Mordecai: The Life & Times


Charles Foran - 2010
    It is also an extraordinary love story that lasted half a century.The first major biography with access to family letters and archives. Mordecai Richler was an outsized and outrageous novelist whose life reads like fiction.Mordecai Richler won multiple Governor General's Literary Awards, the Giller Prize, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, among others, as well as many awards for his children's books. He also wrote Oscar-nominated screenplays. His influence was larger than life in Canada and abroad. In Mordecai, award-winning novelist and journalist Charlie Foran brings to the page the richness of Mordecai's life as young bohemian, irreverent writer, passionate and controversial Canadian, loyal friend and deeply romantic lover. He explores Mordecai's distraught childhood, and gives us the "portrait of a marriage" — the lifelong love affair with Florence, with Mordecai as beloved father of five. The portrait is alive and intimate — warts and all.

Liar


Lynn Crosbie - 2006
    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.

I Refused to Bribe


Gireesh Sharma
    When Satish offers a bribe to Jitesh, the latter abuses the industrialist and threatens to call the police. Undeterred by all this, Satish approaches Arora who is Jitesh’s senior officer and offers him a share in his business. Arora puts pressure on Jitesh to ignore certain norms and stipulations and approve the loan, but Jitesh succumbs neither to greed nor pressure. Arora and Satish turn hostile towards Jitesh. A few days later at the bank, Jitesh helps an unknown customer, who claims to be illiterate, to fill his withdrawal form. The customer is later identified as a conman who fraudulently withdraws money from someone else’s account. His arch rival Arora manipulates facts and Jitesh is named in the chargesheet. Jitesh is suspended from his job and faces a judicial inquiry that lasts for 14 long and painful years. During the long ordeal, Jitesh is flooded with offers to bribe his way out of the matter and this includes vigilance officers, bank officials, CID officers, court clerks and even the judge. Arora connives with businessmen and amasses huge wealth through underhand means. Arora ignores his family and takes to the wrong path in personal life also. What has destiny in store for him? Is he able to escape from the clutches of justice? ********************************** ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Gireesh Sharma, soldier-turned-author, writes straight from his heart. Born in 1973 in a small hamlet near Aligarh, he was brought up by his grandfather-in-law, an active political leader. It was under his tutelage that he developed patriotic fervour and on turning 17 years of age, chose to join the Indian Air Force to serve the nation. After his retirement, he worked with several youth organisations and today actively participates in socio-political activities to bring a positive change in the country. He is working as a marketing manager in a software company and enjoys writing books during his spare time. I Refused to Bribe is his first fiction, though he has written three popular non-fictions: 'Office Politics', 'How to Win the Heart of Your Wife' and 'Stay Free, Stay Happy'.http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=s...

What the Soul Doesn't Want


Lorna Crozier - 2017
    Her arresting, edgy poems about aging and grief are surprising and invigorating: a defiant balm. At the same time, she revels in the quirkiness and whimsy of the natural world: the vision of a fly, the naming of an eggplant, and a woman who — not unhappily — finds that cockroaches are drawn to her.“God draws a life. And then begins to rub it out / with the eraser on his pencil.” Lorna Crozier draws a world in What the Soul Doesn’t Want, and then beckons us in. Crozier’s signature wit and striking imagery are on display as she stretches her wings and reminds us that we haven’t yet seen all that she can do.

Ava Comes Home


Lesley Crewe - 2008
    Ava Harris is a famous actress living the life of the rich and fabulous in L.A. when a family crisis calls her home. It’s been ten years since she’s set foot in Glace Bay, Cape Breton—back when she was plain old Libby MacKinnon. Why she ran away, no one knows. Returning home, she must face her family, her friends, and her first love, Seamus O’Reilly, whose heart broke the day she left. Ava is a good little actress, determined that no one will know what happened. She will keep the truth buried at all costs-even if she has to run again. But secrets have a way of surfacing, especially in a small town, and love has a way of blasting through the toughest barriers. While Ava can never go home again, perhaps Libby finally can.

Kiss the Sunset Pig: A Canadian's American Road Trip With Exotic Detours


Laurie Gough - 2005
    Heading towards a half-remembered cave on the Pacific coast where her younger, more adventurous self once stayed, she recalls adventures in Sumatra, the Yukon and many places in between—and wonders what compels her to keep moving through life while everyone else has found a place to belong.

We Run Bad


John Curry - 2018
    After abandoning his new home as a lost cause, he's caught up in the poker craze and moves to Atlantic City with a new dream of "playing poker for a living", but soon finds himself stuck in a dizzying spell of bad luck at the card tables. Or maybe he just sucks at poker, like everybody else. His money all gone, and finding that it's actually difficult to drink oneself to death at 1am, he's suddenly offered a chance to make his money back, and then some, by running an underground poker game in New York City. Once in New York, Tim finds himself on the road to recovery and making real money for the first time—but at what cost? We Run Bad offers an authentic and darkly comic look at underground poker culture, while serving up an indictment of post-recession America. Here, every game is rigged, and the only way to come out ahead is to be the one doing the rigging.

Descent (The Walking Dead #5)


Jay Bonansinga - 2014
    A free promotional sampler containing the first chapter of the latest installment in the Walking Dead novel series!

