Bern’s looking forward to a quiet life, but the memories of what he witnessed during his stints in Afghanistan and other war-torn countries haunt him still. When the body of one of the workers is found floating in the huge bottle-washing tank at the local brewery, Bern is called in for a routine investigation. What first appears to be a tragic accident takes a menacing turn when the body of the worker’s girlfriend is discovered in a nearby field. Bern needs the help of brewery safety investigator Evie Chapelle, who, burdened by tragedies she might have prevented, is more determined than ever to keep her workers, and their tight-knit community, safe. Soon, Bern and Evie find themselves risking their jobs—and their lives—to uncover a killer hiding in a place where it is awfully hard to keep a secret. Deryn Collier’s debut novel is a taut mystery full of suspense. Confined Space was shortlisted for the Arthur Ellis Award for best unpublished first crime novel by the Crime Writers of Canada.

    Agathe handles her grief by fondling the shirts in the Big and Tall department at Henderman's Family Apparel and carrying on a relationship with a cigarette survey. As her hope dwindles, Agathe falls in with her spirited coworker Debbie, who teaches Agathe about rock and roll, and with Martin Bureau, the one man who might just know the truth about Rejean's fate.Reminiscent of 2015 Canada Reads finalist And the Birds Rained Down and Gone Girl, I Am A Truck is a funny and moving portrayal of Acadian love and loyalty.

    Her mixed-media art is a source of wonder to her younger brother, Irwin, but an unmitigated horror to the panoply of insufficiently grown-up grown-ups who surround her. She plans to run away to Algonquin Park, hole up in a cabin like Tom Thomson and paint trees; and so, to fund her escape, she runs errands for the seniors who inhabit the Shangrila, the decrepit apartment building that houses her fractured family.Determined, resourceful, and a little reckless, Harriet tries to navigate the clueless adults around her, dumpster dives for the flotsam and jetsam that fuels her art, and attempts to fathom her complicated feelings for Irwin, who suffers from hydrocephalus. On the other hand, Irwin’s love for Harriet is not conflicted at all. She’s his compass. But Irwin himself must untangle the web of the human heart.Masterful and mordantly funny, Strube is at the top of her considerable form in this deliciously subversive story of love and redemption.

    The band's story unfolds through the eyes of Jim, a small-town violin prodigy who struggles with her past as well as her present; and Rize, an emotionally charged trombone player who is stuck playing sidekick to his best friend, charismatic lead singer Jules. As the band's popularity mounts, the pressures of road-life and success begin to complicate relationships and The Angel Riots' chaotic world threatens to implode. Dark and dazzling, this novel will firmly establish Kaslik's reputation as a young literary talent.

    The novel is at once a compassionate portrait of innocence and idealism, and an emphatic condemnation of a society where the lines between good and evil are essentially blurred.Such Is My Beloved is widely considered to be Morley Callaghan’s finest novel.From the Paperback edition.

    Gripping and emotional." —David Nicholls, bestselling author of One Day"Both tender and truthful in its evoking of the canyon that lies between the openness of youth and the dangerous restraint of middle age, this is a luminous, quiet storm of a novel that resounds long after its heartbreaking coda." —Diana Evans, The Guardian"De Vries's final confrontation with Dirk is a tragic, Gatsby-like meditation on the impossibility of reliving the past, however much we cling to our memories." —Financial TimesA wrenching and spare novel about an electric friendship that slowly reveals itself as a deep and lifelong love.Jan de Vries is a virtuoso pianist who would be in the prime of his career but for the crippling auditory hallucinations that have plundered his performances and mind. As the disorder reaches its devastating peak the walls Jan has built around himself start to crumble, and he's unable to repress the trove of memories and unspoken words that linger between him and his childhood best friend, Dirk Noosen, with whom he lost touch long ago. He is faced with only one recourse: to head home and confront Dirk.With a masterful balance of emotional resonance and restraint, Eric Beck Rubin tells the story of Jan's obsessive friendship with the charismatic, irreverent Dirk as the reader breathlessly awaits their reunion. This is a story about music, repression and regret; about adolescence, sex and friendship; and, ultimately, about the kind of love that lasts a lifetime.

    The banal finality of this event triggers an introspective voyage through the events of her life and how she became who she is: wife of business executive Rick, citizen of the suburb of Rowanwood, mother to two accomplished daughters in university. Before Betty Friedan coined the term feminine mystique, The Torontonians told a classic feminist story of suburban ennui and existential self-discovery, tracing a detailed portrait of femininity in the 1950s through the eyes of its perceptive and thoughtful heroine. The book is also a unique contemporary meditation on community and social ties from a time when Canada's major cities were just beginning to spread out into suburban sprawl.

    The summer Fancy Mosher turns twelve, she goes to work at Petal’s End, the rotting, sprawling mansion perched on the cliffs of The Bay of Fundy. Owned by the Parker family, abandoned after the First World War, and briefly revived as a convalescent hospital during the next, it has been kept barely standing for years. The remaining Parkers—Estelle and her daughters, the beautiful, talented Pomeline, and the young, mercurial Jenny—now ruled by fading matriarch Marigold, return for one final visit. But we come to realize that, like the children in Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, the children here are not entirely innocent or naïve. Marigold, having suffered a stroke, lives in fey twilight, only half-hearing the sinister and sordid goings-on that are slowly closing in on her family. Her son, Charlie, died at Petal’s End many years before, as a result of what is insisted was an accidental hanging. When she decides to give a late summer garden party, Marigold finally becomes a witness to her own complicity. But the reckoning she has so feared, and so scrupulously avoided, is only beginning. Salvation resides in Fancy Mosher’s quest to accept what could either be a gift or a curse. Fancy may have inherited her grandfather’s power to see and commune with the dead, what the Mosher family calls the memento. The memento shows itself to each person who possesses it in different ways; just as memory often materializes unbidden, so too can the dead. After a horrific accident on the cliffs of Parker Island, Fancy is the sole hope for learning what the dead want and how to appease them.

