Avery is one of the engineers responsible for the dismantling and reconstruction of the temple as it’s rescued from the rising waters of the Aswan Dam. He is a “machine-worshipper,” yet exquisitely sensitive to the dichotomy of creation and destruction of which machines are capable. Jean is a botanist by avocation and passion, interested in everything that grows. They had met on the banks of the St. Lawrence River and watched together as the construction of the seaway changed the course of the river and swallowed towns, homes, lives. Now, at the edge of another world about to be lost forever, Avery and Jean create their own world, exchanging the “moments that are the mortar of our days, innocent memories we don’t know we hold until given the gift of the eagerness of another.”But that gift will not be enough to bind them when tragedy strikes, and they will go back to separate lives in Toronto. Avery returns to school to study architecture, and Jean enters the life of Lucjan, a Polish émigré artist. Lucjan’s haunting stories of occupied Warsaw draw Jean further and further away from Avery. But, in time, he will also offer her the chance for forgiveness, consolation, and, finally, her own, most essential life.Stunning in its explorations of both the physical and emotional worlds of its characters, intensely moving and lyrical, The Winter Vault is a radiant work of fiction.

    The blog is smart, thoughtful, funny, and bold, brazenly taking on various injustices in the lives of women. But it's the blogger Eve's post about the controversial entrepreneur behind XY, a new chain of high-end strip clubs opening up across the country that sets off a firestorm. In a matter of hours, the Eve of Equality website crashes, its Twitter count jumps from a paltry 19 followers to nearly 250,000, and Eve is suddenly lauded as the new voice of feminism.   But who is the Eve behind Eve of Equality? Well... not who you might think. Meet Everett Kane, aspiring writer and fervent feminist. He writes his erudite blog in his apartment, at his kitchen table, conveniently but unexpectedly located right above one of the aforementioned XY strip clubs.Hilarious and smart, and offering thoughtful commentary on a subject that is flooding our headlines, newsfeeds, Twitter streams, and society, Poles Apart is Terry Fallis at his best, confirming his status as a king of CanLit comedy.

    Darcie Friesen Hossack's stories in Mennonites Don't Dance offer an honest, detailed look into the experiences of children - both young and adult - and their parents and grandparents, exploring generational ties, sins, penance, and redemption. Taking place primarily on the Canadian prairies, the families in these stories are confronted by the conflict between tradition and change. One story sees a daughter-in-law's urban ideals push and pull against a mother's simple, rural, ways. In another, a daughter raised in the Mennonite tradition tries to break free from her upbringing to escape to the city in search of a better life.

    Montgomery presents charming and poignant tales of orphans and children brought up by unloving families but who eventually find warmth and caring in homes of their own. An enchanting collection of 19 stories never before published in the U.S.

    The magnificent and long-awaited biography of the beloved writer who gave us the Manawaka novels, including The Diviners and The Stone Angel.

    Accident or suicide?On the other side of the world, a young woman walks out of a sandstorm in sub-Saharan Africa. In the labyrinth of the Niger Delta, a young boy learns to survive by navigating through the gas flares and oil spills of a ruined landscape. In the seething heat of Lagos City, a criminal cartel scours the internet looking for victims.Lives intersect, worlds collide, a family falls apart. And it all begins with a single email: “Dear Sir, I am the son of an exiled Nigerian diplomat, and I need your help ...”419 takes readers behind the scene of the world’s most insidious internet scam. When Laura’s father gets caught up in one such swindle and pays with his life, she is forced to leave the comfort of North America to make a journey deep into the dangerous back streets and alleyways of the Lagos underworld to confront her father’s killer. What she finds there will change her life forever...

    And although he felt terribly alone, his suicide changes everyone around him.His parents are devastated. His secret boyfriend's girlfriend is relieved. His unicorn- and virginity-obsessed classmate, Faraday, is shattered; she wishes she had made friends with him that time she sold him an Iced Cappuccino at Tim Hortons. His English teacher, mid-divorce and mid-menopause, wishes she could remember the dead student's name, that she could care more about her students than her ex's new girlfriend. Who happens to be her cousin. The school guidance counselor, Walter, feels guilty—maybe he should have made an effort when the kid asked for help. Max, the principal, is worried about how it will reflect on the school. And Walter, who's secretly been in a relationship with Max for years, thinks that's a little callous. He's also tired of Max's obsession with some sci-fi show on TV. And Max wishes Walter would lose some weight and remember to use a coaster.And then Max meets a drag queen named Crepe Suzette. And everything changes.

    These 11 profoundly moving and finely crafted stories encapsulate wildly divergent themes of love and loss, containment and exclusion. In the title story, a parks & rec worker faces an assailant who does not leave the altercation intact. A medical researcher and his claustrophobic fiancée are locked in the trunk of their car after a failed carjacking (the thief can't drive standard). A young woman enters a pharmaceutical trial in the outer reaches of suburbia and slips between sleeping and waking with increasingly alarming ease. Pairing the cultural acuity of Lost in Translation with the compassion and reach of The World According to Garp, Heighton breathes new life into the short story, a genre that is finally coming into its own.

