In lushly evocative language, Smart recounts her love affair with the poet George Barker with an operatic grandeur that takes in the tragedy of her passion; the suffering of Barker's wife;the children the lovers conceived. Accompanied in this edition by The Assumption of the Rogues and Rascals, a short novel that may be read as its sequel, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept has been hailed by critics worldwide as a work of sheer genius.

    Four lives become entangled by the whirlpool at the Falls and the woods surrounding it. Darker and more sinister currents gain momentum and ultimately release them from their obsessions.

    Addie-as her grandfather Chauncey Beynon Beale affectionately calls her- believes that everything she could ever want or need is to be found on his cattle ranch, the place her family calls home, or in the little town twelve bush miles away, a place called Sorry. After tragedy strikes her family, Addie holds her sorrows close to her heart. Only later will she learn that her grandfather too has lived with his own secret torment for more than seventy years. It will take his slipping into blindness and dementia before the dark spectre from his past emerges, leaving her the one responsible for its consequences. And when that day arrives, when Chauncey Beale's past intersects with Addie's present, it will change her future in ways that she, and those she loves, could never have imagined.

    1989. A city on the brink of utter economic collapse. On the brink of violence. Driving home one night, unlikely passengers Jamie Garrison and Moses Moon hit a lion at fifty miles an hour. Both men stumble away from the freak accident unharmed, but neither reports the bizarre incident. Haunted by the dead lion, Moses storms through the frozen city with his pathetic crew of wannabe skinheads searching for his mentally unstable mother. Jamie struggles with raising his young daughter and working a dead-end job in a butcher shop, where a dead body shows up in the waste buckets out back. A warning of something worse to come. Somewhere out there in the dark, a man is still looking for his lion. His name is Astor Crane, and he has never really understood forgiveness.

    Thirty years after the mythical summer his grandfather returned to town on a quixotic search for his dead wife, Stephen confronts the painful losses in his own life.

    While the beautiful Viv is forced by the girls' overbearing mother to compete in child beauty pageants, plain-looking Edith follows in her father's footsteps: collecting oddities, studying coins, and reading from old books.When Viv rebels against her mother's expectations, Edith finds herself torn between a desire to help her sister and pursuing her own love for a boy who might love her sister more than he loves her. When Edith accepts a job at the National Gallery of Canada, she meets an elderly cryptozoologist named Theo who is searching for a bird many believe to be extinct. Navigating her way through Vivienne's dark landscape while trying to win Liam's heart, Edith develops an unlikely friendship with Theo when she realizes they might have more in common than she imagined; they are both trying to retrieve something that may be impossible to bring back to life.The Gallery of Lost Species is about finding solace in unexpected places - in works of art, in people, and in animals that the world has forgotten.

     A captivating blend of historical fact and imaginative fiction, Above All Things moves seamlessly back and forth between the epic story of Mallory's legendary final expedition and a heartbreaking account of a day in the life of Ruth Mallory. Through George's perspective, and that of the newest member of the climbing team, Sandy Irvine, we get an astonishing picture of the terrible risks taken by the men on the treacherous terrain of the Himalaya. But it is through Ruth's eyes that a complex portrait of a marriage emerges, one forged on the eve of the First World War, shadowed by its losses, and haunted by the ever-present possibility that George might not come home. Drawing on years of research, this powerful and beautifully written novel is a timeless story of desire, redemption, and the lengths we are willing to go for honour, glory, and love.

    While investigating a suspicious yard sale, M discovers a red chesterfield sitting in a ditch. Looking closer, M finds a running shoe-and a severed foot. Now M is involved in a murder investigation. Meanwhile, older brother K's work for a new political party begins to seem suspicious, while younger brother J navigates the complicated world of young-adulthood, and boss Rhonda demands more and more attention, M must navigate a world of Russian gangsters and neglected wives, biker gangs and suspicious coincidences. On top of everything else, M is determined to track down the owner of that red chesterfield and make sure they get a ticket. The Red Chesterfield is a delightful, unusual novel that upends the tropes and traditions of crime fiction while asking how far one person is willing to go to solve a crime, be it murder or the abandonment of a piece of furniture.

    These stories showcase Miranda Hill's astonishing range and virtuosity, introducing us to a protean variety of characters, each as well-realized as the next. Here is a writer who can seamlessly inhabit the consciousness of a sixteen-year-old navigating an embarrassing sex-ed class, a middle-aged minister experiencing a devastating crisis of faith in a 19th century rural village, a pilot's widow coping with her grief by growing an unusual "victory garden" during World War II, and well-heeled modern professional women juggling jobs, kids, and husbands, and trying to cope with the arrival of a beautiful bohemian neighbour, on a gentrified street in downtown Toronto.The qualities that unite these remarkable stories are a pervasive sense of mystery and magic, a wonderful wit and sophistication, and most surprisingly, the slight disorientation implied by the title: In Miranda Hill's beguiling universe, the "real world" is recognizable and slightly askew, as if you were experiencing one of those strange dreams where you think you are awake--or as if you've been "sleeping funny" and are on the cusp of waking into the everyday world you thought you knew.

