He's a narcissistic, judgmental snob who rates women's looks from one to ten; a racist, homophobic megalomaniac who makes fun of people's weight; a cheating, lying, manipulative jerk who sees his older girlfriend as nothing more than an adornment. His only real friend, besides his dog, is a loser who belongs to a pick-up artist group. Guy is completely oblivious to his own lack of empathy, and his greatest talent is hiding it all...until he meets someone who challenges him in a way he's never been challenged before. Darkly funny and utterly offensive, "Guy" is a brilliant and insightful character study that exposes the twisted thoughts of the misogynist bro next door.

    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.

    Mark’s Residential School for Girls by government decree, young Rose Marie finds herself in an alien universe where nothing of her previous life is tolerated, not even her Blackfoot name. For she has entered into the world of the Sisters of Brotherly Love, an order of nuns dedicated to saving the Indigenous children from damnation. Life under the sharp eye of Mother Grace, the Mother General, becomes an endless series of torments, from daily recitations and obligations to chronic sickness and inedible food. And then there are the beatings. All the feisty Rose Marie wants to do is escape from St. Mark’s. How her imagination soars as she dreams about her lost family on the Reserve, finding in her visions a healing spirit that touches her heart. But all too soon she starts to see other shapes in her dreams as well, shapes that warn her of unspoken dangers and mysteries that threaten to engulf her. And she has seen the rows of plain wooden crosses behind the school, reminding her that many students have never left here alive. Set during the Second World War and the 1950s, Black Apple is an unforgettable, vividly rendered novel about two very different women whose worlds collide: an irrepressible young Blackfoot girl whose spirit cannot be destroyed, and an aging yet powerful nun who increasingly doubts the value of her life. It captures brilliantly the strange mix of cruelty and compassion in the residential schools, where young children are forbidden to speak their own languages and given Christian names. As Rose Marie matures, she finds increasingly that she knows only the life of the nuns, with its piety, hard work and self-denial. Why is it, then, that she is haunted by secret visions—of past crimes in the school that terrify her, of her dead mother, of the Indigenous life on the plains that has long vanished? Even the kind-hearted Sister Cilla is unable to calm her fears. And then, there is a miracle, or so Mother Grace says. Now Rose is thrust back into the outside world with only her wits to save her. With a poet’s eye, Joan Crate creates brilliantly the many shadings of this heartbreaking novel, rendering perfectly the inner voices of Rose Marie and Mother Grace, and exploring the larger themes of belief and belonging, of faith and forgiveness.

    A woman runs away to a cottage in the English moors to escape a love affair; shards of glass reconcile a middle-aged wife to her husband’s estrangement; a grandmother makes a startling confession from her youth; a young woman discovers herself through the life of an Italian saint; and, in a spellbinding story of artistic jealousy, we enter the mind of poet Robert Browning at the end of his life. In these beautifully crafted stories, ordinary objects brim with meaning and memories radiate with significance as Jane Urquhart illuminates the things that lie just beneath the surface of our lives.

    A bold new story that bridges Native and white cultures across a bend in a river where the salmon run.On one side of the river is a ranch once owned by Eugene Robertson, who came in the gold rush around 1860, and stayed on as a homesteader. On the other side is a Shuswap community that has its own tangled history with the river--and the whites. At the heart of the novel are Hannah and Brandon Robertson, teenagers who have been raised by their grandfather after they lost their mother. As the novel opens, the river is dying, its flow reduced to a trickle, and Hannah is carrying salmon past the choke point to the spawning grounds while her childhood best friend, Alex, leads a Native protest against the development further threatening the river. When drowning nearly claims the lives of both Hannah's grandfather and her little brother, their world is thrown into chaos. Hannah, Alex, and most especially Brandon come to doubt their own reality as they are pulled deep into Brandon's numinous visions, which summon the myths of Shuswap culture and tragic family stories of the past. The novel hovers beautifully in the fluid boundary between past and present, between the ordinary world and the world of the spirit, all disordered by the human and environmental crises that have knit the white and Native worlds together in love, and hate, and tragedy for 150 years. Can Hannah and her brother, and Alex, find a way forward that will neither destroy the river nor themselves?

    There, he grows into a prosperous and respectable merchant, eventually falling in love with his Chinese business partner's daughter Pearl, a delicate beauty twenty years his junior. As a wedding present, he builds for her the most magnificent mansion in Hong Kong. Then Semah arrives unannounced from Calcutta to take her place as mistress of the house...and life will change irrevocably for all of them. Inspired by the lives of Choa-Johnston's ancestors, The House of Wives is an unforgettable novel about the machinations of the early opium trade, and about two remarkable women determined to secure a dynasty for their children in the tumultuous British Crown colony.