    Araceli and Adrien are two journalists who meet while covering a fire. From that moment, she is unable to forget him. Adrien then falls in love with Pénélope, who, in turn, is torn between him and Gabriel. Gabriel reciprocates her love, but is too tormented by his past, and by the search for his lost father, to be much of a husband or father himself. These interlocking love stories that deftly reveal the devastating consequences of betrayal and commitment, of grief and hope.

    It is a Canadian summer in 1939 and Robert and Annie’s love has blossomed, even as the inevitability of the boys joining up means separation and the first of many losses. Fearing he might not return, Robert makes William promise to take care of Annie. Every arena of their lives is infiltrated by the war, from the home front to the underground of queer London to the bloody battlefields of Italy. Even in the aftermath, in the shadow of The Dreamland, these friends fight their own inner battles: to have faith in their right to love and be loved, to honour their promises and ultimately find their way “home.”

    Mitchell began publishing in the 1940s and more than 300 radio scripts created for broadcast on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's national radio airwaves between 1950 and 1958, Jake and the Kid has won a special place in the mythology of the Canadian Prairies. Mitchell didn't just conjure up life in the 1940s in the fictional community of Crocus, Saskatchewan. He made Jake Trumper and the unnamed Kid a part of Canadians' lives. They could laugh at Jake's homespun thoughts on everything from "wimmin" to the Riel Rebellion of 1885 (Jake claiming that he helped take care of "Looie" Riel) to Canadian heroes like Prime Minister Sir Wilfred Laurier (better known as "Wilf" to Jake). A gentle satire pervades Mitchell's evocative recreation of small-town life as seen through the eyes of a wide-eyed little boy and the hired man who becomes his hero. The stories were compiled in book form in 1961 and won Mitchell his first Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal. They still have the magic that captured the Canadian imagination for nearly two decades. --Jeffrey Canton

     was inspired by the life of David Thompson, a Welshman who came to the New World at the age of fifteen, and went on to become its greatest cartographer. He walked or paddled 80,000 miles and mapped 1.9 million square miles, cataloguing flora and fauna as well as the language and customs of the Natives. But though he has been described as the greatest land geographer who ever lived, he died impoverished and unknown. KanataFollowing the lives of Thompson's illegitimate son and his descendants, Kanata takes readers on a fictionalized, multi-generational journey through millennia and across a continent to examine the stories, myths, and legends of those who formed the country and who were formed by it.Kanata is the story of the invention of a nation.

    Behind her is a string of failed relationships and half-forgotten ambitions of being a painter; in front of her lies the dreary task of finding a real job and figuring out what “normal” people do with their lives. Then, a classified ad in the local paper introduces Frieda to Gladys, an elderly woman who long ago gave up on her dreams of being a dancer.The catch? Gladys is a ghost.In Dance, Gladys, Dance, Cassie Stocks tells the uplifting story of a woman whose uncanny connection with a kindred spirit causes her to see her life in a new way—as anything but ordinary.

    The war is over, and as the initial phase of de-Nazification winds down, the citizens of Vienna struggle to rebuild their lives amidst the rubble.Anna Beer returns to the city she fled nine years earlier after discovering her husband's infidelity. She has come back to find him and, perhaps, to forgive him. Traveling on the same train from Switzerland is 18-year-old Robert Seidel, a schoolboy summoned home to his stepfather's sickbed and the secrets of his family's past.As Anna and Robert navigate an unrecognizable city, they cross paths with a war-widowed American journalist, a hunchbacked young servant girl, and a former POW whose primary purpose is to survive by any means and to forget. Meanwhile, in the shells of burned-out houses and beneath the bombed-out ruins, a ghost of a man, his head wrapped in a red scarf, battles demons from his past and hides from a future deeply uncertain for all.In The Crooked Maid, Dan Vyleta returns to the shadows of war-darkened Vienna, proving himself once again "a magical storyteller, master of the macabre" (David Park).

    What people don’t understand is that Earl and Linda are still keeping Roxanne company, reincarnated in the forms of a wiener dog and standard poodle. But this relationship—not idyllic, it’s true, but at least relatively harmonious—is disrupted when Roxanne accidentally hits a pit bull with her car. On the precipice of having the dog put down, she recognizes the eyes of her daughter’s killer, Helmut. Should she choose retribution, or forgiveness?This is the highly original set-up of “You’re Home Now,” the opening story in Rachel Rose’s debut work of fiction. These are clever, engaging stories with a compelling link: the characters, generally living on the fringes of society for some reason or another, all have better relationships with animals than with other humans. There’s a diverse range of creatures, with stories featuring a parrot, an octopus, rats, a chameleon, a pig (Francis Bacon), deer and bats, as well as the more traditional dogs and a pair of kittens named Yin and Yang.The stories in The Octopus Has Three Hearts combine vivid characters and original premises with Rose’s trademark combination of whimsy and irony to explore universal elements of the human condition, from parenthood to sexuality, identity to fidelity. It is a collection that will appeal to animal lovers, readers of literary fiction and anyone looking for their place to belong.