The Shape of a Girl / Jewel


Joan Macleod - 2002
    MacLeod’s young protagonist enters all the bright open avenues of peer-group play and the dark blind alleys of individual and collective terror, as she discovers within herself both the capacity for and the conflict between impulses of good and evil. In thinking back on the history of her own tight-knit group of friends, she begins to see how in the excitement of belonging to a ritualized, secret collective, the self is created by the increasing dehumanization of the other—of both the bully and the victim. The Shape of a Girl goes far beyond a simple dramatization of the seemingly inexplicable code of silence and tacit complicity which surrounded the sensationalized Reena Virk murder in 1997 on which the play is based. It speaks eloquently and compassionately to a world increasingly dominated by all forms of collectivised and ritualized tribalist hatred, and offers the embrace of trust as the only way out of this circle of violence.Jewel is also based on a real-life catastrophe—the sinking of the Ocean Ranger, an oil rig off the coast of Newfoundland, on Valentine’s Day, 1982. Three years later, a widow, Marjorie Clifford, at home in her trailer in Fort St. John, British Columbia, begins to take the first step in understanding that the humanity of love, in all of its tentative frailty, uncertainty and promise, can free a life paralyzed and dominated by loss.

The Prisoner and the Chaplain


Michelle Berry - 2017
    As the hours drain away, the chaplain must decide if the prisoner’s story is an off-the-cuff confession or a last bid for salvation. As the chaplain listens he realizes a life has many stories, and he has his own story to tell – a last ditch plea for forgiveness told to someone who will never be able to repeat it. Each man is guilty in his own way, and their stories have led them to the same room, a room that only one of them will leave alive. If you had only twelve hours left to live, what would you have to say?

Short Haul Engine


Karen Solie - 2001
    Short Haul Engine is one great twist of fate and fury after another. The writing is clear, striking and open to all sorts of possibilities. Even at their most playful, these poems dive much deeper than initially expected. There's a remarkably dark sense of humour at work here, but tempered with a haunting vulnerability that makes even the sharpest lines tremble.from "Signs Taken for Wonders" ... Too delicate for these dog-days, small, clover-blonde, my sister sews indoors. I ask her to fashion me into something nice, ivory silk. I am a big girl, sunburnt skin like raw meat, sweating two pews in front of the Blessed Virgin....

Everything I do..


Suvika - 2015
    A boy. A heir. To carry the family name and the company forward into the future. Instead I got you! Two daughters. Fit for nothing except to marry someone and walk away.”Kajal Rathore had walked out of her home and her father after that confrontation, making a life and living it on her own terms. Away from the archaic chauvinism that made her father reject her because she was not the son he wanted. Now her father’s flailing health has brought her back to her home. And to the company that had been in her family for generations. Once Kajal had had a dream of becoming a part of that company and now fates were handing over that dream. But to claim it, she will have to confront the father who denies her, the mother who never stood up for her, the sister who needs her and the man who wants her. “I want you to marry Kajal. I don’t..I can’t trust her with Rathore Industries. But I don’t have a choice. But if you are beside her, I would never have to worry. Marry her and the company would be yours.”Arjun Shekhawat was deeply indebted to his boss. The man who had been his godfather and his mentor. Refusing him was not on cards. Even when it was something as personal as marriage. After all, it was a win-win situation. But keeping the promise meant getting close to his boss’s daughter. Close enough to win her trust, to appreciate the person that she was and the secrets that surrounded her. Close enough to fall in love with her. And to realize that he had unwittingly agreed to become the weapon that would one day be used against her.

Mr & Mrs Sehgal


Madhuri Tamse - 2020
    SeriesMr & Mrs. SehgalKabier and Aashi’s is a marriage of utmost convenience. Everything about the marriage is wrong yet Aashi falls for her tycoon husband who has no time for her. While Kabier is busy earning billions, Aashi battles her solitude until she decides to give up. Jealousy creeps in Kabier’s heart when his wife’s friend comes into the picture. Will Kabier realize Aashi’s worth? How will he woo her back? A romantic tale of arrogant Business Tycoon Kabier Sehgal and his Former Miss India Wife Aashi Sehgal with sparks of attraction, love, jealousy, and a happily-ever-after.

The Fearsome Particles


Trevor Cole - 2006
    Now the Governor General’s Award finalist is back with The Fearsome Particles, a brilliantly observed comic tragedy about the widening cracks in a family’s picture-perfect veneer. Gerald Woodlore, a window screen executive, wakes one morning to find, to his utter dismay, that he has reached the limits of what he can control. The company he works for is rapidly losing market share and a junior assistant seems to be the only one with an idea how to fix it. His wife, Vicki, a luxury real-estate dresser, appears to be bending under the pressures of constructing an image of perfect happiness both at work and at home. But most worrying of all is Gerald and Vicki’s twenty-year-old son, Kyle, who quit school to volunteer with the military’s civilian support staff in Afghanistan. Now he has returned early and retreated to his room in the wake of a mysterious and traumatic event. With his trademark wit and strong emotional insight, Trevor Cole has created a compelling, tender story that captures a family at a crucial turning point.The Fearsome Particles has recently been optioned for film.

The Rain Ascends


Joy Kogawa - 1995
    Originally published to critical acclaim in 1995, The Rain Ascends has been revisited by the author, with substantive additions to the end of the narrative that bring to fruition the heroine's struggle for forgiveness and redemption.As a middle-aged mother, Millicent is confronted with the secrets of her father's past as she recalls certain events in her childhood-a childhood that, on the surface, was a blissful one. Disbelief turns to confusion as she faces up to the sins of her father and wrestles with a legacy of lies, silence and her own embattled conscience.In The Rain Ascends, Joy Kogawa beautifully sifts the truth from the past and the sinner from the perceived saint. The result is a sensitive, poetic, yet searing depiction of the wounds left by abuse and the redemption brought by truth.