she may never find or really know.

    Against a backdrop of a digital economy that rewards online platforms instead of content creators, with climate-change anxiety hanging palpably in the air, the resolutely contemporary Morissette immerses readers into a vagabond year of modern love, as Daniel and Grace navigate their aspirations, insecurities and ambitions amidst a culture obsessed with the instantaneous satisfaction of selfies and self-identity. The Original Face is a fresh and imaginative critical examination of work and life in the 21st century by the author of the cultishly popular New Tab, a finalist for the 2015 Amazon.ca First Novel Award, and the 2014 Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction.

    But now she finds herself backed into a corner. After a hustle gone dangerously wrong, her mother, Marlene, is sliding into an abyss of alcoholic depression, spending her days fantasizing aloud about death—a goal Sammie is tempted to help her accomplish. Horrified by the appeal of this, Sammie packs a bag and leaves her mother to her own devices. With her father missing in action, she has nowhere else to go but the home of a friend with two parents who seem to actually love their daughter and each other—and who awkwardly try to extend some semblance of family to Sammie. Throughout a long summer of crisis among the normals, Sammie is torn between her longing for the approval of the con-man father she was named for and her desire for the "weird, spearmint-fresh feeling" of life in the straight world. Sammie wants to be normal but fears that where she comes from makes that beyond the realm of possibility. One Good Hustle chronicles two months in Sammie Bell's struggle with her dread that she is somehow doomed genetically to be just another hustler.

    She has a wonderful son and a business she loves. Though challenged to make ends meet, she’s come a long way from the tough times she endured as a teenage mom. With the busy Christmas season ahead, things are looking up, until Scrooge himself arrives intent on putting a huge resort next to her inn—a resort destined to put her out of business. Wealthy business developer Rob McKenna is coming back home to the tiny town of Pinetop, Colorado to tie up loose ends. After the death of his mother, he’s inherited her Victorian home, her dog, and hundreds of acres of land he plans to develop into a resort and sell. It all seems so simple until he runs into Celia Roberts. In high school, she was the “it” girl, and he was nobody. She dated the bully, and he was the target. Now he’s back, and she’s single, and as beautiful as ever. However, she’s the only thing standing between him and his plan to get in, get rich, and get out of town. He wants to move the small town into the future. She wants to preserve the past. Can the magic of Christmas leave them both with full hearts and bright futures or will one of them end up with nothing under the tree?