    From illusions of permanence and ownership to the pain of estrangement, Liar masterfully explores feelings familiar to anyone who has ever loved — and lost. Crosbie also goes beyond this territory, examining the lover’s own complicity in her joy and suffering. Liar is a grotesque, beautiful meditation on the nature of love.

    But her immersion in contemporary war is offset by her refusal to put herself at risk, and by her insistence on keeping her past at bay.Ten years earlier, in the mid-1980s, Arcadia had fled Toronto for London after two university students--rivals for her love--fought a pistol duel over her. Now, through the interventions of her sister, Lux, and her increasingly complicated relationship with a new lover, Amir, who has secrets of his own, Arcadia is forced to confront what really happened on the day of the duel.Moving from the verdant ravines of Toronto to the secret canals of a gritty, vibrant London, The Rules of Engagement has an extraordinary sense of time and place. A powerful exploration of the nature of love, the novel provocatively explores the crossing of emotional, ethical, and literal borders.

    Recently divorced without custody of her two young sons, Annie’s career is now stalling under the ambitions of her ruthless colleagues. John Taggart is a Scottish journalist looking to land the scoop that will secure his future. In Halifax to cover the Royal visit, John finally has a chance to understand his mother’s connection to the province, which she has always kept hidden.When two murders occur within 48 hours, they are both led to the small, picturesque town of Lunenburg and a 30-year-old murder case with a long-buried secret. The town’s dark past may hold the answers they both need, but digging it up could mean more danger than it’s worth.

    That perfect letter. The wishbone, fork in the road, empty wineglass. The question we ask over and over. Why? . . . My life begins at the Y." So opens Marjorie Celona's highly acclaimed and exquisitely rendered debut about a wise-beyond-her-years foster child abandoned as a newborn on the doorstep of the local YMCA. Swaddled in a dirty gray sweatshirt with nothing but a Swiss Army knife tucked between her feet, little Shannon is discovered by a man who catches only a glimpse of her troubled mother as she disappears from view. That morning, all three lives are forever changed. Bounced between foster homes, Shannon endures abuse and neglect until she finally finds stability with Miranda, a kind but no-nonsense single mother with a free-spirited daughter of her own. Yet Shannon defines life on her own terms, refusing to settle down, and never stops longing to uncover her roots — especially the stubborn question of why her mother would abandon her on the day she was born.Brilliantly and hauntingly interwoven with Shannon's story is the tale of her mother, Yula, a girl herself who is facing a desperate fate in the hours and days leading up to Shannon's birth. As past and present converge, Y tells an unforgettable story of identity, inheritance, and, ultimately, forgiveness. Celona's ravishingly beautiful novel offers a deeply affecting look at the choices we make and what it means to be a family, and it marks the debut of a magnificent new voice in contemporary fiction.

    Morbidly amused by the decadent decay of his surroundings, he watches the patrons fall into their nightly oblivion, making notes for his novel. In the hope of uncovering their secrets and motives, he establishes tentative friendships with the cast of variously pathological regulars. But as his tenure at the bar continues, he begins to serve himself more often than his customers, and the moments he lives outside the bar become more and more painful: he loses his wife, his way, himself. Trapped by his habits and his loneliness, he realizes he will not survive if he doesn't break free. And so he hatches a terrible, but necessary plan of escape and his only chance for redemption. Step into Ablutions and step behind the bar, below rock bottom, and beyond the everyday take on storytelling for a brilliant, new twist on the classic tale of addiction and its consequences.

    Her work as a translator draws her into an underworld of family-controlled drug cartels operating out of South America, and she falls in love with a son in one such family. Pregnant, she is kidnapped to an island off the coast of Colombia and slowly tricked into a dependence on cocaine. Her narrative - violent and bizarre, but also riveting, erotic and filled with the heady flamboyance of orchids - runs parallel to her account of life in "Death Clinic," as Death Row is called at the Heaven Valley Facility for Women. It is a moving story of friendship amongst three female inmates - portrayed with devastating wit - who share only the fact that they each have a date with the executioner.Cargo of Orchids swings through comedy and tragedy to shed a gradual, eerie light on the questions of guilt and innocence and moral ambiguity that lie at its heart.Excerpt from Cargo of Orchids:"Despite the freight of anger she carries, Rainy seems so frail it is hard to imagine her giving birth to anything heavier than tears. Rainy gave birth to twins and six months later left them on the railway tracks. She claims it prejudiced the jury. If she'd smothered them or driven them off a pier, it would have been more socially acceptable.-- But abandoning your kids on the tracks wasn't in fashion. She wishes now she'd gone out drinking for the evening instead, but she didn't have enough money to hire a babysitter and pay for the beer."

    Set in the 1920s, the story unfolds against the wild desolation of a wind swept island off the coast of Nova Scotia. In writing The Nymph and the Lamp, Thomas Raddall created a haunting and powerful love story that when first published in 1950, became one of Canada’s best known novels.