    Her father said it was the home of Uncle Joe Spondoolak, an elf who’d moved in after the cottage had burned down long ago. Susan, a fanciful child, decided to become keeper of the hearth, tidying it up and leaving little gifts for the elves: handfuls of wild strawberries, daisy chains, a tiny birchbark canoe. Overnight the gifts would disappear. One morning, there was a tiny piece of carefully folded pink paper wedged in between the mossy stones.To Helen Susan Cameron Coyne: GreetingsHer Majesty, Queen Mab, has instructed me to thank you for making a home for all her people.Thus began Susan’s correspondence with a precocious young fairy princess, Nootsie Tah, and her indoctrination into the world of the great and little people.Susan took the letter next door to Mr. Moir, because he knew all sorts of interesting things. Sure enough, he had an entire library filled with books about characters such as Puck, Ariel and Oberon. The letters from Nootsie Tah continued, and that summer Susan developed two unique relationships: one with a proud princess from a mystical land, and the other with a gentle gardener with infinite wisdom and patience. These would sustain her throughout her life.

    A rogue black bear, 300 pounds of fury, is attacking the family's campsite, pouncing on her parents as prey.At her dying mother's faint urging, Anna manages to get her brother into the family's canoe and paddle away. But when the canoe dumps the two children on the edge of the woods, and the sister and brother must battle hunger, the elements, and a dangerous wilderness, we see Anna's heartbreaking love for her family -- and her struggle to be brave when nothing in her world seems safe anymore.Told in the honest, raw voice of five-year-old Anna, this is a riveting story of love, courage, and survival.

    As the journey progresses, secrets are unveiled, a friendship is tested, and there is a run-in with the Hurley family, a family both men have feared since childhood. In The Architects Are Here, Winter’s fifth and most emotionally resonant novel to date, he explores the nature of grief and friendship in unwaveringly powerful prose, and sheds light on who we are and how we go on when the future seems uncertain.

    . . Three-year-old Sherry is the adored only child of Simon and Karen Barrett. When Sherry is critically injured in a hit-and-run accident, the fault lines in the Barretts's marriage begin to show. As her parents' marriage falls apart, it is discovered that Sherry--in her coma-like state--has miraculous healing powers.    Meanwhile, the guilt-stricken driver of the truck attempts suicide--but is unable to die. Henry Denton instead finds himself in a place of darkness, somewhere between this world and the next, invisible to all but a group of mysterious and downtrodden men. Haunted by his shame, Henry struggles to understand this mysterious limbo, and what he must do to free himself.     As word of Sherry's powers spread, her parents must decide how best to shelter their daughter and help the many sick and dying who are drawn to her side. At the same time, a larger battle is brewing--one that has been raging for close to two-thousand years, and one that might yet claim the lives of Sherry and her family.

    In stories like "Stranger Danger", we watch how shy Julie, though supported by her roomies, is filled with apprehension as she goes on her first white-guy date, while years later in "Two Years Less A Day" we witness her change as her worries and vulnerability are put to the real test when she is unjustly convicted in a violent melee and must serve some jail time. "The House and Things That Can Be Taken" establishes how the move from the city both excites and intimidate reserve youth respectively, how a young man finds a job or a young woman becomes vulnerable in the bar scene. As well as developing her characters experientially, Dumont carefully contrasts them, as we see in the fragile and uncertain Everett and the culturally strong and independent but reckless Taz.As the four friends experience family catastrophes, broken friendships, travel to Mexico, and the aftermath of the great tragedy of 9/11, readers are intimately connected with each struggle, whether it is with racism, isolation, finding their cultural identity, or repairing the wounds of their upbringing.

    Aspiring painter Masha C. is blindly devoted to Antosha, her famous writer-brother. Through the years Antosha takes up with numerous women from Masha’s circle of friends, yet none of these relationships threaten the siblings’ close ties until the winter he falls into a depression. Then Masha invites into their Moscow home a young woman who teaches with her—the beautiful, vivacious and deeply vulnerable Lika Mizanova—with the express hope she might help Antosha recover.The appearance of Lika sets off a convolution of unrequited love, jealousy and scandal that lasts for seven years. If the famously unattainable writer has lost his heart to Lika as everyone claims, why does he undertake a life-threatening voyage to Sakhalin Island? And what will happen to Masha if she is demoted from “woman of the house” to “spinster sister”? While Antosha and Lika push and pull, Masha falls in love herself—with a man and with a mongoose—only to have her dreams crushed twice. From her own heartbreak Masha comes to recognize the harm that she has done to her friends by encouraging their involvement with Antosha, but it is too late for Lika, who will both sacrifice herself for love and be immortalized as the model for Nina in Chekhov’s The Seagull.A Russian Sister offers a clever commentary on the role of women as prey for male needs and inspiration, a role they continue to play today. At the same time the novel is a plea for sisterhood, both familial and friendly. Chekhov’s The Seagull changed the theatre. A Russian Sister gives the reader a glimpse behind the curtain to the fascinating real-life people who inspired it and the tragedy that followed its premiere.