    A collection of linked stories that navigate the difficult realm of friendship, charting its beginnings and endings, its intimacies and betrayals, its joys and humiliations.

    A volcano unexpectedly erupts in Iceland and airspace is shut down over Europe. Harriet works in local radio in London, and with most of her colleagues abroad, she seizes a unique career opportunity. Her husband, Michael, stuck in New York on business, travels to visit an old flame, and their teenage son, Jack, feeling liberated from normal life, takes an unexpected risk only to find himself in trouble. Meanwhile Emily, a young TV researcher, loses her adoptive father to a heart attack, and half a world away, a Pakistani migrant worker named Yacub is stranded in a Dubai labor camp. Two years later, Yacub, attempting to stow away, falls out of the landing gear of an airplane onto Harriet’s car in a London supermarket parking lot—and survives—while Emily accidentally captures it all on film. Yacub’s sudden arrival in the lives of Harriet, Jack, Michael, and Emily catapults these characters into a series of life-changing events, ultimately revealing the tenuous, often unexpected ties that bind us together.Inspired by real-life accounts of airplane stowaways, Landing Gear is about the complex texture of modern life, and how we fight the loneliness of the nuclear family to hold on to one another.

    As Sam finds himself falling away from the world as he grows feathers from his back, Lilah seeks sexual penance under the harsh hand of her boss, her own transformation subtle and terrifying. Sam and Lilah fall deeper into their separate spiritual paths, and the two hurtle closer and closer to a dark, unknown destiny — one that changes all that they know about life and pain, love and God, and how to find light in the most unlooked-for of places. The Miracles of Ordinary Men re-examines the traditional roles of priest and prophet, damned and divine, and creates something monstrous and exquisite reminiscent of Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Angel’s Game, Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away, and Andrew Davidson’s The Gargoyle.

    A breathless, clothes-in-a-heap romp or a naughty tease before the elevator doors slide open. Even better when it’s a quick sex story you can read again and again. “Turn me on in 50 words or less and I’ll follow you home,” writes editor and erotica aficionado Alison Tyler about Got a Minute? The lovers in Marie Potoczny’s “The Other Side of Sleep” revel in the delicious pause between sleep and waking. Sharon Wachsler’s “Perfect” is a love story that happens to include ropes, rough play, and butterfly pillows. The 60 short and spicy stories in Got a Minute? will rev your motor and leave you aching for more. When it comes to hot sex, who doesn’t have a minute?

    Seen on one of her thieving missions in the village of Freyzus, she is chased by suspicious townspeople to the edge of a deep gorge, where she jumps and disappears, vanishing into village legend.On the other side of the gorge, in an abandoned estate, Peyre Rouff lives out his self-imposed exile. Following a horrific hunting accident, he now focuses all of his attention on intricate taxidermic dioramas, keeping his thoughts from wandering too close to the day he lost everything.When Peyre encounters the wild girl, they find a link in their mutual estrangement from conventional society. He provides her with her material needs, while she brings light to places Peyre had thought dark forever. The two achieve an easy coexistence. But the careful patterns of the life Peyre has made for himself begin to unravel, and when the wider world learns of the girl's presence at the estate, Peyre is forced to confront not only his choices and their consequences, but society itself.In The Hunter and the Wild Girl, award-winning author Pauline Holdstock spins a haunting tale affirming the persistence of life, the power of human connection, adn the fundamental urge to be free.

    The Middle Stories is a strikingly original collection of stories, fables, and short brutalities that are alternately heartwarming, cruel, and hilarious.

    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.

    Campbell Award for Best New Writer, Locus Awards for Best Novella and Best Critic, and numerous other awards. Twenty-four of his 30 books are still in print, in 10 languages. His short work has appeared in magazines around the planet, from Omni and Analog to Xhurnal Izobretatel i Rationalizator (Moscow), and in numerous anthologies. His most recent books are the novels Callahan's Key, and The Free Lunch.Contents:God Is an Iron (1979)In the Olden Days (1984)Local Champ (1979)Melancholy Elephants (1982)Not Fade Away (1982)Orphans of Eden (1996)Rubber Soul (1982)Soul Search (1979)Stardance (1977) with Jeanne RobinsonThe Magnificent Conspiracy (1977)

    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.